When Whoopi Goldberg worked as a cosmetician in a mortuary, she called the corpses "big dolls" and made them up to resemble celebrities like Joan Collins. "I'm glad you're dead," she would say on occasion. "You were a creep."

Gunfire during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania Court House was so intense that a tree at the courthouse was whittled down to a four-foot stump.

In Ghana, where personalized coffins are common, one man was buried in a giant Nike sneaker.

One day in 2001, Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe went for a jog, planning to visit the observation deck at the World Trade Center. On the way, he realized he'd forgotten his camera. He returned to his hotel, flipped on the TV, and saw the World Trade Center on fire.

The black box from an Aeroflot jet that crashed into a mountain in 1994 revealed that the last words spoken on the flight were: "Daddy, can I turn this?"

When Louis Pasteur was working on a rabies vaccine, he and his assistants agreed that anyone who got infected would be shot in the head.

While hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Regis Philbin considered using "Is that your final answer?" as his epitaph.

A Czech family asked Guinness to add a new record for breeding a bunny with 3 penises. Two other bunnies had already been eaten because they had just 2 penises each.

Thanks to "Finding Your Roots," Anderson Cooper learned that an ancestor had been blugeoned to death by a slave. Cooper's response? "He had 12 slaves. I don't feel bad for him."

On 12 March 1928, William Mulholland, chief engineer of the L.A. Water Department, declared that the St. Francis Dam was safe. Hours later it failed, causing a flood that killed 600 people.