Weird Historical Stories That Sound Made Up (But Aren’t)

The story of the "Cadaver Synod" is kind of like the ninth-century version of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit: On the surface it sounds silly, but once you learn the facts, it actually makes sense. 

In the ninth century, the pope had the power to crown the Holy Roman Emperor. This meant that popes were involved with political intrigue, and many of them didn't live long after assuming office. Stephen VI's predecessor, Formosus, reluctantly crowned the Duke of Spoleto as the Holy Roman Emperor and later crowned the duke's son, Lambert. In 896, Formosus reversed course and crowned one of his allies, King Arnulf of the East Franks. Shortly after becoming emperor, Arnulf became paralyzed and returned to his native Germany, and Formosus himself perished.

When Stephen VI took the papacy, the crowning was still in dispute. Stephen had closer ties to Lambert and wanted to reinstate his ally, and the Cadaver Synod was a means to deligitimize Formosus and all of his decisions as pope. 

Stephen ordered Formosus's nine-month-old corpse be clothed and actually brought to the courtroom, and he appointed a deacon to speak on the departed's behalf. During the sham trial, Stephen accused the cadaver of everything from perjury to violating canonical law.

What was left of Formosus was found guilty and thrown into the Tiber River. But the trial itself was so controversial that Stephen's reign only lasted a few more months, until he was stripped of his papal seal and executed. 

It might sound like the plot of a sci-fi B-movie, but Einstein's brain really was stolen shortly after his passing. In the 19th century, the brains of geniuses were often preserved so that scientists could try to determine the origins of that person's intelligence. For example, half of the brain of Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computing machine, is still on display at the Hunterian Museum at London's Royal College of Surgeons.

Einstein was aware that scientists might want to study his brain after his passing and explicitly forbade it, knowing that such studies rarely produce useful information. Nevertheless, when Einstein passed at Princeton Hospital in the early morning of April 18, 1955, the pathologist who examined him, Dr. Thomas Harvey, decided to remove the brain on his own initiative for future study. Dr. Harvey took Einstein's brain home, divided it into 240 pieces and stored it in two mason jars filled with celloidin. Shortly after Einstein's cremation, his son Hans Albert found out about the theft and was furious. But Dr. Harvey convinced him to let him keep the brain. 

Taking the brain of the world's most famous physicist without permission did have professional consequences for Dr. Harvey. He soon lost both his job at Princeton Hospital and his marriage, then moved to the Midwest where he took a series of jobs either practicing medicine or running research labs. He kept Einstein's brain for the next several decades - at one point storing it in a cider box underneath a beer cooler - hoping to unlock the secrets of Einstein's intelligence. The fate of Einstein's brain was mostly unknown until 1978, when a reporter tracked Harvey down in Wichita, Kansas.

The magazine article about Harvey brought a flood of requests for samples of the brain to study, and starting in 1985, scientists began publishing their findings. Many of these studies did claim to find some differences between Einstein's brain and that of a "normal" person, but they also lacked representative control groups, making their findings suspect. And even if these studies had been conducted more effectively, neurology still hasn't determined whether the physical structures of the brain actually affect a person's intelligence. 

Today, what remains of Einstein's brain resides at the Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Almost nobody is allowed to see it, not even researchers. But many more pieces of Einstein's brain can possibly still be found across America, thanks to Dr. Harvey's habit of giving away pieces of it to curious friends. 

Thanks to movies like The Boys from Brazil, it's somewhat common knowledge that several members of the Third Reich fled Germany after WWII and took refuge in South America. It's less commonly known that thousands of Confederates did the same after the American Civil War. 

When the Civil War ended, much of the South was in ruins. Rather than rebuild in a unified America that had abolished slavery, many Southerners preferred to move to entirely different countries where slavery was still legal, like Brazil. The Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro, who had supported the Confederacy, enticed Southerners to relocate to his country with cheap land and by subsidizing their transport.

It's estimated that between 8,000 and 20,000 Southerners left the United States for other countries, and most of them ended up in Brazil. Many of these Southerners specifically chose Brazil because they wanted to continue enslaving people. For the Brazilian government's part, American Southerners were desirable because of an official policy to make Brazil's population more white by enticing Europeans and their American descendants to immigrate. 

These Southern immigrants came to be called "Confederados," and they built five or six settlements across Brazil. Most of the Confederados found Brazil's climate too hot and soil too inhospitable for cultivating the crops they were accustomed to growing. Others failed to assimilate into Brazilian culture. In 1888, Brazil outlawed slavery and many Confederados returned to the United States. However, a few hundred Confederados remained, and their descendants still live in Brazil and celebrate their Confederate heritage today. One Confederado settlement, Americana, grew into a large city and still has that name. 

