27 Super Dark Parts Of History That We Do Not Know Much About, And I Am Seriously Appalled And Horrified After Reading Them

I’m a geek about history. I find it fascinating to learn about how life was 100 years ago, how the different political systems were, and just how people used to live lives we know little about. It seems surreal to read about it, but it did happen at one point. Given this, when I came across a Reddit thread where a user asked, “What dark part of history isn’t talked about enough?” I was horrified and astonished to learn about some of these events. This should have been taught to us in school, but it was never really discussed out loud. And that’s a shame.

Here are 27 dark parts of history that we never learned or discussed out loud, and it’s a heavy read:

Disclaimer: The following content has mentions of historical events, violence, death, and other sensitive topics. Reader discretion is advised.

1. “In 1794, when French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre realized he was to be executed, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. He was unsuccessful, and when they took him to the guillotine, the executioner ripped off the bandage holding his wounded jaw together, causing him to scream in agony before the crowd until he was silenced by the blade of the guillotine.”

2. “The Great Migration. In the early 20th century, Black people in the South faced severe exploitation. As factories in the North expanded, many Black people began moving north in search of better-paying jobs and safer working conditions. This shift created a labor shortage in the South, and white communities used a range of tactics to prevent Black people from leaving. Police sometimes went to train stations and tore up tickets purchased by Black men traveling north. Train stations near Black communities were dismantled, and labor agents from the North were barred from advertising jobs. In some cases, Black people faced violent retaliation if local white residents learned they were planning to leave. These abuses were most severe in smaller towns, where close-knit white communities worked together to restrict Black mobility and maintain control.”

3. “One of the creepiest events I tell students in my Western Civilizations class is the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus around 875 AD. This event was called the Synodus Horrenda, also known as the Cadaver Synod. Formosus had been dead for 7 months, but the new pope, Pope Stephen VI, found it necessary to exhume Formosus’ body and bring it to the papal court to answer for accusations of perjury and acceding to the papacy illegally. Granted, the Catholic Church has gone through many strange things over the course of its history; however, this event always gets a reaction, especially when the Jean-Paul Laurens painting is shown.”

4. “The year 536 is considered the worst in history; there were a series of volcanic eruptions that blocked the sun that caused famine and droughts. The bubonic plague also started to take hold this year, which took out 1/3 of the human population in Europe.”

5. “The Einsatzgruppen has always freaked me out. They were the Nazi death squads that went around and shot people into mass graves. But they started to go crazy having to look people in the eye and shoot them, so the high command came up with the idea for death camps. The whole series of events is basically the worst game of dominoes ever. Also, I think the cost of bullets was too high—another contributing factor to developing gas chambers.”

6. “In Switzerland, we used to sell orphan children to farmers where they had to do hard work. It was basically slavery and lasted until the 1970s. Similar stuff happened in Germany and Sweden as well.”

7. “Unit 731. If you know, you know; if you don’t know, I’d think twice about looking it up. It was a Japanese experimental facility where their subjects were seen as logs rather than humans. It had some seriously messed-up experiments, which included infecting people with STDs and getting them to infect the other subjects, whether consensual or not. Honestly, it gets into way too much gruesome **** to say on here, so if you’re really curious, look it up, but be warned it’s really messed up. Seriously though, I never hear anyone talk about it. It only happened like 100 years ago, so it’s not too far back in history (1937-1945).”

8. “I live in a city named Halifax in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. During the potato famine in Ireland, thousands of immigrants would land here first before heading on to other parts of Canada. Many did not survive the crossing, so mass graves were dug. One day, workers who had been loading bodies into these graves went to lunch and upon their return found one person had crawled out.”

9. “The 2nd-century decline that basically set in motion the fall of the Roman Empire but also set the groundwork for the challenges faced by the Parthian Empire (Persia), the Han Dynasty (China), the Gupta Empire (India), and the Kushan Empire (Central Asia). Basically the whole civilized world started to fall and forever change course during that era.”

10. “The Raft of the Medusa. In 1816, France sent a ship called the Medusa to go reclaim the French African colony of Senegal. The captain was appointed based on politics rather than merit. Captain Dumbfuck ended up running the ship onto a sandbar and refused to dump the cannons in order to make the ship light enough to get back into the sea. The giant raft they built to hold the ship’s cargo was eventually used to float the 147 people who couldn’t fit onto the lifeboats. The idea was that the lifeboats could tow the raft to shore. The lifeboat folks, including Captain Dumbfuck and the governor, decided to cut off the raft and leave everyone for dead while they sailed to land. After two weeks, there were only fifteen men left alive on the raft, and boy, did they have a story to tell.”

