Ah, the History of Torture series. We certainly hope you’ve missed our run down of some of the various methods of torture utilized throughout history. We know we’ve certainly missed writing about them, gruesome as that may sound.

Let’s jump right back into it, then:

Impalement

This is one of the types of tortures that really makes you wonder how we’ve made it so far as a society. We have iPhones and medicine, aircrafts that almost magically fly through the sky, and Twinkies. We also have impalement, a form of torture that again focused on causing pain starting at the genitals.

The victim didn’t always have to begin their impalement with the genitals – the sides or abdomen could also be used; however, it was very common to insert the spike into the anus or vagina of the victim, with a ‘perfect’ impalement moving throughout the entire body and exiting at the mouth.

Torturers who wanted to increase the amount of time and subsequent pain of the victim would use multiple stakes to balance the body and the weight so that the victim would not be able to slide down so quickly.

While impalement has been a part of human history since as far back as the 900′s BC, there’s one rock star of a sadist who really took impalement to a whole new level: Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, and – wait for it! – Dracula. That’s right. In case you didn’t know before, the basis of the Dracula legend is from a real life freak.

We won’t get completely into this sicko in this post, but we will leave impalement for another torture method with this fun fact: During his reign, Vlad the Impaler impaled over 20,000 people, and at one point impaled so many at once that it created a ‘forest’ of corpses for an Ottoman army to see on the banks of the Danube. This was too much and the army actually turned around, because c’mon, fuck that shit.

The Lead Sprinkler

We know, it sounds like something you would buy at a local hardware store back in the 50′s, when we thought that getting covered in lead wasn’t such a big deal. That’s not the case though, the lead sprinkler was a whole lot more terrible.

Molten lead (or the molten metal preferred by the executioner) would be poured into one end of the device. The holes on the other end? You guessed it – they were there to ‘sprinkle’ searing hot liquid metal onto the victim. If you were in a pinch and didn’t have a molten metal on hand you could also use boiling water or oil as well.

Aside from the insidiousness of this device, it should be said that the molten metal trick is something that would be used even without the sprinkler, with many executioners pouring molten metal into the victims eyes to burn right their skulls and elicit death.

The Intestinal Crank

We know, it sounds like the name of a Steve Carell movie, but it’s not. The intestinal crank was a torture method that was commonly used to extract confessions or gain information, because doing the entire ‘good cop, bad cop’ thing didn’t occur to anyone until the 1970′s.

We feel like putting this one in recipe format in case you ever want to play intestinal crank with your friends:

You will need:

• 1 Table (to strap the victim down)
• 1 sharp knife, dull knife, rusty knife, a sharpened rock – whatever you can use to make an incision.
• 1 hook
• 1 length of rope or chain
• 1 crank (think like you’re making a rotisserie chicken

Directions

• Strap your victim down – we don’t want them getting up and running away, it would ruin the recipe!
• Go ahead and make an incision in the lower stomach area. It needs to be big enough to fit your hand inside.
• Reach in – don’t be shy! Grab onto the victim’s intestine and fish that sucker out. Take your cutting device a slice the sucker in twain.
• Attach the small intestine to the hook (which you have prepared earlier with your rope or chain or whatever.
• Crank away! The victim’s intestine will begin to wrap around your crank.

INTERESTING FACT: You will be able to extract between 10-30 feet of intestine out before your victim runs out!

There you have it, a really cool way to teach your friends and family about the human body! This form of torture was 100% fatal, because once you get your information, why do you care of the victim lives to tell about it?