As you’ll see today, humans have been very
ingenious when it comes to making people suffer. We’ve ripped out ribs for decoration and
impaled people on perennial plants, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On the face of it, we aren’t really a very
nice species at times, and if you don’t agree with us by the end of this show, we’ll
happily take that back. 10. Molten gold
Let’s start with a symbolic kind of punishment fit for a thief. Pouring molten gold down someone’s throat
sounds like something you’d see on TV. You might have watched the episode in Game
of Thrones when something like that happened, although in that case the poor victim was
given a golden crown, “fit for a king” no less. Did such a thing happen in real life? As you’ll see today in all its bloody glory,
there’s no end to the depths that humans will sink to. So, yes, of course, it’s possible that some
people throughout history died after someone smelted a load of gold and poured it down
their throat. We rather like the story of Valerian, who
was the Roman emperor from 253 to 260 AD. By all accounts, he wasn’t a very nice guy,
often persecuting Christians by taking everything they had and banishing them from Rome. When the mood took him, he also had them executed. But then he met his downfall after the Battle
of Edessa in the year 260. He lost and subsequently became a prisoner
of war to the Persian King, Shapur I. Shapur the first was also a guy that didn’t
hold back when it came to punishing people. Once he had Valerian in captivity, for a while
he just concentrated on humiliating him, using him at times as a footstool which he used
to get on his horse. Valerian was a bit upset about this, as you
can understand, and he offered Shapur a tempting ransom for his release. Shapur’s response was, “Er…nah.” Historians sometimes disagree as to what happened
next, and one account has him being flayed alive and his skin then stuffed with straw
so he could be used as a trophy. But there’s a better story. It is said that Shapur had some gold melted
down so the stuff could be poured down Valerian’s throat. While this would definitely be a painful kind
of death, the good news for its victims is that death is almost instant. You don’t swallow the stuff and think, ouch,
that’s hot. Rather, your organs are immediately ruptured,
and you die due to pulmonary dysfunction and shock. The gold would take about 10 seconds to congeal,
so even if you somehow lasted that long, your airways would be blocked. That's what might have happened to the ever-greedy
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome who was famous for being part of that
First Triumvirate with the great Julius Caesar and the war-mongering man we now call Pompey
the Great. Crassus, not the best of the three when it
came to war, lost a battle with the Parthians and because he was so greedy, they gave him
the molten gold treatment. But we can’t talk about this punishment
without mentioning the Spanish conquistadors, who as you know, went over to South America
back in the day, stealing as much gold as they could. If anyone deserved a molten gold death, it
was those guys. There’s a great story published in the National
Library of Medicine that discusses the death of a Spanish governor in Ecuador back in 1599. The native Indians of the Jivaro tribe had
enough of this guy hitting them with high taxes, so they kidnapped him and killed him
by making him drink molten gold. It was this story that inspired a bunch of
Dutch scientists to see what would happen if someone actually did that, but unfortunately,
they couldn’t get any humans to volunteer for an experiment. Instead, they used a cow, a dead cow, and
indeed, they said the cause of death would have been from ruptured organs. As we said, it would have been over very quickly,
but this next death, this would have been slow, and very, very painful. 9. The spiked hare
As you’ve probably heard, torture was very a la mode in Europe during the Middle Ages. Everyone got up to it, either as a form of
getting a person to spill the beans – often when there were no beans to spill – or as
a means of frightening people so they would think twice about committing the same kind
of crime. Usually, the punishments were performed in
public squares on market days. They were big events, rather like a heavyweight
boxing match in today’s times. Historians say people would travel for miles,
not just to see some blood being spilled, but also to sell their wares. Sometimes the event was the punishment of
a witch, which happened to thousands of women back then. The condemned woman would be taken from town
to town over a period of weeks. As we said, these events were big money spinners. One of the punishments was called the spiked
hare. It basically involved a tool that looks similar
to those devices that makes little holes in your lawn. The reason it got the name the spiked hare
is that when the torturer was done, the victim would look a bit like a hare that is about
to be roasted. The torture was said to have been quite popular
in Germany at least until Frederick the Great banned it in 1740. If you visit museums there today, you’ll
find a few of the rollers still in existence. With enough rolling up and down someone’s
back, people would admit to almost anything. “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch…Ok, ok, I turned
my husband into a cat.” Something like that. It’s not mentioned in too many stories,
likely just because in terms of punishments, this one was mostly used on regular folks,
not powerful people or outright maniacs. In a 1767 dictionary written by a German guy
named Johann Theodor Jablonski, he describes it like this, “It is a roller with small,
pointed pegs stuck around it. This is placed under the patient's back when
he is stretched out on the bench and pulled back and forth.” It may not have caused instant death like
having gold being forced down your throat, but it did tear a person’s flesh to pieces. Not only would that have been very painful,
at the time and after, but the victim would likely have died from an infection. Let’s now head to China, where slow deaths
were all the rage. 8. The cangue
This punishment was really common, although it didn't always end in death. It doesn’t sound too bad at first, though. Imagine you had committed a transgression. The authorities wanted to make an example
out of you and leave you with a mark of shame, something which was not unusual in the past. The Europeans would often use branding, so
a thief would get a T branded on his face. The Chinese had the cangue, right up until
the 20th century, too. It was a wooden board fastened around someone’s
neck, usually with the crime they’d committed written onto the board. So, when they went out in public, they couldn’t
exactly blend into the crowd. If their crime wasn’t a very severe one,
they might only have worn the cangue for a day or two and if people felt a bit sorry
for them, they might have given them water and food. Remember that the board was so big that a
person couldn’t get their hands to their mouth. If people didn’t bother helping, they slowly
died in shame. And this was not uncommon. There was an even worse punishment, though,
kind of connected to the cangue. It happened to Chinese rebels in the year
1900. They were put inside a box with their neck
fastened to some wood while they balanced on pegs. Each day, the pegs were lowered a bit, so
they died slowly from hanging. As you’ll now see, for China, that was kind
of tame. 7. The waist chop
Back when we were little many of us used to love watching magic tricks, especially the
one where people were cut in half, or at least you were supposed to think they were. But what would happen if this wasn’t a magic
trick, but a torture method instead. Waist chopping first became a thing in China
during the Zhou dynasty from 1046 BC to 256 BC, although there are lots of stories of
it happening right up until the 18th century. They even had a word for it, “zhǎn.” It was supposed to be very slow and very painful,
although Chinese historians tell us that sometimes the victim was able to pay the executioner
to either stab him somewhere fatal first, or at least pay to buy some kind of pain relief. The more cash you had, the less painful being
tortured was. If the procedure started at the waist, as
it usually did, it could go on for a long time before the person was dead. In fact, there’s a story about an education
administrator named Yu Hongtu, who in 1734 went to the chopping block for giving the
answers away to exam questions. The executioner took his time, and so Hongtu
was able to use his blood to wipe the words “miserable”, “cruel” and “awful”
on the floor. Historians say that during this era sawing
someone in half replaced cooking someone to death as a form of punishment. We’re not quite sure which one we’d prefer. Before some of you folks start criticizing
the Chinese, you might want to know that the Europeans were also into sawing people in
two, as were the people of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Let’s face it, it doesn’t take a genius
to know that this punishment would be frightenedly painful. There were two ways of doing it. One was to saw across the middle of the body,
but we think the horizontal sawing style would have been much worse. Not that we’d like to have to choose. The always-paranoid Roman emperor Caligula
had a thing for sawing folks, with some sources saying he even did it to members of his own
family. The French did a bit of sawing when Napoleon
was doing his thing and there’s some evidence that the Serbians did it to the Hungarians
in the year 1850. The victims were men, women, and children,
and it happened just after the Hungarian Revolution. There are instances of it happening pretty
much all over the world, so as disgusting and far-fetched as you might think it is,
it definitely happened and did so many times. The most recent cases involved Cambodia’s
Khmer Rouge. According to witnesses whose testimonies were
heard when the Khmer Rouge went on trial, sometimes the victim would be tied up between
two poles and then sawed in two. The person’s organs were then used to decorate
nearby trees. If you know anything about the utter evil
of this regime, you’ll know that this kind of thing was par for the course. Ok, now for something we know you’ve all
thought about at one time or another. 6. The pit of snakes
While sawing someone in half does make a bit of sense as it’s cheap, convenient, and
effective, you could easily believe that death in a snake pit just didn’t happen. We mean, would a king or a leader really go
out of his way to collect a bunch of snakes and keep them in a pit, waiting for the time
when he can throw a guy in? We found one website that said it was “very
common” but we reckon that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t common at all, and if it did happen,
it only happened when the Vikings were plundering their way around Europe. Inscriptions of various objects say it occured,
but it is not always easy to separate the truth from legend. In one Viking tale, Ragnar was captured by
King Aella, the guy that ruled over Northumbria in northern England. In another story, it was the other way around
and Aella was given a gruesome punishment we’ll take about later. But let’s stick with Aella winning and the
Vikings losing. This particular legend, written in the 14th
century, has Ragnar squirming around in a snake pit. The writers of the tale have him saying, “Fix’d
is the viper’s harm. Within my heart, his mansion warm. In the recesses of my breast. The writhing snake hath form’d his nest.” As it was vipers in the pit, it could be true. There are around 200 subspecies of vipers,
and they are found all over the planet. The rattlesnake is a viper, as is the cottonmouth,
as is the pit viper, and they are all not the kind of animal you’d want to share a
pit with. If you did, they’d bite you, and if no one
helped you, you’d die a slow death. We don’t know what kind of snakes England
had back then, but the country has venomous adders (a kind of viper) right now. They haven’t killed anyone for over 20 years,
but we imagine if Mr. Ragnar was thrown into a pit of them, he would have eventually died. He would have become feverish, and because
the haemotoxic venom had gotten into his blood cells and caused hemorrhaging, he might have
started bleeding from the mouth. If the English had such a thing as a death
certificate in those days, it would have said, “Cause of death: extensive internal bleeding.” We’ll come back to the Vikings and arguably
their most gruesome punishment, but let’s stay with the evil English for now. 5. The gibbet
Imagine this. It’s the 1700s and you’re just a regular
guy living in the bustling city of London. You decide to go out for a walk with your
wife and your 12-year-old kid, and as you stroll along the pathway next to the river
Thames, occasionally praising the summer warmth and lush green views, a disgusting smell suddenly
hits you. You walk on, only for your kid to say, “Look
daddy, look up there.” As you get closer to what your kid is looking
at, you see a man in a cage, hanging from a tree. Ravens are pecking his eyes. His flesh is blackened by decomposition. What you’re looking at is a former criminal. He’s inside a gibbet. Back then, you could find such sights all
over London, often at crossroads so they got the most exposure. They were a warning to people and were quite
normal, even though this seems incredibly grim to us now. Pirates and smugglers were often the ones
in the gibbet, but usually, they’d been hanged first. For the hanging, thousands of people would
often turn up. They were huge events, sometimes family events. In the gibbets, the rotting flesh and the
stink of putrefaction were obscene, and not surprisingly, people would often complain
that the gibbets were too close to their homes. They also sometimes scared little kids. But under the Murder Act of 1751, the British
government said the people needed to be terrorized so they wouldn’t think about committing
crimes themselves. Rather than help the poor to prevent the spread
of crime, they ignored poverty and upped the ante when it came to punishment. Hardliners still call for this kind of thing
today. When a Mr. Swan was hung up in a gibbet, so-called
gentlemen complained of the grim view from their houses. The authorities moved him to Buckets Hill,
where the poor folks lived. Mr. Swan stayed there until his smaller bones
fell out of the device. When the smugglers who named themselves the
Hawkhurst gang were arrested, some were transported to penal colonies, but around 14 were hanged
and then strung up in gibbets. As you can imagine, making the cages wasn’t
easy. We found some documents that said a blacksmith
named Richard Goodman was paid 17 pounds, 14 shillings for making a gibbet. That’s almost seven thousand in today’s
money. In another document, the authorities wrote
about one condemned man, saying: “The head was shaved and tarred, to preserve
it from the action of the weather, and the cap in which he had suffered was drawn over
his face. On Saturday afternoon his body, attired as
at the time of his execution, having been firmly fixed in the irons necessary to keep
the limbs together, was carried to the place of its intended suspension.” Women weren’t usually gibbetted. Not because they didn’t commit crimes, but
because it was seen as rude to have a woman high up where people might be able to catch
a glimpse of her rotting private parts. A flash of dirty panties was deemed much more
impolite back then than putting a rotting corpse in a cage for the kids to see. Go figure. You might be thinking, well, it’s not as
if they died in the gibbet, but in the Middle Ages, the authorities would sometimes hang
a person up there alive and let the elements take care of them. Now that’s a terrible death if there ever
was one. But this is arguably worse. 4. The Judas Cradle
In Europe in the Middle Ages, the authorities had all kinds of terrifying torture devices. Some were never used, such as the Iron Maiden
(a coffin with spikes in it), and it’s debatable if others were used. The artifacts exist, but historians are sometimes
unsure if the authorities build them just so they could show them off to the public. So, maybe things such as the head-crusher
didn’t really get used. It’s hard to say. You can find websites saying it did, but when
you research a bit more it’s difficult to find real-life cases that were written about
back then. As we said, though, the artifacts exist, and
also, we wouldn’t put it past those Middles Ages folks. This brings us to our favorite device that
may or may not have been used: the Judas Cradle. It was basically a sharp pyramid stuck to
the top of a chair. The person who was being interrogated would
be forced to sit on the point, which we imagine was slightly uncomfortable, but if the person
wasn’t talking, they’d have weights connected to their legs. The pyramid was also greased allowing the
weights to do much more damage. After a while, the internal injuries caused
by the device became catastrophic. It was a horrible way to die. Today, there are plenty of these devices in
museums all over Europe, and there is no shortage of sketches of people being tortured on such
chairs. Some sources say they were invented in the
16th century in Spain as a means of getting people to confess during the inquisitions,
but we are not sure that’s true. The Spanish had laws about torture, and they
usually kept really good records of what went down during interrogations. Nothing in these records talk about a Judas
Chair. If they did use it, the outcome was never
good for the victim. They’d have been split and maimed, and even
if they did survive, they’d more than likely die from an infection. In conclusion, since people back then were
ripped into pieces, boiled alive, or had their skin peeled off, all backed up by plenty of
evidence, we’re going to say the Judas Cradle may well have been used on more than a few
occasions. Let’s now get to a modern torture method
that we are 100% percent sure led to many people’s demise. 3. Tiger cage
During the Vietnam War, some US politicians went to South Vietnam to see what the Vietnamese
on their side were doing to their prisoners. Photographs weren’t ever supposed to get
back to the US public, but they did, and they revealed that lots of prisoners were kept
in tiger cages. Assisting the congressmen that day was a guy
named Don Luce, and throughout his later life, he talked about torture and the fact the Americans
didn’t just turn a blind eye to it but actually spent a ton of money on contracts to make
tiger cages, American-made tiger cages. Once the victims were thrown down into the
cages, the hot sun would shine on them all day long. Their captors would throw lime on them, just
to make them itch and feel really uncomfortable. Sometimes they were beaten first. Some of them, merely student activists, died
down there or were crippled during the beatings. Even a Buddhist monk died in a tiger cage. This wasn’t a good look for the US. In 1970, the New York Times ran the headline,
“Saigon Is Investigating ‘Tiger Cage’ Cells at a Prison.” Thousands of people, said the report, were
tortured this way. The cages weren’t all the same, either,
with some of them looking like coffins, big enough for only one person. One victim of these cages later said, “They
put us in the Tiger Cages, and when I came to my senses, I thought I fell into Hell because
the cage was the shape of a coffin.” This could lead to a slow and horrible death. The bloodied person would just lay there all
day in his or her cage under the sun. Ants, and sometimes snakes and centipedes,
could get in there with them. A Vietnamese museum later stated “Thousands
of prisoners died in the prison because they couldn’t stand tortures.” This particular prison was built with American
money and influenced by the CIA. As Mr. Luce said, “The US paid the salaries
of the torturers, taught them new methods, and turned suspects over to the police.” After telling everyone about what really went
on, he had to get out of Vietnam for fear of his life. That straw that broke the camel’s back was
waking up one day to find someone had put a deadly “two-step” snake in his bed. So yes, torture isn’t just from the Middle
Ages and ancient times. This one is also modern, but it belongs to
another age. It’s frankly disgusting.
2. Bamboo torture
In the 19th century, when the British were helping the Siamese (Thai) during the “Siamese
invasion of Kedah”, a British navy admiral and explorer named Sherard Osborn was present. He wrote down some of the things he saw and
turned them into a book that critics now say is “culturally important.” That’s because not many western people were
writing books about South East Asia back in those days. Osborn talked about one of the most macabre
things he’d ever seen in this life. It involved some Siamese soldiers, some Malay
victims, bamboo shoots, and what he referred to as “formidable lances”. He said he’d seen the natives cook people
to death, but what they did with a shoot of bamboo was nothing short of evil. In his own words, talking about bamboo, he
explained “Its lance-like point should enter his body, and bring on mortification and death
by piercing the intestines — in short, a slow mode of impaling.” That’s right. A guy was forced to sit on a bamboo shoot
and the shoot grew through his butthole and headed towards his insides. This created possibly the slowest, scariest,
and most painful way to die. It’s mentioned by another Brit from back
then, who talked about it in his book, “Journey Across the Peninsula of India, from Madras
to Bombay.” Yep, the Indians got down with bamboo torture,
too, as did the Chinese, but it’s the Japanese who did it last, or supposedly did, when they
made the shoots grow through their captors’ butts during WW2. First of all, maybe some of you are thinking,
no way could that work. Actually, it could. Bamboo is super tough. That’s why so many Asian countries still
use it for scaffolding. It also grows extremely fast, at about 36
inches, just over 91 cm, a day. So, as long as they could fasten the guy down,
the bamboo could certainly poke through his backside and enter the insides quite quickly. Mythbusters once did a show on it and concluded
that it would have worked. But what about the Japanese army? If you know what they did in their dreaded
Unit 731 camps, you could quite easily believe they’d have some fun with bamboo. Indeed, one book we found said, “Great pain
was inflicted on prisoners by tying them with their anus on the top of young bamboo shoots
which would pierce them as the shoots grew every day.” Some historians have questioned if this actually
occurred, but as you’ve heard, quite a few people have talked about it. In fact, the BBC once wrote, “Tales were
told by surviving prisoners and soldiers who found the mutilated bodies of their lost comrades. How the Japanese placed Bamboo shoots under
the tied down Allied Prisoner.” This is the biggest ouch torture we reckon
you can get. This next one is more of an “arghhh” torture
but thankfully it would have been over pretty quick. 1. The blood eagle A person was first brought to a ceremonial
chopping block where they were laid on their stomach. The executioner then took a really sharp knife
and cut through the man’s back with so much pressure that he severed the rib cage. That’s part one. The ribs were pulled through his back and
were stretched out so they kind of looked like wings, but as they were very boney wings,
the man’s lungs were stretched over them. Voila! An eagle, a bloody eagle. By this time, of course, the man was as dead
as a dodo. It sounds too bad to be true, and the only
evidence is in those old Viking legends. It’s mentioned in something called the “Orkneyinga
saga” from the 13th century. In this story, a guy named Harald I Fairhair,
the first King of Norway, goes up to the rugged islands of what is now northern Scotland,
and he gives the locals a hard time – as the Vikings were apt to do. It was on the island of Orkney that Harald’s
son, Halfdan Long-Leg, was executed because he’d taken out some Viking nobility. His death wasn’t just about revenge, but
it was also about sacrificing Mr. Long-leg for the god, Odin. Here’s some actual text from the saga, in
translation: “Earl Einarr went up to Halfdan and cut
the ‘blood eagle’ on his back, in this fashion that he thrust his sword into his
chest by the backbone and severed all the ribs down to the loins, and then pulled out
the lungs; and that was Halfdan’s death.” Another case involved a formidable Viking
warrior named Ivar the Boneless. Boneless, some historians say, wasn’t related
to a lack of courage or a disability, but the fact that his John Thomas didn’t always
rise to the occasion. It’s a long story, but do you remember the
English king we talked about earlier, Aella, of snake pit fame. Well, Mr. Boneless outsmarted the king and
captured him. Only the very worst punishment would do, so
they gave him the blood eagle. The text in the saga reads, “And Ívar,
the one, who dwelt at York, had Aella’s back, cut with an eagle.” Were the Vikings making this up? Possibly, but they were a rough bunch from
time to time, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Now you need to watch “The Worst Amusement
Park Ride Disasters.” Or, have a look at this gruesome video “Why
Escalator Accident is Worst Way To Die.”
