1

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)

The definitive blonde bombshell, the one and only Marilyn Monroe took the world by storm with her talent and breathtaking beauty during Hollywood’s Golden Age. And although the world will always remember her image and performance in classic films like Some Like It Hot (1959), her unforgettable smile often hid deep sadness.

The queen of glamour suffered from anxiety and substance abuse, and was very frustrated by the roles offered to her; her life came to a sudden end on August 5, 1962, at the age of 36, following an overdose.

2

Judy Garland (1922–1969)

When you think of Judy Garland, sweet, hopeful Dorothy Gale in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz immediately comes to mind. Just 17 when the film was released, her career as an actress and gifted singer was off to a fantastic start, and her future looked bright.

But the studio system repeatedly pressured Garland with strict dieting and the use of stimulants and sedatives when working as a young performer. Later in life, she struggled with mental illness and financial problems. Garland was 47 when she passed away in London on June 22, 1969, after an overdose.

3

James Dean (1931–1955)

What James Dean achieved in just five years in the movie industry is mind-blowing. In the 1950s, Dean was one of the most iconic figures in Hollywood; he was the cool young heartthrob who became a symbol of rebellion after the smash hit Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

But at the peak of his career, he had a car crash while driving his Porsche 550 Spyder in California and was killed at age 24.

4

John Candy (1950–1994)

John Candy’s warm and funny characters have a special place in Hollywood history, and his death still feels unfair. Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1950, Candy became a major comedy star thanks to classics like Trains & Automobiles (1987), Uncle Buck (1989), and The Great Outdoors (1988).

And while he still had so much to offer, on March 4, 1994, he suffered a sudden heart attack while filming Wagons East! (1994) and died at the age of 43.

5

Robin Williams (1951–2014)

Robin Williams always inspires a bittersweet smile. A genius comedian who could make audiences crack up with a funny accent or an impish smile — with real dramatic chops, too —  Williams starred in classics like Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and brought us to tears with his outstanding performance in movies like Good Will Hunting (1997).

But behind the hilarious comedian, Robin struggled with depression and substance dependence, as well as Lewy body disease. He died by suicide on August 11, 2014, at the age of 63.

6

Patrick Swayze (1952–2009)

Patrick Swayze made movie history in classics like Dirty Dancing (1987) and Ghost (1990). Swayze’s energetic performances and his image as the romantic, tough heartthrob have a lasting legacy.

He was nominated three times for the Golden Globes (1997, 1990, and 1995). Sadly, in 2008, Swayze announced he had pancreatic cancer and passed away 20 months later on September 14, 2009, at the age of 57.

7

River Phoenix (1970–1993)

The older brother of the Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix was considered one of the most promising young actors of his generation. His ticket to stardom came with Stand by Me (1986) when he was just 16 years old, and from there, his reputation took off with movies like Running on Empty (1988) and My Own Private Idaho (1991).

But when he was riding high in Hollywood, Phoenix lost his life at just 23, outside the Viper Room nightclub in Los Angeles on October 31, 1993, from acute multiple drug intoxication.

8

Chris Farley (1964–1997)

Starting out in Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and later joining Saturday Night Live in 1990, Chris Farley knew exactly how to get a laugh out of the audience with memorable characters like motivational speaker Matt Foley.

He became a major comedy star and made it to the big screen in movies like Tommy Boy (1995) and Black Sheep (1996). But behind the laughter, Farley struggled with substance use. He lost his life due to an overdose in 1997 when he was just 33 years old.

9

Heath Ledger (1979–2008)

Heath Ledger remains one of the most respected actors in Hollywood, and his performances are widely remembered, especially his final turn in The Dark Knight (2008), in which he gave a masterful portrayal of Batman’s most iconic villain, the Joker — considered by many to be the best portrayal of the character ever.

Ledger was found dead in his apartment at the age of 28 from an accidental overdose. Thirteen months later, he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor posthumously for his performance.

10

Jonathan Brandis (1976–2003)

Jonathan Brandis rose to fame after he played the courageous Bill Denbrough in the 1990 television miniseries It , based on Stephen King’s novel, though he had also previously starred in The NeverEnding Story II (1990).

Brandis was a teen heartthrob with a seemingly bright future, but his career opportunities started to dry up as he got older. He struggled with severe depression and heavy drinking, and took his own life on November 12, 2003, at the age of 27.

1

There's an unexplained billion-year gap

Look closely at the canyon walls, and you'll notice something strange: a clean, sharp line where ancient rock simply stops, and a much younger layer begins directly above it.

