The Shocking History of Execution.

Tonight we are going to tell you a tale. A superb tale. A tale as old as time that takes us from the beginnings of civilization until today. This tale will thrill you and chill you. It may elicit feelings of dread and sadness. It may make you angry.  At times it may make you uneasily laugh like the friend at school that was kicked in the balls but couldn’t show his weakness. It's a subject that people continually argue about and debate with savage ferocity. Tonight we are talking about executions! We'll talk about the methods and the reasons behind executions throughout the years. Then we'll talk about some famous executions, as well as some of the more fucked up ones. And by fucked up, we mean botched. Bad stuff. This episode isn't meant to be a debate for or against executions but merely to discuss them and the crazy shit surrounding them. So with all that being said, Let’s rock and roll!

 

        Capital punishment has been practiced in the history of virtually all known societies and places. The first established death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes.  The Code of Hammurabi was one of the earliest and most complete written legal codes and was proclaimed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C. Hammurabi expanded the city-state of Babylon along the Euphrates River to unite all of southern Mesopotamia. The Hammurabi code of laws, a collection of 282 rules, established standards for commercial interactions and set fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice. Hammurabi’s Code was carved onto a massive, finger-shaped black stone stele (pillar) that was looted by invaders and finally rediscovered in 1901. The text, compiled at the end of Hammurabi’s reign, is less a proclamation of principles than a collection of legal precedents, set between prose celebrating Hammurabi’s just and pious rule. Hammurabi’s Code provides some of the earliest examples of the doctrine of “lex talionis,” or the laws of retribution, sometimes better known as “an eye for an eye the greatest soulfly song ever!
  The Code of Hammurabi includes many harsh punishments, sometimes demanding the removal of the guilty party’s tongue, hands, breasts, eye, or ear. But the code is also one of the earliest examples of an accused person being considered innocent until proven guilty. The 282 laws are all written in an “if-then form.” For example, if a man steals an ox, he must pay back 30 times its value. The laws range from family law to professional contracts and administrative law, often outlining different standards of justice for the three classes of Babylonian society—the propertied class, freedmen, and slaves.

 

A doctor’s fee for curing a severe wound would be ten silver shekels for a gentleman, five shekels for a freedman, and two shekels for a slave. So, it was less expensive when you were a lower-class citizen. Penalties for malpractice followed the same scheme: a doctor who killed a wealthy patient would have his hands cut off, while only financial restitution was required if the victim was a slave. Crazy!

 

Some examples of the death penalty laws at this time are as follows: 

 

     If a man accuses another man and charges him with homicide but cannot bring proof against him, his accuser shall be killed. Holy shit.

 

      If a man breaks into a house, they shall kill him and hang him in front of that same house.

 

       The death penalty was also part of the Hittite Code in the 14th century B.C., but only partially. The most severe offenses typically were punished through enslavement, although crimes of a sexual nature often were punishable by death. The Hittite laws, also known as the Code of the Nesilim, constitute an ancient legal code dating from c. 1650 – 1500 BCE. The Hittite laws were kept in use for roughly 500 years, and many copies show that other than changes in grammar, what might be called the 'original edition' with its apparent disorder, was copied slavishly; no attempt was made to 'tidy up' by placing even apparent afterthoughts in a more appropriate position. 

 

The Draconian constitution, or Draco's code, was a written law code enforced by Draco near the end of the 7th century BC; its composition started around 621BC. It was written in response to the unjust interpretation and modification of oral law by Athenian aristocrats. Aristotle, the chief source for knowledge of Draco, claims that he was the first to write Athenian laws and that Draco established a constitution enfranchising hoplites, the lower class soldiers. The Draconian laws were most noteworthy for their harshness; they were written in blood rather than ink. Death was prescribed for almost all criminal offenses. Solon, who was the magistrate in 594 BCE, later repealed Draco’s code and published new laws, retaining only Draco’s homicide statutes.

 

In the 5th century B.C., the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables also contained the death penalty. Death sentences were carried out by such means as beheading, boiling in oil, burying alive, burning, crucifixion, disembowelment, drowning, flaying alive, hanging, impalement, stoning, strangling, being thrown to wild animals, and quartering. We'll talk more about that later. The earliest attempt by the Romans to create a code of law was the Laws of the Twelve Tables. A commission of ten men (Decemviri) was appointed (c. 455 B.C.) to draw up a code of law binding on patrician and plebeian and which consuls would have to enforce. The commission produced enough statutes to fill ten bronze tablets. 

