Doctors have often been seen as some of the smartest members of society, and with good reason. It takes years of training, constant retraining, and a lot more than just book smarts to be a good doctor. But they are still human, and humans are fallible. Mistakes are made every day, and while some of them can be insignificant, others can completely change lives. Suing doctors for less-than-perfect practice is becoming more and more common, the morality of which is debatable. If you need help, and only certain people are able (and often, legally obliged) to help you, is it really fair to blame them if their best isn’t good enough? In many cases on the other hand, it is clear if a patient suffered because somebody was careless. Below are ten examples of some of the most cringe-inducing medical malpractices of recent years.

Going in for brain surgery is worrying enough for most patients, but those in Rhode Island Hospital could be forgiven for being more worried than most. Despite being the most prestigious hospital of the state, and a teaching hospital for students of Brown University, the hospital made the basic yet tremendous mistake of operating on the wrong side of a patient’s brain. Three times in one year.

The first incident was the result of a third-year resident failing to mark which side of the brain was to be operated on. The doctor and nurse in this operation claimed they were not trained in how to use a checklist, although one must ask how many people would allow their heads to be cut open by someone who has clearly never received professional training in the fine art of grocery shopping.

In the second incident, a different doctor (with over 20 years experience) never filled out which side of an 86 year old man’s brain had a blood clot, assuring the nurse that he remembered. The patient in this case died a few weeks later.

In the third case, the chief resident neurosurgeon and a nurse both clarified which side of the brain was to be operated on beforehand, and then proceeded to operate on the other side. All three cases involved different doctors, but whether it’s better to be in a hospital where one doctor repeats a mistake multiple times, or several doctors make the same mistake is debatable.

Alexander Baez is a former Mr. Mexico and a runner-up Mr. Universe. Being a bodybuilder, he is, unsurprisingly, concerned with his physique, and in 1999 he decided he wanted to get pec implants. When he awoke from his surgery, he discovered that while he had been given implants, he was actually given breast implants (C-cups), and not pec implants. Police in Florida began a search for Reinaldo Silvestre, a man who had posed as a doctor and had no legitimate medical credentials. Silvestre had forged documents and had also operated on at least two women in Florida, using kitchen utensils. In 2004, Silvestre was found in working in Belize, where he is believed to have treated hundreds of patients over at least a one year period.

Carol Weihrer had long suffered pain in her right eye, and at the advice of her doctor, decided her quality of life would be improved if she had the eye removed. The surgery was five and a half hours long, and for about two of those hours, Carol was awake. She explained that anesthesia is made up of two different elements, one to paralyze the patient, and one to put them to sleep. Unfortunately, only the paralyzing agent worked fully in her case, and halfway through the operation, she woke up but could not move at all. She was horrified to hear the surgeon listening to disco music throughout, as well as having to hear things like “Cut deeper, pull harder”. Carol was awake for the exact moment they removed the eye. Eventually, the doctor realized she was conscious, and the administered more of the nerve-blocking anesthesia, which Carol described made her insides feel like “being roasted on a barbecue pit”. She was so traumatized by the ordeal that she has slept in a reclining chair since, too afraid to lie down. Cases like these are known as Anesthesia Awareness, and it is estimated that up to 42,000 people in the US alone experience it every year.

Never having been in for any sort of surgery in my life (and after writing this, hoping I never will be), I can only imagine the worries people have beforehand: how skilled is the surgeon, what if they cut something they shouldn’t and so on. I also think it’s safe to assume that “What if I catch on fire?” isn’t a common concern among patients. But perhaps it should be. In 2009 Janice McCall, 65, died six days after she caught fire during surgery. While the cause of the fire was not released in this case, there are a number of other examples to that can explain possible causes to igniting in surgery: In 2012, Enrique Ruiz suffered second-degree burns after an electronic scalpel caused his oxygen supply to explode, which the hospital then tried to cover up.

In another case, Catherine Reuter, 74, suffered second and third-degree burns after a cauterizing tool caused the alcohol based disinfectant on her face to catch fire. The incident led to strong infections, kidney failure, and long-term sedation. Reuter never fully recovered, and died in hospital two years later. It is estimated that surgical fires affect up to 650 patients a year.

It’s likely that everyone reading this will have heard stories about people who get operations and later find out that they had foreign objects stitched inside them. There are about 1,500 such reports every year in the US. While uncommon, such an occurrence can be extremely painful, and can lead to other complications such as infection or internal bleeding. What sets Daryoush Mazarei out from other examples is not the fact that the item left behind inside his chest, a retractor, was 10 inches long, nor that it could physically be seen poking out. It is that when he went back to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, he was told he should seek psychiatric care. After a month of agonizing pain, multiple complaints, and repeatedly being told the problem was in his head, Marazei was finally given a CT scan, and the item was removed. He has begun legal proceedings against the hospital.

Jesica Santillan was a 17 year old girl who died 15 days after receiving a heart and double-lung transplant. Undoubtedly, this was a major operation and any number of things could have gone wrong. The whole thing could have even gone perfectly, but failed if Jesica’s body rejected the new organs. While her body did reject the organs, it was not simply a case of bad luck. With such long waiting lists for organs in the US, you would think that the professionals in Duke University Hospital would make sure that the organs they intend to transplant are the same blood type as the person they’re going into. Unfortunately, Jesica was blood type O, and received organs from someone that was blood type A, something over a dozen people were supposed to check, but didn’t. The hospital hid the mistake for 11 days, and then went public looking for another donor. She received a second transplant two weeks after the first one, but was declared brain dead and taken off life support. Her mother believes that she was weaned off her medication so she would seemingly pass away naturally.

Only people who have actually seen it for themselves can really know how easy it is to look at something like a pair of kidneys and tell which one is healthy and which is not. Apparently, it’s not as clear a difference as you might think. In 2000, 70 year old Graham Reeves of Wales died after not one, but two surgeons removed the wrong kidney. This sort of error is not an isolated incident, nor is it confined to any one body part. Benjamin Houghton, an Air Force veteran, received $200,000 compensation after doctors removed the wrong testicle, while Willie King, who suffered from diabetes, received a total of $1.15 million after his right leg was amputated by mistake (with the correct leg being amputated later).

Kim Tutt was getting her jaw x-rayed at the dentist, when they noticed a large lump on the left side of her jaw. After undergoing further examinations, she was told she had 3-6 months to live. The doctors told her she could possibly get an extra three months if they removed the left side of her chin, right up to her ear, and replaced it with her fibula. Desperate to spend more time with her 10 and 12 year old sons, she underwent the procedure. The lump was removed, and although slightly disfigured, Tutt was grateful to have extra time with her sons. Three months later, she was called to the doctors office, who gave her the good news that she was cancer free. The bad news was that she had in fact never had cancer at all. There had been a mix up in the lab, and Kim Tutt had gone through five surgeries and been left disfigured for nothing.

Medical malpractice is not limited to surgery, and the case of Paul Lozano illustrates this better than any other example. Lozano had been sexually abused by his mother as a child, and his psychiatrist, Margaret Bean-Bayog, decided to try a form of therapy known as “reparenting”, where the psychiatrist simulates the different stages of lifespan development in an attempt to “reprogram” the patient. She coddled him, read him stories, called him “baby”, made him call her “mother”, and made him learn cue-cards off by heart. One such card read “I’m your mom and I love you and you love me very much. Say that 10 times”. Other cards were more sexual, and more notes were found that appeared to be erotica featuring Lozano and his doctor. It was also reported that they did in fact have sexual relations. After about five years, he committed suicide.

Some of the examples mentioned so far were a result of poor communication, while others can be attributed to bad practice. Depending on who and what you believe, it can be argued that both of these are present in the case of Bryan Mejia, but what sets it apart from the others is the ethical debate that it sparked. Bryan was born with only one leg, and no arms. The deformity is obviously not the fault of the medical staff at Palm Beaches, but parents Ana Mejia and Rodolfo Santana have accused the staff of negligence for not properly detecting this through ultrasounds, saying they would have aborted their son if they had known he would only have one limb. Most people would expect that a doctor would be able to alert the parents-to-be of such a disability, but Dr. Morel, the defendant, argued that he is not to blame. The couple, who feared the child may be born with down-syndrome, opted not to undergo amniocentesis after they were told there was a 99.9% chance that the child would not have any form of mental disability. This test would have detected the missing limbs, but there was a 1 in 500 chance that it could result in a miscarriage, and Morel argued that it was their decision, and he cannot be blamed. But according to the lawyer representing the couple, the second ultrasound given to them shows all four limbs intact, suggesting they were given false evidence.

The couple was awarded $4.5 million, to help Bryan have a good life, and stated that none of this was compensation for their mental anguish. But many people see this as the couple suing the hospital because they had a disabled child. This, the fact that the couple say they would have aborted their son, and the accusations of malpractice, all caused widespread outrage and debate.

Sacks containing dead bodies or merely a torso were common finds in the early 20th century. In fact, a quick search through the archives of US and Australian newspapers shows evidence of hundreds of bodies having been found sacked and discarded.

Only a few different types of sacks were used to hold the bodies. But the most common bag was the gunnysack, also called a burlap bag. Cornsacks were also used. But the only difference between the gunnysack and the cornsack was the size of the bag and its original use before a body was placed in it.

There were a few cases of smaller bags being used where the murderer had to chop apart the body and fit it into four different bags, but that was a lot of work for one murder. Few killers were keen on putting in the effort of cleanup.

Most of the body sack cases were never solved. They were simply mentioned in two short sentences in a local newspaper. There were many instances of torsos being found. With nothing else to identify the bodies, the cases remained mysteries for all time.

10 A Floater

The number one rule to getting rid of a sacked body is to weigh it down before dumping it into a deep body of water. There is no telling how many murderers got away with their crimes by following this basic 101 tip. However, some murderers failed miserably at this most basic rule.

For example, James Moore of Texas was a different kind of special. In 1898, he grew jealous of his wife. While she slept one night, he took a hammer and bashed her skull in. After that, he proceeded to stab her with a knife numerous times before stuffing her into a sack.

Moore took his wife’s lifeless body to the Trinity River and threw her in. But he forgot to weigh down the sack, and she was soon found floating in the river. Moore was arrested and confessed to his crime.^[1]

9 Four Suspicious Sacks

Early one morning in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1902, a young man was on his way to work when he spotted two oddly shaped sacks at the back of the Central College of Physicians and Surgeons. As he walked on, he saw an even stranger sight. There was a body-shaped sack sitting on top of a dry goods box.

The young man telephoned the police, and shortly thereafter, the bicycle patrolmen arrived. They opened the sack sitting on the box and discovered a body. A look inside the dry goods box revealed a second body stuffed in a sack. When they went behind the school for doctors, two more bodies were discovered.^[2]

An investigation was made, but everyone already knew what was going on. The bodies were recognized as those who had recently been buried in nearby cemeteries and were going to be used by the doctors for dissection.

Seventeen arrests were made, including grave robbers, three doctors, an undertaker, the proprietor of one of the cemeteries, and three watchmen.

8 Half Sacked

In most cases where bodies were stuck inside sacks, the murderer would either fold the body up to make it fit or he would chop off a few of the limbs. However, in 1939, there was a murderer on the loose who just could not be bothered with either of those tasks.

In a private dam in Wycheproof Shire, Victoria, Australia, a body was discovered floating in the water in 1939. What was curious about this particular body was that its legs were in a sack that was tied to the victim’s hips. It was as if the murderer just said to heck with it and tossed the victim into the water half sacked.

There was no mention of any heavy objects in the sack to help weigh it down. Also, the victim had injuries to the head which suggested that the person had been murdered instead of committing suicide.^[3]

The identity of the man was not determined.

7 Who Knows And Who Cares?

Out of Montana came a story that was fairly typical of gruesome sack finds. It was 1910, and a chef who was out fishing found a sack containing bones along the bank of a river. The police were called to investigate. When they arrived, they saw the sack with a bone sticking out of it.

