There are some terribly unsettling things that happen every day that we’re not aware of until it is splashed on the front page of the newspaper or make the rounds as a viral social media post. Some of these things have been happening since before any of us were born and still have the potential to make our hair stand on end. On this list are just a few unbelievably creepy incidents that will haunt your nightmares for a good long while.

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10 Woman stuck in chair for months

On 16 February 2017, an Ohio church volunteer placed a call to 911. He told the operator that a 75-year-old woman he had been caring for for over a decade was not acting herself and seemingly refused to get out of a specific chair at her home.

However, police were not prepared for the horrific scene that awaited them when they arrived at Barbara Foster’s home in Springfield Township. Barbara, who at that point weighed 550 pounds, was found literally molded to her chair as her skin had begun attaching itself to the fabric. It seemed that she had been trapped in the chair for at least a year, and as emergency personnel removed her from the house Barbara’s bones started breaking because they were extremely frail.

From the sight and smell of the house, it was clear that Barbara Foster was a hoarder, with the smell becoming so strong that it reached the sidewalk before Barbara was rescued.

Barbara’s left leg was amputated soon after she arrived at the hospital. But unfortunately, after a month-long stay in the hospital, the former teacher and animal lover died in March 2017.^[1]

9 Suicide forest is eerily silent

The fact that Aokigahara is a popular destination for both hikers and those who want to end their own lives is terrifying enough. In fact, it is the world’s second most common destination for suicides behind The Golden Gate Bridge. But the creep factor of this dark, dense forest doesn’t stop there.

It is not surprising that many believe Aokigahara to be haunted by the people who never leave it. Some also believe that there is a bird demon called Tengu that roams the forest. Tengu and various ghosts have been blamed for the fact all signs of human life vanish about a mile into the forest.

But perhaps the eeriest thing about the ‘suicide forest’ is that despite the number of hikers and hopeless looking for a solution, the place is completely silent. This has been attributed to the density of the foliage and trees as well as the presence of a lava floor. To test the theory some visitors to the forest have let out loud screams only to have them swallowed up in the thick atmosphere.^[2]

8 Infestation by the thousands

In October 2007, Brian and Susan Trost bought their dream home in Weldon Spring, Missouri. To their horror and dismay, the couple soon began seeing brown recluse spiders everywhere in their home. Once, when Susan was taking a shower, one of the spiders fell from the ceiling and almost landed on her. She dodged it just in time and it washed down the shower drain.

The Trosts filed a claim with their insurance company and lodged a complaint against the home’s previous owner. This was after they had tried to deal with the problem by employing exterminators to spray behind the drywall and put down pesticide in the attic. These measures did not help at all and by 2012, the house was literally oozing spiders. The population of spiders were estimated to be around 5,000. The Trosts were forced to move and their home went into foreclosure.

In 2014 the house had been vacant for two years, but only of people. The brown recluse spiders continued to overrun the property.^[3]

7 The voices won’t stop

Children often invent imaginary friends to deal with feelings of loneliness or simply to enjoy a fantasy world of their own. They ‘see and hear’ their imaginary friends with an enthusiasm that most adults will never understand.

Unfortunately, however, the voices that children attribute to their invisible friends often become far too real. It is estimated that at least 1 in 12 children persistently hear voices in their head. In 2018, 21-year-old Laura Moulding told the BBC that she had been hearing voices since she was three years old. The voices surround her almost constantly and are a mixture of male, female, adults, and children.

As a toddler, she heard a lion and bear from a beloved TV programme calling to her: “I’m coming to get you.” They repeated this over and over until Laura was terrified. By the time she was fifteen, her auditory hallucinations had become too much for Laura and her mother took her to a doctor. At this point, Laura was self-harming to try and block out the pain of the voices telling her that she was useless, no good and that no one loved her.

Laura Moulding was eventually diagnosed with severe depression that included psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, disturbing thoughts, and a lack of self-awareness.^[4]

6 Where is Pedro Alonso López?

In 1980, Pedro Alonso López was arrested for trying to lure a 12-year-old girl away while she was browsing through a market in Ecuador. This incident took place mere days after a mass grave of 53 young girls was uncovered in the area. After being taken into custody, López confessed to the murders of 300 girls. His MO was to pose as a salesman who had become lost and needed assistance to get back to his office. He would then lure young girls away from their distracted families and proceed to rape and murder them. He told police he committed the murders to ensure the girls could go to heaven.

