Students of the bizarre know to expect the unexpected… but cats that give people an edge in business? Predicting death by what a person can and cannot smell? True tales, kids.

Strange links are everywhere. Some have fascinating explanations, like Scooby-Doo’s connection to the RFK assassination. But plenty of others remain steeped in speculation and mystery. Either way, here are ten of the weirdest couples out there.

10 Historical Swastikas Unrelated To The Nazis

10 Sense Of Smell And Death

There is a disturbing link between not being able to smell a flower (or anything else, for that matter) and dying within the next five to ten years. The warning sign appears in the elderly and 28 percent of all cases can be explained by dementia and Parkinson’s disease, both of which often mute a person’s sense of smell.

The majority of fatalities—the remaining 72 percent—defies explanation. Nobody knows why their noses stopped working or why their life expectancy dropped so dramatically. The strangest thing is that the phenomenon becomes more accurate at predicting death when it flags the healthy old folks.^[1]

9 A Bad Mood And Greater Productivity

When feelings go dark, the last perk one might expect is a completed To-Do list. This holds true for most people, who either throw in the towel or underperform when they feel down. But for a select group, the moment their crabby-meter tips into the red zone, it sharpens their focus and time-management skills.

This performance boost only works for individuals who habitually hold onto negative emotions. On the other hand, people with short grouchy spells tend to be less efficient during their bad moods. Curiously, neither show an uptick in productivity when they feel positive.

The answer might be disappointingly mundane. Negative feelings could improve moody people’s performance (when compared to others) because they are used to feeling that way. Such feelings do not upset and distract them as much as those who experience fewer dark days and thus are more easily derailed by them.^[2]

8 Low Intelligence And Pseudo-Profound Statements

Pseudo-profound statements are sayings that sound deep and wise—but make no sense. Here’s an example; “Wellbeing requires exploration. To traverse the mission is to become one with it.” Despite the vagueness, such lines convince too many people that they are fantastic truths.

Even during a recent experiment, when fake statements were created by a random generator, they were taken at face value. The researchers who dangled the wise-sounding bait in front of volunteers were trying to understand why people adore cliches without substance. This, in turn, might explain why the same individuals tend to turn away from important fact-based topics in science and medicine.

The study made an unfortunate connection. The participants were thoroughly tested for intelligence and those with the lowest scores bought into the nonsense more frequently. They were also the volunteers who were more likely to support baseless conspiracy theories and alternative medicine.^[3]

7 Bottle-Feeding And Left-Handedness

A person’s dominant hand is partially determined by genes. What else causes left or right-handedness is a mystery. Then scientists followed 60,000 mothers for a year, starting right after their baby was born. By the nine-month mark, an odd piece of the puzzle fell into place. Bottle-feeding raises more lefties.

For some reason, this happened when the infants were bottle-fed before the age of six months. But for each consecutive month of breastfeeding, more children became right-handed. The discovery did not solve the left-right riddle. But it showed that the way Junior is fed might be one of the strongest factors that influence handedness.^[4]

6 More Homework And Poor Test Scores

Homework’s purpose is to reinforce what is taught in class. On average, US students are given 3.5 hours’ worth every day. Ironically, there is a chance that such a workload might undo what children learn.

In 2015, a study tracked over 7,700 adolescents from Spain. The goal was to weigh their academic performance against the time they spend doing homework. Most scored better on tests when their homework was limited to an hour every day. When an additional forty minutes were added, their test results dropped.

However, things are not as simple as reducing homework and expecting stellar grades. Other factors were also involved. The teens who performed better also did homework on more days than their peers and those who received parental help actually fared worse.

Overall, it appears that an hour of focused effort, done every day on their own, is the road to better test results.^[5]

Top 10 Great Nature Mysteries To Puzzle Over Today

5 Beards And Punches

Charles Darwin’s evolution theories include the human beard. According to him, it served no purpose. But beards are not as useless as Darwin made them out to be. There is a strong link between face fuzz and fistfights (or getting hit in the face with a stick perhaps).

Indeed, male skulls appear to have evolved to shield the face during a brawl. If bone structure can serve as personal protection, then beards might also play a similar role.

The idea was tested on fake heads with a human-like bone structure. Covered with sheepskin, some heads were dressed in fully-grown wool to mimic beards. Others had sheared skin (to see if the hair follicles gave any protection) while the rest had their skins plucked clean of all hair (these were the beardless chins).

Then researchers started swiping at the skulls with a rod. All the beardless and 95 percent of the sheared faces were severely damaged. Only 45 percent of bearded jaws broke. This is good evidence that beards do protect the face after all—but the “How?” remains unanswered. Plausibly, a thick beard might defuse a punch by absorbing and spreading its energy over a bigger area.^[6]

4 PainKillers And Less Empathy

Roughly 52 million Americans consume acetaminophen every week. This painkiller is sold as Tylenol and over 600 medications contain it as an ingredient. In 2016, a worrying side-effect was discovered. Acetaminophen seems to lower people’s empathy towards others.

During an experiment, volunteers drank the maximum dosage allowed for one day. Then they read stories where people suffered physically or emotionally. Afterward, they rated how deeply they thought the characters experienced the pain. The volunteers who took a placebo thought the victims had a tougher time of it.

Curiously, during a second test, the acetaminophen-laced participants had less empathy for themselves as well. They were blasted with uncomfortably loud music but once again, it was the placebo group who were less appreciative. Not only for themselves but they also felt more strongly that others would also find the experience unpleasant.