 

Mosaic Law codified many capital crimes. There is evidence that Jews used many different techniques, including stoning, hanging, beheading, crucifixion (copied from the Romans), throwing the criminal from a rock, and sawing asunder. The most infamous execution of history occurred approximately 29 AD with the crucifixion of that one guy, Jesus Christ, outside Jerusalem. About 300 years later, Emperor Constantine, after converting to Christianity, abolished crucifixion and other cruel death penalties in the Roman Empire. In 438, the Code of Theodosius made more than 80 crimes punishable by death. 

 

Britain influenced the colonies more than any other country and has a long history of punishment by death. About 450 BC, the death penalty was often enforced by throwing the condemned into a quagmire, which is not only the character from Family Guy, and another word for dilemma but in this case is a soft boggy area of land.

By the 10th Century, hanging from the gallows was the most frequent execution method. William the Conqueror opposed taking life except in war and ordered no person to be hanged or executed for any offense. Nice guy, right? However, he allowed criminals to be mutilated for their crimes. 

 

During the middle ages, capital punishment was accompanied by torture. Most barons had a drowning pit as well as gallows, and they were used for major as well as minor crimes. For example, in 1279, two hundred and eighty-nine Jews were hanged for clipping coins. What the fuck is that you may be wondering. Well, Clipping was taking a small amount of metal off the edge of hand-struck coins. Over time, the precious metal clippings could be saved up and melted into bullion (a lump of precious metal) to be sold or used to make new coins.

Under Edward I, two gatekeepers were killed because the city gate had not been closed in time to prevent the escape of an accused murderer. Burning was the punishment for women’s high treason, and men were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Beheading was generally accepted for the upper classes. One could be burned to death for marrying a Jew. Pressing became the penalty for those who would not confess to their crimes—the executioner placed heavy weights on the victim’s chest until death. On the first day, he gave the victim a small quantity of bread, on the second day a small drink of bad water, and so on until he confessed or died. Under the reign of Henry VIII, the number of those put to death is estimated as high as 72,000. Boiling to death was another penalty approved in 1531, and there are records to show some people cooked for up to two hours before death took them. When a woman was burned, the executioner tied a rope around her neck when she was connected to the stake. When the flames reached her, she could be strangled from outside the ring of fire. However, this often failed, and many were burnt alive.

 

In Britain, the number of capital offenses continually increased until the 1700’s when two hundred and twenty-two crimes were punishable by death. These included stealing from a house for forty shillings, stealing from a shop the value of five shillings, robbing a rabbit warren, cutting down a tree, and counterfeiting tax stamps. However, juries tended not to convict when the penalty was significant, and the crime was not. Reforms began to take place. In 1823, five laws were passed, removing about a hundred crimes from the death penalty. Between 1832 and 1837, many capital offenses were swept away. In 1840, there was a failed attempt to abolish all capital punishment. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more and more capital punishments were abolished, not only in Britain but also all across Europe; until today, only a few European countries retain the death penalty.

 

The first recorded execution in the English American colonies was in 1608 when officials executed George Kendall of Virginia for supposedly plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. In 1612, Virginia’s governor, Sir Thomas Dale, implemented the Divine, Moral, and Martial Laws that made death the penalty for even minor offenses such as stealing grapes, killing chickens, killing dogs or horses without permission, or trading with Indians. Seven years later, these laws were softened because Virginia feared that no one would settle there. Well, no shit.

 

In 1622, the first legal execution of a criminal, Daniel Frank, occurred in, of course, Virginia for the crime of theft. Some colonies were very strict in using the death penalty, while others were less so. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first execution was in 1630, but the earliest capital statutes did not occur until later. Under the Capital Laws of New England that went into effect between 1636-1647, the death penalty was set forth for pre-meditated murder, sodomy, witchcraft, adultery, idolatry, blasphemy, assault in anger, rape, statutory rape, manstealing, perjury in a capital trial, rebellion, manslaughter, poisoning, and bestiality. A scripture from the Old Testament accompanied early laws. By 1780, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts only recognized seven capital crimes: murder, sodomy, burglary, buggery, arson, rape, and treason. And for those wondering, The Buggery Act of 1533, formally An Act for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie, was an Act of the Parliament of England that was passed during the reign of Henry VIII. It was the country's first civil sodomy law.

