Remember being bored out of your skull because your parents dragged you to some stupid museum when you were a kid? Well, it could have been worse. Much worse.

Because there are apparently museums out there capable of inflicting the kind of trauma a person never recovers from.

Location: Guanajuato, Mexico

The El Museo is the museum of HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT!

Why... does that exist anywhere?

To say this is a museum full of mummies doesn't even come close to conveying the unspeakable horror of this place. How about this: In ancient Rome, and college fraternities, there is a brutal and humiliating tradition known as running the gauntlet, during which you strip naked and run through a valley of horrors. Guanajuato's El Museo De Las Momias ("Museum of the Mummies") is just like that, except that it's the spectators who are naked. And dead.

You know one of those hands will reach out and grab you.

The Mummies of Guanajuato are naturally preserved bodies from a cholera outbreak that hit Guanajuato way back in 1833. Since this is basically just a huge open grave with floodlights, its legality and moral status continues to be the subject of much discussion everywhere except in Mexico.

Most of the mummies on display were corpses whose families could not afford to pay a grave tax levied on their families once they died. If you failed to pay the taxes, you guessed it...

You went up on display.

Hey, have we mentioned the babies?

"Come play with us..."

"...forever..."

"...and ever..."

Oh, and while we're on the subject of nightmarish carnivals of the rotting dead...

Location: Palermo, Sicily

Welcome to Catacombe dei Cappuccini: the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. Described as a "human library," the Catacombs serve as an invaluable historic record on everything from clothing trends to fear tolerance.

In 1599, the monks who lived here discovered a great new method for embalming the dead, and as the situation warranted, they went to work embalming each other. Then wealthy locals wanted to be interred in the Capuchin Catacombs as a status thing.

Despite being as old as Galileo and bombed to hell during World War II, some of the inhabitants of the Capuchin Catacombs still look pretty fresh...

...And all of them dressed in the finest clothes, eagerly awaiting the Resurrection.

Seriously, what the fuck...

"BUY POSTCARDS!"

Location: St. Joseph, Missouri

The Glore Psychiatric Museum, formally known as Missouri's State Lunatic Asylum No. 2, is like the Event Horizon of art galleries.

They call this one "Schizophrenia."

The museum takes its name from one George Glore, who in the 60s, put his patients/inmates at the St. Joseph State Hospital to work building full-size replicas of some of the most horrific psychiatric practices from the last few centuries--which makes about as much sense as making the inmates at Guantanamo Bay build Big Macs until they love America.

Apparently, building creepy shit like this is a damn good way to get sane.

The result is a weird and terrifying excursion through the minds of a hundred lunatics, displaying patient art which ranges from sophisticated...

Albeit psychopathic.

To South Park...

Stan?

But the, uh, highlight of the museum has to be this magnificent mosaic, which was constructed entirely from the stomach contents of a woman suffering from compulsive swallowing.

That horror is 100 percent stomach contents.

It is actually hard to picture anyone going crazy over anything in Missouri, but now that we have seen what their hospitals look like, it is probably best to avoid the state. After all, the woman who swallowed those 1,446 objects died in surgery. So who the fuck made the mosaic?

Location: New Carrollton, Maryland

We're all adults here, hopefully. Menstruation isn't any more disgusting than the other bodily functions we don't discuss in polite company. So what's wrong with having a museum dedicated to the subject?

How about the fact that it's in some random dude's basement in lower Maryland.

This guy!

While there genuinely is a long history to menstruation's imprint on culture, from its symbolic record to its inclusion in Cervantes' Don Quixote , the Museum of Menstruation & Women's Health is really just the story of one man with a dream: Harry Finley.

Since 1995, this humble, middle-aged American has devoted his life to making his private collection of feminine hygiene products and mutilated mannequins available to the public. His work has received accolades from Johns Hopkins University and The New York Times--at least according to his website--and Harry's reputation has since blossomed from local neighborhood character to a character from a Thomas Harris novel.

Among the museum's collections are a dress made out of tampons...

...well kept archives...

...whatever the hell these are...

...and finally, the intimacy of knowing that you and Harry are the only people in the house. For real. Since 1999, all visits to the museum/Harry's basement have had to be done by appointment and in private.

We imagine so that no one can hear you scream.

It's a running theme here at Cracked that a lot of what we think we know about history has been filtered through many centuries of utter bullshit. Our image of the past is largely made up of Hollywood inventions, propaganda and uneducated guesses.

So you will probably be surprised to find that...

