the 10 most interesting wikipedia articles ever

01

Heaven's Gate (religious group)

Thirty-nine people castrated themselves, donned identical black tracksuits and Nike Decades, and drank phenobarbital pudding to board the Hale-Bopp comet. Their bunk beds were made, bags packed, and hands folded across their chests.

02

Tarrare

Tarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, snakes, and a 14-month-old toddler — then vanished from a hospital ward. His autopsy revealed a stomach cavity large enough to fit a small child.

03

Bog body

Iron Age men, women, and children were pressed face-down into peat bogs; two thousand years later, Tollund Man surfaced with his stubble, stomach contents — last meal: porridge — and the noose still around his neck.

04

Death erection

At the moment of hanging, male corpses reliably develop full erections and sometimes ejaculate — a documented physiological response with a Latin medical name. The body's final act is indistinguishable from arousal.

05

Radium Girls

Young women at the US Radium Corporation painted watch dials with their lips to point the brush; their jaws later crumbled and fell out. Company doctors falsified medical records while executives stockpiled internal warnings.

06

Ergotism

In 1951, an entire French village — Pont-Saint-Esprit — simultaneously hallucinated, convulsed, and attempted flight from windows after eating contaminated bread. A fungus called Claviceps purpurea may have fueled the Salem witch trials, too.

07

Hinterkaifeck murders

In March 1922, someone slaughtered six members of the Gruber family at Hinterkaifeck farm with a mattock. Neighbors found the livestock fed, the stove warm, and fresh food cooked — the killer had lived there for days.

08

Mellified man

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

09

Sedlec Ossuary

A 13th-century Czech chapel holds chandeliers, coats of arms, and garland decorations made entirely from approximately 40,000 human skeletons. A woodcarver named František Rint signed his name in the corner — in bones.

10

Phineas Gage

In 1848, a 3.5-cm iron tamping rod blasted through Phineas Gage's left cheekbone and out the top of his skull. He survived, walked to a cart — and became an entirely different man.