Why the drug dilutes empathy is not fully understood.^[7]

3 Scooby-Doo And The RFK Assassination

During the 1960s, morning cartoons like Tom & Jerry lost popularity. To up the ratings, TV networks made the programming more violent. Sure enough, kids loved the new sci-fi cartoons because they were packed with wall-to-wall action and violence.

The first Scooby-Doo series aired in 1969. The four teenagers and their talking Great Dane spawned a franchise that lasts to this day. But the famous hound might never have seen the light of day had it not been for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy a year earlier.

But back to the sci-fi cartoons that aired before Scooby-Doo. Anti-violence organizations hated them but needed the support of society to remove the programs. The opportunity came when the Vietnam War, among other things, made violence too real for the public. RFK’s death followed and so did widespread panic over anything that might corrupt morals—including TV shows. The activists gained support with gory statistics about the cartoons and saying that Kennedy had wanted children’s programming to be more innocent (which was true).

To survive the public’s backlash, the networks abandoned science-fiction for comedy. However, they still needed a cartoon with enough action to keep the kids hooked—and Scooby-Doo was born. Children loved the gang’s spooky investigations while the censors had nothing to complain about. Despite meeting monsters, the characters were never violent or in any real danger.^[8]

2 Famine And Daughters

Normally, more boys are born than girls. This is probably to compensate for the higher death rate among males. But when life gets tough, more girls are born. Scientists have been trying to understand this trend for decades. In 1973, a Harvard team suggested that women without good nutrition develop a biology that favors daughters.

The Harvard study argued that famine reduces the number of healthy men who become fathers but that the majority of women could still reproduce, regardless of their poor health. Baby girls ensure that more grandchildren are born if the famine lasts for another generation. On the other hand, better times provides more opportunity for sons to become fathers.

The theory is backed by real-life famines. During China’s socialist Great Leap Forward, 30 million people died of starvation. More daughters were born during this time and the two years following the famine. But hunger cannot create a baby’s gender—that’s a job for chromosomes. So, what is going on? Apparently, when a mother’s blood sugar levels are unstable (from starvation), more male fetuses are lost. That could be why more girls are born during times of disaster.^[9]

1 Business-Minded People And Cats

Some cats carry a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. The bug is famous for turning mice fearless and this makes them easy to catch—and for T. gondii to infect cats. The felines can then infect people.

Researchers knew the parasite probably tweaked human behavior. But did it make them more daring like the mice? The study examined databases and saliva samples from students and business professionals. The idea was to match the go-getters with T. gondii infections.

There were hundreds of positive cases. Among these, more students majored in business or studied entrepreneurship than their unaffected peers. The infected professionals also started their own business more often than others in their field. The positive cases from the databases also had more startups and fewer reports of fearing that their ventures would fail.

Nobody turned into risk-taking zombies. The numbers do suggest, however, that the pest influences entrepreneurs with a drive to succeed.^[10]

10 Contentious Explanations For Racial Differences

For the longest time, when most companies produced a product, they were content with doing nothing about the waste leftover from the production process. Times have changed, though. Through genius innovation, many entrepreneurs have taken what was once useless sludge and transmuted it into massive profits.

After yielding their finished product, breweries in the late 19th century were left with thousands of pounds of excess yeast and frothy liquid leftover from the manufacturing process. It was common practice to dump it all down the drain, rendering it useless, but German scientist Justus Liebig desperately wanted to find a way to make it edible. Seeing the vast quantities of wasted product that he could attain for free, he accidentally discovered that the yeast could be concentrated, bottled, heavily salted, and then eaten. He called his product Marmite. It ended up being a massive success in countries like Sri Lanka and Britain, and it was a mainstay in the cost-efficient rations of soldiers in both world wars. To this day, the company still manufactures over 24 million jars a year and is so popular that it has created a competitive market with other companies, such as Vegemite.

The human race has a rich history of getting hopelessly inebriated, and with the demand for fermented, smashed grapes also comes the demand for agents to remove the bits of yeast, bacteria, and proteins that pollute the finished product. This process is called clarification. For thousands of years, our ancestors used things like oyster shells, chalk, and earthenware during this process, and even went so far as to store the wine in the dried skins of dead animals. At the end of the 18th century, commercial brewing was going through a massive expansion which led to the innovation and widespread use of Isinglass, a collagen obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish. You’d think by now we’d have some sort of machine to streamline the clarification process, but it turns out the bladders of fish do the job better than anything we can synthesize. They accelerate the process of clumping the live yeast together into a jelly-like substance through an electro-static interaction between the positively charged collagen molecules and the negatively charged yeast cells, creating a tight bond between yeast and Isinglass. The result is a cleaner and clearer wine in a fraction of the time.

When coal is carbonized to make high-carbon fuel or gasified to make coal gas, coal tar is produced as a byproduct. For a long time, uses for coal tar were sparse and exclusively industrial. It was mostly lit on fire and burned for its heat, if for no other reason than simply because it was flammable. In 1878, Constantin Fahlberg was part of a Johns Hopkins University study on coal tar where he experimented with a variety of different compounds throughout the day. One night, while eating bread at dinner, he noticed an incredibly sweet taste on his hand and instantly ran back to his laboratory and tasted all of the beakers he was working on that day. After several hours of searching, he found one in particular that was 300 times sweeter than sugar. Simply put, the world of zero-calorie artificial sweeteners was born. He named his creation Saccharin—a wildly popular alternative to sugar throughout the 20th century and the chief ingredient in Sweet N’ Low.

