Strange Facts

THE REAL MOB UNDERGROUND - SICILY
If you know anything about Italian history, you've heard about the Greeks and the Romans - but what about the Ostrogoths and the Vandals? At the beginning of the Middle Ages, as the Roman Empire was fading, those two groups came to dominate trade and shipping in parts of the Mediterranean and North Africa, especially in and around Sicily.

The Vandals wanted that island's valuable oil and grain for themselves, so they attacked its coasts and looted its cities as often as they could. The Roman emperors were too weak to stop the Vandals, and in the early 470s the Emperor Zeno simply gave the island to the pirates who besieged it. They, in turn, sold Sicily to the Ostrogoths, who held onto it while the Vandals went on to sack Rome.
 

DEN OF THE GLADIATORS - ROME
While he was alive, many people thought that Spartacus was a thug and a bandit, but over the years he has inspired countless modern rebels and revolutionaries.

Toussaint l'Ouverture, the former slave who became the hero of the Haitian revolution, was widely known as the "Black Spartacus," and Karl Marx and Che Guevara famously admired the gladiator as well. And in Weimar Germany, a group of young Marxists who hoped to bring about a Bolshevik-style revolution of their own founded the Spartacist League, or Spartakusbund.

Today, a small International Communist League in the United States is known as the Spartacist League as well, though the two groups are not related.

SUBTERRANEAN STRIP - LOS ANGELES
In order for Las Vegas to survive, it needs water - a commodity that's not so easy to come by in the desert. During the Great Depression, federal workers built the enormous Hoover Dam to provide electricity and water to millions of people across the Southwest, but so many people live and vacation in Las Vegas now that there just isn't enough water to go around.

As a result, the city is always looking for ways to drill and pump water from rivers and aquifers that are hundreds of miles away - sometimes angering the other people who rely on that water. It also closely monitors water use within the city limits by enforcing a host of rules and regulations that are designed to make sure people don't use more water than they need. Violators have to pay a water-waste fee or take a class to teach them how to use the scarce resource more efficiently.

THE OTHER IWO JIMA
The Japanese troops defending the island of Iwo Jima fought from an elaborate system of underground bunkers and tunnels. They built a hospital 46 feet underground, along with a sauna, a seven-story armory and 1,500 small rooms and barracks.

There is an active volcano on the island, and these underground spaces were unbearably hot and were rarely stocked with enough medicine or food. Many Japanese soldiers died in these tunnels, and some of their bodies are still down there today.

HAUNTED UNDERGROUND - LONDON
During the fall of 1888, the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper terrorised the East End of London. He killed and mutilated at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel neighbourhood, and after each murder he just seemed to vanish into the fog.

Since all of the crime scenes were near subway stations, some people speculated that he escaped by slipping down into the tunnels when no one was watching. Steam grates on the surface of the street would have made it simple to jump into the train tunnels without ever passing through a crowded train station. Indeed, in the middle of the Ripper's spree some passengers on the Tower Hill platform spotted a man with a knife walking through the far end of the tunnel.

Some people even think that Jack the Ripper was a police officer stationed inside the neighborhood's subway trains and stations. In that case, his uniform would have diverted suspicion while his knowledge of the tracks and timetables would have ensured a speedy getaway after each killing.

HITLER'S BEGINNINGS - BERLIN
Underground bunkers played such an important role in Hitler's life that it seems fitting that he died in one, too. On 28 April 1945, he married his photographer's assistant, Eva Braun, in the map room of his private bunker in Berlin. The next day he wrote his will, and the day after that he and his new wife committed suicide together in the bunker's living room. The Fuhrer bit down on a cyanide capsule while shooting himself in the head; Braun simply poisoned herself with the cyanide.

Aides brought the bodies aboveground and tried to cremate them in the courtyard of the New Reich Chancellery, but they lacked the proper equipment and the bodies were never burned. The Red Army sealed the bunker when Berlin fell to the Russians and, since people were worried that the site would become a neo-Nazi shrine, it stayed that way until 1999.