The human body is a wondrous thing and arguably a miracle of science. Consider how many other things are as complex as a human in the known universe and we do kind of stand out as pretty incredible. It’s either extremely fitting or extremely offputting then that some people have taken it upon themselves to use parts of bodies to craft new and interesting things. 

10. Flesh Map

Artists are often unique and creative individuals. They have to be if they want to succeed at their craft. So while some artists are happy to put ink to paper or paint to canvas, others like to experiment with how they create their works. After all, anything can technically be art if you try hard enough.

American artist Andrew Krasnow is an artist who pushes the envelope in how he makes art and also what he considers art. For twenty years, Krasnow has used human flesh to make sculptures. 

Using skin from bodies that have been donated to science, Krasnow has made lampshades, boots, and even a map of the United States. Naturally, Krasnow has a meaning behind his art and considers it a commentary on human cruelty. 

9. Ancient Blood Paint

Few things are more interesting from an archaeological standpoint than ancient cave paintings. Seeing some of the earliest forms of communication, art, and historical documentation is fascinating. Most of us think of cave art as little stick figures throwing spears at stick buffalo, but there’s more to it than all that. For instance, aside from the subject of the cave paintings, there’s something to be said for the paint itself. 

Research has shown that prehistoric artists in Australia and Tasmania developed the red pigment they used for their art in a very simple and all too obvious way. They used blood.

Several paintings dating back 10,000 years, and one at least 20,000 years, show evidence of proteins from human blood. The art itself looks to have been painted over even older carvings. It’s possible these date back as much as 31,000 years, making them some of the oldest cave paintings in the world.

8. Bone Sculptures

Not so long ago, humans used to be big fans of carving things from ivory. The fact that this had to be harvested from elephants wasn’t a concern for many people, and we’ve made countless pieces of art and even piano keys from it. The cruel and macabre practice is mostly, but not completely, behind us. But the fact is, death and the things it leaves behind have always fascinated us as a species. Some people are still making art from the bones of animals. And humans. 

Bruce Mahalski makes sculptures that, from a distance, might look like any other sculpture you’d see in a museum. Get closer, however, and the textures will catch your eye. He makes extensive use of animal bones, the kinds of things that might be left over from dinner or found on the forest floor. But then there are the human ones.

Mahalski’s art is like a three-dimensional collage of bits and pieces, large and small. The human bones are given no more prominence than any others and, in fact, are often hard to pick out of the crowd. This is intentional, as Mahalski doesn’t feel like humans are any more important than the other creatures of the earth. His goal is simple to show a reverence for both life and death, whether the bones are from chickens or humans.

7. Body Worlds

In 1995, the first Body Worlds exhibit opened to the public in Tokyo. Since that time, over 40 million people have gone to museums around the world to check out the exhibit or some of the spin-offs it inspired. 

The concept of the exhibit is as fascinating as it is grisly. They subject human bodies to a process called plastination. They remove fluids from the body, replacing them with polymers that harden and preserve the body perfectly. This allows the bodies to be manipulated in a variety of fascinating and unusual ways. They can be stripped of their flesh, or cut to show perfectly preserved cross sections. They can remove layers beyond just flesh including fat, muscle, and bone. In some cases, whole bodies constructed of nothing but veins and arteries in the shape of the human that once housed them have been made. 

Originally it was said that all of the bodies were donated by people who, in life, were 100% aware of what would happen to their bodies after death. That said, the exhibit actually returned some bodies to China in the early 2000s as there was evidence they had been executed prisoners. A competing exhibit called Bodies says that they are simply unable to verify one way or another if the bodies they used were executed prisoners or not. 

6. Human Skin Books

For a serious book fan, nothing beats a leather-bound tome. Whether it’s a personal journal or a valuable old antique, a book bound in leather can be a conversation piece and a collectible. But it’s worth looking into when a leather-bound book was made, and exactly how it was made. Leather comes in various forms after all, from sheep to cow and, more often than you might think, human.

