Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

[ElizabethBest]

Let's hear it please - I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole. I'll start - The Willard Suitcases. Over 400 suitcases of possessions were found in an attic at the Willard Insane Asylum belong to patients who had died whilst inpatients so never left. The New York State Museum started a project to document the cases and their contents, and you can learn all about it and see the cases on their website.

The life of David Livingstone and his wife, is the most fantastic story, it would make a fantastic film.
He was born in a wee town in Scotland not from a wealthy family, yet was driven to go to Africa ( to spread Christianity) but really he preferred exploring, and used this as a pretext of funding his trips.
He tried again and again to find the source of the river Nile, was attacked by a tiger but his tweed jacket( unbelievable in the African climate) saved him as it’s teeth caught on it, although his arm was damaged.
His wife following on, giving birth to many children at the same time! This woman alone deserves a film.
When he died the African men who explored huge areas of Africa with, carried him hundreds of miles, risking their own lives as carrying dead bodies through villages was not allowed and punishable by death. They returned his body to a ship bound for Britain as a tribute to him allow him to be buried at home. They must have thought highly of him to attempt this feat,
No fancy equipment, no malaria tablets, no comforts of any kind in blistering heat covering hundreds and hundreds of miles on foot! This is a fascinating story as I’ve zero idea how anyone could do all this.

Re regency menstruation - I believe the theory and what evidence there is suggests sanitary belts stuffed with rags?

I went to this museum just this week! Something I knew nothing about and very interesting.

Re: the little tokens - I got talking to a staff member who told me that these for the most complete record of Georgian fabric in the world because of the number of skirt cuttings left behind.

@CrosswordConundrum apparently she got locked back up several times because she would not accept that she shouldn’t work as a cook, nor was she willing to wash her hands!

I have been there and it is amazing. I truly believe that Newgrange, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and probably those in Central and South America as well, were all calculated and designed by extra terrestrial aliens - even if they did get humans to actually build them. I came to that conclusion about the Egyptian Pyramids when I was a child, long before I knew that other people also thought that that was a possibility.

Most of you will probably think I am "seriously mistaken", but it is the only conclusion that makes complete sense to me. I also think that if the parting of the seas in the Bible did happen, and if Manna from Heaven also happened, that that was due to an alien star ship, and it's crew. None of which negates there being a God, there are still far more questions than there are answers.

Paternoster lifts I've spent hours reading about and watching them after riding on one In Germany

In the 70s I spent seven years going back and forth to the dental hospital in Birmingham and they had Paternoster lifts. One time me and my dad went round the whole loop to see what it was like, which was dark and clanky.

It's interesting that so many of us are fascinated by women in history. There really is not enough coverage in film and TV on the lives of women - especially on the lives of ordinary women.

I loved The Weaker Vessel by Antonia Fraser, and more recently The Five by Hallie Rubenhold.

@Roussette thanks. That looks all very interesting.
@AngelinaFibres several years ago I was fascinated by past lives and read several books. There was one about a English women who remembered she was once an Irish women who died leaving behind several children in the 1930s (?).
It was made into a made for TV movie (although they changed the woman as being American not English).
Any idea what the book or woman was called? I would love to re read.

Was it Bridey Murphy? Virginia Tighe claimed to have been a 19th century Irish woman in a past life. Her story has been pretty much discredited now.

I worked in an archive and we had an album of photographs of criminals from the 1880s. It fascinated me looking through the album as to what they thought of having their photograph taken, the faces they pulled and their circumstances.

We also had asylum records, the asylum was a central location and patients were sent from around the country, Liverpool and Lambeth for example. There were people from all walks of life, doctors to housewives and chimney sweeps. The place made a constant supply of birthday cakes for the inpatients, they had a farm and grew vegetables, patients working in the laundry and kitchens

This got us through lockdown for so many hours and we still play it religiously. Absolutely love it

I went on a Paternoster lift once with my parents, when I was a child, we were visiting someone at a College or University at the time - I can't remember which one, but it might have been Leicester or Loughborough, I think it began with an L anyway!

I was bloody terrified of it, it didn't stop and you had to jump on and jump off, I thought I would either brake my leg whilst jumping, or that I would get squashed going over the top! I never went on one again - they were a horrible invention 😂

I have that book! Dc is, reading it at the moment and finds it fascinating!

@SolitudeNotLoneliness - if you enjoyed that one you might enjoy Atul Gawande's "Being Mortal ".

There are videos posted on Youtube of a man who goes down storm drains and explores tunnels, underground train lines...even saw a river with boat and people underground. Can't remember the name of the poster but real fascinating stuff.

Anyone who's interested in British history can happily lose hours on the Old Bailey Online site of actual court cases from 1674 onwards. Utterly engrossing.

cali Totally agree I find woman’s history and stories fascinating as it’s been ignored for too long! Too much his story and not enough hers!

Although I love the David Livingstone story we forget his wife was there probably doing everything he did and giving birth raising children too!

@calimali no that's not her.
The one I remember was an English women and her book was from the 80s/90s.
Although I am now going to spend hours reading about the one you suggested 😂

I LOVE this thread and also anticipate an hour or two of happy googling. My contribution - The Bolton Stride and children’s’ skulls (teeth). Both brought to my attention by Mumsnetters on old threads. I consider my general knowledge to be really good and knew nothing about either of these things.

That pipe is still there exactly like it is in the before picture. And there is still litter everywhere. Those pictures don't really show any genuine difference. The steps are a huge improvement though

For anyone who is happy to get stuck down the reincarnation, near death experiences rabbit hole I recommend Raymond Moody's Life After Life. Fascinating.

cali the story of Mary Barbour is another one! To step up and defend woman and children from greedy landlords in the times she lived and take them on and not only win but actually get a change in the law is fascinating and amazing!

The coal mine fire under Centralia in Pennsylvania is really interesting. It's been burning since the sixties and is likely to keep going for a few hundred years more at least.
Experts spent years coming up with suggestions of how to put it out, but they were all astronomically expensive and not guaranteed to work so in the end they just left it to burn and evacuated everyone who was willing to go.
So now it's an almost ghost town, with a fire merrily burning away underneath, and is just being left to do its thing.

I also find extinct megafauna fascinating. Huge otters, ground sloths and beavers, glyptodon, argentavis, megalodon. I get lost in looking up stuff about them quite frequently.

The David Parr house. David Parr was a decorator and between 1886 and 1926 he painted the walls of every room in his house in the style of William Morris. I've thought about this a lot, what it might have been like living there while all the painting was going on. Some rooms must have been unusable at times because the paint was wet and there would have been a constant smell of paint and terps. I wonder what his family thought of it all.

There's a page I follow on Instagram called dark theme Reddit and they share stories of weird, wonderful and scary stuff. My favourite are the most dangerous places or towns people have been or scary/weird things most people don't know. I read them and then find them on Google earth and look around and try and judge for myself or google the shit out of them until I'm so far down a rabbit hole I can't remember how I got there. Another morbid curiosity has some really interesting stories about things that happened years ago. I love mysteries but then get really annoyed that I will probably never know the answers.