Worst Punishments Throughout Human History
Does your kid break down on the mere thought of you deleting their Tik Tok account for punishment? Do they think having their PlayStations taken away is like being roasted in literal hell? Since there have been human civilizations, there have been laws, and the people who break the law have to face the consequences. Modern society may become more humane as certain countries have incarcerations more comfortable than a four-star hotel, but the further we go back in the past, the more harrowing and bone-chilling the system methods and the philosophy behind punishments become.
Welcome to Nutty History. Today, we are looking back at the worst punishments throughout human history. Viewer discretion is advised for this video as some of this video may be offensive or disturbing.
Impalement
Impalement is a long-known torment practice and a capital punishment that has been practiced since before humans began building cities. A long sharp and most likely greased stake would be used longitudinally or transversely, and the stakes would be left in the open, most likely outside a city, to strike fear in the hearts of the people passing by. In antiquity, it was the most preferred method of fear-mongering among the Assyrians, especially Emperor Ashurbanipal. In the late Middle Ages, Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia, earned the title of “Vlad the Impaler” and wore it with pride.
For longitudinal impalement, the stake would be beneath the elevated prisoner and inserted in between their legs. The gravity then would make sure the spike would run through them, avoiding major organs like the heart, lungs, and spleen, and exiting through the skin of the shoulder, neck, or if they are truly unlucky, the lower part of the skull. A person could survive like this for days, if not weeks. For transversal impalement, the stake would be pierced through the torso and then the stake would be hoisted up vertically.
The Garrote
The prisoner was forced to sit on a small chair-like structure made with a slightly elevated platform attached to an upright pole that had two holes bored into it. Then their neck would be pushed into the backside pole like they were about to get a dental checkup, only this would be a more breathtaking experience. The prisoner’s neck would be aligned to the holes on the pole and a rope would be run through them to create a loop around their neck. On the other side of the pole, a stick would be introduced in the loop and the executioner would twist the stick to tighten the rope so that they can take their breath away.
Thanks to historical museums and spy movies like James Bond, punishing someone for information or a confession is considered an elaborate and complex business that requires a degree of understanding in mechanical engineering and human anatomy. But that wasn’t always the case. Such was the case of the garrote, which was used for hundreds of years in Spain as a method to carry out a death sentence. There is historical evidence that the garrote was invented by the Romans in the 1st Century B.C.E. They used to punish the conspirators of the second Catiline conspiracy. Spain and Portugal also used it during the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, and it was brought to the Americas by the conquistadors.
The garrote was infamously used to end the life of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa. King Ferdinand VII put the spotlight on the garrote by appointing it as the exclusive standard form of the death penalty in 1813 to replace hanging. Unlike modern hanging which is considered one of the most humane forms of punishment by death, hanging in the 19th century or earlier was crude and irregular and people suffered for too long before dying. It was the case until an Irish doctor named Samuel Haughton devised a way to cause immediate death by the drop in 1866.
Interestingly, the garrote was introduced in Spain by Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars of 1808 to 1814 while Ferdinand VII was imprisoned by Napoleon. The garrote was considered the best method to quash the Spanish guerrilla warriors, priests, and anybody else who tried to inspire an uprising against the French invaders. The records are patchy even for the 20th century, but at least 736 people were garrotted during the 19th century, including 16 women. The last public garrotting happened in 1897 and a total of 96 people were put on the death chair between then and 1935. 80 Freemasons were garrotted in 1935 alone in the city of Malaga for not abandoning their religion to join the armed forces. This was one of the major reasons for the civil discourse that followed in Spain. The last garrotting happened in 1974.
The Wheel
Also known as the Catherine wheel or breaking wheel, the wheel was a popular form of public capital punishment during the Middle Ages. Now it’s hard to trace who invented it or when, but the earliest record comes from the author Gregory of Tours in the 6th Century CE. Now the Catherine wheel got around pretty good, traveling a large part of the globe as its use has been documented in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Rome, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Sweden, and the colonized Indian subcontinent.