The police looked inside the bag and declared the contents to be “too dead to be recognizable.” It could have been a person, a dog, or a calf for all they cared.

Instead of having a professional identify the bones, the men buried the sack where they found it and went on with their day.^[4]

6 Laziness Or Lack Of Curiosity

For two weeks back in 1926, thousands of people crossed over the bridge in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia, and viewed the object floating in the water. No one was all that curious about it because it looked like a bag in the muddy water.

One day, however, a man noticed that the sack was floating higher than before. Upon taking a closer look at the object, he could see an ear and part of a head sticking out from it.

The police were called, and they fished the sack out of the water. Inside it, they found the bloated body of a man.

Although no follow-up on the case could be found in the newspapers, it is rather curious that no one bothered to investigate the bag. After all, this is the type of behavior we expect from modern-day citizens and not from the people of nearly 100 years ago.^[5]

5 No Missing Person Report

One of the few ways that the police of the early 20th century were able to name an unidentified body was through the missing persons reports. If someone in the local vicinity had been reported missing, it was either assumed that the body belonged to that person or relatives were brought in for further identification.

If no local person was reported missing and no one confessed to the murder, the discovered body would remain unnamed. Without any form of identification, the case would sit unsolved.

In 1929, a chaff bag washed up on the creek banks in Narrabri, New South Wales, Australia, after some recent floods. A rabbit trapper going about his business found the bag and opened it up.^[6]

Inside was the torso of a man. His head, hands, and legs had been hacked off so that the body could fit into the sack and to help prevent identification. It was estimated that the victim had been deceased for a little under three months.

The police inspector was mystified by the case. Not only did he have an unidentified body on his hands, but no one had been reported missing during the three-month time period.

4 Quite A Haul

Fishermen who fail to catch a fish are apt to catch a boot instead. At least that is what we see in the cartoons. Unfortunately, there have been more known instances of bodies being fished out of the water than shoes.

That was the case back in 1910 when a man was fishing at Tooradin, Victoria, Australia. He brought up a heavy sack from the depths of the water and saw a pale, clammy hand sticking out from the side of the sack. The top of the sack had been tied with a rope.

The victim was described as a well-dressed man who had been spotted walking around Tooradin the day before his body was discovered. The locals believed that he was a city man who had been camping by the river.

When the police went to the victim’s campsite, they discovered his clothing neatly arranged and nothing seemed out of place. Naturally, they concluded that the unnamed man had ended his own life in a rather bizarre fashion.^[7]

3 Where Is The Rest?

Many of the bodies dumped in lakes and rivers were mere torsos. In the early 1900s, there was no real way to identify these torsos unless they had a tattoo or a unique scar. Often, the torso cases remained unsolved and the rest of the body parts were never discovered.

For instance, in 1914, a sewn-up sack was removed from the Mohawk River in New York. In it was the nude torso of a woman. Her head, arms, and legs were removed. The police investigated the case, but without DNA technology, there was little chance they could identify the unmarked torso.

Again, in 1921, a torso was discovered in Rogers, Texas. This time, the torso was discovered by two fishermen who pulled a floating gunnysack out of the river. Inside the sack, they found a woman’s torso. Her head and legs had been removed, but her arms remained attached.^[8]

2 Hair Completely Cut Off

As two men were preparing to leave Lyon, France, one morning and head out to the country, they noticed a strange sack on the ground. Of course, they opened it and discovered the body of a woman. There was blood on her lips and nostrils, and it appeared that someone had cut off all her hair.

The authorities were alerted, and soon enough, the body was identified as that of Marie Servageon. Her husband was located, and he claimed that his wife had disappeared the previous day on June 13, 1908. He found her sudden disappearance rather odd but decided not to contact the police. He said he had hoped that she would return the next morning.^[9]

The police were fine with the husband’s seeming lack of concern over his wife’s disappearance. They assumed that she had been kidnapped and murdered by people unknown.

No further reports were made about the case. It appears that the husband was never charged for the murder and that the kidnappers were never discovered.

1 Sacked With Arms Sticking Out

Imagine waking up one morning to head out to the bathroom. You open the door, already expecting the stench on a warm, damp morning. But instead of the smell, you are greeted with a sight that you would not soon forget. In truth, it was something straight out of a horror movie.

It was summer 1910 when a horrifying discovery was made in Bonner, Montana. The body of a man was found inside an outhouse. The victim had been stuffed inside a gunnysack which was then sewn closed. Oddly enough, whoever sewed the victim into the bag had left the man’s arms sticking out of the sides of the bag at the seams.^[10]

While suicides in outhouses were fairly common in the early 1900s, it was doubtful that a man might sew himself up inside a bag, leaving his arms out, and then commit the terrible deed. For this reason, the police and investigators at the scene were near certain that this was a case of murder.

Elizabeth lives in the beautiful state of Massachusetts where she is currently involved in researching early American history. She writes and travels in her spare time.

Science progresses by theory and experimentation. When an experiment requires a human subject there are two main options for the investigator. By far the most popular is to cast about for a volunteer, usually obtained by offering money rather than appealing to their thirst for scientific advancement. The other option is for the scientist to use him or herself as a test subject. Here are ten cases of bizarre, dangerous or important self-experiments.

10 Pain

Pain is a tricky concept to quantify. We all know people who can deal with a limb being lopped off without complaint while we ourselves are weeping over a paper cut. One potential way to work out a scale of pain would be for an individual to experience a range of painful stimuli and compare them against each other. This was the course Justin Schmidt took when he wished to compare the pain caused by various invertebrate stings. Schmidt ranks the pain caused by a sting from 0 (Ineffective against humans) to 4 (Excruciating). For stings at the higher end of the scale he also adds a verbal description of the pain to allow a fuller examination of what one suffers. One sting—that of the Pepsis wasp—was described as “Immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream.”

9 Cholera

Max von Pettenkofer was a huge figure in 19th century German medicine, being seen as the founder of hygiene. One of the most troubling diseases at the time was cholera, which causes death by extreme loss of fluids by diarrhea. We now know that it is caused by a germ, Vibrio cholerae, and is spread by fecal contamination. Pettenkofer lived in the early days of the germ theory of disease and was convinced cholera was caused by a mixture of a germ and soil conditions which transformed the germ into an infectious miasma. To prove the importance of soil in developing cholera, Pettenkofer drank a sample of pure cholera germs to see if he would get sick. While he felt a little unwell he did not end up dying from voluminous vomiting and diarrhea. This shows the limit of self-experimentation; we only have one self and a single datum is not generally sufficient to prove a theory.

8 Food

Since the first person starved to death it has been obvious that humans need food. What is less obvious is what happens to it once it is inside you and why it seems we excrete less than we take in. In the early 17th century a doctor called Sanctorius decided to weigh everything he ate, his own body, and everything he excreted for over 30 years. He built a special chair to allow him to measure the changes in his weight. These experiments allowed him to calculate that for every 8 pounds of food he ate he passed only 3 pounds of waste. Clearly some was being lost by a process he could not understand and he called this an insensible perspiration. Weighing all your feces and urine for 30 years is true dedication to science, but then I suppose it is better to use your own than someone else’s.

7 Infectiousness

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by mosquitoes that still kills 30,000 people each year despite there being an effective vaccine available. In the past epidemics of yellow fever would spread through North America and people would regularly leave cities for the safer countryside during ‘the fever season.’ Since it was such a peril a young medical student called Stubbins Ffirth decided to investigate. Certain that it was impossible for the disease to pass from one person to another he tried to infect someone using samples from victims. The person he tried to infect, as you might guess from this list, was himself. He took vomit from yellow fever patients and drank it. He also rubbed it in cuts on his own body for good measure. He did not contract the disease. Perhaps that was not the infectious route, he considered; so he then poured vomit onto his eyeballs. Still no fever. He then progressed through blood, saliva, and pus. Still in robust health Ffirth decided he had confirmed yellow fever was not infectious and published his results. Unfortunately all his samples had come from patients who had passed the infectious stage of the illness and yellow fever is very much a transmissible illness. He never found out he had drunk vomit for nothing.

6 Electrical Stimulation

The discovery of electricity and its effects on dead animals lead to a scramble of scientists attempting to investigate the role of electricity in life. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, discoverer of ultraviolet light, was one such scientist. His experiments into ‘animal electricity’ did away with testing it on corpses and onto his own body. He applied charges to various areas and recorded the results. The most extreme reaction he found was when he used his battery, a Voltaic pile, on his genitals and achieved orgasm. Like a child with a new toy he repeated his experiments endlessly. He was so attached to his work that he joked about marrying his Voltaic pile. The increasing shocks he gave himself occasionally required morphine to dull the pain and it is likely he shortened his life by his work.

5 Surviving Submarines

War has been a natural training ground for scientists. The huge number of bodies produced let early medics explore human anatomy. But the urge to help prevent deaths has also spurred some scientists into risky behaviors. J. B. S. Haldane was one of the great theorists of evolution but also had a flair for dramatic experiments. He learned this from his father, also a biologist, who used to experiment on his son. Wishing to study the effects of rapid changes in pressure which a submariner would experience on escaping from a wreck, Haldane had himself repeatedly placed in a decompression chamber. While much was learned about nitrogen narcosis, the bends, no major harm was done to Haldane except for some fits and perforated ear drums. He shrugged this latter off. “The drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

4 Upside Down World

All we know of the world is through our senses and so it is natural for scientists to investigate how those senses work. George Stratton decided to test how the mind would adapt to change in its perception of sight. By wearing glasses he inverted his vision so up was down and down was up. At first putting on the glasses led to the nausea and disconnected feelings you would expect. Within days he was able to function normally and after some time he reported that he actually felt the image he was receiving was actually the right way up. When he took the glasses off he thought the world as he saw it without the glasses was upside down. Repetitions of this experiment have failed to replicate this feeling normality but have shown the power of the brain to adapt to changes in perception compared to reality.

3 Hanging Sensation

Nicolae Minovici was a man who had a question he wanted an answer to: what does hanging feel like? For most of us the answer ‘Probably not great’ would be a sufficient guess, but Minovici wanted to know beyond reasonable doubt. The only logical answer was therefore to have himself hanged and experience it for himself. Several times and with several different types of noose he had assistants hoist him into the air. The pain was apparently severe and lasted for weeks after each experiment, not something condemned men would have to contend with as their suffering is cut somewhat short. Of course this experiment does not answer what those who suffer the long drop and a broken neck undergo when they are executed.

2 Heart Cathetar

Sometimes it is necessary for doctors to get access to the heart either for diagnosis or treatment. The simplest way to do this might seem to be to hack open the chest and have a look at the organ itself. Obviously this has massive risks and while even today opening the chest is risky, in the 1930s it would have been almost certainly fatal. Werner Forssman studied corpses and decided it would be possible to pass a thin tube, or catheter, along blood vessels and directly into the heart. Needing to discover whether this would be possible in still living humans he decided an experiment would be in order. He cut open his arm and threaded the tube up and into his heart. A small slip could have torn a major vessel and led to his death but he still needed to prove he had reached the heart. So, with the tube dangling from his arm, he walked from the operating room to an x-ray machine, and took the pictures which showed he had been successful. For this bit of scientific derring-do he shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1956.

1 Stomach Ulcers

One of the most basic rules of lab safety is no eating or drinking, but there can be serious rewards for ignoring this ban. Today stomach ulcers are, for the most part, just punch lines in jokes about people being too stressed but they were once a major cause of death. The risk is from an ulcer causing bleeding or perforating and leading to infection. The cause of these potentially fatal ulcers was a mystery until two scientists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, discovered many patients carried the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in their stomachs. After checking his stomach was healthy Marshall downed a Petri dish of the bacteria and waited. He soon developed gastritis and other symptoms. They had shown H. pylori could cause stomach ulcers and that antibiotics could treat them. For this discovery Marshall and Warren shared a Nobel Prize in 2005.

