“I don't trust or love anyone. Because people are so creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere.”—Vincent Gallo.
There are some seriously demented people out there in the world and it is creepy to think about all of the otherwise normal lives throughout history that were drawn into the sadistic webs of psychopaths. But beyond these stories of sick individuals, there are also some creepy things that can’t just be blamed on one disturbed mind. Here are tales of the most disturbing, weirdest things that have ever occurred throughout history. Now, don’t let it ruin any sunny days, but, maybe, just maybe, remember to lock the door and shut the blinds tonight.
47. Saving Hitler
When he was a four-year-old, Adolf Hitler was rescued by a priest from drowning in an icy river.
Just imagine how different history would be if he wasn't saved.
46. The Horrors of Gendercide
An estimated 200 million girls are not here today because of gendercide.
45. Melting In The Streets
During some instances of carpet bombing raids in WWII, the heat thrown off from burning buildings would melt the pavement in the streets to the point where it was basically boiling, molten tar. People would flee the burning buildings and run into the street where they would literally melt into the road and catch on fire.
44. Fighting To Stay Alive
When a pregnant mother dies, the fetus within will begin to gasp for air, and will drown in the amniotic fluid, to the sound of their mother's fibrillating heart.
It's called fetal gasping.
43. The Creepiest Thing Of All Is What We Don’t Know
Creepier and more disturbing than all these things is that there are countless others which we don't know—horrible things that have happened that have been forgotten by history, or where the crime has never been found. All the lost persons reports throughout history...maybe they're still alive, chained in a dungeon somewhere. All the murders that nobody ever found out about. All the forgotten crimes in foreign countries where there isn't enough press or police activity to solve them.
That we don't know anything about them may be the most disturbing thing of all.
42. Don’t Drink The Kool Aid
The Jonestown Massacre, in which over 900 people who were part of "The People's Temple," a cult, committed mass suicide by poisoning. The term "suicide" is debated though since there are reports of some people being force-fed the poison. This is where the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" comes from. There are several good documentaries about it, and Eli Roth and Ti West recently collaborated on a film that is basically an exact copy of the Jonestown massacre called The Sacrament.
Just a warning that the images, if you decide to search for them, are pretty graphic. The final recording by the pastor Jim Jones is also the creepiest stuff ever. Dude talks about heaven and the afterlife while in the background, women and children scream in agony.
41. Too Many Teeth Spoils The Mouth
Hyperdontia, a disease that causes the body to produce too many teeth... Utterly horrifying.
40. Soft Burials
I remember hearing a story from WWI. Where because so many people were dying constantly, they were just burying them wherever they could. Eventually, they had to bury them on top of other graves.
What happened often was that graves were so shallow with so many bodies, that the ground was actually "squishy or soft" in some places.
In one particular place, one of the dead's arms would stick out of the ground due to rigor mortis. They reburied him, and his arm broke free of the shallow grave again. They reburied him a second and possibly a third time. Eventually, they just gave up, and this dead man's arm was sticking out of the ground. So each time the servicemen marched by, they'd give the dead soldier a slap of the hand as they went by.
Shows how morbid things got that to lighten the mood, they slapped a dead guy's hand on the way to combat.
39. Tennessee Creeps
There was this story I was reading, I think it's on Reddit somewhere, but it was a guy talking about driving home one night and seeing a car crash, pulling through and stopping to see if he could go help. Anyway, turns out no one was hurt, and when he looked in his mirror the people lying in the road were sitting up, and there were a few more standing in the woods.
More to the point of this. One night I was driving home from a friends house and I saw two guys, miles apart, standing on the side of the road just staring into the dark, and I couldn't help think about that story. Probably the creepiest thing I know to be true in Tennessee because I experienced it.
38. The Spirit of The Doll
In Xochimilco, near Mexico City, there is an island with thousands of dolls hanging from trees. The story goes that the caretaker of the island found a doll on the ground, and hung it in a tree. A while later he found out that the doll belonged to a girl who had drowned on the island that day. The man thought the girl’s spirit was trapped inside that doll.
Eventually, her spirit was too strong for just one doll and was telling the man to drown himself in the same place the girl had. So, to contain her spirit, he put thousands of dolls all over the island. He was eventually found dead in the same place where the girl had died, years later.
37. Surviving The Cannibals
During WWII, an American airplane crashed near the Japanese island of Chichi Jima. There were nine servicemen on board. One was rescued by an American submarine. The other eight were taken in by the Japanese. Eventually, the Japanese ended up EATING those servicemen.
But that’s not the weird part. The one serviceman who was rescued? That was George H. W. Bush.
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36. Sick Treatment of Children
I can't get over how this still happens everywhere. A young girl was neglected to an unspeakable extent, she grew up in a room filled with her own feces. Rarely fed. Malnourished and frail. She was never taught how to speak or interact.
