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    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History
    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History
    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History

    By Stephen Liddell

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    About this ebook

    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History misses out all the boring stuff and gets straight to the very sharp point, the weird, bizarre and even a bit of the gore! Often when learning history at school, we'd all squirm in our chairs at hearing about the odd bit of torture or terrible execution but on the inside a bit of us loved it.

    This book covers some of the craziest tortures that humans have inflicted on each other over the last 6,000 years from every corner of the world. Whether you like your tortures boiling-hot; if medieval dungeons are your thing or you think Mongolian tortures are the coolest procedures until the CIA Cold Cell Air-Con torture.

    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History takes a wry look at history, torture and bizarre punishments of times past and just a bit of the present so that we can thank our lucky stars that none of this is ever likely happen to us.

    History doesn't have to be torture!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStephen Liddell
    Release dateMay 3, 2015
    ISBN9781310056871
    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History
    Author

    Stephen Liddell

    Author Stephen Liddell lives in Hertfordshire, just outside London, England. For Stephen, writing started as a hobby and turned into a career as he became a multi-genre writer and historian for magazines, online resources and of course his first love, books.When not writing, Stephen enjoys travelling with his wife and personally runs Ye Olde England Tours which specialise in private tours to historic and cultural attractions. Stephen loves meeting people from all walks of life and this often shows through in his stories.For more information on Author Stephen Liddell please visit his website www.stephenliddell.co.uk for links to his books, blogs and tours.

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    Book preview

    101 Most Horrible Tortures In History - Stephen Liddell

    101_Most_Horrible_Tortures_in_History_by_Stephen_Liddell_-_Smashwords_Cover.jpg

    Title Page

    101 Most Horrible

    Tortures In History:

    by

    Stephen Liddell

    Copyright page

    © Copyright 2015 Stephen Liddell.

    The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the author and publisher.

    Smashwords Edition 2015.

    Printing History.

    First Published in 2015.

    ISBN-13: 978-1511957267.

    ISBN-10: 1511957263.

    Front Cover Art and Design by Jo Robinson All Drawings & Photos Public Domain except for those captioned otherwise.

    E-book production by Moyhill Publishing. Suite 471, 6 Slington House, Rankine Rd., Basingstoke, RG24 8PH, UK.

    Acknowledgements

    Acknowledgements

    My thanks go out to all those who helped me with this book. Specials thanks to the very talented Jo Robinson for her superb cover art which excellently captures the themes of the book.

    Thanks also to my friend and author Ekaterina Botziou for her encouragement and advice as well as to my wife Emilia who really doesn’t like anything remotely gory or horrific but understands for some twisted reason that I do.

    Finally much appreciation goes to my history lecturers at SOAS and in particular Dr. David Morgan and Dr. Colin Heywood who did so much to fill my notebooks with four years of mostly terrible tortures and horrible history.

    Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright page

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction.

    1. Coffin Torture

    2. The Judas Cradle

    3. The Brazen or Sicilian Bull

    4. Impalement

    5. Crucifixion

    6. Iron Maiden

    7. Ducking

    8. Cats in a bag

    9. Rope Torture

    10. Guillotine

    11. The Rack

    12. Rat Torture

    13. The Chair of Torture

    14. Cement Shoes

    15. Breast Ripper

    16. Crocodile Shears

    17. Republican Marriage

    18. The Breaking Wheel

    19. Spanish Donkey

    20. Saw Torture

    21. Seppuku

    22. Hanged, Drawn and Quartered

    23. The Tub

    24. Death by horses

    25. Freezing

    26. The Glasgow Smile

    27. Necklacing

    28. Flaying

    29. Chinese Water Torture

    30. The Head Crusher

    32. Damnation ad bestias

    33. Water Torture

    34. Scaphism

    35. Tiger Bench

    36. Hell Confinement

    37. Tucker Telephone

    38. Lead Sprinkler

    39. Tean Zu

    40. White Torture

    41. Strappado

    42. Syrian Box Torture

    43. The Copper Boot

    44. Keelhauling

    45. Toe Wedging

    46. The Stake

    47. Scold’s Bride

    48. The Pope’s Pear

    49. Knee Splitter

    50. Tongue Tearer

    51. Garrotte Torture

    52. Pillory Torture

    53. Systematic Amputation

    54. Spanish Tickler

    55. Bamboo Torture

    56. Chastity Belt

    57. Gridiron

    58. Elephant Torture

    59. Boiling

    60. Disembowelment

    61. Cold Cell

    62. The Elephant

    63. Slow Slicing

    64. Nero’s living lamps

    65. The Scavengers Daughter

    66. Mongol Dinner Party

    67. Stoning

    68. Immurement

    69. Blowing from a gun

    70. The German Chair

    71. Pendulum

    72. Pressing

    73. The Electric Chair

    74. The Blood Eagle

    75. Ash Suffocation

    76. Neck Torture

    77. Waterboarding

    78. The Five Pains

    79. Buried Alive

    80. Thumbscrew

    81. Snake-pit

    82. Pashtun Torture

    83. Lethal Injection

    84. Heretics Fork

    85. Biological Warfare

    86. Mazzatello

    87. Death by molten silver

    88. The Upright Jerker

    89. Crushing

    90. Burning At The Stake

    91. Columbian Necktie

    92. Falling

    93. Execution Vans

    94. Walking The Plank

    95. Open Cullei

    96. The Brank

    97. The Gas Chamber

    98. The Picquet

    99. Intestinal Crank

    100. The Cat O’ Nine Tails

    101. Deadman’s Revenge

    About The Author

    About the Book

    Also by Stephen Liddell

    Introduction.

    Lots of us are interested in some of the more gory and gruesome parts of history. The separation of time and place makes the intolerable, interesting even if in a dark, morbid way. Many of us as children enjoyed hearing of some of the bizarre and horrid methods of torture and executions of times gone by but I’ve found that there was no real definitive list of historic style tortures and I thought it’s about time that there was.

    I first got interested in unusual forms of execution and its closely related cousin ‘Bizarre ways to die’ as a student studying the history of the Middle-East, Africa and Asia where many lectures would be punctuated by various atrocities and spine-tingling events that more often than not turned out to be true.

    Torture can be defined as the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something. This book has also incorporated a number of methods of execution and capital punishment as being worthy of the term torture due to the choice being deliberately taken to kill a person in a more cruel way than is necessary.

    Neither this book or the author in any way condones torture or capital punishment. This book is an attempt to catalogue the terribly imaginative way that humans have inflicted pain on each other for thousands of years right up to the present day. It is not an exhaustive list and concentrates more on ‘state’ punishments rather than illegal tortures such as knee-capping by the IRA nor does it include the countless methods of modern torture by tyrannical regimes across the world which are largely omitted for reasons of taste. Instead we can sit back and thank our lucky stars that most of us are lucky enough never to have to live through 101 most horrible tortures in history.

    1. Coffin Torture

    This type of torture is one of the most infamous of the many, many types of torture used in the Middle

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