You Don't Want to Know: The grisly, jaw-dropping and most macabre moments from history, nature and beyond

by James Felton

call with the navy (who are world-renowned for solving their problems by blowing the shit out of them),

Well, you’d be wrong, and you’re embarrassing yourself, quite frankly. Grow up.

being, as you will soon discover, fucking idiots

‘There’s a bunch of people at the beach who have never blown up a whale before and they’re going to try and blow up a whale,’

With no one willing to foot the bill, they are left up there, scattered around like the least appetising Calippo you’ll ever see.

often why a corpse found in a similar naked-burrowing situation is thought to have been murdered, because it’s not often you see a naked dead body that’s hidden itself in a trash compactor and think ‘natural causes, that’.

As part of the legal proceedings, he was also about to get wanked off. ‘The women made the same William remove his clothes down to his vest’ – sexy – ‘[and] with cold hands they touched his yard’ – I told you it was big – ‘which because of coldness and the women’s excessive and rough touching, and yet still on account of embarrassment, the said yard withdrew into his body.’ Like a shy tortoise.

As it turned out, this particular type of penguin was a nasty little pervert bird too disgusting to be documented in any science journal of the day.

Quite why they conducted a training exercise next to a nuclear storage facility, like a clown holding fire-juggling auditions in an Esso forecourt, is unclear.

But the bomb is still missing and, this I really must stress, is a nuclear fucking bomb.

Four policemen noticed the people in boats attempting to grab the eel, and decided to cut the rope to stop the festivities. Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t banked on just how much the players of ‘yanking the eel off a rope in a boat’ absolutely loved to yank that eel off a rope in a boat.

The first day of rioting was finally quelled at 10 p.m., presumably when the players realised it was way too late now to yank eel anyhow.

Like a passive-aggressive flatmate picking a fight about the washing up, it wasn’t really about the eels. The disparity between the rich and poor in the city had grown enormous, so it was probably a lot to do with that. The eel game was their ‘last pleasure’, and they snapped when that was taken away from them. Which speaks volumes about how terrible conditions must have been, to be honest. I mean, how bleak does life have to become before your only solace is yanking an eel off a rope?

Inevitably, this led to someone seeing a dead guy and thinking, ‘Yeah, I might blow me some tobacco smoke up his arsehole, see if that makes him not dead.’ The indigenous people of North America were the first to try the Forbidden Combo, and they even developed a traditional bum tube they’d breathe smoke through to stimulate breathing.

One study, for instance, looked at whether toast really does land butter-side down more often than not, and found that it did. Which is great, but I’ve just googled it and apparently cancer still exists. Cheers scientists, good to know why my floor is buttery, that’s so much more important.

Scientists also knew, thanks to another experiment, that if you blindfold an adult cat then throw it in the air like an angry football it will still right itself to an extent, though blindfolded cats land a bit more awkwardly as they don’t know how far they are off the ground.

Also, maybe for science or maybe just to keep things spicy, the scientists began throwing the kittens up into the air to see how that would affect the results. As it turns out, in the early days it wasn’t a lot. The problem for the kittens was that they were in fact kittens, and hadn’t learned to right themselves yet. For the first twenty-five days, both the blinded cats and the lucky cats (here ‘lucky’ means ‘thrown from heights a lot but while in possession of eyeballs’) righted themselves about as much as each other, which is to say not at all. They would be dropped to the ground, twat themselves, then wait around for their next mid-morning twatting. Around the 25-day mark, the cats did begin to right themselves as they went down and from then on had a nice soft landing on their feet, but to say this in the defence of the scientists is like defending a criminal charged with repeated GBH on the grounds that the victim got used to the twattings. The blinded cats righted themselves in the air, but weren’t as good at the final landing part. From this, the scientists learned that cats’ righting mechanism operates largely through their sense of balance, with vision playing a role in the landing.27 The applications of which are fucking non-existent.

‘Right, eating cereal hasn’t worked, time for some genital mutilation.’ Kellogg was the leader of an anti-masturbation movement, and he advocated circumcising boys in the most painful way possible as a means of keeping them from touching themselves. ‘The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic,’ he wrote. ‘As the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.’ He also favoured sewing the foreskin together with a single wire, to make it impossible to get an erection, tying the victims’ hands together, and placing their genitals in his own patented penis cage. In girls, he preferred enemas, ‘the application of blisters and other irritants to the sensitive parts of the sexual organs’, applying carbolic acid to the clitoris, and, of course, the removal of the clitoris altogether.

