Category

Dark History

Stories in this category

• The assassin dressed in green: the colour of death

  In 1775, the Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele created a bright green pigment, copper arsenite, which in 1814 the German entre…

• The bell underground: the nightmare of being buried alive

  The fear of being buried alive, known as taphophobia, haunted humanity for centuries. In the nineteenth century, when medicine co…

• Mary "Typhoid": the woman who brought death into the kitchen

  Mary Mallon, an Irish cook who emigrated to New York, was a healthy carrier of typhoid fever: without ever falling ill, she sprea…

• The fashion of consumption: the beauty that killed

  In the 1800s, tuberculosis (called "consumption" or "phthisis") became a romantic aesthetic ideal: pale skin, cheeks flushed with…

• The dance of death

  Strasbourg, 1518. A summer of famine and fear. It starts with one woman, then there are hundreds. A feverish movement infects the…

• Lucusta — The poisoner of Rome

  Lucusta, a professional poisoner, became the secret weapon of imperial power in Rome. It is said that on Agrippina's orders, she…

• The night Paris sank among the dead

  One night in 1780, a Parisian innkeeper goes down to his cellar to tap some wine and discovers that the dead have broken through…

• The shadow over Salem: when fear became madness

  In 1692, in Salem Village, Massachusetts, on a cold winter night, two little girls begin to behave inexplicably. The doctor's dia…

• Elizabeth Báthory, the myth of the "Blood Countess"

  Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman, went down in history as the "Blood Countess", accused of torturing and ki…

• The basement of evil

  In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo set up a simulated prison in the Stanford basement. Twenty-four healthy students were rando…

• The skin library: books with the voice of the dead

  In the 19th century, doctors and anatomists bound books, mostly medical texts, with human skin taken from unclaimed cadavers or e…