“In 1788, a Persian soldier named Mithrredatis made a mistake that would cost him 17 days of his life. Not 17 days in prison. 17 days of dying. He was placed between two boats fitted together like a shell. Only his head and limbs protruded. He was force-fed milk and honey until diarrhea erupted uncontrollably.”
“Honey was poured over his exposed skin. The boats were pushed onto a stagnant pond. The flies came within hours. They laid eggs in every opening of his body. The eggs hatched into larvae. The larvae began feeding. Guards were assigned to keep Mithrates alive by force-feeding him more milk and honey every day.”
“He lasted 17 days before his body finally surrendered to the creatures consuming him from the inside. This method was called scaffism. It is the first of 20 torture methods I will show you tonight. But here is what you need to understand. Scaffism is not even close to the worst on this list.”
“The 20 methods you are about to learn span 4,000 years and six continents. Most have never appeared in any documentary. Some were classified by governments for decades. Others were recorded in trial transcripts that sat untranslated in archives until this century. You will learn about the 30 years war torture so vile that soldiers vomited while performing it.”
“About the French revolutionary who drowned 4,000 people in a single month, tying naked couples together before throwing them in the river. About the American prison torture from 1966 that used electrical current in ways that made victims prefer death. You will learn about the Chinese execution method photographed in 1905.”
“Images so disturbing they were hidden from the public until the 1970s. About the Brazilian military technique that suspended victims in positions that destroyed their joints within hours. About the Iranian method that leaves no marks on the body but guarantees permanent psychological destruction. Every method is documented.”
“Every victim I mention is real. Every detail comes from court records, survivor testimony, archaeological evidence, or eyewitness accounts.”
“What follows is worse than anything you have imagined. Let us begin where I started with the method that took 17 days to kill one man. The Persians called it the boats. The Greeks called it scaffism from their word for hollowed-out vessel. It was reserved for crimes against the royal family and it was designed to make death take as long as biologically possible.”
“Mithratis was a common soldier at the battle of Kunaka in 401 BC. During the fighting, he killed a man named Cyrus the Younger who was leading a rebellion against King Artaxerxes II. This should have made a hero. Instead, it killed him. The problem was that Artaxerxes wanted credit for killing Cyrus himself. He announced to the court that he had personally struck the fatal blow.”
“The lie became official history. Weeks later, at a royal banquet, Mithrates got drunk and bragged about being the true killer of Cyrus. Multiple witnesses heard him. Word reached the king within hours. For contradicting the king’s official version of events, Mithratis was sentenced to the boats. Two boats of identical size were selected.”
“One was placed right side up. Mithratis was forced to lie inside it on his back. The second boat was inverted and fitted over the first, creating a sealed shell with holes cut for the victim’s head, hands, and feet. The force-feeding began immediately. Milk mixed with honey poured down his throat in quantities designed to cause violent diarrhea.”
“His own waste accumulated inside the sealed boats, unable to escape. More milk and honey was poured over his exposed face and extremities. In the Persian summer heat, flies arrived within the first day. They swarmed his honey-coated skin. They entered his mouth, his nostrils, his ears.”
“They laid eggs in every available surface. The boats were pushed onto a stagnant pond and left floating. The water kept the temperature from becoming immediately lethal while providing no relief from the insects. Guards rode out daily to force-feed him more milk and honey. Their orders were explicit. Keep the prisoner alive as long as possible.”
“Death by starvation or dehydration would be considered failure. By the third day, the larvae had hatched. They were feeding on his living tissue while simultaneously breeding in the waste-filled interior of the boats. Mithratis was being consumed from the outside and the inside simultaneously. The Greek historian Plutarch documented what the guards observed over the following two weeks.”
“The flesh rotting while the victim remained conscious. The creatures visibly moving beneath the skin. The smell so overwhelming that guards wrapped cloth around their faces before approaching. Mithratis remained conscious for most of the 17 days. He begged for death. The guards were forbidden to provide it. When he finally died, the boats were opened.”
“What remained inside was no longer recognizable as human. The body had become an ecosystem, a colony of insects inhabiting what had once been a man. Scaffism was practiced until approximately the 4th century AD. No visual record survives. Only the written accounts of historians who understood that some things must be documented precisely because they are unbearable to contemplate.”
