Due to the unseemly elements and tools required, torture is often conducted in specially designed, clandestine rooms, ominously called “chambers.” Some enter these palaces of pain willingly. However, most are compelled against their will. Make no mistake; there is always a political connotation. “Good” people do not need torture chambers. 10 Saddam’s Upper East Side Secret According to anonymous Iraqi officials, Saddam Hussein operated a secret torture chamber out of the Iraqi mission in Manhattan’s Upper East Side....

10 Hayyi Rabbi The Mandaeans (aka Sabaeans) are practitioners of an Abrahamic religion who believe their religion to be older than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam but who have not actively proselytized since the first century AD. They now believe that the only way to become a member of their faith is to be born into it. Their god is known as Hayyi Rabbi, to whom all absolute properties belong. Hayyi Rabbi created all the worlds of the universe as well as souls, which were placed into human bodies by angels....

Saimir Strati, an Albanian artist, holds the Guiness World Record for creating the largest toothpick mosaic. The 86.11-square feet creation is made of 1.5 million toothpicks, and took 40 days to complete. The mosaic, which depicted a galloping horse, was displayed at the Arbnori International Centre of Culture, Tirana, Albania on 4 September 2007. Saimir Strati gets another spot on my list for his other record-breaking piece, a 988-square feet mosaic made of 229,675 bottle corks....

In the myths concerning the labors of Heracles, the eighth task he must perform is to steal the mares of Diomedes, King of Thrace. Horse theft should be a simple matter for the son of a god, but these are man-eating horses. Unaware that the horses are mad and deadly, he leaves them with his companion, whom the horses kill and devour. As a punishment on Diomedes for raising such monsters, Heracles feeds Diomedes to his own horses....

10The Presbyterians Beneath New York In 2015, workers in New York City were digging up Washington Square East so they could install a water main. While digging up the foundations, they discovered a large empty space filled with human remains. In the 1800s, two-thirds of Washington Square Park was a potters’ field, and the remainder was a cemetery for a small Presbyterian church. After another vault was discovered, archaeologists came in to excavate the sensitive area....

The passengers of the Mayflower consisted of servants, laborers, doctors, wives, children, and more. We don’t know much about the people who were on board the ship, but some documents have been recovered to give us a small glimpse into their lives. From what we do know about them, here is a list of ten of the most interesting passengers from the Mayflower. 10 Samuel Fuller Samuel Fuller was married three times and had four children....

10A New York First On the evening of December 22, 1799, Gulielma “Elma” Sands left her home in a Manhattan boarding house after confiding to her cousin that she was marrying her fellow boarder, Levi Weeks. She wasn’t seen again until January 2, 1800, when her body was discovered in the Manhattan Well. Elma’s demise produced a list of “firsts” in US history. For starters, it was New York’s first scandalous murder mystery....

10The Swedish Skulls Mounted On Stakes In 2009, archaeologists excavated an 8,000-year-old Stone Age settlement, known as Kanaljorden, near the town of Motala (pictured above, c. 1890) in southeast Sweden. The skulls and skull fragments of 11 people were found in a stone-encased mass grave at the bottom of a formerly shallow lake. Strangely, the bases of two of these skulls were impaled with wooden spikes. Other skulls seemed to have been mounted this way, too....

10 Arch Crawford While working at Merrill Lynch in the early 1960s, Arch Crawford turned from using the past behavior of companies to predict their future financial success to using astrology. Apparently, an article in The Wall Street Journal on astrological cycles reshaped his thinking. Crawford has rebranded himself as a financial astrologer through his Crawford Perspectives newsletter, which compares the planetary movements with the major stock and commodity indexes, bonds, some individual commodities, and the US dollar....

They also harbor strange mysteries. When black holes die, what happens to everything they ate? Why did a black hole flash in 2019 when science argues that they cannot flash? New discoveries could have spectacular answers. 10 Mind-Blowing Things Black Holes Do (Other Than Suck) 10 A Star Turned Into Space-Pasta A star perished in 2019. One half blew into space. A black hole shredded the other half into long tendrils and munched them....

