It could be said that even before humans appeared on this Earth, history started being written. Then, when we appeared, the craziest things started happening — we’re not an easy species for a planet to handle, to put it simply.
Throughout many years of human history, so many weird things have happened that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of them all. Today, we’re gonna take a look at a few of the events from history books — some of which are pretty weird. In fact, some of them are so weird, people say they would look “too unrealistic” in a movie. So, let’s jump in, shall we?
More info: Reddit
#1
The Shakleton Endurance expedition for sure. Boat stranded on drfting ice for months, eventually crushed and sinks, crew use 3 small unprotected lifeboats to navigate to a small rocky baron outcrop in freezing winter during a gale, then a few of them take a boat and make a passage hundreds of miles across the roughest sea on the planet to make landfall on a small island on the wrong side, and need to cross a(n uncharted) mountain range on foot, with no gear or food to reach a whaling station to call for help.
And then every single crew member survives.
#2
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for work when the b**b dropped. He survived, returned home to Nagasaki… and survived the second b**b too.
#3
The death of Henry Ziegland. Henry left his wife of 5 years which caused her to commit s*****e. Her brother decided to m****r Henry, so he snuck up on him while he was working in the barn and took a shot at him. The bullet grazed Henry’s cheek and imbedded in a tree behind the barn. Henry laid down and pretended to be dead. His wife’s brother thinking he had accomplished his goal, then shot and k****d himself. Twenty years go by, and Henry decides to chop down the tree in front of his barn because it’s too big and in the way. Henry and his brother take turns chopping at the tree, but it’s too hard and the progress is slow. Henry decides he’s going to use 3 sticks of dynamite to take the tree down. He ties them around the tree and lights the fuse. The explosion sent the bullet that had imbedded in the tree 20 years earlier straight into Henry’s head, k*****g him.
Throughout cinematic history, humans have made a lot of movies. As of 2025, the world has recorded over 698,754 movies, with the number increasing daily. So, such a huge number is bound to have quite a few weird ones among them.
The question is, what is considered to be a weird movie? After all, we all have different understandings of what is weird for us and for others – essentially, it’s very subjective. Yet, this doesn’t stop people from sharing their opinions about it. Here, there’s this public list on IMDB of “The Top 100 Weirdest Movies of All Time” in no particular order.
#4
Japan being protected from an invasion from another country by a freak typhoon. Twice.
#5
The Great Emu War.
In Western Australia in the 1930s, the military was called in to eradicate a large emu population that was destroying wheat crops. They failed spectacularly and had to withdraw.
Australias military went to war with a flock of giant birds and were beaten.
#6
The f*****g molasses flood…people died…because of a tsunami of boiling molasses rolling down the streets.
Sounds like the nightmare of a 5 year old with a fever.
It includes titles like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Donnie Darko, The Shining, and many others. Maybe you don’t find them particularly weird, but some others do, enough to include them in such lists. You know, to each his own.
At the same time, as Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” The first part of the quote is the most important for us today – truth or reality can be stranger, and usually is, stranger than fiction.
#7
Hannibal crossing the alps, smashnig three Roman armies in three years including a perfect encirclement tactic that was influential in modern battle tactics, then not besieging/attacking Rome directly… Like wtf.
#8
There was a group of 38 soldiers tasked with guarding a mountain pass during WWI. No one ever came through except for one guy who joined them. They spent the war enjoying a mountain vacation.
I can’t remember the country, but it was a small European one.
Edit: It was Lichtenstein and the austroprussian war. Also, 80 soldiers initially with 81 returning. Thanks to those who corrected me.
#9
How the British stole tea from China. They had to send an agent to discover how the Chinese were making tea and steal some samples to grow in India. In 1848, the British East India Company sent Robert Fortune, a Scottish Botanist to buy samples of Chinese luxury variants. Foreigners in China were not allowed outside the Treaty Ports. Fortune, a large Scotsman disguised himself as a high ranking Mandarin and travelled undercover despite not speaking much Chinese. Think Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (except Chinese not Japanese).
Fortune shaved his head, plaited the hair at the back into the classic braid, and wore silk robes. When sometimes challenged about his strange accent and poor Chinese, he would tell questioners he was from up North in China.
