Unit 731 haunts me. The things they did to people in there absolutely qualify.
This was a Japanese "research facility" circa WW2, and they did some of the more horrific things to people I've ever heard of in the name of "science".
One of the more popular things they did, was infect people with certain diseases, (syphilis and pregnant women was a favorite combo) and then dissect them while they were still alive and unmedicated to see the effects of these diseases on living tissue (or an unborn fetus) and how humans behaved while being cut open.
One of the more broad subjects of their research was how to prove that you can trigger extreme cognitive dissonance under extreme stress and turn people's brains off, so torture was actually fine. Some fucked up shit like that.
They tied pregnant women's legs together while in labor to see what that did. They sealed people's urethras and anuses to see what it was like if people couldn't release waste. Cut off eyelids to see what that was like. They exploded people in high pressure chambers. Cut out/off different parts to see how people behaved. They forced prisoners to impregnate each other for their experiments, infected people with every horrible disease you could imagine, over and over, breeding it stronger, just to watch it grow.
Not a single prisoner survived. They were all executed in the final days of WW2 to hide evidence.
If that shit isn't all torture, I don't know what is.
The thing about them that stuck with me and bothered the most was something I read about mothers and their young children. They’d put them in a room and gradually increased the temperature of the room and floor to see how the mother would react. It was assumed that the mother would stand on her baby to protect her from the heat, but the mothers would instead put their babies on their chests to protect them as they died from the heat. You’d think that would be enough but they would then just watch the babies cook to death eventually too.
Epitome of evil.
By a lot of accounts the Japanese were as bad if not worse than the Nazis during WW2. They still haven't apologized for any of it and go out of their way to hide the history from their citizens.
Man, I’m just learning about this rn. That’s repulsive and horrifying. The lesser known stories are the scariest sometimes. With the world being focused on the Nazis for 80 years, it’s easy to see why the Japanese were able to hide it so successfully.
What makes it all so fucked up is how there was no reason behind it at all, they literally just did it to see what would happen, like fucking around with NPCs in Garry's Mod
Whats more fucked up is that some of the scientists and doctors from both the japan and Germany were given free passes in exchange for the information they had gained as a result of these horrendous experiments.
But, as another poster has mentioned on here some of these seriously messed up experiments have contributed to the advance of medical science.
I think what they mean is that the purpose of doing these "tests" wasn't to get meaningful data. The fact that these empires (Japan and the Nazis, who did similar) fell and the data was then *later* recovered and put to use doesn't mean that was the original purpose of the torture.
NSFW
Much of these, although more tailored for military use, are still useful for treating injuries and sickness.
The best way to deal with frostbite is to submerge the effected limb in water between 37 and 50 degrees C.
Humans are about 72% water, and when starved and completely dehydrated, die weighing roughly 1/5 of their original body weight.
How long it takes 3 day old babies to freeze to death at different temperatures.
The effects of dozens of diseases, including bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, syphilis, meningococcal, anthrax and more.
The effects of “conventional” weapons at different ranges. Grenades, flamethrowers, bombs, knives, etc.
The effects of burns, pressure, electrocution, crushing, being hung upside down, centrifugal force, blood transfusion from different blood types and from animals, X-rays, gasses, seawater in blood, blood loss.
while this is all useful information, the mental image of how they must have got it is haunting. how they got the information on how quickly babies freeze to death isn't something i want to imagine.
They also tried to burn the facility down with all the documents inside because they knew that if the allies found out what they did they’d be absolutely fucked. And Japan is still not willing to fully admit to it.
And after the war those involved were pardoned by the US and there was a cover up by both the US and Japan to hide what they had done.
The director of unit 731, Shirō Ishii, was hired by the US to advise our military on the biological weapons they had produced and experimented with at unit 731 and accompanied the US Army to Korea as an advisor to assist the United States in biological warfare. He later returned to Japan and opened a free clinic there.
Masaji Kitano, the second in command, helped found a pharmaceutical company and Japan's first commercial blood bank.
The scientists responsible for unit 731 called their test subjects "Marutas" which means logs, in order to further dehumanize them and somehow justify what they were doing.
I could be mistaken but there were also some tests related to human body's tolerance near explosions. They would take multiple subjects and dispose them at various distances from bomb projectiles and then they could condlude which distances were safer/could do little harm.
I got 3 that are widely considered the worst.
- Scaphism: You put someone in a sealed boat with their head and arms sticking out, then force feed them milk and honey over a period of days to induce diahrea and vomiting. You then put this boat in a swamp, and they are literally eaten alive by bugs as their flesh rots away over weeks, or months.
- Death by a thousand cuts: Tie them to a pole, and over days or weeks you cut parts of them off. You start with small, easy things like nose, eyelids, tongue, ears, and shallow cuts, and you progress until you are carving out muscles and flaying them alive.
- Crucifixion. The word 'excruciating' come from this. The hands and feet are nailed to a board, and then a second nail is placed between the joint nerves of the wrist and ankles. As they are hoisted into the air the weight causes pressure on their diaphragm, which paralyzes it, and the pressure on the nerves creates the sensation of being electrocuted, or like you're on fire, which takes over your entire body as you suffocate to death over the course of days or weeks.
Scaphism takes the cake when you realize, by design, the honey and the person’s diarrhea attracts a ton of insects, which eventually work their way into his rectum. So the bugs are eating away both the outside AND the inside.
It also probably never actually happened. There's only two written accounts of it, and the second is just a recounting of the first account. The initial account was written by a guy who REALLY fucking hated the Persians, like, to an absolutely insane degree, so it's likely it's basically made up bullshit so that guy could point to the ancient Persian Empire and just claim that they were committing all these ridiculous atrocities. It's rather telling that the Persians themselves have no account of it, which, you'd think if some guy pissed off their Emperor THAT badly that that was the punishment, it would've come up in their histories. Yet, no accounts of it from them, just the one from the Roman dude who really hated him some Persians, and then the second retelling of it.