In the 19th century, it became a rare but not unheard-of practice for the flesh of executed criminals or mental patients to be used to bind books. The skin of the first man hanged at the Bristol Gaol in England was used to bind the book that told the story of the man’s crime. The flesh of William Burke, a known murderer, was used to bind a journal cover. 

The practice was by no means widespread, and today there are only a handful of examples that have been found and definitively identified. It seems as though the books were mostly produced by doctors, people who had access to corpses and the skill to remove human flesh. Why they also felt the need to use it to make books is a matter that has not been fully determined, however. 

5. Lab Grown Human Skin Bags

The future comes at your fast and technology is changing the world every day. Just look at your local grocery store in the meat section and you’ll see that there’s already a section devoted to meat that isn’t actually meat. And soon there will be a section devoted to meat that is meat. It was just never alive.

Lab-grown tissue is a real thing and will revolutionize both your barbecue and healthcare. But maybe it’s destined to revolutionize fashion as well. After all, if you can grow skin without a living body, what’s stopping you from making your own leather? And, for that matter, what’s stopping you from making human skin leather? 

Designer Tina Gorjanc had plans as far back as 2016 to make leather handbags made from skin grown from the DNA of designer Alexander McQueen. McQueen died in 2010, but Gorjanc has access to some of his DNA thanks to hair samples he left behind. 

Celebrity bags aside, the same technology could be used to make a bag out of anyone’s DNA, if they had the money and the interest. 

4. Teeth Necklaces

There’s a popular legend that George Washington had wooden teeth. Look into it and you’ll see that’s not the case and he very likely may have had dentures made from the teeth of other humans. There has always been a market for human teeth, and they’ve served a number of purposes. Reusing them as dentures is almost too normal. Back in the day, they were used as necklaces as well.

Archaeologists in Turkey uncovered relics in a Neolithic that date back thousands of years. Among them are some teeth that are around 8,500 years old, which were drilled and strung together to form a necklace, just like beads. Analysis also indicated that the teeth likely came from different people.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that ancient peoples were knocking teeth out just for the fun of making jewelry, but it also doesn’t preclude that as a possibility. There was no sign of disease, so the likeliest possibility was that they were removed from someone on purpose, rather than falling out naturally.

3. Hair Sweaters

In the Bible, wearing a hair shirt is a form of penance. You slip into a camel hair garment as a way to punish yourself because it’s terribly uncomfortable. In modern times we have terribly uncomfortable wool sweaters that can get very itchy and arguably fit the bill here as well. Suffice it to say, there are not many benefits to wearing a shirt made of hair. And those ones aren’t even human hair. 

For those who do like the idea of hair, or fur, but not the cruelty aspect associated with traditional fur farming, some design clothing made from human hair. It’s arguably sustainable and offers something unique if nothing else. 

2. Blood Album

Sometimes an artist will talk about how they put their blood, sweat, and tears into the work that they make. It’s a metaphor in almost every single case, but not always. For instance, there is at least one album you can get that has been pressed with the blood of several pop stars inside. 

The Flaming Lips released an album called The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends back in 2012. As a special treat for extremely rabid fans, there were 10 special pressings of the album made. These versions contain blood samples taken from the aforementioned friends, including Ke$ha, Chris Martin, and Erykah Badu. The album had a price tag of $2,500 a pop and was sold with a normal copy of the album so you could still listen to it without risking a bloodbath in your record player. 

In 2014, Meredith Graves of the band Perfect Pussy one-upped the Flaming Lips by having her own blood pressed into the wax itself rather than just being encased in a compartment in the vinyl and put out 180 copies of the album. 

1. Blood Ink

Ancient cave artists aren’t the only ones who saw the upside to using blood as ink. Modern art has found some uses for it as well, and it’s not the avant-garde fringe art you may think. In fact, in more than one instance the use of blood in art has been incredibly mainstream. 

