From cults that’ll make you drink some really bad Kool-Aid to war victims that choose death over torture, we count 15 times a large group of people have committed mass suicide.
15 – Town of Demmin,
- This took place near the end of World War 2, almost 1000 people, mostly women and children that decided to take their own life instead of getting raped and murdered by the Soviet Red Army
- It was 1945 when people used everything from guns to razor blades and poison, slaughtering their own children and loved ones instead of enduring the pain and humiliation from a notorious army
- Sadly, some parents killed their own children but couldn’t die themselves because they didn’t have enough poison leftover to finish the job
14 – People’s Temple,
- 900 members of the infamous religious group People’s Temple that ended their own lives by consuming a poisonous drink, with almost 300 of said members being children forced to commit suicide
- 1978, the goal was to escape fascism by ending their own lives, defectors who tried to escape were shot to death as they ran, and children were injected with the drink against their will and murdered
- Before this, their members had been encouraged to drink non-poisonous drink under the belief it WOULD kill them, but sadly, this time it really did
13 – Badung,
- A town in Bali attacked by the Dutch army during 1906, in which the Balinese officials recognised they’d stand no chance against the campaign and thus opted to take their own lives
- They did this by performing the Puputan, translated into English as simply “The End”, stabbing members of their own family in violent bloodbaths as if in a trance
- What the Dutch army saw when they arrived was a horrorshow, dismembered human flesh everywhere, babies torn to pieces by their own mothers, so bad that it actually traumatised these hardened soldiers for a long time afterward
12 – Masada,
- 60AD, Isreal, the Roman conquest of Judea, over 900 jews barricaded themselves into a fortress in the Judean Desert and for 12 years they survived there
- Emperor Lucius Flavius Silvius then constructed a giant ramp to breach the walls, but by the time this happened all he and his soldiers found were burnt buildings and hundreds of bodies
- Only a handful of survivors lived to tell the tale, that their leader wanted themselves slain before wives could be abused and children sold as slaves
11 – Heaven’s Gate,
- 39 followers of this strange religion in California, 1997, in which they believed suicide would allow their souls to leave the human vessels and go on a spiritual journey alongside the coment Hale-Bopp (pronounced: hail-bop)
- Various male members went under voluntary castration in preperation for their new genderless existence aboard the comet, and while they successfully committed suicide, one member fell into a coma and waited most of a year before completing it
- Tragically, actress Nichelle Nichols from the original series of Star Trek – her brother covered his head in a plastic bag and used propane gas to end his own life, the suicide note explaining he went the same way as the rest of Heaven’s Gate