Wild Historical Moments That Are Too Bizarre To Seem Real

Author image for Eric Lund
Eric Lund
Oct 19, 2021 6:00 PM EDT

One would think that studying history is a good way to achieve some insight into the human condition. To understand the common threads of all people within the contexts of the various times they existed. To, in some way, reach into the collective conscious of humankind and come out with a deeper knowledge of what makes us uniquely human. And then you learn bout the Great Emu War and you realize that we're all just wingin' it. Here are some history memes to become one with time.

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  • 01
    Font - VolJin · 20h e S During the siege of Tenochtitlan, the conquistadors built a trebuchet. However, the conquistadors, being an exploratory expedition, had not brought any military engineers with them. So they winged it. Surprisingly, they did build a trebuchet, which fired exactly one shot, directly upwards, which promptly came down and smashed the trebuchet. This event is chronicled in both the journals of the conquistadors present as well as the Aztec records.
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  • 02
    Human body - germanophile66 · 18h 1859 border dispute between the US and Britain over San Juan island. Only casualty was a pig so it is referenced as the Pig War.
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  • 03
    Font - CaitlinSnep - 14h Literally anything involving the country of Liechtenstein. Switzerland accidentally invaded them at least once, they left with an army of 80 men and returned with 81, and they had the exact same flag as Haiti until 1936 and didn't realize it until the Olympic Flag Ceremony.
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  • 04
    Smile - septembervirghoe · 22h e2 3 3 2 Europe declaring war on Napoleon. Not France...Napoleon.
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  • 05
    Font - Bunnystrawbery · 19h 2 3 In 1920, President Paul Deschanel of France fell through the window of the train while travelling on the Orient Express. He stumbled up to the nearest signal box in his pyjamas and told the signalman that he needed help and that he was the President of France. The signalman reportedly replied 'And I'm Napoleon Bonaparte
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  • 06
    Font - golu_281105 · 23h · edited 10h 3 The time when Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from the island where he was imprisoned on after his army was defeated, he snuck back into France under the nose of King Louis XVIII and literally every royal guard and roadblock from Marseille to Paris, and when he was actually caught just outside Paris, he managed to persuade the soldiers (who just so happened to be former Bonapartists) to escort him into Paris where he managed to successfully cause the ki
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  • 07
    Font - kayriss · 19h The Halifax Explosion. 100 years ago two ships did a s! * job of passing each other while entering / leaving Halifax Harbour, in Nova Scotia. One of them was LOADED with explosives destined for WW1. They collided and one of them burned for a while, then exploded. The blast was a -2/3 again larger than the one we saw in Beirut last year. Thousands died or were blinded by shattering windows. There was a local tsunami (which followed a brief moment where the seabed was exposed
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  • 08
    Font - IMakelowballLOffers · 20h 2 3 3 Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Russian Baltic fleet sails the long way (16k miles and 7 months) started by them opening fire on British fishing boats mistaken for Japanese vessels in the North sea... sank their own ships while conducting target practice, then were destroyed by the Japanese fleet upon arrival (they mistook the Japanese ships for Russian and signaled them instead of firing).
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  • 09
    Font - ungodliest - 20h S The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (catalyst for WWI). Conspirators throw bombs at motorcade which miss but injury others. An hour later, Ferdinand was going to visit the injured at a hospital and his driver made a wrong turn and stalled the engine right in front of a deli. A deli one of the conspirators had gone to to eat and lay low. He came out and shot the Archduke and his wife, sparking an international crisis and WWI.
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  • 10
    Font - HordaksPupil - 18h · edited 18h The Cadaver Synod - In AD 897, Pope Stephen VI had his dead rival Pope Formosus exhumed and put on trial. Stephen had a deacon speak on the dead pope's behalf. Naturally, Formosus was found guilty. Stephen ordered that two fingers Formosus used for blessing people cut off and his corpse thrown in the Tiber river.
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  • 11
    Font - mordenty - 18h Alexander the Great named (or renamed) 70 cities after himself. Some still have the name or derivatives of it - Alexandria in Egypt being the most obvious, but also Iskandariya in Iraq and Kandahar in Afghanistan.
