Tainted Love: History's 7 Most Terrifying Romances

7 Nero Falls for a Boy, Turns Him into a Woman

Ancient Christian scholars believed that Nero was the physical incarnation of the Antichrist himself, so it's not surprising that he had a rather unconventional sex life. Dwarves, animals and his own mom have all said to have been in on the act. Of course this is hard to verify and may just be the ancient equivalent of slash fiction (once a guy is literally declared the devil, the gossip really gets going).

But we do know his relationship with a slave named Sporus was very real. Horrifyingly real.

Sporus was an underage boy who Nero fell madly in love with and, since he was a Roman and not Greek Emperor, this was actually not cool with anyone. Nero was a problem-solver though and did the only sensible thing: he had Sporus castrated and turned into a woman.

He put a full dress and veil on Sporus and married him with all the pomp and circumstance you'd expect (we can only imagine how many people in the wedding party were put to death when it came time to ask if anyone objected to the union).

Nero nicknamed Sporus "Sabina" which in a charming twist was also the name of his 2nd wife who died after Nero kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Nero paraded Sporus around town dressed as an empress, making out amorously and even putting on simulated sex shows with the kid.

So the next time you find yourself embarrassed by your president, this may help keep things in perspective.

6 The "Siamese Twins" and the Yates Sisters Get it On

The basis for the term "Siamese twins," Chang and Eng Bunker were born in, you guessed it, Siam in 1811. The Bunkers (The Bunker?) were two of the 19th century's biggest celebrities by virtue of having been born stuck together at the chest.

They eventually moved to America and began looking for love. You can see the difficulties here right away, since they're sort of sharing the same body. Do they both share one woman? If not, where the hell do you find a girl who will have sex with you while your brother lies just inches away, presumably staring at her boobs?

The answer is, of course, you marry a set of very open-minded sisters. Thus Chang and Eng Bunker married Adelaide and Sarah Yates, to which their fellow North Carolinians reacted with the kind of open-minded tolerance that remains that state's trademark to this day.

Chang and Eng Bunker and their vivacious spouses.

You may think we're intentionally playing up the Siamese twin sex angle and you may be telling yourself that in reality, the twins probably couldn't function sexually due to their condition anyway. And, you'd be way, way wrong. Eng fathered 11 children with his wife, Chang had 10 (in your face Chang).

Despite the closeness that you'd think kinky conjoined sex would bring to a family, the Yates sisters eventually had a falling out. This necessitated two separate houses be built.

In a scenario out of a sitcom written by David Lynch, the twins would alternate houses, with the "guest" brother having to do everything the "host" brother said. Eventually the brothers themselves started feuding. Chang even threatened Eng with a knife at one point which not only goes to show that Chang was kind of retarded, but that even sharing essential organs won't keep two people from acting like complete cocks to one another.

5 One Man, One Woman, Six Legs

Juan Baptista dos Santos, born in 1843 in Portugal, was known across Europe as "the 3-legged Man." While that may sound like innuendo, it's not; Santos actually had three legs. If you wanted to get clever you'd be better off calling dos Santos the human coffee table, as in addition to his three legs he also happened to have two penises and three or four testicles (that's right, the man has so many balls he couldn't keep track of them).

And as with Chang and Eng, both penises were very active. To quote a man who photographed dos Santos, "the sight of a female is sufficient to excite his amorous propensities. He functions with both of the penes, finishes with one, then continues with the other."

We'll pause for a moment to let that sink in.

So, dos Santos had all the celebrity and freak show groupies he could handle, but would he ever find that special someone? Well, we believe there's a soul mate out there for everyone. Regardless of your flaws, missing genes or superfluous limbs, fairy tales do come true, damn it.

As fate would have it, around this same time in Paris, Blanche Dumas was making her name as the "3-legged Courtesan."

Oh, yeah, you can see where this is going. Like Santos, Dumas had three legs, two sets of genitals and reportedly a voracious sexual appetite. Upon hearing of dos Santos, Dumas expressed a strong desire to get down to some freak freakiness with him.

This is how the man with two dongs came to have sex with the woman with two vaginas, their six tangled legs probably resembling a porn shoot that had been run over by a train.

4 Marquis de Sade Had a Very Understanding Wife

Ah, the Marquis de Sade, the all-time grand poobah of perverts. A man so famous for his violent writing and sex life that his name is the basis for the term "sadism"; we don't have the room (or the stomach frankly) to list all the forms of debauchery de Sade indulged in during his lifetime.

At some point he decided he needed to settle down with a nice girl. So, in what may have been his most perverted act yet, married a religious, reserved woman, Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil.

Respecting the part of the Bible that demands that a wife be devoted to her husband (and ignoring everything else), de Montreuil organized orgies, haggled with prostitutes, hid her husband's harem of young girls from the police and during his many stints in jail, made sure he was provided with the essentials (which in Sade's case consisted mostly of drugs and dildos).

A whole lot of guys reading this are nodding to each other with cocked eyebrows, thinking that De Sade had totally found the perfect wife here. Hell, at one point she even disguised herself as a man and organized her husband's daring escape from prison, presumably so he could then have sex with a room full of women and possibly poop on one of them.

But de Montreuil came with baggage, specifically, her mother. De Sade's mother-in-law, shockingly, didn't approve of her daughter's marriage to the guy who invented sadism and in fact she was responsible for many of his stints in jail. De Sade, perhaps in an attempt to make peace, had sex with another one of her daughters on the side.

