We've all learned about some of the scariest people who have ever lived,
from Adolf Hitler to Charles Manson, yet there are countless other
terrifying figures from history who get very little mention in
textbooks. The following ten people were brutal monsters among men;
people who became infamous for things like bathing in blood, murdering
scores of helpless children, or committing heinous, unforgivable crimes
against humanity in times of war. Read on to discover ten terrifying
but obscure historical figures whose troubling lifestyles haunt our
human history to this day.
Gilles de Rais was a celebrated Breton knight who fought in the French
army alongside none other than Joan of Arc. However, it is not de
Rais' prowess as a soldier for which he is best remembered; his life
ended after he confessed to murdering at least eighty to two hundred
peasant and servant children. The actual number of his victims will
never be known, but some scholars speculate that de Rais killed up to
six hundred children over a seven year period.
After de Rais
retired from the military, he admitted to dabbling in the occult,
attempting to summon demons and offering pieces of his victims as
sacrifices. Finding children to murder was not difficult, as peasant
children would often approach his castle begging for food. Since he
selected children from very poor families, no one had the clout to
accuse him of wrongdoing when their children went missing.
Once
de Rais had abducted the children, he took great pleasure in torturing,
sodomizing, and murdering them. His preferred method of death was
decapitation, but he would also cut their throats, dismember them, or
break their necks. He admitted that it was his habit to pleasure
himself sexually in the bloody remains of his victims.
In 1440,
de Rais made a fatal error when he kidnapped a prestigious cleric,
prompting a formal investigation and trial. De Rais, who was about to
be tortured into a confession, finally admitted to murdering hundreds of
children. He, along with a few accomplices who had helped him on his
gruesome mission, were executed by hanging and burning in 1440.
Elizabeth Báthory (1560-1614), "The Blood Countess"
Elizabeth Báthory was a countess from a prestigious noble family in
Hungary. Báthory was well educated and able to read and write in four
languages, and due to her social rank she was an important person who
was well known in Vienna and the surrounding countryside. It is because
of her noble blood and influential husband that her heinous crimes went
unpunished for so long.
Once Báthory's husband died in 1604, the
whispers from local villagers could no longer be ignored by
authorities. Rumors circulated that young women and girls kept
disappearing in and around the Countess' many castles. Most of the
victims were peasants and servants who Báthory assumed would not be
missed, but towards the end of her reign of terror she made the mistake
of kidnapping the daughters of lesser nobility, which is how she was
eventually caught and tried for murder.
Báthory's trial lasted
for several weeks and had hundreds of witnesses testifying against her.
Most of the witnesses were family members of missing girls, but there
were also women who had managed to escape Báthory's clutches and who
told sordid tales of what they had endured. Eventually, Báthory
confessed and she and four collaborators were convicted of torturing and
killing hundreds of girls. One witness claimed that Báthory and her
cohorts murdered over six hundred and fifty young girls, however they
could only prove that she had murdered eighty.
Báthory is called
"The Blood Countess" because she is rumored to have bathed in the blood
of her virginal victims, thinking that doing so would help preserve her
youthful appearance. After Báthory was convicted of her crimes, she was
sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest. She was bricked into a series
of small rooms in her castle, with just small slits for the passing of
food and oxygen, where she remained for four years until her death in
1614.
Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-1794), Obsessed with The Guillotine
Maximilien de Robespierre was a French lawyer and politician who was
also one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution.
Robespierre was a skilled orator, captivating audiences with speeches
about virtue, patriotism, and morals. He truly wanted freedom and civil
rights for the people of France. Unfortunately, once he rose to power
he became a tyrant who believed that the only way to accomplish his
democratic goals was to terrorize the people with the threat of
execution.
