10Hitler Led One Of The First Anti-Smoking Campaigns Introducing a health program that saved the lives of 20,000 women would be a huge achievement for any politician. Well, unless that politician was Adolf Hitler, a man who infamously ordered the mass murder of at least 11 million people he considered undesirable, including Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, and the disabled. A mere 20,000 really does pale in comparison. The health program in question was actually one of the earliest government anti-smoking campaigns....

Ancient texts can also provide detailed information on past atrocities. Together, this shows the dark side of human nature and the horrors that may result from it. 10 Pit Of Severed Limbs Among 60 Neolithic pits discovered near Bergheim, France, 14 contained human remains. One of these stood out from the rest with its morbid collection of severed limbs. The pit had severed arms, hands, and fingers from at least seven different people, including one teenager, dating to 5,335 years ago....

10Clifford Irving Published A Fake Autobiography Of Howard Hughes Business tycoon Howard Hughes was one of the wealthiest and most famous men in the world, but his immense struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and mental illness caused him to become a total recluse. He was almost never seen in public for the last two decades of his life. As a result, Hughes was a prime target for hoaxers who wanted to capitalize on his fame....

We can’t talk about the fear of being inside an elevator because there are always those people who will scoff at the notion. “Nothing bad can happen,” they say. But history shows us otherwise. Elevators can come crashing down. Cables do break. People get smooshed between floors. Accidents do happen. 10 Crushed To Death In Marshall Field’s Marshall Field’s was a huge department store that began in 1852 in Chicago, Illinois....

Life behind a city’s walls when the Assyrian army drew close was terrifying. Assyria made sure of it. They pioneered the use of terror as a weapon—and they made the lives of their enemies a living horror story. 10An Enemy That Lived At War Every Assyrian man, from the poorest to the richest, was required to serve in the army. This was the first country to make military service mandatory for every male citizen, no matter who he was....

We’ll never get to see Lucas’s version of those films, but little details have slipped out. The people who have seen his ideas have had a hard time keeping their mouths closed—and thanks to them, we have a decent idea of what a new Star Wars trilogy would have looked like with George Lucas at the helm. 10 Luke Would Be A Father Back in 1983, Mark Hamill let a little hint about Lucas’s dream for a new trilogy slip: Luke Skywalker was to be a father....

Number 10 because nobody died and not nearly as many fans were devastated as some more notable break-ups, the collapse of the Smiths came after an extremely fertile, yet brief period of musical creation (between 1982 and 1987), wherein each album got progressively better and more demonstrative of each musician’s growth. Splitting after a mere fourth studio album, and absolutely because the songwriting team of Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr was corrupted by the vocalist’s impossible ego, it’s tragic to think of what great body of work could have ensued had the two been able to work out their differences....

Die-hard fans probably know the answer already. According to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes is a combination of Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn, both skilled doctors who assisted police and possessed the amazing ability to size up a person with a single glance. But while they influenced Doyle’s detective, they didn’t actually investigate crimes or battle any British baddies. Jerome Caminada, on the other hand, was Sherlock Holmes in the flesh....

This is the favorite game of Japan/Korea’s World Cup mascots, Ato, Kaz and Nik. Atomball is, I think, the most obscure game on this list. As a result, not much is known about this game, but from the context, it can be assumed that it is similar to football (soccer). The inspiration for this list, Calvinball might be the most well known of the entries. For those who don’t know, Calvinball is a nonsense game from the comic Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson....

10 The Iolaire On January 1, 1919, two months after the end of World War I, British sailors who’d survived the perils of both the ocean and the war were returning to their families on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, only to tragically perish within miles of reaching home. The Iolaire (which means “eagle” in Gaelic) was built as a luxury yacht in 1881. During the war, it was equipped with guns and performed anti-submarine and patrol work....

