★ Daily Strange History ★
You're about to discover something weird from history.
On July 18, 1806, a gunpowder magazine known as the Polverista in the town of Birgu, Malta, catastrophically exploded, instantly killing around 200 people and devastating the surrounding area. The explosion was one of the deadliest accidents in Maltese history.
This catastrophic explosion in a densely packed historic fortified town is almost entirely forgotten outside of Malta, despite killing 200 people in a single blast - a death toll that would be front-page news anywhere in the world today, yet it has virtually vanished from broader historical memory.
On July 18, 1290, King Edward I of England issued the Edict of Expulsion, ordering approximately 16,000 Jewish people to leave England entirely on pain of death. The edict remained in force for over 350 years, making England one of the longest-running official exclusion zones for Jewish people in European history.
England essentially erased an entire religious community from its borders and then largely forgot it had done so - the expulsion was so thorough and so old that by the time it was formally reversed under Oliver Cromwell in 1657, most English people had never actually met a Jewish person in their lives.
On July 18, 1995, the Soufriere Hills volcano on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat erupted for the first time in recorded history, beginning a years-long eruption that buried the island's capital city of Plymouth in ash and pyroclastic flows. The eruption forced the evacuation of most of the island's population, and Plymouth remains abandoned and buried to this day.
Montserrat now has an entire buried capital city that is essentially a real-life Pompeii frozen in the 1990s - complete with abandoned houses, a clock tower, and a courthouse all entombed under meters of volcanic debris, making it one of the strangest ghost capitals on Earth.