One of the most popular plot devices in fiction is for a character to develop amnesia and lose their memory. Of course, in real life, amnesia cases don’t happen nearly as often as they do on soap operas, and they come in many different forms. But when these cases do occur, they make for some interesting stories, even when they turn out to be a complete hoax. We’ve already profiled the story of Benjaman Kyle, a middle-aged man who lost his memory after an assault and still hasn’t uncovered his true identity, but his is not the only bizarre case of amnesia (not by a long shot).

10 Ansel Bourne

One of the most well-known amnesiacs in pop culture is Jason Bourne, a character who is forced to uncover his past as a government assassin after losing his memory. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that Jason Bourne was named after one of the first known amnesiacs. Ansel Bourne was an evangelical preacher from Greene, Rhode Island, who took a trip to visit his sister in Providence on January 17, 1887. However, for unexplained reasons, he ended up withdrawing his savings instead and traveling to Norristown, Pennsylvania. While there, he decided to open up a variety store under the name Albert J. Brown and started a new life.

When Bourne woke up on the morning of March 15, he had no idea where he was. He became very confused when residents told him his name was Albert J. Brown. In his mind, it was still January 17 and he had no memory of his previous two months in Norristown. After returning home, Bourne was studied by the Society for Physical Research. Under hypnosis, he would assume the persona of Albert J. Brown. The hypnotized Bourne told a back story about Brown that was similar to his own, but denied knowledge of anyone named Ansel Bourne. It was probably the first documented case of a psychiatric disorder known as the “fugue state,” a dissociative form of amnesia that causes a person to lose their identity for a period of time before their memory suddenly returns. After the hypnosis, Ansel Bourne lived out the rest of his life without incident and never assumed the persona of Albert J. Brown again.

9 Clive Wearing

After suffering a serious brain injury, the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed film Memento is afflicted with anterograde amnesia. Even though he still remembers his past, he is unable to create new memories. While this condition is real, it is far less common than retrograde amnesia, which involves losing memories from one’s past. However, a British musicologist named Clive Wearing has the dubious distinction of suffering from both forms of amnesia at the same time. On March 27, 1985, the 46-year-old Wearing contracted herpesviral encephalitis, a very rare form of the herpes simplex virus that attacks the central nervous system. As a result, Wearing cannot remember events from his past or store new memories in his brain.

The virus severely damaged Wearing’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that transfers memories from short-term to long-term. As a result, his brain can only store new memories for several seconds before he forgets them again. Wearing also cannot remember most of the details of his life before 1985. He can recall that he had children from a previous marriage, but cannot remember their names. While Wearing can still remember that he loves his current wife, he often forgets that they’re married. However, his procedural memory is still intact, meaning that even though he cannot remember his musical background, he still knows how to play the piano. It sounds like a nightmarish situation, but Wearing has managed to live day-to-day life under these difficult circumstances for the past 28 years.

8 Sywald Skeid

On November 28, 1999, a young man in his mid-twenties wandered into the emergency department of a hospital in Toronto, Canada. He had a broken nose and appeared to be the victim of an attack. The man spoke with a foreign accent, but carried no identification and claimed to have no idea who he was. He was treated by doctors, who diagnosed him as having post-concussive global amnesia. When the press picked up on his story, they gave him the nickname “Mr. Nobody.” After being released from the hospital, Mr. Nobody stayed at a shelter for a few weeks before being taken in by an Ontario couple. The young man went through various name changes throughout the years, but finally settled on Sywald Skeid.

Skeid’s photographs and fingerprints were circulated in an attempt to uncover his identity, but he refused all offers of treatment for his amnesia. He moved to Vancouver and met with a lawyer in order to lobby for a Canadian citizenship and eventually married the lawyer’s daughter. Police received a lead suggesting that Skeid was a French model named Georges Lecuit, but subsequently discovered that the real Lecuit’s passport had been stolen in 1998. Skeid and his wife fled the country and were later found living in Portugal, where he was attempting to obtain Portuguese citizenship. Skeid finally revealed his full story in an exclusive interview for the June 2007 issue of GQ magazine. He hailed from a poor Romanian peasant family and his real name was Ciprian Skeid. In the end, Skeid admitted to faking the whole amnesia episode in order to escape his past and seek citizenship in another country.

7 Jody Roberts

In 1985, 26-year-old Jody Roberts lived in Tacoma, Washington, working as a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune. In May of that year, Roberts’ friends and family started to notice some strange changes, as she stopped taking care of herself and began to drink significantly more than usual. On May 20, she mysteriously vanished and would not be seen by her loved ones for 12 years. Little did they know that five days later, a disoriented Roberts was found wandering around in a mall in Aurora, Colorado, over 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) away. She carried no identification, but had a key to a Toyota, which was never found. She was admitted to a Denver hospital, where doctors determined that she had entered a fugue state and developed amnesia.

Unable to uncover her true identity, Roberts started a new life after leaving the hospital. She gave herself the name Jane Dee, got a job at a fast food restaurant, and enrolled at the University of Denver. After moving to the town of Sitka, Alaska, Roberts married a commercial fisherman and had two sets of female twins while starting a new career as a web designer. In 1997, one of Jane Dee’s Alaskan co-workers saw Jody Roberts’ picture on a Seattle newscast and recognized her. Roberts eventually reunited with her old friends and family in Tacoma, but still had no memory of them. While it’s theorized that severe stress might have brought on her fugue state, it remains unknown how Jody Roberts ended up in Colorado.

6 Raymond Robins

Raymond Robins was a noted economist and advocate of organized labor who often worked closely with the White House on such issues as prohibition and establishing diplomatic relations with Russia. On September 3, 1932, Robins had a meeting scheduled with President Herbert Hoover, but never showed up. He was last seen leaving the City Club in Manhattan. Robins’ disappearance made headlines, leading to speculation that he might have been the victim of organized crime, but there were also reported sightings of him acting strangely while wandering the streets of Chicago. On November 18, Robins was discovered living under the name Reynolds H. Rogers in Whittier, a small town in the mountains of North Carolina.

Robins had apparently arrived in the town one week after he disappeared, claiming that he was a miner from Kentucky. He lived in a boarding house, spent most of his time prospecting, and became a popular figure in the community. However, even though Robins had a grown a beard by that time, a 12-year-old boy recognized him from a photograph in the newspaper and contacted the authorities. Robins’ nephew went to Whittier to identify him, but Robins did not recognize him and had no memory of his previous life. After reuniting with his wife and undergoing psychiatric treatment, Robins finally started to regain his memory. It was speculated that a combination of stress and emotional strain might have caused Robins to enter a fugue state, prompting him to assume a new identity.

5 Barre Cox

In 1984, 31-year-old Wesley Barrett “Barre” Cox had a wife and a six-month-old daughter and worked as a minister in San Antonio. On July 11, Cox had just taken a trip to Lubbock and phoned his wife to tell her he was planning to drive to Abilene to see friends. The next day, Cox’s vehicle was found abandoned and ransacked on a rural road in Jones County, and the contents of his wallet were scattered across the ground. In the early hours of the morning, Cox had been seen at a nearby convenience store buying two jugs of fuel. He claimed his car had run out of gas and a policeman gave him a ride back to his vehicle. Cox was not seen again until 2000, when he was recognized working at a gay church in Dallas as a minister named James Simmons.

Cox claimed he had been beaten and found unconscious inside a car trunk in a Memphis junkyard. He was taken to a hospital and remained in a coma for two weeks. When Cox woke up, he had no idea who he was and learned that he had amnesia. After leaving the hospital, Cox started a new life and eventually became a minister at a gay church. However, authorities could find no police or hospital records to verify Cox’s story. The policeman who drove Cox back to his vehicle had noticed a motorcycle in the car’s trunk. This motorbike was missing when the abandoned car was found, and witnesses saw a man fitting Cox’s description riding it later that day. This has created suspicion that Barre Cox chose to stage his own disappearance and seek a new life after realizing he was gay.

4 Michelle Philpots

In the comedy 50 First Dates, Drew Barrymore plays a woman who suffers a serious head injury in a car accident. As a result, she develops a rare form of anterograde amnesia which causes her memory to reset whenever she goes to sleep. After she wakes up, all her new memories have been erased and she believes that it’s the day of her accident. Believe it or not, this story actually has some basis in reality. In 1985, Michelle Philpots of England suffered a head injury a motorcycle accident. Five years later, she re-injured her head in a serious car accident. These injuries did enough cumulative damage to Philpots’ brain that she eventually started having seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. By 1994, she was suffering from anterograde amnesia and had completely lost the ability to create new memories.

For the past 20 years, Philpots has had all her memories wiped clean after she goes to sleep. When she wakes up, she believes that it is still 1994. Even though Philpots was in a relationship with her husband long before she suffered amnesia, they did not actually get married until 1997. As a result, Philpots’ husband has to show her their wedding pictures every morning in order to remind her that they’re married. During an appearance on The Today Show with Matt Lauer, Philpots actually forgot Lauer’s name in the middle of their interview. Even though an operation was performed to remove some of Philpots’ damaged brain cells and put an end to her seizures, it seems unlikely that her condition will go away or that her erased memories will return.

3 Doug Bruce

On the morning of July 3, 2003, an unidentified British man walked into a New York police station and told them he didn’t know who he was. He had recently woken up on a subway train having no idea how he got there, and since he carried no identification, he did not even know his own name. The man was checked into a nearby hospital for a few days until a phone number was discovered inside his knapsack. The number belonged to a female acquaintance, who came forward to identify the man as Doug Bruce. Bruce was a British citizen who had earned millions by working as a banker in Paris before moving to New York to pursue a degree in photography. But even after Bruce was escorted home to his fancy loft in Manhattan, he did not remember the place or any other details about his life.

Bruce is believed to be suffering from a very rare form of retrograde amnesia, and he became the subject of an acclaimed documentary called Unknown White Male. The film became the subject of controversy as there have been allegations that Bruce’s story is an elaborate hoax. Experts have been unable to pinpoint a specific traumatic incident that could have caused Bruce’s amnesia and some have expressed doubts that it is genuine. Shortly before the incident, one of Bruce’s friends had gone through his own bout of short-term amnesia after suffering a head injury, leading to speculation that the incident might have inspired Doug to perpetrate a hoax. Whether Doug Bruce is faking it or not, he has yet to show any signs of regaining his memory.

2 Anthelme Mangin

On February 4, 1918, a disoriented French soldier was discovered wandering around on a railway platform at the Brotteaux train station in Lyon, France. The soldier carried no identification, but after being questioned, he said that he believed his name was Anthelme Mangin. However, he didn’t know anything else about his life and could not recall how he’d ended up on the railway platform. Mangin was placed in an insane asylum and was moved around from institution to institution for years as they attempted to work out who he was.

Mangin’s photograph was widely circulated in newspapers and over 300 families came forward to claim his as their own. However, Mangin did not remember any of them, and none these families could be verified as his relatives. Finally, in 1930, a family from the commune of Saint-Maur, Indre positively identified Mangin as a former waiter named Octave Monjoin, who had gone off to fight in World War I and never returned. In August 1914, Monjoin had been wounded and taken prisoner alongside 65 other French soldiers on the Western Front. After spending the next 3.5 years in a series of prison camps, the soldiers had been sent back to France in January 1918. However, Monjoin’s paperwork was lost, so his family never found out he’d returned home. It is believed that Monjoin’s traumatic experiences in the war caused him to lose his memory.

1 Agatha Christie

Since Agatha Christie was arguably the most famous mystery writer of all time, it’s only appropriate that she became the center of her own bizarre mystery in 1926. On the evening of December 3, the 36-year-old Christie mysteriously vanished from her home in Sunningdale, England. The next morning, her abandoned car was discovered one hour away in Newlands Corner, but she was nowhere to be found. Christie’s disappearance became a huge story and once word spread that her husband, Archibald, had recently asked for a divorce, speculation ran rampant that he’d murdered her. Finally, on December 14, Christine was found alive and well, registered under the name Teresa Neele at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate. She claimed to have no memory of how she’d ended up there.

