In the 19th century, New Englanders thought that tuberculosis was the result of vampires. Some people even dug up TB victims and staked them through the heart.

Male black widow spiders try to choose a mate based on whether or not she has recently eaten. They do this by sensing certain chemicals in her webs. Why? Because female black widows typically eat their mates after sex.

This tiny frog has enough poison on its skin to kill 10-20 fully grown humans.

Ancient Romans believed that drinking the blood of a freshly killed gladiator gave them strength.

The Black Death killed 1/3 of the entire population of Europe in the mid-14th century.

The estimated 2,000 people who lived in Pompeii were killed within 15 minutes of Mt. Vesuvius erupting.

There is evidence of Stone Age people depicting werewolves and vampires in their art.

The average bed can contain anywhere between 100,000 to 10 million dust mites. The good news is that they aren’t parasitic to humans. They only like eating our dead tissue….

In Victorian times, one in four patients died after surgery. There were no pain-killers or anything.

It is estimated that there have been over 3,000,000 shipwrecks in human history. The staggering number of lives who were lost and drifted slowly to the bottom of the ocean is unimaginable.

Up until the mid 20th century it was common for some doctors to use human remains (in powder form) as a way of ‘curing’ people.

In the 1930s, Londoners used to hang ‘baby cages’ out of their windows to help children get more fresh air.

With such high mortality rates during the 18th century, doctors couldn’t always be there to confirm that a patient had died. In fact, sometimes people were buried alive due to this.

Historians estimate that between 40-100,000 people have been executed for witchcraft throughout history.

In 2001, a small town in India experienced “blood rain.” As it turned out, this occurred due to airborne spores from a locally prolific terrestrial green alga.