While gephyrophobia is irrational, bridges have collapsed in the past. Furthermore, in the dark world of urban legends and folklore, bridges are often depicted as seats of mystery, evil, or both. The following 10 bridges serve as the backdrops for numerous ghost stories, all of which are guaranteed to frighten gephyrophobes and non-gephyrophobes alike. 10 The Old Alton BridgeTexas Located near the cities of Denton and Copper Canyon, Texas, the Old Alton Bridge was originally built by the King Iron Bridge Manufacturing Company as a way to transport people and cattle....

P.T. Barnum died in 1891, and the circus came under the control of his partner, James Bailey, who purchased Barnum’s share from his wife. Bailey himself died in 1906, and the Ringling Brothers, who already owned the successful Ringling Brothers Circus, bought the Barnum & Bailey Circus and merged it with theirs to create the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which remained in business until it shut down in May 2017 due to high operating costs, changing tastes, and animal rights issues....

Larry Clarke’s feature debut came along with very mixed reactions from critics. The film Kids is one of the most realistic depictions of lower-class, urban teenagers one may ever come across. The film plays out like a documentary about sexually active teenagers in New York. The plot is circled around a young boy named Telly who has infected many virgins with HIV including a girl named Jennie. Jennie treks across New York to prevent him from infecting any others while Telly takes it on himself to raise hell in his urban neighborhood....

Etzel Cardena, another parapsychology researcher, found that the Ganzfeld procedure provided evidence of true psychic powers as well. With the Ganzfeld procedure, participants sit in soundproof rooms while blindfolded. They are asked to talk about a film clip they’ve never watched. The snippet is either played in another room at the same time or shown to them afterward. Then another set of people is asked to use the blindfolded partipants’ descriptions to accurately choose the clip from a group of film excerpts....

Top 10 Disgusting Foods The Chinese Eat 10 Alaskan Ice Cream Step 1: beat a seal to death with a bat. Step 2: wait . . . who cares about step two, let’s take a closer look at step 1! Sure enough, Akutuq (known as Alaskan Indian Ice Cream in Alaska) is an ice cream made in Canada and Alaska with origins in the native Eskimos of the regions but also adopted more broadly by those living there....

10 Movie Concepts You Won’t Believe Exist In Real Life Just like modern people are scared by the idea of self-driving cars, people in the past were scared by some things that they thought were crazy. 10 Passport Photos What could be a more obvious idea than a passport photo? What better system could there be to identify someone than an actual picture and description of that person? Well, if you were the British government in 1835, a better system was “no system....

Born in 1469, Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, more commonly referred to as simply Machiavelli, was considered an evil man primarily because his thoughts, both written and spoken, were new and unusual. As a result, his writings were found to be diabolical in nature, partly because they were viewed as attacks on people of importance at the time, including the clergy. He was an Italian diplomat, philosopher, historian, and writer....

Officially, they may have attacked Caesar to keep him from crowning himself king, but there were little moments in every one of their lives that set them on the path to murder. Most of those men have been forgotten, but each one had a life of his own. Each one of Caesar’s assassins has a story that ultimately led him to become a killer—and a story of the fallout that ensued....

But it’s not as if nobody ever tried. More than a few people did their best to take out the leader of the Third Reich—but Hitler, as it turns out, was surprisingly hard to kill. Dozens of people tried to take out Hitler—at least four before he became Chancellor and more than 40 afterward—but nobody ever pulled it off. It’s one of the forgotten stories of history: the many, many plots to take out Hitler....

It is ultimately up to the songwriter whether he wants the inspiration for his lyrics to shine through clearly or whether the words are ambiguous, leaving the song open to interpretation by the listeners. On this list are stories (some very sad) that inspired the writing of very popular songs. 10 ‘Bad Moon Rising’Creedence Clearwater Revival Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), and “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” and “Bad Moon Rising” immediately spring to mind....

