History
Uncover the mysterious and often unsettling aspects of history. From alchemists and occult figures to unexplained events and dark legends.
30 articles found
Zosia of Pień: The Woman They Locked Into Her Grave
A young woman was buried in 17th-century Poland with a sickle across her throat and a padlock on her foot, so she could not rise. In 2024 a …
The Magic Garden of Heidelberg: The Winter King's Eighth Wonder
The Hortus Palatinus was the Eighth Wonder of its day: a machine-garden of singing statues and water organs, built by the Winter King at the …
The Drowned Country: Can a Myth Remember a Real Lost World?
The North Sea hides a drowned country. Doggerland was real, and it sank around 6200 BCE. Can a myth carry memory that old? This is the …
The Bog Bodies: Were They Criminals or Gods?
The Iron Age bog bodies of Northern Europe kept their faces and skin for two thousand years. They were killed with a violence that looks …
The 280 Stone Rings of the Atbai: The Saharan Civilisation Pharaonic Egypt Inherited
Four archaeologists working in Eastern Sudan's Atbai Desert have just published 280 monumental stone burial enclosures, 260 of them …
Atlantis: What Plato Wrote, and What People Made Up After
Plato wrote about Atlantis once, in two dialogues, twenty-five pages total. That is the entire primary source. In 1882 a former US …
The Spirit Telegraph: How Victorian Engineers Plugged the Dead Into the Cable
On 31 March 1848 in Hydesville, New York, two girls worked out a code with a rapping presence in their cottage. Four years earlier Samuel …
John Dee in Bohemia: The Angelic Covenant of 21 April 1587
On 21 April 1587, in a Bohemian household at Třeboň, John Dee and Edward Kelley signed an angelic covenant to share their wives. The angel …
The Deviant Burial at Račeša: A Croatian Vukodlak Reconstructed
A man buried between the 13th and 16th centuries on a former Hospitaller estate in western Slavonia was dug up by his own community, …
Gilles de Rais: Saint, Soldier, Serial Killer
He rode beside Joan of Arc at Orléans. He was made Marshal of France before his 25th birthday. Then he retired to his castles and, according …
Haunted Houses of England: Eight Cases from Four Centuries
England has been documenting its ghosts for four centuries. Not with folklore and campfire stories, but with court transcripts, military …
The Amulet Trade: Sacred Objects or History's Longest-Running Fraud?
The oldest amulet factories date to Tell el-Amarna, where Petrie found approximately 5,000 clay molds for mass-producing faience charms in …
Qin Shi Huang: The Emperor Who Poisoned Himself Seeking Immortality
The first emperor of China spent his final years swallowing mercury pills, sending fleets to find the Islands of the Immortals, and burying …
Giambattista della Porta: The Professor of Secrets
In 1558, a 23-year-old Neapolitan published a recipe that could have stopped the witch burnings across Europe. It proved the Witches' …
Giordano Bruno: The Man They Had to Silence
A Dominican friar who combined Copernican astronomy with Hermetic magic, Giordano Bruno proposed an infinite universe full of inhabited …
Stefano Zannowich: The Shoemaker's Son Who Became a Prince
Born in a Venetian coastal town to a shoemaker father, Stefano Zannowich reinvented himself as an Albanian prince, corresponded with …
Paracelsus: The Doctor Who Burned the Textbook
Born a semi-serf in Swiss mining country, Theophrastus von Hohenheim called himself Paracelsus and waged war on every medical authority of …
The Curse of the Mummy: How Europe Invented Egypt's Most Famous Tradition
The 'curse of the mummy' is attributed to ancient Egypt, but the Egyptians never had such a tradition. Real tomb inscriptions were rare, …
The Dancing Plague of 1518: When Strasbourg Danced Itself to Death
In the summer of 1518, the city of Strasbourg witnessed one of history's strangest epidemics. It began with one woman dancing in the street. …
The Real Dr. Faustus: Johann Georg Faust
The historical Faust was a wandering astrologer, palm reader, and alchemist who left documented traces across southern Germany between 1507 …
The Lady of Secrets: How Isabella Cortese Made Science Go Viral in 1561
The historical Isabella Cortese is a ghost. No baptismal record, no notarial document, no grave. What she left behind is a book: I secreti …
Arnold Paole: The Vampire Case That Made Europe Believe
When Austrian surgeons opened seventeen graves in Medveđa in 1732 and documented bloated corpses with blood at their lips, they produced the …
The Many Masks of Cagliostro: Alchemist, Trickster, Prophet of Light
A fact-checked walk through Cagliostro's reinventions, from the Palermo slums to the Bastille to the fortress of San Leo, with the Egyptian …
Count Kuefstein's Bottled Spirits: The Servant Who Wrote It All Down
Count Kuefstein destroyed every record of his alchemical experiments before he died. His servant's half-torn diary survived anyway. What it …
The Alchemist Who Pre-Invented Plastics: Bartholomäus Schobinger of St. Gallen (1530)
Five centuries before Bakelite, St. Gallen's Bartholomäus Schobinger spread a recipe that hardened milk protein into a translucent, …
Nicolas Flamel: The Enigmatic Alchemist of Paris
In 1612, a book claimed that a medieval Parisian scribe had discovered the Philosopher's Stone and achieved immortality. The book was a …
The Aix-en-Provence Possessions: The Trial of Father Louis Gaufridi
In 1611, a charismatic Marseille priest was executed for allegedly bewitching young nuns into demonic possession—a sensational case that …
Hildegard of Bingen: The Sibyl of the Rhine Who Saw the Living Light
The full story of Hildegard of Bingen: the girl enclosed in a monastic cell at fourteen, the visionary who won papal approval, the composer …
The Count of St. Germain: The Man Nobody Could Identify
The Count of St. Germain appeared in 18th-century Europe with no verifiable past, charmed kings, performed real chemistry, carried …
Elizabeth Báthory: The Blood Countess, the Trial, and the Legend That Grew for Four Centuries
Elizabeth Báthory was charged with 80 murders, accused of 650, and became history's most infamous female killer. But the blood-bathing …