 

The Act defined buggery as an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and Man. This term was later determined by the courts to include only anal penetration and bestiality.

 

The New York colony instituted the so-called Duke’s Laws of 1665. This list of laws directed the death penalty for denial of the true God, pre-meditated murder, killing someone who had no weapon of defense, killing by lying in wait or by poisoning, sodomy, buggery, kidnapping, perjury in a capital trial, traitorous denial of the king’s rights or raising arms to resist his authority, conspiracy to invade towns or forts in the colony and striking one’s mother or father (upon complaint of both). The two colonies that were more lenient concerning capital punishment were South Jersey and Pennsylvania. In South Jersey, there was no death penalty for any crime, and there were only two crimes, murder, and treason, punishable by death. Way to go, Jersey Raccoons!

 

Some states were more severe. For example, by 1837, North Carolina required death for the crimes of murder, rape, statutory rape, slave-stealing, stealing banknotes, highway robbery, burglary, arson, castration, buggery, sodomy, bestiality, dueling where death occurs, (and this insidious shit), hiding a slave with intent to free him, taking a free Negro out of state to sell him, bigamy, inciting slaves to rebel, circulating seditious literature among slaves, accessory to murder, robbery, burglary, arson, or mayhem and others. However, North Carolina did not have a state prison and, many said, no suitable alternative to capital punishment. So, instead of building a fucking prison to hold criminals, they just made the penalty for less severe crimes punishable by death. What the shit, North Carolina?!?

 

The first reforms of the death penalty occurred between 1776-1800. Thomas Jefferson and four others, authorized to undertake a complete revision of Virginia’s laws, proposed a law that recommended the death penalty for only treason and murder. After a stormy debate, the legislature defeated the bill by one vote. The writing of European theorists such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Bentham had a significant effect on American intellectuals, as did English Quaker prison reformers John Bellers and John Howard.

 

Organizations were formed in different colonies for the abolition of the death penalty and to relieve poor prison conditions. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a renowned Philadelphia citizen, proposed abolishing capital punishment. William Bradford, Attorney General of Pennsylvania, was ordered to investigate capital punishment. In 1793 he published “An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary” in Pennsylvania. Bradford strongly insisted that the death penalty be retained but admitted it was useless in preventing certain crimes. He said the death penalty made convictions harder to obtain because in Pennsylvania, and indeed in all states, the death penalty was mandatory. Juries would often not return a guilty verdict because of this fact, which makes sense. In response, in 1794, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished capital punishment for all crimes except murder “in the first degree,” the first time murder had been broken down into “degrees.” In New York, in 1796, the legislature authorized construction of the state’s first prison, abolished whipping, and reduced the number of capital offenses from thirteen to two. Virginia and Kentucky passed similar reform bills. Four more states reduced their capital crimes: Vermont in 1797 to three; Maryland in 1810, to four; New Hampshire in 1812, to two and Ohio in 1815 to two. Each of these states built state penitentiaries. A few states went in the opposite direction. Rhode Island restored the death penalty for rape and arson; Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut raised death crimes from six to ten, including sodomy, maiming, robbery, and forgery. Many southern states made more crimes capital, especially for slaves. Assholes.

 

The first profound reform era occurred between 1833-1853. Public executions were attacked as cruel. Sometimes tens of thousands of eager viewers would show up to view hangings; local merchants would sell souvenirs and alcohol. Which, I’m not sure if I hate or absolutely love. Fighting and pushing would often break out as people jockeyed for the best view of the hanging or the corpse! Onlookers often cursed the widow or the victim and would try to tear down the scaffold or the rope for keepsakes. Violence and drunkenness often ruled towns far into the night after “justice had been served.” People are fucking weird, dude.

Many states enacted laws providing private hangings. Rhode Island (1833), Pennsylvania (1834), New York (1835), Massachusetts (1835), and New Jersey (1835) all abolished public hangings. By 1849, fifteen states were holding private hangings. This move was opposed by many death penalty abolitionists who thought public executions would eventually cause people to cry out against execution itself. For example, in 1835, Maine enacted what was in effect a moratorium on capital punishment after over ten thousand people who watched a hanging had to be restrained by police after they became unruly and began fighting. All felons sentenced to death would have to remain in prison at hard labor and could not be executed until one year had elapsed and then only on the governor’s order. No governor ordered an execution under the “Maine Law” for twenty-seven years. Though many states argued the merits of the death penalty, no state went as far as Maine. The most influential reformers were the clergy, of course. Ironically, the small but influential group that opposed the abolitionists was the clergy. 