“The Persians designed scaffism for maximum duration. 12 centuries later, German soldiers developed a method designed for maximum degradation. They made their victims drink until their stomachs burst. But what they were drinking was not water. The 30 Years War 1618 to 1648 killed approximately 8 million people across central Europe.”
“It was the deadliest conflict in European history until World War I and it produced innovations in cruelty that soldiers themselves struggled to perform. The Schweden trunk translates to Swedish drink. It was named after the Swedish mercenaries who popularized it, though German and Imperial soldiers used it just as frequently.”
“The method targeted civilians suspected of hiding valuables. Soldiers would occupy a village and demand that residents reveal where they had buried their money, their grain, their livestock. When residents claimed to have nothing, the Schweden trunk began. The victim was restrained and their mouth was forced open. A funnel was inserted into the throat.”
“The soldiers then poured liquid manure into the funnel. Not water, not alcohol. The liquid collected from barn floors, the slurry of cow and pig waste mixed with urine and rotting straw. The pouring continued until the victim’s stomach distended visibly. Then soldiers would stomp on the abdomen, forcing the contents back up and begin pouring again.”
“Contemporary accounts describe victims being forced to consume between 3 and 5 gallons of the slurry. The stomach would stretch beyond its capacity. Internal ruptures were common. Those who did not die from stomach rupture died from the infections that followed. The psychological effect on the victim’s family was the method’s purpose.”
“Soldiers performed the Schweden trunk on one family member while others watched. After witnessing what had been done to a husband, a wife would typically reveal any hidden valuables immediately. The practice was documented extensively in village records, church accounts, and letters from survivors. A pastor named Johan Daniel Mink described witnessing the Schweden trunk performed on 17 villagers in a single day in 1634.”
“14 of them died within hours. Three survived with permanent internal damage. The method was so common during the war that it developed regional variations. In some areas, boiling liquid was used instead of barn slurry. In others, the liquid was mixed with sand or small stones to cause additional internal damage.”
“Swedish military commanders officially prohibited the Schweden trunk in 1636 after complaints from allied German princes that the practice was depopulating entire regions. The prohibition was largely ignored by soldiers who had discovered the method’s effectiveness. The 30 Years War eventually ended. The trauma did not. Villages across Germany passed down stories of the Schweden trunk for generations.”
“The phrase entered German idiom as a term for any forced consumption of something vile. The Swedish drink killed individuals. The French Revolution developed a method that could kill thousands in days. A single official drowned 4,000 people in one month. He called his invention Republican marriages. Jean Baptiste Carrier arrived in Nantes in October 1793 with orders to crush the counterrevolutionary uprising in the Vende.”
“He found the city’s prisons overflowing with captured rebels, Catholic priests, and suspected royalists. The guillotine could execute perhaps 30 people per day. Carrier had thousands of prisoners and weeks of pressure from Paris to show results. He invented what he called noades, meaning drownings. The process was industrialized slaughter.”
“Flatbottomed boats called gabares were modified with trap doors in their hulls. Prisoners were loaded onto the boats, packed tightly, chained to prevent swimming. The boats were towed to the center of the Loire River. The trap doors opened. Everyone drowned. The first noade occurred on November 16th, 1793. 90 Catholic priests were drowned at once.”
“Their crime was refusing to swear loyalty to the revolutionary government. Carrier then refined his method. He began ordering male and female prisoners stripped naked and tied together in pairs before drowning. He called these marriages Republicans. Republican marriages. The pairing was deliberately obscene. Elderly priests tied face to face with young prostitutes, nuns bound to convicted thieves, teenage boys tied to elderly women.”
“The purpose was not merely death, but humiliation. Carrier wanted the drownings to be discussed throughout France. He wanted people to understand what happened to enemies of the revolution. Between November 1793 and February 1794, Carrier drowned an estimated 4,000 people. Some historians estimate the number was closer to 6,000.”
“Records were not carefully kept. The bodies clogged the Loire. They washed up on river banks for 20 miles downstream. Fishermen reported catching corpses in their nets for months. The water supply became contaminated. A public health crisis developed. Carrier ordered bodies weighted with stones, but the sheer volume overwhelmed any disposal system.”