Cow intestines led a pretty depressing existence prior to the nineteenth century. Their taste was overshadowed by the rest of the delicious parts of the cow and their utility was overshadowed by the versatility of pig and sheep intestines for sausage casing. All of that ended in 1875 when Pierre Babolat made the first cow intestine tennis racket, citing its ability to absorb wrist strain and control the ball better. Typically, the 120-foot small intestine is extracted and cut into 40-foot strands that are then treated with chemicals to aid preservation. The strands are spun tightly together and dried out in a humid room for six weeks to prevent cracking. It takes nearly four whole intestines to make a single tennis racket, but even today it’s a commodity that’s cherished by some of the world’s best professional tennis players. Previously, cow farms would pay waste removal companies thousands of dollars each month to remove the leftover intestines, but now they’ve become one of the most profitable byproducts of the slaughtering process.

Throughout history, pig farmers rarely found much use at all for the pig’s heart. In fact, some internal organs had such little value, they would grind them up into a sludgy makeshift feedstock and feed it to pigs they would breed in the future. In 1968, the marginal success of experiments at the National Heart Hospital in London, England eventually led to the development of porcine heart valve replacement surgery. Today, there is an entire subculture of the pig farming community that breeds pigs exclusively for their heart valves and sells them to bioprosthesis companies. Nature Farm in Malta, Idaho, breeds over 200 sows a week, all meeting the strict specifications required by the porcine heart valve market. A typical heart valve will run consumers about $5,000 in the current market, and considering the typical American diet, pig hearts are probably better suited for us anyway.

For as long as horses have bred and domesticated, their urine has seeped into the topsoil, smelled terrible, and killed vegetation. Things changed in 1942 when the FDA approved Premarin, a hormone replacement therapy that’s derived from the urine of pregnant horses. It contains over 200 hormones that combine with modern medical advances to greatly reduce the effects of several ailments. Its use in hormone replacement therapy reduces hot flashes. Its estrogen is used to treat certain types of clinical depression. Its various hormones aid patients plagued by heart disease and osteoporosis, and it can even be used as a chief ingredient in fertility treatments. In just under sixty years, a yellow, alfalfa-smelling waste product has turned into a $2 billion industry that helps more than nine million people a year relieve symptoms of painful and annoying conditions.

During the life of a cow, hooves are a source of anguish for farmers because of their tendency to cause health problems and pain. In death, they used to be expensive to dispose of and relatively useless, but that changed in the mid 1900’s when it was discovered that their chief ingredient, keratin, could be added to fire extinguishers to aid in suppressing the high-heat, high-intensity fires triggered by aviation fuel. Keratin acts as a bonding agent to the foam bubbles that would typically break up upon contacting these remarkably hot fires, and the reinforced structure forms an oxygen-proof blanket that stifles the flames. Additionally, for the past decade or so, beauty companies have been selling ‘Brazilian Keratin Treatments’ that claim to use keratin to smooth and shine hair and ‘revitalize’ the outer layer of skin. Although some of the biggest players in the industry have moved to synthesized keratin, the majority of companies still get it from cow hooves, feathers, and sheep wool.

When corn and potato farmers are done harvesting their crop, a crushed, tattered remnant of the original stalk remains, seemingly useless. When the biomass movement began in the late 20th century, farmers began to extract the starch from the leftover plants by blasting them with water and then letting the white-ish liquid dry in the sun for a few days. They then took the residual powder and processed it into a pellet they referred to as resin. This resin is used—often times in coalition with several other waste products—to produce a plethora of fully biodegradable bioplastic products, including starch-based packing peanuts. In fact, there is so much starch content in some of these bioplastics that the human body can actually digest them! A vibrant global marketplace now exists and is growing tremendously. Just one company from California named Cereplast tripled their earnings in one year—from $1.5 million to $5.4 million.

Urea, in short, is the component of urine by which the kidneys expel excess nitrogen from the body. For years it was (literally) pissed away, but in 1828, the German chemist Friedrich Wohler found a way to isolate urea from the urine by treating silver isocyanate with ammonium chloride. Despite this breakthrough, urea continued to be of little use until the 21st century. In response to consumer demand for teeth-whitening products with a long shelf life, companies that sold whitening toothpaste and teeth whitening strips began using urea mixed with hydrogen peroxide, a substance called carbamide peroxide. The urea is used to stabilize and extend the shelf life of the whitening agent. It is primarily found in clinical grade whiteners that are found at a dentist’s office, but one particularly well known product that uses it is Colgate Simply White.

Twenty years ago, not only were chicken feet almost completely useless, chicken farmers had to pay to get rid of them. Most of the time, they would end up as a filler in dog foods. In the 1990s, globalization became a more feasible reality for smaller companies aspiring for a transnational business model, and chicken farmers started profiting from the sale of chicken feet to China. Now, the U.S. exports about 300,000 metric tons of chicken feet a year. Just one company, Perdue Farms, produces over a billion chicken paws a year and brings in more than $40 million in revenue. The demand for chicken feet is so high, the farmers could breed twice as many chickens as they do now and still easily sell them to China, but they would have no way to sell all the other parts of the chicken in the United States. What was once a complete waste product is now the chief profit center for every chicken farmer in the United States. It is the consensus amongst the industry that without the global demand for chicken paws, most farms would be driven out of business.

