Weird History
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50 free Weird History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
History is usually taught as kings, battles and dates, but the past is also full of moments that sound made up. Armies have marched off over trifles, rulers have taxed the oddest things, a flood once came out of a storage tank, and more than one grand plan fell apart in a way nobody could have predicted. Every story in this quiz really happened. The questions cover strange wars and stranger truces, surprising royal pets, hoaxes that fooled whole countries, wartime schemes that sound like pranks, and the unlikely beginnings of things you may have at home. They open with the best-known oddities and work towards the tales that only true history fans have heard. It is written for curious kids and grown-ups alike, so it suits classrooms, family quiz nights and pub teams looking for a round nobody expects. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a story worth retelling.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bird did Australian soldiers armed with machine guns fail to wipe out in a 1932 military operation?
Emus
Emus were raiding wheat farms in Western Australia, but they scattered so quickly that 2,500 rounds were fired in six days with little effect on their numbers.
Q 02What could hundreds of people in Strasbourg not stop doing for weeks during a strange outbreak in 1518?
Dancing
Dancing spread to somewhere between 50 and 400 people after one woman began in the street, and nobody has ever settled why it happened.
Q 03What sweet, sticky substance burst from a giant tank and flooded Boston streets in a deadly 1919 wave?
Molasses
Molasses surged through the North End in a wave about 25 feet high moving at 35 mph, far too fast for anyone in its path to outrun.
Q 04Which flower sold for more than ten times a skilled craftsman's yearly pay during a Dutch craze of the 1630s?
Tulips
Tulips were traded as bulbs on paper contracts, and when prices collapsed abruptly in February 1637 the whole trade ground to a halt.
Q 05In which country was Hawaiian pizza, topped with ham and pineapple, first created in 1962?
Canada
Canada is where Greek-born restaurant owner Sam Panopoulos first tried canned pineapple on a pizza, naming it after the brand on the tin.
Q 06Under what everyday modern site in Leicester were the lost bones of King Richard III found in 2012?
A car park
A car park had been laid over the foundations of the friary church where Richard III was hastily buried without ceremony after dying in battle in 1485.
Q 07Which mythical creature, a supporter of the old royal coat of arms, is the national animal of Scotland?
Unicorn
The unicorn was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion, the beast that England's royals had adopted about a century earlier.
Q 08Which US president, who refused to shoot a captured bear on a hunt, gave the teddy bear its name?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt loathed the nickname Teddy, but a newspaper cartoon of the 1902 hunt inspired a toymaker to sell stuffed bears under it.
Q 09Britain's 1896 war with which island sultanate lasted under 45 minutes, the shortest war on record?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar's new sultan had moved into the palace without British approval, and a naval bombardment ended his reign in about 38 minutes.
Q 10What did Pope Stephen VI put on trial in Rome in 897, propped up on a throne to face the charges?
A corpse
A corpse: the body of his predecessor Formosus was taken from its tomb, a deacon answered for it, and it was found guilty and later thrown into the Tiber.
Q 11Which Roman was held for ransom by pirates as a young man, then returned with a fleet to capture them?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar was freed for a ransom of fifty talents in the ancient accounts, though modern historians think the story grew in the telling.
Q 12What insect, found jammed in a relay of Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947, was taped into the logbook?
A moth
A moth gave the operators a joke: engineers already called faults bugs, so they wrote beside it that this was the first actual case of a bug being found.
Q 13To which US state were London Bridge's facing stones shipped after a developer bought it in 1968?
Arizona
Arizona's Lake Havasu City rebuilt the bridge as a concrete frame clad in the original masonry, as a lure for people buying land in the new town.
Q 21Which Paris landmark did con man Victor Lustig pretend to sell to scrap metal dealers in 1925?
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain, so Lustig posed as a ministry official and told the dealers that the government secretly wanted it sold for scrap.