Shockingly, this monster received a mere 16-year prison sentence and was released in 1994 after serving 14. An hour after being released, López was arrested again for illegal immigration and deported to Colombia. Here he was convicted of a murder he committed 20 years prior. However, he was declared insane and spent some time in a mental asylum before being released again in 1998.

In 2020, no one knows López’s whereabouts. He could be continuing his murderous streak unabated anywhere in the world. Rumors that he had died in a vigilante style killing have yet to be confirmed.^[5]

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5 The stone baby

In 1955, 26-year-old Zahra Aboutalib went into labor and suffered for 48 hours before being rushed to a local hospital in Morocco. Upon her arrival Zahra witnessed another woman dying in excruciating pain while giving birth and this frightened her so much that she fled back home.

When, after a while, her labor pains ceased, Zahra carried on with her life. She never gave birth and never suffered a miscarriage. She adopted three children and eventually became a grandmother. 46 years after her terrifying experience at the hospital, Zahra felt intense pain once more. Doctors took an ultrasound scan of her belly and found a mass. An MRI scan revealed the mass to be her unborn baby.

It was discovered that Zahra’s pregnancy had been ectopic with the fetus growing from the fallopian tube and into her stomach. Because the baby was never born, it basically calcified inside Zahra’s body and was removed during a four-hour procedure. Zahra Aboutalib became known as the woman who gave birth to a stone baby when she was over 70 years old.^[6]

4 Starvation led to cannibalism

Photo credit: Don Hurlbert, Smithsonian

In 2013 a grisly new discovery was made as part of ongoing research into the Jamestown Colony. While recent excavations have led to the discovery of animal carcasses consumed during the harsh winter of 1609, newly discovered bones told a horrifying tale of human dismemberment and cannibalization. The bones belonged to a 14-year-old English girl.

The bones revealed that the girl had been struck by an object to the head at least four times, which led to her skull being split in two. She also had a penetrating wound to her left temple which is believed to have been made by a knife for the purpose of removing her brain and the flesh from her face for consumption.

While experts agree that the young girl was dismembered to be eaten, it remains to be discovered whether multiple people cut her into pieces or whether one person was responsible for the dark act.^[7]

3 I don’t want to work for Mickey anymore

There are a multitude of conspiracy theories and dark rumors that swirl around Disney Enterprises Inc. These include hidden details of evil in Disney movies, including that Frozen is simply a distraction from Walt Disney’s frozen head. You know, the head that is currently stored underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland? When people Google “frozen” or “Disney frozen” it now displays results about the movie and not the host of conspiracies about Walt’s wish to be cryogenically frozen after death.

Sometimes though, real twisted events make these theories seem just the tiniest bit plausible. For instance, in 2010 two Disneyland Paris employees killed themselves. One of the employees was a restaurant manager at Disneyland and had a wife and four children. After the 37-year-old committed suicide, a note was found scratched on a wall in his house: “I don’t want to work for Mickey anymore.”

The other employee had thrown himself in front of a train a month earlier.

The suicides have been attributed to a less than ideal working environment under new management which has been making employees miserable.^[8]

2 Don’t look behind the walls

In 2015, a family from Schuylkill County wanted to add some insulation behind the walls of a room in their Auburn house. They were not prepared for what they found behind the layers of drywall: several dead animal carcasses wrapped in newspapers dating back to the 30s and 40s.

Kajia Bretzuis confirmed that they had made one or two animal discoveries since 2012, but nothing at the scale of the new discovery, and that the home inspection before they moved in didn’t reveal any of the horror behind the walls. Removing the carcasses, half-used spices, and other items from behind the walls have depleted the family’s savings as the insurance didn’t cover any of it.

