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We know about the Boston Tea Party, but what about Grey’s Raid at Fairhaven? We all remember the Alamo, but how many remember Gonzalez and Goliad? Sometimes, small towns play host to the biggest calamities, tragedies, and misfortunes to ever occur. As such, a lot of little places have developed large reputations for darkness and horror. Here are ten of the darkest, small settlements whose dubious pasts place them in the history books right next to their big-city cousins....

10 Princess Basmah’s Fake Sheikh Her Royal Highness Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the granddaughter of the first Saudi king and the daughter of the second, has long been a thorn in the side of the country’s rulers due to her liberal reformist outlook and human rights campaigning. She has publicly stated her wish that the kingdom would adopt a constitution ensuring gender equality and civil rights, reform of divorce laws, the education system, and social services to reduce discrimination against women, and getting rid of the mahram, a male chaperone who must accompany Saudi women in public....

On YouTube, you may find a variety of content called “ASMR.” ASMR is a complicated emotional state that some people experience when they hear specific triggers. And you’ll notice that they use just about any sound imaginable. Some of them may have a surprising effect on you, while others may have no impact at all. Here are ten sounds that people utilize to impact feelings. 10 A Little Light Laughter Have you ever heard of background laughter?...

10 Kitten Killers Warning: The images in the source links are graphic and may be disturbing. In 2006, a video of a well-dressed woman crushing kittens with stiletto shoes caused massive controversy and an online crusade to identify the culprit. The images were traced to a video uploaded by user “Gainmas” for a company known as Crushworld, a fetish website specializing in videos of small animals crushed to death by attractive women....

Some of these are location-specific and only affect people visiting a place. Others affect anybody but are just as weird. Imagine a disorder that makes a person believe they do not exist, that their house is a clone, or that they are outside their own bodies. You might be surprised that some of these disorders even exist. 10 Jerusalem Syndrome Jerusalem syndrome is a mental disorder that affects tourists who visit Jerusalem....

10 Quark Star A star at the end of its life can collapse into a black hole, a white dwarf, or a neutron star. If the star is sufficiently dense before it erupts into a supernova, the stellar remnant will form a neutron star. When this happens, the star becomes extremely hot and dense. With so much matter and energy, the star attempts to collapse in on itself and form a singularity, but the fermionic particles in the center (in this case neutrons) obey the Pauli exclusion principle....

10 Charlotte Charke When writing her memoirs, Charlotte Charke (wearing pink in the picture above) says, “I am certain, there is no one in the world more fit than myself to be laughed at.” What was certain was that 18th-century London had no idea what to make of Charke and her alter ego, Charles Brown. While it definitely wasn’t strange to see cross-dressing on the stage, Charke went a few steps further in creating Charles Brown as an extension of her everyday, offstage self....

10Pill Use May Influence A Woman’s Choice Of Sexual Partner Studies have repeatedly shown that women are more attracted to typically “masculine” men when they ovulate. Some researchers believe this preference evolved so that women would be attracted to good providers with larger, stronger bodies. Specifically, ovulating women want men who are tall, broad-shouldered, dominant, competitive, and highly intelligent. Then the pill happened. With over 60 million women now using birth control pills worldwide, evolution may be taking a psychophysical turn....

In 1942, four Australian POWs did the unthinkable, and tried to escape from their Japanese prisoner of war camp. The Japanese became so incensed that they ordered every POW in the Changi peninsula to sign an agreement promising not to escape. These prisoners—being Australian—promptly told the Japanese to do one. In retaliation, the Japanese ordered every single one of them to assemble in the Selarang barracks without food or water—all fifteen thousand of them....

But there really is something extra horrifying about masks that it’s difficult to put our finger on. Imagine not being able to see the true face of the person looming in the darkness or meeting a ghoul who reveals who they really are by unmasking. See if you recognize any of the following characters and hope you never meet anyone like them on dark nights! 10 Kuchisake-Onna Japanese legend tells of a female ghost called Kuchisake-onna, who is the soul of a woman murdered by her jealous husband....