There has always been debate over what happened to Christie during those 11 days. At the time, many believed she staged her own disappearance for publicity or as a way of getting back at her husband—especially since Teresa Neele happened to be the name of his mistress. However, there is evidence that Christie might have entered a fugue state and genuinely lost her memory. On the morning of her disappearance, a witness encountered her walking down the road. In spite of the cold weather, she was wearing nothing but a thin dress and seemed upset and confused. It has been theorized that Christie’s impending divorce and the recent death of her mother caused her to enter a deep depression. Crashing her car might have been the breaking point that caused her to develop amnesia and forget who she was. Agatha Christie died in 1976, and took the full truth about what happened to her grave.

Robin Warder is a budding Canadian screenwriter who has used his encyclopaedic movie knowledge to publish numerous articles at Cracked.com. He is also the co-owner of a pop culture website called The Back Row and recently worked on a sci-fi short film called Jet Ranger of Another Tomorrow. Feel free to contact him here.

Mankind’s love of records left behind countless documents. Needless to say, some are so common that the very sight of them makes people regret going to the museum.

Then there are the secret codes and oaths, unique manuscripts, and caves marked with people’s fear. Text-obsessed scholars are talking in dead tongues and admit once again that the ancient Egyptians did some amazing things.

The world of rare words and pictures is a magnetic one. Sometimes, it’s even downright funny.

10 Oldest Near-Death Case

In 1740, a French doctor called Pierre-Jean du Monchaux described a curious case. An unconscious patient had recovered, only to describe a light so pure and white that the man was convinced he had stood with one shoe in Heaven. The case was included in the doctor’s book, Anecdotes de Medecine.

It might have gone unnoticed if not for Phillippe Charlier, who recently riffled through an antique shop. Ironically, he was also a French doctor. He found the book by chance and bought it for less than $1.

When he read about the case, Charlier realized he was looking at the world’s oldest report of a near-death experience. It was a time when people leaned on religion to explain such things, but the ancient physician stayed professional. He suggested a medical reason—too much blood rushing to the brain.

Monchaux’s assessment nearly matched modern explanations. Today, researchers think a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the brain cause the sensations of a near-death experience.^[1]

9 The Mysterious Devourer

In 2017, archaeologists took their shovels to a shrine-like building. The small structure stood at Zincirli in Turkey and soon yielded a pot. The stone vessel originally held cosmetics but was reused to display an incantation.

A story was carved over the surface, describing the capture of something called a “devourer” which was said to bring “fire” to its victims. The only way a person could recover was to use the devourer’s own blood.

The incantation did not specify how the blood was to be administered or the creature’s identity. Illustrations suggested that it was either a centipede or a scorpion. The “fire” sounds like a painful sting.

The author was a magician called Rahim, who carved the advice in Aramaic 2,800 years ago. This made it the oldest Aramaic incantation ever found. Archaeologists believe that the incantation was important enough to preserve after the magician’s lifetime because the inscription was already over a century old by the time the temple was built.^[2]

8 Dirty Bathroom Jokes

Ancient bathrooms with floor mosaics are rare. When one was found in 2018 in Turkey’s ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum, it was a cause for celebration. However, the images were not beautifully rendered legends or geometric patterns. The tiny tiles told dirty jokes.

As Roman men visited the latrine around 1,800 years ago, they would have been amused by the antics of Narcissus and Ganymede. Both men belonged to real myths. Narcissus was in love with his own image. Ganymede was kidnapped by the god Zeus as a slave but also as a love interest.

The mosaics twisted the stories, first by giving Narcissus an ugly nose. Instead of admiring his reflection, he appeared to be fixated on his genitals. Ganymede’s scene was even more detailed. He was getting his private parts sponged clean by a heron. The type of sponge was usually reserved for cleaning toilets, and the bird represented Zeus.^[3]

The unusual theme stunned archaeologists but at least proved that bathroom humor is nothing new.

7 The Creswell Marks

The border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire is marked by a limestone gorge. Called Creswell Crags, the site is historically significant. Apart from past discoveries of ancient remains, Creswell holds the only Ice Age art in Britain.

After years of investigations, the caves managed to deliver a big surprise in 2019. A tour group stumbled upon the country’s largest collection of apotropaic marks. The engravings had nothing do to with the Ice Age gallery. The latter were thousands of years older, while the newfound carvings were from medieval times until the 19th century.

Historians recognized several of the symbols. Also called witches’ marks, their purpose was to protect the living from bad supernatural influences. Among the most popular was “VV,” invoking the Virgin Mary. Others—like boxes, mazes, and diagonal stripes—captured whatever mysterious evil brought diseases and made the crops fail.^[4]

Dense clusters of symbols lined the ceilings and walls of the caves, a testament to the local people’s fear of the unknown.

6 The Nag Hammadi Library

Around 1,400 years ago, a jar was buried in Egypt. Containing 13 codices, the vessel was rediscovered in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi. The rolls contained Gnostic records of Jesus. The Gnostic tradition, an early and sometimes mystical branch of Christianity, is considered to be heretical by mainstream Christians. Most were traditionally penned in Coptic, a language that was spoken in Egypt for centuries.^[5]

In 2017, researchers in Texas found that one codex was different. Instead of Coptic scribbles, the text was Greek. This was exceptional. The work in question, the First Apocalypse of James, had never been recovered in ancient Greek before. The piece covered a conversation between Jesus and James, the latter taking instructions on how to continue teaching after Jesus’s death.

Another feature that set the scroll apart was little dots that divided the text into syllables. This rare technique is known from educational texts, which suggested the writer used the heretical gospel to teach Greek to students.

5 Unique Palimpsest

Centuries ago, writing material was expensive. Sometimes, an old manuscript would be scraped clean and inked with new information. These recycled documents are known as palimpsests.

In 2018, Dr. Eleonore Cellard assessed fragments containing Quran script. She noticed ghostly letters behind the eighth-century Arabic text and identified several Bible passages. Written in Coptic, they belonged to the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy.

The find was extraordinary. Quran palimpsests are rare enough, but never before had a Christian document been erased to make space for the Islamic holy book. The writing style dated the Arabic text, but the Coptic was more difficult to place.^[6]

The fragility of the manuscript prevented carbon dating. Even if the document was strong enough, the technique can only date the paper and not the writing. Once again, the style was the only clue.

Unfortunately, it was a very broad one. The original Coptic was not written before the seventh century. Despite the dating issue, the palimpsest remains invaluable for its uniqueness.

4 Earliest Record Of Algol

The star Algol is actually a 3-in-1 deal. Officially discovered in 1669, the three suns move around each other, causing the “star” to dim and brighten. A papyrus studied in 2015 suggested that the ancient Egyptians discovered it first.

Called the Cairo Calendar, the document guided each day of the year, giving auspicious dates for ceremonies, forecasts, warnings, and even the activities of the gods. Previously, researchers felt the ancient calendar had a link to the heavens, but they never had any proof.

The study found that the calendar’s positive days matched Algol’s brightest days as well as those of the Moon. The appearances of one deity, Horus, also matched the star system’s 2,867-day cycle.

This strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptians were the first to follow Algol around 3,200 years ago. More remarkably, they did so without a telescope even though the system was almost 92.25 light-years away.^[7]

3 Unique Ninja Oath

In Japan, rumors of a written ninja oath persisted for almost 50 years. If true, this was a historic gem. Unlike movie ninjas, the real guys used stealth to gather intelligence and rarely used weapons. Most of their traditions and training were passed down verbally from master to student. A written document, especially an oath, would be a first.

In 2018, the piece finally surfaced. It was donated to a museum by the Kizu family, once a ninja clan from the town of Iga. The donated cache consisted of 130 ancient documents, but the oath was the most remarkable. Written by a man called Inosuke Kizu, he thanked his masters for the ninjutsu training and vowed to never reveal the secret knowledge. Not even to his immediate family.

The 300-year-old paper also captured the penalty of sharing ninja techniques with outsiders. The author accepted that his betrayal would cause his descendants to be tortured by the gods for generations. The letter was probably handed to his masters and returned to the Kizu family after his death.^[8]

2 Ferdinand’s Code

To safeguard military information from his enemies, King Ferdinand of Spain wrote in secret code. It was a little too effective. His correspondence with a commander named Gonzalo de Cordoba went undeciphered for 500 years.

Ferdinand sponsored Christopher Columbus’s trips to the Americas and fought several enemies. He recaptured Spain from the Moors in 1492 and battled France for the Mediterranean.

The letters promised interesting insights into the war king’s mind. Spain’s intelligence agency picked up the challenge. Ferdinand’s alphabet had 88 symbols, 237 letters, and six accompanying characters (such as numbers and triangles) that made each letter’s meaning more complex. In addition, the “language” ran continuously without breaks to indicate words.^[9]

In 2018, after six months, the agency cracked enough of the code to read four pieces of correspondence. They revealed details ranging from instructions on troop deployment in Italy to berating the commander for making decisions without Ferdinand’s approval. The breakthrough is a good step toward cracking the rest of the royal mail.

1 Extinct Language Spoken Again

A Cambridge academic loved ancient Babylonian so much that he decided to learn the language. Not just to read it but to speak it correctly. Babylonian went extinct around the time that Jesus was born.

Nearly 2,000 years of silence did not deter Dr. Martin Worthington, who already spoke Sumerian, Assyrian, English, Italian, and French. For over 20 years, he dove into ancient scripts and compiled a unique archive of research.

After gleaning correspondence, treaties, letters, and scientific reports written in Babylonian, Worthington arrived at a point where he could speak it. He was the first to admit that the project was not perfect. Although he could give a speech in the lost language, he was not fluent.

Worthington now teaches the language to Assyriology students, mainly to bring them closer to the ancient world they chose to study. Interestingly, if the two were to meet, ancient Babylonians might understand modern speakers because the language is related to Hebrew and Arabic, which replaced Babylonian as the Middle East’s dominant language.^[10]

The idea that life often mirrors art is one with which many of us are familiar. In most cases, these parallels between fact and fiction feel like harmless fun. There are times, however, in which the blurred line between the two can start to feel unsettling, as though there was more at play than simple coincidence.

From novels that proved eerily prophetic to famous faces who met their end in uncannily familiar ways, here are some of the most tragic examples of life imitating art.

10 Carrie Fisher And The Fate of Princess Leia

We picture her with cinnamon bun hair, a flowing white gown, and a blaster gun in hand. Indeed, actress and writer Carrie Fisher is best remembered as the woman who breathed life into the iconic Star Wars heroine, Princess Leia.

Fisher experienced a medical emergency on a flight from London to Los Angeles in late 2016. After four days in a coma, she sadly died at age 60. Shortly before her death, Fisher had finished filming scenes for Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi, her fifth official outing as Leia.

Though having the opportunity to see her once again on the big screen was welcomed by many as a touching tribute, others—including Fisher’s own brother—found certain scenes hard to swallow. He pointed out the uncomfortable irony that Episode VIII saw Leia falling into a coma, a sequence the actress had filmed mere months before suffering the same fate in real life.^[1]

Though Fisher tragically never regained consciousness, her fictional counterpart lived to fight another day. As such, Fisher’s legacy will live on through the character and the scenes she had already completed. It is a bittersweet silver lining that does not quite take the sting out of her untimely loss.

9 The Disappearance Of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her world-famous crime stories have sold more than a billion copies in English and a further billion copies in translation. So, it is certainly fair to say that she knew a thing or two about penning a compelling mystery.

However, it was her own personal affairs that had the public gripped in December 1926. In an incident that could have been lifted right from one of her books, Christie disappeared without notice.