There was no standard way to use the wheel, and it could mean from being trampled by a moving wheel to being tied on crossbeams attached to the center of the beams. The punishers would begin by breaking the leg bones of the prisoner and slowly break their other bones one by one by either using clubs or the wheel itself. A Jewish person named Jonah endured this torment for four days and four nights in 1348, marking him as a long-term survivor of the wheel. He was left to bleed to death like most of the victims.
Rats
You know rats have been following humans for centuries through every new city and country. While most of us have tried to exterminate them and some of us tried to domesticate them, some weaponized them. Roman Emperor Nero’s mental health is a huge question mark in history. He was the earliest known person to use these rodents as his tool of justice. He would have the mouth of a bucket full of starving rats tied to the stomach of his prisoners and then heat would be applied on the bottom of the bucket. Hungry and burning, the desperate rats would claw and chew through whatever was in its path to escape the heat.
Centuries later, medieval Germany upgraded the torment method by replacing the bucket with a metal cage with a pocket for hot charcoals at the bottom to make the anticipation, anxiety, and torment itself last longer so they could get the desired confession out of the prisoners. Drawing inspiration from the same concept, medieval Germany introduced the rat chair. The prisoner was forced to sit upright while a metal cage teeming with hungry rats was strapped around their face instead of their belly.
During the Elizabethan times, the rat dungeons of the London Tower became infamous for the horrors that caused dreaded fear among the Catholics living in the city. Hidden beneath the Tower of London are several dungeons responsible for its bloody reputation. It must have been terrifying for prisoners to be led down into the dungeons where they would have heard other prisoners screaming. Cells were built at a high-level mark in total darkness. The prisoners would hear rats scurrying towards their cells from the River Thames as the tide flowed in.
Things reached a new level in South America during the 20th century as rats became quite popular among South American dictators such as Castello Branco who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the five dictators of Uruguay from 1973 to 1986, and General Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. But the most harrowing accounts of rat punishment are from Augusto Pinochet who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and created the punishment called rectoscope. A hot metal pipe would be used to push rats down towards the rear of the prisoner and just like Nero’s version, the rats had no other way to escape the heat but to burrow through everything in its path.
The Rack
In some parts of the world, cracking knuckles publicly is considered rude, but in medieval times it was all the rage. They would crack all your joints while you’d be in a rage. The rack was invented by the Duke of Exeter in 1420 and was used to stretch the prisoners beyond their body’s limit until their joints would pop. The objective was to extract confessions and incriminating information from suspected traitors, heretics, and conspirators.
The prisoner would be laid down on a wooden frame with their limbs tied to the rollers on either end. When rollers begin to turn, they would pull the prisoner’s joints apart. We have bones popping, joints ripping, and tendons coming undone. Anne Askew, a 16th-century English writer and poet, a friend of Catherine Parr and a devout Protestant, decided to champion her beliefs among other women in her social circle. She was soon arrested for reading and citing excerpts of the Bible because somebody snitched on her. As King Henry VIII was still hopping back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism, she was charged with being a heretic and was punished on the rack.
“Give us the names of the women you congregate with!” they asked her again and again as they kept turning the rollers.
But the lady didn’t budge. All of her joints were paralyzed when they took her off the rack and then they put her on a fiery stake. She would have been alive if she also had kept her mouth shut in front of her very Catholic husband who sold her out. Various forms of the rack popped up across different countries and England itself used the rack well up to the 17th century. There is no known number of how many endured the rack, but one of the most famous victims was the English rebel Guy Fawkes who suffered this agonizing torment.
The Iron Maiden
Now although the Iron Maiden is one of the most recognized and widely present medieval torment devices in pop culture, there is no evidence that the closet big enough to fit an adult person with iron spikes in the interior walls was ever used in the Middle Ages. None captures the imagination more than the infamous Iron Maiden, a metal casket towering nearly seven feet tall. Its exterior features a woman’s face, one allegedly inspired by the Virgin Mary, and when it’s opened there’s an unholy surprise.