While it was nowhere near as successful, there was another minor renaissance for superheroes in television in the 1970s. It started with the popular Six Million Dollar Man (1974–1978), which told the story of Steve Austin, an astronaut and test pilot given superhuman bionic replacements for both legs, one arm, and one eye. Some of the TV series from this period, like The Amazing Spider-Man (1977–1979), Wonder Woman (1975–1979), and The Incredible Hulk (1977–1982), brought characters from the comics to the small screen....

It was once (and perhaps still is) a superstition that if you found a hole in a loaf of bread you cut, it symbolized a coffin and meant that someone was soon to die. If a person found a loaf in this state, there would be days of discussion to guess who it might be that would be stricken down. Of course, these days we are less likely to cut our own loaves of bread, so this one is likely to die into obscurity....

In today’s hyper-politically correct cancel culture, most (if not all) of Archie’s comments would immediately go viral, with offended parties decrying the remarks and people losing jobs left, right, and center . . . well, mostly right. But before you take offense at this list of zingers, consider director Norman Lear’s motivation behind creating Archie Bunker. Through Archie, Lear was able to bring up topics that many Americans considered taboo....

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Ways Google Does Evil That being said, there have been times when Google Maps has managed to give us quite the creeps too. People have found some bizarre and mysterious stuff just looking through Google Maps and its Street View feature, ranging from harmlessly creepy to downright horrifying. 10 A Possible Scientology Base Scientology is a weird mix of science and religion—with quite a bit of aliens thrown in—that we really don’t have the space to get into right now....

10The Tale Of Two BrothersEgyptian, c. 1185 BC Written during or slightly after the reign of Seti II, ruler of Egypt from 1200–1194 BC, The Tale of Two Brothers is seen by some as the earliest example of a fairy tale. Though the exact date of the discovery of the papyrus is unknown, it was sold to the British Museum in 1857 and subsequently translated from the hieratic writing with which it was composed....

10Anamorphosis Anamorphosis is the technique of drawing images which can only be fully understood from a specific point or angle. In some cases, the correct image will only appear if viewed through a mirror. One of the earliest well-known examples of anamorphosis was produced by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century. Several other famous examples of the art form date back to the Renaissance period, including Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors and Andrea Pozzo’s magnificent frescoes on the dome of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome....

Along the way, there was a great deal of medical trial and error and many people suffered as a consequence. These treatments often caused disastrous results that outweighed any potential benefits. Here are 10 of the most macabre medical treatments history has ever known. 10 Bloodletting Bloodletting is an old, macabre medical practice that’s been around for millennia. A physician “lets the blood out of” (drains) a living patient to cure an ailment or disease....

Of course, the big drawback is that more people now have knowledge of the murder, so there’s always a greater risk of the scheme falling apart. The most unique murder-for-hire cases are built on circumstances so outrageous that they seem like an unbelievable work of fiction. Some of these cases ended in murder, while others were aborted before they even got off the ground, but it often seemed inevitable that the perpetrators would be caught....

10James Jesus Angleton The long-time counterintelligence chief at the CIA was a man whose job was as simple to describe as it was difficult to perform: Catch all Soviet spies and their allies in the US. His was a world of smoke and mirrors where trust was a mere chimaera. That constant pressure made him see a massive conspiracy in which dozens of people in the CIA were in fact Soviet moles....

Or do you? Though we’re taught only the great and good ever make it to the top, the truth is that you don’t have to be intelligent, eloquent, or important to shake things up. In some cases, you don’t even need to exist. 10The Phantom Politician Who Became A Government Minister The year 2007 was a good year for Andre Kasongo Ilunga. At only 34, he’d risen from an obscure backwater town to become Minister of Foreign Trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected government....