5 Truly Creepshow Moments in History

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The Bones of Soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo Were Turned Into Fertilizer

History is full of tales about unwitting cannibalism — Soylent Green, Sweeney Todd, Scott Tenorman — but those are just stories, right? Okay, Sweeney Todd might have been sort of real, but we know for a fact that people in England in the early 1800s ate vegetables fertilized with the bones of soldiers. They probably overcooked them, too.

Back then, it wasn’t uncommon to make fertilizer out of bone meal. It’s not even uncommon today, it’s just usually made from the bones of animals that have been slaughtered for food, so it’s hard to take a moral stand on it unless you’re Moby or something, and then you can’t take a moral stand on anything anyway.

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After the Battle of Waterloo left tens of thousands of soldiers and countless horses dead; however, fertilizer companies went all Mrs. Lovett on the battlefield. Those who were left standing couldn’t exactly load up all those bodies on a truck, so they kind of just had to leave them there, piled into a mass grave. Following what must have been an awkward debate about how long they should wait in terms of both respect and practicality, fertilizer companies swooped in and scavenged as much as they could to supplement their stock, which was all of it.

And we do mean all of it. Exactly one full skeleton has been recovered from the battlefield, which is now a parking lot because life is a morbid Joni Mitchell song. So many bones were stolen that it took them 200 years to put together even one full skeleton, all of which were carted back to England to nourish their potatoes, peas, and that’s about all the plants Brits eat for the next 40 years. They didn’t stop until an 1860 op-ed called out the practice, which truly illustrates how far we’ve come as a culture. These days, corporations are routinely held accountable for shady business dealings, but back then, someone had to say, “Hey, guys, maybe we should stop eating soldier bones.”