This geological puzzle is called the "Great Unconformity," and it represents over a billion years of rock layers that are simply absent , as though that stretch of time never happened. In some spots, rock dated 1.8 billion years old sits directly beneath rock that is only 520 million years old. Where did the missing billion years go?

The leading theory involves the violent breakup of an ancient supercontinent, but scientists are still piecing it together.

2

During the Cold War, it hid a nuclear fallout shelter

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. government converted part of the Grand Canyon Caverns into a fallout shelter. This dry cave system, more than 200 feet underground, was stocked with enough food and water to sustain 2,000 people. Naturally, it was never occupied, and the supplies were never used.

The caverns have since been transformed into a tourist attraction, with organized tours winding through the same underground chambers that were once intended as a refuge from nuclear war. You can even book a night's stay there.

3

The Federal Aviation Administration was founded after a crash over the canyon

In 1956, two commercial passenger planes collided in midair over the eastern Grand Canyon, killing all 128 people on board both crafts. Rescue teams struggled to reach the wreckage deep inside the canyon, and the extreme heat of the crash had caused the planes' aluminum to fuse with the bedrock. There were no survivors.

The disaster exposed a terrifying truth: the U.S. air traffic control system was dangerously outdated, relying on pilots' visual estimates and rough guesswork from controllers , with no way to separate fast-moving aircraft from slow ones, or instrument-flying planes from those navigating by sight. Congress responded by passing legislation that created both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board.

4

A hoax suggested that an Egyptian civilization had lived there

In 1909, the Arizona Gazette reported that an explorer named G. E. Kinkaid had discovered a vast underground citadel inside the canyon, filled with artifacts linked to ancient Egyptian civilization. He even claimed the expedition had been funded by the Smithsonian.

This story described hieroglyphics on the walls, mummies in the chambers, and relics pointing to a direct connection with the Egypt of the pharaohs. It was incredibly detailed, and it was, of course, a hoax. No evidence for any of Kinkaid's claims ever surfaced.

5

Fewer than 100 people have ever hiked its full length

Among the few people who have completed the through-hike of the Grand Canyon is Jen Hogan, the first woman to accomplish it, finishing her journey in 2021–2022.

It’s a full 800-mile length below the rim. The route involves extreme heat, flash floods, near-impassable areas, and stretches with no water or trail whatsoever. Around 60 or 70 people have reportedly accomplished it. This makes it one of the most exclusive feats on Earth.

6

The Grand Canyon's rocks predate dinosaurs entirely

Visitors scanning the canyon walls for fossils are often surprised to learn they won't find any dinosaur bones here. The rock layers of the Grand Canyon are simply older than dinosaurs. This fact alone can be shocking: staring at its walls means staring at marine fossils from as far back as 1.2 billion years ago. Some of its caves hold the remains of ancient mammals. The canyon is a window into a world that existed long before the dinosaurs, when the land that is now Arizona lay beneath a shallow sea.

7

The park is bigger than Rhode Island

Numbers alone rarely capture the Grand Canyon's scale, so here's a different approach. Rhode Island covers about 1,214 square miles, and the Grand Canyon National Park spans 1,904 square miles.

The canyon's depth exceeds four Empire State Buildings (which is 1,454 feet) stacked on top of one another. That’s 6,093 feet at its deepest point.

8

But it's not the deepest canyon on Earth

For all its grandeur, the Grand Canyon does not hold the depth record. Pictured above, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, China, plunges to 17,567 feet, which is nearly three times deeper. Carved by the Yarlung Tsangpo River as it cuts through the eastern Himalayas, that canyon is so remote and extreme that it remained largely uncharted until the late 20th century.

9

It is home to a pink rattlesnake found nowhere else on Earth

The Grand Canyon Pink Rattlesnake has a pinkish-red coloring that matches the canyon's own distinctive rock walls so closely that it's nearly invisible. It is found nowhere else in the world. Officially classified as Crotalus oreganus abyssus , it has darker diamond-shaped markings along its back that deepen the camouflage further.

10

There's a village at the bottom: Supai Village

For over 1,000 years, the remote village of Supai has been home to the Havasupai Tribe, the People of the Blue-Green Waters. It is located an eight-mile hike from the rim, but sits roughly 3,000 feet deep inside the Grand Canyon.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has called it the most remote community in the contiguous United States, and it has no automobiles and no road access. The only ways in are on foot, by mule, or by helicopter. It is also the only place in the United States where the postal service still delivers mail by mule train.