Her uncharacteristic and unexplained absence quickly made headlines, with thousands of volunteers scouring the country in search of clues. When her car was found abandoned near a quarry, her coat and ID discarded inside, many feared the worst. When it then emerged that her husband had recently announced plans to leave her for another woman, suspicion fell on him.^[2]

Christie would eventually be found alive, 11 days after first disappearing. But it was not exactly a happy ending. Somewhat disturbingly, she had checked into a hotel using the name of her husband’s new lover and claimed to remember nothing of the ordeal.

Doctors would diagnose concussion and amnesia, and the author would speak little of the difficult period again. New theories suggest that she had contemplated suicide and hid herself away in a bout of religion-fueled shame.

The more commonly held belief is that the stress of her husband’s betrayal added to her existing depression over the loss of her mother. The combination of the two proved to be too much and triggered a mental breakdown.

8 Mary Shelley And Her Husband’s Drowning

Mary Shelley is the author of the revered horror novel Frankenstein. Another of her major works, Mathilda, was not released until years after her death because its publication was suppressed by her father. Due to its gothic exploration of an incestuous infatuation, he feared that readers would think it was autobiographical.

In the novella, there is a scene which sees the titular heroine rushing toward the sea. She is distressed by the news that someone she loves may have drowned, but she would arrive too late to save him.^[3]

A couple of years after it was written, Shelley would find herself mirroring her character’s actions when her own husband met a similar watery end. Shelley later commented on the uncanny comparisons between the two incidents. She described how she identified with her tragic heroine’s plight and had come to consider the book “prophetic.”

7 H.G. Wells And The Atom Bomb

History best remembers H.G. Wells as the author of enduring sci-fi classics such as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. As Wells was a pioneer of the genre, his writing was often considered ahead of its time, with prescient ideas and technologies that would later become reality.

One of his most disturbingly accurate predictions appeared in his 1914 novel, The World Set Free. He described a weapon of unprecedented power that would be dropped from planes to unleash untold suffering on the world below. He called it the “atomic bomb.”

Three decades later, a frighteningly similar nuclear weapon did indeed emerge and was even given the same name. When the bomb was unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even those involved in its development were said to be disturbed by the sheer scale of misery that it caused. Perhaps things would have turned out differently had they paid closer attention to the moral warnings that had been present in Wells’s fiction.^[4]

6 A Famous Dog’s Grisly End

The 1989 comedy-action film K-9 is about a cop and his faithful furry companion. The movie’s climax sees the dog shot while trying to apprehend a criminal. Though greatly injured, he manages to pull through, and they all live happily ever after.

In real life, things worked out considerably less well. Koton, the four-legged star of the film, was an actual police dog away from the big screen. He had a successful career and was responsible for more than 24 arrests.

Heartbreakingly, just like his character before him, Koton was shot in 1991 while pursuing a suspect. Unlike his fictional counterpart, he sadly didn’t make it.^[5]

5 The Death Of Paul Walker

US actor Paul Walker is best known for his long-running role in the big-budget The Fast and the Furious franchise. The films are high-octane action flicks, full of high-speed car chases and dramatic stunt sequences.

It is this fact that made his death in 2013 all the more difficult for his fans and loved ones to accept. At age 40, Walker was killed in a car crash when the Porsche driven by his friend collided with a lamppost and became engulfed in flames.

Production of the seventh film in the series was already well underway at the time of his passing. Filmmakers decided to use existing footage of the star to craft a suitable outcome for his character. This was deemed an appropriate and sensitive way to preserve the actor’s memory.^[6]

4 Eva Cassidy And ‘Fields Of Gold’

Given the widespread admiration that exists for Eva Cassidy now, it is hard to believe that she was virtually unknown at the time of her death from melanoma in 1996. Then just 33 years old, she had been a regular on the local music scene in Washington DC.

But with most of her recordings unreleased, international audiences were still largely unaware of her. These various unheard tracks were compiled and released posthumously, which led to extensive radio play, platinum sales, and a whole new level of appreciation for the tragic star.

Shortly before her death, however, Cassidy had released Live at Blues Alley, a collection of intimate recordings. It would prove to be the last release made during her lifetime. This album included her version of “Fields of Gold.” Originally by Sting, it is a track that has endured as one of her most recognizable and beloved songs.^[7]

The touching irony of the final verse—with lyrics that speak of being remembered after you are gone—was not lost on many. This sentiment took on a whole new meaning when the singer was dead mere months after the song’s release. Thanks to the music she left behind, Cassidy has at least been remembered fondly, just as the song wished for.

3 Bill Turnbull And Stand Up To Cancer

Bill Turnbull is a journalist and broadcaster and a familiar face on UK television. Fans of The Great British Bake Off from around the world may also recognize him from his stint in the famous tent as part of a charity special.

The episode, which first aired in early 2018, was produced in aid of Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C). The aim was to raise both awareness about the importance of getting health checks and funds to help improve treatment and survival rates.

In a twist of painful irony, Turnbull was diagnosed with prostate cancer while filming was taking place. Though he underwent several rounds of chemotherapy to slow the disease’s spread, he subsequently announced that his case is terminal. Facing the situation with dignity, he has used his story as a means to further drive home the importance of regular health screening.^[8]

2 J.K. Rowling And The Loss Of Her Mother

J.K. Rowling is best known as the author behind the Harry Potter series. Rowling had been working on the first book for around six months when her mother died from multiple sclerosis. She was just 45 years old and completely unaware of the fame and fortune that awaited her daughter.

At this time, with the book still in an early draft form, the eponymous boy wizard had already been written as an orphan. Suddenly finding herself without parental ties of her own, however, Rowling was able to identify with her fictional hero’s sadness on a much greater level.

This clearer understanding of the grief she had written for him was so profound that it prompted Rowling to rework the scenes concerning his loss. His parents’ deaths were no longer glossed over. Instead, they were imbued with a heavy dose of poignancy and emotional weight.

As Rowling said herself, “Everything deepened and darkened.”^[9] Though this was to the benefit of the story, it should not be forgotten that Rowling had to endure Harry’s pain firsthand to gain this heartfelt insight.

1 The Sinking Of The Titanic

Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novella, Futility (aka The Wreck of the Titan), was about a vast, luxurious ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank, killing almost everyone on board.

Sound familiar?

Yes, indeed, the sinking of the Titanic is another example of a horrific real-life event that was eerily foretold in fiction. The book was published 14 years before the Titanic’s doomed voyage, but the name and fate of the two ships were not the only striking similarities.

It is little wonder that many suspected Robertson of clairvoyance once you start delving into the many unnerving parallels. These include the size and capacity of the two vessels as well as intricate, finer details such as the number of lifeboats present.^[10]

Even the time and date of each ship’s impact with the iceberg are nigh on identical. Prophecy? Coincidence? Whatever the case may be, it is one of the most tragic cases of life imitating art the world has yet seen.

Callum McLaughlin is a freelance writer based in Scotland. He writes content on a variety of subjects for blogs, websites, and magazines. He can be found on Twitter, where he’ll invariably be chatting about books, cats, and tea.

When Netflix released their feature film Bird Box in 2018, many viewers were left questioning what the “monster” was that drove everyone to suicide. One of the online theories is that the monster represented “mass hysterical contagion,” nowadays known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), where a single individual suffers a psychogenic illness that spreads to a much larger group.

SEE ALSO: 10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing

Generally, women and girls will succumb to MPI more than men, as they are more likely to be triggered by another affected individual. Unlike the film suggests, nobody has reportedly died from the symptoms, which include hyperventilation, dizziness, panic, faintness, abdominal pain, sickness, headache, weakness, and itching.

These following real-life cases of mass hysterical contagion all ended nearly as quickly as they started. However, the sufferers will not easily forget just how frightening and disturbing such an outbreak can be.

10 The Twitching Teenagers

In October 2011, cheerleading captain Thera Sanchez woke up from a nap to find herself violently twitching and jerking. Two weeks later, a senior from the same school named Lydia Parker began humming and swinging her arms around involuntarily. Eventually, the numbers swelled from two to 20 people (mostly teenage girls) affected at Le Roy Junior/Senior High School, near Buffalo, New York.

Parents were becoming increasingly concerned that the tics were caused by the school’s water supply or that the playing fields were contaminated. However, the country’s leading environmentalists agreed there was nothing that would cause these symptoms.

According to Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, who treated 15 patients at the Dent Neurologic Institute, the symptoms were worsened by social media and press attention. Mechtler explained, “One thing we’ve learned is how social media and mainstream media can worsen the symptoms. The mass hysteria was really fueled by the national media, social media—all this promoted the worsening of symptoms by putting these people at the national forefront.”^[1] By the end of the school term, many of the teenage girls who were affected had returned back to normal.

9 June Bug

In June 1962, 62 workers at a dressmaking textile mill in South Carolina began to show symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and “a breaking out over the body.” The workers believed that the outbreak was caused by bug bites after receiving a fabric shipment.

However, investigation by the US Public Health Service, concluded that there was no reliable evidence that the contagion had been caused by an insect. Instead, it was explained that working conditions in the 1960s were so poor that the stress spread both physically and mentally between coworkers. The “June Bug” itself also could have been manifested by the initial untrained medical staff, who were not familiar with such symptoms.

The June Bug outbreak can also be explained as a social contagion, which is where groups of people who have strong social ties are affected in the same way. The majority of the coworkers were women who were the main providers for their families, which meant spending many long hours together.^[2]

8 Tarantism

In Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, tarantism was a form of hysteria that was associated with a bite from a tarantula. The term is derived from the town of Taranto, Italy. Those who were convinced they had suffered a tarantula bite would experience heightened excitability and restlessness. They would break out into a form of frenzied dancing which would allow them to be “cured.”

In 1693, a doctor in Naples suffered two tarantula bites in order to disprove that they would result in any of the typical tarantism symptoms. In front of six witnesses, he experienced no physical changes.

Tarantism gave rise to the tarantella, in which couples dance quickly and flirtatiously with each other. Composers Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Carl Maria von Weber have all written tarantella music.^[3]

7 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, the country of Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika) suffered a laughter epidemic that began with an outbreak at a girl’s school before spreading to the surrounding communities. More than 1,000 people were affected by chronic laughter that lasted several months. Symptoms also included hysterical crying, aimless running, and violent outbursts which could last anywhere between a few hours to more than two weeks. Fourteen schools were closed due to the epidemic.

It is believed that in this particular case, one schoolgirl fell ill with anxiety-induced laughter, which then set off other girls, and a chain reaction occurred throughout the region. Researcher Christian Hempelmann noted, “We build up some magical psychic pressure, and laughter lets us release it. Statistically in this case, this did not release anything. These people were suffering, expressing their suffering through that. Nothing got better because they laughed.”^[4]

6 False Anthrax Alarms

On October 5, 2001, a letter that tested positive for anthrax killed the Sun newspaper’s picture editor Bob Stevens, and the world went berserk. The anthrax antibiotic, Cipro, was one of the fastest-selling drugs on the market, and in Dallas, an airplane was forced to make an emergency landing when potato chips that were crunched into the carpet were mistook for anthrax. In England, Canterbury Cathedral and the London Stock Exchange were evacuated due to false alarms. During the month of the anthrax fatality, there were four letters sent in the US mail that tested positive for anthrax but more than 3,000 cases of both false alarms and hoaxes.

Also during October, newspapers reported huge rises in sales as people were in desperate need of more information, and the media was blamed for overhyping the anthrax threats. Steve Caprus, executive producer of NBC Nightly News, stated that all journalists must “deal with facts—not hyping or being overly dramatic.”^[5] Over the months that followed, five people died from inhaling anthrax, and 17 others were infected after exposure.

5 St. John’s Dance

In 1374, there was an outbreak of uncontrollable dancing in the streets of Aachen, Germany, which still baffles experts even to this day. The writhing of the bodies, sometimes referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” would drive sufferers to exhaustion.