Back in the year 1977, the band KISS was incredibly huge. They were so big, in fact, that Marvel comics actually had a KISS comic to chronicle some fictional adventures for the band. 

For the Super Special #1 issue, blood was drawn from all four band members and mixed into the ink used to color the book. And why not? They were taking on some big-time Marvel villains like Dr. Doom. Blood was inevitably going to be spilled. 

Though it sounds like the stuff of urban legends, it really did happen and was even certified by a notary public. Obviously, someone felt it was unbelievable even at the time it was happening. A copy of the book in decent condition will run you a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Closer to the present, rapper Lil Nas X caused a stir by releasing some limited-edition Satan-themed shoes in 2021 that also contained his blood in the ink used for the design. Many people were up in arms over the idea, but it also made international news and guaranteed that the shoes would be known the world over, so maybe the plan worked out just fine.

To have a person vanish out of thin air is extremely disturbing, but to have bizarre events surrounding the disappearance can make the situation even more unsettling. This list compiles ten of the most unsettling disappearances that have occurred. The circumstances surrounding each disappearance are extremely bizarre and many of the crimes have yet to be solved.

See Also: 10 Truly Bizarre And Chilling Cases Of Mass Disappearances

10 Jackie Sutton

Jackie Sutton was a passionate, former BBC journalist who was working for War and Peace Reporting to help local journalists in war torn areas. 50-year-old Jackie Sutton had landed in Turkey from her London flight around 10:00PM in October of 2015. Her connecting flight to Erbil, Iraq, was scheduled to leave at 12:15AM. It was said that Jackie had spent some time in the café leisurely drinking a beer and reportedly fell asleep. At around 12:30 Jackie walked up to the counter in no apparent distress only to be told that she had missed her flight. It’s said that she suddenly started crying and saying that she had no money to pay for another flight, but was told that nothing could be done. From there, the story takes a very odd turn. Jackie was seen entering the bathroom and a few minutes later two Russian women are seen coming out of the bathroom visibly panicked. This is because they found the body of Jackie Sutton after committing suicide in a bathroom stall.

While some have come to terms with the suicide, others believe that there had to have been foul play. Many of her friends say that she was an extremely happy and passionate person, who would never have taken her own life, especially over something as trivial as missing a connecting flight. Even more mysteriously, it was found that Sutton actually had 2,300 euros in her bag, which would go against the fact that she said that she didn’t have enough money to buy another ticket. She had spoken out previously about fear of being targeted by the Islamic State as her predecessor, Ammar Al Shahbander was killed in a car bomb in Baghdad in May of 2015.

9The Toronto Trio

The body of Philip Sit was found in a wooded area of York Region on August 9th, 2006, after disappearing in September 2005. His killer was never found. What is so odd about this case is not just Philip’s disappearance, but also the disappearance of his three friends, Eve Ho, Kevin Lim, Jackie Li that occurred on August 14th, 2006. Eve Ho had arranged to meet up with her best friend at the Eaton Centre, but never showed up. Jackie Li was last seen by her mother when he left their Scarborough apartment to go to work in the morning. He called her later that day, but that is the last she ever heard from her son. Kevin Lim was last seen by his grandmother as he went to the store to buy a drink. Eve and Jackie were dating at the time and Kevin was Eve’s childhood friend, but all three were friends of Philip. What makes this disappearance even more odd is that Philip’s murder was made public on August 25th, 11 days after the trio disappeared. The three are not considered suspects in Sit’s murder, and no leads have been given as to their disappearances.