The world has gone absolutely crazy for superheroes. There are tons of superhero movies in production and an endless supply of comic books as a ground zero source of inspiration. The comic industry has tried to capitalize on the success of heroes such as Batman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman, but the results are not always so super.

Our list below will cover ten heroes whose powers are seemingly pointless. With so many attempts at creating new heroes, they can’t all be winners. Jazz, Squirrel Girl (seriously?), and the Almighty Dollar are just a few of the incredibly silly heroes that have been created over the years. Some of them even have catchphrases that are worse than their names and powers. Maybe these comic book editors are the real supervillains. So hunker down in your own “Fortress of Solitude” and get ready to marvel at some of the most pointless powers ever put in print.

Related: 10 Superhero Actors Who Have Their Own Tragic Backstories

10 Hindsight Lad

Hindsight Lad! Just saying his name brings a smile to my face. Marvel Comics created this hero. His name is very appropriate, and his powers are very pointless. Hindsight Lad has the incredible power of (you guessed it) hindsight. After various missions with his superhero pals, Hindsight Lad analyzes and understands how events could have played out differently. I guess his hindsight is 20/20?

Clearly, Marvel was scraping the bottom of the barrel when they came up with this one. To be honest, Hindsight Lad seems more like an annoying friend than a superhero. What’s next? Back-seat driver guy? The Grammar Corrector? Some of the other heroes on this list have even more pointless powers.

9 Cypher

Cypher has one thing that many heroes on this list do not: a cool name. With such a great name, it is too bad that his power is seemingly pretty useless. Cypher is one of the X-Men, like Wolverine, Storm, and Cyclops, but his power lies in linguistics. His mutation is that he can understand every language. While that may have seemed cool (or at least useful) at the time, now that we all walk around with Google translate in our pockets, he seems totally useless.

It seemed that Marvel came to the same conclusion in 1988 when he was killed off in a comic book. It turned out his story was not over because he came back to life in 2009. I think that a mutant power to understand different languages would barely qualify you as an X-Men, but I guess Professor X had to get his enrollment numbers up. Cypher’s very specific and rarely useful power makes him one of the most pointless heroes of all time.

8 Squirrel Girl

Yep, seriously, there is a comic book hero named Squirrel Girl. I am convinced that they only made this character because the name rhymes. There is certainly no other rhyme or reason to this character. Squirrel Girl is kind of like Aquaman, except her powers work above the ocean, and she can only communicate with one kind of animal: squirrels.

If you are in a squirrel or acorn-related emergency, this is the hero you want coming to your rescue. Otherwise, she is pretty worthless as far as heroes go. Squirrel Girl also takes on some of the powers of a squirrel. She can chew through wood, has a tail (for balance, I guess?), and has sharp claws. Squirrel Girl is a member of the Great Lakes Avengers, alongside another pointless hero on our list. Some of these heroes are crazy ideas, no doubt, but the creator of Squirrel Girl must have been totally nuts.

7 Almighty Dollar

Like many, Almighty Dollar is a hero who has a secret identity. However, his secret identity seems as though it would be pretty easy to crack. His name is J. Pennington Pennypacker, which is already a huge clue. Almighty Dollar also works as a CPA by day. You read that right; not only does Almighty Dollar have a name that clues to his identity, but he also works as an accountant!

Almighty Dollar can shoot pennies out of his wrist. Not only are his powers underwhelming and his secret identity not very secretive, but Almighty Dollar also has a cringeworthy catchphrase. When he’s hunting down his enemies (tax evaders?), he says he can “throw money at my problems.” As you may have guessed, this character did not stick around for long, and customers didn’t want to throw any pennies, much less dollars, at these comics.

6 Badrock

Many of the most recognized heroes from comic books are from the two biggest publishers, Marvel and DC. The next hero on our list was a creation of a much smaller company, Image Comics, as a part of their “Youngblood” series. At least, apparently. Badrock looks suspiciously familiar. This is because he is basically a copy of a much more famous hero, Marvel’s Thing. This means that his powers include super strength and resistance to damage.

However, this was not the only aspect of Badrock that Image Comics ripped off. Initially, Badrock had a better (or at least more logical) name of Bedrock. The creators of the Flintstones cartoons (Hanna-Barbera) contacted Image Comics, and they quickly changed the name to Badrock. Badrock’s catchphrase? “Yabba dabba doom.” Yikes. I think it is fair to say that the character of Badrock was yabba dabba doomed from the start.

Comic books and comic book heroes thrive on their unique qualities and creativity. Badrock had neither and simply made for a pointless hero.

5 Phone Ranger

A.G. Bell was just an ordinary telephone repairman. Yes, kids, that used to be a real job. He would travel from house to house, repairing home telephones. Until one day, his life totally changed! A.G. Bell was helping a customer fix their phone when he realized that the phone contained a message from an alien race. A.G. Bell created a super suit and a new persona using this alien technology. This is the origin story of the Phone Ranger, another Marvel hero on our list.

The Phone Ranger’s suit enabled him to connect to any telecommunications device. This allowed him to respond quickly to emergency calls. Unfortunately, his lack of useful powers led to an early death. While the Phone Ranger may have seemed like a cool idea at the time, looking back, it seems ludicrous. His special power was connecting with phones. Don’t phones do that anyway? While his origin story was much better than most on our list, the Phone Ranger’s powers were seemingly pointless and even laughable.

