15 Ghouls of Trivia That Sank Their Teeth Into Us This Week
As Halloween approaches, we want you focusing on what’s truly terrifying: your own eyes. What if something’s living in your eye? What if your eye exists as a separate being from you? What if your eyes are lying about what you see?
Whatever you find out, don’t go to doctors because they’re even scarier. They do terrible things to you when you’re unconscious, they may kill you to save you, and other times, they just kill you because they feel like it. And once they send you to the morgue, even then, the indignities don’t end. To find out why, read on…
Parselmouth
One defendant jailed for witchcraft in Salem was just four years old. Dorothy Good spent 10 days in jail, having said her snake talked to her. They got Dorothy to flip on her mother, another suspected witch, whom they hanged.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Salem has another tradition, unconnected with witches. Locals commemorate how the city once put a batch of tomatoes on trial for being poisonous, leading one defender to dramatically eat them and prove them safe. No historical record supports this story. Maybe Salem just tells it because it sounds more whimsical than the other trial we know them for.
Scary Syringes
Doctors used to infect people with malaria to treat syphilis. This malaria killed 15 percent of patients. Still better than syphilis, which would kill everyone.
Pass the Ponic
You might have heard marijuana referred to as “chronic.” This comes from the 1992 Dr. Dre album The Chronic — and from a misunderstanding. Someone introduced Snoop Dogg to hydroponic marijuana. Unfamiliar with the word, everyone in the room started calling it “hydro chronic.”
Best Burgers
“Fancy ketchup” is not some meaningless advertising term. The USDA officially grades ketchup, and fancy ketchup is grade A. It is more solid than alternative ketchups.
Bigger and Bigger
One part of your body keeps growing throughout your life. The lens in each eye grows by 1.38 milligrams every year, which might not sound like much, but that means it may double in size between early adulthood and when you die.
Happy Mother’s Day
The first ever artificial insemination was done on a patient without her consent or even her knowledge. Six medical students watched the procedure (again, without the patient’s knowledge), and one donated the sperm. The doctor chose him because he looked best.
‘The Prodigy’
In 2007, thousands of college students signed up for what they were told was a reality TV show with a $1 million grand prize. The first task: sell home alarm systems. This was actually all just a scam, by an alarm company, to sell home alarm systems.
The Net Effect
Oranges are sold in red net bags because the red makes the fruits look more orange than they would otherwise. This is surprising because we more often use the exact opposite color of a food to emphasize its color (e.g., green leaves bring out the red in raw meat).
Bees!
In 2019, a woman in Taiwan was discovered to be suffering from a condition called sweat bees. Tiny bees named halictidae lived under her left eyelid and fed on her tears.
The Skin Hunters
Four paramedics in Poland were convicted in 2007 of murdering patients to send their bodies to funeral homes, in exchange for bribes. The media referred to the killers as Skin Hunters, because the killers referred to the patients they killed as “skins.”
Island Dwarfish
A population of people isolated on an island are likely to grow shorter over time. The small animals on this same island, however, are likely to grow larger.
Fancy British Lace
When Victoria’s Secret was expanding in the 1980s, they were still based in Ohio, where the founder set up the first store. Despite this, they claimed to be headquartered in London, to fool customers into considering them upscale.
Spider-Ant, Spider-Ant
One way spiders try to hide is by disguising themselves as ants. They’ll hold up two legs like their legs are antennae. They then blend in with ants and eat them at leisure.
Such a Karen
Karen Greenlee found fame at the end of the 1970s by getting caught having sex with a corpse. History offers many cases of male necrophiles, but it’s rarer for a woman to try this. Greenlee went on to admit having had sex with 20 corpses as part of her job working in a mortuary.