The family, looking for answers, sent some of the artifacts and animal remains to an expert in Kutztown who told them that the items were placed inside the walls as part of a Dutch magic ritual to heal diseases. The Brezuis’s have since started a Go Fund Me account to raise money to tear out more walls to ensure there aren’t any more animal remains tucked inside.^[9]

1 Serial killer lair

In March 2014, Catrina McGhaw signed a lease on a North County ranch house. Her landlady was Sandra Travis. A few months after moving in, Catrina was watching a documentary on serial killers with a friend when they both suddenly sat up straight and looked at each other in alarm. The house being featured in various crime scene photos on the tv screen was the very one they were sitting in.

The house Catrina was living in previously belonged to serial killer Maury Travis, son of her landlady, Sandra Travis. Maury had built several torture chambers in the basement of the house and kept corpses there.

Catrina immediately went to Sandra and demanded she be let out of the lease. Sandra was unwilling to release Catrina from the lease until the St. Louis Housing Authority intervened. Only then did she agree to rescind the contract.

Maury Travis killed himself before he could be charged with the murders of at least 17 women.^[10]

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England is next up in the series where we take a look at some of the most intriguing mysteries from a country’s dark and bewildering history. Aliens, ghost ships, unsolved murders, poltergeists, unexplained disappearances, they can all be found right here.

10. The Balham Mystery

The death of Charles Bravo became preserved in London lore as Murder at the Priory, or sometimes the Balham Mystery. In April 1876, a well-to-do lawyer died after several days of suffering, following what multiple physicians concluded was a clear case of antimony poisoning. So then, naturally, the new question became “Who killed him? And why?”

At the time, Bravo had only recently married a woman named Florence Campbell. Before her marriage, she had had a scandalous affair with an older, married doctor. Her reputation in Victorian society wasn’t exactly spotless so, in the eyes of many, she became the obvious suspect. But then again, she was the rich one in the marriage so, if money was the motive, then it was Bravo who should have been trying to poison her. And that is actually what some people believed – they thought that he intended to kill Florence and ingested some poison by mistake, thinking it was genuine medicine. 

Other popular suspects included the doctor who used to have an affair with Florence Campbell, a disgruntled coachman that Bravo had recently fired, and Mrs. Jane Cox, Florence’s companion whom Bravo had also threatened with dismissal. All were plausible, but the true identity of the poisoner remains unknown to this day.

9. The Enfield Poltergeist

One night in August 1977, Peggy Hodgson called the police to her home in Enfield to report hearing strange noises and objects being knocked over. She didn’t know at the time that she was about to launch one of the biggest paranormal sensations in English history.

Her haunting became known as the Enfield poltergeist and it seemed to center around two of her daughters, 12-year-old Margaret and 11-year-old Janet. Dozens of people unrelated to the Hodgsons ended up reporting various strange happenings such as hearing sudden noises and disembodied voices, seeing drawers and doors open by themselves, while tables and chairs moved on their own across the floor.

So was it genuine? Well, most paranormal investigators thought so, which isn’t really surprising. Also not surprising was that plenty of skeptics dismissed the whole case as nothing but the antics of two clever and bored girls, which were then sensationalized by newspapers looking for a good story. Decades after the fact, Janet admitted to faking some of the alleged phenomena with her sister, although she insisted that most of it had still been genuine.

Like with most of these cases, the paranormal activity stopped suddenly in 1979, but the legend of the Enfield poltergeist still lived on long after that.

8. The Vanishing of Mary Flanagan

The disappearance of Mary Flanagan has the ignoble distinction of being Scotland Yard’s oldest missing persons case. On New Year’s Eve, 1959, the London teenager left her home in West Ham to attend a party at her workplace. When her parents realized that she did not return home the following day, they went to the refinery where the 16-year-old worked and were dismayed to discover that she never showed up to the party that night. Mary Flanagan had last been seen heading for the metro station before she vanished, never to be heard from again.

An investigation revealed that Mary had called in sick and not showed up for work for the last two weeks. This actually gave her family hope that her disappearance had been planned, and that instead of something sinister happening to Mary, she ran away with her boyfriend. Her family knew a bit about him – his first name was Tom, he was an Irish immigrant and he may have worked as a stoker for the merchant navy. His last name could have been McGinty, except that there was no Tom McGinty employed by the navy.

