6 Real-Life Horror Movies Your History Teacher Skipped Over

If there's one thing PBS didn't want Ken Burns to include in his Civil War documentary, it's that certain parts of your ancestors probably ended up in some Englishman's mouth, harrumphing and grinning for another few years after their funerals.

Victoria Gallery And Museum
Pictured: a Civil War cemetery.

Tooth harvesting was a common practice in the 19th century, especially when you had enormous battles like Gettysburg and Shiloh blanketing the countryside with tens of thousands of young dead men and their perfectly good teeth. Once the shooting stopped and the armies left, scavengers would sneak out of their hiding places like gnomes to pry every last tooth out of the soldiers' skulls, probably without a great deal of concern about whether the victims were completely dead or just mostly dead.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan
Either way, they'd never have to eat hardtack again, so that's one plus.

This led to the term "Waterloo Teeth," which were infamously taken from the thousands of English, French, and Prussian soldiers who fell during Napoleon's last waltz. According to the BBC, the below specimens are precisely that: real-deal teeth extracted from the skulls of Waterloo's dead and dying.

British Dental Association
You can also use this picture when sexting the Tooth Fairy.

The American Civil War led to what tooth farmers call "a good harvest." Teeth from fallen Union and Confederate soldiers were shipped to England "by the barrelful" to be made into dentures or sold individually. And so it was common for a Brit to spend the rest of his life running his tongue over teeth that had been pulled from the mutilated corpse of a young man who'd died screaming on a battlefield. And then they sipped their tea and thought, "Yep, the times we live in are horrifying as fuck!"

If Hollywood chooses to show you a peasant rebellion in a movie, you can bet your sweet ass that by the end, either A) the rebels will depose the evil king or B) the rebel leader will die a glorious death that inspires generations. The reality is that more often than not, the underclasses who rose up would get crushed via methods so gruesome that they'd give George R.R. Martin nightmares (or possibly an erection).

Case in point: In 1514, a Hungarian soldier named Gyorgy Dozsa was asked to lead an ill-fated Crusade that eventually exploded into a full-on rebellion. After being captured in battle, Dozsa was forced to sit on an "iron throne" while wearing an iron crown and holding a scepter. The only catch was that all three were red hot.

via Wikimedia
Crispy is the head that wears the crown.

So this guy was chained to this hunk of searing hot metal, his skin being fried off of his body, and then Phase II of the punishment kicked in. While Dozsa was still kicking in his smoldering throne, his fellow rebels -- who had all been starved beforehand -- were forced to "bite into his burning body" and "drink his flowing blood." Yeah, this is one of those situations that make you happy that cameras didn't exist back then.

Stephan Taurinus
They didn't even let them choose white or dark meat.

According to that picture, some dudes were playing the bagpipes the whole time, and we absolutely believe it. A captured rebel strapped to a burning chair, screaming as his flesh sizzles off his body while his former loyal friends and comrades rip off ragged hunks of his skin with their teeth like the fucking Walking Dead? Of course they made a band provide theme music. Hey, we bet the entire time you looked at that pic, you didn't even notice that at the very bottom, there's a dude lying on the ground with a massive spike that's been driven up his asshole until it popped out of his shoulder. Why wouldn't there be?

... "cannibal" is probably not the first word which comes to mind. Or maybe it is -- we probably should have found a less creepy picture. The point is that he was totally a cannibal, as were some of the most esteemed scientists and aristocrats of 1600s England.

You see, powdered human skull was a common medical prescription for those who could afford it, for everything from dysentery to epilepsy. The same went for human fat, powdered mummy, moss from a dead person's skull, and even fresh human blood -- which one priest had a recipe for making into marmalade. Noted brain scientist Thomas Willis even had a famous medicine made out of powdered skull and, no joke, chocolate. Of course, it was all probably a placebo effect; you can't help but feel a bit better after consuming someone else's fucking cranium. "I don't know if this is clearing up the infection, but it just feels right, damn it!"

