Historical things you learned that you regret finding out about?

[Trevor]

The Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184 where noblemen fell through a floor and drowned in a poo pit 😳😳😳😳

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster

[ER]

Learning that one of the US Presidents I most admired, Theodore Roosevelt, loved to kill. Or perhaps I should say how ardently he loved to kill.

He made a pastime of killing animals, and not just his "sport" hunts in Africa or his possible subsistence hunting in the American west, but even in childhood he would wander his neighborhood and kill dogs and cats and birds and just about anything else he could, and then record each event in a diary, including describing how the animal died, and if a dog he shot whimpered or howled, he counted it a cowardly death, but if an animal died snarling he said it died heroically.  In his youth his father took the family to Egypt, where young Teddy spent his time slaughtering animals like birds and cats into the literal thousands.

If you're thinking, yeah, but.... then get this. He also had a burning desire to kill a person, and if you've ever seen his letters home before he shipped off to fight in Cuba, he would write what sounded like feverishly masturbatory sentences about his longing to be able to say he was "bloodied" in battle, and would speculate about where the first man he was going to kill was at that instant, what he was doing and thinking, what he'd just had to eat, what he looked like, what he would feel when the bullet hit him, and how he did not yet know that he was going to kill him.

To read these messed up things changed my entire perception of someone I had once thought almost entirely admirable.

[ER]

George Washington's buttock abscesses.

[Alex]

England is 2nd on the list of countries with the most known serial killers (although the country holding the no. 1 spot has around twenty times more).

[ER]

That Saint Francis of Assisi believed washing was an indulgence of vanity.