Movies are supposed to be escapism. Viewers watch fantastical antics of larger than life characters. Some roles require less imagination. For these ten actors, they simply had to remember the most traumatizing experiences of their life. They give a whole new meaning to method actors.

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10 Mercedes McCambridge was Forced to Relapse

In her most famous role, Mercedes McCambridge is never seen. Her name does not even appear in the credits. She is merely heard. That was enough to become a legend.

McCambridge lent her voice to Pazuzu, the demon that possesses Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil in 1973’s The Exorcist. It takes a lot of embody a Mesopotamian monster. To achieve the haunting guttural cries of the beast, director William Friedkin physically strained McCambridge to her breaking point. McCambridge was bound and gagged to a chair to induce anger and aggression. To achieve a gravelly voice, she was compelled to swallow raw eggs and chain smoke. Meanest of all, she was forced to drink whiskey shots.

In 1950, McCambridge married Fletcher Markle. The marriage dissolved in part because of McCambridge’s alcoholism. She was often hospitalized for drinking too much. In 1969, she finally achieved sobriety with help from Alcoholics Anonymous. William Friedkin, aware of this history, still made her drink on set. Four years of sobriety were gone. Luckily, McCambridge did not fall back in her old ways.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, in 1987 her son was fired from his job on Friday 13th so he put on a wrinkled demonic halloween mask and shot his wife, children, and then himself. His suicide note laid the blame at his mother’s feet.^[1]

9 Winona Ryder Dove Headfirst Into Her Fears

Winona Ryder has fought villains as varied as Demogorgons, Beetlejuice, and Dracula. Her main enemy is something much more mundane, water. As a teenager, Ryder nearly drowned to death. Stemming from that accident, she developed crippling aquaphobia. She fell into a restrictive panic any time she had to get near water. For years, she completely avoided going into a pool or the ocean. She had to overcome that fear on the set of Alien: Resurrection.^[2]

Conditions were less than ideal to alleviate a lifelong paranoia. The tank was murky from grime and flotsam. Even more experienced divers struggled to navigate the partially submerged kitchen set. As Ryder’s costar Ron Perlman swam underneath, props floated in his path. The set pieces blocked him from breaking the surface. On four separate occasions, rescue divers were deployed to save Perlman. Due to her personal history and the precarious conditions, Ryder was sent into a panic.^[3]

8 The Displaced Cast of Casablanca

Nobody knew how the war was going to end. In 1942, the patrons of Rick’s café belted out a stirring rendition of La Marseillaise. Their version of the French anthem dwarfed the similar call for nationalism from their German occupants. For all they knew, it might have been a meaningless gesture. A group of refugees tried to humiliate the Nazis. It might have been a hallow victory. It still brought the cast to tears.

Almost all of the cast members were immigrants. A large portion of them were genuine refugees. Paul Henreid, an Austrian Jew, fled England after being labelled an enemy of the Nazi party. Conrad Veidt may have played SS officer Strasser, but he was still compelled to wear the racial label “Jude” in his native Germany. Madeleine Lebeau openly teared up while singing because she was reminded of her homeland. Both her and her husband Marcel Dalio evacuated Paris on the eve of the German occupation. S.Z. Sakall sang as his sisters and his niece were sent to the camps they eventually died in. La Marseillaise was a symbolic protest. For many of them, it was all they had.^[4]

7 Joaquin Phoenix Reenters a Cult

Director Paul Thomas Anderson insists that The Master is fictional. For legal reasons, he cannot say that the work is loosely based on the early years of the Church of Scientology. Main lead Joaquin Phoenix has not been as cagey. He openly admits which cult he was inspired by, the one he grew up in.