In his 1888 book The Black Death and The Dancing Mania, Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker describes:

They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.^[6]

4 Elsa Perea Flores School

Elsa Perea Flores School in Tarapoto, Peru, fell victim to an outbreak of hysteria affecting nearly 100 children at the school. During the summer of 2016, the children, mostly aged between 11 and 14, claimed they saw terrifying visions of a man in black trying to kill them and also experienced seizures. They experienced fainting attacks, muscular convulsions, delirium, and repeated screaming.

One pupil described her experience, saying, “It’s disturbing for me to think about it. It’s as if someone kept on chasing me from behind. It was a tall man all dressed in black and with a big beard and it felt like he was trying to strangle me.”^[7] Another added, “Several children from different classrooms fainted at the same time. I got nauseous and started vomiting. I heard voices. A man in black chased me and wanted to touch me.” Locals put the hysteria down to demonic possession and claimed that the children must have been playing with an Ouija board before the attacks.

3 Blackburn Fainting Frenzy

During the summer of 1965, more than 300 people in Blackburn, England, began to suddenly faint with no prior symptoms. Princess Margaret was scheduled to visit the newly restored Blackburn Cathedral, and the crowds gathered in their thousands to await her arrival. Then, one by one, people began to collapse on the ground. The ambulance staff who attended the scene said the fainting was due to being stood around in the hot sun.

The following day, 98 pupils at St. Hilda’s Girls’ School also began to suddenly faint without explanation. They were rushed to the hospital, and mattresses were laid out in the hallways to cope with the sudden rise in patients. One ambulance driver recalled, “As fast as we took them away, new cases from classrooms in other parts of the school were being brought in.”^[8]

A year later, a report in the British Medical Journal by a pediatrician and a London psychologist confirmed that this was a case a mass hysteria or, as noted, an “epidemic of over-breathing.”

2 Resignation Syndrome

A mystery illness observed in Sweden has been dubbed “resignation syndrome.” Children of asylum-seekers would withdraw completely, unable to open their eyes, speak, or even walk. Eventually, they did recover, but the illness baffled medical experts for more than two decades. Dr. Elisabeth Hultcrantz, a volunteer with Doctors of the World, revealed, “When I explain to the parents what has happened, I tell them the world has been so terrible that [their child] has gone into herself and disconnected the conscious part of her brain.”

Resignation syndrome was first reported in the 1990s. From 2003 to 2005, more than 400 cases were noted. Karl Sallin, a pediatrician at the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, said, “To our knowledge, no cases have been established outside of Sweden.” More recently, in 2016, Sweden’s National Board of Health stated that numbers had decreased; there were 169 cases that year.^[9]

1 Coca-Cola Scare

In June 1999, Coca-Cola withdrew 30 million cans and bottles from the shelves in Belgium after more than 100 people claimed the product made them ill. It was reported throughout the country that many people, including children, became suddenly sick with “stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and palpitations” after drinking bottled Coca-Cola. After the Belgian government was swamped with complaints from citizens concerned about airborne toxins, an investigation took place. However, four members of Belgium’s Health Council suggested that the epidemic was a case of mass hysteria.

In a public letter, the health council stated, “It is probably significant that a company with such high visibility and symbolic image was involved in this episode. Besides the important role of the media, the scale of the outbreak may have been amplified by the radical measures taken by the health authorities, as well as deficient communication by the Coca-Cola company.”^[10] Coca-Cola quickly recovered from the epidemic, and sales were back on the rise within weeks of the event.

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines.
Twitter: @thecheish

Have you heard of Ebola? It’s this disease from West Africa that only kills people there, right? Unfortunately, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, or the Ebola virus disease (EVD), has been on the planet for decades and might be coming soon to a country near you (if it hasn’t been there already). Ebola is known as a hemorrhagic fever, which plainly means that it can affect major organs, damage blood vessels, and cause severe illness in humans. The deadly hemorrhaging virus has been responsible for over 11,000 deaths reported between 1976 and 2016.^[1]

Recurrent in West Africa and with cases spread all over the world, it seems like EVD is not leaving us anytime soon. Most reported cases of EVD outside of West Africa have been from health workers who have worked in or been based in West Africa. These infections are a result of exposure to the disease from outside their home countries. As a result, the following ten places have had suspected or confirmed EVD cases over the past five years.

10 Lagos, Nigeria

In the summer of 2014, a Liberian-American man flew from Liberia to the city of Lagos in Nigeria. On arrival at the airport, he became violently ill and unfortunately died five days later. Two leading infectious disease doctors who treated him at the hospital also died. This initial EVD case infected a total of 19 people, with seven of them consequently dying.^[2]

The virus was eventually declared contained in October 2014 after 42 days with no new cases. In early 2018, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority urged Nigerian airports to be vigilant in detecting the virus and began thoroughly screening both passengers and crew arrivals from EVD-affected countries.

9 Gulu, Uganda

EVD cases were first reported in Uganda in 2000 and subsequently in 2012, 2014, and 2018. Due to their proximity, it is thought that the cases are linked to the EVD outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan. Statistics show that there have been a total of 425 reported cases of EVD in Gulu, Northern Uganda, resulting in 224 deaths.^[3]

Since early 2018, there has been an increase in suspected EVD cases in Uganda around the northern and eastern regions. These reports are increasing due to the return of EVD in the DRC and Sudan and a rise in refugees fleeing violence. Many cases have been identified as Marburg disease, a “sister” viral hemorrhagic disease of EVD which presents similar patient symptoms, including internal bleeding and vomiting.

8 Mali

In 2014, an EVD-infected man from Guinea traveled to Mali and subsequently died. The infection spread to a further seven people, resulting in a total of six deaths.^[4]

All the same, the response of the health care agencies and Malian government has been championed. There is no need to worry about being infected, as in 2019, Mali has been classified by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a no-go area for citizens from other countries. Only essential travel is advised in most of the country.

7 Glasgow, Scotland

While working in Sierra Leone in 2014, a health worker became infected with Ebola.^[5] She has been noted as one of the most controversial EVD patients, as she was undetected on arrival at Heathrow Airport in London. The attending doctor checked her temperature and noted that it was normal. (It was actually high.) However, the patient soon deteriorated and became ill with the virus after arriving home in Glasgow, causing a nationwide panic. The attending doctor has since been suspended due to faking the details of the patient’s examination.

Since this period, after months of isolation, the patient has recovered from the virus. She has, however, returned to the hospital for rechecks, as the Ebola virus has returned in different parts of her body. Twice more, she was close to death but fully recovered. This case has been noted down in history as one of the worst Ebola cases in the West.

6 Dallas, Texas, US

In 2014, a Liberian who had been visiting family in Dallas, Texas, became unwell with the Ebola virus and soon died in a hospital. It emerged that on arriving from Liberia, he had lied on his airport admission documents about the fact that he had been in close contact with EVD-infected people in West Africa. Subsequently, two nurses who attended to him also contracted Ebola. Fortunately, both the nurses survived.

One of the nurses went on to sue the parent company of the hospital for a lack of personal protective equipment and health and safety measures. This subsequently resulted in a settlement.^[6] It is unknown if she is still working as a nurse.

5 New York, New York, US

An emergency doctor who returned from volunteering with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Guinea in October 2014 became ill just days after getting back to New York. He first went to meet friends and went bowling in the city before locking himself in his flat when he became suspicious of his high temperature. He was then transferred to Bellevue Hospital in New York and put into isolation. Three people who were in close contact with him were also put into isolation for security measures. He eventually recovered after weeks in the hospital.^[7]

4 Sardinia

In 2015, a nurse returned to Sardinia after performing three months’ worth of humanitarian aid work in Sierra Leone with the charity organization Emergency. When he began to notice Ebola symptoms, he put himself into isolation and ultimately ended up under quarantine in a specialist hospital in Rome, Italy. The nurse was placed under the care of a doctor who had successful experience treating patients with Ebola and was eventually cured.^[8]

3 Madrid, Spain

A Spanish nurse was infected with EVD while treating an infected patient who had been flown into Spain from West Africa. The EVD patient was a Spanish priest who had been working in Sierra Leone.^[9]

The nurse survived. However, unfortunately, the priest later died. He was the second Spanish priest to die from EVD. The first had been working as a health worker in Liberia.

2 Cornwall, England

In 2014, A Nigerian security guard was tested for Ebola after visiting his family in Nigeria. He was placed in quarantine for three weeks, a fact which made headlines. The man said he felt victimized by the quarantine. Nigeria was declared Ebola-free only two days after his return.^[10]

A Nigerian citizen staying at a Cornish navy base in Cornwall was also quarantined after becoming ill. However, test results identified a rare form of the monkeypox virus, and he was transferred to London for treatment.

1 Saudi Arabia

In 2014, a 40-year-old man returned to Saudi Arabia from a business trip to Sierra Leone. He soon became ill with the Ebola virus and was placed in isolation. He had returned to the country to make a pilgrimage to Jeddah and was stopped so that the disease could not be spread to hundreds of other pilgrims.^[11] He is the only known Ebola victim to have traveled to Saudi Arabia.

World Health Organization experts state that Ebola can be passed through close and direct contact with infected people and through handling infected persons’ body fluids, such as blood and saliva. Health care staff are advised to follow strict precautions to reduce the risk of human-to-human transmission by following outbreak protocols. This includes using personal protective equipment when handling suspected or Ebola-positive patients and moving and disposing of the bodies of Ebola patients safely. Ebola is a deadly virus that can recur in different parts of the body months and years after initial infection and treatment.

So remember to wash your hands and watch out for any cuts if you’re traveling or working in any affected regions in Africa. Be sure to take precautions in countries such as Guinea, Sierra Leone, Libera, Nigeria, Sudan, the DRC, and Uganda during your travels.

Caroline Alice is a freelance writer and English language teacher with an interest in health and infectious diseases. Twitter @carolinealiceb

FBI Special Agent John Douglas is the man known as “Mindhunter.” The nickname originates from the 1995 book that he wrote alongside Mark Olshaker. The book profiles Douglas’s creation of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, formerly known as the Bureau’s Behavioral Science unit. Douglas and fellow agent Robert “Bob” Ressler interviewed hundreds of killers in order to invent the process known as criminal profiling.

See Also: 10 Murderers Who Did Not Kill Anybody

As dramatically shown on the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” Douglas and other agents dealt with such infamous serial killers as Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, David Carpenter, Robert Hansen, and Wayne D. Williams. Douglas even talked with Charles Manson, the man once widely seen as America’s most infamous inmate.

Besides these high-profile cases, “Mindhunter” the book also dives deep into lesser known crimes and criminals, all of whom Douglas interacted with or chased in one form of another. The following list details and describes some of the more overlooked horrors of Douglas’s groundbreaking autobiography.

10 The Murder of Betty Jean Shade

The 1979 slaying of 22-year-old Betty Jean (Douglas’s book says “Jane”) Shade is depicted in the fifth episode of the first season of “Mindhunter.” Here’s the real story: On the last night of her life, Shade got into a serious argument with her live-in boyfriend, Charles “Butch” Soult, Jr. Despite this, and despite Shade’s determination to break things off with Butch, she still decided to ride in the same car with Butch, his brother Michael, and their sister Catherine. The foursome went to Wopsononock Mountain near the city of Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Hours later, Logan Township police officers Steven D. Jackson and Walter Coho were dispatched to Skyline Drive near the mountain. A local jogger had found the mutilated body of a white female. The body belonged to Shade. Lead investigator Detective Howard Horton, along with Robert Long, Edward G. Pottmeyer, and Barry Bidelspach, were quick to zero in on Butch as the prime suspect. Douglas concurred with this view. Ultimately, Douglas and the Logan Township officers learned that Butch and Mike Soult had raped and murdered Shade. Mike not only sexually assaulted Shade, but helped his brother dispose of her body. Butch killed and mutilated Shade. Catherine Soult helped her brothers to transport the corpse.