But what if you aren’t ready to go? Can you grasp a single filament, hold on, leave some fragmented piece of yourself to haunt the land of the living? Do some deaths echo through eternity? The belief in ghosts is one of humanity’s oldest guilty pleasures, and for good reason—all it takes is one night in a darkened room where whispers fill the shadows and every windblown sigh could be the approaching rake of bloodstained fingernails to make a believer out of the most hard-boiled skeptic....

10The Religious Origins Of Costumes While today’s costumes channel an inner fantasy, they started with a much more solemn purpose. One of the earliest examples we have of people donning costumes comes from Hallow Mass, a ceremonial mass dedicated to prayers for the dead. People appealed to their ancestors for everything from happy marriages to fertility, and costumes were a part of that. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that the idea of dressing up really went mainstream, and a lot of that started with the Robert Burns poem “Halloween....

10 Leprechauns Are a Protected Species Leprechaun: otherwise known as a tiny bearded man dressed in green and in possession of a pot of gold that is hidden at the end of a rainbow. These solitary creatures are said to be fond of making shoes and playing tricks on humans. While they are prominently featured in Irish folklore and are thought to live in a colony in Ireland, there is also an official colony in Portland, Oregon....

In recent times, archaeologists listened to music made millennia ago and saw miniatures of giant icons. They found bizarre objects in burials and personal items that belonged to extinct humans. Perhaps the most remarkable yield comes from small artifacts that reveal behavior, including mysterious cultural ways and even survival tactics used in the Cretaceous. 10 Unique Pencil Scientists only became aware of Denisovans in 2008.[1] A small finger fragment revealed an entire branch of humanity that went extinct thousands of years ago....

Things didn’t get any better when they made contact with the outside world. From the moment they first met the Europeans, the Inuit have gone through tragedy after tragedy. They have been taken from their homes. Their culture has been crushed, and countless lives have been ruined—all in ways that still affect them today. 10 First Contact With Europeans Ended In A Kidnapping Martin Frobisher was one of the first European faces the Inuit saw....

10 Who Put The D-Day Code Names And ‘Dieppe’ In A Crossword Puzzle? The word “Dieppe” turned out to be one of the solutions to a crossword puzzle in Daily Telegraph newspapers in August 1942. This looks quite normal, until you realize that two days after the puzzle ran (and one day after its solution was given), Allied troops launched a deadly assault on the French port of Dieppe. MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, spotted this but ignored it as a coincidence....

Humans have the largest penises of all primates, both in relative and absolute terms. Compared to barnacles, however, we humans are mere tiddlers. Once barnacles leave their juvenile stage, they become anchored to a single spot, from which they’re unable to move. This is one instance of playing it too cool, and it presents something of a problem when they’re looking for a mate. Lots of sessile organisms get around this problem by simply releasing their sperm, and hoping it will find an egg....

10 Santa Most horror stories involving someone dressed like Santa just put a person with bad hygiene into a suit that’s poorly maintained. But Santa—from Greek sibling directors Dionysis and Manos Atzarakis—justifies the old conceit that children shouldn’t try to look at Santa Claus. This video also predates Krampus by one year. In this story, two sisters awaken at night on Christmas Eve when they hear something downstairs. The older one sneaks down and immediately hides again after seeing that Santa is a tall, green, goblinish creature....

10 The Corona Discount Mall Kidnapping On November 7, 2004, at about 6:00 PM, a surveillance camera captured a woman walking along the sidewalk of the Corona Discount Mall in Corona, California. When a newer-model black Toyota Solara pulled up beside her, the woman took off running. The car followed her for a short distance before two men got out and chased her across the parking lot. One of the men caught her, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her to the car, where they forced the woman into the trunk....

This week, teddy bears get tossed, money gets returned, and mothers and daughters get reunited. There are also two dinosaur tales as well as a love story between a donkey and an emu. 10 New Teddy Bear Toss Record The Hershey Bears set a new Teddy Bear Toss record, collecting almost 34,800 toys to donate as presents for charities and hospitals. The Teddy Bear Toss is a warm and fuzzy tradition practiced around Christmastime at hockey games in certain leagues....