8 Craig Frear

Craig Frear was a well-built, 17-year-old high school soccer player that vanished after walking into the woods on July 27, 2004. That day, Craig had been at the Cambridge Manor apartments where his girlfriend lived. His mother Veronica had gone to see Craig at Price Chopper, where He was working, but when she got there, she was told that Craig had just stopped showing up a while back. Confused, Veronica was able to get hold of Craig to ask him about what was going on. Craig had told her that he would be home to talk with her about it, but went to the Cambridge Manor Apartments instead. Two middle school boys last spotted him at 2:00PM on July 27, 2004, walking along railroad tracks. It is reported that he put his finger to his lips as if to make a “shh” gesture before walking into the woods and disappearing forever. Over 500 interviews have since been conducted with countless searches and no leads or evidence has ever surfaced.

7Timmothy Pitzen

Amy Fry-Pitzen took her 6 year-old son, Timmothy, out of Greenman Elementary School on May 11, 2011 for a ‘family emergency’. Three days later, his mother’s body was found in a hotel room in Illinois, dead from apparent suicide. With her body, a note was found stating that Timmothy was safe with people who would care for him and that “you’ll never find him”. Timmothy was never seen or heard from again. His father, Jim Pitzen, has no idea where Timmothy could be, but hopes that he is safe. Amy had suffered from depression and previous suicide attempts, but nothing had ever indicated that she was going to disappear and take Timmothy with her. Records show that she made several short phone calls from an unknown location. One call was to her mother who spoke with both Amy and Timmothy, neither appearing to be in any distress. Surveillance video and receipts chronicled what the two had done in the three days before Amy’s suicide. They were seen having fun and visiting zoos and waterparks. On Friday, may 13th, the day before Amy was found dead, however, she was seen visiting a grocery store in Winnebago, Illinois without Timmothy. His location is still unknown.

6Iwona Wieczorek

In 2010, Iwona Wieczorek was a recent high school graduate planning to take a vacation to Spain while waiting to hear back from the university she had applied to. On the night of July 16th, 2010, she went to a party with her friends at one of their places. Later that night, she went to a club in Sopot with her friend Adria and three boys she had gotten to know only the month prior. She was supposed to stay at the first party, but decided to go to the club instead. While at the party, there was an argument between the five, though no one knows what the argument was about. Iwona was seen running out of the club, visibly upset, and going towards the Seaside Promenade. She did not have any money with her and her phone battery was running low.

Once sunrise began, around 4:00AM, she began the 4-mile journey home through Seaside Boulevard; barefoot because her feet hurt from her new heels. On her way home, she texted Adria saying that she was angry that Adria didn’t follow her out of the club. Adria later said that Iwona called her and that they settled the argument. A few minutes after 4:00 she called Adria for the last time to tell her that her phone battery was dying, where she was at (which is consistent with the CCTV footage), that she was a bit drunk, and that she was headed to Adria’s house. She said that she didn’t want to meet Adria’s mom drunk, but Adria said her parents weren’t home and that she would leave the keys outside for Iwona to come in. Adria had almost made it back to her house when talking to Iwona and was walking past Iwona’s apartment.

It was reported that Iwona’s stepfather heard Adria and Iwona speaking because she had the phone on speaker. Surveillance footage at the Jelitkowo beach shows Iwona walking and an unidentified man in a plaid shirt walking behind her with a towel on his shoulder. Investigators are now convinced that he did not have anything to do with her disappearance. It is most likely that Iwona made it to the area she lived, but she never reached Adria or her house. That morning, her mother thought she was at Adria’s, but Adria thought she went home because the keys were untouched. By 5:00pm on July 17th, Adria and Iwona’s family came to the terrifying conclusion that Iwona had disappeared. The police have since questioned over 100 people and offered a 1,000,000 polish zloty award ($270K), but nothing from Iwona has ever been found.

5 Brandon Lawson

Brandon Lawson was a 26-year-old father of four from Texas who made a chilling 911 call in the early morning hours of August 9, 2013. He had apparently run out of gas near Bronte, Texas and began walking in the fields along Highway 277. In the 911 call, he can be heard saying, “Yes I’m in the middle of a field (inaudible) pushed some guys over, right here going towards Abilene, on both sides. My truck ran out of gas, there’s one car here, the guy’s chasing (inaudible) to the woods, please hurry!” The operator then asks him if he needs an ambulance and his final words were, “No I need the cops.” During the call he is clearly distressed and panicked, but no one is sure exactly what happened to him that night. Since the night he disappeared, there has been no cellphone or bank activity in any of his accounts.

