The truth about the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale

Finding the earliest version of any given common fairy tale is an almost impossible endeavor. Before the Grimm Brothers gathered their collection of well-known German folk fairy tales into a single volume, these stories followed an oral tradition, being passed on from grandmother to mother to children. What you may not know is that these…

Schliztie the Pinhead in the 1932 film Freaks

From birth Schlitzie looked like any other baby boy but as the years progressed, it became apparent that he suffered from microcephaly, a condition where the face grows at a normal rate but the head does not. Microcephaly bestows upon the person an abnormally small head (often only half the size of a normal head)…

Minnie Woolsey – Koo Koo the Bird Girl

Koo Koo, the Bird Girl was born Minnie Woolsey in Georgia in 1880. Fate dealt Minnie a bad hand – she was born with a rare skeletal disorder, Virchow-Seckel syndrome. Virchow-Seckel syndrome is also known as bird-headed dwarfism, Harper’s syndrome or Seckel dwarfism. It is characterized by growth retardation and dwarfism, an extremely small head,…

The Mysterious Chicago Tylenol Murderers

On September 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, (a suburb of Chicago) woke up at dawn and went into her parents’ bedroom. She did not feel well and complained that she had a sore throat and a runny nose. Suspecting a cold was coming on, her parents gave her one Extra-Strength…

The run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without rest. Virtually flipping hundreds of coins each second, they are operated and maintained by one or the United States most prominent educational institutions – Princeton University. And scientists have discovered that they predict the future.

You can’t be in two places at the same time. Or can you? Many believe that each of us has a “doppelganer”, an exact duplicate or twin, that occasionally stalks its better half. Doppelgangers commonly appear when a person is deathly ill or shortly before a person dies. They rarely appear side-by-side with their counterpart…

Prince Randian, billed as the Living Torso, was a side show performer during the 1930’s. He starred in the landmark film, Freaks, where he was mistakenly credited as “Rardion”. Born without arms and legs, Randian was often introduced as “the human caterpillar who crawls on his belly like a reptile”.

Jena Six (or Jena 6) was the name given to a group of six black teenagers charged with the beating of Justin Barker, a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, United States, on December 4, 2006. Sparking questions of racial disparity, many aspects of the case are troubling, including the subsequent crimes…

The Winchester Rifle, “the rifle that won the West”, was a revolution in gun design. Designed and developed by Oliver Winchester and utilized by the United States’ military branches, the gun’s unique lever action design produced unrenowned riches for Oliver and his heirs. After a series of tragedies drove one of the heirs to madness,…

The story is known throughout the world embodied in story and song. Sent by King Herod and following a shining star in the sky, the Three Wise Men travelled throughout the East until they reached the newborn king, the baby Jesus where they embellished him with gifts. But who were the Three Wise Men and…