Shockingly, it only made things worse, proving that for all his sexual misadventures the person de Sade ended up screwing the hardest was himself.

3 Pope Julius III "Adopts" a Teenage Boy

Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte was born in 1532 in Italy, the son of a beggar mother and a deadbeat father. Thankfully the tow-headed urchin was saved from life on the street when Cardinal Giovanni Maria Del Monte adopted him. Now before you applaud the good Cardinal for his good deed, we should inform you that, shockingly, the man had ulterior motives for plucking a good looking, eager-to-please 14-year old boy off the streets. Yes, those kind of motives.

While God apparently wasn't paying attention, Cardinal Giovanni Maria Del Monte managed to get himself elected Pope in 1550. The newly minted Pope Julius III immediately made Innocenzo a Cardinal then quickly elevated him to the Vatican's top office and everyone involved knew exactly why.

"Uhh...You guys think he might be a little young and unqualified for, you know...the Vatican?

The joke at the time was that Innocenzo was promoted for being the keeper of the Pope's "monkey" (proving dick jokes have the blessing of the Catholic Church). Julius would defend himself claiming he and Innocenzo were simply sleeping together in an innocent, non-sexual way like a father would with a child. So yeah, the Michael Jackson defense was being used as far back as the 1550s. By the Pope.

2 Caligula and His Horse

Yup, another Roman Emperor made the list. We told you some messed up shit was going on underneath those imperial togas.

Roman Emperor, tyrant, lunatic, subject of the most expensive porno of all time and er, equestrian enthusiast; you could apply many labels to Caligula, none of them flattering (well except for the porno thing).

Caligula was of course famous for his sexual deviance, but that's nothing unique. It was pretty much a Roman tradition for Emperors to stick their dong in anything that moved (and a few things that didn't). No, where things went from merely pervy to crazy with Caligula was in his relationship with his prize horse Incatitus.

Pictured: Statue of Caligula and Incatitus.
Not Pictured: Caligula's pants.

Caligula loved his horse dearly. Are we saying he "loved" his horse, as in, with his penis? History does not explicitly say. What history does say is that Caligula built it a marble stable, ivory manger, and adorned it with jewels. He had it attend glamorous banquets and dinner parties (where we imagine it drolly discussed pressing matters of the day, muffled by one of those feed bags).

It's been said he even appointed his horse to the position of senator and head priest, which admittedly couldn't help but make Church a lot more entertaining. When it came time to produce an heir, Caligula supposedly was torn between marrying Incatitus or, you know, somebody human (clearly whoever gave Caligula the birds and the bees talk was hitting the opium pipe pretty hard beforehand).

Sadly Caligula eventually chose the human option over Incatitus, finally coming to terms with the anatomical difficulties involved with humping a horse. With cruel biology keeping them apart Caligula reverted to the only thing he had much interest in other than screwing; killing stuff. Incatitus was taken out behind the marble stable and beheaded in an ending we'd call sad if we didn't suspect that Incatitus was looking for a way out of the whole creep-fest by then.

1 Count Carl Von Cosel and His Dead Wife

A German immigrant and doctor, Count Carl Von Cosel became obsessed with 20-year-old Cuban tuberculosis patient Elena Hoyos. Intent on saving her, Von Cosel subjected Hoyos to numerous cures of his own invention, but sadly brain frying electric shocks did little to cure her lungs (go figure). Despite his efforts she passed away and Von Cosel not only paid for her funeral but a lavish mausoleum. Gee, wasn't that nice of him?

Problem was, to the Count the mausoleum wasn't so much an eternal resting place for Hoyos as a secluded love shack where their romance could bloom. For two years Von Cosel spent almost every night inside the mausoleum, before apparently deciding it was time to take the relationship to the next level and have Elena move in with him.

In the dead of night Von Cosel stole her body from the cemetery, dragged the corpse to his house on the back of a toy wagon and reconstructed his beloved with wire coat hangers, wax and plaster. Oh, and what a job he did.

Believe it or not, Elena Hoyos isn't alive in one of these pictures. All we see is sexy.

Von Cosel would live with Hoyos for seven years, keeping the body in his bed (where we certainly hope nothing untoward happened; they were unmarried after all).

Elena's sister finally began to suspect something was up (perhaps after noticing the door to his sister's mausoleum hanging open for seven years straight) and the Count was arrested. He got off Scott free though as the statute of limitations on his crime had expired, plus we imagine neither the judge or jury wanted to spend any time in the same room with the dude.

The body was put on public display, attracting nearly 7000 gawkers (proving folks back then were all about class) and eventually buried in a secret unmarked grave just in case ol' Carl started jonesing for some mummified tail.

As for the Count himself he became a minor celebrity, created a life-sized effigy of Hoyos and made money inviting tourists into his home (again, class). Von Cosel would even write an autobiography, which appeared in respected literary publication "Fantastic Adventures."

Fantastic indeed.

Nathan Birch also writes fantastic adventure filled webcomic Zoology.

If you're tired of reading about depraved sexual acts watch a video chock full of them in What I Do to Unwind After Sex (SFW). And now that he's made you hate love, Nathan will gladly make you hate children too with 8 Child Prodigies So Amazing They'll Ruin Your Day.