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.

(Source)

Hot water can freeze faster than cold water.

As impossible as it sounds, this one is actually true. It's called The Mpemba Effect, named after Erasto Mpemba when he noticed it in 1963. Amazingly though, it was actually discovered long before that...by Aristotle. Nobody knows exactly why this happens but the most plausible theory is that boiling the water removes some of the substances dissolved in it which makes it easier to freeze.

This works in reverse when salt is put on the ground on cold days to melt the ice. In this instance, the salt dissolves, making freezing more difficult. For more information, check out this video by VSauce

(Source)

A rural county in Ireland lets people drink and drive!

The city council of County Kerry, Ireland has just passed a measure that allows people to drink and drive – as long as its in a rural area and on rural roads. This measure might seem a little suspect given that the council member who introduced the measure own a pub himself. However, he insists this is about mental health.

The councilman said that these people pose very little risks at drinking and driving because they’re traveling on very slow roads and usually in tractors, so it doesn’t make sense to treat them the same as other higher risk drivers. He says not being able to go out and drink and drive home leads some of these people to depression and suicide.

(Source)

The famous shot of a naked John Lennon curled against Yoko Ono was taken at the same apartment complex where on the same day he was shot.

The famous picture is one you’ve probably seen before. If not, it’s pictured to the right. That picture was taken on the 8th of December 1980, the same day he was killed. Photographer Annie Leibovitz met Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono at their apartment in The Dakota building in New York to do the shoot.

Only five hours later, Lennon would be killed in the same place by Mark David Chapman. It’s been said that the picture was meant to mimic the famous painting “The Kiss” by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. The photograph, obviously, was published after Lennon’s death.

The really haunting thing is the dark attire and somber look on Ono’s face, almost making it look like she was already grieving. It’s also been said that John Lennon’s nakedness and Yoko Ono’s lack of response to him could symbolize Lennon as an angel (or just dead), invisible to her.

(Source)

A court stenographer was sent to jail for not completing a trial transcript on time!

Ann Margaret Smith was sent to jail back in 2007 for not completing the transcript for the trial of a convicted rapist by its deadline. Smith, who had already failed for several months to produce the transcript, stood trial and was held in contempt of court for not meeting the final due date. Later that week, the stenographer was released and placed under house arrest because she reportedly could not finish the work in jail because she was worried about her children. The house arrest period ended once she was finally able to complete the last 400 pages of the 1,500-page document.
(source)