Even if Mary Flanagan ran away with her boyfriend, it still seemed unlikely that she would not reach out to her family in the decades that followed. That is why police were reluctant to dismiss her as simply a “typical teenage runaway,” and why the case was officially reopened in 2013, hoping that modern technologies and policing methods might yield new clues. So far, no luck…

7. Who Shot Robert Pakington?

While we’re talking about dubious honors, we should also mention Robert Pakington, possibly the first handgun murder victim in the history of London, killed almost 500 years ago.

Pakington was a merchant involved with the Worshipful Company of Mercers and a Member of Parliament. He was also a big critic of the clergy which, at the time, placed him at odds with the Catholics and in the favor of the Protestants. Anyway, on the morning of November 13, 1536, Pakington was on his way to church when somebody shot him dead. Although plenty of people heard the booming noise, the identity of the killer was concealed by a heavy mist that had set over London that day. 

Pakington became regarded as somewhat of a martyr, and many people accused the clergy of being behind his murder. Several names have been put forward, but chroniclers of that time could not agree on the identity of the culprit, which will likely remain a mystery forever.

6. The Truths and Falsehoods of Elizabeth Canning

Back in 1753, an 18-year-old maid named Elizabeth Canning made her appearance in a deplorable state, with a shocking story to tell. She had been missing for a month, time during which she said that she had been held prisoner in a brothel, being restrained and denied food unless she agreed to work as a prostitute. Eventually, Canning managed to escape and returned to her mother’s home.

After telling her story to outraged friends, neighbors, and family members, Elizabeth took the police to the house where she had been imprisoned and identified her captors: two women named Susannah Wells and Mary Squires. They were arrested and Canning’s case was taken on by a prominent London magistrate named Henry Fielding. Bizarrely, back then assault was not as serious as theft, which carried with it the possibility of the death penalty, so Mary Squires was actually sentenced to death for stealing Elizabeth’s corset.

Not everyone was convinced by Canning’s story, and among the skeptics was Sir Crisp Gascoyne, the Lord Mayor of London, who decided to open his own investigation. He found witnesses who could testify in favor of Wells and Squires, as well as other witnesses who said they had been bullied into testifying for Canning by an angry mob of her supporters. The case took a dramatic new turn, as Elizabeth Canning now stood accused of perjury.  

This pretty much split the entire city in two camps: the Canning supporters who believed that she had been kidnapped, and the skeptics who thought that she made up the whole thing to conceal something scandalous, such as a secret birth or some kind of criminal plot.

In the end, Mary Squires was exonerated, and Elizabeth Canning was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation to America. There, she married and never returned to England, and the true story behind her disappearance still remains unknown.

5. The HMS Eurydice

The year 1878 saw one of England’s worst maritime disasters during peacetime when the Royal Navy corvette HMS Eurydice was caught in a snowstorm and sank off the Isle of Wight, during a return voyage from Bermuda, taking 281 men to their cold, watery graves. The wreckage was refloated later that same year, but it had been so badly damaged that, ultimately, it was decided to break it up.

However, that has not stopped sailors from seeing the HMS Eurydice, now as a ghost ship, still sailing the waters of the English Channel, particularly near Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight. In the 140 years that have passed, there have been numerous sightings of the vessel, including in 1998 when Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, claimed to have spotted the ghost ship along with a film crew while making a documentary. 

And there was an even stranger encounter, reported by Commander Lipscomb during the 1930s. While he was in charge of a submarine around the Isle of Wight, he saw that he was on a collision course with an old-fashioned, full-rigged ship, and ordered immediate evasive maneuvers to avoid striking it. After the danger had passed, the ghost ship was nowhere to be seen.

4. The Ghosts of Hampton Court

It won’t surprise you to discover that England has loads of haunted places, from old castles, to inns and pubs, to roads that were once preyed upon by highwaymen. Today, we will only be looking at one location, but it is said to be one of the most haunted places in England, and it is also one of the biggest. It is Hampton Court Palace in London, the 500-year-old royal palace originally intended for the Archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey, but used mainly by King Henry VIII.

