Big Dave’s 5 Nuggets Of Knowledge For Your Noggin’ – Halloween Edition – (10/31/23)

Here are Big Dave’s 5 Nuggets of Knowledge for your Noggin’ – a special Halloween Edition – on this Tuesday, October 31st, 2023. Let’s learn something together:

1. Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride originally featured real human remains, which were acquired through UCLA.  The ride was a big investment, and they thought the fake skeletons of the time were “just too unconvincing.”  They’ve since replaced all the actual bones with models or so they say.
2. Mexico’s “Island of the Dolls” (a.k.a. “La Isla de las Muñecas”) is supposedly one of the most haunted places on Earth.  Legend has it the island’s caretaker found a girl who drowned in mysterious circumstances.  The next day, he discovered a doll floating in the water, and he hung it from a tree.  The young girl’s spirit haunted the island, and to appease her, the caretaker kept hanging dolls from the trees until his death in 2001.
3. Dead bodies can get goosebumps.  In the living, goosebumps are a nervous system reaction to external stimuli.  But in the dead, they’re part of rigor mortis.
4. History shows that taphophobia, or the fear of being buried alive, has some degree of merit.  There were stories of it happening enough that “safety coffins” were patented during the 18th and 19th centuries.  One had a BELL above ground that a person could ring from below if they suddenly came back to life.  (This was mostly during the cholera epidemic, when people worried that they could be mistaken for being dead.)
5. When you die, the last sense to leave your body is the ability to hear.

Be sure to share these 5 Nuggets of Knowledge for your Noggin’ with your family, friends & coworkers at some point today!

(IFL Science / Wikipedia / Snopes / Wikipedia / Neuroscience News)