6 Catastrophes With Horrifying Aftermaths History Left Out

Lincoln's body was to be taken from Washington to his burial plot in Springfield, Illinois. Ordinarily, this would have been a swift train journey; however, Stanton arranged for the president to be paraded through the streets of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois over the course of two weeks. Mary Todd Lincoln flipped her shit, but what could she do? She was only, um ... the widow.

The Lincolnollapalooza Farewell Tour departed on April 21, 1865, and things went well for the first few stops. It all started to turn south, however, after an extended open-air viewing in Manhattan. The body was exposed to the elements for 23 hours, and the papers began to remark that it "had very materially altered ... the lower jaw somewhat dropped, the lips slightly parted, and the teeth visible." One paper went so far as to declare this "not the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln ... but a ghastly shadow." It's almost as if he'd died or something.

The conditions and vibrations of the train were causing ol' Abe to break down at an unexpected rate. His skin was beginning to darken and discolor. Still, at no point did anyone suggest cancelling the rest of the tour, lest the populace think they'd spent four years being governed by Skeletor's politically minded brother.

Finally, the train reached Illinois and Lincoln was buried -- but the indignities continued. In 1876, a criminal gang was arrested midway through stealing Lincoln's remains as part of a bizarre blackmail scheme, after which he was re-interred into a tougher grave ... which had to be re-opened in 1901 after conspiracy theorists started spreading rumors that Lincoln hadn't been buried at all. It was pretty much the "Paul is Dead," Tupac/Biggie of its day. And so, the coffin was chiseled out and opened, revealing the great man's trademarks: the beard, the fine suit, the foul look of disgust on his face.

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Two journalists, however, broke through the lines. George Weller of the Chicago Daily News traveled to Nagasaki, whilst freelancer Wilfred Burchett hitched a ride to Hiroshima. Both saw the same thing: a massive number of civilians dying from a mysterious sickness. Weller, trusting soul that he was, submitted his report to the military censors so they could give it a once-over before he showed it to his editor. The censors responded by flipping him an epic bird and quashing the story. Burchett, meanwhile, was able to secretly wire his article out to a colleague. It appeared in the September 5, 1945 issue of London newspaper Daily Express, under a typically subtle title:

The military responded by harassing Burchett, stealing his camera, and trying to get him expelled from Japan. New York Times reporter William Laurence, who was on the War Department's payroll, helped out by publishing puff pieces accusing Burchett and the Japanese of making the whole thing up as a sympathy ploy.

He won a Pulitzer. No, not the guy who reported the truth. The one who buried it.

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On discovering the victims, investigators were called in to find out what-in-the-great-fuck had happened to everyone. They did as much as they could under the circumstances. See, Jonestown was in the middle of the hot, humid Guyana jungle -- not the best place to preserve dead bodies. This meant by the time the compound was raided, the heat and humidity had already turned most of the deceased into unrecognizable mush, forcing a small army of pathologists to rely on dental records in order to have a hope of putting names to ... fluids.

Oh, and just to compound the horror-movie vibe that this whole situation was throwing up, the authorities also had to contend with wild animals venturing into the homestead and chowing down on the abundant food sources laying around.

To make matters worse, investigators weren't able to give a reliable death toll for days because the bodies weren't just strewn around haphazardly. No, they were in layers, with primarily children at the bottom. Over the several days it took to extricate the remains, the death toll would rise in hundred-strong increments as the world's unluckiest pathologists pulled back each layer of this horror lasagna.

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And then ... nothing happened. The world's biggest manhunt (up to that point) ended in an anti-climactic staring contest. With no orders and not enough fuel remaining for an effective kamikaze strike, they were forced to let him slip. One month later, the USS Cole was bombed in Yemen. It was only after this bombing that the military went, "Hey, we can put weapons on these Predators!" Yeah, those might have come in pretty handy a little while earlier.

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Focusing on several geese hotspots across the city, officials from the Department of Agriculture and NYC's Parks & Recs team "rounded-up" 1,235 fowl and shipped them off to be gassed, probably by that weird kid you grew up with around the time all those cats went missing. Just to be sure that their younglings wouldn't eventually seek revenge on the bird-wranglers, the government also suffocated 1,739 eggs by coating them with oil. This would have been, like, the third saddest episode of Parks & Recreation.

So, that was kind of a bummer, but they were solving the problem of bird strikes, right? Yes ... except it soon transpired that the birds who brought down Flight 1549 weren't local residents, just a migratory species that happened to be passing through. Considering that the geese population of NYC is reportedly within the millions, killing a few thousand did precisely shit for their already-slim odds of getting bird-struck. Basically, the most tangible consequence was making the New York Post happy:

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Without any official guidance on how to re-nourish Holocaust victims, they'd be given rations or gorge on whatever they could find, and become seriously ill or die. As one inmate described the scene, the distribution of rations "produced a tremendous death rate, instantly. People were eating that stuff and got diarrhea, and there was nothing in the world to stop it ... It was like poison." Some prisoners who'd been doctors in their previous life were even seen wandering the camps warning their fellow inmates not to eat the abundant pork rations that were being distributed, and probably looked like the biggest jerks in existence.

The crisis was eventually ended by calling a halt to the willy-nilly distribution of food. Inmates were instead moved onto a diet of thin soups, followed by a slow-but-steady progression to rations and real food. It's hard to put a figure on how many prisoners died from refeeding syndrome/diarrhea, but one estimate places the figure at 2,000 people. We don't know what the take-home message is from this, but it for sure adds a whole new darkness to the saying "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook. He also has a newsletter about depressing history, if you're into that sort of thing.

Also check out The 17 Most Hilarious True Stories Left Out of History Class and 6 Disasters With Details So Awful, History Left Them Out.

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