“20 Most H*rrific T*rture Devices Ever Invented (Cr*el but Real) “

In 1809, an English town dunked a woman in a river for swearing. That was the mildest thing on this list. You’ll meet twenty real devices built by kings, courts, and even reformers who swore they were helping. Yet one of them killed an innocent man in 1762, and it took a famous writer to prove it.

Number 20 is the Ducking Stool. In 1809, a woman named Jenny Pipes was strapped into a chair in the English town of Leominster and dunked in the river. Her crime was cursing out loud, and that was enough. Town leaders had kept that chair for centuries, and it sat on a long wooden arm so they could swing it over the water and let go. It sounds funny until you hear what happened in Nottingham in 1731: a woman died in one of those chairs, and the mayor was prosecuted over it. Why did towns keep the thing for so long? It cost almost nothing, it drew a crowd, and it shamed you in front of every neighbor you had. Jenny Pipes was the last full ducking on record, but not the last cruelty. The next device in England skipped the water entirely and locked an iron cage around a woman’s head.

At number 19 sits the Scold’s Bridle. This one was an iron cage that locked around your head with a metal plate pressed against your tongue so you couldn’t speak. Courts in England and Scotland used it on women branded as scolds, and the victim could be paraded through the street while neighbors watched. The law behind it was real—being a common scold was a crime in England, and nobody wiped that charge off the books until 1967. In 1829, a Washington writer named Anne Royall was convicted of it, and the judge fined her $10. Her real offense, plenty of people said, was writing about crooked politicians. Keep that small fine in your head, because an American court puts a price on torture later in this video, and you’ll want to compare the two. So who was the bridle really built to silence? You’d be right to suspect it wasn’t just gossip. The next device handed the punishment to a whole crowd, and one of its victims became a famous writer in England.

Coming in at number 18 is the Pillory. A pillory locked your head and hands into a wooden board in the middle of town, and the crowd decided the rest. If your neighbors liked you, they left you alone; if they didn’t, they threw rocks, and some victims never walked away. So who gave a crowd that kind of power? The law did, on purpose. In 1703, Daniel Defoe, who later wrote Robinson Crusoe, was sentenced to stand in the pillory three times over a satirical pamphlet. Instead of rocks, the crowd threw flowers at him and drank to his health. It was really a vote on how much a town hated you. England dropped the pillory for good in 1837, and Delaware still kept a whipping post until 1972. Honestly, that second date surprised me more than the first, and it might surprise you too. But some punishments didn’t need a crowd at all. The next one needed only a sharp beam of wood, and armies used it on their own soldiers.

That makes the Wooden Horse number 17. Commanders loved the wooden horse because it cost almost nothing to build. They took a long beam with a sharp top edge, set it on legs, and made a soldier sit astride it—and you can guess how that felt. Weights tied to his feet made every minute worse. Officers used it for centuries, and American officers were still ordering it during the Civil War. It left a man hurt but alive, and an army always needs its men alive. Why did it matter that the horse stood in the middle of camp? Because shame was half the point, and you can’t shame a man in the dark.

In 1818, an English engineer found a way to make torture look like honest work, and British prisons kept it running for about eighty years. Number 16 is the Treadwheel. An engineer named William Cubitt built the first one, and it was a giant wheel with steps around the outside. Prisoners climbed those steps for hours while the wheel turned beneath them, and you’d never move an inch. It could grind grain or pump water, so officials called it “useful labor.” You can call it what it was: a staircase to nowhere. Oscar Wilde, one of the most famous writers in England, got two years of hard labor in 1895, and hard labor then meant hours on a treadmill or a crank. His health never recovered, and he died five years later. Does it still count as torture if the wheel grinds grain? The men who built it said:

“No.”

And nobody asked you or the prisoners. The treadwheel at least left a man’s back alone. The next device went straight for it, and the Royal Navy used it on sailors for hundreds of years.

At number 15 comes the Cat o’ Nine Tails. The cat was a whip with nine knotted cords, and the Royal Navy used it on sailors for centuries. A captain could order you a dozen lashes for a small offense. For big crimes, the sentence was flogging around the fleet, where a sailor was rowed from ship to ship and whipped at each one, and some men didn’t survive it. The man holding the whip was usually a fellow sailor, and he was ordered to swing with full force. Why did the Navy cling to it so long? Naval officers argued:

“A ship full of armed men needs fear to keep order.”

In 1850, America banned flogging on Navy ships. The Royal Navy kept it until 1879, which means the telephone already existed when Britain dropped it. That whip hit a man from the outside. The next device was small enough to fit in your pocket, and it once made a young painter swear to her own truth while it tightened.

Number 14 is the Thumbscrew. A thumbscrew was a small iron vise with a screw on top. A jailer set your thumbs inside and turned the screw slowly. It was cheap, it was easy to carry, and it hurt far more than its size suggested. Courts across Europe used it. Scotland’s Privy Council aimed it at religious rebels in the seventeenth century. In Rome in 1612, a painter named Artemisia Gentileschi, who was about eighteen, accused a fellow artist, Agostino Tassi, of raping her. The court tied cords around her fingers, then tightened them to test whether she was lying. The trial record says she kept crying out:

“It is true! It is true!”

