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Strange Facts
The Real Mob Underground
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
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
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
During the fall of 1888, the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper terrorized the East End of London. He killed and mutilated at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel neighborhood, 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
Underground bunkers played such an important role in Hitler's life that it seems fitting that he died in one, too. On April 28, 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.
Dark Ages
A murder hole or muertriere is an opening in the floor of an upstairs room in a castle or over an entrance gate or passageway. During the Dark Ages, soldiers and guards dropped weapons--stones, arrows, hot sand, boiling water, molten lead--down through the murder hole onto attackers passing through the gate or captured enemy soldiers trapped in the rooms below. Some castles had similar holes in their exterior walls; these were called machicolations.
Los Angeles
During Prohibition, illegal liquor found its way into Los Angeles in many ways. One of these was through the utility tunnels that ran underneath Venice Beach. These tunnels, there since Venice was built in 1905, connected the city's downtown with its heating and power plants. (Another set of tunnels ran underneath the boardwalk. No bathing suits were allowed on the promenade, so swimmers and sunbathers needed an easy way to get from oceanfront hotels to the beach.) Bootleggers in high-speed motorboats delivered Canadian booze from rumrunners docked far offshore; then they parked their speedboats under the pier and snuck the liquor through the tunnels to basement speakeasies throughout the city.
San Francisco
During the 1920s, San Francisco had more than its share of speakeasies. Some were hidden in secret rooms or tunnels; others sat in plain view but required a password or an invitation to get in. One of the city's finest hotels had a tiny gin mill squeezed between its lobby and its first floor. (You can still see it today!) But basements were the most popular spot for speakeasies. For example, a diner called Coffee Dan's served hot breakfast and coffee upstairs and hard liquor in the basement--but in order to get down there you had to slide down a twisty wooden slide. (You can still see--and slide down--that, too.)
Jesus' Underground/The Lost Tribes
According to a scholar named Tudor Parfitt, the real-life Ark of the Covenant is sitting in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe. (Over the years, some people have thought that the Ark was hidden under the Sphinx, while others have thought that it was in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount. Some have even traced it to London and France!) Parfitt looked for the Ark in Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia and New Guinea and eventually found it--or at least, he found what he believes is the most recent replacement, built when the Ark was destroyed 400 years ago--in the museum. There's no doubt that scholars will debate whether or not Parfitt has really found the Ark, but he doesn't mind: As far as he's concerned, "what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses."
Under the Pharaohs
Nobody knows what's underneath the Sphinx. Almost 30 years ago, archaeologists working on the statue's restoration discovered a passage in the northwest corner of its rear end. One part of the tunnel they found winds down underneath the structure; the other, they said, would be "an open trench in the upward curve of the rump" if earlier restorers hadn't covered it with stones. Some seismic tests have suggested that there are more chambers and tunnels under the Sphinx, but the only way to know for sure is to dig or drill into the statue's base--something that's unlikely to happen, of course, since its restorers and custodians would definitely not allow it, for fear of damaging the iconic structure.
Trojan War Underground
The Cave of Psychro in Crete, also called the Diktaion or Dictaean Cave, is an extremely important place in Greek mythology: According to legend, that's where Zeus's mother Rhea hid to give birth to the future god. As the story goes, a seer had told Zeus's father Cronus that one day his children would overthrow him; in order to prevent that fate, Cronus had swallowed Zeus's five older brothers and sisters whole, which is why Rhea had her sixth baby in secret. In order to keep his father from finding him, demons called the Curetes danced and clattered their swords to drown out Zeus's cries, and he was nursed by the goat-nymph Amalthea (or, in some versions of the tale, a swarm of bees). Meanwhile, Rhea gave Cronus a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes and told him it was his newborn son. (He believed her and swallowed the rock.) After Zeus grew up to be the king of all the gods, he was able to rescue his brothers and sisters from his father's stomach.
Outback Underground
In 1916, 5,000 soldiers from the Australian Light Brigade went for a pub crawl in the Sydney suburb of Liverpool that ended in an incredibly destructive three-day-long riot. This embarrassing debacle resulted in much soul-searching and hand-wringing about all the vice and crime that plagued the nation's capital, and appalled Australians demanded that something be done. That something turned out to be an ordinance that required all of Sydney's bars and pubs to close at 6 PM. (This, in turn, led to the birth of what came to be known as the "six-o-clock swill": the race to drink as much as possible between the end of the workday and the time that the pubs closed for the night.) Keeping bars open after dark was illegal in New South Wales until 1955.
Iran Underground
In order to survive in a place where there wasn't much surface water for drinking or watering crops, ancient Persians developed an innovative irrigation technology that's still in use in some places today. They dug small underground canals, called qanats, which used gravity to move large amounts of groundwater from place to place without disrupting the landscape above them. The qanat sloped down from mountain aquifers to the farms and villages in the valleys below. Putting the qanat underground minimized evaporation; meanwhile, vertical shafts along the tunnel's route provided air to the workers digging and making repairs below. Today, you can find Iran's oldest and longest qanat in the city of Gonabad: It's 2,700 years old, 45 kilometers long and still provides water to 40,000 people.
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