You will not be able to forget these eight facts.
We go about living our lives, seeing animals, objects, and even our own bodies, without fully realizing that there are many things – many disturbing things – that we do not know about them. Here are 8 mind-blowing facts that will disturb you and make you wish that they were not true.
1. A chicken lived 18 months without a head.
You are probably thinking that there is no way this is true. However, according to the BBC, on 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were killing chickens on their farm in Fruita, Colorado. One of these chickens (a bird which later became known as Mike) refused to die even though it was beheaded; that is, Mike continued to live for 18 months after Lloyd and Clara Olsen tried to kill it.
2. Creatures called snakehead fish can ‘walk’ on land.
Reader’s Digest claims that this fish has ‘both gills and an organ’ that permits it to breathe oxygen. Therefore, it can come up on land to search for food and it can flop on its fins for ‘up to a quarter of a mile’.
3. Your body sheds a pound and a half of skin every year.
You probably already know that your body sheds dead skin cells – but did you know how much? Your body sheds skin almost constantly as Reader’s Digest reports that ‘your entire epidermis completely regenerates approximately every 27 days’. This means that per year, your body sheds about a pound and a half of skin.
4. Parts of Albert Einstein’s brain can be found in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
On April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein died at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. The Smithsonian Magazine explains that when Thomas Harvey performed Einstein’s autopsy and found that he had died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, he also stole parts of Einstein’s brain. Today, you can see parts of the professor’s brain on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
5. Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride had real skeletons.
The designers of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride were initially unhappy with the ‘unrealistic-looking’ skeletons. Subsequently, they decided to use real human remains to make the ride feel more realistic and so, they obtained skeletons from the anatomy labs of UCLA Medical Center. Of course, now that technology has developed and it is much easier to make things look believable, these remains have been removed. Nevertheless, according to Atlas Obscura, there are rumors that a few real remains have been kept.
6. Vampire bats consume half their body’s weight worth of blood in 30 minutes.
These creatures are the only animals that can survive on a diet of nothing but blood. Vampire bats are native to Central and South America and they usually feed on the blood of cows or horses. OneKindPlanet notes that they do not extract enough blood to kill an animal but their bites do have the power to cause severe infections. Moreover, it is believed that these bats drink roughly half of their body weight in blood every night and will die if they do not find blood for two nights in a row.
7. An island near Mexico City is filled with old dolls.
It goes without saying that this sounds like a place straight out of a horror film. Located on a lake near Mexico City, La Isla de la Muñecas (Island of the Dead Dolls) is considered to be one of the most terrifying places in the world. Reader’s Digest shares the legend of the island as they explain: “A man named Don Julian Santana was the caretaker of the island. One day, he learned that a little girl had drowned in one of the island’s canals, and he made it his life’s mission to honor her. And for him, “honoring” her meant collecting dolls from wherever he could find them and displaying them on the island, however creepy-looking or decrepit they were.”
8. There are over 200 corpses on Mount Everest.
It is known that many people never return from climbing Mount Everest. For this reason, it is believed that over 200 corpses can be found there. Unfortunately, because people are afraid that they too may die, nobody has ever climbed up to retrieve and bury the dead bodies. Therefore, the numbers of corpses keep on increasing. Reader’s Digest even notes that some corpses have even become unofficial location markers for mountaineers today.