Think about that for a second. Would you have trusted a court that tortured the victim to check her honesty, and chose the hands of a painter? You haven’t forgotten the innocent man from 1762, have you? He’s still waiting. But first comes a device that did its work with a hammer while a king watched.

That makes the Boot number 13. The boot did exactly what its name says: jailers fitted a frame around your leg, then drove wedges between the frame and the bone, tightening it with every blow. In 1590, a Scottish teacher named John Fian went into the boot during the North Berwick witch trials. A pamphlet from the next year says his legs were crushed. King James VI was said to have watched some of the questioning himself. Fian confessed, and in January of 1591, he was burned in Edinburgh. The king later wrote a whole book about witches in 1597. What gets me is how a confession pulled out by a hammer could count as evidence for anything. Would you believe a word of it? Then there’s a device named for a man who ran the Tower of London, and it did the opposite of what you’d expect.

Number 12 is the Scavenger’s Daughter. The name sounds like a fairy tale, but it came from Leonard Skeffington, who ran the Tower of London for Henry VIII. People twisted his name into “scavenger” over time. The device was an iron frame that pressed you into a tight ball for an hour or more. The rack stretched a person out, and this squeezed a person in. Historians argue about how often jailers really used it because the records are thin. Even so, Tudor England built it, and that tells you something about the people in charge. What kind of mind sits down and designs that? The next device didn’t hurt the living at all; it waited until after the hanging, and it was built to scare the neighbors of a dead man.

At number 11 sits the Gibbet Cage. After a hanging, an English court could order the body locked in an iron cage and hung up near the scene of the crime so you had to see it on every trip down the road. Courts called that “hanging in chains.” The last man treated this way was William Jobling in 1832. Jobling was a coal miner who joined a strike in northeast England, and he was hanged for a killing that happened during it. Local stories say his friends took the body down quietly in the night. In 1834, England banned the practice. Was the cage really a torture device? Ask the family that had to walk past it every day. Not every cruel idea came from kings, though. The next one came from reformers, and a famous novelist who walked through it in 1842 came out shaken.

Number 10 is the Silent Cell at Eastern State Penitentiary. Eastern State opened in Philadelphia in 1829, and Quaker reformers designed it to fix criminals without a single blow. Each prisoner lived alone in his cell, ate alone, worked alone, and wore a hood whenever guards moved him so you never saw another face. The idea was that silence, they hoped, would make him sorry. It didn’t go that way. Critics said men lost their grip on reality after years alone. Charles Dickens visited in 1842, and he wrote:

“The slow wearing down of the brain is worse than any torture of the body.”

The wild part about this cell, honestly, is that nobody in the building thought they were the villain. Could you spot cruelty if everyone around you called it kindness? The next device could break your shoulders with nothing but a rope and a high beam.

That makes the Strappado number nine. A jailer tied your hands behind your back, ran the rope over a pulley, and hauled you off the floor by your wrists. Then he let you drop partway and caught you over and over until your shoulders came apart. What would you have said to make it stop? Almost anything—and that’s exactly what many people confessed to. Courts in Italy, Spain, and Germany used it, and the Spanish Inquisition called it the garrucha, which means pulley in Spanish. What gets me is that judges treated those confessions as proof. Many courts even made the prisoner repeat the confession later without torture, which tells you the judges knew exactly what they were doing. Spain used the next device until 1974, and one of its last victims was twenty-five years old.

Number eight is the Garrote. A garrote is an iron collar with a screw behind the neck, and the executioner turned the screw until the collar closed. Spain used it as an official method of execution for centuries. In March of 1974, Spain used it on an anarchist named Salvador Puig Antich, who was twenty-five and had been convicted of killing a police officer. Protests broke out across Europe, but dictator Francisco Franco refused to spare him. Franco himself died in 1975. Spain’s new law of the land banned peacetime executions in 1978. How does a tool that old survive into the age of color television, when you could already watch a man walk on the moon? Because the man at the top wanted it, and nobody could stop him. The next punishment was invented to protect a family’s land, and it killed an old farmer in Massachusetts in 1692.

At number seven comes Peine Forte et Dure. The name is French for “strong and hard punishment.” In English courts, a prisoner had to say:

“Guilty,”

or:

“Not guilty,”

before a trial could start. If you refused to speak, the court laid stones or iron weights on your chest until you answered or died. Why would you choose that? Because a convicted felon lost his land to the Crown, and a man who died without a verdict could pass his farm to his children. In 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, a farmer named Giles Corey, about eighty years old, refused to plead to witchcraft charges. Officers laid him under heavy stones, and when pressed to enter a plea, he famously demanded:

“More weight!”