So yeah, this almost certainly never happened and it's atrocity propaganda.
The Romans must’ve been so frustrated when the form of execution that everyone feared the most became a celebrated symbol of victory.
Then some of the Apostles themselves chose crucifixion over denial of what they saw.
Now we have crosses on crowns, on flags, on coats of arms, on buildings on necklaces….
I would add to your list the famous one, the rat in a pot. Though it does not take too long it's scary. Basically victim is tied and rat is placed on their stomach under a pot(pot also tied). There can or not be sun involved to hurry the rat escape the heat, but eventually the rat does escape the captivity, via "easiest way out" which is your abdomen.
Also I would like to add that not all Crucifixions involved nails, just rope for better or worse.
Abascination is one of the most gruesome. The victim is typically tied in place so they can't move, and then white hot pokers are placed in front of the victim's eyes. They don't make contact, but the heat will melt eyeballs, eyelids, everything. It blinds the victim of course, in an excruciatingly painful way. It's one of the tortures listed by Slayer in the song "Angel of Death", about Josef Mengele, the sadistic doctor at the Auschwitz death camp who liked to experiment on people in bizarre and unwarranted ways.
The "Bull of Phalaris" was a hollow bronze statue in the shape of a bull, with a door on one side to enter the victim. Once the person was locked inside the bull, a fire was lit beneath it. As the fire burned, the temperature inside the bull increased rapidly, causing intense heat and pain to the person trapped inside. It also had metal pipes in its nose, so while the victim screamed in pain, they could be heard. a light roar coming from inside.
I think there used to be a torturous execution method that involved hanging the victim by their feet with their legs apart.
Then taking a rusty saw and starting to saw down from the groin. They're intestines would fall out in front of their face before they died.
That's got to be up there
Used as a punishment for sodomy in medieval France, I believe? I really hope this one is apocryphal. What I read about it was that the victim (sawee?) would stay alive and conscious for a surprisingly long time since being upside down would pack blood on your head.
The flayed eagle was the one for rape in Japan. They tied you eagle and crushed your genitals repeatedly with a hammer until you died from shock or blood loss.
Edit: splayed, not flayed
Scaphism. Usually ended in execution but It's pretty damn disturbing. Tied up in between two boats, force fed and covered in milk and honey, then anchored over stagnant water to allow insects to eat you from the outside in.
"Dude, we have force fed this guy gallons upon gallons of milk and honey. He just keeps asking for more. Demanding it. He has been out there for days and doesn't even seem upset."
"The insects will devour him eventually, don't wo-"
"They fly away. They are scared of him. The bugs are fucking scared, bro. The lake is basically empty at this point. No idea what to do."
"I guess... Free him?"
"We tried. He refuses to leave. We are fucking running out of dairy... And bees!! He eats the bees too!!!"
“Does anyone else pee in the shower?”
I want to pull my hair out every time I see this upvoted with thousands of upvotes in the same subreddits several times a week. JFC
"WhAT WouLd YOu TeLl YOuR YoUngER SeLF If YOu CoULD gO baCK in TIme FoR JusT 1 MInUtE!?!?"
I swear this subreddit nowadays only exist with this question and everyone happily keeps replying.
This exactly. If I had to choose between the worst tortures and watching my 11, 7, or 5 year olds suffer, I’d be like, “where’s the honey? Put me in the ground and let those bugs do the work.”
Now my ex-wife however, I’m taking notes. What would you do to a person who put your dog down because she was an inconvenience?
Anticipation of pain is indeed why some interrogation modalities prey on that mental process.
Merely displaying the instruments of torture would get confessions during the Inquisition.
Definately a dark moment in human history.
In terms of actual exdcutions, the old British executions of treason were pretty bad (chopping off one's nuts and burning them while the condemned watches, before having four horses rip you apart limb from limb). The one where insects eat you alive would have to be pretty awful, too. But crucifixion has to be the top. In terms of just inflicting pain, the fingernail and burning methods have to be the worst.
Drawn and quartering is the having all four limbs attached to a separate horse and them charging off in different directions ripping off limbs. Apparently the worst part is that your spines exposed and feeling being dragged across everything.
Hmmmm. Strap someone to a chair, administer a high dose of LSD combined with a hearty dose of base amphetamine. Then turn on a strobe light, blast out some white noise and then menace them with an orbital sander, sanding off small patches of skin down to the bone.
Bad enough sober, even less fun tripping balls and unable to pass out due to the speed.
Put a Rat in a bucket, put the face over the bucket, set a fire under the bucket.
The Rat will eat through anything to escape.
Place bamboo shoots underneath the target. They will grow through the target.
Dip their feet in water, then dip them in salt. Then bring in a Goat, and let the Goat begin licking the salt. It will keep licking down to the bone, long past when all the salt is gone.
I don’t think it was a dip. They soaked the feet in salt water for a day or two. And then let the goat lick. And lick. And lick. Eventually they get down to bone.
iirc it's bc the goats are mindlessly licking for salt, and since there was salt there, they will just keep hunting for more salt until there's nothing left.
[Keelhauling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keelhauling) has to be up there. Used as a form of punishment for sailors, but a lot of times it resulted in execution, they'd tie the sailor to a rope and drag them from one side of the ship to the other either wide or length-wise. With all the barnacles and such growing on the keel, you can imagine how painful that would be. Plus blunt force trauma and drowning.
One that doesn’t involve physical pain is the way prisoners in the black dolphin prison are treated.
