You’d be surprised at how some of the darkest, most horrific true stories never get much classroom time, probably because they’re so terrifying.
Behind the paperwork
It sounds like something from a horror movie, but unfortunately, the Guatemala Syphilis Experiments were very much real. They involved U.S. Public Health Service researchers working in Guatemala City to deliberately expose over 1,300 people to serious diseases.
These included syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, hardly a walk in the park. Nobody was spared as soldiers, prisoners, psychiatric patients, and sex workers were all exposed between 1946 and 1948. Worst of all? They were never told what was happening, just tested on.
Footsteps in the snow
Hinterkaifeck, Germany, looks like a lovely Bavarian farmstead, it was that way once, but everything changed on either March 31 or April 1, 1922. Six people were brutally murdered there using a mattock, including two children, although that’s just the start of it.
The family had apparently seen tracks in the snow leading toward the house before the murder, and they’d also heard footsteps in the attic as well, if that wasn’t creepy enough. Someone had been living in the house before the family was killed. Nobody was ever convicted.
Down the stairs
Bethnal Green is an underground station in London that, on March 3, 1943, was the site of the biggest loss of British civilian life during the Second World War. A bomb? No, it was a crowd-crushing incident, caused by people rushing into the station after an air-raid warning.
They were looking for shelter, one person fell on the stairs near the entrance, and then all chaos broke loose, as the crowd behind kept pressing forward. 173 people eventually died, including 62 children, because, yes, crowds can be just as deadly as some weapons.
Ledger marks at sea
Slavery was awful enough, we all know that, but there’s one story of slavery that tops the worst moments lists. In 1781, the British-owned ship Zong was headed toward Jamaica when tragedy struck, in the form of disease and water shortages, that was bad enough.
The slaveowners had taken out insurance on the slaves and threw more than 130 of them overboard, straight into the sea. Why? Because they wanted to claim insurance for their ‘lost cargo,’ aka the slaves. 130 people were killed, all for money, and treated like objects.
A pressure door
Some of the most horrifying stories are a little more recent, like the Byford Dolphin incident. In 1983, workers on the oil rig were trying to connect a diving bell to a pressurized chamber when a locking mechanism failed, nothing too serious. Except it absolutely was.
The pressure dropped almost instantly, and all the air rushed out, killing four divers right away. One diving assistant died later, another assistant was badly injured, simply because of one piece of broken equipment and a huge failure in safety standards. Truly terrifying.
A short walk from Wolfsburg
Rühen was a place near the Volkswagen works in Nazi Germany, and in 1943, babies born to Polish and Soviet forced laborers were sent there. The babies were put in nursery-style facilities so their mothers could return to work because, unfortunately, that’s how things were.
The following year, over 400 children were moved to one of the former prison camps at Rühen. It went as badly as you probably expect. Hundreds of infants died from neglect, starvation, as well as a severe lack of medical care, just another part of the Nazi Party’s horrifying actions.
On open ground
The Selk’nam were an indigenous group who’d been living in Tierra del Fuego, part of Chile and Argentina, for a long time, right until the late 1800s. That’s when ranching spread through the area, and ranchers decided that, actually, they were going to steal the land, not ask for it.
The ranchers hunted and kidnapped members of the Selk’nam group before killing them. In some cases, they were even paid for each dead Indigenous person, because apparently, they were just like animals to the ranchers.
Trouble at anchor
Whangaroa Harbour, New Zealand, was meant to be a timber stop for the Boyd in December 1809, the key word being ‘meant to be.’ The ship’s captain, John Thompson, flogged a young Māori chief named Te Ara, and then denied him food, simply because he didn’t want to work.
The local Māori weren’t having it. They attacked the ship soon after it reached Whangaroa Harbour and killed most of the passengers and crew. Then, they took the bodies back to their village and ate them, as a kind of revenge.
Rooms with records
Pennhurst State School and Hospital. Sounds like a safe enough place, but it was the exact opposite for the intellectually and developmentally disabled people here. Over 3,500 people lived there and faced all kinds of horrific treatment.
Abuse, physical restraints, seclusion rooms, overcrowding, drugging, filthy conditions, these were all very common, and very normalized here. The goal was to, essentially, segregate disabled individuals from the general public, and remove them from the gene pool.
A place called Willowbrook
Willowbrook State School, on Staten Island, was supposed to be a safe place, a place for intellectually disabled children to flourish. It definitely wasn’t like that. From 1956 to 1971, the children were used for hepatitis studies and were deliberately given live hepatitis strains.
Sometimes, this included infecting them through contaminated material mixed into food, just to make things even more evil. The doctors told parents that, yes, their kids could be admitted into Willowbrook if they agreed to letting their children be tested on.
Locked in for the night
It started small. A candle and oily rags, that’s all it took for the Ohio Penitentiary fire to start on April 21, 1930, and the fire ended up killing 322 inmates. 130 prisoners were injured. The fire began in the prison’s West Block, where 800 inmates had been locked in for the night.
But the worst part was the fact that the guards didn’t open the cells right away when they saw the fire spreading, because they were worried about a prison break. Smoke filled the building, and the roof came down, yet the men were stuck inside, watching the flames get closer.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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