What Are ‘Dark Events’ From History You May Not Have Known About?

Our fascination with history never wanes. We constantly flip through dusty volumes of books to learn more about our past and understand our impact on the world. When we read about fascinating characters or find gaps in interesting knowledge we missed in class, we expand our mental horizons and begin to see the good and bad in humanity.

We often applaud and toast historical heroes who have shown kindness and courage to make society a little better. But unfortunately, it is undeniable that not all parts of our past are worth celebrating. So, user rockingkp reached out to fellow Ask Reddit members to find out more about dark and disturbing historical events that few people know about.

Many users have rolled up their sleeves to share the hard facts of some of the lowest points in our history. Discovering them can make us feel uncomfortable, but even the worst moments can hold important lessons that teach us never to repeat them. Scroll down to read the responses and share your thoughts in the comments.

Psst! Just to warn you, some of these answers are not for the faint of heart. If you feel like it's too much and you're in dire need of something positive, 

Check out our latest compilation full of wholesome stories here

#1 Unit 731: Inside World War II

Human "experiments" by Japanese Unit 731 during World War II, committed primarily against innocent Chinese civilians. Nothing I've heard of in my life, even in fiction, is darker than the horrors perpetrated over the years by Unit 731, a military biological and chemical weapons research arm of the United States. Imperial Japanese Army.

There's no room in a Reddit post to list half of them, but here's a selection: dissections of live babies, pregnant women, and more. without anesthesia (aka vivisection), usually after being intentionally exposed to horrible diseases, chemical and biological weapons, etc. Freeze victims' limbs. Sadistic horror movie surgeries that involve amputating limbs and placing them on the wrong side of the victim, or removing organs and reconnecting the conduits without the organs to see what would be like the esophagus without a stomach between the two was fed directly into the intestine.

Not to mention the fact that victims were systematically tortured for the sake of torture without even the lame excuse that "science" was being practiced.

And we're talking about the thousands and thousands of victims, usually unfortunate Chinese civilians, political prisoners, POWs and homeless people, who have perpetrated these atrocities over the years in huge facilities employing thousands of people. .

The icing on the cake? General MacArthur and the rest of the US government found out when they conquered Japan and granted Unit 731 immunity for their war crimes as long as they share their findings with the US and ONLY United States. Many former members of Unit 731 even had very successful and profitable futures in Japan after the war.

Edit: Based on a few comments I've received where people are judgmental about modern Japanese, I just want to make it clear that I'm not biased towards Japanese, and I certainly am not. Encourage others to do the same: Every country and every person has a truly horrific past, and almost everyone sweeps it under the rug as best they can. Also in our generation. We can argue that the torture perpetrated by American soldiers at, say, Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib was not half as bad or more justifiable, but in the end, torture is torture and sadism is sadism. A culture or government that begins to allow and justify such things is, with sufficient motivation, well into the spiral. Let us not be fooled by consoling racism or nationalism that even today our countries or our peoples are incapable of committing our own atrocities.

#2 Philippine Zoo Girl

The one that really catches my eye is the Philippine Zoo Girl that was on display at the Coney Island Zoo in 1914. She was tied up with ropes and peanuts were thrown at her. It's heartbreaking to see something like this happen, especially for such a young child.
A lot of people have no idea [human zoos] ever existed, but they're definitely a dark part of history.

The crazy thing is that there have still been some in the 21st century, but not as horrible as before.

#3 The Radium Girls

Girls on the radio. In the 1920s, they worked at a clock company that painted the hours on clocks with radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. They did it without PPE and they weren't told radium was dangerous. Meanwhile, chemists wore full personal protective equipment and worked in a closed environment.

Worse, they were instructed to lick the tip of the brush to make a very fine point. Some of them painted their nails or teeth with it for fun when they went out at night.

Every time the paint touched them, they got cancer, and many of them had holes in their jaws that needed bandaging.

#4 ​The massacre of kalavrita

The massacre of Kalavrite. It is a city in Greece. The Germans entered and rounded up all the male villagers in a field. Then they all fired machine guns. After that they took the children and the women and put them in the church. When everyone was inside, they closed the doors and set fire to the church. About 20 minutes after the fire, a German soldier can no longer take it and opens the doors. About half of the people escaped the fire, but the rest perished. The German soldier was shot for this, and if you go to Kalavrita today, his name is on the monument. No one was punished for this except the head of the department, who my grandmother told me [died] in a gulag. But everyone got away with it. It's sad that nobody knows because things like this happened all over Greece, Russia and Poland. I only know because my great-grandmother was a runaway from church. This massacre was in retaliation for the villagers' support for the local resistance force, which had recently killed a dozen Nazis.