“He then ordered firing squads to supplement the drownings, mass executions, and quarries outside the city. The quarries were used because the sound was partially contained. When the political tide in Paris shifted in early 1794, Carrier was recalled and arrested. His trial transcript runs to hundreds of pages.”
“Witnesses described the drownings in detail. Survivors who had escaped by swimming or grabbing debris testified about what they had seen. Carrier’s defense was that he had been following orders and acting in the Republic’s interest. He argued that extraordinary times required extraordinary measures. The Revolutionary Tribunal disagreed. Carrier was guillotined in December 1794.”
“His death took three seconds. His victims had taken considerably longer, struggling in the cold river water, bound to strangers, dying in the darkness of the Loire. France killed by water. China developed a method that killed by sequential mutilation over months. It had five stages. Each stage was designed to leave the victim alive for the next.”
“The wuxing or five pains was codified in Chinese law during the Qin dynasty around 220 BC. It remained in various forms until the early 20th century. The method was reserved for treason, rebellion, and crimes against the imperial family. The five pains were administered in a specific sequence. Tattooing, amputation of the nose, amputation of one or both feet, castration or confinement, and finally death.”
“Each stage was separated by a recovery period. The purpose was not rapid execution, but extended degradation. The victim would live with each mutilation, experiencing its consequences before the next was applied. Stage one was mo tattooing. The character for criminal was permanently inscribed on the forehead using ink and needles.”
“The victim would carry this mark for however long they survived, visible to everyone they encountered. Stage two was yi amputation of the nose. This was performed with a knife or chisel. Noses do not regenerate. The victim’s face was permanently disfigured, a walking advertisement of their crime. Stage three was yu amputation of one or both feet.”
“Some versions amputated at the ankle. Others removed only the toes. The result was the same. The victim could no longer walk normally, could no longer work, could no longer escape. Stage four was gong for men. Castration. For women, the equivalent was jin, confinement in a crushing box that caused internal injuries.”
“Male victims who survived castration often became palace servants. Female victims rarely survived jin. Stage five was da death by cutting the body into pieces. The historian Sima Qian, author of the foundational records of the Grand Historian, was sentenced to castration in 99 BC for defending a general who had surrendered to the enemy.”
“He chose castration over death so he could complete his historical work. He spent the rest of his life as a court eunuch documenting the dynasty that had mutilated him. Records from the Han dynasty described the five pains being administered over periods ranging from weeks to months. The victim was kept alive between stages through medical care.”
“Guards were assigned to prevent suicide. The suffering was carefully calibrated. Later, dynasties modified the five pains. Some added additional stages. Others combined stages for more severe crimes. But the principle remained constant. Death was the final punishment preceded by a systematic destruction of the body’s integrity. The five pains distributed suffering over time.”
“The Chinese developed another method that concentrated suffering into a single terrible session. It was photographed in 1905. The images were so disturbing they were classified for decades. The western name is death by a thousand cuts. The actual number was considerably higher and photographic evidence exists of exactly what it looked like.”
“Lingchi was practiced from approximately 900 AD until its abolition in 1905. The method was standardized in legal codes that specified the sequence of cuts, the tools to be used, and the expected duration. The victim was tied to a wooden frame in a public location. The executioner began with flesh from nonvital areas, chest, arms, legs, back.”
“Each cut removed a small piece, perhaps the size of a coin. The cuts were made with sharp knives to minimize tearing. Opium was sometimes administered, not for mercy, but for duration. The punishment’s purpose was extended suffering. Witnessed by crowds. A victim who lost consciousness too early was considered a failure.”
“The standard 3000 cut version progressed systematically toward vital areas. The sequence was specified. Start with the breasts, move to the thighs, then the arms, then the shoulders. The face was typically reserved for later stages. The killing blow, usually to the heart or throat, came only after the specified number of cuts.”
“In April 1905, a man named Fu-zhuli was executed by Lingchi in Beijing for murdering a Mongolian prince. French soldiers stationed nearby photographed the execution. The photographs were smuggled out of China and eventually published in European academic journals in the 1970s. The images show Fu-zhuli tied to the frame.”