It’s a testament to how utterly bizarre his views on doing the five-dog dance were that people barely mention that he was massively into racial segregation and eugenics, including wanting to sterilise the mentally ill. Which was a bold move for someone going around talking about mutilating genitals and designing anti-wanking breakfast treats.

Following his orders to the letter, Onada refused to die and was left there with three other soldiers, hiding out in the mountains like fucking Predator.

Upon his superior officer’s arrival on the island he finally accepted he wasn’t a brave soldier fulfilling his duties against all odds but merely a bog-standard serial killer with massive trust issues.

Charles Babbage Everyone feels pretty idiotic every now and then. For instance, I once lost my phone on the train and googled ‘Who do you report a lost phone to’ on what turned out to be my phone.

you’re putting together a voyage to the most dangerous parts of the seas, hold a few more interviews until you find someone called Ian Floatsquitewell rather than Johnny Corpse, that’s my advice. Play it safe.

But at least they’d managed to avoid Cannibal Island (which turned out not to have any cannibals on it at all), as that could have been a fucking disaster.

He had held in a gigantic shit for longer than any other human on record for no benefit whatsoever.

He attributed his failure to ‘forgetting to provide himself a tail’ rather than not having a clue what he was doing, and honestly I kind of respect him more for not learning a thing as his bones cracked from jumping off a church.

The best way I can describe it is if, instead of picturing a flying squirrel, you picture a regular squirrel that has piled on the pounds and then lost it all after conquering his addiction to acorns, leaving some skin flaps, sure, but not nearly enough to achieve flight.

Turns out back then you could book a trip up it for any old shit like this. ‘Can you book me in for a 9 a.m. jumping?’ ‘Sorry sir, all booked up. Can I tempt you with a 10 a.m. standing too close to the edge and feeling a bit woozy?’

It’s why you never see the judges plonk their testicles in the pudding on Masterchef. Even Gregg.

imagine it’s pretty uncomfortable to have something wriggle into your body through your breathing flaps.

Like somebody who murders your accountant but then shows up every year to do your tax returns. In return for performing tongue duties, the louse helps itself to food that the fish eats, causing the fish to lose a bit of weight in the process.

If you imagine this from the fish’s perspective, it truly is horrifying. First, your tongue is gone and that’s weird. Then it’s back and that’s even weirder. But you can’t feel it and it’s significantly more mobile than you remember. Then suddenly, while you’re pondering that, something starts having sex with it.

The air spaces in the nose aren’t connected to the eye like some sort of meaty spud gun, so there’s no way a sneeze or puffing up your cheeks and then smacking them can create the pressure needed to force your eyes out of their sockets and make them dangle around like the ball in a game of swingball. In fact, your eyes closing is a reflex that some people can overcome, and all have gone on to live full eyeball-in-head lives. You can vomit so hard that your eye lenses come out, but we’ll leave that for another book.47

The bad news is there are other ways you can severely injure yourself by just having a bit of a sneeze. I sincerely wish I didn’t know about it, but I’m now going to tell you here because – fuck you, I guess. I don’t see why I should be the only one who’s scarred for life.

Imagine sneezing, you feel a pain and ask for help, and your colleague asks, ‘Why the fuck are you talking like Joe Pasquale?’ Doctors soon found that his neck and all the way down

As well as birds that want to peck your face off, there are three species of bird (at least) that deliberately burn down forests and spread wildfires.

The suicide plant Australia is so awful that even the plants have evolved to be wankers. Of the many stinging trees of this fine country, the Gympie-Gympie is by far the most toxic. Amongst the first to come across the tree was North Queensland road surveyor A.C. Macmillan. In 1866 he reported that his packhorse had been stung by the tree – which is pretty toxic all over, but especially on the stems – and had then gone insane, dying within hours. Folklore says that having been stung, horses may throw themselves off cliffs in agony. People who have been stung by the plant describe it as unbearable. ‘I remember it feeling like there were giant hands trying to squash my chest,’ Ernie Rider said of his encounter in 1963.56 ‘For two or three days the pain was almost unbearable; I couldn’t work or sleep, then it was pretty bad pain

for another fortnight or so. The stinging persisted for two years and recurred every time I had a cold shower.’ It’s so horrendous in fact, that the British, who inhabit an island where it’s just the general population you have to be mindful of, considered weaponising it. It’s easy to see why; an ex-serviceman in the Australian army claimed that an officer he knew had mistakenly used a leaf of the tree as toilet paper. Thinking he was going to have the familiar feeling of a nice clean anus, he was instead given the most unbearable anus pain he’d ever encountered, and shot himself rather than bear it any longer. Seems a fairly effective weapon to me.