I bawled my eyes out the first time I read this. It killed me. I became enraged that someone would treat their child in this way.
35. There Are Still Concentration Camps In The World
The concentration camps in North Korea...and they still exist today.
34. Celebrity Cannibal
Issei Sagawa: a Japanese man who raped and ate his Dutch friend, who cannot stop his cannibalism urges. He wasn't arrested and became a celebrity.
33. Nature Gets In By Any Means Necessary
Bed bugs can get it on vaginally, but a large percentage of the time the male can’t be bothered to find the vagina, so he just penetrates the abdomen with his penis and goes to town.
32. Kennedy Secrets
There was a mentally handicapped Kennedy girl who grew into a rebellious teen, so they gave her a lobotomy and turned her into a vegetable.
Not only her, the heyday of lobotomy is creepy as hell. "Following his development of the icepick lobotomy, Freeman began traveling across the country visiting mental institutions in his personal van, which he called the "lobotomobile." He toured around the nation performing lobotomies and spreading their use..."
Basically, hammering an icepick into the skull right beside the eye socket and destroying brain matter. To me, that's some Mengele level stuff.
31. Staying Swedish
The Swedish Expedition of Baltic Troops.
Long story short, around 300 Baltic soldiers wanted to escape the Soviet army. So they asked to enter Sweden.
Sweden says no because they aren't wounded, and so, many of the soldiers self-mutilate themselves—one even stabbing his eyeball out with a pencil.
Sweden still rejected their request and nearly all the troops were executed for treason.
Artillerimuseet i Kristianstad
30. The Austrian Guy Is Josef Fritzl
Somewhere on earth, probably many places, there is another Jaycee Lee Dugard/Amanda Berry/that Austrian guy and his daughter situation going on. Someone missing, alive, trapped right next door to normal people.
29. Messed Up Doesn’t Cover It
The fact that 200 girls in Nigeria are about to be sold into slavery is pretty messed up.
28. Mixing The Modern With Pre-Modern
I was listening to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast. During the early battles of WWI, the combatants were using modern weapons with pre-modern tactics, so you had cavalry charges against machine guns and whatnot.
During, if I recall correctly, the Battle of the Marne, the Germans expected to push out the French relatively quickly, but a series of forts created a defensive line that caused the battle to drag on for days. A way into it, casualties were so bad that the advancing Germans were using piles of the dead as cover. During the night, the Germans were using artillery shells to illuminate the battlefield.
Imagine yourself, charging a machine more efficient at killing human beings than anything before in history, moving through a maze of those who had failed before you, while a strobe light goes off.
27. Abandonment In America
The Underground Child Exchange in America.
Apparently, Americans use the internet to abandon their adopted children to absolute strangers they have met on the internet.
26. Labyrinth Tunnels In Odessa
The tunnel systems beneath Odessa have not been fully mapped out. People get lost down there and die.
25. Encouraging The Children
The torture and murder of Sylvia Likens.
Her family left her in the care of this woman who then encouraged local children, including her own, to torture and murder her.
Not just the things they did to the girl, but the fact she got children involved in her crimes and made them commit such horrible actions is absolutely horrifying.
24. Stumbling Onto Modern Incest Colony
An incest colony was discovered in New South Wales, Australia, last year. 40 adults and children living in filthy caravans, sheds, and tents with no running water. Pretty messed up.
23. Just Tending The Farm
Surprised no one has talked about Hinterkaifeck. An unsolved murder in Germany. Basically, someone snuck onto this farm, lived there for a few days, and murdered everyone there with a mattock (like a pickaxe). And then apparently lived in the house for a few days and took nothing. Just stayed there and even took care of the farm. It still scares the crap out of me.
22. Living With A Corpse. No, Literally Living With A Corpse.
Carl Tanzler.
Don’t Google him at night.
21. NUMBER STATIONS
Webdriver Torso is a YouTube user who has uploaded 77,000 11-second videos of red and blue rectangles accompanied by weird tones. At their peak (Christmas 2013) they were uploading 400 videos a day and never slept; so it's pretty clear the system is automated.
Many people theorize that it's a modern-day numbers station. Others think it's a 'test' to recruit cryptographers.
Weirdly enough, Webdriver Torso once uploaded a video of someone at the Eiffel Tower halfway through their rectangles career. They also have a single 'liked' video: one of their own weird rectangles videos, which is pretty much indistinguishable from the other 77,000.
Officiall Creepypasta Indonesia
20. Babies On The Market
Babies are routinely sold throughout the world. Some of the buyers have no intention of raising the children they buy.
19. Scariest Snake Alive
Pseudocerastes urarachnoides: a snake that has evolved a tail that mimics a spider.