“His torso is covered with wounds arranged in disturbingly regular patterns. His face appears calm in some photographs, contorted in others. The executioner is visible in several frames, working methodically, his basket of removed flesh beside him. The photographs show the crowd as well. Hundreds of spectators watching with expressions ranging from fascination to apparent boredom.”
“Children are visible in some frames. Food vendors operated at the edge of the crowd. Fu-zhuli’s execution lasted approximately 15 minutes, shorter than many Lingchi executions because of pressure from foreign observers. Contemporary accounts describe executions lasting 3 hours or more when performed at the traditional pace.”
“Lingchi was abolished in April 1905 as part of legal reforms during the late Qing dynasty. Fu-zhuli was among the last victims. The photographs of his death remain the only visual documentation of a practice that killed thousands over nearly a millennium. The Chinese made death visible. The Iranians developed a method that leaves no visible mark at all.”
“It is still used today. Survivors describe it as worse than any physical torture. White torture has no single inventor. It emerged in the 20th century as governments sought interrogation methods that produced no evidence, left no scars, and could be denied if exposed. The Iranian government refined it to a precise science in the prisons of the Islamic Republic.”
“Survivors who have escaped describe a system designed to destroy the mind while leaving the body intact. The prisoner is placed in a white cell. The walls are white. The floor is white. The ceiling is white. The lights, which remain on 24 hours a day, are white. The prisoner wears white clothing.”
“Food, when provided, is white rice on a white plate. Guards wear padded shoes that make no sound. They do not speak. If the prisoner speaks, they do not respond. The door has no handle on the inside. There is no window. There is no clock. There is no way to measure time. The sensory environment never changes. There is no dark and light cycle.”
“There is no variation in temperature. There is no sound except what the prisoner makes. And the prisoner quickly learns that speaking to no one produces a particular kind of madness. Duration varies. Some prisoners report being held in white conditions for weeks. Others report months. The impossibility of tracking time is part of the torture.”
“A week can feel like a month. A month can feel like a year. The psychological effects begin within days. Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, profound disorientation, panic attacks triggered by the unchanging environment, difficulty distinguishing between sleep and waking, difficulty remembering who they are. Survivors who have been released and debriefed by human rights organizations describe the experience as annihilation of the self.”
“They describe forgetting their own names, forgetting their families, forgetting what they had been accused of. They describe wanting to die but having no means to accomplish it. The white room leaves no bruises. Medical examinations find nothing wrong, but survivors frequently suffer permanent psychological damage. Many cannot function in normal society after extended white torture.”
“Some report ongoing hallucinations years after release. Some take their own lives. White torture is currently practiced in Iranian prisons. It has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and numerous international bodies. Iranian authorities deny its existence. The denial is part of the design.”
“A torture that leaves no evidence is a torture that can continue indefinitely. The Iranians torture the mind. The ancient Romans tortured everything, including the victim’s symbolic relationship to the natural world. They sewed the condemned into a leather sack with four specific animals. Each animal was chosen for a reason. The punishment was called Poena Cullei, the penalty of the sack.”
“It was reserved for parricide, the murder of a parent or close relative. Roman law considered parricide so unnatural that the murderer had to be isolated from all elements, earth, water, air, and fire. The condemned was first beaten with blood red rods, a ritual marking them as cursed. They were then sewn into a leather sack with four animals, a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey.”
“Each animal was symbolically chosen. The dog represented shamelessness because dogs were considered animals without shame, and the parricide had acted without shame. The snake represented venom, the poison of betrayal. The rooster was included because roosters crow at dawn, a symbol of natural order that the parricide had violated.”
“The monkey represented the perversion of human nature into something beastial. The sack was then thrown into the sea or a river. The condemned could not touch the earth because they had violated its fundamental relationships. They could not be burned because that would release their spirit into the air. They had to drown among creatures as unnatural as themselves.”
“Inside the sealed sack, the practical effect was chaos. Four terrified animals trapped in darkness with a human. The animals would bite, claw, and attack anything they encountered. The victim would try to protect themselves while drowning. Death came from some combination of animal attack and suffocation. Emperor Hadrian modified the punishment in the 2nd century AD.”