Mel Gibson is best recognized, other than as a belligerent bigot, as a versatile actor and Hollywood’s most ruggedly handsome hunk in the late 80s-early 90’s. His most iconic role is as wild card cop and partner to Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, if not as William Wallace in Braveheart (“They can take our lives, but they’ll never take our FREEDOM!”), which he directed and won two Oscars for. In recent years, however, Gibson has avoided screen time (with a few very recent exceptions) in favor of being a director....

As a result, British politicians had plenty of room to cook up crazy conspiracies. Although many of them went under the radar for years, these 10 finally got exposed. 10 Both Major Parties Were Protecting A Gang Lord In 1964, the Daily Mirror published a huge scoop linking prominent Conservative politician Lord Robert Boothby to gang lord Ronnie Kray, who ran the East End of London with his twin brother, Reggie....

Here are 10 examples of soon-to-be-developed or bet-you-didn’t-know-this-was-a-thing innovations that’ll make you look at your surroundings and say: “James Cameron? Are you making all this happen?… Are you watching me right now?” 10 No More “Pew Pew” For all the uber high-tech teleportation-y, voice command-y, thought reading-y machines we’ve become accustomed to in science fiction movies, the weapons are probably the coolest aspect in these films and TV shows. How easy would deer hunting be with a phaser?...

Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was one of the greatest opera singers that lived to recording age. She performed her first opera Orfeo ed Euridice at age 13 in Germany. In an ironic turn of luck, her father was censored by the Nazis, resulting in her inability to study medicine. Her beautifully lyric sound made her ideal for Classical operas, such as Mozart and the operettas of Johann Strauss Jr. and Jacques Offenbach....

10 Fake Artworks And Artifacts Exhibited In Museums 10 The Turkish Superman ‘Süpermen Dönüyor’ is a Turkish movie released in 1979 which takes the ‘Man of Steel’ and reframes him through a very different lens. The story is very close to the original Christopher Reeve film, just set in Turkey rather than the States. They even use some of the score lifted from the US version. And the James Bond theme....

During its operation, the state hospital was infamous for its forced sterilization program, the use of hydrotherapy, and castration to treat “imbeciles.” Numerous reports detailed patient neglect, rape, and beatings. The most unbelievable thing was that no one was able to do anything about the atrocities within the hospital because the workers and doctors were protected by the Kansas state government. Nothing remains of the original hospital, and while many people felt that the building was haunted, it was torn down and removed in 2010....

Yelena Isinbayeva Pole Vault Apart from being smoking hot, Yelena Isinbayeva is also the best female pole vaulter currently competing, and has set 20 world records, 9 of them in 2005 alone. She is virtually unbeaten since the Olympic Games of 2004. Though Emma George arguably revolutionised female pole vaulting in the latter half of the 90s, increasing the world record from 4.23m to 4.60m in less than four years, Isinbayeva took the sport to new heights in July 2005, when she became the first woman to pass 5m, increasing that to 5....

Everyone knows that famous artwork and historic artifacts are among some of the most valuable pieces, but what really goes into stealing the most expensive items on Earth? Below, you will learn about some of the world’s most expensive items and the risky operations that went into stealing them. 10 Glittering Facts About The Faberge Eggs 10 The Mona Lisa Known as one of the most famous paintings in the world, The Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci, was once stolen by a staff member of the Louvre where the painting is housed....

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Eerie Recordings 10 Alessandro Moreschi, Only Recorded True Castrato The Castrati were men who were forcibly castrated at an early age in order to ensure that they would not experience the hormonal changes of puberty that lead to the lowering of the male voice. This meant that as adult men they sang like a modern soprano (they retained their boy soprano voices). After the Catholic Church ensured that all nations banned the practice, Pope Leo XIII took the remaining Castrati into the care of the Sistine Chapel Choir to guarantee them a quiet life (at the time they had become the subject of ridicule)....

One of the foremost professional soldiers of his day, Alba was the commander in chief of Charles V army. Despite diminishing trust in Alba, Charles’ heir, Phillip II sent Alba as an emissary to France to hold negotiations with Catherine de Medici. With an anti-Protestant policy, it is believed that Alba helped lay the groundwork for the massacre of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. In 1567, Alba was dispatched as governor of the Spanish Netherlands following the outbreak of popular unrest....