David Loggan
Sometimes you feel like founding neurology. Sometimes you feel like cooking up cranium cocoa.

And where did all these medicinal body parts came from? Graveyards, battlefields, executioners, etc. Where else? The past was littered with corpses like they were cigarette butts -- people would probably trip over that shit. As for more exotic ingredients like dried flesh, African sandstorms regularly provided bountiful harvests of jerky.

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
You would literally snap into a slim Jim.

Clearly, nobody at that time was too worried about hauntings, is what we're saying. Then again ...

Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, lived a pretty miserable life. Three of her four children died before adulthood, to say nothing of a theater hack taking out her husband. Basically, everyone in Mary Todd's family was having a great time hanging out in the Great Beyond, while she was left alone and depressed. It's no shock that she would give anything to reach out to her loved ones again.

So she became obsessed with the occult, as one does. Specifically, the spirit photography of William H. Mumler, who took this photo of Mary Todd in 1871, which also appears to show ... somebody else.

William Mumler

Do you see it? It depends on your monitor settings. Here, let's adjust the picture:

William Mumler
*Play for full effect*

No, we're not saying that Honest Abe came back to haunt his widow. Photo manipulation seemed like magic back then (hell, cameras probably seemed like magic), and with so many people dead thanks to the Civil War, men like Mumler made a good racket preying on mourning widows like Mary. Though we should point out that the fact that Mumler was a fraud doesn't mean that the ghost of a dead president isn't standing behind you right now.

Harris And Ewing
Don't bother hiding your disappointment if it's Warren G. Harding. He's used to it.

Mary Todd Lincoln sure as shit thought there was, and presumably believed it for the rest of her days. This is what life was like in the past: A president dies and they're like, "Okay, do you want to try to reanimate his corpse, or just be satisfied to have him following you around all the time, running his ghost hands all over your body?"

As the first permanent English settlement in America and first British colony, Jamestown has been described as "where the British Empire began." Now, here in America we have something of a romanticized view of our colonial days, thanks to a lifetime of hearing the stories of colonists every Thanksgiving. And while we hear talk of how life was hard back then, the image that sticks with us is that of a bunch of jolly pilgrims sitting around a table and chowing down on a bountiful turkey feast while bald eagles circle overhead. In reality, the Jamestown colony was a cannibalistic disaster, complete with brain-eating.

Sidney E. King
Could've been worse. They could've eaten that dog.

The winter of 1609-1610 was particularly bad -- so bad that it is referred to as the Starving Time. Things turned so unexpectedly brutal that we have a half-dozen documented instances of cannibalism; among them is one man convicted of killing and eating his own wife. His punishment: execution, which we can only gather was swiftly followed with a feast.

And the truth is that archaeologists are only beginning to scratch the surface of this American nightmare. Only 60 of Jamestown's 214 colonists survived. The rest died in ways we can only imagine -- or, in the case of one recently excavated teenage girl, pretend we never knew about. The girl, unidentified, was found with her skull bearing dozens of cuts, its temporal bone "pried off to reach the brain."

Armando Trull
Even her replica looks ready to roll her eyes at our history books.

Yeah. It's funny, because you've probably seen movies in which stranded/desperate people have to make the terrible decision to eat a deceased member of their party. And they have this big moral dilemma in which they finally decide that survival is more important and damn it, if Jebediah were still alive, he would want us to eat him! But when you're talking about real history, a few months of starvation is all it takes for us to reach the "BRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSSSS!!!!" stage. Never forget that, kids.

For more horror stories from the annals of history, preorder Jacopo's new novel, License To Quill, a James Bond-esque spy thriller starring William Shakespeare and Guy Fawkes during the Gunpowder Plot!

Turns out history was just as horrifying as you're probably imagining right now. For more terror from our ancestors, check out 6 Archaeological Discoveries Scarier Than Any Horror Movie and 5 Historical Figures More Terrifying Than Any Horror Villain.

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