TRUTH REVEALED: You Were Never Meant To Know These Disturbing Historical Facts

1. The witch trials of the 1600s go back even further than that. In the medieval period alone, over 600,000 people were executed for witchcraft.

2. In the 19th century, the wealthy would pay for "safety coffins" in the event they were buried alive. One incarnation featured a bell, coining the phrase "saved by the bell."

3. John Smith and Pocahontas never fell in love; when the two met, he was in his 40s and she was 10.

4. Pope Gregory IX declared cats as associates of the devil. The subsequent mass extermination of them led to an increase in the rat population that spread the bubonic plague.

5. King Tut was inbred. Egyptian royalty, like the Hapsburgs, engaged in incest to keep the blood "pure."

6. Major Henry Rathbone, who almost caught John Wilkes Booth just after the Lincoln assassination, later went mad with guilt and murdered his wife.

7. Roman Emperor Caligula humiliated the Senate by making one of his horses a full-fledged roman senator.

8. In the Victorian Era, it was common for people to take photos of their close relatives' fresh corpses as keepsakes.

9. Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, were all nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

10. Tsutomu Yamaguchi lived in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. He survived and traveled to Nagasaki the day before the second bomb was dropped. He survived again and lived until he was 93.

11. Pre-Columbian America had a native population of 12 million in 1500. By 1900, that number was just 237,000.

12. In Los Angeles County 1942, a false alarm caused the U.S. Army to fire over 1400 anti-air rounds, thinking it was a Japanese Air Raid. Five people died.

13. In the 16th and 17th centuries, nobles would cannibalize parts of human corpses to cure various ailments.

14. Before the 19th century, dentures were made using the teeth of dead soldiers.

15. Edgar Allen Poe's 1838 book, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," told of a shipwrecked crew of four who cannibalize a cabin boy named Richard Parker. 46 years later, a shipwrecked crew of four in the pacific cannibalize a cabin boy named Richard Parker.

16. In 19th century New England, there was an actual vampire panic where it was thought that victims of tuberculosis, or consumption, were actually attacked by vampires.

17. The Aztec culture of modern day Mexico practices ritual human sacrifice. It's said at least 20,000 people were killed at just Tenochtitlan.

19. Rasputin, a Russian spiritualist and favorite of the Tsarina reportedly survived multiple assassination attempts in the same night. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, and then finally drowned.

20. The vampire Dracula was based off of the Wallachian monarch Vlad Dracula, or Vlad The Impaler. According to legend, he dined on the blood of his enemies.

21. Joan of Arc helped defeat the English at the Siege Of Orleans in the Hundred Years War, but was repaid by the French by being executed for witchcraft.

22. In 1930s China, the Japanese Army committed crimes against humanity in what's now called the Rape Of Nanking. Up to 300,000 civilians were slaughtered in six weeks.

23. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted an unethical experiment on African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama. They told the men they were being treated for syphilis, but never actually treated them, instead documenting the stages of the disease.

24. In the mid-20th century, the CIA conducted real research into mind control in a project called MK-Ultra, which involved dosing civilians with LSD.

25. In 1948, the SS Ourang Medan reportedly sent multiple messages in morse code. "All officers, including captain, are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead." The next message said, "I die." When found, everyone was dead, frozen with contorted faces looking upward.

26. Sultan Ibrahim I of the Ottoman Empire drowned 280 of his concubines after just one slept with another man.

27. In the Fourth Crusade, the Crusader army didn't even make it to the Holy Land, they just sacked Constantinople and went home.

28. In the middle ages, animals like horses, donkeys, even a tomato plant, were put on trial in court. And sentenced to death.

29. During the 1960s and 70s, the US Government forcibly sterilized Native American women through the Indian Health Service.

30. Joseph Stalin, dictator of the USSR is thought to have killed up to 60 million of his own people through forced industrialization and mass starvation.

31. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the famed gun manufacturer, built an exceedingly strange house in order to appease the spirits of the dead who were killed by Winchester weapons.

32. According to the histories, Roman Emperor Commodus rounded up all the dwarfs and little people he could find and had them fight to the death in the Colosseum.

33. In colonial America pregnant women didn't receive painkillers when delivering the baby, because pain was considered God's punishment for Eve eating from the Tree Of Knowledge.

34. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reached its height and politically controlled large swaths of the southern states of the USA.

35. Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration Of Independence, is historically known to have routinely raped his slaves.

36. During World War II, the U.S. was experimenting with gas that would only effect certain races. Yes, racist gas. 60,000 personnel were involved.

37. During the Crusades, a child-preacher named Stephen claimed to see a vision that he and an army of children could take Jerusalem without incident. They never made it, most were killed or sold into slavery.

38. The largest nuke ever made was called the "Tsar Bomba" and caused damage as far as 1,000km away.

39. During the Italian renaissance, an outbreak of syphilis became so bad, that it essentially looked like zombies took over 15th century Florence!

40. In the Roman Empire, it was thought that if you drank the fresh blood of a fallen gladiator, you would absorb their power.