Like his character Freddie Quell, Joaquin’s parents were lost souls. They had grown tired of the complacency of post-War America. They were susceptible to the alluring charm of the Children of God. The Children of God are now infamous for promoting pedophilia and rampant sexual abuse. Phoenix’s experience was more positive. Along with his siblings Rain and River, Joaquin sang spirituals to raise funds for the religious sect. The organization earned a fortune, while the family lived in rat-infested huts. Before the worst elements of the church were uncovered, the family abandoned the group. The family discarded all reminders of their previous life. They dropped their surname “Bottom.” To signify their rebirth, they chose the name “Phoenix.”^[5]

6 Katey Sagal’s Miscarriage

Married…With Children was not a show equipped with handling complex moral questions. Sometimes they barely wrote plots more complicated than thirty minutes of Al Bundy sitting around with his hand down his pants. When actual tragedy befell the cast, they reworked the entire show.

Season Six premiered with Peg Bundy revealing she was pregnant, much to her husband’s chagrin. Al spent much of the season worried about the financial strain of a new child. Luckily for him, it turns out the whole season arc was a dream. For Peg Bundy actress Katey Sagal, it was a nightmare.

Sagal spent most of the season noticeably pregnant. Unfortunately, she suffered a stillbirth eight months into the pregnancy. Out of sympathy, the storyline was adjusted so that she would not have to deal with an infant on set. Because they could not simply ignore that her character was supposed to have a child, the script made it all a dream. Even in that preferable option, she was still required to talk about a pregnancy that never rendered any child.^[6]

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5 Pieter Dengler Became a Prisoner Again

Werner Herzog is not known for his gentle touch as director. Commentators have labelled the German auteur’s eccentricities and grueling demands as torturous. For Lieutenant Dieter Dengler, that was not hyperbole.

Pilot Lt. Dengler crash-landed his plane into Laos during the Vietnam war. He endured imprisonment for months. Dengler’s determination resonated with Herzog. Herzog set out to capture Dengler’s story in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. To get a more authentic version of the story, Herzog coerced Dengler to recreate even the most grueling experiences. The handcuffed Dengler was compelled to march through the jungle. Cast members beat him with sticks. In the most traumatic scene, Dengler reenacted the scene were a Vietcong guard chopped off his fingers as punishment for stealing back his engagement ring. The scene was so authentic that the South Asian extras believed he needed medical attention.^[7]

In 2007, Herzog remade the story as Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale playing Lt. Dieter Dengler. Apparently, he found a way to tell the story without resorting to physical torture.^[8]

4 Rita Moreno Broke Down after a Rape Scene

West Side Story is a wholesome love story of two people who would do everything they can to see each other. Tony and Maria may feel pretty, but much of the musical is a tale of street violence and racism. Anita, one of Maria’s friends, does not get the Hollywood ending. Her lover is murdered. The Jets reciprocate the violence. Even the musical street gangs are not fun to hang around.^[9]

Despite what the lyrics may say, Puerto Rico was not the show’s devotion. There was only one Puerto Rican actress among the cast, Rita Moreno. Morena’s acclaimed portrayal of Anita earned her an Oscar. It was a hard-won trophy. Years before shooting, Morena was raped on two separate occasions. She was nearly raped again during the Columbia Studios afterparty for the movie. In between those startling events, she had to reenact it. Her pain rushed back in a scene where it is heavily implied that Anita is raped. The emotional experience forced Morena to breakdown on set. For 45 minutes, she cried on set after remembering her trauma.^[10]

3 Dorothy Gibson Got Back on the Titanic

Dorothy Gibson could have waited. As Leonardo Dicaprio knows, people are still fascinated by the Titanic’s demise. Though less remembered than the 1997 blockbuster, the first movie about the ill-fated voyage was more impactful in one key aspect. It was filmed merely thirty days after the horrific incident. Bodies were still being recovered in the Atlantic by the time they started shooting.