18. Trying To Infect Yourself
Bugchasing is a slang term for the practice of pursuing sexual intercourse with HIV-infected individuals in order to contract HIV. Individuals engaged in this activity are referred to as bugchasers. It is a form of self-harm.
17. Choosing To Watch Haunted Dolls
If you can manage to find the stream, you can watch a bunch of supposedly haunted dolls online 24/7.
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16. H.H. Holmes Builds A Death House
This guy named H.H. Holmes built a “murder castle.” A hotel specifically designed to kill people, complete with gas lines running into rooms where people slept, a suffocation chamber, body chutes, etc.
15. The Eyes Are The Window Into The Soul
When I was working on my Master's degree, I went to a continuing education class being put on by a former FBI profiler who focused on sexual murders. Sounds like an interesting course, doesn’t it?
We started with about 300 people at 8 am. By the end of the lunch break, only 50 or so of us came back. I attribute this, in part, due to the last set of photos before lunch. They weren’t violent, they were of a college-age woman bound in various ways, something you’d find on any number of dirty video sites, except when you looked at her eyes, they were just so hollow. And that is what kept drawing my attention and that of the people at my table, not her bonds, not her nudity, but her eyes. As we wrapped up for the lunch break, the guy giving the presentation told us what many of us had already guessed, the whole time she was doing those photos, she knew she was going to die; her killer later admitted to telling her. All the sexually degrading things we had seen were her last moments on Earth, because once the killer was done taking his photos, he raped her, then stabbed her to death.
After lunch, the slides got far bloodier. But nothing quite as horrifying as her hollow eyes and the defeat in them, and realizing she knew she wasn’t going to make it.
14. A Monster In Hiding
The Monster of the Andes: Pedro Alonso Lopez killed and raped at least 350 children before his arrest in 1980. Despite showing no remorse, and even stating “I Will Be Happy to Kill Again, It Is My Mission,” he was released in 1998. His whereabouts are currently unknown.
13. The Saddest of Childhoods
The story of Genie the feral child.
12. Nightmare In Cambodia
When the Khmer Rouge was in power in Cambodia, they killed anyone who was educated so they could brainwash/control the remainder of the population, often starting with children. They then appealed to ex-patriates to come back and rebuild Cambodia, and killed anyone who came back to help.
The people who were considered “political dissidents” were kept in prisons and fed a few grains of rice a day, in dirty water. If someone got a hold of other food somehow (rats, etc.), they were tortured if they ate it.
The prisoners were then taken to killing fields after months of starvation and torture. The Khmer Rouge would play loud music to drown out their screams as they killed them quietly with palm leaves, farm tools, etc. then dumped them into mass graves and poured lye on them. Sometimes, the people wouldn’t yet be dead, and they’d burn for hours from the lye on their open wounds.
This is only a sampling. The Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge regime is one of the greatest atrocities that mankind has ever let occur. And sadly, Pol Pot died of old age, never paying for his crimes. Yet still, somehow the world doesn’t intervene in places like North Korea where humans are being treated just as badly by oppressive regimes.
11. Japanese Mengele
Unit 731, Japanese scientists who performed brutal experiments on prisoners in WWII, including live vivisection. Similar to Mengele at Auschwitz. The most messed up thing is that most of the scientists got away with it, in exchange for information. Truly disturbing stuff.
10. Twins Gone Crazy
Those Swedish twins that were completely normal until they met each other is certainly up there.
9. Be Careful In The Bathtub
Apparently, they used to make electrically heated bathtubs so you could sit in them without the water getting cold. A guy died in one of these baths and wasn’t found for a long time. The whole time the tub stayed heated and cooked him like a pot roast in a crock pot.
They had to pull him out piece by piece since the meat fell off the bones the moment they tried to move it. There are pictures online somewhere but I sure as hell don’t want to see them a second time.
8. Creepy Random Roommates Can
I met a friend of mine for dinner the other night. He has recently moved and is now living in a flat with three girls. He was telling me how the interview process for the room he is renting was very in-depth and thorough, and the girls asked him quite personal questions, which he found odd at the time, but as he got the room he did not push the subject.
The girls, obviously realizing my friend is a decent guy, told him a few weeks ago the reason the interview process was so particular: the guy who had previously rented the room turned out to be quite something indeed. Initially, he had seemed like an OK guy, a bit quiet and shy perhaps, kept to himself a lot but nothing the girls couldn’t deal with.
As the months passed, the guy became strange. He would very rarely leave his room, and when he did he would come up with really bizarre and creepy things to say. He told one of the girls exactly how he would go about killing her—by chopping up her body and feeding it to pigs as he had found through research that pigs eat everything except human nails—which he would dispose of separately.