 

Ok, let’s talk about electrocution. Want to know how the electric chair came to be? Well, Electrocution as a method of execution came onto the scene in an implausible manner. Edison Company, with its DC (direct current) electrical systems, began attacking Westinghouse Company and its AC (alternating current) electrical systems as they were pressing for nationwide electrification with alternating current. To show how dangerous AC could be, Edison Company began public demonstrations by electrocuting animals. People reasoned that if electricity could kill animals, it could kill people. In 1888, New York approved the dismantling of its gallows and the building of the nation’s first electric chair. It held its first victim, William Kemmler, in 1890, and even though the first electrocution was clumsy at best, other states soon followed the lead.

 

Between 1917 and 1955, the death penalty abolition movement again slowed. Washington, Arizona, and Oregon in 1919-20 reinstated the death penalty. In 1924, the first execution by cyanide gas took place in Nevada, when Tong war gang murderer Gee Jon became its first victim. Get this shit. The frigging state wanted to secretly pump cyanide gas into Jon’s cell at night while he was asleep as a more humanitarian way of carrying out the penalty. Still, technical difficulties prohibited this, and a special “gas chamber” was hastily built. Other concerns developed when less “civilized” methods of execution failed. In 1930, Mrs. Eva Dugan became the first female to be executed by Arizona. The execution was botched when the hangman misjudged the drop, and Mrs. Dugan’s head was ripped from her body. More states converted to electric chairs and gas chambers. During this time, abolitionist organizations sprang up all across the country, but they had little effect. Several stormy protests were held against the execution of certain convicted felons, like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. The couple was convicted of providing top-secret information about radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and valuable nuclear weapon designs. At that time, the United States was supposedly the only country with nuclear weapons. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the United States federal government in 1953 in the Sing Sing correctional facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to receive that penalty during peacetime.

However, these protests held little opposition against the death penalty itself. In fact, during the anti-Communist period, with all its fears and hysteria, Texas Governor Allan Shivers seriously suggested that capital punishment be the penalty for membership in the Communist Party.

 

The movement against capital punishment revived again between 1955 and 1972.

 

England and Canada completed exhaustive studies which were largely critical of the death penalty, and these were widely circulated in the U.S. 

Death row criminals gave their moving accounts of capital punishment in books and films. Convicted robber, kidnapper, and rapist Caryl Chessman, published “Cell 2455 Death Row” and “Trial by Ordeal.” Barbara Graham’s story was utilized in the book and movie “I Want to Live!” after her execution. She was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on the same day as two convicted accomplices, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins. All of them were involved in a robbery that led to the murder of an elderly widow. 

Television shows were broadcast on the death penalty. Hawaii and Alaska ended capital punishment in 1957, and Delaware did so the following year. Controversy over the death penalty gripped the nation, forcing politicians to take sides. Delaware restored the death penalty in 1961. Michigan abolished capital punishment for treason in 1963. Voters in 1964 abolished the death penalty in Oregon. In 1965 Iowa, New York, West Virginia, and Vermont ended the death penalty. New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 1969.

 

The controversy over the death penalty continues today. There is a strong movement against lawlessness propelled by citizens’ fears of security. Politicians at the national and state levels are taking the floor of legislatures and calling for more frequent death penalties, death penalties for more crimes, and longer prison sentences. Those opposing these moves counter by arguing that harsher sentences do not slow crime and that crime is slightly or the same as in the past. FBI statistics show murders are now up. (For example, 9.3 persons per 100,000 were murdered in 1973, and 9.4 persons per 100,000 were murdered in 1992, and as of today, it's upwards of 14.4 people per 100,000. This upswing might be because of more advanced crime technology, as well as more prominent news and media.

 

Capital punishment has been completely abolished in all European countries except for Belarus and Russia, which has a moratorium and has not conducted an execution since September 1996. The complete ban on capital punishment is enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU). Two widely adopted protocols of the European Convention on Human Rights of the Council of Europe are thus considered a central value. Of all modern European countries, San Marino, Portugal, and the Netherlands were the first to abolish capital punishment, whereas only Belarus still practices capital punishment in some form or another. In 2012, Latvia became the last EU member state to abolish capital punishment in wartime.