4Robert Hourihan

Robert Hourihan is a 33-year-old man from Virginia who left his house at 6:00AM on April 8, 2011, to his job as an electrician for the state. Two hours later, his wife’s coworker said she had seen Hourihan’s white Chevy Cavalier with the license plate “TARAMAE” heading north on the SR53, completely out of the way. Worried, his wife, Tara, called his phone, but repeatedly got his voicemail. He never returned her call; out of character because he would always alert her when he had a scheduling issue.

He never returned home and has not been seen since. Former coworkers did see him eating breakfast at the EW Thomas grocery store in Palmyra around 8:00AM, but that was the last time he was seen. What is even more odd is that Hourihan was not even scheduled to work that day, but left his house in his full uniform. Seven weeks later, his Chevy Cavalier was found in a Target parking lot in La Plata, Maryland, with all of his expensive tools still in the car. Police learned that he planned to meet someone in Palmyra that day, but never arrived. Hourihan was diagnosed with a heart condition, which he took daily medication for. He had missed his dose, and there is no indication that the prescription was ever refilled, but his doctor said he would’ve died in a week without it. To this day, the police are no closer to solving the case than they were in 2011 and Hourihan has yet to be seen or heard from.

3 Kayelyn Louder

Kayelyn Louder was a 30-year-old social worker from Utah who was planning to spend her September 2014 weekend updating her resume and cleaning her condo. In the afternoon, Kayelyn was caught on surveillance taking her pug, Phyllis, for a walk. The next time she was seen on surveillance footage, Louder is seen sprinting out of her home in the rain completely barefoot and without any belongings. This was the last time anyone heard from her. The previous night it was reported that Louder had made an odd 911 call stating that there was a brutal fight going on in the clubhouse at her condo that involved guns, but when police arrived, it was a calm wedding reception.

An hour later she called 911 and abruptly hung up. When dispatchers called back, she told them that her friend had said she was being delusional and paranoid. The morning of her disappearance, she had made another 911 call to say that there was an intruder in her home and she could hear two people talking, even though her roommate said that the door was dead bolted and no one else was there. Weeks after disappearing, a body was found floating in the Jordan River that was identified as Kayelyn Louder. Unfortunately, the autopsy was inconclusive.

2 Lars Mittank

July 2014 started out like any other summer break for 28-year-old Lars Mittank of Germany as he went to spend time with his friend at Golden Sands in Bulgaria. Golden Sands was known as a popular party spot for young people from Germany and England. Partying on the beach, he got into a fistfight over football with some of the other tourists. Mittank sustained a ruptured eardrum and was advised by his doctor not to fly until it healed. During that time, Mittank got a room in a hostel located in the poorer part of town and told his friends to go back to Germany without him. After spending a night in the hostel, Mittank became extremely scared and paranoid. His mother received a panicked text from him stating that he didn’t feel safe, she should cancel his credit card, and that four mysterious men were following him.

The doctor confirmed that Lars had gone to his office the next day, but when he arrived, Lars immediately jumped up and ran out. He soon went to the airport and is seen on surveillance walking through the airport with his luggage. Suddenly, he walks off screen then is seen sprinting the other direction out of the airport without his bags, jumping over the fence, and disappearing into the forest. He was never seen again. He family confirmed that he didn’t suffer from any mental illness and they have no idea why their son would begin acting in such a bizarre and erratic manner. A massive search was launched to find Lars, but was unsuccessful.

