The belief in Vampires or Vampire-like beings well predates the modern era, and superstitions about them ran deep. Those beliefs extended even to the modern era, when “vampire panics” led people to exhume corpses they thought were somehow affecting the living.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.
The 1927 Coverdale Mine Brinks Armored Car robbery was a particularly violent episode in the particularly violent era.
In 1933 a farmer named Ed Carlson walked into a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and asked a simple question- what was killing his cattle? The answer to that question would earn the university millions of dollars, and revolutionize the fields of both medicine and vermin extermination. The strange story of warfarin deserves to be remembered.