#5 ​Magdalene asylums

Establishments of La Magdalena, also known as Laundromats La Magdalena. "Reformed" places for women who did not correspond to the image of a good citizen with integrity. The best known were in Ireland. Women and girls were abused and abused by nursing home staff, most of whom were nuns.

The mass graves, the sale of the children of these women to people from other countries, the blocking of parental rights... Apparently at least one film will be released, many stories about it and many people will tell stories about their mothers and grandmothers. I think it's more popular than I originally thought.

#6 ​New London School Explosion

The explosion of the new London school. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the school store teacher in New London, Texas, turned on an electric grinder. Unbeknownst to him, there was a massive natural gas leak under the school. The grinder fired, igniting the gas and causing a massive explosion that disheartened nearly 300 students and faculty. It was absolutely awful. The force of the explosion was so great that a two-ton concrete block shattered a parked car 200 meters away. This event is actually why natural gas now smells. They started adding it after the explosion so something like this wouldn't happen again.

My grandfather was actually one of the survivors of the explosion. He never told it, not even to his own family, so I didn't know much about it (other than the fact that he survived) until he [died]. Towards the end of his life, he suffered a series of strokes which left him quite physically disabled. So my dad gave him a voice-activated recorder and suggested he might record his memories for his grandchildren to listen to someday. Turns out he did. We have hours of tapes of him telling his (actually very interesting) life story, including a great segment on the New London school explosion. For everyone's privacy, I will call my grandfather Papa and I will use an initial for everyone else.

Dad was in fourth grade when it happened, in his English class around 3:00 p.m. M. on a Thursday afternoon. By the time class started, Dad and his friend T were playing and shouting (as eighth graders often do) in the back of the class. Her teacher, Miss M, got fed up with her interruptions and asked Dad to switch places with another student. He went to the girl's office in the front row and she went back to her desk in the back of the room. When the school exploded, they took a test on Ivanhoe's book. Dad was momentarily unconscious and when he woke up he couldn't see anything because the dust was so thick. He looked down and saw that the pencil had gone through his hand. When the dust cleared, he saw that the entire back of the room was gone. I won't go into details, but there were corpses (and body parts) everywhere. The students in the front half of the room survived. Back half students do not. This included Dad T's friend and the little girl who was forced to take over Dad's office because of her bad behavior at the start of class. If he hadn't behaved badly, he would have been [not alive] and she would have been alive. He was responsible for her [death] until the day he [died].

Dad's class was on the second floor. There was no other way but to enter the room through the open cavity of the explosion. After the first few seconds of shock wore off, he and another classmate swung into action. They were the only two children in the class not seriously injured. They made a tourniquet with a sock and a shoelace for a girl with a badly injured arm and brought out her teacher, who was alive but badly injured. Now the men were running under the hole, so Dad and the other boy began to lower the wounded. Then those who could walk got off, including Dad. He ran off to find his older brother B to see if he was okay.

Turns out B was supposed to be in geometry class. However, he and his friend had sneaked out to go fishing. The explosion happened as they opened the door to exit into the parking lot. The force of the explosion sent him tumbling through the parking lot. Both were hit and stunned, but survived. The rest of his geometry class was [dead]. I don't know if there's a moral to the fact that my grandfather and his brother survived because they behaved badly that day. I know it cost them both dearly for the rest of their lives.

There's a lot more to his story about the day and the aftermath (most are absolutely horrific), but I won't go into all of that here. However, a few things: - Dad and the boy who helped him save the other students in his class received medals and certificates of bravery for their actions that day. - Almost every family in the city has lost a child, some all of their children. I'm sure you can imagine the extreme toll this has had on everyone's mental health. Dad described New London as a "city without children" in the months after the explosion. To help the healing process, oil companies were actively recruiting families with children to transfer them so there would be some normalcy when school resumed in the fall. - Dad had played the French horn in the school band. When school resumed, however, he was asked to switch to trumpet because the entire trumpet section was [dead].