1 Juan Martinez

It was June 25, 1986, at 6:00AM as a Volvo F12 truck carrying pure sulfuric acid came barreling down the Somosierra Mountain Pass in Madrid, Spain. The truck began passing other trucks, so close that he knocked the mirror off of one. Suddenly, he reached a third truck and instead of passing it, he pushed it from behind until it was forced off the road. It becomes apparent to the other drivers that the Volvo’s brakes were not working. Suddenly, the Volvo smashed into an oncoming truck going close to 87 mph, causing it to overturn and spill its sulfuric acid contents out all over the road. Rescue working come to find a man and woman in the cabin of the first truck dead and covered in the acid. They immediately begin rescuing the other drivers and pouring sand and lime on the acid to neutralize it. After three hours of work, they able to identify the bodies of Andres Martinez, the owner of the vehicle, and his wife Carmen Gomez, who frequently accompanied him on his trips, as the couple that were covered in acid. That afternoon a call is placed to Carmen’s mother in Murcia informing her of the tragedy. To everyone’s surprise, she replies with, “And the boy? Please tell me the boy is alright!”

Juan Pedro Martinez was the 10-year-old only child of Andres and Carmen. He had accompanied his father on his trips before, but never one this long. His father had promised to bring him on his trip to Basque if he got good grades, and Juan did just that. Andres had his wife come with him on the trip to watch Juan as he unloaded the truck then they would vacation in Basque for a few days. At 7:00PM on June 24, the three left for Cartagena with the truck loaded.

Examination of the cabin after the horrific accident did show child-oriented cassettes and boy clothes in the back, but absolutely no trace of Juan. Many people from the community banded together to search for Juan, digging through the sand and lime that was put down as well as searching through the rubble and surrounding area, but found nothing. While some believed that Juan was completely dissolved by the sulfuric acid, chemists maintain that there is no way that the acid could have dissolved his body that quickly and left no trace. Many tests were done and it was found that even if his body had landed in a ditch that acted as a tub, it would take 24 hours for the soft tissue to be lost and 5 days for bones to be damaged, but the hair, nails, teeth, and some clothing should still be found.

The trucks tachometer was intact and showed that they had reached their scheduled stops including a stop at a gas station and the Aragon inn. A waiter recalled the family and said that they came and went without incident. It was also found, however, that following the inn, the truck made 12 extremely short stops during the ascension of the pass with the shortest lasting less than one second and the longest one near the peak lasting twenty seconds. Truckers that usually drive that route say that they usually make one stop at most and two is a waste of time. Furthermore, there was no traffic jam that would explain the odd stops. Examination of the truck showed that the brakes were not damaged, which means Andre’s speed was voluntary.

The trucker that was run off the road stated that he saw a white Nissan van stop by his vehicle immediately after the accident. At that time, a man with a mustache and foreign accent got out with a blonde woman. He was told not to worry and that she was a nurse. She checked his injuries then moved on to the vehicle that hit the Volvo head on and was never seen again. It was also said that two shepherds saw the white van stop by the Volvo, a Nordic-looking man and women stepped out dressed in doctor clothing. They picked a package up from the wreckage and disappeared. The police attempted to locate these shepherds, but found none in the area that saw the accident. To this day, there has been no trace of Juan Pedro ever found. There are countless theories, but none have proven true.

When watching or re-watching a horror movie or scary series, most fans can’t wait to get to the creepy stuff, after wading through the talking and other mundane activities that push the story along. This includes Regan’s famous head spin in The Exorcist and Annie literally cutting her own head off with a piano wire in Hereditary. And who could forget Leatherface’s skin mask scene? Creepy is what horrors are about after all, and while some horror movies and series are definitely better than others, most of them have that one chill-inducing scene that hardcore fans can’t wait to watch over and over again. Spoilers ahead.

Warning: Some of these clips are not suitable for sensitive viewers.

