On March 12th, the Winchester Mystery house, located in San Jose, California, announced via its website that it would be closing its doors until at least April 7th, citing concerns about the novel coronavirus pandemic. Now the location is open to the public, if only virtually.
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Why is it that citizens in the richest country on Earth are charged so much money for not dying that many go broke and even end up living on the streets? Let's take a look at the history and the travesty of American healthcare.
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Action Park officially opened on May 26, 1978, and for the first few years it was a huge success. Waves of visitors flocked to what was then the state's first and largest modern waterpark... but it would also become its most dangerous.
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It's not everybody who gets an entire classification of something named after them. Yet so it is with Benedict Arnold, an otherwise hit-or-miss military commander during the American Revolution who is now well and truly and forever associated with traitors.
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The history of 9th century Vikings is passed down to us today via Old Norse oral tradition, written down long after the campfires died. Did tales get changed? Quite possibly. Over time, things get added, subtracted, multiplied, and even turned into shows on the History Channel, like Vikings.
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History is a murky son of a gun, but most historians agree that Cleopatra died on or around August 12th of 30 BC. It's generally accepted that she killed herself, but firsthand accounts are difficult to come by and the exact method of her demise is up for debate.
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Photographer Dave Crocket described the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens as "hell on Earth," per My Northwest. One of Washington state's seven mountains, it had sat inactive since 1857...
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Over the course of the 20th century, experts from all over the world have dug, dug, dug in their quest to reach Earth's mantle. This quest for depth has led to all kinds of terrifyingly deep holes punching through the Earth, but the deepest of them all can be found in Murmansk, Russia.
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Sitting Bull was a respected spiritual leader who was revered for bravery on the battlefield. He brought Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes together and led a legendary united front against the United States. Here's the truth about his death.
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Sometimes, mascots can land a company in boiling hot water. From racist controversies to violent incidents, you’ll probably remember these controversial mascots, even if the corporations themselves might prefer that you didn't.
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The East India Company is pretty much the poster child of an evil corporation. Just how evil? Well, here's the messed up truth about this notorious organization.
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The U.S. divorce rate reached a record low in 2019, when only around 15 out of every 1,000 marriages ended in divorce. That was the lowest figure since 1970.
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In the early 1930s, millions of Americans were out of work, and many were struggling to support their families. Unemployment skyrocketed nationally.
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Henry Hill, the gangster who inspired the book Wiseguy and Ray Liotta's performance in Goodfellas didn't die of lead poisoning, so to speak. His was a much slower passage.
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Those of us who enjoy the comforts of the modern world would probably be horrified to walk a day in the sandals of the average person in ancient Egypt.
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Alfred, king of Wessex (the area south of the Thames River in England -- and the Thames is the river that runs through London, so go ahead and check the map), is universally referred to as The Great. But we're not sure how he died.
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Myth and legend often begins with oral history rooted in fact. But Pecos Bill emerged from the typewriter of a former soldier of fortune named Edward O'Reilly.
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Federal judge and former special narcotics prosecutor Sterling Johnson, Jr, said of Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, "He had charisma. Have you been in the presence of Bill Clinton when he walks down the street? That was Nicky Barnes." Not a great look for Bill, but Barnes was quite the drug dealer.
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Some people think that the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm are as dark as a Friday the 13th movie. Well, most of them aren’t … but some of them definitely are. Here are the most messed up Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
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All by his lonesome, Elfego Baca took on over 80 outlaws and dodged hundreds of bullets in a clash that lasted more than 33 hours.
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While every other nation in the world has a rectangular or square flag, Nepal's flag instead follows a double-pennant design, and has done so for centuries. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, this makes Nepal the only modern country with a non-quadrilateral flag.
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The very first pins for clothing showed up around the 14th century BCE. It was called a fibula (plural: fibulae) and was mostly used by the Mycenaeans. The Fashion Institute of Technology explained fibulae functioned like a clasp to fasten garments.
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At the 1936 Olympics, Haiti competed under its civil flag, a horizontal blue stripe on top of an equal-width red stripe. In contrast, Haiti's national flag includes a coat of arms in the center, per CRW Flags, but the civil flag was more commonly used for non-governmental affairs like the Olympics.
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In 2017, a team of paleoanthropologists in Morocco made a discovery that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the origin of our species. Their findings, published in Nature, push back the oldest known beginnings of Homo sapiens another 100,000 years.
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The heiress and businesswoman Marjorie Merriweather Post (basically, she built General Foods Corporation) purchased an unkempt patch of palm trees and vegetation off the coast of Palm Beach Island in 1923. Four years later, the brush had been transformed into a million-dollar beachfront property.
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They're not just for Thanksgiving turkeys: presidential pardons have long been a contentious practice, seeming to give a green light for close allies of a sitting President to engage in nefarious dealings with the knowledge that a get-out-of-jail-free card will be waiting for them.
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In January 1959, Igor Dyatlov, a college student, and his cadre of nine fellow hikers set out to cross Russia's Ural mountains in the coldest part of the year.
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