Q 01/05

What did Frau Troffea begin doing uncontrollably in Strasbourg in July 1518, starting an outbreak?

A) Laughing

B) Weeping

C) Screaming

D) Dancing

Answer · why

D) Dancing

Dancing spread to as many as 400 people within weeks, and the city's first cure was more of it: officials put up a stage and hired musicians so they c...

Q 02/05

The Catacombs of Paris hold the remains of roughly how many people?

A) 600,000

B) 2 million

C) 6 million

D) 20 million

Answer · why

C) 6 million

About 6 million Parisians lie there: from the 1780s their bones were carted by night from the city's overflowing cemeteries into its old stone quarrie...

Q 03/05

Which country's Sedlec Ossuary is famous for a chandelier made of human bones?

A) Portugal

B) Poland

C) Austria

D) Czechia

Answer · why

D) Czechia

Czechia's bone church stands at Sedlec, near Kutná Hora, where woodcarver František Rint arranged the heaps in 1870 and signed the wall in bone.

Q 04/05

What message greets visitors to Rome's Capuchin Crypt, decorated with friars' bones?

A) Abandon all hope, you who enter here

B) Remember that you too will die, brother, and be judged

C) The dead keep their secrets, and so shall you

D) What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be

Answer · why

D) What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be

New friars were dug up after about 30 years so their bones could join the decor; Mark Twain wrote about the place.

Q 05/05

Tollund Man, a 2,400-year-old Danish bog body found in 1950, looked so fresh that his finders took him for what?

A) A sleeping farmer

B) A recent murder victim

C) A shipwrecked sailor

D) A wax figure

Answer · why

B) A recent murder victim

A recent murder victim, the peat cutters thought, so they called the police; the plaited noose still round his neck was in fact some 2,400 years old.