He did this for years, and made multiple trips.
It should be the plot for a long forgotten racist comedy from the 1970s, but it actually happened, and he did get the samples, as well as exposing some massive fraud in the Chinese tea industry where they were treating some of teas with cyanide to make them look like the more expensive versions to sell to foreigners.
You might wonder – how can that be? After all, movies can have ghosts, zombies, and other various creatures that, as far as we know, don’t exist in our world. So, how can reality be a reality weirder than that? Well, it only takes opening a history book to realize how.
Today, you don’t even have to open a book; opening this article was more than enough. It’s because here you will find a full-blown list of various weird historical events. And they’re not simply weird – they are so odd that many netizens say that if they were suggested as a movie plot, people would write them off as too unrealistic.
#10
Caesar was kidnapped by pirates – and resented that the ransom asked for was too small.
In 75 BC, the future dictator of Rome was kidnapped. He himself insisted that the pirates raise the ransom. After his release, he organized a fleet, caught them and crucified them.
#11
Rasputin. Like all of him is just so crazy that no one could take it seriously in a movie.
#12
The Bone Wars between two paleontologists in the 1870s who got so competitive they started dynamiting fossil sites just to spite each other.
Without spoiling too much, we’re going to mention that this collection of historical events includes such things as The Great Emu War, stories of various historical personalities, like Joan of Arc, The Great Molasses Flood, and many other stories. Did we pique your interest? Take a look at the list and don’t forget to upvote!
Basically, humanity has survived through a lot of good, bad, ugly, and interesting things. Our experiences inspired a bunch of movies, from documentaries to stories that are very loosely based on something that happened.
#13
World War I.
All the alliances built just feel like a series of contrivances some writer put in place to get to the conclusion of starting a war.
Then the actual match that lit the powder keg, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, was a series of insane incompetency and coincidences.
In the middle of it all, one of the longest running and largest empires, Russia, collapses.
A global war too boring? Okay, let’s throw in a pandemic that may have been responsible for 50 million deaths in just 2 years.
Then finish it such an unsatisfying and inconclusive way that it’s obvious you left an opening for a sequel.
#14
Since it’s Canada Day, Leo Major liberating an entire Dutch city from German occupation in one night, by himself.
#15
The guy who assassinated Franz Ferdinand failed twice, and decided to get something to eat at a cafe when Franz Ferdinand drove right in front of him, so he pulled out his gun and took the shot.
Still, there are more than enough events that weren’t turned into screenplays – our history is very broad. So, if you’re someone who’s looking for inspiration for your next great project, maybe our list can provide it.
What other weird historical events would you add to this list? We’ll be waiting for your suggestions in the comments!
#16
Joan of Arc. The whole story could just come out of Game of thrones.
#17
An Australian doc named Barry Marshall was working on research in the 1980s to show that it was bacteria, not stress, that was the cause of stomach ulcers. His team’s research was rejected and unpublished.
So Barry did what any scientist would do. He took a solution containing the H. Pylori bacteria, drank it, and waited to see what happened. 3 days later he started developing symptoms of stomach ulcers.
More research was published, his work was now taken seriously, and he won a Nobel Prize in the early 2000s with his partner on the research project.
Moral of the story: they say don’t be resentful of others because it’s like drinking poison and hoping the other people suffer.
That’s usually true, but sometimes it gets you a Nobel Prize and an immediate write-up in every medical school textbook.
#18
In the 19th century, a Chinese p********e (today known as Zheng Yi Sao) ended up marrying a pirate. She helped her husband consolidate control of a large confederation of pirate ships.
Eventually her husband died, so she married her adoptive son, further consolidated power and led the largest pirate force in human history: over 40,000 pirates and 400 vessels, absolutely terrorizing the Pearl River Delta (where Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Macau are located)
The Chinese navy was so overwhelmed that they requested British and Portuguese aid.
Zheng Yi Sao continued the fight but realized that with time, they were going to lose. She negotiated a surrender and got amnesty for herself and her crew.
She quietly lived out the rest of her life running a gambling house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao.
#19
You’re not getting a ton of actual answers or answers that are made up, so I’ll give you a real one.