The case of Betty Jean Shade was one of Douglas’s early attempts at a criminal profile. He correctly deduced that Shade’s killer was someone from a broken family with a domineering mother. Douglas also correctly predicted that Shade’s killer would be “inept with women”. This matched Butch to a T, as he mutilated his former girlfriend after failing to have sexual intercourse with her prior to her death.

9George Russell Jr.

George Russell Jr. was one of the first murderers to complicate Douglas’s thinking concerning cross-racial sex crimes. Prior to 1991, Douglas and the majority of the American law enforcement community operated under the assumption that lust murderers targeted victims of the same race, i.e. white attackers target white victims or black attackers target black victims. Russell changed the game.

Between 1990 and 1991, Russell, a handsome black male in his thirties, bludgeoned and strangled to death three white women named Mary Anne Pohlreich, Andrea Levine, and Carol Marie Beethe. According to the residents of Mercer Island, Washington, Russell was charming and dated many different women of different races. Even though he had a history of petty theft, Mercer Island police officers had a hard time believing that he was capable of such heinous murders.

The 27-year-old Pohlreich spent her last night drinking and dancing with friends at Papagayo’s bar on June 22, 1990. Hours later she was found beaten to death in her bed by someone using what Douglas calls a “blitz-type” attack style. A similar fate befell the 35-year-old Beethe and 24-year-old Levine. As Douglas writes in “Mindhunter, Russell’s method of overwhelming his victims with speed and violence was not unique. Rather, what made Russell unusual was the amount of post-mortem posing that he did with his victims. For instance, one of the women was left in her bed with a pillow over her head and a rifle inserted in her vagina. The final victim was put in an even more humiliating position, indicating to Douglas that Russell had a deep-seated hatred of women and felt compelled to degrade them.

8 The Murder of Francine Elveson

Francine Elveson was a petite woman—90 pounds and only five feet tall. She was also quiet and shy and suffered from a case of kyphoscoliosis (a curvature of the spine). The 26-year-old spent her days teaching handicapped children, while her nights were spent with her parents inside of their Pelham Parkway apartment in The Bronx.

In October 1979, a young resident of Elveson’s apartment building found her wallet in the stairwell connecting the third and fourth floors. Upon returning the wallet to the Elveson family, it was learned that Francine had failed to show up for work that day. Afraid that something had happened to her daughter, Mrs. Elveson and some of her neighbors searched the apartment building for Francine. They found her at the top of the stairs leading to the roof. Francine was found naked and badly bruised. In fact, Francine’s killer had managed to fracture her jaw, nose, and cheeks. The killer had also strangled Elveson with her own belt and nylon stockings. Other grotesque acts included biting the Elveson’s thighs, removing her nipples, inserting various objects into her vagina, and leaving behind excrement at the crime scene.

Douglas’s profile figured that Elveson’s killer was someone who knew the apartment building well and lived in the area. Douglas also predicted that the killer would have a history of mental illness, would be unemployed or intermittently employed, and a military reject. All of these described Carmine Calabro, the man charged with Elveson’s murder many months after her body was found. Calabro, who pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, was ultimately convicted of the murder thanks to dental forensics, which matched his teeth with the bite marks on Elveson’s body.

7Carl Stephen Mosely

Carl Stephen Mosely, who Douglas calls “Gregory Mosely” in “Mindhunter,” preyed on vulnerable women. His first victim, 35-year-old Dorothy Louise Woods-Johnson, was a widow who wanted to make friends. On a Friday night in April 1991, Dorothy went to the SRO Country Club in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was there that she met the handsome Mosely. The following day, April 13, 1991, Dorothy’s body was found outside of a housing development. The medical examiner found not only multiple stab wounds on Dorothy’s body, but also found signs of strangulation as well as bruising on Dorothy’s face and throat.

The next victim, 38-year-old Deborah Jane Henley, spent her last night alive at the SRO Country Club too. When Deborah failed to come home that night, her parents called the sheriff. That same day, a farmer found Deborah’s nude body in a cornfield. Like Dorothy, Deborah’s body contained bruises, particularly on the throat and face. Both cases were broke wide open thanks to an anonymous tip, which claimed that Carl Mosely had borrowed a friend’s car on the night of Deborah Henley’s murder. It did not take police long to discover that Mosely had a prior conviction: In 1989, Mosely had abducted and sexually assaulted Laura Fletcher, thus earning convictions for assault with a deadly weapon and second-degree rape.

Two of Douglas’s students, Larry Ankrom and Greg Cooper, profiled Mosely as a sexual sadist with an “inadequate personality.” Furthermore, the FBI agents saw Mosely as obsessed with control and cruelty. After all, Mosely not only mutilated his victims before killing them, but he had also stabbed both women twelve times each on top of penetrating them vaginally and anally.

6Larry Gene Bell

Larry Gene Bell was a soft-spoken killer who enjoyed taunting his victims. Bell was so vile that Douglas devotes an entire chapter to his crimes in “Mindhunter.” During the summer of 1985, Bell was the man who struck fear in the hearts of South Carolinians, especially those with blonde daughters.

At approximately 3:38 p.m. on May 31, 1985, high school senior Shari Faye Smith went missing. After her father, Robert, found Shari Faye’s car setting in the family’s driveway with the engine running, he alerted the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. This would set off the largest manhunt in the history of Columbia, South Carolina—a manhunt that would become a kidnapping case when Shari Faye’s abductor called the Smith family and told them: “Shari Faye was kidnapped from her mailbox with a gun. She had the fear of God in her”.

These taunting phone calls would continue. One of these phone calls led Sheriff Jim Metts to Shari Faye’s body, which was found eighteen miles away from her home in Saluda County. The level of decomposition made it impossible to determine the cause of death, but the medical examiner did conclude that Shari Faye had expired on the same day that she was kidnapped.

After Shari Faye, another victim, 9-year-old Debra May Helmick, was abducted near her family’s trailer located at Old Percival Road in Richland County, South Carolina. Helmick was murdered almost immediately, and the killer called the Smith family again and told them where to find Helmick’s body. Douglas, other members of the FBI, and Sheriff Metts encouraged Dawn Smith, Shari Faye’s sister, to keep talking to the killer every time he called. Eventually the phone number was traced to Huntsville, Alabama, and from there cross-checked with a phone belonging to the Sheppard residence, which was fifteen miles from the Smith family home. The Sheppards were ruled out, but not Larry Gene Bell, their house sitter.

Before Bell’s discovery, Douglas believed that Shari Faye’s killer would be a white male in his late twenties to early thirties. He also believed that the killer had married early in life before getting a divorce. The killer lived with his parents, had been discharged after a brief stint in the military, and was a porn addict. Larry Gene Bell was a divorced loner who did odd construction jobs. He spent less than a year in the Marines before being discharged due to a knee injury, and the first search of his room in the Sheppard home uncovered a “Hustler” magazine.

Bell never confessed to the murders. He died in the electric chair on October 4, 1996. Bell is still considered one of the primary suspects in the 1984 disappearance of Sandee Elaine Cornett, the girlfriend of one of his co-workers, and the July 1975 disappearance of Denise Newsom Porch, who was last seen at an apartment complex not far from where Bell lived at the time.

5 James R. Odom & James C. Lawson

James Russell Odom and James Clayton Lawson met in a mental ward in the mid-1970s. Both were serving time for rape at California’s Atascadero State Mental Hospital. Lawson and Odom passed the time by talking about their future plans. Lawson wanted to kidnap women, cut off their breasts, cut out their ovaries, and stick knives into their vaginas. Lawson wanted to do everything to his female victims except have sex with them. For Odom, the only crime he cared about was rape.

Not long after both men were released back into the civilian world, they hopped into the 1974 Ford Comet belonging to Lawson’s father. Days later, on August 29, 1975, the nude body of a 25-year-old mother of two was found near Columbia, South Carolina. Both of the victim’s breasts had been removed. Her genitals had also been removed as well, while evidence at the scene indicated that the woman’s killers had eaten part of her flesh.

The case of Odom and Lawson, which ended in 1976 with Odom receiving life plus forty years and Lawson dying in the electric chair on May 18, 1976, became one of the foundational case studies for Douglas. In a 1980 article penned by Douglas and Robert Hazelwood, the case of Odom and Lawson was used to describe how sexual fantasies influence lust murderers.

4 Joseph Christopher

On September 22, 1980, 14-year-old Glenn Dunn was found dead in a supermarket parking lot. A day later, 32-year-old Harold Green was shot while eating at a fast food restaurant. Later that same day, 30-year-old Emmanuel Thomas was shot to death outside of his own home. On September 24th, another victim, Joseph McCoy, was shot to death not far from Niagara Falls.

Because of the weapon used, the murderer of these men became known as the .22-Caliber Killer. Eyewitnesses who saw some of the shootings described the assailant as a young white male. This fact led Douglas to believe that the murders were conducted by a “mission-oriented, assassin-style” killer who was motivated by racism (all of the victims were black males). Douglas’s profile was given added ammunition when, on October 9th, a man matching the description of the killer entered a Buffalo, New York hospital and attacked 37-year-old patient Collin Cole. The assailant screamed “I hate niggers” before running away. After months of investigation, the .22-Caliber Killer was unmasked as 25-year-old Joseph Christopher, a private in the US Army.

Douglas and other investigators also proved that Christopher was the man known as the “Midtown Slasher,” an assailant who stabbed four black men and one Hispanic man to death in downtown Manhattan over a thirteen-hour period on December 22, 1980. Prior to Christopher’s capture, Douglas had predicted that the .22-Caliber Killer would be a serviceman who was rational and well-organized, and yet unable to live under Army discipline. This description applied to Christopher, who carried out the murders while on leave from Fort Benning.

3 William Henry Hance

Serial killer William Hance is featured in the third episode of the second season of “Mindhunter.” In real life, Hance was known to the terrified people of Georgia as the Stocking Strangler. Although convicted on solid evidence, Hance’s 1994 execution has been labeled as a “legal lynching” by some advocates because of Hance’s diminished mental capacity.

Beginning in 1978, the Stocking Strangler attacked and strangled six elderly women after breaking into their homes, all of which were either in or near the city of Columbus, Georgia. All six victims were white, and the limited forensic evidence found at the crime scenes suggested that the killer was black. Around the same time, the Columbus police received a letter on US Army stationary signed by seven people calling themselves the “Forces of Evil.” The letter claimed that because the Stocking Strangler was a black male, they would kill a black woman in retaliation. The letter also claimed that a black prostitute named Gail Jackson had already be abducted and killed by the group.

Douglas, who was already working a major serial killer case in Atlanta, believed that the “Forces of Evil” was a deflection written by the real killer, aka the Stocking Strangler. Fellow FBI profiler Robert Ressler, himself a former Army MP, believed that the killer was a black male and an enlisted soldier stationed at Fort Benning. Ressler believed that the killer was either in the artillery or the military police.

After the FBI criminal profile made its way around Fort Benning, 26-year-old Specialist William Hance, who was a member of an artillery unit, was arrested. He confessed to the murders of Gail Jackson, Irene Thirkield, and Army private Karen Hickman, who had been found dead at Fort Benning in 1977.

A year before “Mindhunter” was published, Hance’s name made the national news because of several accusations of racism. Specifically, multiple jurors who had participated in Hance’s second sentencing claimed that racial epithets had been used by other jurors towards Nance and the lone black member of the jury. However, despite these accusations and despite the fact that Hance’s IQ was once tested at 76 (thereby making him borderline disabled), his execution went ahead.

2Wayne Nance

Doug and Kris Wells, who became friends with Douglas, have the distinction of being some of the few people to ever go from serial killer victims to serial killer killers. This strange turn of events occurred on September 3, 1986.