Top 10 Creepy Scenes In Movies

10 mother! – Baby scene

First off, mother! is not a movie for everyone. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence star in this insane film as a married couple whose lives are upended by the arrival of several uninvited guests at their home. While the house is systematically destroyed, viewers are shown a beating heart inside the wall (which seems to indicate that the house is alive). As the film progresses, there are several shocking scenes, including some kind of bloody organ inside the toilet, extreme sibling rivalry and a woman shooting people point blank.

The most unsettling scene however is the one after Lawrence’s character gives birth and her husband basically lets the newborn crowd surf through the throng of weird looters in their house. Lawrence tries her best to get her baby back but to no avail. The climax of this scene is nauseating and extremely shocking.

9 Lovecraft Country – Ghost with baby head

From one shocking baby scene to another: Lovecraft Country is not short on scares and has several terrifying scenes. This horror drama series is a continuation of the novel by the same name and does for horror what Riverdale is desperately trying to do for dark teen drama. Lovecraft Country is named after horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and breathes fresh life into old horror tropes.

There are some truly weird scenes and monsters in this series, but the one that will haunt your nightmares is the adult ghost sporting a baby’s head. This freaky-looking ghost is part of an exorcism scene and chases off some home invaders who probably will never break into a house again as long as they live after seeing it. The creator of the series, Misha Green, revealed that the inspiration for the ghost came from the infamous Tuskegee experiments.

Be warned, the end of this clip contains a very graphic and gruesome scene.

8 The Orphanage – Tomás

The Orphanage is a Spanish horror movie that centers around the inhabitants of an abandoned orphanage; both alive and dead. This film is a rare entity that builds suspense and fear without overreliance on cheap jump scares. At the end, viewers are left to wonder about what they’ve actually seen and whether the ghosts are actual ghosts or illusions. One of the spookiest scenes is also one of the simplest: it features a child in a sack-cloth mask who likes staring and locking people in rooms. See it for yourself here:

7 Channel Zero – Tooth Child

Channel Zero aired briefly on Syfy in 2016 and 2017 before being renewed for 2 more seasons. The show was finally cancelled in January 2019. This horror anthology series is based on creepypastas made extremely popular by the internet, including Candle Cove, No-End House, Slender Man, The Dream Door, and a whole lot more.

Candle Cove is one of the series’ most popular episodes and tells the story of a cursed children show that haunts a small town. Throughout the episode a chilling atmosphere reigns and the monster viewers are introduced to, is bound to hover in one’s mind for a while. The Tooth Child is unlike any other horror series monster, made completely from hundreds of teeth and has no discernible facial features other than a small gap for a mouth and two hollows for eyes. In this scene the toothy one puts a living person’s fingers in his ‘mouth’.

You will never think of the toothfairy the same way again.

6 Paranormal Activity 2 – Exploding kitchen

Toby is the main creepy thing in Paranormal Activity and is instrumental in quite a few unsettling scenes. He sets a Ouija pointer on fire while the house is empty, creeps toward characters while they are sleeping, kills a man by bending him over backwards, makes the Xbox Kinect something people will be reluctant to use after watching the movie, and even bites people.

Toby seems most active in the kitchen for some reason. It is here that a sheet, seemingly with someone underneath it, falls into a puddle on the floor as the camera pans from side to side. It is also in the kitchen, in the second movie, that all the cabinet doors suddenly fly open at the same time, scaring one of the characters half to death.

Top 10 Lamest Horror Movies That Should Have Been Terrifying

5 The Haunting of Hill House – Horror in the dumbwaiter

In 2019, Netflix introduced one of the best horror series to grace screens in a long time. Viewers binge-watched all 10 episodes, and excitedly posted their ‘reviews’ on social media. Most were impressed and many were freaked out by the horde of ghosts, the most infamous being the Bent Neck Lady who was introduced in the first episode during a truly terrifying scene.

As the episodes progress, the ghosts become apparent as they crawl out of their hiding places, horrifying the living. One of the creepiest scenes happen in a dumbwaiter, with a messed-up looking ghost crawling towards the exit. The scene relies on atmosphere and choppy light to get the job done and the result is goosebump inducing.