As well as all the money, the sugar industry provided chocolates, sweets and caramels, like an alternative Willy Wonka who was still up for endangering the lives of people in his care, but without the creepy pervert vibes or singing slaves.

he had gone down to collect her corpse – like a fucked-up Deliveroo – and transported it back to his ‘laboratory’, where he set about mummifying her body.

Look, I’m not defending the guy, but you don’t go to the trouble of exhuming your obsession’s corpse not to perform a creepy marriage ceremony once you’ve got her home.

I’m not saying I’m perfect at raising children, but I’ve read the manuals and on pretty much page 1 it says ‘no inviting strange men around to fart right at your kids’.

Fortunately for Washington, his family intervened and demanded that Thornton leave his body be, which was good news for his dignity, but very bad news for everyone who wonders what it would have been like to have an undead zombie sheep politician years before Boris Johnson came into office.

However, animal behaviour experts and psychologists (and anyone who has seen a dog be surprised by the pain that biting its own tail causes) agree that animals lack the foresight and knowledge that what they are doing will kill themselves. Besides, dogs love life. You’d have to be eating the best meal you ever had, beating your Tetris high score and landing your dream job at the precise moment of climax to experience just a fraction of the pleasure that a dog feels when he sees a medium-sized stick. These dogs are not in any way intentionally trying to end things.

In 1988, 12-year-old Jessica Fleming arrived home at her parents’ and grandparents’ house in Nebraska when she saw her grandfather walking a goose with a leash. That’s not really something you ignore; either something amazing had happened or Grandpa Gene was on track for an intervention. She approached and soon realised that the leash was the least of their problems, for the goose – named Andy, like geese often are, shut up – was wearing a pair of people trainers. Her grandfather had found Andy on his sister-in-law’s farm, and, upon seeing that the goose had no feet, decided to intervene. At first, as your mind would, Gene leapt to the idea of attaching a skateboard to one of the goose’s stumps and letting it push itself around the farm like some sort of deranged mashup between Untitled Goose Game and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skateboarding. The skateboard idea failed, because it was fucking insane. Gene moved on from this setback and instead put the goose in tiny baby shoes. Before he knew it, Andy the goose had mastered people shoes and was running around all over the place. Jessica, who was a tween and embarrassed about her family already, wasn’t too happy that she now had to explain to her friends, ‘Yes, we’ve got a goose with shoes on, don’t . . . don’t look at it,’ as it waddled its way into the room. Not much happens in Hastings, Nebraska, I’m forced to assume, as news of the goose soon hit the front pages of the local press. At least I hope nothing happens in Hastings, Nebra...

park. It wasn’t clear at that point that it was Andy, but for one vital clue: NONE OF THE OTHER GEESE IN THE WORLD WORE SHOES. Andy was missing, and the body was confirmed to be him. What’s more, the family investigated the backyard where Andy had been caged, and found two sets of footprints. One set was the normal everyday goose footprints that you’d expect to find, but the other footprints were larger, clearly from a human, or perhaps a slightly larger goose. It was, forgive me Jesus, a murder most fowl. ‘The instant we looked at his poor dismembered body, we knew it was him,’ Gene told the Chicago Tribune,76 not even considering the possibility that someone had rammed shoes onto a separate goose, or taking a moment to apologise to that day’s shoe sponsor. ‘Andy died with his boots on.’ Of course, a media storm descended on the town once more. Even though people probably ate goose, or at least usually couldn’t give a shit if a goose died, they hated the idea that someone would do this to a goose that had made the effort to wear shoes. Reward money came flooding in for anybody with any information. Little tip: if your cat goes missing and nobody cares, tell them it likes to wear a tuxedo and you might be in business. Condolence cards came in absurd numbers, and a gravestone was paid for by fans, and tips for the murder investigation kept coming. The police followed up on a lot of the leads, but found nothing. We’ll never know exactly what happened to Andy, the celebrity g...

Emus were protected in Australia way up until 1922, despite the fact they’re giant two-metre feathered demon birds

So, with pressure mounting, the Australian government decided to skip phases such as controlled culls or maybe even building some sort of fence, and decided to declare war on what I really must stress were some birds.

The military admitted defeat and withdrew the troops, the only army to have lost a war to an animal later described in a scientific journal as the dumbest bird alive.79

Then there were some insane curveballs to throw into the evidence box labelled ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Her DNA showed up on a toy pistol that