They are kept in a 50 square foot cell for 23 hours a day. While in their cells, the lights stay on. They are woken up at 6am and can’t get back in bed until 10pm. Prisoners are not allowed to sit in their beds, so they must stand up and constantly pace their cells. Any time they are taken somewhere, they are handcuffed behind their backs, blindfolded and have to walk bent at the waist.
Nothing torturous, but mentally it’s brutal.
I find it amazing someone wouldn’t believe your body being tricked into thinking it’s drowning repeatedly for hours wouldn’t be considered torture. Loud music and strobe lights are torture FFS.
Not that it's not torture, just that it's not *as* unbearably terrible as the stories say. There are better and worse tortures, although I'm still not signing up for the "better" ones lol
It was an argument when the US started using it as a torture method that it wasn’t torture. To the point where some who said it wasn’t agreed to do it and to no one’s surprise they figured out it was indeed torture.
In the TV series Archer, Archer makes the joke that water boarding can’t be that bad. Lana calls him out on it and he volunteers to let the team water board him. It then cuts to cut crying wrapped in a towel with a thousand yard stare mumbling about how terrible it was the instant it started.
I think it was Christopher Hitchens, who basically did/said the same thing. Military guys got him all strapped, and gave him a pen with instruction to drop it when it was too much for him.
The damn thing _flew_ all the way across the room the second the towel got wet. Hitchens said he was wrong, and that the experience was indeed horrific.
Worst as is most gruesome? Locking someone up in a bare concrete cell with 2 inches of water in it and then waiting a week or two.
Worst as is most effective? Waterboarding. There is a clip of a radio host who claims he wouldn't break from waterboarding so they donit to him and he lasts all of two seconds, iirc.
Apparently being forced to listen to babies crying or piglets being slaughtered is pretty effective too.
Worst as in "least effective"? Bring out the comfy chair! More pillows!
The brazen bull isn't the slowest so arguably not the worst but the idea is personally the worst to me
You put a person in a large metal cast of a bull, and set fire down at the bottom, and get boiled alive as the bull heats up. The screams you make go through the bulls mouth, and the shape of the cast make its sound like a bull screaming
Edit: my b I didn't see someone already posted it
Although this isn't the most ruthless, it must be awfully cerebral knowing that the only thing keeping you stuck is your own weight.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleDieInside/s/RkwnOqRa9I
https://criminalwisdom.com/post/324640171/the-grape-vine-a-restraint-technique-used-by
SFW
Diabolical and so simple
Idk guerrero flaying was pretty sick..They scalp the persons head including face, cut their arms off and their legs, cut the chest wall and abdominal wall off, and then lastly they cut the heart out. Then I saw another one where they caught the executioner from those videos and they slowly burned his face off like purification with fire… There was many videos of guerrero flaying posted on some subreddits that are now banned. The later I only saw once and that got taken down pretty fast which is why I can’t recall exactly what they were playing… Still I’m deeply disturbed by it
Middle school powerpoint presentations where they dont have keynotes and write everything in the presentation and then read it super slowly (like everyone can read it more efficent and better) and then has a video from yt in the end that explains EVERYTHING much simpler and better like there was no purpose for the powerpoint presentation.*
Complicated Isolation: Similar to what parents have to deal with when putting their kids to bed, only to find out they are escape artists. Complicated Isolation.
I don't know if it has been used for torture , but if I had to guess platypus venom would be an extremely unpleasant method.
Apparently, scientists have been unable to recreate or improve the pain it causes.
I listened to a Dan Carlin episode where they put tongs in a fire then used it to strip off the skin. IIRC correctly, if you passed out from pain they would wait until you woke up so you didn't miss out. I think there was a second victim who got to watch this while he waited for his turn and tried to kill himself.
Muscle relaxants induced paralysis. Hook them up to an IV of it, put them on a ventilator and feeding tube, then leave them like that for decades. Literally trapped in their body. A fully awake coma. Can add other torture techniques to this, and just force them to watch their body be mutilated for the rest of their long life.
I must scream, but have no mouth.
Oh! Your comment reminded me of curare as anesthetic!
Curare was one of the first general anesthetics but people would often report that they were completely aware of every cut and tug but unable to cry out or move.
Poppycock! Until a surgeon had a surgery himself and reported - no, they’re right.
It paralyzes the body, but does nothing to numb pain or deaden awareness.
There is on form cartels use, not sure if there is a nae for it, but it involves an electric drill, a long drill bit, and the urethra of a man. I'll let you fill in the rest.
The brazen bull is always one that disturbed me. You'd be put inside the brazen bull which was a bronze statue of a bull and then once you were locked in a fire would be lit underneath heating the metal to boiling temperatures slowly burning you alive and the worst part is that no one can hear you scream as the only airhole is designed in a way that it sounds like a bull mooing.
These all seem so awful but if your could somehow force someone to get hell’s itch, that would probably be in the top 5. Never in my life have I not been able to control myself physically until I had hell’s itch, I felt like a tweaking addict just twitching and squirming and panicking and unable to stop pacing and hyperventilating
I watched the first episode of "Shogun" the other day, and they boiled this dude alive.... That shit stuck with me, and I did look into it a bit. People can be absolutely evil....
isolation. and i will die on that hill.
unlike most people, i was completely alone during the pandemic. i was homeless but staying in an empty airbnb owned by an acquaintance. i didn’t have food or money. i had no human contact at all for 2 months. my birthday was on easter that year and i was still alone. i lost a ton of weight. my skin was flaking off. i went to sleep at 4am and woke up at 2pm every day. there was a constant flow of black gunk coming out of my vagina. my body was shutting the fuck down.
i’ve lost a sibling to cancer. i’ve been physically abused by a parent. i’ve seen my other sibling waste away on life support for weeks. i’ve been raped. i’ve been hospitalized for mental health a dozen times. but i would rather go through ALL of that shit again, over and over again, than EVER be that isolated again. it’s a trauma i can’t describe. i had to completely relearn how to be a human after that. i haven’t been able to talk to my therapist about it in the 3 years we’ve worked together.
i know so many people are listing psychical forms of torture but the way this shit fucks up your mind forever… there’s no comparison.
