If anyone tries to lock you in one of these mediaeval torture devices, Run to the Hills. Thankfully, that’s unlikely to happen, even if you do get blasted back in time to this rather uncivilised era. And that’s because the famous Iron Maiden (a human-sized box adorned with interior spikes) never existed. It’s fiction.

The earliest account of such a device can be traced back to a book written in the fifth century AD that tells of the torturing of Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus, who was locked in a nail-studded box. Later, German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees wrote about the execution of a coin-forger in 1515 via “iron maiden”. Although his works were never seen as credible, they did inspire many people to build iron maidens and sell them to museums.