During the late 19th century in Paris, a body of a girl presumed to be a teenager who drowned herself was pulled from the Seine River. In an attempt to identify the unknown girl, authorities put her body on display in a mortuary, but no one came forward to identify the teen, who became known as "L'Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown Woman of the Seine)." According to an article in The BMJ, a doctor who conducted an autopsy was struck by the serene look on the girl's face and created a plaster cast, or "death mask," of her countenance. Replicas were made of the mask, which went on to become the model for a CPR dummy's face.

In the late 1950s and '60s, when mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR were invented, Archer Gordon of the American Heart Association noticed that medical students who practiced CPR could end up hurting each other. So he and and another doctor, Bjorn Lind, asked a toymaker, Åsmund Laerdal, to create a mannequin students could practice on. Laerdal had seen a replica of the mask of "L'Inconnue de la Seine," and used it for a female mannequin dubbed "Resusci Anne (or Annie)" because it looked so peaceful and wouldn't be intimidating. According to the Laerdal company, which still makes the mannequins, about 300 million people have been trained using Resusci Anne, so she has earned the title of "the most kissed girl in the world." 

It sounds like a gag from a Peter Sellers comedy, but exploding cigars really were one of the methods the CIA considered while plotting to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro. The United States has regularly engaged in regime change throughout its history, and Castro - after establishing a Communist government just over 100 miles from its border - was a particularly irritating thorn in the nation's side.

It's unknown exactly how many times the CIA tried to eliminate Castro, but one of Castro's security officers estimated that there were 634 attempts on Castro's life. Many of these were conventional assassination plots, like a 1963 plan to shoot Castro with a sniper rifle at the University of Havana, or a 1964 plan to throw grenades at Castro while he attended a baseball game, or a 2000 plot to plant explosives under a podium where Castro was due to give a speech. 

But when conventional plans failed, the CIA was more than willing to think outside the box. Many of these plans tried to take advantage of Castro's personal life. Multiple plans involved his love of cigars, like the plot to plant explosives in a cigar that Castro would smoke, or a 1960 plot to lace a box of his favorite cigars with botulinum. Since Castro was an avid scuba diver, the CIA considered poisoning his diving suit, or giving him an exploding seashell. The CIA found a seashell large enough to hide a lethal amount of explosives, painted it to make it stand out, and tried to leave it in a swimming spot where a curious Castro would find it.

There were also plans to take him out with a poisoned fountain pen and a poisoned milkshake. (The milkshake plot apparently came the closest to success.) At one point, the CIA sent one of Castro's former lovers to take him out. She hid poison pills in a jar of cold cream, but they melted. Castro supposedly guessed that she wanted to end his life, and offered his pistol to let her finish the job, but she couldn't work up the nerve. 

After the exploding cigar plot failed, the CIA again tried to slip Castro a cigar, this time laced with LSD. The hope was that Castro would start tripping during an interview and ruin his reputation. Castro dodged that one, too. 

When you consider that WWI cost the lives of about 40 million people worldwide, it seems almost impossible that its origin could be so random. Yet the assassination of Franz Ferdinand really did succeed because of dumb luck. 

When the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie visited Sarajevo in June 1914, it came at a time of heightened tensions between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbian nationalists. In 1909, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbian nationalists wanted the principality to be part of a new unified, free Yugoslavia. In the midst of these tensions, student activists formed organizations like Young Bosnia to agitate for the end of Austro-Hungarian control. But Young Bosnia also received support from the Black Hand, a terrorist organization with ties to the Serbian military. 

The Austro-Hungarian government knew of the danger posed by groups like Young Bosnia and the Black Hand, but Ferdinand opted to visit Sarajevo anyway, hoping it would ease tensions. The Young Bosnians saw the visit as an opportunity to assassinate him and destabilize the Austro-Hungarian government - especially since Ferdinand's travel route was published prior to the visit. 

On the morning of June 28, 1914, seven members of the Young Bosnians waited to ambush Ferdinand's motorcade. Ferdinand had been traveling in an open-top convertible, and the plan was to throw an incendiary device inside the car as it passed by. However, that morning, the top of the convertible was up. The would-be assassin, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, gave it a try anyway and threw a bomb at the convertible, but it bounced off the roof and rolled under another vehicle in the motorcade, exploding and injuring two soldiers. Cabrinovic surrendered almost immediately, and it was believed the assassination had failed. 

After the explosion, Ferdinand wanted to visit the wounded soldiers. On the way to the hospital, the motorcade went down a side street and stopped right in front of a deli, where another member of Young Bosnia, Gavrilo Princip, happened to be standing. Princip drew a pistol and fired two shots at Ferdinand, ending his life and that of his wife. The assassination directly led to WWI, all because Franz Ferdinand's driver turned down the wrong street.