4

Stalin Led The Charge Against Blind Folk Musicians

Ukrainian bards, or kobzars, were itinerant musicians who roamed from town to town, busking with their lute-like instruments. Almost always blind, kobzars were most often known for the dumas that they sung -- epic poems which celebrated Ukrainian greatness. This made them generally well-loved by Ukrainians, and an established part of Ukrainian society. However, one person who was famously not a fan of Ukrainian greatness was Joseph Stalin, which is perhaps putting it mildly, considering he once starved seven million Ukranian farmers to death. Around the same time he was doing this, he was also instituting policies to scrub out any aspects of Ukrainian culture he didn't like. Which was all of them. Which brings us to the poor old kobzars (who, again, were harmless, mostly blind minstrels).

Wiki Commons To be fair, that sign clearly says "No loitering."

3

19th-Century England Waged War Against The Poor

Being poor sucks. And that's in our civilized, modern era, wherein we mostly ignore the poor. It used to be far more dangerous to be penniless. Back in Victorian England, for example, being poor was basically considered a crime. There were a few reasons for this, but at least one cause appears to be the panic caused by a wave of street robberies in the 1850s and '60s. Even though crime was on a generally downward trend at that point, the press grossly inflated the frequency and extremity of these minor robberies. Because most of the robberies were committed with the generous application of choke holds, they became known as "garroting," which did absolutely nothing to relieve the public anxiety over them.

todayifoundout.com "For those pants alone, you deserve this."

2

The U.S. Government Thought Homosexual Employees Were The Real Threat

Most people are passingly aware of the "Red Scare," the frenzied hunt for suspected Communists that gripped America in the '40s and '50s. But a less-reported aspect of this era was the government's parallel fear of homosexuals. Yep, at the very same time Senator Joseph McCarthy was braying like a donkey about the prevalence of Commies in the State Department, the government was also on the hunt for anyone with a hint of the gay about them. For instance, in 1950, the State Department forced 91 of their homosexual employees to resign, lest their gayness spread through the government like wildfire.

Out "Sure, we just helped defend the world from the Nazis, but homosexuals are the real problem."

1

The Great New England Vampire Panic

New England seems to be oddly susceptible to panics. Apart from the famous Salem Witch Trials, we've discussed in this very article the region's dubious history with clown sightings, and now we're can add another mythical monster scare to their scorecard: freaking vampires.

Boston Daily Globe And yet Patriots fans roam the streets with impunity.

In the early 1800s, 200 years removed from Salem and what should have been a sobering lesson on the dangers of moral panics, the region convinced itself that it was now beset with vampires. Residents throughout New England decided that dead guys were rising from the grave to suck the life essence from the living. To protect themselves, residents began exhuming corpses, decapitating the bodies and burning their organs. That's a whole lot of work, though, so sometimes they would merely flip the exhumed corpse over, which is apparently sufficient defense against the undead. Maybe vampires have a terrible sense of direction and are easily confused.

It was a whole ordeal, too, often carried out in the dead of night with lanterns to guide the way. Henry David Thoreau wrote about an exhumation in his own journal, covering it like it was a normal thing to do on a Saturday night. Occasionally, the vampire hunters would also festively burn the dead guy's heart and inhale the smoke, or eat its ashes so that they themselves would not become a vampire. Again, it is unclear why this would help, but the important thing is they believed it would.

The Providence Journal "Mix it with hot water and pretend it's cocoa."

The horrific tuberculosis outbreaks going on at the time provide an almost plausible explanation for this insanity. You see, tuberculosis was called consumption back then, and a significant portion of the population appeared to think it was caused by dead people "consuming" the unsuspecting living. That's what all the corpse-exhuming was about -- they were looking for corpses that appeared "too fresh," as if they had been up all night the day before consuming the rosy-cheeked energy from living people. Now, this is obviously dumb, but to a 19th-century person with limited education watching all of their neighbors wither away, you can sort of see why the notion of vampires might cling to their thoughts (the vampire legend is a plague allegory, after all).

Also, the early 1800s were super boring, and it's not like those corpses were using their heads and organs anymore.

Justin is writing a free, spooky novel here. Vote for it. He writes other, less grim stuff on his website.

Also check out 5 Eerie Ways Entire Groups Went Insane Science Can't Explain and The 6 Most Insane Moral Panics In American History.

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