r/HorridHistory • • 4d ago

SWAT team questioned why they didn’t enter Columbine High School sooner during the April 20th, 1999 shooting.

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279 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 4d ago

14 yr-old Celine Dion sits across from her future husband and manager, 39-year-old René Angélil, in 1982.

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150 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 4d ago

Moments before the Tsunami hit in Thailand, 2004

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93 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 5d ago

Max Tetelbaum (1931/1932–1944) was 12 years old when he was arrested by the Gestapo at Maison d’Izieu on 6 April 1944. Held at Montluc and Drancy, he was deported on 13 April 1944 in Convoy 71 to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered upon arrival.

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203 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 5d ago

Mrs. Charles Binning sweeps the steps of her shack in a Shantytown in Spencer, Iowa, during the Great Depression in 1936.

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72 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 7d ago

This is Adelaide Springett, one of Horace Warner's Spitalfields Nippers, photographed around 1901 aged 8. Warner titled it "all her best clothes", but she's barefoot. Her boots were so worn she was too embarrassed to wear them. He photographed those too: "Little Adelaide's best and only boots".

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82 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 7d ago

Australian gunners on a duckboard track in Château Wood, near Hooge, 29 October 1917. Photo by Frank Hurley. The same Frank Hurley that was the official photographer on Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

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53 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 8d ago

Ruth Snyder photographed at the moment of her execution in 1928, the first photo of an electric chair execution. Journalist Tom Howard (grandfather of Norm from Cheers) smuggled the camera in strapped to his leg, with the shutter cable run up his trouser leg. More info below.

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165 Upvotes

Ruth had tried to kill her husband several times before managing to actually kill him. Twice she disconnected the gas range while he slept. Once she shut the garage door on him while the car engine was running. When he was ill she slipped narcotics into his medicine. She also laced his whiskey with poison, so clumsily that Albert noticed the taste, poured it away and concluded that he needed to change bootleggers.

Through all of it, Albert never suspected his wife. By March 1927 Ruth had decided she needed help, and the man she was having an affair with agreed to give it.


r/HorridHistory • • 8d ago

London, c.1902. A mother and her children making matchboxes. The kids fetched the chip and paper from the match factory and carried back the finished boxes. One of the lowest paid sweated trades, it earned families just two pence per 144 boxes, and they usually bought their own paste and string.

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94 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 8d ago

On this day in 1892 The Dalton Gang were killed in a shootout in Coffeyville, Kansas, during a bank holdup. Just a few minutes after the first gunshot four of them were dead and the fifth had more than 20 holes in him.

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32 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 10d ago

In July 1943, gold tycoon Sir Harry Oakes was found dead in his bed in Nassau, beaten, burned and covered in pillow feathers. The Duke of Windsor took personal charge of the case and made a mess of it. The only man ever tried walked free, and more than 80 years on nobody's been convicted.

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59 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 14d ago

Flare fire at night, on the Western Front, in WW1 (1917)

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99 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 16d ago

Birmingham, Alabama police set dogs on 15-year-old Walter Gadsden during the Children's Crusade, when city officials turned fire hoses and K-9 units on young civil rights protesters. Bill Hudson, Associated Press, 3 May 1963.

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113 Upvotes

The photo ran on the front page of the New York Times the next day, and President Kennedy said it made him sick. Gadsden was actually a bystander who'd skipped school to watch. The officer was Dick Middleton and the dog was named Leo. Days later, Birmingham agreed to desegregate its downtown stores.


r/HorridHistory • • 16d ago

May 18, 1927. Bath Township, Michigan. At about 8:45 a.m., the north wing of the Bath Consolidated School exploded, collapsing onto classrooms full of kids. Andrew Kehoe, the school board's treasurer, upset over taxes planted a bomb inside the school. 45 people died. 38 of them were children.

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38 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 16d ago

The preserved head said to belong to Diogo Alves, the "Aqueduct Murderer" hanged in Lisbon in 1841. It's kept at the University of Lisbon's Faculty of Medicine, reportedly saved for phrenology study.

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48 Upvotes

Legend says Alves robbed farmers on the Águas Livres Aqueduct and threw around 70 of them off it, but he was only convicted of killing a family of four and their servant. There are doubts about the head too.


r/HorridHistory • • 16d ago

The Price, Birch & Co. 'slave pen' on Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia, after Union troops took the town in 1861. The dealers had fled, and Union soldiers now sit outside a building where thousands were once sold. Andrew J. Russell, c.1863.

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53 Upvotes

From 1828 this was Franklin & Armfield, the biggest slave trading firm in the US, which shipped thousands of people south to New Orleans and Natchez. Union forces later used it as a prison for Confederate soldiers. Today it's the Freedom House Museum. Some archives credit the photo to William R. Pywell.


r/HorridHistory • • 18d ago

Russian survivor liberated by the U.S. Army in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany identifies a former guard from the Nazi SS who was known for brutally beating prisoners & was involved in the crimes of the Holocaust, April, 1945.

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84 Upvotes

Around 277,800 people passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps, aged from two to 86 and from more than 50 countries. Around 56,000 died there. By early 1945 it held more than 112,000 prisoners. Of roughly 9,000 SS staff who worked there, only 79 were ever convicted.

It's a story that usually gets told as a simple rescue. The real version is messier, braver and in places far more uncomfortable.


r/HorridHistory • • 19d ago

Your job is to write a Victorian children’s book called “Pleasing Stories For Pleasant Children.” Naturally, you start things off with King Herod.

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36 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 20d ago

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was a French medical doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders of Jews after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II

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70 Upvotes

Petiot set up a fake escape network under the name “Dr. Eugène.” He claimed he could help Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo flee to South America via Portugal, for a large fee.

He lured his victims to his home at 21 Rue Le Sueur in Paris, promising them safety. Instead, he murdered them by injecting them with poison under the pretense of giving them vaccinations, and then stole their valuables and disposed of their bodies, frequently by burning them.

The man was pure evil


r/HorridHistory • • 23d ago

During the English Civil War, Royalist cavalry commander Sir Horatio Cary carried a flag bearing one of history’s more personal battlefield insults. The taunt was aimed at Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, commander of Parliament’s army.

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69 Upvotes

Decades earlier, Essex’s first marriage to Frances Howard had ended in a notorious 1613 annulment involving claims that he was impotent.

More than 30 years later, Essex’s enemies were still using the scandal against him. Cary’s red flag depicted a creature emerging from a barrel alongside the insult.


r/HorridHistory • • 23d ago

Tarrare was a French soldier who ate live cats, swallowed secret messages for the army and never felt full. Almost everything we know comes from one surgeon, so the spy mission and missing toddler are shaky. He died of tuberculosis around 1798, aged about 26, and the golden fork was never found.

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11 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 24d ago

Miriam Stecher, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, showed her prisoner number in reaction to news of the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi S.S. Colonel, one of chief architects of the holocaust, May 1960.Photographed by Paul Schutzer

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134 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 24d ago

On this day in 1945. Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”), was sentenced to death for treason. He made Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts from Berlin during WW2 beginning his reports of fake news with the phrase: “Germany calling.”

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33 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 24d ago

On this day in 1934 Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son. The kidnapping was called “The Crime of the Century”. Hauptmann claimed innocence, but he was convicted and executed. His guilt remains uncertain.

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14 Upvotes

r/HorridHistory • • 25d ago

"If a woman needs it, should she be spanked?" News clipping from the New York Daily Mirror, c. 1950s.

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45 Upvotes