Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania is extremely high in soda and salt content so after animals die in the lake, their carcasses are preserved through calcification as they dry, resulting in petrified “mummies” of birds and bats made of salts

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Kek_Pilled

@Kek_Pilled

Dec 2, 2024

Unsettling historical facts

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In 1963, an American man used a pay phone to call a British newspaper. He told them to contact the U.S. Embassy for some "exciting" news, then abruptly hung up. The call came at an odd hour, and the cryptic message left the newspaper staff puzzled. Thirty minutes later, the world was shaken when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The mysterious phone call seemed to be a bizarre prelude to the tragic event, but the caller's identity remained unknown.

The phone call added an eerie layer to the tragic day in American history, leaving people to wonder whether it was a coincidence, a warning, or something more sinister. The man behind the call has never been identified, and his motives, if any, remain a mystery to this day.

In 897, Pope Stephen VI took the extraordinary and macabre step of exhuming the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, who had been dead for seven months. Stephen VI put the deceased Pope on trial in a bizarre event known as the "Cadaver Synod." Formosus, of course, could not defend himself, and his lifeless body was propped up in the courtroom, dressed in papal robes. His right hand, which had once blessed the faithful, was even fixed into a position as if it were raised in judgment.

The trial was politically motivated, as Pope Stephen VI was embroiled in a bitter conflict with Formosus' supporters. The charges against the corpse included violating church laws and allegedly perjuring himself during his papacy. The trial was a spectacle of medieval grotesquery, with the dead pope found guilty. His papacy was declared invalid, and his body was stripped of its papal garments, dragged through the streets of Rome, and thrown into the Tiber River.

The event, one of the strangest moments in papal history, was widely condemned by contemporaries. Pope Stephen VI's reign ended shortly after the trial, as he was imprisoned and strangled to death by political rivals. The Cadaver Synod became a symbol of the deeply entrenched political rivalries and corruption that plagued the church during that era.

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