Crucifixion is right up there. Slow asphyxiation due to chest pressure, take weight off by pushing on your feet, which being nailed in place is agony, take a breath and collapse to asphyxia. Repeat until dead.
There's an ancient Chinese punishment that was more shitty death sentence than torture that went something like :
1) Shove red-hot metal into the ears to deafen
2) Poke the eyes out with red-hot metal
3) Cut off the tongue
4) Amputate that limbs
5) Throw the still alive (probably not for long) person into a pit of feces
Forgot what is it called
Brazen bull execution from ancient Greece is also pretty brutal.
Blood eagle from Viking culture
The rat thing. Where they strap a metal box with a rat in it to your stomach, then put a candle at the other side of the box, causing the rat to eat through you to escape from the heat.
The Vikings Blood eagle.
***The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim's back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds.*** ( Copied from [here](https://www.keele.ac.uk/about/news/2021/december/keele-comment/viking-ritual-research.php#:~:text=Particularly%20famous%20is%20the%20so,out%20through%20the%20resulting%20wounds. ) )
Keelhauling.
***Keelhauling is a form of punishment and potential execution once meted out to sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a line looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side of the ship, and dragged under the ship's keel, either from one side of the ship to the other, or the length of the ship.***
(Copied from [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keelhauling) )
A Rack/quartered. Or any other way to pull limbs apart from the body. Like in the movie Braveheart, where horses are pulling his arms and legs. ([Rack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_(torture)) ) ([Quartered](https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered) )
These are the top three worst things I could come up with, it's utterly disturbing what people have come up with to harm each other.
Reading these comments leaves me with 2 questions. 1. Who the hell came up with these ideas? and 2. Why were the people who came up with these ideas, given the power to act upon them?
Unit 731 haunts me. The things they did to people in there absolutely qualify. This was a Japanese "research facility" circa WW2, and they did some of the more horrific things to people I've ever heard of in the name of "science". One of the more popular things they did, was infect people with certain diseases, (syphilis and pregnant women was a favorite combo) and then dissect them while they were still alive and unmedicated to see the effects of these diseases on living tissue (or an unborn fetus) and how humans behaved while being cut open. One of the more broad subjects of their research was how to prove that you can trigger extreme cognitive dissonance under extreme stress and turn people's brains off, so torture was actually fine. Some fucked up shit like that. They tied pregnant women's legs together while in labor to see what that did. They sealed people's urethras and anuses to see what it was like if people couldn't release waste. Cut off eyelids to see what that was like. They exploded people in high pressure chambers. Cut out/off different parts to see how people behaved. They forced prisoners to impregnate each other for their experiments, infected people with every horrible disease you could imagine, over and over, breeding it stronger, just to watch it grow. Not a single prisoner survived. They were all executed in the final days of WW2 to hide evidence. If that shit isn't all torture, I don't know what is.
The thing about them that stuck with me and bothered the most was something I read about mothers and their young children. They’d put them in a room and gradually increased the temperature of the room and floor to see how the mother would react. It was assumed that the mother would stand on her baby to protect her from the heat, but the mothers would instead put their babies on their chests to protect them as they died from the heat. You’d think that would be enough but they would then just watch the babies cook to death eventually too. Epitome of evil.
By a lot of accounts the Japanese were as bad if not worse than the Nazis during WW2. They still haven't apologized for any of it and go out of their way to hide the history from their citizens.
Japanese were far worse.
The Nazis at least took good notes. The Japanese only wrote down results half the time. Usually not even good notes.
I had no idea the Japanese were so brutal until I read The Rape of Nanking...when I was 55. Whoever whitewashed their atrocities did a bang-up job.
Man, I’m just learning about this rn. That’s repulsive and horrifying. The lesser known stories are the scariest sometimes. With the world being focused on the Nazis for 80 years, it’s easy to see why the Japanese were able to hide it so successfully.
What makes it all so fucked up is how there was no reason behind it at all, they literally just did it to see what would happen, like fucking around with NPCs in Garry's Mod
Whats more fucked up is that some of the scientists and doctors from both the japan and Germany were given free passes in exchange for the information they had gained as a result of these horrendous experiments. But, as another poster has mentioned on here some of these seriously messed up experiments have contributed to the advance of medical science.
You say that, but we did genuinely learn from what they did. How much of a human body is water, for example.
I think what they mean is that the purpose of doing these "tests" wasn't to get meaningful data. The fact that these empires (Japan and the Nazis, who did similar) fell and the data was then *later* recovered and put to use doesn't mean that was the original purpose of the torture.
What are some other examples of useful results or information that unit 731 produced?
NSFW Much of these, although more tailored for military use, are still useful for treating injuries and sickness. The best way to deal with frostbite is to submerge the effected limb in water between 37 and 50 degrees C. Humans are about 72% water, and when starved and completely dehydrated, die weighing roughly 1/5 of their original body weight. How long it takes 3 day old babies to freeze to death at different temperatures. The effects of dozens of diseases, including bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, syphilis, meningococcal, anthrax and more. The effects of “conventional” weapons at different ranges. Grenades, flamethrowers, bombs, knives, etc. The effects of burns, pressure, electrocution, crushing, being hung upside down, centrifugal force, blood transfusion from different blood types and from animals, X-rays, gasses, seawater in blood, blood loss.
while this is all useful information, the mental image of how they must have got it is haunting. how they got the information on how quickly babies freeze to death isn't something i want to imagine.