1

Rachel Jackson: A "Bigamy" scandal (1820s)

In 1791, a young Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson. Both believed her first husband, Captain Lewis Robards, had successfully finalized their divorce. Apparently, Robards didn’t file the petition, making her marriage to Jackson technically bigamous. Once the divorce went through in 1794, they officially remarried.

During the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson’s political opponents used this legal mistake against him. They branded Rachel a loose woman and a bigamist in pamphlets scattered across the country. The intense public shaming broke her spirit and deteriorated her health. She suffered a fatal heart attack just days before Jackson’s inauguration, leaving the newly elected president heartbroken and extremely bitter toward his political rivals for the rest of his life.

2

Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child (1884)

Decades later, another personal bombshell rocked another presidential race. Republican opponents revealed that Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland, a bachelor praised for his integrity, had fathered a child out of wedlock with a widow called Maria Halpin ten years before.

Republicans paraded through the streets chanting, "Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?" Instead of denying the affair or trying to bury it, Cleveland instructed his campaign managers to do something radical: "Tell the truth." He admitted to supporting the child financially. His honesty caught his opponents off guard and won over voters who were tired of such dirty political tactics.

3

The Crédit Mobilier scandal (1872)

This particular scandal stands as one of the most shameless corporate schemes of the Gilded Age. Stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad formed a fraudulent construction company called Crédit Mobilier of America . Then, they hired themselves to build the transcontinental railroad at inflated prices, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies.

To prevent Congress from investigating their profit margins, Congressman Oakes Ames distributed discounted shares of the company’s stock to influential politicians, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax. When the press exposed the story in 1872, the revelation that lawmakers were bribing themselves tarnished the legacy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration.

4

The Whiskey Ring scandal (1875)

A few years later, another financial disaster hit the Grant administration. The Whiskey Ring was a widespread conspiracy involving distillers, distributors, and internal federal tax officials who stole millions of dollars in liquor taxes.

Using a complex web of bribes and falsified records, the ring defrauded the U.S. Treasury. The scandal reached the inner circle of power when President Grant’s own private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted as a ringleader. Grant provided a deposition in his secretary’s defense. While this saved Babcock from prison, it permanently damaged the president’s reputation.

5

The Teapot Dome scandal (1920s)

Until Watergate occurred, Teapot Dome was synonymous with political corruption. During the administration of Warren G. Harding, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took control of valuable federal oil reserves located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California.

Instead of opening these fields up for competitive bidding among energy companies, Fall secretly leased the drilling rights to private oil tycoons in exchange for more than $400,000 in bribes.

6

The Chappaquiddick incident (1969)

By the mid-20th century, the nature of political scandals shifted. Secrets began to involve personal crisis and tragic losses.

In July 1969, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy drove his car off a narrow wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. The vehicle overturned into a tidal pond, trapping and drowning his passenger, 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy managed to escape but failed to report the fatal accident to the police for ten hours. Although he eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, his delayed reaction ended his lifelong presidential ambitions.

7

The Pentagon Papers (1971)

In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg felt the moral obligation to leak a top-secret 7,000-page Department of Defense study detailing U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

Published by The New York Times , the papers exposed a disturbing truth: successive administrations had systematically lied to both Congress and the American public. The documents proved that the government had expanded the war and increased troop counts while knowing that the conflict was unwinnable. The Supreme Court eventually rejected the government’s attempts to block the leaks, making a victory for freedom of the press.

8

The Watergate scandal (1972–1974)

This is, probably, the ultimate American political scandal. In June 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The break in itself was minor compared to the illegal cover-up orchestrated by President Richard Nixon and his collaborators. From paying hush money to instructing the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation, Nixon’s complicity was exposed via his own secret White House taping system. Facing impeachment and conviction by the Senate, Nixon became the first and only U.S. president to resign from office.

9

The "Keating Five" (Late 1980s)

During the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s, five U.S. Senators—John McCain, Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, and Donald Riegle—came under intense scrutiny.

The group was accused of intervening with federal banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who had contributed to their political campaigns. Lincoln eventually collapsed, costing American taxpayers over $3 billion. Although the Senate Ethics Committee ultimately cleared the senators of corruption, they were publicly condemned.

10

The Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair (1998)

The 20th century ended with a scandal that blended personal infidelity with a constitutional crisis. In 1998, news broke that President Bill Clinton had an intimate relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern called Monica Lewinsky.

The affair turned into a legal battle when Clinton denied the relationship under oath during an unrelated sexual harassment lawsuit. The investigation led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate ultimately acquitted him, yet he couldn’t bypass the media circus.