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Known as the “holy grail of shipwrecks,” Spain’s San José held an estimated 200 tons of treasure, including gold coins and ingots, silver, emeralds, and Chinese porcelain. Armada de ColombiaThe San José was discovered more than 300 years after sinking. The galleon San José was a casualty of the War of the Spanish Succession. It held billions in stolen treasure and sank off Cartagena’s coast in Colombia in 1708, but its location remained mysterious until 2015....

From politicians to police to his own lover, as Pablo Escobar’s top hitman, no one was safe from John Jairo Velasquez. RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty ImagesPablo Escobar’s former top hitman, John Jairo Velasquez, A.K.A “Popeye.” John Jairo Velasquez killed over 250 people and masterminded the deaths of 3,000 more while serving as the top hitman for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar during the 1980s. “I’m a professional killer, I kill for money. I also killed out of love and respect for Pablo Escobar,” he said in the Russia Today documentary Escobar’s Hitman....

Although 19-year-old Kevin Hines nearly severed his spine when he hit the water, he eventually recovered and now dedicates his life to suicide prevention. Kevin Hines StoryKevin Hines stands on the beach overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. On September 25, 2000, 19-year-old Kevin Hines leaped from the Golden Gate Bridge, intending to end his life. Since the bridge opened in 1937, an estimated 2,000 people have done the same....

When she wasn’t testing her lethal concoctions on hundreds of slaves and children, she was dispatching Nero’s enemies — until she met a brutal end herself. Evelyn De Morgan/Wikimedia CommonsRoman poisoners turned to arsenic, belladonna, and other deadly substances to kill. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Rome’s emperors and empresses waged war against each other. Their weapon of choice? Poison. And one woman named Locusta of Gaul became Rome’s deadliest poisoner in the 1st century A....

Saint Olga of Kiev was the 10th-century princess of Kievan Rus who enacted bloodthirsty revenge on the tribe that killed her husband, the Grand Prince Igor I. Nikolay Bruni/Wikimedia CommonsSaint Olga of Kiev, the princess who brutally tormented her enemies. When news reached Princess Olga of Kiev that a neighboring tribe had killed her husband, Prince Igor, she vowed revenge. In 945, Igor, the ruler of the Kievan Rus in what is today Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, traveled to the edges of his empire....

Talk about a good game of fetch. A 18-month-old golden retriever earned an honorary spot on his local K-9 force after finding 15 ounces of black tar heroin in his owners’ backyard. Kenyon, as he’s affectionately known, was playing with his owners (who requested not to be named) in their backyard in Yamhill County, Oregon, when he stumbled upon what his owners thought was a time capsule. They pulled out their video camera to film themselves opening it, hoping for a big reveal, but unfortunately didn’t find exactly what they were looking for....

The relics were found in Cave Tunel Wielki in Małopolska, Poland. Researchers say the discovery challenges what we know about early humans, since similar discoveries have suggested that they lived in the open air and not in caves. M. KotThe artifacts were much older than previously thought. For millennia, the depths of the Cave Tunel Wielki in Małopolska, Poland contained a long-lost echo of our ancient human ancestors. Polish researchers have determined that a previously unexplored layer of the cave contains evidence of flint tools made by the extinct human species Homo heidelbergensis some 500,000 years ago....

Though scholars know the Anunnaki as the gods of ancient Mesopotamia, fringe theorists believe they are ancient alien invaders from the planet Nibiru. Before the Greeks exalted Zeus or the Egyptians praised Osiris, the Sumerians worshipped the Anunnaki. These ancient gods of Mesopotamia had wings, wore horned caps, and possessed the ability to control all of humanity. Sumerians revered the Anunnaki as heavenly beings who shaped the destiny of their society....

“Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.” – Winston Churchill, 1908. /AFP/Getty ImagesSoldiers guard Mau Mau fighters behind barbed wires, in October 1952, in the Kikuyu reserve. When British settlers began pouring into what is now Kenya in 1902, they intended to set up an agricultural colony whose surplus could help pay the costs of other imperial projects in East Africa....

Not even two months after Lincoln’s 56th birthday, he was shot dead. Those near the president in his last moments suffered some pretty eerie fates. If you took U.S. History in high school, you know that on April 14th, 1865 Abraham Lincoln was shot by a man named John Wilkes Booth while attending the theatre with his wife. Top-hat wearing, emancipation-declaring Honest Abe left behind an enduring legacy — but what you weren’t taught was that the events surrounding that fateful night were downright spooky....