Q 22Which kitchen appliance was born after a radar engineer reportedly found a candy bar melted in his pocket?
Microwave oven
The microwave oven grew out of Percy Spencer's work on radar magnetrons, and one of the first foods he tested on purpose was popcorn.
Q 23Which piece of gym equipment began in 1818 as a hard-labour machine for convicts in English prisons?
Treadmill
Q 14On an island of which country did Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda keep fighting World War II until 1974?
Philippines
The Philippines island of Lubang was his hideout for nearly 29 years, and he gave up only when his old commanding officer flew in to relieve him of duty.
Q 15Which children's modelling clay was first sold in the 1930s as a putty for cleaning soot off wallpaper?
Play-Doh
Play-Doh began in Cincinnati as a cleaner for coal-stained walls, and found a second life as a toy once demand for wallpaper putty shrank after World War II.
Q 16Which fizzy drink was invented in wartime Germany when Coca-Cola syrup could no longer be imported?
Fanta
Fanta was made from whatever was left in the country, including sugar beet, whey and apple pomace, and sold three million cases in 1943.
Q 17Which Russian tsar taxed beards in 1698 and made bearded men carry a token to prove they had paid?
Peter the Great
Peter the Great wanted Russians to look like Western Europeans, so a man who kept his whiskers had to carry a copper or silver token showing a beard.
Q 18Which animal's ivory was used in George Washington's false teeth, which contained no wood despite the myth?
Hippopotamus
Hippopotamus ivory was carved to hold the teeth, alongside brass, gold and real human teeth, in dentures made by his dentist John Greenwood.
Q 19Which animal, a gift from Norway to King Henry III, fished in the Thames on a chain from the Tower of London?
A polar bear
A polar bear arrived in 1252, and London's sheriffs were ordered to pay fourpence a day for its upkeep while crowds watched it fish.
Q 20Which ancient monument did Cecil Chubb buy at auction in 1915 for £6,600 and later give to the nation?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge was one of several lots in the sale of a family estate, and Chubb, a local man, handed it to the public three years after his winning bid.
The treadmill was engineer William Cubitt's cure for idle prisoners, who climbed its turning steps as hard labour; it was also called the everlasting staircase.
Q 24Which country's soldiers mistakenly marched into Liechtenstein in 2007 after taking a wrong turn in bad weather?
Switzerland
Switzerland had 171 disoriented soldiers cross the border that night; decades earlier its artillery had accidentally shelled Liechtenstein's only ski resort.
Q 25What did astronaut John Young smuggle aboard Gemini 3 in 1965, hidden in a pocket of his spacesuit?
A corned beef sandwich
A corned beef sandwich came out in orbit and was shared for a few bites, and NASA later made clear that such snacks were barred from future missions.
Q 26Falling pieces of which spacecraft earned NASA a $400 littering fine from an Australian shire in 1979?
Skylab
Skylab came down east of Perth, and the Shire of Esperance's joke fine went unpaid until 2009, when a radio host raised the money from his listeners.
Q 27Which country's army enlisted a bear named Wojtek, who carried artillery shells at Monte Cassino?
Poland
Poland's soldiers gave Wojtek his own paybook, rank and serial number, and after the war he retired to Edinburgh Zoo, where old comrades came to visit.
Q 28What kind of animal was Hanno, the pet that the King of Portugal gave to Pope Leo X in the 1510s?
An elephant
An elephant, and a white one: visitors could watch the pope play with Hanno on Sundays, and the artist Raphael designed a memorial when the animal died.
Q 29Which country had a February 30 in 1712, added to undo a muddled attempt at changing calendars?
Sweden
Sweden went back to its old calendar that year by adding a second leap day, the only known time the date has really been used.
Q 30The shooting of which farm animal nearly brought the US and Britain to war in the San Juan Islands in 1859?
A pig
A pig that kept raiding an American settler's garden was shot, and the standoff that followed drew in troops and warships before arbitration settled the border.