The Perception:

We get so busy being amazed by the Pyramids, with their massive, meticulously layered sandy golden bricks, that we forget that what we're seeing are the broken-down remnants. If you could see them new, you'd barely recognize them. They were much more awesome back then.

The Reality:

What we think of today as the Pyramids are really just the exposed layers of the structural base. The original pyramids lit up like the Times Square of ancient Egypt. Egyptians were all about having the maximum amount of glittery goodness, especially when it came to death.

Pharaohs liked tacky shit? We would have never guessed.

And since the Pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs, they made sure they were the biggest, most sparkly things of all. The original outside consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece. Don't take our word for it; you can still see bits of that decorative layer on some of them:

That outer crunchy candy shell was then polished until it was on the verge of blinding from all the light it would reflect from the sun or moon. It was said that they could be seen from miles away, even during the night.

Of course that wasn't enough, so the capstone was then plated in gold or electrum. Had the technology existed, we're sure the pharaohs would have stuck 24-inch chrome rims on them, too.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

What we're looking at today are the equivalent of sports cars that have been long forgotten in some junkyard.

Weather and time have been beating down the pyramids for four and a half thousand years. Well, partly it was time, but mostly it was assholes. Those shiny layers of white and gold? They were stripped off and used in the construction of Medieval Cairo, and there are cracks and holes where 19th century treasure hunters tried to get in with pickaxes and in one unfortunate case, dynamite.

Oh don't worry about it looters, those were only the greatest architectural accomplishments of the Ancient World. We're sure what you needed the stuff for was way more important.

The Perception:

Sure, the T-Rex may be the go-to killer dinosaur, but everyone who's anyone knows that Velociraptors were the real baddest asses of prehistoric times. Cracked Paleontologists theorize that if it wasn't for a giant boulder shot from outer space wiping them all out, Velociraptors would be ruling the planet today, only keeping humans around for food and sport.

"We'll give you a two minute head start."

These deadly beasts of yore looked like miniaturized Tyrannosaurs, but sleeker, quicker and more dangerous. The dinosaur Kobe to the T-Rex's Shaq, if you will. Anyone who's seen Jurassic Park has a pretty good idea of what Raptors looked like. Well... except for one minor detail.

"We hope it's not something that makes us look totally lame!"

The Reality:

They had feathers. Not just a few here and there either. But a full on, honest to goodness coat of teeth-to-tail FEATHERS.

Source.

Now, it would be awesome if this meant they could fly, but obviously if they could do that, you'd already damned well know about it. No, it turns out Velociraptors were just big fluffy looking lizards, who most likely used the feathers to show off to other raptors, or in mating rituals. Apparently Raptor ladies were impressed if you looked like the bastard offspring of a komodo dragon and Big Bird.

Velociraptors: Preening douchebags of the thunder lizard kingdom.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

We actually didn't know about this until 1998, when a bone proving the extent of quill knobs on Velociraptors was discovered, and many a childhood ruined.

Here's to hoping they do a Star Wars-style special edition for Jurassic Park, with updated, more accurate CGI dinosaurs. That should be goddamned hilarious.

The Perception:

Quick, what do you picture in your head when we say, "Ancient Greece"? If you're like most people you either picture lots of dudes standing around in togas, or white marble statues with no pupils in their eyes:

"Colorful clothes are for gangbangers and homosexuals."

Those ornate statues made of pure white marble, depicting the austere beauty and power of epic gods and heroes, have made quite an impression on history. Renaissance sculptors carved their own marble statues based on the belief that that's how the ever wise Greeks did things.

The Reality:

Ancient Greece looked more like someone crashed their LGBT pride parade into a Mardi Gras Festival.

Recent studies using the awesome powers of lasers and shit (no, seriously!) have found that once completing the iconic marble statues and buildings we know today, the Greeks covered them head to toe in bright primary colors. Greek sculptors worked together with painters to come up with psychedelic patterns and colors to make their statues and buildings pop.

So in the midst of all that theorizing and philosophizing, the Greeks were also really focused on making sure their day to day life looked like the album cover of Magical Mystery Tour. Oh, and you know the iconic Parthenon? Based on the way buildings were painted back then, it was most likely an eye-searing mash of bright yellow, red and blue.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

As years passed, like with the Pyramids, the primitive paint used on the statues chipped and wore off, so when they were rediscovered by later civilizations, they appeared in their all white form. And frankly people just liked the idea of the all white marble look.

