Abu Sayyaf

Chapel interior

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Red Bird – watercolour on paper

Abu Sayyaf accumulated over $25 million in ransoms across the 2000s, running hostage-taking as a product line. Deadlines were not negotiable: late payments ended in beheadings filmed and distributed as marketing.

Tissaphernes

The Persian satrap Tissaphernes invited the Greek generals of the Ten Thousand to a peace feast in 401 BC, then seized and beheaded each one — leaving 10,000 soldiers leaderless in the Persian heartland.

Alexei Leonov

Alexei Leonov floated free of his capsule in 1965, then found his suit had ballooned so rigid he couldn't reenter — so he bled pressure from the suit valve himself, alone, 500 km up.

Hermann Nitsch

Hermann Nitsch built a six-day 'Orgien Mysterien Theatre' around slaughtered ox carcasses, rivers of animal blood, and nude bodies roped to crosses — sixty years of it, in an Austrian castle.

Dnepropetrovsk maniacs

In 2007, two teenagers in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine filmed themselves beating a homeless man to death with hammers and a pipe over several minutes. The video, called '3 Guys 1 Hammer,' leaked online and became one of the most viewed snuff films in history.

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.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Screaming Lord Sutch

Screaming Lord Sutch lost 40 consecutive British elections across 35 years, founding the Official Monster Raving Loony Party — yet outlasted so many rivals that he became the longest-serving party leader in UK history.

Chris Ofili

Ofili painted the Virgin Mary with a clump of elephant dung as one breast and pornographic collage for her halo. Mayor Giuliani called it 'disgusting' and tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.