The earliest account was written by the historian Johann Philipp Siebenkees in a guidebook to the city of Nuremberg, citing the use of the Iron Maiden in 1515. He mentioned that the spikes were deliberately kept small enough to keep the prisoner alive and bleed slowly for two days until death. There would be 20 strategically placed spikes that were meant to impale the body but in such a way that it wouldn’t kill the human inside, only prolong their agony. It would go into places that were very painful but not particularly deadly. However, he hasn’t cited any sources for his account and there was no Iron Maiden known to exist from that period. In fact, the first known Iron Maiden was produced based on Siebenkees’ account in Nuremberg and one was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1894 Chicago.
Gibbetting
While most torments had been devised to make the punishment an experience worse than death, gibbetting was a punishment that extended beyond death. Gibbets were extremely cramped and restrained to the point that they were practically a straightjacket for the whole body. To add to the misery, the prisoner would be hung by a pole at a considerable height from the ground. The gibbets attracted large enthusiastic crowds that could number up to tens of thousands to watch the demise of the prisoner.
In the US, Boston used gibbets at the ports to deter pirates during the golden and silver age of piracy. In England, gibbetting peaked in the 1740s and was mandated later in 1752. Between 1752 and 1832, 134 men were gibbetted in England and in 1834 the practice was officially abolished. Because gibbetting would happen more or less once a year, there was no standard technique for crafting the cage for the blacksmiths. These were mostly last-moment commission jobs where the smiths had to reinvent the wheel every time. Some were heavy, some were loose, some looked like stickman drawings with shackles on every end, and some were designed like bird cages.
One of the major reasons for its discontinuation, apart from the terrible fate for the prisoner, was the stench. Despite the fact that gibbetting was supposed to be a crowd attraction, the gibbets would make living nearby them absolutely horrendous and a health hazard. The gibbets were strung as high as 30 feet to make sure no one could take them down even decades after the prisoners inside them had perished. Some of the gibbets that have survived to this state are stored in small museums across England and they still have the remains of their victims. The odor of rotting flesh was so potent and attracted bugs, especially at the beginning of the decomposition when there were still soft tissues. They twisted and swayed and creaked and clanked eerily when the wind would blow. Female prisoners were spared from this horrible fate for fear of the surgeons and the anatomists stealing their bodies. Though gibbetting was always protested by few or many, courts saw it as an easy way to deter people from committing grave crimes.
Scaphism
Ancient Indians created bathhouses, ancient Egyptians created pyramids, and ancient Persians, well, they invented punishment so innovative that even admins of hell would be proud of them, if hell was a thing. According to Greek historian Plutarch, “boats” or scaphism was the worst form of punishment he witnessed during his time in the Persian Empire. Plutarch mentioned a prisoner named Mithridates that was placed between two floating boats with his head and limbs sticking out and his body trapped inside. Then the prisoner would be forced-fed lots of milk and honey until they got visibly bloated, and then some more as their body and face would also be plastered with honey. As the prisoner would be left alone to attract vermin and bugs, excessive milk and honey would induce severe diarrhea which would entice more pests to not only join the feast, but often vermin would enter the body of the victim and eat them inside out. This procedure would be repeated for days.
Poena Cullei
Do you know what’s common between Vin Diesel and ancient Rome? They both understand the importance of family. Ancient Rome took pride in being a hierarchical and patriarchal society. Being born in a Roman family was considered fortunate and the authority of parents, especially fathers, over the lives of their children was absolute. So parricide was considered the most heinous crime in Roman society and they devised the worst form of punishment they could think of for it: Poena Cullei.
The prisoner would be bound and stuffed in a sack made of ox skin with a number of animals like a snake, a dog, a monkey, a cockerel, a fox, a cat, or whatever they could find. The sack would then be sewn shut and the bag would be thrown into the river to drown. The animals could act out for being confined in a small space alone, but add drowning and the intensity of scratching, biting, and doing other things on the prisoner would overwhelm their last moments. Though the menagerie of animals would depend on availability, the animals still held some symbolism. For example, snakes were meant to symbolize the prisoners themselves and dogs were considered the least respectable animals; therefore, being in their company signified the prisoner’s own low status. Wait a minute, Romans didn’t like dogs? How could you not like dogs?
