Composer Frederic Chopin, scientist/inventor/philanthropist Alfred Nobel, and children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen were very scared of being buried alive. Andersen always kept a sign around whenever he slept, which said he wasn’t really dead, he just looked that way, but was really sleeping. The fear of being buried alive is called “taphophobia.”

As a child, Alfred Hitchcock’s father had him put in a jail cell for five minutes to put a scare into him after he had misbehaved. Likely as a result, he developed a lifelong fear of both jail and the police.

In 2010, Angelina Jolie’s favorite book was Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula by M.J. Trow.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “boo!” is an onomatopoeia for the sound made by oxen and cows.

Pliny the Elder wrote about arena spectators who drank the blood of fallen gladiators in hopes it would cure their epilepsy.

This article appears in November 1 • 2019.

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