It took six hours and $400,000 to move the historic building six blocks. FacebookThe house was placed onto a truck with a remotely-operated hydraulic dolly. For early risers in San Francisco, the morning of February 21 was a little different than usual, as many noticed a complete house floating by through the city streets. But this was no dream or hallucination — a team of workers actually managed to uproot and transport a 139-year-old home in one piece to a new location nearby....

Weegee, the world’s first paparazzo, documented the brutality of New York’s gang wars of the 1930s and 1940s like no one before or since. While the Rockefellers and Carnegies gallivanted around luxurious Manhattan hotspots in the early 20th century, Arthur Fellig had his eyes, and camera, on a very different New York City. In the 1930s and ’40s, life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Fellig took many of his photos, was marked by violence, crime, and death....

The brain was boiled, dried, and preserved under sediment for almost 4,000 years. Scientists in Turkey discovered a Bronze Age human brain that has been preserved for 4,000 years. The brain was discovered in Seyitomer Hoyuk, Turkey, and is one of the oldest ever discovered. It is also one of the most intact. Brain tissue is rich in enzymes and cells deteriorate quickly after death which is why scientists rarely, if ever, find intact specimens....

Fred proves that Egyptians had been using embalming practices for more than 1,500 years longer than scientists believed. Museo EgizioFred, the Turin mummy. One incredibly well-preserved 5,600-year-old mummy is now upending much of what we thought we knew about Ancient Egyptian embalming. A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science shows strong evidence that embalming practices in Ancient Egypt were in place more than 1,500 years earlier than previously believed....

From the man who donned a Santa suit and went on a bloody rampage to the 15-year-old tortured for being a “witch,” these grisly murders turned the cheeriest time of the year into a nightmare. For many, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. But for some, this holiday has been marked by ferocious family feuds, mysterious disappearances, and murder. Many of history’s worst Christmas crimes unfolded due to long-held personal grudges, as in the case of Bruce Pardo, who dressed as Santa Claus and murdered his ex-wife and eight members of her family on Christmas Eve in 2008 following his divorce....

Discovered in 1988, the fossil was incorrectly classified and relegated to a museum drawer. It’s now been identified as the jaw of a saber-toothed creature that was one of the first carnivorous mammals on Earth. San Diego Natural History MuseumAn illustration of the Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae in what is today San Diego. Most newly-discovered species are typically found during archaeological excavations in the great outdoors. Paleontologist Ashley Poust, however, was digging through the fossil library of the San Diego Natural History Museum when he unearthed fossilized evidence of the oldest known saber-toothed predator in the world....

The Civil War was about just one states’ right: the right to own slaves. Wikimedia CommonsA statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is removed from its perch in New Orleans on May 19, 2017. As Confederate monuments come down across the South, the Civil War has once again become a lightning rod throughout the United States. Many of the monuments’ defenders have claimed that the Civil War was not about slavery but instead about states’ rights....

The evergreen stories written by Charles Perrault are still told to children today as they’re tucked into bed at night. Wikimedia CommonsCharles Perrault, the father of fairytales and the first version of Cinderella. For centuries, fairytales have been a part of the bedtime tradition. Children around the world have long been tucked into bed along with stories of princes and princesses and evil queens, and of far off lands home to magical woods filled with dangerous creatures....

Claire Phillips was a smalltown girl from Michigan who wound up running a spy ring for the United States in the Japan-occupied Philippines during World War II. One of the most daring spies in World War II, Claire Phillips joined the Philippine resistance movement using her many talents to extract secrets from the Japanese and aid the Allies. Born Claire Maybelle Snyder in Michigan in 1907, she moved with her family to Portland, Ore....

“Freddy hated guys who abused women. Whitey was a rat who killed women. It’s probably that simple.” Wikimedia Commons/Don Treeger /The Republican via APWhitey Bulger and Freddy Geas Shortly after the notorious Boston Mafia boss James “Whitey” Bulger was transferred to the high-security Hazelton penitentiary in West Virginia, he was brutally murdered by fellow inmates. The attackers who carried out the murder tried to cut out his tongue, which is a popular punishment executed in the organized crime world of La Cosa Nostra for mafia members that have cooperated with law enforcement — also known as “rats....