He also had a habit of coming out of his room at night and standing outside the individual rooms the girls lived in, he would breathe heavily. Not for a couple of minutes, but for three or four hours at a time. The girls were, obviously, freaked out and decided that something had to be done, they had to find some reason to evict him before the end of the contract.
So, they proceed to pick the lock on his door to have a look around his room when he wasn’t at home. They entered the room and saw bottles all around the room with what they initially thought was apple juice. It wasn’t. The bottles were all filled with urine. Furthermore, on the walls all around his room, the guy had posted large pictures of the three girls with a tally-chart underneath each picture, noting every time they entered and left the flat.
The girls immediately went to the police. The police refused to do anything and did not even come around the flat to have a look. The girls, refusing to keep living with this guy, called the landlord who eventually managed to evict the guy.
Creepy right? The story does not end here… After my friend moved in, one of the girls received a phone call one night from the police. They wanted to come around the flat to have a chat about the creepy ex-flatmate. Turns out, after he had moved out of the girls’ flat, he had moved back in with his mother. He had proceeded to brutally murder the mother and had then dressed up in her clothes and moved around the house/garden to avoid suspicion.
Never living with random people ever again.
7. Utterly Destroying Nanking
The Rape of Nanking. Brief synopsis: Japan captured the Chinese city of Nanking, which at the time was the capital of China, and then they spent about six weeks raping and murdering every Chinese person in sight, most of whom were unarmed civilians. Children, even infants, were not exempt from either activity. The Japanese soldiers completely laid waste to the entire city: looting shops and homes, razing entire blocks to the ground. There were some allegations of cannibalism. Oh yeah. And this happened after the Chinese army officially retreated from Nanking. In 1937.
What Happened Today in History?
6. People Gotta Eat
In 1933, Stalin deported 6000 people, mostly dissenters, to an island in Siberia. 4,000 of them died.
On the island, there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, “Take care of her,” but with all the people there the comrade couldn’t do much. People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything. They were hungry, they had to eat. When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.
Lachschon
5. Through The Lens
From another Reddit post: A bunch of hikers take pictures of themselves, not knowing that a few of the pictures captured the image of a girl close to death who had fallen off a waterfall the night before.
4. Trust The 10-Year-Old When She Says She Did It
Not as bad as many things posted here already, but since she hasn't been mentioned yet:
Mary Bell, the 1960s English 10-year-old schoolgirl dual murderess.
“Investigators now looked at the mysterious death of Martin Brown as a homicide. In fact, Mary Bell's behavior after Martin's death was so flagrant, it was a wonder she hadn't been apprehended sooner. Perhaps Brian Howe's life would have been spared. But, as one local boy said, everyone knew Mary was a "show-off," and her screams "I am a murderer!" had simply been laughed at.”
“Meanwhile, the true menace of Scotswood, Mary and Norma, were giving Martin's aunt the creeps with their prying questions. "They kept asking me, 'Do you miss Martin?' and 'Do you cry for him?' and 'Does June miss him?' and they were always grinning. In the end, I could stand it no more and told them to get out and not to come back."”
3. My Dad, The Informant
Years ago, when I was maybe 13, I found a book in my dad's library called Louie's Widow which seemed kind of off for his usual collection. My dad is a retired DEA Agent and was in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back before the DEA was formed. Anyway, I read the book and it's about this informant for the DEA, from the point of view of his wife, who comes up missing. His torso is found in a dumpster sometime later and they are able to make a positive identification based on dental records... That kind of confused me.
So, I asked my dad what the deal was with the book. "Oh yeah, I am the character named so and so, this was my informant, the dental records were used to identify about six teeth they pulled out of his stomach that he apparently swallowed while being beaten to death."
2. The Noise Rings True
A 58-year-old man living alone in Japan started hearing noises at night and noticing things out of place in his house. He installed video cameras. Turns out a homeless woman had been living in his attic and cupboards for almost a YEAR in his house, undetected.
This is why I get freaked out when I hear things at night.
1. The Boogeyman Lives In The Closet
I’m a reporter in Cleveland. While researching the unsolved murder of Amy Mihaljevic, I interviewed an older woman from the same town. She told me this story about her daughter, who used to come down the stairs every night and tell her that there was a Boogeyman in her closet. She and the Dad would get upset and just say, “Go back to your room. There’s no such thing as the Boogeyman.” This went on for a couple weeks. Finally, the Dad was pissed and he said, “Fine, I’ll show you there’s no Boogeyman.” He stomps to the bedroom and goes to open her closet door when someone inside yanks it closed. There was a man in there. The whole damn time. Every night he’d stand in there, watching the girl fall asleep. The dad beat the crap out of the guy and the perv went to prison for a couple decades, because, of course, he’d been feeling the girl up, too. When he got out, he disappeared again. Sleep tight.