4 Razorback

The next hero on our list is one with regional roots. He is the hero of the state of Arkansas. Or he was designed to be, at least. Buford Hollis was a truck driver before he became the hero Razorback. Razorback has multiple powers, all of them with questionable utility. First, he has the “power” to drive, pilot, or operate any vehicle. He always names his vehicle “Big Pig.” While this is impressive, is it really a power?

His other power relates to the large hog head he wears as a head covering. It is electrically charged. Razorback is a clear attempt to pander to the state of Arkansas but was unsuccessful. Despite the best efforts of Marvel writers, including featuring Razorback in comics with Spiderman, She-Hulk, and other famous heroes, Razorback never achieved any of the same popularity. Maybe that is because he is a glorified cab driver with a silly hat.

3 Jazz

Jazz, or John Arthur Zander, is another Marvel hero with pointless powers. Jazz’s father was a genetic mutant who did not feel pain. Because he was not visibly a mutant, he could live in normal society. However, Jazz was not so lucky. He was born with blue skin. Maybe this was not so much of a “superpower” and was more of just a skin condition.

Jazz had a tough story arc throughout Marvel comics. First, he left home at 16, trying to become a famous rapper. He must not have been that great of a rapper because he was unsuccessful and eventually started dealing drugs instead. Finally, in one of the most pathetic deaths of a hero in comic history, Jazz was killed by another mutant, Johnny Dee, who created a voodoo doll of Jazz. Despite being branded as a mutant, Jazz had no useful powers and just suffered because of his blue skin.

2 Hepzibah

The next hero comes to us from another planet. Hepzibah is a Mephitisoid species, which means she is a humanoid with skunk characteristics. In fact, Hepzibah is not even her real name. Her real name cannot be pronounced because it is a series of smells. Hepzibah is a nickname by another comic book character, Corsair. Her powers are as strange as her name and origin.

She is acrobatic and has superhuman night vision and smell. Most uniquely, she can emit pheromones. Hepzibah has been embraced by the furry community for her animal characteristics, but overall, her powers are pretty useless. She definitely has an unforgettable look with a huge skunk tail. In recent comics, she has become more like a cat and less like a skunk. Her ears and tail may have changed over the years, but her powers remain mostly useless.

1 Mr. Immortal

The last hero on our list has a pretty dark origin story. As a young man, Craig Hollis was tricked into starting a fire by the villain Deathurge. The fire ended up killing both of Hollis’s parents. This obviously left Hollis feeling depressed. His depression led to suicide attempts. When Hollis realized he could not kill himself, Mr. Immortal was born.

He began to try and fight crime on his own. Eventually, he formed the Great Lakes Avengers along with Squirrel Girl. Mr. Immortal, as you might guess, cannot die. When he does, he is quickly resurrected, often with fits of rage. While this is certainly an amazing power, it is not very useful compared to flying, super speed, or superhuman strength. Mr. Immortal’s origin story is a sad one, and so is his superpower.

Sometimes seemly innocent and innocuous images have pretty dark and sinister backgrounds. A happy-faced photo of an ordinary family can be hiding what could become some of the darkest moments in history. Below we have found ten seemingly normal images, which, when you dig a little deeper into the backstory, unravel dark and tragic stories.

Related: 10 Haunting Images Of The Chernobyl Disaster And Their Backstories

10 Omagh Bombing, 1998

A man smiles for a photo wearing a bright yellow jumper with his equally smiley son hoisted on his shoulders. They are a couple of excited Spanish tourists visiting the town of Omagh in Northern Ireland.

They stand in front of an innocuous red car on a busy street. The year is 1998, and that red car was packed with around 500 pounds )226 kilograms) of fertilizer-based explosives that would detonate moments after that photo was snapped. It was a terrorist attack orchestrated by the Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA), a splinter group from the IRA that did not agree with the ceasefire that the IRA had agreed upon earlier that year.

The explosion would kill 29 people, injure 220, and spark national and international outrage. The two in the photo would miraculously survive, though the photographer would unfortunately die.^[1]

9 David A. Johnston

Legs stretched out in front of him, a notebook and pen on his lap, David A. Johnston directs a sunny smile to the cameraman, Harry Glicken, who was a student of David’s. His demeanor is relaxed and excited. As he should be. He is a volcanologist studying the rumbling Mount St. Helens.

Thirteen and a half hours later, Johnston would be killed by the eruption of Mount St Helens. His last words shared over the radio to the closest U.S. Geological Survey office were, “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!”

His remains were never found. Glicken was meant to be on duty observing the volcano that day. But he swapped shifts with Johnston at the last minute as Glicken had an interview to attend. Upon hearing the news of the eruption and Johnston’s death, Glicken was devasted and joined helicopter crews to try and find survivors for hours before they refused to allow him to continue. In a strange twist of fate, Glicken would die from a separate volcanic eruption in Japan years later.^[2]

8 Black Bear in the Woods

The photo shows a 300-pound black bear in the forest. The bear is around 100 feet (30 meters) away, behind a fallen log, and seems to be following the photographer.

The photo was snapped on a phone by Darsh Patel, a 22-year-old Rutgers University student who had decided to go hiking in West Milford’s Apshawa Preserve with four of his fellow university friends. Unfortunately, the bear ended up chasing the students, so they decided to split up. When they regrouped, one student from the group was missing: Darsh Patel.