After arriving home sometime after midnight, Doug and Kris Wells found an unknown pickup truck parked outside of their Missoula, Montana home. Doug found that the truck was occupied by a sleeping man. Minutes later, that same man asked Doug for a flashlight. Before Doug could retrieve the flashlight, the man pulled out a gun and ordered Kris to tie up Doug. The man then separated the two. Kris was taken to a bedroom in the house, while Doug was brought to the basement, tied to a pole, and beaten and stabbed with an 8-inch knife. Incredibly, Doug managed to free himself. He grabbed a loaded rifle and made his way upstairs. He shot the assailant once, but did not kill him. When the man fought back, Doug struck him several times in the head. Then, after the assailant fired three rounds from his .22-caliber pistol (one round hit Doug in the leg), Doug seized the pistol and shot the intruder in the head. The man would die in St. Patrick’s Hospital the next day.

The intruder turned out to be Wayne Nance, a native son of Missoula who was born in 1955. Nance knew Kris Wells because she was the store manager at Conlin’s Furniture, the same store that he worked at as a delivery driver. Nance became infatuated with Kris and may have decided on killing her during one working day.

In the years since the attack on the Wells family and the publication of “Mindhunter,” Douglas and Montana police officials have asserted time and time again that Nance was more than likely a serial killer responsible for more than five deaths between 1974 and 1986. Some of Nance’s suspected and confirmed victims include Donna Pounds (1974), Devonna Nelson (1980), Marcella Cheri “Marci” Bachmann (1984), the unidentified woman known as “Christy Crystal Creek” (1985), and the murders of Michael and Teresa Shook (1985).

1 Steven Brian Pennell

Delaware is not known for much besides being America’s “First State” (Delaware was the first state to ratify the US Constitution). But Delaware made the news for all the wrong reasons between 1987 and 1988.

During that time, a serial killer regularly traveled US Route 40 in New Castle County, Delaware in order to abduct and murder women. The first body discovered was that of ex-prostitute Shirley Anne Ellis, 23, who was found partially nude and bound with black tape. Ellis’s killer had hit her several times in the head with a hammer and had tortured her with work tools before strangling her. After Ellis, several more women either went missing or were found dead. These women included 32-year-old Catherine A. DiMauro, 22-year-old Michele A. Gordon, 26-year-old Kathleen Anne Meyer, and 27-year-old Margaret Lynn Finner.

After being called in to consult on the case, Douglas profiled the killer as a white male with a wife and kids. He was also a blue-collar worker who knew how to use tools. Douglas also predicted that the killer knew Route 40 well, and would hunt the area nightly with a “rape kit” prepared in his work van. 31-year-old Seven Brian Pennell, an electrician and a married father, was the man that police were looking for. The Delaware native enjoyed dominating women and fit Douglas’s profile of “macho” man archetype.

Pennell, Delaware’s only recorded serial killer, died via lethal injection on March 14, 1992.

Nonliving objects and animals are not always safe from litigation. Over the years, people have sued animals and even inanimate objects like puppets. In turn, people have been sued by animals and nonhuman objects.

Obviously, lawsuits of this nature aren’t actually filed by animals or nonliving things but by people or groups. While the following court cases are bizarre, hilarious, or both, they show just how far people will go to get justice.

10 Musician Loses Court Battle Against Puppet

South African musician Steve Hofmeyr holds the rare distinction of having lost a court case to a puppet. The puppet in question is Chester Missing, which is owned by South African ventriloquist and comedian Conrad Koch (pictured above with Chester).

The whole thing began in November 2014, when Hofmeyr blamed black people for apartheid. Koch replied in a series of tweets he posted on his personal Twitter page and Missing’s Twitter page in which he criticized Hofmeyr over his racist statement. One of his messages urged Hofmeyr’s sponsors to cancel their contracts with the musician.

Hofmeyr requested for a protection order against Koch and Missing over what he called threats and harassment. However, he failed to receive the order when a court determined that Koch and Missing had done nothing wrong and could tweet about Hofmeyr. The court also ordered Hofmeyr to pay Koch and Missing’s attorney fees.

Koch quickly returned to making tweets about Hofmeyr, who he called “Racistboy.” The less-than-amused Hofmeyr accused the courts of siding with the comedian and his puppet.^[1]

9 Kansas Sues A Toyota Truck And Loses

In 2018, the state of Kansas lost a lawsuit against a Toyota pickup truck. Sergeant Christopher Ricard of the Geary County Sheriff’s Department stopped the truck over a partially obscured traffic plate. However, he impounded it when Scooby, his police dog, sniffed out 11.9 grams of marijuana hidden inside the vehicle. Sergeant Ricard also found $84,000 in cash.

The state filed to seize the vehicle and money. Considering that it was a civil forfeiture case, the state listed the truck, money, and marijuana as defendants instead of the two men driving it. However, the court determined that the state could not legally seize the truck and money because Sergeant Ricard had illegally extended the stop to allow Scooby to sniff the vehicle.^[2]

8 Police Dog Wins Lawsuit Filed By A Burglar It Bit

On July 6, 2013, a Georgia man named Randall Kevin Jones broke into his ex’s home and stole several items, including her television, camera, and game console. The unnamed ex called the police after spotting Jones leaving her home. Officers from the Gwinnett County Police Department responded to the scene.

The police found Jones and ordered him to surrender. Jones didn’t and started to run. He continued running, even after an officer threatened to send a police dog after him. The officer ultimately unleashed the dog, named Draco. Draco bit Jones, sending him falling into a ravine. Jones required some stitches for his injuries.

Two years later, Jones sued the police department for “excessive use of force.” As defendants, he named at least three officers and the dog, which was listed as “Officer K-9 Draco of the Gwinnett County Police Department in his individual capacity.” Jones claimed Officer K-9 Draco bit him “for what seemed like a lifetime.” He also claimed the officers watched and didn’t try to get Draco off him as this was happening.

Gwinnet County tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but a federal judge rejected this, so the county appealed. Finally, Judge Robin Rosenbaum of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta threw the case out, saying, “We hold that a dog may not be sued individually for negligence since a dog is not a person.” She added that dogs cannot be issued a subpoena, cannot get an attorney, and cannot pay damages if found guilty.^[3]

7 Judge Stops Horse From Suing Its Owner

In 2018, a horse in Oregon sued its owner for neglect. It requested $100,000 in damages. However, a judge threw the case out because horses cannot sue their owners, or anybody for that matter. The horse itself did not file the lawsuit, though. The Animal Legal Defense Fund did on its behalf.

The horse, named Justice, was owned by Gwendolyn Vercher, who had left it outside in the cold. Justice was hungry, thirsty, and underweight by 136 kilograms (300 lb) at the time it was rescued. It also suffered from frostbite. Vercher was charged with neglect of an animal and paid for the horse’s treatment.

However, the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed the lawsuit because Justice could need money for further treatment. The court ruled the horse could not file the lawsuit because otherwise, courts would soon be filled with animals suing their owners. Gwendolyn Vercher said the lawsuit was “outrageous.”^[4]

6 Aborted Fetus Sues Abortion Clinic

In March 2019, Ryan Magers sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville, Alabama, for aborting his unborn child. Also listed as defendants were the company that made the pill used for the abortion, the doctor who did the abortion, and every organization the doctor worked with.

Ryan Magers called the fetus Baby Roe. He claimed his girlfriend aborted Baby Roe in February 2017. She was six weeks pregnant at the time and went ahead with the abortion after he refused. Magers said he filed the lawsuit because he wants the law to protect fathers of unborn children.

For now, the law allows the mother to abort the baby without any consideration from the father. The lawsuit has raised eyebrows among feminists and pro-abortion advocates. The case is currently ongoing.^[5]

5 Monkey Selfie Ends In A Win For Photographer

In 2008, photographer David Slater encountered a troop of crested black macaques while taking pictures at an Indonesian wildlife park. While he concentrated on shooing some curious monkeys, others snuck to his camera, which was on a tripod, and started to click on the shutter.

The monkeys took hundreds of pictures, some of which included Slater. However, the most popular was a selfie taken by a monkey that pressed on the shutter. What followed was a bizarre copyright battle between Slater and the monkey, which was named Naruto.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) claimed that Naruto owned the copyright to the picture. Slater insisted that he owned the copyright and not Naruto. In 2015, PETA filed a copyright lawsuit on behalf of Naruto. In 2017, PETA agreed to dump the lawsuit on the condition that Slater gave them 25 percent of the royalties he received from the images.

However, in 2018, a court stopped PETA from settling the lawsuit because it wanted to pass judgment that would allow judges to decide over similar incidents in the future. The court ruled that animals cannot file or own copyrights. This effectively gave copyright ownership to Slater.^[6]

4 Wheelchair Thief Sues Police Dog

On April 23, 2015, 55-year-old Stanley McQuery broke into the Hillcrest, San Diego, home of 79-year-old William Ballard. He attacked Ballard and stole his phone and electric wheelchair. He also demanded money. The police were called in.

Officers found McQuery in the neighborhood. For some reason, his getaway vehicle was Ballard’s wheelchair, which traveled at a pitiable 3.2 kilometers per hour (2 mph). The police sent a dog after McQuery after he refused orders to stop. McQuery was ultimately sentenced to 16 years in prison because he already had three felony convictions.

In 2016, McQuery sued the police dog for “excessive force, assault and battery” while in prison. He demanded $7 million in compensation. He claimed he was already on the ground at the time the officer set the dog on him. He added that the officer told the dog, “Eat him up, eat him up.”

McQuery later claimed he made a mistake by naming the dog as a defendant. He said he loved dogs and never planned to sue a dog. However, this does not explain the fact that he listed the dog as a defendant twice.^[7]

3 Monkey Gets Charged With Assault For Attacking Woman

On November 29, 1877, The New York Times reported that one Ms. Mary Shea lost a lawsuit against Jimmy Dillio, a monkey owned by one Mr. Casslo Dillio. Trouble began for Jimmy when Mr. Dillio took him to Ms. Shea’s shop. Shea offered Jimmy a piece of candy, which he accepted while chattering in appreciation.

However, Jimmy turned violent and bit Ms. Shea’s finger when she playfully attempted to retrieve the candy. Mrs. Shea got Mr. Dillio and Jimmy arrested and taken to court. Judge Flammer threw the case out, saying the that court could not charge monkeys. Jimmy reportedly exhibited some gentlemanly behavior by doffing his hat after Judge Flammer delivered the decision.^[8]

2 Woman Attempts To Get Monkeys Charged With Sexual Assault

In 2015, 23-year-old Melissa Hart tried getting a pair of monkeys arrested and charged with sexual assault while he was visiting Gibraltar. She was watching the Barbary macaques when two of them attacked her without warning.

The monkeys scratched her with their paws, pulled at her clothes and hair, and removed her bikini top. She screamed for help during the attack, but nearby tourists just laughed. She was saved when a warden chased the monkeys away.

A startled, embarrassed, and angry Ms. Hart reported the incident to the police and tried to file charges against the monkeys. The officers turned down her request because monkeys are wild animals and cannot be charged. One officer even asked her if she could identify the monkeys in a police lineup.^[9]

1 Man Sues Police Dog After He Was Bitten

In 2018, 66-year-old Joseph Carr of Oregon sued a police dog named Rolo and its handler, Deputy Jason Bernards of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, because Rolo bit him. Rolo bit Carr on September 18, 2016, as Carr attended the opening of a store.

Carr met Deputy Bernards and Rolo standing at the entrance of the store. Bernards told Rolo to “say hi,” which Carr took as an invitation to pet the dog. However, Rolo bit Carr in the abdomen when Carr touched the canine’s ear and head. Carr sued for $50,000 in damages.

Deputy Bernards claimed that Carr was bitten because he wrapped his hands around the dog’s snout. However, Carr’s attorney, Brian Hefner, noted that surveillance footage shows that Carr only touched the dog’s head and ear. Carr said the bite scar constantly reminds him of the “horrific and unnecessary event.”^[10]