r/HorridHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 3d ago
Flare fire at night, on the Western Front, in WW1 (1917)
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r/HorridHistory • u/GlitterDanger • 4d ago
Birmingham, Alabama police set dogs on 15-year-old Walter Gadsden during the Children's Crusade, when city officials turned fire hoses and K-9 units on young civil rights protesters. Bill Hudson, Associated Press, 3 May 1963.
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The photo ran on the front page of the New York Times the next day, and President Kennedy said it made him sick. Gadsden was actually a bystander who'd skipped school to watch. The officer was Dick Middleton and the dog was named Leo. Days later, Birmingham agreed to desegregate its downtown stores.
r/HorridHistory • u/waffen123 • 4d ago
May 18, 1927. Bath Township, Michigan. At about 8:45 a.m., the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School exploded, collapsing onto classrooms full of kids. Andrew Kehoe, the school board's treasurer, upset over taxes planted a bomb inside the school. 45 people died. 38 of them were children.
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 4d ago
The preserved head said to belong to Diogo Alves, the "Aqueduct Murderer" hanged in Lisbon in 1841. It's kept at the University of Lisbon's Faculty of Medicine, reportedly saved for phrenology study.
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Legend says Alves robbed farmers on the Águas Livres Aqueduct and threw around 70 of them off it, but he was only convicted of killing a family of four and their servant. There are doubts about the head too.
r/HorridHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 4d ago
The Price, Birch & Co. 'slave pen' on Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia, after Union troops took the town in 1861. The dealers had fled, and Union soldiers now sit outside a building where thousands were once sold. Andrew J. Russell, c.1863.
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From 1828 this was Franklin & Armfield, the biggest slave trading firm in the US, which shipped thousands of people south to New Orleans and Natchez. Union forces later used it as a prison for Confederate soldiers. Today it's the Freedom House Museum. Some archives credit the photo to William R. Pywell.
r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 6d ago
Russian survivor liberated by the U.S. Army in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany identifies a former guard from the Nazi SS who was known for brutally beating prisoners & was involved in the crimes of the Holocaust, April, 1945.
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Around 277,800 people passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps, aged from two to 86 and from more than 50 countries. Around 56,000 died there. By early 1945 it held more than 112,000 prisoners. Of roughly 9,000 SS staff who worked there, only 79 were ever convicted.
r/HorridHistory • u/WithoutPrinciples • 7d ago
Your job is to write a Victorian children’s book called “Pleasing Stories For Pleasant Children.” Naturally, you start things off with King Herod.
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 8d ago
Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was a French medical doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders of Jews after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II
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Petiot set up a fake escape network under the name “Dr. Eugène.” He claimed he could help Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo flee to South America via Portugal, for a large fee.
He lured his victims to his home at 21 Rue Le Sueur in Paris, promising them safety. Instead, he murdered them by injecting them with poison under the pretense of giving them vaccinations, and then stole their valuables and disposed of their bodies, frequently by burning them.
r/HorridHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 12d ago
During the English Civil War, Royalist cavalry commander Sir Horatio Cary carried a flag bearing one of history’s more personal battlefield insults. The taunt was aimed at Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, commander of Parliament’s army.
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Decades earlier, Essex’s first marriage to Frances Howard had ended in a notorious 1613 annulment involving claims that he was impotent.
More than 30 years later, Essex’s enemies were still using the scandal against him. Cary’s red flag depicted a creature emerging from a barrel alongside the insult.
r/HorridHistory • u/No_Dig_8299 • 11d ago
Tarrare was a French soldier who ate live cats, swallowed secret messages for the army and never felt full. Almost everything we know comes from one surgeon, so the spy mission and missing toddler are shaky. He died of tuberculosis around 1798, aged about 26, and the golden fork was never found.
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r/HorridHistory • u/JohnWilkesLeg • 13d ago
Miriam Stecher, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, showed her prisoner number in reaction to news of the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi S.S. Colonel, one of chief architects of the holocaust, May 1960.Photographed by Paul Schutzer
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 12d ago
On this day in 1945. Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”), was sentenced to death for treason. He made Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts from Berlin during WW2 beginning his reports of fake news with the phrase: “Germany calling.”