10 Grover ClevelandIllegitimate Child Grover Cleveland had a child out of wedlock long before he ran for president in 1884. When the news broke, Cleveland admitted to his relationship with Maria Halpin matter-of-factly. He also asserted that Halpin had engaged in affairs with many other men at the same time and that he had admitted paternity largely because he was the only bachelor among them. At the time, these statements about Halpin’s character, which indicated that Cleveland hadn’t seduced an innocent or respectable woman, were almost perceived as justification....

An African mammal that looks like a slender yellow-grey hyena, but in fact lives almost entirely on insects such as termites. The name means ‘earth wolf’, because it inhabits burrows. No doubt it would have been better known if it hadn’t just missed (by one letter) being the first entry in the dictionary. That honour goes to another burrow-dweller, the African aardvark (‘earth pig’). The largest wild sheep (up to 120 cm....

Today, people are better-educated about these physical and mental health problems and are much less inclined to view those who suffer from them as helpless, pitiful, menacing, or evil. Nevertheless, audiences continue to pay to see movies featuring unusual physical and mental disabilities, as these ten medical conditions that inspired horror movie victims and villains suggest. 10 Acromegaly In The Brute Man (1946), Rondo Hatton (1894–1946) plays a disfigured man, Hal Moffat, who’s known to police as “The Creeper....

10 A Freeze-Frame Of The Solar System’s Formation This is a thin section of a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old meteorite. The round blobs, called chondrules, are why these meteorites are called chondrites. Today, chondrites show scientists exactly how Earth and the rest of the solar system formed. Chondrites are literally older than dirt. They formed when the solar system was just a cloud of interstellar dust, some of which melted into chondrules. The rest of it started clumping together into bigger and bigger objects with more and more gravity....

10 The Super-Sargasso Sea In The Book of the Damned, Charles Hoy Fort described the Super-Sargasso Sea, a dimension that collects all the things that have gone missing from our world before spewing them back out again. His biggest piece of evidence for his was the world’s mysterious rains of animals. The source was his proposed dimension. The Super-Sargasso Sea revolves above and with our world (or it might remain in a stationary position above us while we move)....

Top 10 Worst Plagues In History While most newsworthy items are about the spread of the virus and the mitigation efforts being implemented to slow its progress, there has been an event or two that might have slipped by unnoticed. These ten things came up this week, and while they mostly relate in some way to the virus, not all of them do. 10 Man Accidentally Gets 2.8 Million Dollars This week, the United States Treasury began sending out stimulus payments to American taxpayers, with many people waking up to find a deposit in their bank accounts....

As the spring got underway, the big story from Washington was that it’s time for war! At least, a trade war, if controversial proposed steel tariffs go ahead. Elsewhere, the news was its usual mixture of exciting, hopeful, and worrying. There were Earth-shaking elections in Italy, huge scientific advances in Australia, and a possible assassination attempt in Britain. Want to find out what the world’s been up to these last seven days?...

The criminal offenses, which include body-snatching, train robbery, kidnapping, and fraud, involve the use of picks and shovels, dynamite, “burking,” pistols, ropes, knives, water, machine guns, and, yes, even cameras. In addition, each has inspired a cinematic chiller or thriller nearly as terrifying and electrifying as the crime itself. 10 The Body Snatcher & The Flesh and the Fiends William Burke (1792–1829) and William Hare (d. 1859?) most likely met while working as laborers on the Union Canal in Scotland....

However, there is also a very dark side to folklore, as evidenced by the entries on this list. The following tales aren’t of the heartwarming, wholesome variety, and they’re hardly dinner table fare. They certainly don’t come off as something to tell to wide-eyed children. 10 Bloody Bones And Raw Head From the Southern United States comes the chilling tale of Bloody Bones, a dancing headless skeleton, and Raw Head, a skull stripped of its skin....

In March 2015, Soren Kam, the fifth most wanted Nazi war criminal named by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, died free. A member of the SS-Viking division, Kam had already been found guilty of killing a Danish newspaper editor. He fled to Germany, though, getting citizenship and dodging all attempts to return him to Denmark to answer for the crime that his associates had already been executed for. Those seeking justice are making some unprecedented attempts to make sure that at least something is served....