De Robespierre became obsessed with the French method
of execution, the guillotine. During a ten month "Reign of Terror," de
Robespierre ordered mass executions of people whom he thought were not
supporting the Revolution. De Robespierre had hundreds of people
guillotined without trials, including some of his own friends and family
members. Even minor crimes such as hoarding, desertion, or rebellion
were cause for execution under de Robespierre's reign. French political
cartoons from that era depict de Robespierre guillotining the
executioner after everyone else had already been killed.
An
estimated forty thousand people were either executed or sentenced to
life in prison, including famous people like King Louis XVI and Queen
Marie Antoinette. De Robespierre also ordered hundreds of thousands of
soldiers to fight losing battles, including the attack of Vendee, in
which over one hundred thousand men, women, and children were murdered.
Eventually, de Robespierre suffered the same fate as his victims when
he was guillotined without a trial in 1794.
Timur (1336-1405), Ruthless Conqueror and Mass Murderer
Although Tamerlane (a.k.a. Timur) is heralded for being an epic Asian
conqueror who founded the Timurid Empire and Timurid Dynasty, he is also
remembered as being a brutal barbarian and bloodthirsty ruler who left a
trail of death in his wake. Timur's methods of conquering were
ruthless and cruel, causing destruction and devastation to millions of
people during his lifetime.
Timur was fond of forcing both
soldiers and civilians alike to commit suicide by jumping from great
heights. In India, Timur ordered over two hundred thousand captured
soldiers to jump from a cliff to their death. He also ordered his
minions to behead tens of thousands of villagers and soldiers in Aleppo,
Ifshan, Tikrit, Baghdad, and more.
Timur had towers of human
skeletons built for his amusement, and over the course of his lifetime
it is estimated that he is responsible for the death of twenty million
people.
Ilse Koch (1906-1967), "The Bitch of Buchenwald"
The story of Ilse Koch is just one of the tales of horror to emerge from
the Holocaust. Ilse Koch was married to Karl Koch, one of Adolf
Hitler's commandants at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Ilse Koch
lived with her husband at Buchenwald, but instead of living the life of
the typical commandant's wife, she joined the Nazi movement
wholeheartedly, becoming a SS Aufseherin (overseer) of the camp.
Ilse
embraced her position with the zeal of a true sadist, often riding her
horse through the camp and brutally whipping prisoners (often to death)
for no reason at all. She enjoyed randomly picking out prisoners who
had skin that interested her; she would then have the prisoner killed
and their skin tanned in order to make gruesome items like skin
lampshades, book bindings, and clothing. She was particularly proud of a
handbag that she often carried that was made out of human flesh.
Koch
was eventually arrested for her war crimes, and her husband was
executed in Munich in 1945. Later, Koch was sentenced to life in
prison. Ilse and Karl Koch's only son committed suicide after the war,
apparently unable to live with himself after learning about his parents'
part in the Holocaust. While in prison, Koch was impregnated by an
unknown man, and nineteen years later he became a frequent visitor to
her jail cell. After twenty years in jail, Koch suddenly took her own
life on the night before she was expecting a visit from her son.
Ranavalona I (1778-1861), The Mad Queen of Madagascar
Ranavalona I was the Queen of the Kingdom of Madagascar for thirty-three
years. During that time, Ranavalona worked tirelessly to reduce
Madagascar's dependency on Europe, repel French attacks, and grow a
formidable army. Ranavalona's preferred method of amassing her thirty
thousand-strong army was to force peasants who were behind on their
taxes to take up arms, build public works, and work without pay as a way
to repay their debts. Millions of people perished during her reign
thanks to constant warfare, disease, famine, harsh punishments for minor
crimes, and forced labor.
During her lifetime, Ranavalona was
viewed as a tyrant who may or may not have been certifiably insane. Her
frequent use of excessive force on both her people and Europeans
(especially the French) caused many Europeans to refer to her by names
such as "The Mad Queen of Madagascar," "Ranavalona The Cruel," "The
Bloody Mary of Madagascar," the "Most Mad Queen of History," the "Wicked
Queen Ranavalona," and the "Female Caligula."
