A man in the 1890s dug up his daughter’s grave and cut out her heart thinking she was a vampire!

This is going to get creepy fast. In the 1880s and 1890s the family of George and Mary brown of Exeter, Massachusetts suffered a sequence of tuberculosis, called consumption at the time, infections. Mary, the mother, was the first to die and then their eldest daughter, Mary Olive, died in 1888. Their son, Edwin, then caught the infectious disease in 1890. Sadly, in 1891, another daughter, Mercy, became infected and died of the disease in January of 1892.

She was buried in the Baptist Church cemetery in Exeter. People began talking about one of the family members being a vampire, as folklore went at the time that if multiple family members died of a disease, then a family member must have been involved in undead activities. George Brown was persuaded to exhume the bodies of his family members in March 1892. While his wife and daughter, Mary Olive, were considerably decomposed, Mercy was still quite preserved and still had some blood in her heart, because they didn’t embalm most people back then.

So, the villagers took that as a sign that Mercy was a vampire and the reason Edwin was sick. Mercy’s heart was removed from her chest, burned, and the ashes mixed with tea and given to Edwin to drink to cure his ailment. He died two months later.

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The Romans dealt with war elephants by circling them with towropes and chariots just like in Star Wars!

There’s little that could be more terrifying than having an angry, screaming elephant, with sharpened tusks and a ferocious man holding a spear charging full speed at you. While war elephants weren’t exactly common, it wasn’t strange to see them in battle.

 They were first employed in India and the technique quickly spread around south-east Asia and eventually to the Mediterranean. Elephants were first tamed for agricultural practices, but after realizing the obvious power of the giant animals they were quickly tamed for war purposes. Alexander the Great’s famed expedition to India while conquering the Persians gained extreme notoriety after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, when the Persians used fifteen war elephants which Alexander took after defeating his enemy because he was so impressed. 

By the time of the Punic Wars, the Carthaginians had perfected the use of war elephants, evident in their trek into Italy, and destroyed the Romans in several battles before they adopted the technique of using fire and riding quickly around them with ropes tied to chariots to bind their legs. Sound similar? The idea is nearly exactly the same as the Battle of Hoth in Star Wars, “The Empire Strikes Back” when the rebels bind the legs of the Imperial Walkers with ropes to topple them. 

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Every year a masked man leaves roses and cognac at Edgar Allan Poe's grave!

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his dark tales of mystery and terror. After living a life that would be difficult to classify as normal, he passed away in 1849 under mysterious circumstances, strangely enough wearing clothes that weren’t even his, that has been attributed to anything from cholera, rabies, alcohol, or even suicide. 

He died in Baltimore and was buried, yet in the 1930’s a tradition began that can be classified nearly as strange as Poe’s life. He’s called the “Poe Toaster.” The nickname was given to a mysterious man that dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat, white scarf, roses, and a bottle of cognac. The unknown man shows up every year since the 1930’s on January 19th at Poe’s gravesite and pours himself a glass of cognac in which he toasts Poe’s memory. 

After the cognac, he arranges the roses in a very specific order on the tombstone and leaves the half-empty bottle as well. Attempts have been made several times to catch of glimpse of the unknown man and discover his true identity, yet each has been unsuccessful. Fans of the Toaster became nervous as the years went on that eventually the man would have to stop coming, yet after leaving several notes it is now assumed that a younger “son” has emerged to take on the Toaster’s responsibility! 

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Continuum, a magazine focused on AIDS denialism, was shut down when all of its editors died from AIDS.

Exactly what you would expect to happen happened here. While it might seem a strange idea in the US, there are a lot of people out there who deny AIDS is real, deny HIV is real, or deny that HIV causes AIDS. 

Still, there is a surprisingly large “denialist” movement to try and disprove the existence of AIDS. Continuum was a magazine written by denialists and focusing on denialism. At one point, Continuum offered a £1,000 reward to "the first person finding one scientific paper establishing actual isolation of HIV.” The challenge was quickly dismissed by various scientists. 

So the year 2007 came around, and aidstruth.org sought to counter denialist claims. By this point, Continuum had already shut down. Aidstruth.org published a list of HIV/AIDS denialists who had died of AIDS or related causes. The editors of Continuum were included in the list. In each case, the death was due to secret drug use or stress related to being a denialist. 

The founder of the magazine, Jody Wells, died in 1995. The editors Tony Tompsett and Huw Christie Williams died in 1998 and 2001, respectively. 

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Black panthers aren’t a real species!

So, what are they? oddly enough, they can be any kind of big cat! They’re the result of a big cat, most commonly a leopard or jaguar, being born with Melanism, a genetic disorder which causes more dark-coloured skin or fur pigment, or melanin, to form. 

It is also the opposite of being born an albino. Because of the genetics involved, a Jaguar born to one normal parent and one melanistic parent can still have spots, but with dark patches. 

This is because the chromosome isn’t completely dominant. Jaguars aren’t the only animals that can experience melanism. Most mammals, including squirrels, guinea pigs, cats, snakes,dogs and moths, can develop the condition. 

It is often seen as a positive adaptation and can often make the animal better suited to its environment. In fact, the peppered moth’s recent evolution is almost completely centered around melanism. 

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