Patel’s body was recovered four hours after police arrived at the scene. He had been mauled by the bear he had photographed only moments beforehand. His phone would also be recovered with puncture marks and this foreboding photo.^[3]

7 Tyler Hadley

The photo is blurred. As if the photographer moved the camera as he took it. The photo shows two men, one with a shaven head, holding an orange cup to the camera. The photo could be from any house party. But, the man with the aloft orange cup is Tyler Hadley, and earlier that day, he killed his parents, Blake and Mary-Jo Hadley, with a clawed hammer while high on ecstasy.

Their dead bodies, wrapped in towels and covered in family possessions that reminded Tyler of his parents, lay upstairs in the house as the party raged on.

Tyler had a history of verbally promising to kill his parents since he was ten years of age, seething whenever they would punish him or show parental authority. Finally, on the day of their murders, he promised the party of the century. Writing on his Facebook page at noon, “party at my crib tonight… maybe.” His classmates did not believe him, as his parents were known to be strict. But at 8 pm, he again posted a message: “party at my house hmu.”

At the party, he started telling people of his murderous deed. People who heard left or thought he was lying. His best friend, Michael Mandell, was shown the bodies upstairs. Afterward, they posed for this infamous photo. Michael eventually ran away from the party, and through word of mouth, Tyler’s crime was reported to the police. Tyler was arrested the morning after the party and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Hadley house was later demolished.^[4]

6 Dutch Girls of Panana

Two young women pose for a selfie in front of the wild nature of Panama. The two girls are Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, Dutch travelers who were hiking the El Pianista trail. They set off for their hike on April 1 at 11 am. Unfortunately, on the 2nd, they did not turn up for an appointment, and the parents of the girls stopped receiving the daily texts they had been getting in the past.

On April 6, the parents arrived in Panana along with a full police search. The forest would be combed for ten days. Nothing was found.

Ten weeks later, a woman handed in a blue backpack. The backpack belonged to Froon, and inside were personal belongings, including a camera and their phones. The phones had evidence of emergency numbers having been dialed only hours after the girls started their hike, but due to lack of reception, the calls did not connect. Froons’s phone died on April 4, and Kremers phone would be turned on intermintently between the 5th and the 11th, but the incorrect pin was entered, or no pin was entered each time.

On the camera, ninety flash photos were taken between one and four am in complete darkness deep within the jungle. One disturbing image shows the back of Kremers’s head with blood on her hair.

Two months after the backpack was discovered, a pelvis and a foot inside a boot were discovered, along with other remains. These were later DNA tested and confirmed to belong to Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon. What happened to them remains a mystery today.^[1]

5 The Red-Haired Woman

The photo shows a man bouldering in Montecito’s Cold Spring Trail in California. Behind him is a flash of red color on the rocks. This red is the hair of Saylor Guilliams. Guilliams had gone on a later afternoon hike with her friend, Brenden Michael Vega. They were ill-equipped, and as it got darker, their cell phones were not enough to illuminate the path, and they ended up slipping.

Vega injured his arm, but Guilliams broke both ankles and her wrist. Vega went to get help but ended up falling 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) off a ledge and succumbing to his injuries. This left Guilliams alone. She would lay there for the entire night until the men bouldering would later discover Guilliams laying on the rocks, unresponsive. They called emergency services, and she was airlifted out. She would survive the ordeal.^[6]

4 Daylenn “Moke” Pua

Daylenn Pua went and visited his grandmother in Waianae, Oahu, Hawaii. He had told her he was interested in hiking the Haiku Stairs, otherwise known as the “Stairway to Heaven.” This hike was closed to the public, and anyone caught hiking it was trespassing. His grandmother warned him against it, saying he would be locked up if he did. On February 27, 2015, he caught a bus and ventured forth to the stairway to heaven hike. Daylenn sent texts to his grandmother with photos of the hike. He was never seen again.

After his disappearance, the photos were studied; one showed a man in the far background. He seems to be following behind Daylenn. The family asked for public assistance and for anyone who recognized the man to come forth. To this day, he or his remains have never been found, and what happened to him and the identity of that strange man in the photo remains a mystery.^[7]

3 Jolee Callan

Dressed in an oversized red shirt, 18-year-old Jolee Callan stands on top of a sheer cliff face and takes a photo of the beautiful view below of Pinhoti Trail in Cheaha State Park in Delta, Alabama

She had just hiked to this scenic location with her ex-boyfriend, Loren Bunner (20). Moments after this photo was taken, Loren would shoot her in the head twice with a .22-caliber Ruger Bearcat revolver and throw her body off the cliffside.

He would later call the police and say that he killed his ex-girlfriend, turning himself in. The pair had dated for ten months before Jolee broke up with Loren as he was controlling and did not allow her to meet with her friends. Despite the breakup, they kept in regular contact. They even had a dog together.

Two months after the breakup, Loren invited Jolee on the hike where he would end up murdering her. Loren Bunner was sentenced to 52 years in prison.^[8]

2 Tina Watson

Two divers pose for a photo while scuba diving off the beautiful Queensland Coast. Behind them, a stiff prone figure lays on the ocean floor. This would later be discovered to be Tina Watson, murdered by her husband

Tina Watson was visiting Queensland with her husband, Gabe, for their honeymoon. On the day of her death, they decided to dive into the popular and challenging wreck of the SS Yongala. The two were underqualified for such a dive, and the dive company suggested a guided dive for the expedition, which they refused.

