The Donner Party. Children choosing who dies to eat the marrow from the bones of their parents. Randomizing flesh so that parents wouldn't know that they were eating their own children. It was crazy.

The aftermath of Katrina in and around New Orleans. I was down there twice immediately after the storm and the stench from dead bodies was almost overwhelming.

My sister and BIL bought a house on the other side of lake pontchartrain a few months later and there were STILL bodies floating up on the north shore of the lake.

Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment had way worse stuff than what the Evan Peters Netflix show portrayed.

The American Civil War. Old school war tactics meeting modern warfare, sprinkled with pre germ theory medicine practices resulted in a bad time.

The sinking of the Britannic. Though she sunk with significantly fewer casualties than her sister ship Titanic, many of the deaths were due to the fact that the lifeboats were prematurely launched while the ship was still moving, which resulted in some of the lifeboats being sucked into the propellers, instantly obliterating the passengers on them.

Syphilis. When it first hit Europe it was nothing like the disease we know now. It was fast-acting and made people’s faces rot off.

I had always read about how Jack the Ripper mutilated his victims but it wasn't until I saw a photo of one that I realized how messed up it actually was.

The Nanking Massacre. Absolutely horrific in a way that makes you question humanity. Most people outside of Japan and China aren't that familiar with it, but it wasn't just your typical wartime death and brutality. This was savagery and cruelty on an inhuman level that really tests your belief in people. The Japanese were on another level whenever they decided to be cruel.

There was a moment during the 9/11 attacks when first responders realized the periodic bangs they were hearing were jumpers hitting the ground. Eye witnesses said the bodies would explode into pink mist upon contact, and one fire fighter was even killed by a falling body. First responders were begging people to stop jumping, thinking that they were coming to save them, not realizing that they wouldn’t be able to reach them, and that the buildings would soon collapse.

The 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion.

We are certain that the crew capsule part of the shuttle survived the explosion intact, and that the astronauts on board were alive for most or all of the following:

The crew capsule continued upward on a ballistic trajectory after the shuttle disintegrated, then plummeted toward the ocean at terminal velocity and anyone who was still alive died from the sudden deceleration, (splat), when they hit the surface of the ocean, which is basically like hitting concrete when you're going that fast.

”The crew cabin tore loose at 45,000 feet, arced upward to about 65,000 feet, and then began a 2-minute, 45-second plunge to the Atlantic Ocean.”

The McDonald's "hot coffee" case. So many people accused that poor woman of just wanting quick cash, but she was SEVERELY burned and only asked that her hospital bills be covered.

The atrocities carried out by the Imperial Army before and during WW2. Truly horrific and inhumane. Yes, the Americans, the Russians, and the British did some ghoulish stuff, but Japan’s Imperial Army committed next level cruelty. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) were responsible for a multitude of war crimes leading to millions of deaths, and they weren’t pleasant.

The John Wayne Gacy case. There are many things that point towards Gacy not only having accomplices, but likely being involved in a piece of the same snuff film ring that Dean Corll participated in. While the official account of the case states that Gacy acted alone, there is at least one murder where Gacy is confirmed to have been out of town at the time, and several more where Gacy claimed to have been out of town, but did not have any reliable sources for authorities to verify that.

The Irish Famine. It was actually a genocide and gets downplayed quite frequently as the result of a potato blight, but it was more than that. The British shipped out any and every morsel of food available and the Irish were left with nothing to eat. Forced to eat grass or whatever was available, and others fled across the sea to America.

The French and Indian war was nasty. They were paying for women’s scalps.

The Belgians' treatment of the people of the Congo during King Leopold's reign. If a parent worker didn't meet their quota, it was common practice to cut off the hand or foot of one of their children.

The Pacific Front of WWII. The more victories the allies got, the harder Japan resisted.

Before we had anesthetic and abundant pain killers, field surgery was absolutely horrific. Here's a bottle of alcohol, we're going to saw your leg off now.

Vlad the Impaler. He would slowly impale dozens of people all at once, behind first, with an audience that often included the loved ones of the victims. Mehmed II was so horrified at the sight that he turned his army around.

In 1914, National Guard troops were responding to a Miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado. They set up a machine gun position on a bluff overlooking the miner's camp. At some point a firefight broke out and the guardsmen opened fire on the camp with the machine gun. This kicked off a multi day battle between the miners and the guardsmen.

During the chaos, women and children fled to cellars underneath the camp for protection. At night fall, the guardsmen soaked the tents in kerosene and set them ablaze. After the fire went out, one cellar revealed there were 11 children and two women that had suffocated and been burned during the fire. A total of 25 people were killed in what became known as the Ludlow Massacre.

The Great Chinese Famine from 1959-1961, with 15 to 45 million people dead, kicked off by the Great Leap Forward. Mao ignored technical experts, economic principles and established agricultural collectives, relying on peasants to figure out industrialization. The government tried to cover up conditions, which only made things worse.

The Trail of Tears.