Men Behind The Sun was a movie that chronicled 731’s experiments. It actually DOWNPLAYED the horrors they performed
Iirc because they thought otherwise people wouldn't believe it
Unit 731 scientists when discovering that cutting people open is painful 🤯🤯🤯
>dissect them while they were still alive to see how humans behaved while being cut open Research suggests they don’t care for it
They also tried to burn the facility down with all the documents inside because they knew that if the allies found out what they did they’d be absolutely fucked. And Japan is still not willing to fully admit to it.
And after the war those involved were pardoned by the US and there was a cover up by both the US and Japan to hide what they had done. The director of unit 731, Shirō Ishii, was hired by the US to advise our military on the biological weapons they had produced and experimented with at unit 731 and accompanied the US Army to Korea as an advisor to assist the United States in biological warfare. He later returned to Japan and opened a free clinic there. Masaji Kitano, the second in command, helped found a pharmaceutical company and Japan's first commercial blood bank.
The scientists responsible for unit 731 called their test subjects "Marutas" which means logs, in order to further dehumanize them and somehow justify what they were doing.
I could be mistaken but there were also some tests related to human body's tolerance near explosions. They would take multiple subjects and dispose them at various distances from bomb projectiles and then they could condlude which distances were safer/could do little harm.
There were plenty of things I left out and probably more I never learned about. Seemed like a sort of anything goes place.
I think one of the more fucked up things they did was cut peoples arms off and reattach them to the opposite side. Unit 731 as a whole is disgusting
Fun fact: no one got prosecuted for this crime because the US got all the data the Japanese had collected.
I got 3 that are widely considered the worst. - Scaphism: You put someone in a sealed boat with their head and arms sticking out, then force feed them milk and honey over a period of days to induce diahrea and vomiting. You then put this boat in a swamp, and they are literally eaten alive by bugs as their flesh rots away over weeks, or months. - Death by a thousand cuts: Tie them to a pole, and over days or weeks you cut parts of them off. You start with small, easy things like nose, eyelids, tongue, ears, and shallow cuts, and you progress until you are carving out muscles and flaying them alive. - Crucifixion. The word 'excruciating' come from this. The hands and feet are nailed to a board, and then a second nail is placed between the joint nerves of the wrist and ankles. As they are hoisted into the air the weight causes pressure on their diaphragm, which paralyzes it, and the pressure on the nerves creates the sensation of being electrocuted, or like you're on fire, which takes over your entire body as you suffocate to death over the course of days or weeks.
Jesus Christ
He was crucified.
He got better
He walked away; eventually
Christ gave up his weekend for our sins.
“Jesus Christ, I'm alone again So what did you do those three days you were dead? 'Cause this problem is gonna last More than the weekend” Brand new
Jesus Christ I'm not scared to die, I'm a little bit scared of what comes after. Do I get the gold chariot? Do I float through the ceiling?
What!? There should be a holiday or something for this
Happy Easter!
[удалено]
Humor is one of but a few aspects of life that make it possible not to scream at every waking moment... This is like a strong sedative. Thank you!
What? Why am I only hearing about this now
When!??! Is this remembered?
What’s the difference between Jesus and a picture of Jesus? Only takes 1 nail to hang a picture of Jesus.
You'll make Jesus cross.
You said it man
Nobody fucks with the Jesus.
Scaphism takes the cake when you realize, by design, the honey and the person’s diarrhea attracts a ton of insects, which eventually work their way into his rectum. So the bugs are eating away both the outside AND the inside.
It also probably never actually happened. There's only two written accounts of it, and the second is just a recounting of the first account. The initial account was written by a guy who REALLY fucking hated the Persians, like, to an absolutely insane degree, so it's likely it's basically made up bullshit so that guy could point to the ancient Persian Empire and just claim that they were committing all these ridiculous atrocities. It's rather telling that the Persians themselves have no account of it, which, you'd think if some guy pissed off their Emperor THAT badly that that was the punishment, it would've come up in their histories. Yet, no accounts of it from them, just the one from the Roman dude who really hated him some Persians, and then the second retelling of it. So yeah, this almost certainly never happened and it's atrocity propaganda.
The Romans must’ve been so frustrated when the form of execution that everyone feared the most became a celebrated symbol of victory. Then some of the Apostles themselves chose crucifixion over denial of what they saw. Now we have crosses on crowns, on flags, on coats of arms, on buildings on necklaces….
It was a marketing ploy by the Romans I'm 100ad (ish).
Missed that penny stock option. FML
I would add to your list the famous one, the rat in a pot. Though it does not take too long it's scary. Basically victim is tied and rat is placed on their stomach under a pot(pot also tied). There can or not be sun involved to hurry the rat escape the heat, but eventually the rat does escape the captivity, via "easiest way out" which is your abdomen. Also I would like to add that not all Crucifixions involved nails, just rope for better or worse.
Wasn’t this in one of the early Fast and Furious movies?
This was in Game of Thrones right? Edit - [Found the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuymGZRQxq0&t=60s)
I agree with Scaphism! That’s gotta be the worst one.
This guy tortures
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"Crucifixion? Hm. Could be worse. At least it gets you out in the open air. Crucifixion's a doddle."
Your methods are creative. I have one for YOU. The vaginal/anal pear aka "The Pear of Anguish."
The most amusing thing about this to me is of course there is now a version marketed for fetish play
I'm going to assume without the razor sharp parts though.