A few years later, my grandfather fought in World War II and saw some of the worst conflicts in the Pacific (including Peleliu and the Liberation of Manila). But he said nothing he saw during the war was as bad as what he saw on the day of the explosion. It always amazes me that more people don't know about it. It was big international news at the time.

#7 The Children's Blizzard

The children's blizzard. It happened in January 1888 on an exceptionally hot day. The weather was fine and many schoolchildren were required not to wear coats or jackets to school, some only short-sleeved. While the kids were in class, the weather outside changed drastically from hot and sunny at noon to dark and heavy like a thunderstorm, with strong winds and 3 pace visibility at 3 p.m. Children left school to go home and do their homework (it was in Minnesota) and had to milk the cows and do whatever came up on the family farm. But they got lost in the darkness, snow and wind, and many froze in their villages, just yards from homes or other places of refuge. 235 people, mostly children [died].

#8 The R*pe of Nanking

A six-week series of mass murders, rapes, tortures, robberies, arson and various other war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers against Chinese civilians in Nanjing (former capital of China) during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This was from December 1937, when the Japanese captured Nanjing after a crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese (of varying severity, depending on which side you ask), to January 1938, when the Japanese installed the new government "collaborative" in the completed city. The number of bodies was enormous (estimates range from 40-50,000 to over 300,000), but the massacre is not only known for the number of people who [perished]. What is remembered most is the incredible level of cruelty displayed, to the point that the soldiers even made *games* about killing people. One of these "games" involved soldiers throwing babies in the air and trying to catch them with their bayonets when they fell. Burials alive, castrations, brutal rapes and roasting of people became routine, then the soldiers got bored and thought of even more twisted things like hanging people by the tongue from iron hooks, burying them by the waist, and hitting starving dogs or forcing families into incestuous acts. Houses and shops were randomly selected and searched every night, the Chinese systematically hiding there [without life], raping them first if they were unlucky enough to be a non-elderly woman or a small child, and the children were not exempt from the worst of everyone. Almost anything horrible you can do to another person has probably happened in Nanjing. Even the city's Nazis at the time were horrified by the massacre, calling it "the work of the b****l machine".

#9 The Vipeholm Experiment

Sweden is best known as a country that does not scare. With good dental care and above all accessible. The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human trials in which patients at the Vipeholm Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped in Lund, Sweden were given large amounts of sweets to induce tooth decay (1945-1955). Experiments have been sponsored by both the sugar industry and dentistry to determine if carbohydrates affect tooth decay.

The experiments provided comprehensive information on dental health and generated enough empirical data to link sugar consumption to dental caries. Today, however, they are considered violations of the principles of medical ethics.

Hey, you're institutionalized and in pain and helpless - let's rot your teeth in your skull. For science uh.

#10 The Cadaver Synod

Basically, the pope exhumed the body of a previous pope so that the body could be tried for something fabricated. So they dug up his 7-month-old bloated corpse and condemned him, retroactively nullifying his papacy. Then they threw his bloated and condemned corpse into a river. The people got angry and overthrew the pope, who was strangled in prison. So the next pope came and brought the body out of the river and posthumously restored his papacy.

#11 Khuk Khi Kai

"Khuk Khi Kai" or the "Prison Chicken Pile" in Thailand. Used by French forces to hold political prisoners (Thai rebels) in the Chanthaburi area.

The long-standing effects of this feared torture are still felt in the region today: there is a Thai proverb for those who defy authority which roughly translates to: "Be careful not to get trapped in a prison of dog poo. "Chicken". I discovered this prison through my parents who learned it from their parents.

How it worked there was a small 2 storey jail. The ground floor houses the prisoners and the top floor is essentially a giant chicken coop.

The mesh floor/ceiling allows chicken droppings to fall on the prisoners below.

Although the "maximum sentence" at Khuk Khi Kai was around a week, it was apparently one of the most feared sentences in existence.

#12 ​Six Million Dollor Man

Once, in the 1970s, a film crew was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, and they were filming in some kind of amusement park. A stagehand moved what he thought was a prop wax figure on a rope, only for an arm to fall off, revealing human flesh and bone beneath. After an autopsy, it was found to be the 60-year-old corpse of an old Wild West outlaw, stuffed to some degree.