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  • 12
    Font - ReaverRogue 19h S Lincoln stopping a fight with a gentleman before it started, with a broadsword. Most people know Lincoln was incredibly talI, but he was also immensely strong. A lifetime of grit, graft, and chopping wood made his wiry frame tight with corded muscles. A gentleman of parliament challenged Lincoln to a duel for his honour, one day. Lincoln picked the weapons. Broadswords. Lincoln showed up to the field of the duel the following day, and with one enormous one handed swing o
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  • 13
    Hair - Kingh82 - 20h Putting a man on the moon with a small fraction of the computing power used to write this message.
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  • 14
    Font - mitchade · 17h Good old Operation Mincemeat Basically, during WWII, the British find some dead body of some poor guy, dress it up like a British officer, attach some fake intel onto him, then throw him into the ocean, hoping he floats to enemy territory to mislead them. It worked.
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  • 15
    Font - -eDgAR- - 20h When Teddy Roosevelt was shot before he was supposed to give a speech. The bullet was slowed down by the folded up 50-page speech, so it did not kill him. The bullet was inside him and he was bleeding, but he still went on and gave the speech, which was 84 minutes long. He started it off with "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose" and showed the crowd the speech with the hole in it.
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  • 16
    Sky - lauren_eats_games · 20h London's beer flood in 1814. What a way to go
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  • 17
    Font - imcaffeinecrash - 19h · edited 1h Ohio going to war with Michigan, over Toledo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo War One person wounded. Ohio got Toledo, while Michigan got the entire upper peninsula and all of it's copper, iron, and forests. I think Michigan won this one.
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  • 18
    Font - ThePolishSensation - 17h Operation Acoustic Kitty! The CIA was rigging up a cat with cameras and microphones to spy on the Soviet Union during the 1960s. It cost about $20 million. When they sent it out in DC to "test it out" it was immediately hit and killed by a taxi.
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  • 19
    Font - LilyWineAuntofDemons 16h During the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a man by the name of Tsutomu Yamaguchi managed, in a feat of massive misfortune, to be present at both atomic bomb detonations. He was working in Hiroshima for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on an oil tanker when the first atom bomb was dropped on August 6th, the last day he was supposed to be in the city before returning home to his wife and infant son. He recounted watching the bomb go off, saying it looked like a massi
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  • 20
    Font - He got up, and managed to find his way to the Mitsubishi shipyard, where he found a couple of colleagues who had also survived, and together they spent the night in the bomb shelter. The next day they found that miraculously a train still worked, so the survivors loaded in, and taken out of the still burning ruins of Hiroshima by train and taken overnight to Nagasaki. August 8th, After stopping at the hospital to have his burns checked out, he went home. His mother thought him a ghost, co
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  • 21
    Font - This time, however, due to Nagasaki's hilly topography, and the design of the building he was in, he sustained only superficial injuries, but did get bathed in yet more radiation from the bomb, having be unfortunate enough to be within 2 miles of this blast as well. Yamaguchi leaves the broken skeleton of the building, and immediately goes to find his wife and child. He goes home and nearly loses hope when he finds his house mostly reduced to rubble. However, in yet another fortunate twis
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  • 22
    Font - Sullisk · 17h The dancing plague of 1518, so from what I remember about what I learned, a few people randomly just started dancing in the town center for no apparent reason, even seeming a bit distraught not really having fun, well randomly people started joining seemingly against their will, I think it was reported that nearly 400 people were eventually involved and danced for literal days without stop, this event was apparently well documented and a few people even died from literal exh
    via AskReddit
  • 23
    Human body - Gmclaro · 19h Football war between Honduras and el salvador. A war that lasted 4 days because of a football match...
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time wtf history absurd bizarre lol ridiculous dumb Historical weird
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