During the dive, Tina ran into trouble and sunk nearly 100 feet (30 meters) to the ocean floor. Gabe claimed to have tried to save his wife, but due to an ear problem, he said he could not dive deep enough to help her. When she was brought aboard, she was pronounced dead after 40 minutes of CPR. Due to contradictory statements issued by Gabe and the fact that before their marriage, Gabe asked Tina to increase her life insurance and make him the sole beneficiary, foul play was suspected. He was charged with manslaughter charges in Queensland but later had his charges dismissed when he was charged in his home country of the United States related to the planning of the murder.^[9]

1 The Dating Game

The photo shows two people. A man and a woman standing side by side. The photo is a still from a popular TV show called The Dating Game, which aired in the 1970s.

The woman’s name was Cheryl Bradshaw. The man beside her, Rodney James Alcala. At the time of his appearance, Rodney was in the middle of a murder spree. He committed five murders between 1977 and 1979. He would torment his victims by strangling them to unconsciousness, allowing them to regain consciousness, and then repeating the process again and again before killing them. He was described as a killing machine. His exact murder count is unknown, but he was caught and convicted for seven murders.

He appeared on The Dating Game as a “successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed. Between takes, you might find him skydiving or motorcycling.” He won the date with the bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw. She, however, refused to go on a date with him, calling him creepy. He would later go on to murder three additional women after this appearance, and some speculate that the rejection was a driving factor.^[10]

For a lot of people food is something in which they can take joy and comfort. We indulge in junk food, try to eat healthy food, make too much food to celebrate special occasions and, thanks to the internet, we can learn about new and exotic foods to try from all over the world. But there are issues we need to be wary of, like over indulging, and food allergies, and safety in terms of food prep. But even the most wary and responsible among us would be unlikely to have seen any of these bizarre reactions to food coming. 

10. A Collapsed Lung Caused by Ghost Peppers

If you’ve ever tried to eat a ghost pepper before you know that you should probably never eat a ghost pepper. They average about 1 million Scoville heat units. Compare that to sriracha which, at best, is about 2,500. For most people, eating a ghost pepper will cause extreme discomfort, sweating, drooling and potentially some stomach upset. That’s a good reaction, though, relatively speaking. 

A 47-year-old man who had entered a ghost pepper eating challenge. After suffering some severe pain and vomiting he was taken to the hospital. Doctors discovered that he was suffering from an esophageal rupture, which means he ended up tearing a hole in his throat as a result of eating the pepper. He also suffered a pneumothorax, better known as a collapsed lung. 

The hole in the man’s throat was leaking food into his chest cavity including hamburger, onion and “green vomitous material.” It’s been suggested he wasn’t even eating pure peppers, but a burger with peppers on it, then he chugged a bunch of water afterwards. He spent 23 days in hospital as a result, and still had a breathing tube when he left. 

9. Carb-Heavy Foods Leading to Drunkenness

You’ve probably experienced some stomach upset at least once in your life after eating something that wasn’t necessarily bad, it just didn’t agree with you. Maybe it made you feel sick, or maybe it just made you gassy, who’s to say? The stomach is a weird and wonderful place, and no one knows this better than a 61-year-old Texas man whose claim to fame is an inexplicable beer gut.

Rather than excess weight from drinking beer, this beer gut refers to the way the man digests food. He went to the hospital suffering from dizziness and related issues and a blood test revealed his blood alcohol was 0.37% which is indicative of being pretty drunk. The weird part, of course, was that the man had not had any alcohol. 

As it happens, the man suffers from a condition called auto-brewery syndrome. Doctors initially brushed it off as the man basically being a liar. They assumed he was drinking in secret and not admitting to it. After keeping him under observation and determining his alcohol levels would rise even when he clearly wasn’t drinking, they discovered that he had an abundance of brewer’s yeast in his digestive tract. As he ate any carbs, the yeast and sugars combined to start producing alcohol inside his body.

The condition is pretty rare and not enough studies have been done to verify much about it, but it does seem linked to the use of antibiotics, which may kill off other gut bacteria. 

8. Black Licorice Heart Attacks

Black licorice is a bit of a maligned treat in the candy world and routinely shows up on lists of the worst candy ever. Still, some people have a taste for it and, as if to validate all the haters out there, that could be a very bad thing. Eating large quantities of black licorice carries some serious health risks that you might not expect from run-of-the-mill candy.

Black licorice has been linked to at least one death due to a heart attack. The man was 54-years-old and had been eating an entire bag or two of black licorice every day for weeks. He collapsed and then died 24 hours after getting to the hospital.  His blood tests showed incredibly low potassium which is caused by something called glycyrrhizin. It’s what makes black licorice sweet, but it’s clearly dangerous. 

Low potassium can dangerously alter heart rhythms and that, combined with the man’s already poor health owing to smoking and a poor diet, led to the fatal heart attack. Obviously you need to consume large quantities of licorice to suffer this fate, but it can happen.

7. A Throat Swelling Shut From Hot Food

Getting your food piping hot is usually a good thing because most meals just taste better that way. But there are levels of heat and you’ve probably burnt your tongue at least once when you realized something wasn’t cool enough to eat yet. So what do you do when food is too hot? Most of us wait, or maybe blow on it to speed the process up. Sadly, that was not what Darren Hickey did. 

The 51-year-old man worked as a wedding planner and was at a venue where a chef offered him a fish cake to try. He must have eaten too quickly as the cake was hot and, rather than spit it out, he simply swallowed it. The fish cake burned the back of his throat and for a time he seemed fine. However, as the day progressed, the burn began to swell until it caused his throat to constrict so much he could no longer breathe. He died as a result of his injuries.

