42 Odd And Unsettling World Facts That Might Keep You Up At Night

She said Titanic broke in two. They took the microphone from her hand to say she was wrong. In 1982, an elderly woman stood up at a Titanic Historical Society convention and used her hands to show exactly how the ship went down snapping in half before it sank. The event's compere took the microphone from her mid-sentence. He was a THS treasurer named Louis Gorman, and he told the room she was mistaken that she'd probably confused a falling funnel with a break in the hull. Officially, everyone "knew" Titanic sank in one piece. That woman was Ruth Becker. She'd been 12 years old on April 14, 1912, watching from lifeboat 13 as Titanic went under, its decks still lined with people jumping into the ocean in its final moments. She'd carried that image for 70 years. She knew what she saw. Three years later, in 1985, Robert Ballard's expedition found the wreck. Two massive pieces of hull, separated by a debris field hundreds of meters wide. Ruth Becker was right. She'd been right the entire time. She died in 1990, and her ashes were scattered in the Atlantic at the exact spot where Titanic went down.