12 Electronic Bits of Trivia That Must Be Removed From Your Bags and Placed in Separate Bins

Fengdu Ghost City is a secluded series of shrines dedicated to the afterlife, and may be around 2,000 years old. There are statues depicting various hellish tortures, plus a very literal pathway to Hell. Tourists are invited to try their luck on the Bridge of Helplessness (where a demon will decide whether or not to push them into the river below), the Ghost-Torturing Pass (where the god of death will pass judgment) and the Tianzi Palace (where they have to stand on one foot atop a sacred stone for three minutes to gain entry to heaven).

“Corpse candles” are flickering blue candle-esque phenomena sometimes seen in — or spookier still, on the way to or from — graveyards. People believe they’re wandering spirits, or omens predicting a living person’s forthcoming trip to the grave. In reality, it’s methane escaping a decomposing corpse, which occasionally combusts, creating a faint, blue, flickering flame. The same thing happens in marshes and bogs. As for the moving corpse candles — they’re most likely owls with bioluminescent fungi in their feathers.

For $2 in 1920 (about $30 now), you could get your chubby mitts on soap that “never fails to reduce flesh when directions are followed.”

When ConEd equipment was struck by lightning, multiple times, in the midst of a 1977 heat wave, a series of switches needed to be hit in a highly specific order. An operator missed a single switch, causing power to go out city-wide for 25 hours. Without TV to distract them, New Yorkers turned to arson, looting and vandalism for entertainment.

As documented by the Times of London in 1816, the Waltz was considered by scoldy prudes to be an “obscene display” that was once “confined to prostitutes and adulteresses.”

When college student Mark Bao’s laptop was stolen, he was able to view the thief’s activity through the cloud. Among other things, the guy recorded himself practicing some dance moves, which Bao uploaded to YouTube with the title “Don’t Steal Computers Belonging to People Who Know How to Use Computers.” The thief turned the laptop over to police, and asked Bao to take the video down — that was in 2011, and the video is still up.

According to his assistant, Michelangelo would keep his clothes and boots on 24/7, which obviously meant his baths were few and far between. When he did occasionally peel his shoes off, “the skin came away, like a snake’s, with the boots.”

The Aztecs would remove the intestines, seal them, then twist them into various shapes. Instead of offering them to a delighted little kid, they’d offer them to their gods (by lighting them on fire). 

Snapple attempted to break the world record for largest popsicle in 2005. Their 2-ton behemoth started melting before they could set it upright and claim the title, leaking so much strawberry-kiwi goop that police had to shut down part of 17th Street. 

The showman wanted Champ, the creature supposedly living in Lake Champlain, real bad. He offered up the equivalent of nearly $2 million to anyone who could bring him the monster’s 25-foot-long impenetrable skin.

A bunch of scuba enthusiasts from the town of Muff, Ireland started up a diving club in the 1990s. After getting a ton of unexpected web traffic when they launched their website, they began selling merchandise and memberships, aiming to make the Muff Diving Club the largest scuba club in the world

Ingvar Kamprad was a weird dude. A $30 haircut in Sweden irked him so much, he started letting his hair grow until the next time he was traveling to “a developing country” for a cheaper cut. He drove a 20-year-old car, wore exclusively thrifted clothes and would reuse his tea bags several times. He was also a big-time fascist. In 2011, a spokesperson said he’d “long admitted flirting with fascism,” but “there are no Nazi-sympathizing thoughts in Ingvar’s head whatsoever.” He died in 2018, so that last part is definitely true now.