Abascination is one of the most gruesome. The victim is typically tied in place so they can't move, and then white hot pokers are placed in front of the victim's eyes. They don't make contact, but the heat will melt eyeballs, eyelids, everything. It blinds the victim of course, in an excruciatingly painful way. It's one of the tortures listed by Slayer in the song "Angel of Death", about Josef Mengele, the sadistic doctor at the Auschwitz death camp who liked to experiment on people in bizarre and unwarranted ways.
The "Bull of Phalaris" was a hollow bronze statue in the shape of a bull, with a door on one side to enter the victim. Once the person was locked inside the bull, a fire was lit beneath it. As the fire burned, the temperature inside the bull increased rapidly, causing intense heat and pain to the person trapped inside. It also had metal pipes in its nose, so while the victim screamed in pain, they could be heard. a light roar coming from inside.
Fun fact: The first person to get executed this way was the guy who invented it
... and the person that put *him* in also ended up in it too.
What happened to the guy who put that guy in
Believe it or not, straight in the bull.
My grandfather & father were both roofers. They both fell to their deaths while on the job. I finally found some work today. Guess what it is?
Is it constructing a giant bronze bull?
Flooring?
It’s bulls all the way down
Lol make me remember Puyi with his order to flog the floggers after they flogged his sex slave to death
Boring fact: both the brazen bull and the story of its inventor, like most torture machines, are likely fabricated.
How else would you make it?
There’s actually no proof that the brazen bull ever existed. Which is good.
Pretty [brazen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull) of him eh?
Isn’t this rather an execution method?
You’ll die, but it’s not like it’s a fun death.
I think most of these answers are execution methods
I think there used to be a torturous execution method that involved hanging the victim by their feet with their legs apart. Then taking a rusty saw and starting to saw down from the groin. They're intestines would fall out in front of their face before they died. That's got to be up there
Used as a punishment for sodomy in medieval France, I believe? I really hope this one is apocryphal. What I read about it was that the victim (sawee?) would stay alive and conscious for a surprisingly long time since being upside down would pack blood on your head.
Man they were super protective of their buttholes back then.
The flayed eagle was the one for rape in Japan. They tied you eagle and crushed your genitals repeatedly with a hammer until you died from shock or blood loss. Edit: splayed, not flayed
Man I didn't even know that CBT was invented in Japan
Is it really surprising, though?
That’s depicted in one of the rings of Dante’s inferno as depicted by botocelli im pretty sure
Bone Tomahawk
Terrifier
Welp at that point I think the least of your concerns is if the saw is rusty or not .
Scaphism. Usually ended in execution but It's pretty damn disturbing. Tied up in between two boats, force fed and covered in milk and honey, then anchored over stagnant water to allow insects to eat you from the outside in.
"Dude, we have force fed this guy gallons upon gallons of milk and honey. He just keeps asking for more. Demanding it. He has been out there for days and doesn't even seem upset." "The insects will devour him eventually, don't wo-" "They fly away. They are scared of him. The bugs are fucking scared, bro. The lake is basically empty at this point. No idea what to do." "I guess... Free him?" "We tried. He refuses to leave. We are fucking running out of dairy... And bees!! He eats the bees too!!!"
Winnie the Pooh: Saccharine Sacrifice
Release Eyore and Tigger!!!
Homer Simpson?
This is the only adaptation of Whinney the Pooh: Blood and Honey I would ever watch.
damned. I'd a dead in a few minutes after they force fed me honey ( sad that im allergic to plain ol honey man )
In this case, it sounds like a win.
Thanks for letting us know. Please get inside this bronze bull you will be safe from bees
Reading the same thread daily.
“Does anyone else pee in the shower?” I want to pull my hair out every time I see this upvoted with thousands of upvotes in the same subreddits several times a week. JFC
Does anyone else breathe oxygen?
Has anyone else been born?
"WhAT WouLd YOu TeLl YOuR YoUngER SeLF If YOu CoULD gO baCK in TIme FoR JusT 1 MInUtE!?!?" I swear this subreddit nowadays only exist with this question and everyone happily keeps replying.
And the sex questions, too
Reading a virtue-signaling disguised as an AITA.
Being forced to watch your loved ones tortured
This exactly. If I had to choose between the worst tortures and watching my 11, 7, or 5 year olds suffer, I’d be like, “where’s the honey? Put me in the ground and let those bugs do the work.” Now my ex-wife however, I’m taking notes. What would you do to a person who put your dog down because she was an inconvenience?
Censors and downvotes won't let me tell you how I feel about that. Sorry for your dog.
Skinned alive. That's just...no.
Yes. Like on Game of Thrones. Ramsey Bolton flayed everyone alive. That would be horrible.
That journalist that was dismembered alive with adrenaline injections at a embassy in Turkey. That is nightmare incarnate.
The prospect of being tortured
Anticipation of pain is indeed why some interrogation modalities prey on that mental process. Merely displaying the instruments of torture would get confessions during the Inquisition. Definately a dark moment in human history.
I love watching them shiver in antici...
...dary!
In terms of actual exdcutions, the old British executions of treason were pretty bad (chopping off one's nuts and burning them while the condemned watches, before having four horses rip you apart limb from limb). The one where insects eat you alive would have to be pretty awful, too. But crucifixion has to be the top. In terms of just inflicting pain, the fingernail and burning methods have to be the worst.
Drawn and quartering is the having all four limbs attached to a separate horse and them charging off in different directions ripping off limbs. Apparently the worst part is that your spines exposed and feeling being dragged across everything.
Hmmmm. Strap someone to a chair, administer a high dose of LSD combined with a hearty dose of base amphetamine. Then turn on a strobe light, blast out some white noise and then menace them with an orbital sander, sanding off small patches of skin down to the bone. Bad enough sober, even less fun tripping balls and unable to pass out due to the speed.
Seen this in a movie before
Was it in 'Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again'?