“He allowed substitution of locally available animals in provinces where monkeys were rare. The dog and snake remained mandatory. Regional variations used different birds or mammals for the other two. The jurist Modestinus recorded that parricide was the only crime in Roman law for which the punishment was considered worse than simple death.”
“The state did not merely execute parricides. It symbolically removed them from the natural order entirely. Historical records document numerous Poena Cullei executions throughout Roman history. The emperor Claudius allegedly sentenced more parricides to the sack than all previous emperors combined during his 14-year reign.”
“The practice continued in modified form in medieval Germany where murderers of close relatives were sometimes sewn into sacks with cats and dogs before drowning. The Romans isolated their condemned. The Chinese perfected a method of public humiliation that lasted not minutes but months. The victim wore their torture. They could never escape it.”
“They could not eat without help. And everyone they encountered knew exactly what they had done. The cangue was a portable pillory, a large wooden board fitted around the neck with holes for the head and hands. Unlike European pillories which were stationary, the cangue was worn continuously. The prisoner carried it everywhere for as long as the sentence specified.”
“The dimensions were standardized by crime. Minor offenses warranted a cangue weighing perhaps 20 lb. Serious crimes earned cangues weighing 60 lb or more. The largest documented cangues weighed over 100 lb. The board extended past the shoulders in every direction. The prisoner could not reach their own face. They could not feed themselves.”
“They could not use the toilet without assistance. They could not lie down to sleep because the board would not fit through any door. Prisoners wearing cangues depended entirely on the mercy of strangers. Some family members would follow their condemned relatives, providing food and water. Others were abandoned entirely. Those without help died of dehydration within days.”
“The cangue’s duration varied by sentence. Minor offenses might require only days. The most serious crimes could mandate months. One recorded case from the Qing dynasty describes a prisoner wearing a cangue for 3 years before death finally ended the sentence. The prisoner’s crimes were written on the board in large characters visible to everyone who passed.”
“The cangue was not merely physical punishment but public advertisement. The prisoner became a walking announcement of their transgression, unable to escape public knowledge wherever they went. European visitors to China in the 18th and 19th centuries documented the cangue extensively. They described seeing prisoners collapsed in streets, unable to move, waiting for death.”
“They described the smell of prisoners who had been wearing cangues for weeks, unable to clean themselves. They described the flies that gathered around condemned faces that could not be brushed away. The cangue was abolished in 1905 as part of the same legal reforms that ended Lingchi.”
“Photographs from the late Qing period survive showing prisoners wearing cangues of various sizes, their faces resigned to a punishment that might last longer than they could endure. China tortured publicly. In 1966, an American prison developed a torture so secret that it took decades for the truth to emerge. It used electrical current.”
“It was performed on American citizens, and the people who created it kept meticulous records. The Tucker State Prison Farm in Arkansas operated for decades as effectively a private thiefdom. The warden had absolute power. The state provided minimal oversight. What happened inside those walls was known only to those who experienced it. In 1966, an investigator named Tom Murton was appointed superintendent.”
“What he discovered led to one of the most significant prison reform cases in American history. The Tucker telephone was a device constructed from an old-fashioned crank telephone. The generator that had once powered the phone’s ringer was repurposed. Wires extended from the generator to two points. One attached to the prisoner’s genitals, one attached to their ear or toe. When the crank was turned, electrical current passed through the prisoner’s body.”
“The device was not an improvised creation. It had been refined over years. Guards understood precisely how fast to crank for maximum pain without causing death. They understood how long a session could last.”
“They understood which prisoners could endure more current and which required gentler treatment. The Tucker telephone was used routinely for discipline, for interrogation, and apparently sometimes for entertainment. Prisoners who violated rules were called to the telephone. The phrase became understood throughout the Arkansas prison system.”
“Sessions lasted from seconds to hours. The current caused muscles to contract uncontrollably. It caused burns at the attachment points. It caused victims to lose control of bodily functions. Prolonged sessions caused heart irregularities. Some prisoners died. When Murton exposed conditions at Tucker Prison, the resulting legal case, Holt versus Sarver, reached the Supreme Court in 1970.”
“The court ruled that conditions in Arkansas prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment, establishing that prisoners retained constitutional rights even while incarcerated. The Tucker telephone was dismantled. The guards who had used it were never prosecuted. The device itself no longer exists, destroyed when the prison was reformed.”