 

Ok, so now let's switch gears from the history of capital punishment and executions in general and get into what we know you beautiful bastards come here for. Let's talk about some methods used throughout the years, and then we'll talk about some famous executions and some fucked and messed up ones.

 

Methods:

 

We've discussed a few of these before, but some are so fucked up we're going to discuss them again.

 

Boiling To Death:

 

A slow and agonizing punishment, this method traditionally saw the victim gradually lowered — feet-first — into boiling oil, water, or wax (although uses of boiling wine and molten lead have also been recorded).

 

If the shock of the pain did not render them immediately unconscious, the person would experience the excruciating sensation of their outer layers of skin, utterly destroyed by immersion burns, dissolving right off their body, followed by the complete breakdown of the fatty tissue, boiling away beneath.

 

Emperor Nero is said to have dispatched thousands of Christians in this manner. At the same time, in the Middle Ages, the primary recipients of the punishment were not killers or rapists but coin forgers, particularly in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. In Britain, meanwhile, King Henry VIII introduced the practice for executing those who used poison to commit murder.

 

Shockingly, the practice is believed to have been carried out as recently as 2002, when the government of Uzbekistan, led by Islam Karimov, was alleged to have tortured several suspected terrorists to death by boiling.

 

The Blood Eagle:

 

A technique ascribed to ancient Norse warriors, the blood eagle, mixed brutality and poetic imagery that only the Vikings could. First, the victim’s back would be hacked open, and the skin ripped apart, exposing the spinal column.

 

The ribs would then be snapped from the spine and forcibly bent backward until they faced outwards from the body, forming a pair of bloody, shattered eagle’s wings. As a horrifying finale, the lungs would then be pulled from the body cavity and coated with stinging salt, causing eventual death by suffocation.

 

There is some question whether this technique was ever actually used as the only accounts come from Norse literature. Odin did this shit, you know it.

 

Several scholars claim that the act we know of today is simply a result of poor translating and misunderstands the strong association of the eagle with blood and death in Norse imagery. That said, every account is consistent in that in each case, the victim is a nobleman being punished for murdering his father.

 

The good news for any poor soul who might have suffered this brutal death? The agony and blood loss from the initial wounds would probably have caused them to pass out long before the lungs were removed from their bodies. 

 

Impalement:

 

Most famously used by Vlad the Impaler, 15th-century ruler of Wallachia (in present-day Romania) and inspiration for Count Dracula, the act of impalement has a long, grim history. While images tend to depict people skewered through the midsection and then held aloft — in a manner that would almost certainly bring about a rapid death — the actual process was a much longer, horrifically drawn-out ordeal.

 

Traditionally, the stake would be partially sharpened and planted, point up, in the ground. The victim would then be placed over the spike as it was inserted partway into the rectum or vagina.

 

As their body weight dragged them further onto the pole, the semi-greased wooden stake would force its way up through their body, piercing organs with agonizing slowness as it eventually penetrated the entire torso, finally tearing an exit wound through the skin of the shoulder, neck or throat. Holy shishkabob. Or bill. Or Karen.

 

The earliest records of the torture come from 1772 B.C. in Babylon, where the aforementioned King Hammurabi ordered a woman be executed in this way for killing her husband. But its use continued until as recently as the 20th century when the Ottoman government employed the technique during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. Which is super fucked up.

 

According to some accounts, it could take the victim — exposed, bleeding, and writhing in tormented agony — as long as eight whole days to die. Oh my hell!

 

Keelhauling:

 

Walking the plank might not be the most pleasant of deaths, but it seems moderately more humane than the other favored maritime punishment of keelhauling.

 

A punishment that often ended in death due to the severity of the wounds sustained (or was simply carried out until the point of death), it saw the victim, legs weighted and suspended from a rope, dropped from the bow of the ship, and then rapidly pulled underwater along the length of the hull — and over the keel (the beam that runs longitudinally down the center of the underside to the stern.

 

In the age of old, old wooden sailing ships, the hull of a vessel would generally be coated in a thick layer of barnacles, whose shells could be rock hard and razor-sharp.

 

As the drowning sailor was yanked relentlessly through the saltwater, these barnacles would strip the skin from his body, gouging out raw chunks of flesh and even, by some accounts, tearing off whole limbs or severing the head.

 

If the sailor was still alive, they might be hung from the mast for 15 minutes before going in again. In some cases, the victim would have an oil-soaked sponge — containing a breath of air — stuffed into their mouth to prevent a “merciful” drowning.