Oubliettes
Would life be better than death if everybody forgot about them and their existence? Oubliettes were solitary confinement dungeons designed to achieve the same in the Middle Ages and stayed in use until the 18th century. Much like the rat dungeon of the London Tower, oubliettes were conical or cylindrical pits built within castles or fortresses to dispose of prisoners of war and criminals so they might never see the light of day again.
The Leap Castle in Ireland was a subject of a generational feud between the O’Bannon and the O’Carroll clans between the 13th and 16th centuries and switched possession multiple times. In the 1920s, the oubliettes were discovered eight feet below a trapdoor containing three cartloads worth of skeletons and sharp spikes waiting for the prisoners at the end of the fall.
Crucifixion
The punishment that became the holy symbol of the world’s most popular religion has existed far more than two millennia, with the most recent incidents happening not even a decade ago. The Assyrians, who were also known for practices like flaying and mutilation, were possibly responsible for inventing this method. The practice then became popular in Babylon, Phoenicia, and Macedonia, and eventually arrived in ancient Rome.
The practice involved a prisoner being tied or, as was the case of Joshua of Nazareth, being nailed to a wooden beam or cross. Nails were pierced just underneath the wrist so that the person could be balanced upon the beam and gravity won’t make them pierce through the nails and fall. The nails would impale the bones causing immense anguish, but no major blood vessels would be hit so the prisoner wouldn’t die easily of bleeding or shock. It would also cause the fingers to seize and hands to go numb so the prisoners can’t use them to try and escape. The feet would be nailed to the vertical beam of the cross and they would slowly bleed, making the body rely on arms to stay up, further piling up on the agony and shoulders being pulled out of their sockets. Eventually, the whole weight of the body would fall upon the person’s chest and they would be constantly out of breath and choke on the very air they would be breathing, leading to eventual suffocation.
Keelhauling
Keelhauling was most likely made popular by the Royal Dutch Navy in the 15th or 16th century. It was also used by the English Navy since the 11th century and there are records of it originally being invented by ancient Greeks in the 9th century BC. But the word keelhauling comes from the Dutch term kielhalen.
The offending sailor would be stripped, tied, and suspended by a rope from the ship’s mast with weights or chains attached to their legs. The rope would be looped beneath the ship so that once the sailor was released, he would be dragged under the keel. Needless to say, the chances of surviving this ordeal were absolutely zero. Most likely the sailor would die drowning and if by any miracle they survived, severe head trauma from repeatedly smacking up against the keel would finish the job. For the time they would be alive, they would suffer deep lacerations from the barnacles or other aquatic life growing on the hull, and if they still made it out alive back on board, the infections from the wounds would make sure death wouldn’t take long.
Flaying
Flaying or skinning has also existed since humans began warring and punishing people for breaking laws. It was a quite popular method for punishment in medieval Europe. The victim would be stripped and have their limbs tied to avoid resistance and sudden movements. The executioner would use a knife to peel the skin, often starting with the head so that most pain could be inflicted upon the prisoner before they lose consciousness due to blood loss.
Persian King Cambyses II took it even a step further. He flayed his judge Sisamnes for being guilty of corruption and then used Sisamnes’ skin to make the chair for the new judge replacing the culprit—Sisamnes’ son.
“Remember what happened to your father before taking advantage of your position,” he warned.
Another unfortunate victim of flaying was genius mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, who was an innocent victim of a religious mob.
The Roman Candle
Yet another invention from the twisted and dominant mind of Emperor Nero, the Roman Candle was truly a work of dark arts. Like crucifixion, victims would be tied and nailed to tall stakes and a flammable liquid would be poured over them before they were covered with other materials to make sure to slow down the burning so when they were lit up, it would last longer—like a candle. Like the case of burning stakes in the Middle Ages, the fire would start at the feet and could take hours to reach the vital organs. Worse, Nero would light them up in his garden and have feasts using them as the torches for the celebrations.