11. “Zhang Xianzhong, also known as Yellow Tiger, was the leader of a seventeenth-century peasant revolt that conquered the Chinese province of Sichuan in the end days of the Ming Dynasty. There he lived the life of a warlord, in constant battle, and eventually descended into madness and barbarism, wherein he turned upon his own people in merciless slaughter. He would pile the heads, hands, ears, and noses of those he had killed so as to better keep count of his murders. In Chengdu, there was erected a stele to commemorate his murders. It has come to be known as the Seven Kill Stele and reads, ‘Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.'”

12. “King Leopold II of Belgium should be remembered on the same level as Hitler and Stalin, and I really don’t understand why he isn’t.”

13. “The labor wars in the USA. Child labor laws, 5-day work weeks, safe working conditions—all bought with the blood of grandparents and great-grandparents. This NEEDS to be taught but, AFIK, is glossed over. History doesn’t repeat, but rhymes. And here we are again.”

14. “Vlad III, better known as Vlad the Impaler. It’s said that when he impales the Ottomans, he’d use a stick with a dull tip to impale them from the anus through the mouth STRAIGHT UP. And from what I’ve heard, he used sticks that have dull tips because it would push the organs aside rather than stabbing through, so they wouldn’t just die right away but would have to suffer painfully. I can’t imagine being a soldier marching through a forest of my comrades moaning in pain, knowing that if I make one mistake, I will end up with them suffering their fate.”

15. “Mediterranean galley slavery seems like something an edgy grimdark author cooked up, yet it was the economic backbone for the Italian kingdoms, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire for centuries.”

16. “The Harrying of the North. I only know a bit about it because it was mentioned in a history lesson, but William the Conqueror killed 100,000 people? That seems like a lot, even for the Norman conquest.”

17. “How the Japanese treated anyone not Japanese: China, PoWs, Pacific Islanders, etc.”

18. “Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator for 40 years under Communist rule. He did things that make North Korea seem warm and fuzzy. He wasn’t deposed either. He died of old age in 1985, and it took another six years for communism to fall in Albania. Things have slowly gotten better, but I’ve heard the country is still struggling.”

19. “The Guangxi Massacre and the Chinese cultural revolution in general. It was a series of politically motivated mass killings with widespread cannibalism, torture, and just an insane level of brutality and violence. It broke out in a rural area, and yet around 100,000 people were killed.”

20. “Up until the 1970s, many unmarried mothers in Ireland had their babies forcibly taken away from them, and they either died and were buried in mass graves, adopted, or even sold to the UK or America. It was a massive scandal, rarely talked about.”

21. “The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was pretty ****** up. African American men were told they would get free treatment but instead were left untreated so scientists could study the progression of untreated syphilis.”

22. “I find The Killing Fields of Cambodia to be very disturbing. Pol Pot murdered a huge percentage of his country through starvation and, of course, execution.”

23. “Madame Delphine LaLaurie was a wealthy socialite in New Orleans, Louisiana, who happened to be a most disturbing sadist and serial killer with a secret torture chamber in the attic. She tortured and killed her servants and was exposed because of a fire that started in her house.”

24. “The Hittite law book has a disturbingly long list of *** crimes. Some highlights include over 10 different kinds of bestiality, with punishment depending on the kind of animal and who topped, and necrophilia, which was 100% legal.”

25. “The lobotomization and shock ‘treatment’ of unruly women and lesbians.”

26. “In the past, people used mummies for everything from medicines to colors to paint with. There was even a tonic to drink that had ground up mummies as part of the ingredients. As for painting, the color was called ‘mummy brown.’ It became in such high demand that, in some instances, the remains of executed criminals were mummified and used to satiate the demand of artists.”

27. “During the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, all Shih Tzus were killed because they were associated with wealth. The modern Shih Tzu is descended from just 13 dogs that were imported to England and Scandinavia between 1928 and 1952.”

I literally had goosebumps reading about these events from history that I had no clue about. How can such major moments not be discussed and taught about in modern times? I will definitely be reading up more about these, and I would suggest everyone do so too (if you can handle it). What other dark parts of history do people gloss over or don’t discuss at all? Let us know in the comments.