Dorothy Gibson’s career was particularly pigeonholed by the calamity. Over two years, she made 25 movies. The penultimate one, Saved From the Titanic, is her most acclaimed performance. It is the most natural. Gibson was onboard the oceanliner when it sank into the midst. Director Étienne Arnaud wanted somebody who could capture the dread of nearly drowning. Only five days after she was pulled from the freezing water, Gibson was on set recreating her harrowing experience. She even wore the same clothes she had packed for the trip. The rushed production mostly focused on the narrow escape of the passengers on board. Today, the film is more remembered for failing to understand the concept of “too soon” more than any artistic genius.^[11]

2 Haing Ngor Never Escaped Killing Fields

Haing S. Ngor was barely an actor. That is not an insult. Professionally, he was an employed as a surgeon. When he gave the Oscar winning performance of Dith Pran, Ngor did not have to get into the mind of a fictional character. He simply had to repeat his life. Punished for his education and class, Ngor spent years interned in the Cambodian camps. His first-hand knowledge shaped how he portrayed the character.^[12]

1984’s Killing Fields is not a fun movie. The retelling of the Khmer Rouge reign is filled with gripping moments that showcase the worst horrors of the genocidal campaign. Yet, the moment that made Ngor cry the most was relatively banal. In one scene, a child soldier uproots a tomato plant that Pram grew. The unnecessary cruelty of the event was reminded Ngor of the callousness of his guards. Out of all the horrific sights in the movie, that was the one that show quickly people can be stripped of their humanity.^[13]

1 Ira Hayes Returned to Iwo Jima

John Wayne wanted to honor Ira Hayes. Ira Hayes did not think he was worthy. Hayes will forever be remembered as one of the soldiers who raised the flag over Iwo Jima. When Hollywood was set to memorialize the iconic image in 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima, they reached out to the three remaining survivors to recreate the shot. Ira Hayes could barely manage a cameo.

In the years after the battle, Hayes felt significant guilt. Following the flag raising, Hayes was ordered to return home. Joe Rosenthal’s photo had cemented Hayes as a hero, but he felt like he deserted his fellow soldiers to die. He grew to so resent being part of the iconography of the war. He confessed that “Sometimes I wish that guy had never made that picture.” Hayes treated his burgeoning shell shock with copious drinking. His alcoholism only became worse the more coverage he received. He was so inebriated on the set of Sands of Iwo Jima that they cut out his speaking parts. In January of 1955, his lifeless body was found on the ground. The 32-year-old veteran had died of exposure and alcohol poisoning.^[14]

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About The Author: If this was the worst moment of your life, you can write to Nate at his email, [email protected]. To read more things he wrote, you can follow Nate on Twitter @nateyungman.

Whether it’s ghost hunters communicating with trapped spirits, or shadowy figures spotted in desolate gravesites, everyone loves to hear about supernatural occurrences caught on camera. The internet is filled with real paranormal stories backed up by scary images and videos that make you want to leave the lights on at night.

Footage from around the world showcases scenes from eyewitnesses that have captured a strange phenomenon, and thankfully, they weren’t too shaken to share it. Authenticating supernatural occurrences can be challenging, but it usually refers to paranormal activity that’s beyond the scope of modern science. Some remain skeptical, but ‘ghost hunting pictures’ or ‘caught on camera videos’ have become part of mainstream entertainment.

Supernatural experts now believe the word or paranormal is misleading, as these occurrences are now seemingly ‘normal’ since they are happening more often. Before you get your spine chilled by investigators looking to uncover unexplainable goings-on, keep in mind that the best supernatural footage happens unexpectedly. Here are the 10 best supernatural occurrences caught on camera: credible, unbelievable to see, and fascinating to hear about.

10 Rolling Inside the Plattsmouth Museum of Shadows

In Plattsmouth, Nebraska, the Museum of Shadows lived up to its name with occurrences that had the whole town talking. Although the institution has seen its fair share of paranormal happenings, the scene that staff discovered from security video footage is nothing but chilling.

According to museum owner Nate Raterman, it happened on Friday the 2, February 2018, in the wee hours of the morning. You’ll see a ball being thrown around and rolled on the floor, but nobody in this video.

