6 Catastrophes With Horrifying Aftermaths History Left Out

6

Lincoln's Dead Body Was Paraded Around America

President Lincoln's assassination sent shockwaves through the populace, reducing housewives and battle-hardened veterans alike to masses of inconsolable weeping. Fortunately, Edwin Stanton, spymaster and Secretary of War, was on hand to raise everyone's spirits in the most tactful way he could think of: going on a gaudy-ass farewell tour.

Library of CongressHis attempts to pass off this train as a resurrected Lincoln didn't prosper.

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.

Rockford College

5

The US Tried To Cover Up The Toxic Fallout Of The Atomic Bombings

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government found themselves with a dilemma: they wanted to flaunt how hard they'd wrecked Japan's shit, but they were still wrecking Japan's shit in the form of massive, widespread radiation poisoning. This was a story that they didn't want the media to get hold of. After all, what's the point in vanquishing evil if doing so makes you look pretty evil yourself?

Their solution was simple: Embark on a massive cover-up operation, with a little help from the New York Times.

The New York Times

On the orders of the U.S. military, no journalist was allowed to enter the cities and do any reporting, even though they claimed it was tooootally safe to be there. Instead, the press was to remain within the easy-to-reach clutches of the censors, far away from the frontlines and the remote possibility of doing that sweet "journalism" shit they'd read about somewhere.

4

After The Jonestown Massacre, Investigators Had To Wade Through Liquefied Human Corpses

In 1978, just prior to coining the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid," cult leader Jim Jones had his most fanatical followers assassinate Congressman Leo Ryan and his entourage. In response, military forces prepared to raid Jones' jungle fortress/shantyville, Jonestown. They knew that they weren't venturing into the land of rainbows and candy unicorns. The best-case scenario was that they were about to throw down against a heavily armed murdercult. The worst-case scenario was ... well, come on, what could be worse than a heavily armed murdercult?

The New York Daily News

3

The US Missed Killing A Pre-9/11 Osama Bin Laden By *This* Much

In 1995, before we thought of sticking a bunch of missiles on them, Predator drones were used by the Air Force for reconnaissance missions in places like the Balkans. They were so useful, in fact, that they were then co-opted by a top-secret skunkworks group known as "Big Safari" in order to find some other use we could give these flying doo-dads.

That use, it turns out? It involved a certain shithead who was going to hit the big time in the most horrifying way possible.

Hamid Mir

In 1999, as the entire intelligence community looked for Osama bin Laden after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Big Safari was tasked with finding his porno-loving ass. After re-modifying the drone for the mission, they took to the skies and eventually tracked bin Laden down to a compound outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. The date was September 2000. The time was now. All the higher-ups had to do was call in some kind of air strike and they could congratulate themselves on a job well done.

2

The "Miracle On The Hudson" Led To A Geese Murderpocalypse

They turned this story into a Tom Hanks movie, so you already know it had a feel-good ending. In 2009, the engines exploded on an aircraft carrying 155 passengers, and it took a swan dive into the Hudson River. On the upside, the landing was successful and no one was killed. On the downside, their newly invented seaplane was in grave danger of floating towards New Jersey.

Greg L/Wiki Commons

A subsequent investigation revealed that the crash wasn't caused by mechanical failure or Twilight Zone gremlins: rather, it was birds. The plane had accidentally flown into a flock of migrating geese who immediately clogged up the engines, causing them to burst into a terrifying, delicious-smelling inferno. In order to prevent any incidents like this (or worse) in the future, therefore, local officials descended on the area and took swift action against the insidious bird menace -- which is to say, they massacred over a thousand geese.

Rob Bennett/The New York Times

1

Newly Liberated Holocaust Survivors Died From Overeating

OK, picture this: You're a soldier liberating people who have spent up to several years being starved for no reason other than cruelty and madness. You have rations of meat, cheese, chocolates, and biscuits for yourself. What do you do? You share it around, right?

Congratulations: You just killed a whole bunch of people. This is exactly what happened at the end of World War II.

See, whilst you'd expect food to be the answer to any problem involving not having food, feeding a severely-starved person with nutrition-packed foodstuffs can cause them to suffer from "refeeding syndrome" -- basically, a condition caused when the body adapts to starvation and gets overloaded with a deluge of nutrient-rich food. This isn't a mild condition, either. It stresses the body so badly that patients can suffer side effects including hypertension, heart failure, seizures, coma, and straight-up death. And those are some of the less disgusting ways to go. You know, because these people hadn't gone through enough already.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum