Let’s imagine you were around in the late
16th in the Kingdom of Hungary. You’re not exactly from a family with wealth
and so when your parents receive a letter from a grand noblewoman by the name of Elizabeth
Báthory they feel extremely honored. What could such a well-respected and rich
woman want from your peasant family your parents wonder at first, and then on reading the letter
they discover that Elizabeth is looking out for the poor and just wants to teach you,
their son, some etiquette. Overjoyed by this incredible offer, your parents
send you off to the great Čachtice Castle. What you and your parents don’t know is
that they’ve just sent you to a castle we can rightly call one of the most evil places
in the world. 5. Čachtice Castle
After hearing what happened there you might think nothing tops it in the realms of evil,
but we can assure you that there have been worse places. Elizabeth Báthory didn’t have a very nice
childhood and when she was young she was around a lot of violence. Another matter that made her life hard was
the fact she had seizures. Back then no one knew anything about neurons
misfiring in the brain, so epileptic fits were a bit of mystery. During the days of witch hunts if a person
had a seizure some holy people might have put it down to the devil being inside them,
but Elizabeth- being nobility and all- did not suffer the terrible burden of experiencing
a witch trial. One thing doctors back then sometimes did
to try and cure seizures was giving sufferers a dose of a healthy person’s blood to drink,
and if that happened to Elizabeth as a child, it might account for her utterly depraved
behavior as an adult. We’re not going to recount everything that
woman did in her castle, but let’s just say that if you’d have accepted that invite
you wouldn’t have been taking any lessons on good manners. You’d have been tortured in the most despicable
ways, perhaps burned, frozen, or even covered in honey and live ants. You might also have lost some body parts before
your death, and that’s why Elizabeth eventually got the nicknames “The Blood Countess”
and “Countess Dracula.” What happened in the castle stayed in the
castle for quite some time, but a lot of people working for the noblewoman knew what was going
on. In fact, some of her staff helped her to find
the people that would become her victims. Elizabeth was eventually arrested and charged,
but unbelievably she wasn’t handed a death sentence. Her punishment was that she had to stay confined
in the castle, her actual home. You could say she got off lightly considering
that she had killed hundreds of young people. The exact figure is not known, but some historians
put the number at 650. That alone is mind-blowing, but if you care
to research what she actually did to those victims you will no doubt agree that the castle
in her hands became an evil place. The reason we’re not going to tell you what
happened is it’s just too gory…and…err…YouTube doesn’t like that kind of thing. 4. Camp 22
We’re now going to talk about the gruesome topic of human experimentation. Here at the Infographics Show we always like
to give you something new. While Japan’s horrific wartime human experimentation
at its “Unit 731” is nothing short of horrific, and all the ghastly things Nazi
doctor Josef Mengele did can bring tears to your eyes, we’re going to talk about a place
we haven’t featured much. Camp 22 was a place in North Korea where someone
might have ended up if they’d been accused of the crime of “wrong-thought.” They might also have committed any number
of crimes. We only know about the prison camp because
defectors who’d spent some time there let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. Conditions in the prison camp were bad enough
without human experimentation. One defector said when he was in the camp
around 25 percent of the prison population died each year from starvation. The place was reportedly closed in 2012, but
in the 1990s something like 50,000 people were sent there. It was always a life sentence, and so no one
ever left the camp alive. Former guards and prisoners have said that
the guards tortured the prisoners to the extent of inmates missing eyes or other parts, with
some of them looking like living skeletons. The human rights violations that happened
there could fill a book, so we’ll concentrate on the medical experiments only. One former prisoner named Lee Soon-ok said
at one point the camp wanted to test a new poison to see just how effective it was, and
the officers at the camp didn’t bother with animal trials and went straight to human trials. Lee said this involved 50 women, most of whom
were at Camp 22 for merely criticizing the government. They were told to eat some cabbage and were
also told it contained poison. If they didn’t eat it, those women were
told their families on the outside would suffer. Lee said soon after the women ate the stuff
they started vomiting and all of them died within 20 minutes. Other experiments included using gas chambers,
and sometimes the people that entered those chambers were entire families. The outcome was of course the death of everyone. A scientist who defected in 2015 said chemical
weapons were also tested on subjects. On other occasions prisoners would be rounded
up and sent for surgery, surgery they didn’t need of course, and the awful procedures would
be done without any kind of anesthesia. What’s really scary is that when prisoners
were chosen for such experiments, they would first see a van driving around the prison
complex. That van would take them to their certain
death. The vehicle was nicknamed “the crow” and
it would turn up once or twice a month where the prisoners lived. 3. The Raft of Medusa
Here’s the story of the raft of Medusa. In June 1816, a French ship called the Méduse
left France for Africa. The short story is it didn’t get there,
and that’s because it hit a sand bank. There were around 400 people on board, and
many of those folks managed to get on to small boats. The people left were in quite a fix, so some
of them quickly built a raft. 151 men and one woman got onto that raft,
and the French officers in the boats said they would tow it…. They didn’t. That’s the first evil part of this story. After a few miles they just cut the raft loose
and all those people were left floating in the ocean. Between them they had a bag of biscuits that
they hastily ate on the first day, and they had about six casks of wine. They had some fresh water, too, but much of
that was lost overboard when the men fought over it. As you can probably tell already, things then
went from bad to worse. With no food and no water what happened next
was a survival of the fittest. On the first night alone, some 20 people were
dead from either fighting or being washed overboard. Some accounts say that some people were just
thrown overboard. By day four, of the 152 people only 67 of
them were left. Many had died in fights, some had died from
dehydration, and some had taken their own lives. Seeing what was going on they just threw themselves
off the raft. This is how one survivor later explained that
scene: “Two young sailors and one baker were not
afraid to jump into the sea, thereby bringing their lives to an end. This was after bidding farewell to their friends.” By day eight, some of those that were weak
or wounded were killed, but since the fittest of the bunch were literally starving, they
ate their victims. This is how that survivor described one of
those nights: “The unfortunates who had been spared by
death during that terrible night fell upon the bodies that covered the raft, cut them
into pieces or devoured them as they were.” He said some men refused to eat the dead at
first, and instead feasted on fabric from clothes and hats. But when they saw how much better the men
looked who had eaten the dead, they joined in, if not somewhat less inhibited by the
wine they had drunk. It was by sheer luck on the 13th day that
a ship called the Argus saw the raft floating in the ocean. We say by luck, because the French authorities
hadn’t even sent out a search party. Let’s remember that those who were left
on the raft at the start were deemed less important people. That’s why this story is even more horrific. As one historian once wrote, “It actually
exposed things as they were – you save the elite, and too bad if there is no more room
for the others.” That’s not to say there weren’t many good
people on the raft. Some ate their dead friends, some men were
buried in the sea, and it was only out of sheer desperation that they turned to cannibalism. On the other hand, when they saw that some
men were pretty much half dead, rather than share meat or wine with them or eat them,
they just threw them overboard. For years after, a lot of people criticized
the men not for eating the dead, but for throwing the dying into the sea. When they were finally rescued there were
15 men still alive, although five of them would die shortly after being picked up by
the Argus. What the men had been through has become one
of the most talked about horrors in the history of mankind. We’ll give you a happy-ish ending, though. This is how one of the survivors described
the feeling on the raft when the men saw the approaching rescue ship:
“We embraced one another and rejoiced in a manner bordering on insanity. Tears of happiness rolled down our dried up
cheeks.” You can call this event a tragedy more than
an evil, but sometimes human desperation can be an evil in itself. 2. The Papacy under Pope John XII
Ok, so there have been more evil places and people, but if you’re a religious person
then you might argue that the evilest you could get would be if you were a degenerate
religious leader. There have been quite a few ‘bad popes’
but perhaps the worst of them all was the man that headed the Christian church from
955 until his death in 964. It’s not a question of what Pope John XII
did, but what he didn’t do. He didn’t do any good things that’s for
sure, and he committed a long list of crimes. This leader of the church it’s said shocked
even the worst offenders of immorality in Rome, a man whose total depravity seemed to
know no end. He surrounded himself with women and turned
his holy house into a kind of house of ill-repute. He took his many lovers, some not exactly
willing to go with him, and fornicated with them at holy sites and also in the papal palace. That pope has been accused of defiling the
tombs of saints, of borrowing money from pilgrims to finance his bad gambling habit, and has
even been accused of blinding someone he didn’t like. On one occasion it’s said he tortured and
murdered a cardinal. If that’s not bad enough, this man who should
have been a devout Christian, was said to have tried to call upon demons. One historian wrote that “he had toasted
to the devil with wine.” If you’re religious, you can’t really
get more evil than that. Another historian wrote that John XII was,
“a robber, a murderer, and incestuous person, unworthy to represent Christ upon the pontifical
throne. This abominable priest soiled the chair of
St. Peter for nine entire years and deserved to be called the most wicked of popes.” We should note that some people that wrote
bad things about this man might have had a reason to dislike him, or even dislike Catholicism,
but Catholics themselves have criticized this man and so have many other historians. 1. Wherever witch hunts took place
There were many witch hunts around Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and many innocent
women were tortured and executed. Those witch hunts, supposedly in the name
of goodness, are up there with the most shameful things humans have ever done to each other. There were lots of witch hunters, but we’ll
look at a person named Matthew Hopkins He came from East Anglia in England and had
the title of Witchfinder General. We certainly don’t want to upset our viewers
from East Anglia, and we are not saying your wonderful part of England is evil, but back
in the day some pretty awful things went down there. As many as 300 alleged witches were executed
in East Anglia and close by after being investigated by Hopkins from 1644 to 1646. How did he know they were witches you might
ask? Well, sometimes the women might have been
accused of being abnormal by someone who just didn’t like them. It was as simple as that at times, but often
they might have had a mental illness or neurological condition that wasn’t understood at the
time. As we already said, seizures to some crazy
folks were the work of the devil. There was a famous book called Malleus Maleficarum,
which translates from Latin as “The Hammer of the Witches”, and after the printing
press was invented that sold a lot of copies and had 30 editions printed over the course
of a century. Hopkins no doubt had his own copy of this
book. His investigations would often include hurting
the women and trying to make them confess. Sometimes he’d deprive them of sleep until
they confessed. Other times he tied them to a chair and threw
them into a river. If they floated that meant they were witches,
since if they had been baptized they’d have sunk. The problem then of course was trying to pull
the innocent woman out of the water before she drowned. Then he had the “devil’s spot” test,
which meant pricking the woman with a pointed object at various points on her body. Of course that hurt, but if one point on the
body seemed less painful to the woman, that meant the devil had entered her body at that
point. If the woman bled and an animal licked that
blood, her witchiness was to the interrogator a certainty. There was also the tear test. This involved telling the accused the story
of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. If she didn’t break down in tears, she was
in league with the devil. Again, we should tell you that some women
who were accused of being witches were mentally ill, or suffered from mental retardation. That story might not have meant much to those
women. Human evil has perhaps never been so personified
than in the face of Matthew Hopkins and others like him. They spread like a plague all over Europe,
North America and the rest of the world, and we at the Infographics Show are going to say
they were absolutely evil, if indeed evil exists. Sources don’t always agree on how many women
were persecuted, but it could have been as many as one million. We must apologize to you for revealing those
depressing facts, but we’ll leave you with some words of the Spanish writer and philosopher
George Santayana, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” If we can think of any two shows that you
need to watch after this, these are the ones, “What Is Hell Really Like?” and “The
Origin Of Evil: The Devil.” Click one now and don’t wait!