He died two days later. In 1586, a York butcher’s wife named Margaret Clitherow met the same end for refusing to plead; she had been accused of sheltering Catholic priests. England dropped pressing in 1772, so this torture lasted into the reign of George III, the king who lost America. A court that kills you for staying silent is one kind of cruelty. In 1902, an American army court found an officer guilty of torturing a mayor, and it fined him $50.

Number six is the Water Cure. In 1902, Major Edwin Glenn of the United States Army stood trial for torturing a Philippine mayor named Tobalno. Soldiers had forced water into his mouth and stomach to make him talk. The army convicted Glenn, and his penalty was a one-month suspension and a fine of $50. You remember Anne Royall’s $10, right? An American court charged a journalist ten dollars for speaking, and it charged an officer fifty dollars for torture. The army’s own top lawyer called the sentence:

“Far too light.”

And he was right. What did Glenn’s career lose? It lost nothing at all. He rose to major general in the First World War, and a highway in Alaska was named after him. Now go back to the Tower of London, where a Protestant writer was hurt so badly that she couldn’t walk to her own execution.

That makes the Rack number five. The rack was a wooden frame with a roller at each end. Your wrists were tied to one roller and your ankles to the other, and a handle turned the rollers apart a little at a time. It stretched the body until the joints gave way. In 1546, a Protestant writer named Anne Askew was racked in the Tower of London after she refused to name others who shared her faith. Two of the most powerful men in England, Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich, turned the handles with their own hands. Askew was carried to the stake in a chair, and she burned that July. Who do you think did that work? These weren’t masked strangers in a basement; they were the Lord Chancellor and a senior royal officer. And you can still read her own account of it. But the worst prison of the Vietnam War wasn’t in a castle. American money helped pay for parts of it, and a visit from Congress in 1970 exposed what sat in its cells.

Number four is the Tiger Cages of Con Son Island. Con Son is an island off the south coast of Vietnam, and the French built a prison there when they ruled the country. Its stone cells, called tiger cages, had iron bars across the top. Guards walked above on a catwalk and looked down at prisoners shackled to the floor. In 1970, a group of American congressmen toured the prison, and an aide named Tom Harkin found the cages. He later became a United States senator. His photos ran in Life magazine, and you could see prisoners packed into stone pits. Many of them were held for their politics, not for crimes. American money had helped pay for the prison system, so nobody watching at home could say:

“This is somebody else’s problem.”

Would you have wanted your tax dollars in that building? Cruel as that was, an ancient Persian king came up with something that used no iron at all. It needed two boats, a pot of honey, and a lot of time.

At number three sits Scaphism. Scaphism comes from one source: the Greek writer Plutarch, who wrote about a Persian soldier named Mithridates around the year 100 AD. Mithridates had bragged in 401 BC:

“I was the one who killed Prince Cyrus, the king’s brother!”

King Artaxerxes had him laid inside two boats fitted together, with only his head and limbs sticking out, and the guards fed him milk and honey. Insects and rot did the rest, and Plutarch says it took seventeen days. Plutarch wrote about five hundred years after the event, so you should treat the details with care, as historians do. Can you trust a story told that long after the fact? Maybe not every detail, yet people have repeated it for nearly two thousand years. A Greek tyrant in Sicily ordered a hollow bronze animal built for one purpose, and ancient writers swore it was real.

Number two is the Brazen Bull. Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily, ruled in the middle of the sixth century BC. The story says a metalworker named Perillos built him a hollow bronze bull. Victims were locked inside through a door, and a fire underneath turned their cries into the sound of an animal. Ancient writers like Pindar and Diodorus described it, and one claimed a Roman general, Scipio, found the bull in Carthage in 146 BC and sent it home. Phalaris supposedly tested it on the inventor first. Some modern historians doubt the bull ever existed because no object survives and no writer lived through it. Why include it, then? The ancient world believed a man with total power could do this, and they told the story as a warning to you and me. The top spot belongs to a machine used on a real man whose name sits in a court record, and an entire country learned he was innocent.

Number one is the Breaking Wheel. The breaking wheel was a large wagon wheel, and the executioner used an iron bar on the prisoner’s arms and legs, one bone at a time. France and Germany used it for centuries into the 1800s. The man at the center of the worst case was Jean Calas, a cloth merchant in Toulouse, France, who was sixty-three. He was a Protestant in a Catholic city, and in 1761, his grown son Marc-Antoine was found hanged in the family shop. A rumor spread that Calas killed his son to stop him from becoming Catholic. The judges of Toulouse believed it. In March of 1762, they sentenced him to be tortured and broken on the wheel. He never confessed, and he declared until the end:

“I am innocent!”

After about two hours, he was strangled. Voltaire heard about it and spent three years fighting for the family, and you can still read his Treatise on Tolerance. In 1765, the judges in Paris cleared Calas, and in 1780, France banned torture to get confessions before trial. Calas died a convicted killer, and clearing his name took three years.