The ball is picked up by an invisible hand, which throws it across the room, then it rolls to the center of the floor. Nate said the ball is what paranormal buffs call a trigger object, a plaything for the supernatural, and he believes the mystery ghost could be a child. The Museum of Shadows is no doubt a haunted building, seeing as it was built in 1881.

Once a saloon, it had an upstairs brothel where many people are said to have died or been murdered. Raterman reflects that if the house itself isn’t attracting malevolent spirits, then the items that are part of his more than 2,000 artifact collection possibly are.

9 Odd Creature Captured by Security Camera Confounds Viewers

This clip that surfaced on Facebook is puzzling, if not alarming. The footage posted by Vivian Gomez has gone viral. When you watch the images captured on her security camera, you’ll be saying ‘what the heck’ right along with Vivian.

You can see a short joyful figure; a bony frame carried on wobbly legs gallivanting along with no qualms whatsoever. The image shows a cross between a rabbit, an elephant, and an alien creature, almost a dead-ringer for ‘Dobby’ from the Harry Potter series.

On Sunday morning, Gomez woke up and looked into her black and white monitor for any activity from the night before. At first, she recalls a shadow that fell across her front door where the camera that captured the wraith is located. Moments later, the figure appears, casually skipping along on the driveway, appearing to do what many viewers related as the ‘chicken dance.’ The dancing phantom disappears and is curiously not captured by two other cameras on the property, but Gomez swears that the video hasn’t been doctored.

8 Mystery Ghost Seen Lurking at a School Where Six People Died

Ghost Hunters worldwide have had their imagination captured by the happenings in a Pocatello high school in Idaho. CCTV footage shows a spine chilling poltergeist roaming the empty corridors at night during the Christmas holidays.

The school was once gutted by fire, and six people lost their lives on its grounds, including a young boy that drowned in the pool, and paranormal occurrences have long plagued it. Students and staff have reported strange noises, fleeting whispers, and there’s an ever-present dark shadow looming on the ceiling of the auditorium. In the eerie clip, there’s flickering as lights turn themselves off and on again, right before a mysterious figure casually strolls into the corridor and enters one of the classrooms.

7 Ghost Opens Transport Van Doors at Bloody Civil War Battle Site

On the night of Tuesday, September 25^th, 2018, at the Putnam County Aging Agency in St. Albans, West Virginia, security cameras capturedcurious paranormal footage. At around quarter past 1 am, a transport van parked on the grounds had its doors slid ajar. But nobody was in or outside the vehicle.

According to Jenni Sutherland, the programs executive director, the van was found with doors open the next morning. Staff assumed there had been a burglary or a trespasser came by at night and checked camera footage for the entire property.

Only the van seems to have been affected, with the clip showing doors being pushed open by an invisible force. The van slightly shudders as a latch that secures the door inside the vehicle is flipped undone in the video. This isn’t the first supernatural occurrence to spook this business’s staff, as the property has a dark past. The aging program agency is located at the civil war Battle of Scary site, where 19 soldiers died.

6 Mischievous Ghost Causes Havoc in Old High School

In October 2015, a Cork, Ireland secondary school with a history of supernatural occurrences managed to obtain video evidence of their resident ghost. In a seemingly deserted corridor, spooky CCTV footage shows the handiwork of a mischievous or angry spirit leaving students and staff mystified. Deerpark CBS was founded in 1821, the oldest school in Cork. And spiritual remnants of someone or something have been intent on making a mess when no one is around.

The eerie clip, which follows what happens after motion sensors were triggered, is straight out of a Ghostbusters remake. Lights start flashing from behind a closed door, flickering as though someone was arc welding at 3 am. A thunderous crash is then heard, and then right on camera, a set of heavy lockers start to rock violently back and forth.

One of the locker doors is swung open with mustered force, papers and books spewing across the corridor floor. As the video ends, a ‘Wet Floor’ sign that’s been left near the wall is aggressively knocked over, sliding to the side as though someone kicked it.