6. Death Caused by Fermented Corn Noodles

Most of us in the Western world eat noodles made from wheat, and occasionally we’ll have rice noodles as well. But you can make noodles out of a lot of different ingredients and that includes corn. A Chinese dish called suantangzi is made with fermented corn noodles and that’s where the problem arose for a family in China that consumed the dish back in 2020. Nine family members ended up dying.

There is a bacterium that can grow in corn which produces something called bongkrekic acid as a by-product. The bacteria that produces it is nearly impossible to get rid of, you can’t wash it off and you can’t cook it out, either. It has no taste or odor so you can’t tell if your food is infected.

Consuming infected grain leads to vomiting and abdominal pain and the mortality rate is pretty high. The only method of prevention is to basically not eat fermented grains at all. 

5. Severe Gastrointestinal Distress from Escolar

The saying “there’s plenty of fish in the sea” is typically a reference to romantic prospects but it’s also just an accurate observation. There are lots of fish in the sea and humans tend to only consume a small number of them as a food source. Tuna, salmon, and bass are all very common. But what about escolar?

Unscrupulous fish sellers will sometimes swap escolar for tuna because it’s cheaper. By all accounts, escolar is a tasty fish, but it’s not ideal for most people to eat thanks to a natural wax in the fish’s flesh that can, in some people, cause keriorrhea. Even if you don’t know that word, the suffix must be ringing a few bells. It’s a specific kind of diarrhea that you can Google if you’re feeling adventurous and is known to be caused by escolar anywhere between 30 minutes and 36 hours after eating it.

While some people will hide the fish, pretending it’s tuna, other places sell it openly as white tuna, butterfish, rudderfish or Hawaiian walu, because it really is considered tasty and it doesn’t cause the adverse reaction in everyone, making it kind of like the seafood version of Russian Roulette. It earned escolar the nickname of Ex-Lax Fish. 

4. Dreamfish Hallucinations

Along the coasts of Africa and Europe you can find a fish called salema porgy, but it’s more often called dreamfish. People have been eating them since Ancient Rome and probably before, but it’s definitely not an everyday sort of thing owing to the fact these little fish will make you trip out. They contain hallucinogenic compounds similar to LSD. 

Despite the effects, or because of them, you can find the fish on menus throughout Europe, you just need to be cautious when eating it. Some people have noted that they’re pretty incapable of doing even basic tasks after eating the fish. At least one diner claimed to have seen the Angel of Death while other people have hallucinated Batman or the chatter of birds. As in, they could see the sounds birds were making. 

It’s not all fun and games, however, as abdominal pain, amnesia and paralysis are also potential effects, along with “brain electricity.”

3. Popcorn Lung from Microwave Popcorn 

Microwave popcorn is over 40 years old at this point and has been a staple of movie nights at home for that entire time. Who doesn’t love a bag of pre-buttered popcorn that’s ready in two minutes? But there is a little known dark side to microwave popcorn that’s known as popcorn lung. Sounds a bit silly, but it had the potential to be fatal.

Popcorn lung happens when the bronchioles of your lungs become damaged and inflamed from inhaling toxins. It gets its name because of how closely tied to popcorn the disease was. In fact, it was first identified in workers at a popcorn factory and later popped up in some people who ate large amounts of microwave popcorn at home.

Popcorn used to be processed with a chemical called diacetyl. That was what made it taste like butter without having to use real butter which would go bad in a package of popcorn. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals in the popcorn bags themselves were also determined to contain perfluorinated compounds, which have been linked to cancer. 

2. Nardoo Poisoning

Most of us have likely not heard of nardoo, but it’s an edible fern you can find in Australia. Aboriginal people have known of it for ages and they can show you how to cook and eat it too, if you want. And, if you don’t want to suffer the potential lethal consequences of eating it, you really should follow their instructions.

Nardoo’s big claim to fame dates back to 1861 when Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills tried to be the first non-aboriginals to cross Australia from South to North. Within three months their supplies ran low, and some locals showed them how to make nardoo. With an abundant supply, they continued to eat it, up to five pounds of it a day, but there was a problem. Despite eating, they were growing weak. They lost weight, their heart rates slowed, and they began to shake frequently. They were starving, but didn’t realize it.

Nardoo contains an enzyme called thiaminase. It prevents the body from processing thiamine, which is vitamin B1 and that, in turn, prevents you from metabolizing energy from the food you eat. So you can eat and eat and eat but get no nutritional benefits. 

What Wills and Burke failed to realize was that the aboriginals had been roasting the seed pods of the nardoo before preparing it. Heat breaks down the thiaminase and makes it edible. They were eating it raw. Both men died from it as a result.

1. A Sexually Transmitted Allergy

Nut allergies are so commonplace that kids can no longer have peanut butter in most schools and peanuts were replaced by pretzels on airplanes. But the extent to which a person may suffer a nut allergy is not something most of us fully understand because, in some cases, it’s almost unbelievable. That’s the case with a couple who were written about in a medical journal back in 2007.

In this case, the man in the couple had eaten Brazil nuts two or three hours before getting together with his girlfriend, who they were both aware was allergic to the nuts. He claimed to have already bathed and brushed his teeth before seeing her so there was no chance of a reaction. However, there was still a reaction, and a very specific one in a very sensitive location that manifested after they had sex, if you catch our meaning. 

Further testing showed that the allergens from the nuts were actually transmitted through her boyfriend’s semen during intercourse causing her to have an allergic reaction. There’s evidence of a similar situation happening to another woman indicating allergies can be essentially sexually transmitted.