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

by James Felton

was involved in a robbery, and was found at several other crime scenes that involved accomplices. None of those interviewed ever said they were with a woman, which the police put down to them being too terrified or loyal to talk.81

They had been tracking their own swabs, like Scooby fucking Doo following his own footprints in the snow.

This weird pattern of near child-drownings and dog rescue went on for quite some time before the parents really showed an interest. They thought maybe someone was pushing the kids in the river, for reasons unknown.

So I guess the thing you don’t want to know in this chapter is Rasputin isn’t a badass, you can’t trust the testimony of a murderer, and nobody is fucking fact-checking any of Boney M’s songs.

In 1990, most of a pilot was sucked out of the window of an aeroplane, leaving just enough pilot inside the plane for a steward to hold on to (specifically, the leg part). Then, the other pilot attempted to land the plane, probably while being quite distracted by all of the air and colleague that was flying out of the window.

when passengers heard a loud ‘bang’, which is way up there with ‘What does this button do?’ and ‘Oh fuck, I really shouldn’t have pressed that button’ in the top ten of sounds you don’t want to hear coming from a cockpit.

I guess this is why, famously, when you’re performing repairs on an aircraft, you’d usually use some sort of fucking torch.

Everyone inside the plane adopted their brace positions, other than Lancaster – who really should have been disciplined for choosing instead to assume the position of a wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube man on the outside of the aircraft, the maverick.

(sadly we have no records of how they improved, so you’re going to have to picture a montage of killers taking out rats with a series of ever larger lawnmowers)

Every now and then, humans are curious about what would happen if something didn’t have a head (as you’ll see in the next story), or if it had two heads, or some number of heads that’s slightly above or below the average number of heads.

But people tend not to remember that sort of thing when you also take the head off a dog and put it on a second, unsuspecting dog.

should have been told as a child, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, fucking stop,’

he kept at it for [checks sources] five fucking years (?!)

It’s fine, everybody, it’s not like the dog tried to kick its second head off. Quit your fucking whining, PETA.

But so much worse was South African doctor Christiaan Barnard, who read about the dog head experiment in 1962. He decided to do it for himself that very afternoon in his hospital, remarking, ‘Anything those Russians can do, we can do, too,’ in a way that would have been acceptable if you were talking about knitting or making a nice pie but not hacking off dogs’ heads, especially not in a normal hospital with human patients who needed medical attention.

He talked about performing the operation on Stephen Hawking,94 though my guess is Hawking – one of the smartest people to ever live – knew better than to trust a guy who said ‘Let me take your head off, I’m good at it,’ before pointing at a pile of dead monkeys as proof.

Mike had survived World War II, largely by being a chicken.

a seasoned chicken murderer,

You may think this was a cruel thing to do to an animal that clearly needed, at the very least, bed rest. But we should remember that it didn’t care at all, largely because it didn’t have a goddamn head.

The molasses flood

like the world’s deadliest flapjack.

The ones that couldn’t be removed for days were encased in the syrup, like overgrown jelly babies,

Nobody knows why he developed this quirk, or why none of his co-workers asked him ‘What the fuck are you playing at, the clients don’t want to see their lawyers hurling themselves into a window, halfway through a meeting like a fucking crow. It doesn’t scream “this firm’s definitely capable of arguing my sentence down to manslaughter”.’ But have the quirk he did, and when new people came to look around the office it became an ordinary sight to see the 38-year-old charging top speed at the 24th-floor window.

Hoy was showing a group of potential lawyers around on 9 July 1993, when he decided to do his shtick. The first run and jump at a window went as planned, by which I mean he ran and twatted himself on the window like a confused elk, while a group of potential employees questioned the decisions that had led to this absolute window smear potentially becoming their boss. The window held on the first try, but rather than leave it there old Garry decided to take another run at it.

good old-fashioned corpse trial,

You could find yourself staring at hieroglyphics that read ‘Be gone from here or suffer at the reanimated hands of Amenhotep’ and as far as you’re concerned all it says is ‘Bird hand, bird, bird, man doing the walk like an Egyptian dance, bird, bird skull and crossbones’.

At that speed, you get about two seconds to think ‘Hmm, that meat smells nice OH GOD IT’S DANIEL’ about the person fifty metres from you before it cooks you alive too.

At this point Dr Andrews has basically got a full erection.

The core team behind Operation Mincemeat – which by the way was only slightly more disrespectful to the deceased than calling it Operation Floatycorpse – were Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley.

All thanks to a ragtag group of good guys who were fine with doing weird dress-up doll things to a corpse.

For a very long time, the finest medical minds were preoccupied with the question: ‘Can this problem be solved by putting something in the bum?’

insomnia to anorexia and indigestion, he came up with a one-size-fits-all solution: taking an increasingly large series of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators and ramming them up your arsehole. ‘First warm dilator in warm water; then lubricate outside of dilator with Dr Young’s Piloment (or if it is not available, with vaseline) and while in a squatting position – or while lying on the side with knees drawn up – gently insert in the rectum as far as the flange or rim,’ the instructions to the dilators read.165

Which is why these days when you tell somebody ‘I’ve had a bad night’s sleep,’ people rarely respond with ‘I’ll go and fetch the gigantic butt plug.’