While wondering if it could be an elaborate prank, the school Principal Aaron Wolfe said that the corridor where it happened was outside the religion room. He also added that the particular section of the 200-year-old building had been having a strange chill, an extreme coldness felt more often by the female staff members.

5 Man Flees Home after Terrifying Face Appears in Photo

After capturing what he believes is a ghost in his kitchen, a man ran from his house, an eerie image that he later shared on the Reddit blog. He was home alone at the time when he heard what can only be described as feet shuffling or the clothes ruffling through the slightly ajar kitchen door.

On taking a photo of the door, he looked closer to see a blurry white face with two dark eyes staring straight at him. The picture horrified the man so much that he’s now looking for another place to live. And we don’t blame him.

4 Ghostly Figure Haunts an Abandoned Mental Asylum

A paranormal investigator struck ghostly gold when a video she’d taken at a derelict Welsh mental health facility revealed an outline of what appears to be a human. Kayleigh Love encountered the spectral momentarily as she aimed her camera at an empty corridor, but on trying to get a second shot, the figure had disappeared.

Thinking nothing of it, Love went home, and on reviewing the video, her stomach turned. She later edited the footage, slowing it down so that the shadowy apparition with a female opulence was more noticeable. Love said that the image made her feel uneasy and on edge, despite her experience conducting investigations on supernatural occurrences.

She didn’t name the mental hospital where the spirit was seen, but her description matched a Mid-Wales Hospital psychiatric facility. This institute for the insane, located in Powys, Talgarth, opened in 1903 and was shut down in 1999. Love thinks the mysterious onlooker is the ghost of a former patient there, one that met their demise in a room on that corridor.

3 Strange Footage from Iowa Restaurant Hints at Supernatural Activity

While this footage has been dismissed as a bug running across a CCTV camera lens, others believe that Chuck & Edna’s Maid-Rite restaurant has potential paranormal residents. Pat Orr, the eatery’s manager, claims that staff members have reported unexplained incidents since the business was established.

First to be caught on camera was a ghostly shadow in the restaurant’s kitchen moving slowly towards the sink before dissipating. Barely a week later, another clip captured a worker being hit by cups that were sliding off a shelf. As if wanting to discredit the bug theory, another stack of cups can be seen falling sideways—all by themselves.

2 The Wailing Ghost of La Llorona Terrifies Residents in Colombia

In the video clip, which has since gone viral on social media, a wailing ghostly figure is captured in treetops during broad daylight. Some are calling it the scariest thing they’ve ever seen, while one resident of Monitors, Cordoba, Colombia, has admitted to being so petrified they had to sleep with their mother.

According to legend, La Llorona was a mother who took her sons to the river and drowned them, afterward killing herself. Being that her soul was now cursed, she was barred from entering heaven until she could find the souls of her kids. The myth goes that when the ghost appears, she wails loudly, abducting children to drown in the river in the hope that her own son’s souls will find rest.

1 Pensacola Paranormal Investigators Get What They Bargained For

The A-Team is a bunch of supernatural investigators who carry out ghost hunts in central Florida and South Carolina. Of these locations in Pensacola, FL, they’ve admitted that this one has the most active spiritual presence. This is likely due to its age and the events that happened there. According to Jill Miller, founder of the team, spirits will linger in the air anywhere where there’s a traumatic emotional activity.

In a home on Pensacola’s East Hill, the ghost hunters come across a malevolent spirit, captured on the group’s thermal infrared SLS or Strained Layer Super-Lattice camera. The dark shadowy figure can be seen walking across the right-hand corner of the video, and it can be slowed down to show the outline clearly above Miller’s left shoulder.

Do You See It Too?

It’s true, some images and videos are cooked-up with fake editing or camera tricks. But if you look closely at a recording of real paranormal occurrences, you’ll spot something you just can’t explain.

Whether or not you believe in the supernatural doesn’t stop that creepy rush of uneasiness from washing over you when you’re staring at paranormal activity caught on camera. Many clips and pictures ring with truth, depicting happenings that can only be described as out of this world.