“But the testimony from prisoners who experienced it fills court documents. They described the anticipation being as terrible as the pain itself. They described fellow prisoners who had been subjected to the telephone and were never the same afterward. The Tucker telephone was American-made. In South America, military dictatorships developed their own electrical methods and added physical contortion that made pain inescapable.”
“The parrot’s perch left victims permanently disabled. Many wished it had simply killed them. The name means parrot’s perch in Portuguese. The device is simple, a horizontal bar positioned approximately 2 ft off the ground. The victim is bound with their wrists tied to their ankles, the bar passed behind their bent knees. They hang from the bar like a parrot perched on a branch.”
“Brazilian military intelligence perfected the method during the dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. It was used on suspected leftists, labor organizers, students, journalists, and anyone else deemed threatening to the regime. The physical effects begin immediately. The position compresses the chest making breathing difficult.”
“Blood pools in the head causing pressure and pain. The joints of the knees, hips, and shoulders are stressed beyond their normal range. Within an hour, the pain becomes overwhelming. Within several hours, lasting damage begins. The joints start to separate. The pressure in the head can cause bleeding. Victims frequently lose consciousness from the combination of pain and restricted breathing, but unconsciousness was not permitted.”
“Guards would revive victims and continue the session. The pau de arara was typically combined with other methods, electrical shocks, beatings, waterboarding. The victim’s helpless position made them completely vulnerable. After the end of the dictatorship, Brazil established a truth commission that documented military torture methods. Thousands of survivors testified about the parrot’s perch.”
“Their accounts fill multiple volumes. Many survivors suffered permanent damage, shoulders that never healed properly, chronic pain in the knees and hips. Some were never able to walk normally again. The method was designed to break bodies as well as wills. The Truth Commission documented at least 400 cases of the parrot’s perch, but acknowledged that the actual number was likely much higher.”
“Many victims died during torture and were never counted. Others refused to testify, too traumatized to revisit the experience. The Brazilian military officers who used the parrot’s perch were protected by an amnesty law passed in 1979. Most were never held accountable. Many continued careers in the security services after democratization.”
“Brazil tortured with position and electricity. Dutch sailors discovered that the ocean itself could be a torture device. They called it keelhauling. The barnacles did the rest. The word comes from the Dutch keelhaling, meaning to drag along the keel. The practice was used by Dutch, English, and French navies from the 16th through 19th centuries.”
“The procedure appears simple. The victim is tied to a rope that runs beneath the ship from one side to the other, passing under the keel. He is thrown overboard and dragged underwater to the other side. What makes keelhauling horrific is what covers a ship’s bottom after months at sea. Barnacles. These small crustaceans attach themselves to wooden hulls in colonies inches thick.”
“Their shells are sharp as razors. A man dragged across a barnacle-encrusted hull does not emerge intact. The shells cut through clothing, then skin, then flesh. A short distance keelhauling lasting perhaps 30 seconds produces deep lacerations across the entire body. A long distance keelhauling from bow to stern rather than side to side produces something closer to flaying.”
“Dutch naval records document keelhauling sentences throughout the 17th century. The admiralty established specific rules. Keelhauling for striking an officer. Keelhauling for theft above a certain value. Keelhauling for mutinous speech. The duration was determined by the severity of the offense. A quick drag might last 30 seconds and be survivable.”
“A slow drag might last 2 minutes or more, drowning the victim before the barnacles finish their work. Survivors described the experience in court testimony. The cold shock of the water, the disorientation of being submerged, the sensation of their skin tearing as they scraped along the hull, the uncertainty of whether they would be raised before their lungs gave out.”
“A Dutch physician named Job Baster documented the injuries of keelhauling survivors in 1734. He described wounds covering 70% of the body surface. He described victims who survived the keelhauling but died within days from infection. He described the psychological effects on victims who knew their ship would be at sea for months with the same barnacle-encrusted hull that had nearly killed them.”
“The Royal Navy abolished keelhauling in 1853. The practice continued informally on merchant vessels for decades. The last documented keelhauling occurred in the 1880s on a whaling ship in the Pacific. Barnacles to.”