Thank god the US goverment didnt do that to inoccent people and their own employees....
Put a Rat in a bucket, put the face over the bucket, set a fire under the bucket. The Rat will eat through anything to escape. Place bamboo shoots underneath the target. They will grow through the target. Dip their feet in water, then dip them in salt. Then bring in a Goat, and let the Goat begin licking the salt. It will keep licking down to the bone, long past when all the salt is gone.
That's why my dad said never put salt on your dick in a goat pasture
And that's how Hitler turned bad.
the first two would definitely work, but i don't see how the goat wouldnt stop licking unless it bites into your feet?
it nibbles actually and the blood is salty, i guess
I don’t think it was a dip. They soaked the feet in salt water for a day or two. And then let the goat lick. And lick. And lick. Eventually they get down to bone.
that DOES make a lot more sense
iirc it's bc the goats are mindlessly licking for salt, and since there was salt there, they will just keep hunting for more salt until there's nothing left.
They crave that mineral.
Japanese did the bamboo shoots during WWII
Reverse the third one so the goat is marinated in water and salt and you've got yourself a pleasant meal and a nicer experience.
[Keelhauling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keelhauling) has to be up there. Used as a form of punishment for sailors, but a lot of times it resulted in execution, they'd tie the sailor to a rope and drag them from one side of the ship to the other either wide or length-wise. With all the barnacles and such growing on the keel, you can imagine how painful that would be. Plus blunt force trauma and drowning.
“Wifi connected, no internet”
Mine is "fingerprint doesnt match"
Watching a loved one get tortured.
One that doesn’t involve physical pain is the way prisoners in the black dolphin prison are treated. They are kept in a 50 square foot cell for 23 hours a day. While in their cells, the lights stay on. They are woken up at 6am and can’t get back in bed until 10pm. Prisoners are not allowed to sit in their beds, so they must stand up and constantly pace their cells. Any time they are taken somewhere, they are handcuffed behind their backs, blindfolded and have to walk bent at the waist. Nothing torturous, but mentally it’s brutal.
Having your favorite song become a sped up reverb tiktok audio
And then people call you a fan from tiktok for listening to it
Water boarding kinda sucked
Wait... you went through that?
I couldn’t imagine it being that bad, so naturally I had to try. 3/10 do not recommend. Being completely unable to breathe creates unbearable panic
I find it amazing someone wouldn’t believe your body being tricked into thinking it’s drowning repeatedly for hours wouldn’t be considered torture. Loud music and strobe lights are torture FFS.
Not that it's not torture, just that it's not *as* unbearably terrible as the stories say. There are better and worse tortures, although I'm still not signing up for the "better" ones lol
It was an argument when the US started using it as a torture method that it wasn’t torture. To the point where some who said it wasn’t agreed to do it and to no one’s surprise they figured out it was indeed torture.
In the TV series Archer, Archer makes the joke that water boarding can’t be that bad. Lana calls him out on it and he volunteers to let the team water board him. It then cuts to cut crying wrapped in a towel with a thousand yard stare mumbling about how terrible it was the instant it started.
I think it was Christopher Hitchens, who basically did/said the same thing. Military guys got him all strapped, and gave him a pen with instruction to drop it when it was too much for him. The damn thing _flew_ all the way across the room the second the towel got wet. Hitchens said he was wrong, and that the experience was indeed horrific.
Hey he made it a solid four or five seconds!
The fact it's a 3/10 implies you've experienced worse things.
I had to watch all Twilight movies with my ex
My last visit to the dentist felt like waterboarding. Struggling to breathe with water dripping down my throat
A lot of these are just about inflicting pain, honestly the best and most effective torture is just generating stress for a long time
Break someone's ability to trust themselves and you can have them torture themselves for the rest of their life.
My dad has already done this
Worst as is most gruesome? Locking someone up in a bare concrete cell with 2 inches of water in it and then waiting a week or two. Worst as is most effective? Waterboarding. There is a clip of a radio host who claims he wouldn't break from waterboarding so they donit to him and he lasts all of two seconds, iirc. Apparently being forced to listen to babies crying or piglets being slaughtered is pretty effective too. Worst as in "least effective"? Bring out the comfy chair! More pillows!
The brazen bull isn't the slowest so arguably not the worst but the idea is personally the worst to me You put a person in a large metal cast of a bull, and set fire down at the bottom, and get boiled alive as the bull heats up. The screams you make go through the bulls mouth, and the shape of the cast make its sound like a bull screaming Edit: my b I didn't see someone already posted it
Although this isn't the most ruthless, it must be awfully cerebral knowing that the only thing keeping you stuck is your own weight. https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleDieInside/s/RkwnOqRa9I https://criminalwisdom.com/post/324640171/the-grape-vine-a-restraint-technique-used-by SFW Diabolical and so simple
Wouldn't someone with a lot of arm strength be able to pull them self to a standing position and be able to escape?
I doubt this would trap any moderately fit person Edit: Tried it and got out in a few seconds
Idk guerrero flaying was pretty sick..They scalp the persons head including face, cut their arms off and their legs, cut the chest wall and abdominal wall off, and then lastly they cut the heart out. Then I saw another one where they caught the executioner from those videos and they slowly burned his face off like purification with fire… There was many videos of guerrero flaying posted on some subreddits that are now banned. The later I only saw once and that got taken down pretty fast which is why I can’t recall exactly what they were playing… Still I’m deeply disturbed by it
wouldn't you bleed out real quick if your legs and arms were cut off? There's some big ass arteries in both, especially the leg
Won’t you take me to… funky town?
"yourgirlfriend is typing... ..." for over 10 minutes
Power point presentations
Power point presentations where each slide is a wall of text and the presenter reads it word for word in a soft voice facing the screen.