Liu Pengli (Unknown - Approximately 144 BC), One of the First Serial Killers Ever
*Note: The above image is not Liu Pengli. There are no known images of Pengli.
Liu
Pengli was the Prince of Jidong, China and a cousin of the Emperor.
Pengli was both arrogant and cruel. He enjoyed taking groups of his
equally-corrupt kinsmen and slaves on ambushes of local villages, where
they would rape, loot, murder, and take more slaves as souvenirs.
Pengli terrorized people for sport, stealing from them, murdering their
loved ones, and leaving them for dead. The people of Jidong lived in
fear of their prince, hiding in their homes and avoiding being out and
about at night. Pengli is responsible for the deaths of at least one
hundred confirmed victims, but there are likely many more that went
unreported.
Pengli's crimes were finally reported to the Emperor,
but the Emperor refused to execute his own cousin, so he removed
Pengli's royal ties and took away his land and fortune, making him a
commoner, and banished him to a distant county.
Belle Gunness (1859-?), "Hell's Belle"
Belle Gunness was born in Norway, and according to some sources she lead
a relatively normal life until she was kicked in the stomach by a man
in her teens, causing her to miscarry her first child. Gunness's
personality then changed drastically. Also, perhaps coincidentally, the
man who hurt her died shortly afterward from "stomach cancer."
In
1881, Gunness immigrated to the U.S. where she worked as a servant, got
married, and had children. Gunness learned how to work the insurance
system, taking out large policies on her family members and their place
of business. Soon after the policies were in place, her children
started dying of stomach issues, and their business burned to the
ground. Later, Gunness's husband also died from intestinal distress,
reportedly the one day of the year on which two of his life insurance
policies overlapped. Gunness collected all of the policy payouts and
then remarried.
Within a week of her second marriage, her
husband's child from his previous marriage died while under Belle's
care. Within a year, her second husband was dead from a mysterious head
wound. Once again, Gunness collected the insurance money and moved on.
Eventually,
Gunness's crimes were brought to light by a handyman whose affections
she had spurned. It was determined that she had killed most of her
suitors and boyfriends as well as her two daughters, and it is suspected
that she killed both of her husbands and all of their children
(approximately twenty to forty people) over a period of about twenty
years. She grew quite rich by collecting life insurance, cash, and
valuables from her victims. Gunness was never jailed for her crimes;
she emptied her bank accounts and disappeared sometime in the early
1900s.
Empress Wu Zetian (625-705), The "Enchanting" Empress
*Photo is an artist's rendition of Empress Wu Zetian.
Wu Zetian
was the only female empress in Chinese history, and she is known as
being a fearsome, ruthless person who never hesitated to resort to
murder to benefit herself or her country. Empress Zetian lead China to a
period of political and military leadership, and she is responsible for
a major expansion of the Chinese empire. However, she was a heartless,
cruel, sexually-depraved and brutal leader who even had her own infant
daughter killed to further her political career.
Every day of her
reign, Wu Zetian ordered tortures, executions, and forced suicides.
She organized the murder of her rivals, family members, clergymen, and
countless more people. Empress Zetian also ordered tens of thousands
of her people to be killed by poison, or boiled alive, or sometimes
simply mutilated. She ruled China until her death, by natural causes,
at the age of eighty-one.
Thug Behram (1765-1840), The World's Most Prolific Serial Killer
Between the years of 1790 and 1840, an Indian cult leader called Thug
Behram murdered nine hundred and thirty-one people in Avadh, India. The
English word "thug" is derived from Behram's name, and the gang itself
was called "Thuggee." Using a ceremonial cloth called a "Rumal,"
similar to a handkerchief or a cumberbun, Behram would strangle his
victims in a ritualistic killing style witnessed by many members of his
cult.
In 1840, Behram was executed for his crimes by hanging.
World's Biggest Dog
