8 Creepy Historical Facts That Will Keep You Up at Night

Our eighth selection for creepy historical facts may seem silly, but it was quite dangerous. In 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a dancing plague began. It started with a single woman dancing solo for a few days, but more and more people were affected. Doctors claimed the ailment was caused by overheated blood and would only be fixed by continuing to dance. The idea may seem funny, but several people kept dancing until they went unconscious or died from exhaustion, heart attack, and stroke.

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While ossuaries nowadays are creepy by themselves, the bones were way fresher during medieval and early modern Europe. Our seventh selection for creepy historical facts, huge ossuaries were set up throughout Europe to save graveyard space. When someone expired, they were laid in the ground for a few years until the bodies were “sufficiently decomposed” and then exhumed to be placed in an ossuary. This created more space for the recently deceased, and also created intricate architecture for years to come.

Sixth on our list of creepy historical facts may remind you of a nightmare. Being buried alive was way more common than you think in the 18th century. During that time, the mortality rate was so high that doctors were not always present to confirm the death, so apparent lack of breathing or pulse was a confirmation for witnesses. The problem became so bad that some people would take extra measures to ensure someone was dead, and the Germans even set up hospitals for the dead to watch the rotting process before being buried.

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Most books nowadays are wrapped in fabric or paper, but back in the day, they had…other methods. For our fifth selection of creepy historical facts, some books in the 18th and 19th centuries were bound in real human skin. Also known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, the books were bound similarly to regular leather-bound ones. There are less than ten tested-and-confirmed books of this kind that still exist, with their contents mostly based on anatomy or erotica.

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Following a similar vein, our fourth selection of creepy historical facts focuses on medicine. Human remains were a common ingredient in several medicines until the 20th century, getting ground into a fine powder that could be made into pills or stirred into drinks. During this time, people thought that ingesting a certain part of the body could help cure illnesses in the same part; for example, crushed skull powder was believed to help headaches.

Most of the time, tigers rarely attack humans, but when the conditions are right, a horrible tragedy can occur. Our third selection for creepy historical facts happened in Nepal and the Kuamon area of India at the turn of the 20th century. A single tiger killed an estimated 436 people, and over time, it became dependent on human meat as its natural habitat was destroyed to make room for timber and farmland. As smaller animals migrated, there was no choice for the tiger and her reign of terror lasted almost a decade.

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Yes, you read that right. For our second selection of creepy historical facts, the 1800s had a lot of dentures made using dead soldier’s teeth. Dentures were a big deal amongst the upper classes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Between high-sugar diets and erosive teeth whitening tactics, many people’s teeth were in bad shape. The easiest way to acquire human teeth for a set of dentures was from the dead, and the various battles throughout the country provided lots of options.

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Earning the number one spot on our creepy historical facts is nearly inconceivable. During Genghis Khan’s 21-year reign, his armies were responsible for up to 40 million people’s deaths. While his intentions for the massacres were anything but right, with no one to farm the lands, they were allowed to grow back to carbon-absorbing forests. It is believed that 700 million tons of carbon was wiped from the atmosphere, which would be around the same amount of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption today!