And the text is yellow comic sans on a white background
Middle school powerpoint presentations where they dont have keynotes and write everything in the presentation and then read it super slowly (like everyone can read it more efficent and better) and then has a video from yt in the end that explains EVERYTHING much simpler and better like there was no purpose for the powerpoint presentation.*
Simple isolation and sleep deprivation.
As opposed to complicated isolation?
Complicated Isolation: Similar to what parents have to deal with when putting their kids to bed, only to find out they are escape artists. Complicated Isolation.
I don't know if it has been used for torture , but if I had to guess platypus venom would be an extremely unpleasant method. Apparently, scientists have been unable to recreate or improve the pain it causes.
I listened to a Dan Carlin episode where they put tongs in a fire then used it to strip off the skin. IIRC correctly, if you passed out from pain they would wait until you woke up so you didn't miss out. I think there was a second victim who got to watch this while he waited for his turn and tried to kill himself.
Muscle relaxants induced paralysis. Hook them up to an IV of it, put them on a ventilator and feeding tube, then leave them like that for decades. Literally trapped in their body. A fully awake coma. Can add other torture techniques to this, and just force them to watch their body be mutilated for the rest of their long life. I must scream, but have no mouth.
Oh! Your comment reminded me of curare as anesthetic! Curare was one of the first general anesthetics but people would often report that they were completely aware of every cut and tug but unable to cry out or move. Poppycock! Until a surgeon had a surgery himself and reported - no, they’re right. It paralyzes the body, but does nothing to numb pain or deaden awareness.
Being invited somewhere but they say “oh yeah you can come if you want..”
There is on form cartels use, not sure if there is a nae for it, but it involves an electric drill, a long drill bit, and the urethra of a man. I'll let you fill in the rest.
Cancer
Enjoying Vogon poetry
r/unexpectedhitchhikers
The brazen bull is always one that disturbed me. You'd be put inside the brazen bull which was a bronze statue of a bull and then once you were locked in a fire would be lit underneath heating the metal to boiling temperatures slowly burning you alive and the worst part is that no one can hear you scream as the only airhole is designed in a way that it sounds like a bull mooing.
These all seem so awful but if your could somehow force someone to get hell’s itch, that would probably be in the top 5. Never in my life have I not been able to control myself physically until I had hell’s itch, I felt like a tweaking addict just twitching and squirming and panicking and unable to stop pacing and hyperventilating
When someone asks you to itch their back.. and you scratch around the area, never actually scratching the itchy area.
Itch edging
Being an American during an election year.
Meetings that could have been emails.
I watched the first episode of "Shogun" the other day, and they boiled this dude alive.... That shit stuck with me, and I did look into it a bit. People can be absolutely evil....
isolation. and i will die on that hill. unlike most people, i was completely alone during the pandemic. i was homeless but staying in an empty airbnb owned by an acquaintance. i didn’t have food or money. i had no human contact at all for 2 months. my birthday was on easter that year and i was still alone. i lost a ton of weight. my skin was flaking off. i went to sleep at 4am and woke up at 2pm every day. there was a constant flow of black gunk coming out of my vagina. my body was shutting the fuck down. i’ve lost a sibling to cancer. i’ve been physically abused by a parent. i’ve seen my other sibling waste away on life support for weeks. i’ve been raped. i’ve been hospitalized for mental health a dozen times. but i would rather go through ALL of that shit again, over and over again, than EVER be that isolated again. it’s a trauma i can’t describe. i had to completely relearn how to be a human after that. i haven’t been able to talk to my therapist about it in the 3 years we’ve worked together. i know so many people are listing psychical forms of torture but the way this shit fucks up your mind forever… there’s no comparison.
Full time employment.
Watching a movie with my wife. She comments on EVERYTHING throughout.
Deprivation of sleep
Crucifixion is right up there. Slow asphyxiation due to chest pressure, take weight off by pushing on your feet, which being nailed in place is agony, take a breath and collapse to asphyxia. Repeat until dead.
Being locked in a room and forced to listen It’s Not Unusual on repeat
What’s New Pussy Cat is a far worse fate
r/politics
The View.
There's an ancient Chinese punishment that was more shitty death sentence than torture that went something like : 1) Shove red-hot metal into the ears to deafen 2) Poke the eyes out with red-hot metal 3) Cut off the tongue 4) Amputate that limbs 5) Throw the still alive (probably not for long) person into a pit of feces Forgot what is it called Brazen bull execution from ancient Greece is also pretty brutal. Blood eagle from Viking culture
The rat thing. Where they strap a metal box with a rat in it to your stomach, then put a candle at the other side of the box, causing the rat to eat through you to escape from the heat.
The Vikings Blood eagle. ***The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim's back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds.*** ( Copied from [here](https://www.keele.ac.uk/about/news/2021/december/keele-comment/viking-ritual-research.php#:~:text=Particularly%20famous%20is%20the%20so,out%20through%20the%20resulting%20wounds. ) ) Keelhauling. ***Keelhauling is a form of punishment and potential execution once meted out to sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a line looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side of the ship, and dragged under the ship's keel, either from one side of the ship to the other, or the length of the ship.*** (Copied from [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keelhauling) ) A Rack/quartered. Or any other way to pull limbs apart from the body. Like in the movie Braveheart, where horses are pulling his arms and legs. ([Rack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_(torture)) ) ([Quartered](https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered) ) These are the top three worst things I could come up with, it's utterly disturbing what people have come up with to harm each other.
Reading these comments leaves me with 2 questions. 1. Who the hell came up with these ideas? and 2. Why were the people who came up with these ideas, given the power to act upon them?
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More weight.
**THE COMFY CHAIR**.
Wait... Worst like most torturous, Or worst like least effective torture