Today is...Halloween

Today is Halloween! Impress your friends with these scary and/or disturbing fun facts.

Real cadavers were used as props in various scenes in the movie Poltergeist.

There was a practice that occasionally occurred up until the 1880s where Buddhist monks would cause their own death while mummifying themselves. It involved 1,000 of eating only nuts and seeds while doing rigorous exercise to rid their body of all fat, then eating only bark and roots for 1,000 and drinking poisonous tea, which caused rapid loss of bodily fluids and made their body too poisonous to be eaten by bugs. They would then lock themselves in a tomb and not move from the lotus position. If all went well, after 1,000 days, the tomb would be opened to see if the mummification process was successful. Somewhere between 16 and 24 of such mummified bodies have been found.

The Jonestown Massacre, when the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, started in Indianapolis in the mid-1950s and moved to Guyana, knowingly drank Flavor Aid that contained Valium, Chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan as a revolutionary suicide, was, until 9/11, the greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster. This is where the phrse "Drinking the Kool-Aid" comes from.

While filming the aversion therapy scene in A Clockwork Orange (when the eyes are held open by clamps), Michael McDowell's cornea was scratched, rendering him temporarily blind.

If a person eats only rabbit, they will die of malnutrition. Rabbit is too lean to provide enough nutrients, and also contains high levels of amino acices, ammonia, and urea which the human kidney cannot process enough of to sustain on rabbit alone.

When an airplane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes, killing 16 of the 45 passengers right away, the survivors fed on the dead passengers who has been preserved in the snow to survive the 72 days until they were rescued. Though a hard decision for all, rugby players embraced it with the saying "Rugby players eat their dead".

During the Salem Witch Trials 19 people were found guilty and executed. 6 were found guilty but pardoned, usually for being pregnant. 5 pled guilty but were pardoned. 1 person would not enter a plea and was pressed to death. Common methods of executing witches was hanging, drowning, and burning.

A serial killer, by definition, is some one who has killed three or more people over a period of more than a month with down time between the killings. There is usually some psychological gratification associated with the killing.

There are on average 51 deaths in the United States due to lightning strikes.

What is your Halloween costume?