The assassination of Kim Jong Un’s older brother sounds like something out of a television show.
They basically tricked these two young ladies into thinking they were on like a television prank show for like a year, and they went around pranking peoplein different locations. The prank was that one girl would run up and rub hand sanitizer on someone’s face and then giggling run away. Then the other girl would run up and squirt perfume on their face and giggle and run away. Haha funny prank right? They were taught carefully exactly how and where to apply the products, and to run away and wash their hands immediately.
Well little did these girls know they were training to k**l Kim Jong un’s older brother. On the day of the actual m****r, it wasn’t hand sanitizer and perfume anymore, it was two components of a deadly neurotoxin that once combined cause a rapid, painful death.
So they’re “pranking” people and filming their videos at the airport, and here comes Kim Jong-Nam with his family through the airport. The “producers” of the “prank show” have the girls target him. They run up on him and the first girl rubs the first half of the poison on his face, giggles and runs away. The second girl runs up squirts him with perfume but it’s not perfume it’s the other half of the neurotoxin, then giggles and runs away.
He figured out something terrible was up immediately because of the pain, and approached security, but he was dead within minutes.
The girls were caught immediately due to the extensive CCTV, but not the people directing the whole thing. They had no idea they’d just k****d someone. They thought they were gonna be TV stars.
Of course, it’s widely believed that Kim Jong Un and his sister had Jong Nam k****d because he was an embarrassment to the family as he he favored Western pop culture a bit too much.
Edit: I have multiple details wrong (thank you for the correction u/palookaboy) but that’s the gist of it. It’s easy enough to look into if anyone is interested.
#20
Lavrentiy Beria
In the Death of Stalin, they had to downplay how evil he was because they thought the audience wouldn’t believe it.
#21
If you wrote a movie about the amateur poker player who won the 2003 World Series of Poker, the producers would beg you to call him *anything* but Chris Moneymaker.
#22
Henry VIII in England. Changed the entire religion of his country so he could s**g Anne Boleyn amongst many other things that no dramatist would dare to make up.
#23
In the American Civil War, the pivotal battle, the Battle of Antietam, may never have happened except for a careless officer and some cigars. General Lee wrote out an order detailing the planned movements of the conferederate army during Lee’s Maryland Campaign. One particular set of orders got wrapped up with a bundle of cigars for safekeeping. That bundle of cigars then got lost (nobody is quite sure how), and later on a union soldier, when walking through the field where they were misplaced, saw a bundle of cigars and said “hey, free cigars!”. He found a note wrapped up with them, and showed it to his commanding officer, who passed it up the chain, and let the union army know exactly where to go to catch the confederates.
If you put it in a movie, people would complain about it being a crappy deus ex machina.
#24
The events described in the Star Spangled Banner. Basically, the Brits were defeated on land, then tried to sail around to attack Baltimore from a different side. However, there was a fort in the way.
The Brits, not really caring about Baltimore anyway, tried to destroy the fort for 27 hours using long range weapons rather than risk sailing up to fort and actually attacking it and risk losing a ship.
The Brits used 2 weapon types: Congreve Rockets, which were developed by Congreve (whose father happened to be the British’s weapon procurer and whose technology lacked spin stabilization or fins). Not surprisingly, the weapon was not successful and lacked range to hit the fort or set its earthen walls on fire. It was essentially a firework at that long range range, filling the air with red burst of flames.
The other weapon, a b**b mortar, was a huge explosive shell launched from massive mortars. However they tended to not go where they were aimed and the fuses, which kept the thing from exploding when fired, tended to fizzle out. One b**b landed right on the fort’s powder store but the fuse failed. Feels like Plot Armor.
Despite nearly 2,000 projectiles being fired at the fort, barely any men were k****d and the next morning the Fort just went about its daily business.
It was a bizarre battle with the Brits trying an untested strategy (because they lacked real motivation to win and didn’t want to lose more than they wanted to win). The Americans won by just sitting there, unable to fight back.
And the description of that bizarre battle became the American National Anthem, thanks to a Congressman representing Baltimore pushing for it.
And the tune of the National Anthem is… British.
#25
That dude that scared off an enemy army by sitting in front of the fort and playing a lute.