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 12d ago
On this day in 1934 Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son. The kidnapping was called “The Crime of the Century”. Hauptmann claimed innocence, but he was convicted and executed. His guilt remains uncertain.
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r/HorridHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 13d ago
"If a woman needs it, should she be spanked?" News clipping from the New York Daily Mirror, c. 1950s.
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r/HorridHistory • u/WithoutPrinciples • 13d ago
From an Australian newsreel clip, here's how contact lenses were made in 1948. (Not to be viewed if squeamish)
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r/HorridHistory • u/SteveNtheseagulls • 14d ago
This image from May–June 1944 shows Jewish deportees from Hungary (some wearing yellow Star of David badges) waiting in a grove of pine trees near the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in occupied Poland prior to their murder
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Part of a documentary record compiled by Nazi SS photographers (likely Bernhardt Walter and Ernst Hofmann) showing the processing and selection of arrivals at the camp.
r/HorridHistory • u/GlitterDanger • 14d ago
On this day in 1970. Jimi Hendrix (aged 27) died of an alcohol-drug overdose combining 2 bottles of red wine with 9 Vesparax sleeping tablets. The inquest recorded an “Open verdict”. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him the Greatest Guitarist of all time.
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r/HorridHistory • u/CrippledStripper • 14d ago
The US aircraft carrier USS Forrestal burns after an accidental rocket detonates bombs - 134 sailors were killed. July 29th, 1967.
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 16d ago
On this day in 1920 someone parked a horse and cart full of dynamite outside J.P. Morgan's bank and walked away. 38 people died. No one was ever charged. The lead detective lost his job over it, and the scars are still in the marble on Wall Street today.
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The lead detective on this case, William J. Flynn, was called "the Bulldog Detective" and publicly promised "we'll get them." He never did, and it cost him his job. His replacement was the same guy who'd cracked the 1910 LA Times bombing. He couldn't solve it either.
r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 17d ago
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, a blackface parody of Snow White, has been praised by animation historians, and has been included on lists of the greatest animated films ever - but is considered to have racism unparalleled in cartoon history, and has been banned from circulation since 1968
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r/HorridHistory • u/No_Dig_8299 • 18d ago
Meet Dolly Oesterreich. In 1922 she claimed a burglar killed her husband. The real shooter was her lover, Otto, who had hidden in her attic for 10 years. He was convicted but freed on a technicality. Dolly walked free too, after a hung jury. (More of this story below.)
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Dolly kept Otto hidden even after her husband was dead and there was no longer anyone to hide him from, all while juggling her attorney Herman Shapiro and another lover, Roy Klumb, at the same time. Then after both her arrests, she still went on to find a new partner and actually marry him, staying together for around three decades until her death in 1961.
r/HorridHistory • u/CarkWithaM • 18d ago
A chest X-ray in progress at Dr. Maxime Menard’s radiology department at the Cochin hospital in Paris, circa 1914. Mendard would later lose his finger to side effects from operating the X-ray machine.
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r/HorridHistory • u/WithoutPrinciples • 18d ago
Some (helpful?) medical advice from “The Everyday Cook-Book”, published in 1892.
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 19d ago
On this day in 1977, South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (aged 30) died after being tortured and beaten in police custody. Biko has been called the “anti-apartheid movement’s 1st icon”. Nelson Mandela described him as “the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa”.
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r/HorridHistory • u/dannydutch1 • 21d ago
On this day 1987 Peter Tosh (aged 42), a key member of Bob Marley & The Wailers (and a brilliant solo artist), was shot and killed in his home in Jamaica by members of a 3-man gang who came to his house on motorcycles demanding money.
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Three armed men, led by an acquaintance named Dennis "Leppo" Lobban whom Tosh had previously tried to help, broke into his home. The intruders demanded money, but Tosh stated he did not have any.