Even so, archaeologists knew that the statues used to be painted, since there were ancient records showing people painting the damned things. However, people simply preferred to display the plain white statues, since they looked more like something made by the founders of Western civilization should look like, in the minds of many scholars. Pure, clean, capturing the shape and essence of scientific accuracy and artistic beauty--whereas the painted versions kinda looked like something you might have made during middle school art class.

The modern world as we know it was shaped by the minds of geniuses. But the same "outside the box" thinking that gave us our great innovations also gave them some truly ridiculous ideas.

Does that give us the right to mock some of history's greatest minds? Ah, who knows?

Thomas Edison is America's most beloved asshole inventor, famous for stealing other people's inventions, hiring thugs to physically intimidate his competition and heroically electrocuting an elephant to discredit the use of alternating current. Also, he invented the light bulb (which he stole) and the motion picture camera, which he only invented so he could film himself having sex with other men's wives [citation needed].

"...and you'll just be in the closet the whole time we're boning, filming the shit out of it."

Naturally, the next step for Edison was paranormal extermination. During the early days of the 20th century, contacting the spirit world was all the rage and any jackass with a gypsy wig and/or monocle could make bundles of cash holding seances to bilk grieving families hoping to talk to a deceased loved one. And if there was one thing Edison loved, it was money.

After intentionally burning his finger to point his fingerprint was erased, Edison noted the fingerprint grew back and triumphantly concluded that all human beings must be made of "immortal units" which cannot be destroyed, thus explaining the existence of ghosts. He set about creating a device that would trap these immortal units and allow them to be studied by the living.

"GET THE MICROSCOPE!"

Edison was incredibly secretive about the nature of his ghost hunting mechanism--not even a prototype was ever seen. Just about the only real detail anyone knows is that one of his assistants died while working on it, presumably because Edison wanted to test and see if it worked.

You'll have to watch Casper: Origins to learn more.

Nikola Tesla is like the photo negative of Thomas Edison. Edison made Direct Current (DC), Tesla made Alternating Current (AC). Edison became grotesquely rich, Tesla died poor. Edison got tons of stuff named after him, including corporations and high schools. All Tesla got was a crappy rock band from Sacramento.

Though it wasn't all sour grapes for Tesla--while Edison invented some pretty common place items like light bulbs and record players, Tesla excelled in awesome invention like robots, wireless electricity and death rays. He predicted the Internet 80 years before its existence. Also, he was played by David Bowie in a movie.

"Immediately, I rule harder than any scientist ever."

One thing Edison and Tesla did have in common was batshit lunacy. In Tesla's case, it was a pocket-sized earthquake generator. In 1898, Tesla conducted an experiment in mechanical resonance in his New York lab, which basically measures the tendency of something to absorb more energy from a vibration if said vibration matches its own natural frequency. In other words, everything has its own musical pitch that, if matched, will break the object, not unlike opera singers breaking crystal glasses with just their voices. Except in this case Tesla's crystal glasses were buildings.

Allegedly while testing his electro-mechanical oscillator (or earthquake machine), many buildings began to shake. Once the very building he stood in began to tremble, Tesla took a sledgehammer to the device, destroying it and likely saving everyone in the city.

"Shit, I've gotta break this fucking thing."

It's not really clear why Tesla was developing a portable earthquake machine, other than the fact that he could use it to get virtually whatever he wanted, for the rest of his life. There is no further record of Tesla using or trying to market the device, though we presume he kept a working version of it in his home in case he ever caught Edison combing through his garbage.

Tesla wouldn't hesitate to murder you with science.

As all of you (hopefully) know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which is arguably the single most important invention of all fucking time. As probably none of you know, one of Bell's less notable inventions is the six nippled sheep.

"SIX GODDAMN TITS ON A MOTHERFUCKING SHEEP!"

Bell spent the last 30 years of his life and $250,000 (adjusted for inflation that's roughly the Gross Domestic Product of Canada) on his beloved deranged sheep. Why would a famed inventor spend all his time and money just to shit on nature? To make more sheep, of course. Upon purchasing a pet ewe for his children, Bell noted sheep possessed only two nipples, an inferior number compared to pigs and cats. Evolution had clearly fucked this one up.

Bell versus Evolution: The Throwdown.

Bell figured that sheep with more nipples would naturally produce more offspring and thus make farmers' wallets fatter, a postulation not supported by science of any kind. Of course, the ramifications of the nipple enhanced sheep implies more far-reaching applications, the likes of which man has only fantasized about to this point.

And by "man" we mean Total Recall.