The facts behind the Virginia Rappe case that rocked 1920s Hollywood to its core.Wikimedia CommonsVirginia Rappe In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the highest-paid actor in the world. He had recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures for a whopping $1 million (about $13 million today), an unheard-of sum at the time. Posters for his movies billed the 266-pound comedian as “worth his weight in laughs.” But before the year was out, he was accused of a crime so monstrous that he would never appear onscreen again.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photo ever, "View from the Window at Le Gras," from his estate in France in 1826 or 1827 using a technique he'd invented called heliography and a camera obscura.Today, most of us walk around with an incredibly powerful camera in our pockets. We don’t think twice about taking photographs of our world, from our pets to beautiful landscapes to our family and friends. We’ve come a long way from what the first photo ever taken looked like.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, a Japanese newspaper reported on the barbaric killing competition as though it were a sporting event.Wikimedia CommonsAn article reporting on the “Contest to Cut Down 100 People.” In 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Empire of Japan invaded China, and for the next eight years, committed horrific atrocities against the civilian population. But while the international press was reporting on the brutality of Japanese troops, newspapers in Japan were looking for stories of wartime heroism.

For centuries, people across southern New Jersey and Delaware have supposedly encountered a horse-headed flying demon known as the Jersey Devil.Legend has it that in the dense woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens lurks a mythological beast known as the Jersey Devil. With the head of a horse, the wings of a bat, and talons befitting a dragon, the Jersey Devil has terrorized the imaginations of New Jersey residents for nearly 300 years.

Few people have been the target of as many assassination attempts as Adolf Hitler. None of them worked out as planned.Image Source: Reddit Several months ago, the Internet lit up in debate after one author posed the question, “Would you kill baby Hitler?” While more of an ethics game than anything else, the fact is that there were many people living in Hitler’s time who wanted to kill Hitler the man, and simply failed.

Blissfully unable to even understand the concept of dying, Joe Arridy was described by his prison warden as "the happiest man who ever lived on death row."Joe Arridy had always been highly suggestible. A mentally handicapped young man with an IQ of 46, Arridy could be coerced into saying or doing almost anything. And when the police coerced him into confessing to a grisly murder he didn’t commit, his short life came to an end.

Evil Science Experiments: The Results Of Injecting People With The Ingredients Of Nuclear Bombs What plutonium can do in a nuclear bomb–and this is what was actually injected into subjects’ bodies. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons In the ’50s and ’60s, there was hardly a quicker way to get your research funded by the U.S. government than to pitch the idea of exposing people (especially minorities) to ridiculous amounts of radiation to see what would happen.

The Godfather Of Harlem: Frank Lucas And American Gangster YouTubeHarlem kingpin Frank Lucas. The second Ridley Scott film in our list, American Gangster traces the rise and fall of the notorious 1970s Harlem drug kingpin, Frank Lucas. Despite a deeply engrossing performance by Denzel Washington, the film that claims to be “based on a true story” takes some creative liberties that are in some ways reflective of the grandiose nature of the protagonist.

Turns out the winter sculpture has served more than just aesthetic purposes.Julian Finney/Getty Images If there’s a white, fluffy layer of snow on the ground, odds are you’re itching to play in it. And if you’re playing in the snow, what else would you do but roll it into a ball? And then another, slightly smaller one. And then a third. Stick on some arms, a face and maybe some accessories, and voila: You’ve become a part of a millennia-long tradition.

In February 2010, Tilikum killed his trainer Dawn Brancheau during a performance at SeaWorld Orlando. The incident became the focus of the 2013 documentary Blackfish and sparked public outcry about the mistreatment of captive orcas. Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events. Wikimedia CommonsTilikum was taken captive from the wild in 1983 and died at SeaWorld in 2017. The 2013 documentary Blackfish presented a scathing portrayal of SeaWorld in the wake of the infamous death of one of its employees, Dawn Brancheau, in 2010.