Rhaphanidosis
If a man was caught committing adultery or unprovoked carnal aggression in Athens during 500 BCE, he might find himself before a crowd in the agora with his rear sticking in the air. The prisoner would be subjected to a grim legal punishment known as Rhaphanidosis. The guilty man would have all the hair from his nether regions removed with hot ash, followed by radishes being shoved one after the other where the sun don’t shine. There is very little information on how long or how many of the vegetables would be used for the punishment. The Romans also adopted the punishment but changed the radishes with mullets—the fish, not the hairstyle. Maybe they ran out of radishes.
Riding the Stang
For centuries, rural Britain played host to a bizarre form of community punishment. In the north of England and Scotland, it was known as “Riding the Stang” and in parts of Southern England it was called “Skimmington Riding.” Both versions had a boisterous rabble of rowdy villagers taunting and embarrassing the offender with an elaborate parade. When a husband was found using violent methods on his wife, the young men of the village set out to create the procession.
The stang was a hurdle or pole on which a gesture of the village would sit and be carried aloft through the streets. Pots and pans were banged and whistles and horns were played. All the villagers would join in and typically the procession would move around the village before arriving at the home of the transgressor who would presumably be peeking nervously through the curtains. Sometimes the effigy being carried around was part of the shaming crew and on other occasions, it was the offender himself who was carted around. Some of the last recorded instances of Riding the Stang were as recent as 1889.
Judas Cradle
Judas Cradle was one of the most crude early modern period inventions for punishment by the Spanish Inquisition. Hippolytus de Marsiliis came up with this horrific invention in the 16th century. The cradle here was actually a pyramid-shaped wooden device and the prisoner would be forced to sit on its tip. Their legs would be tied together to increase the pain and sometimes they would add weight on top of them. Most of the victims of the Judas Cradle were religiously persecuted people charged with heresy or people who either belonged to Protestant, Islamist, or Jewish faith.
The Iron Chair
The iron chair was one of the major dreaded attractions of the medieval dungeons. Direct involvement in the death of another person, witchcraft, adultery, and banditry could win you a seat on the iron chair. The victim would have their legs and wrists Shackled as fire would be lit under the chair and the prisoner would be slowly roasted alive. In other cases, the fire would be in front of the chair at some distance and the chair would be pushed slowly towards the flame. After a few decades, somewhere between 500 to 1,500 spikes were added to the back, seat, armrest, and leg rests, probably because they weren’t sure if the chair wasn’t sadistic enough.
The Spanish Donkey
The chevalet, or the Spanish donkey, or the wooden horse was an extremely agonizing medieval torment device that was first used by the Jesuits in the Holy Inquisition in France, then in the Spanish Inquisition, and also in Germany. The Spanish Inquisition also took it to the Americas with them and it was prominently used there in the colonial period. There were slight variations but mostly the basic design remained the same: a triangular wooden box standing on four legs with wheels that had a very sharp top end similar to a horse’s spine.
The offender would be mounted upon the horse with weights on their ankles and their hands restrained behind their back. They would be left there for hours or days being cut slowly and roughly between the legs by the sharp spine, causing pain. Once punished on the wooden horse, a person could never walk normally ever again and they would endure a ruptured perineum that couldn’t be sewn back again.
The Pear of Anguish
The Pear of Anguish was also known as the choke pear or mouth pear, possibly originated in the 16th or 17th century but later it was used in a much more malicious way. This pear-shaped device with a bulbous head was shoved inside—not the mouth, but on the other end. The screw on the other side of the device was turned to expand the bulb inside the prisoner’s rectum to interrogate the prisoner or force a confession. As the device threatened to rip the delicate tissue, the pressure itself was enough to force the prisoners to agree to whatever was demanded of them.
The Heretic’s Fork
The Heretic’s Fork was another brutal medieval device that was in use from the 11th to the 16th centuries. A leather belt that was snugly attached to the neck with two sharp prongs—one for the chin and one for the sternum. It would force the wearer to keep their head in a steady position because the prongs would dig in with any head movement. Prisoners would throw their heads back to the skies hoping they could keep that posture for long hours; others may try to lash out hoping to end their lives fast, but the prongs were designed in a way that such attempts would only prolong the agony. The device was used both for extracting confessions and also to silence the prisoners so they won’t speak more than prosecutors wanted them to.