 

Employed mainly by the Dutch and the French from the 1500s until it was abolished in 1853, accounts of its use date back to Greece in 800 B.C.

 

The Roman Candle:

 

Many of the worst execution methods ever devised involve fire — from burning witches at stake in medieval Britain to roasting criminals alive in the hot metal insides of the brazen bull in Ancient Greece — but few match the sheer lack of humanity as the Roman Candle.

 

A rumored favorite of the mad Roman Emperor Nero, this method saw the subject tied to a stake and smeared with flammable pitch (tree or plant resin), then set ablaze, slowly burning to death from the feet up.

 

What sets this above the many other similar methods is that the victims were sometimes lined up outside to provide the lighting for one of Nero’s evening parties.\

 

Being Hanged, Drawn, And Quartered:

 

First recorded in England during the 13th century, this unusually extreme — even for the time — mode of execution was made the statutory punishment for treason in 1351. Though it was intended to be an act of such barbarous severity that no one would ever risk committing a treasonous act, there were nevertheless plenty of recipients over the next 500 years.

 

The process of being hanged, drawn, and quartered began with the victim being dragged to the site of execution while strapped to a wooden panel, which was in turn tied to a horse.

 

They would then experience a slow hanging, in which, rather than being dropped to the traditional quick death of a broken neck, they would instead be left to choke horribly as the rope tore up the skin of their throat, their body weight dragging them downwards.

 

Some had the good fortune to die at this stage, including the infamous Gunpowder Plot conspirator Guy Fawkes, who ensured a faster death by leaping from the gallows.

 

Once half-strangled, the drawing would begin. The victim would be strapped down and then slowly disemboweled, their stomachs sliced open, and their intestines and other significant organs hacked apart and pulled — “drawn” — from the body.

 

The genitals would often be mutilated and ripped from between their legs. Those unlucky enough to still be alive at this point might witness their organs burned in front of them before they were finally decapitated.

 

Once death had finally claimed them, the recipient’s body would be carved into four pieces — or “quartered” — and the parts sent to prominent areas of the country as a warning to others.

 

The head would often be taken to the infamous Tower of London, where it would be impaled on a spike and placed on the walls “for the mockery of London.”

 

Rat Torture:

 

As recently depicted in that horrible show, Game Of Thrones, rat torture is ingenious in its disgusting simplicity. In its most basic form, a bucket containing live rats is placed on the exposed torso of the victim, and heat is applied to the base of the bucket.

 

The rats, crazy with fear from the heat, tear and gnaw their way into the abdomen of the victim, clawing and ripping through skin, flesh, organs, and intestines in their quest to escape.

 

Possessing the most powerful biting and chewing motion of any rodent, rats can make short work of a human stomach. Along with the unimaginable pain, the victim would also suffer the sick horror of feeling the large, filthy creatures writhing around inside their guts as they died.

 

While associated with Elizabethan England — where the Tower of London was said to have housed a “Dungeon of Rats,” a pitch-black room below high watermark that would draw in rats from the River Thames to torment the room’s inhabitants — the practice has been used far more recently.

 

General Pinochet is said to have employed the technique during his dictatorship of Chile (1973-1990), while reports from Argentina during the National Reorganization Process in the late 1970s and early ’80s claimed victims were subjected to a version in which live rats — or sometimes spiders — were inserted into the subject’s body via a tube in the rectum or vagina….yep.

 

Bamboo Torture

 

Forcing thin shards of bamboo under the fingernails has long been cited as an interrogation method, but bamboo has been used to creatively — and slowly — execute a person, too. Allegedly used by the Japanese on American prisoners of war, it saw the victim tied down to a frame over a patch of newly sprouting bamboo plants.

 

One of the fastest-growing plants in the world, capable of up to three feet of growth in 24 hours, the sharp-tipped plants would slowly pierce the victim's skin — and then continue to grow. The result was death by gradual, continuous, multiple impalements, the equivalent of being dropped on a bed of sharpened stakes in terrible slow motion.

 

Despite the practice having roots in the former areas of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Siam (now Thailand) in the 19th century, there are no proven instances of it being used during WWII.

 

It’s certainly possible, however, and it has been shown that the technique, among the worst execution methods ever, works: A 2008 episode of MythBusters found that bamboo was capable of penetrating a human-sized lump of ballistic gelatin over three days.

 

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