There are several ghosts which allegedly make their residence at Hampton Court, and two of them used to be married to Henry VIII. The first is Jane Seymour, the king’s third wife, who died at Hampton Court during childbirth. People have reported seeing her on the Silverstick Stairs which led to the room where she passed away. The second apparition belongs to Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife who was beheaded for adultery and treason when she was only 19 years old. Her ghost is a lot louder and angrier and can allegedly be heard screaming down the corridor, pleading with the king, the same way she did in life when she was arrested and taken to be executed.

Then there is also the third ghost known as the Grey Lady, believed to be Sybil Penn, a 16th century servant and wetnurse who died of smallpox. She appears to be the busiest of all the Hampton Court ghosts. People have reported seeing her and hearing her working on a spinning wheel numerous times since 1829, after her tomb was disturbed during renovations.

3. The Hoxton Horror

The most notorious mystery from Victorian London has to be the true identity of Jack the Ripper, but he was hardly the only one responsible for gruesome, unsolved murders at that time. Another case from around that era which is almost forgotten nowadays was dubbed by newspapers of the time as the “Hoxton Horror.” 

On July 10, 1872, mother and daughter Sarah and Christiana Squires were found murdered inside the stationery shop that they owned and ran. They both had been bludgeoned with a hammer or an iron bar, and the store was in complete disarray, seemingly the target of a robbery.

The biggest conundrum in the case seemed to be a disagreement over the time of the murders. Multiple witnesses claimed to have seen the mother and daughter between 9 and 11 a.m., and one witness was adamant that they saw Sarah Squires in the door of her shop at 12:30. However, inside the store, investigators found a broken clock which, presumably, had been knocked over during the fight and it had stopped at 12 p.m.

Authorities were never able to figure out this discrepancy. Was the witness simply wrong or did they see someone else by the door, perhaps even the killer? Police only had one solid suspect – Sarah Squires’ son – but he was locked up in an insane asylum at the time, so the Hoxton Horror went on to become another one of London’s unsolved mysteries.

2. The Rendlesham Forest Incident

England has had more than its fair share of UFO sightings, but none are more famous than the Rendlesham Forest Incident, sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Roswell.”

Forty years ago, something strange happened near the Woodbridge Royal Air Force station in Suffolk. At the time, it was being used by the US Air Force, and between the dates of December 26 and December 28, 1980, several members of personnel reported seeing strange, colorful lights moving through the forest, as well as a metallic, glowing object. When they investigated one morning, they found a glade with burn tree marks, broken branches everywhere, and three indentations in the ground in a triangular pattern.

The story gained steam a few years after the event, when the US Government released the memo written by deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt, which described the incident. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sightings among UFO enthusiasts.

As far as the skeptics were concerned, they put forward alternative explanations such as the lights coming from the Orfordness Lighthouse or from natural phenomena like a meteor or a bright star, but if the eyewitnesses are indeed telling the truth, then nothing accounts so far for all of the strange things they reported seeing.

1. Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?

On April 18, 1943, four young boys entered Hagley Woods in Worcestershire, looking for bird nests. One of them decided to climb a wych elm that looked promising, but he didn’t find any nests. Instead, inside the hollow trunk he saw a human skull.   

One of the boys told his parents who alerted the police. The following day, detectives and forensic experts were on the scene, and they recovered most of the skeleton of a young woman who had been murdered at least 18 months earlier. She appeared to be in her mid 30s and was about five feet tall. The victim had very protuberant teeth, which gave her a distinctive bite and this, in turn, gave authorities hope that she would soon be identified. However, the weeks turned into months, turned into years, and the identity of the woman was still a mystery.

Some of the popular theories said that the victim had been a prostitute, or a spy, and even a sacrifice in a witchcraft ritual.

The case took an unusual turn the following year, when a piece of graffiti appeared in Birmingham, which read “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood?” Was this a taunt from the killer and the woman was actually named Bella or simply a prank? Police looked into the new lead but again came up short. Ever since then, the graffiti keeps appearing on occasion, and while we may never find out who put Bella in the wych elm, at least it serves to remind people of one of England’s greatest wartime mysteries.