4 The Conjuring 2 – The nun comes to life

In The Conjuring 2, there are a lot of hints as to the presence of the ugly nun, Valak. There are also a whole lot more jump scares than in the first movie, some successful, some hokey. Demonologist Lorraine Warren encounters a little ghost boy, a whole ghost family and of course, the aforementioned Valak in a scary sequence.

The nun’s scenes are the scariest in this particular film and freaked many moviegoers out solidly the first time they watched it. The part with Valak coming to life from the painting is very well done and still holds up against newer horror movies. Warren is wandering around when she spies a covered mirror (after running into the little ghost boy and family). Uncovering the mirror, looking over her shoulder and back at the mirror sees Valak materialize behind her. What ensues is the stuff of nightmares.

3 The Haunting of Bly Manor – Boy with no face

The follow up to Hill House is arguably less scary than its predecessor but it is the hallmark of fantastic storytelling (the accents aside). Sure, it starts off slow with just a couple of scary moments, but there are some frightening scenes including a silent man with shining glasses haunting an au pair, wheezing ghosts in period clothing and a lady in the lake that grabs whoever crosses her well-worn path.

Adorable 8-year-old Flora has a massive doll house that adds to the eeriness of the overall story, but things get truly weird after she sees a little boy playing with the doll house. One time she follows him and approaches him only to discover that he has no face. The story behind the faceless ghosts is eventually revealed but nothing is creepier than Flora ‘giving the boy a story’ and putting a new face on him. Which just so happens to be the face of a nightmarish-looking doll.

2 The Visit – Crawling grandma

Comedy horrors can have scary scenes too as proven in The Visit by M. Night Shyamalan. Two siblings go to their grandparents for a week, to meet them for the first time and spend some time with them. Once there, things get weird when their grandparents start acting strange. There is gross projectile vomiting, requests for one of the siblings to climb into an oven and a dirty diaper smeared over the face of the other sibling.

Things are kicked up a notch in the scary department when it is revealed that the two old people are not the siblings’ true grandparents but insane imposters. Comedy flies out the window for a few moments when the old woman follows her ‘grandchildren’ around in a cramped crawl space beneath the house. The scene features her gallop-crawling towards them and makes for some anxiety-inducing viewing.

1 American Horror Story – School shooting

One of the best words to describe the American Horror Story series is ‘bonkers.’ The various seasons have given us a whole new meaning of the words “white wedding”, corpses turned into life-sized toys, a lizard girl, Mr Guinea Pig, exorcisms, and the controversial Addiction Demon.

Even more controversial than this demon, however, was the ‘Piggy Piggy’ episode that aired during season 1 in 2011. The inspiration for the episode is believed to have been taken from the real-life tragedy at Columbine and came a mere year before the Sandy Hook massacre. Controversy aside, some fans agree that the depiction of the school shooting in the episode is one of the truest depictions on TV. It also features a plot twist, in that the gunman is a character well known by fans.

15 students lose their lives in one of the most chilling scenes on TV.

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In Season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith Grey wakes up during the beginning of episode 16 and refuses to go to work. When asked what the matter is by her roommates and best friend, Cristina Yang, she simply states that she has a feeling that she might die that day. Seeing as how she ends up with her hand inside a body cavity that also contains a homemade bomb that same day, one can easily say that her premonition came true. However, despite her premonition, she is not the one who dies. After the bomb is removed, the head of the bomb squad is killed when it explodes in the hallway of Seattle Grace hospital.

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During the following season, Meredith’s eerie premonition is brought to fruition when she nearly drowns in the Elliott Bay. She is eventually revived, but not before having a strange after-death experience with several characters who had died in previous episodes. On this list are people who, like Meredith, had a persistent sense of impending doom. These feelings were validated by awful tragedies on a much larger scale. But in these cases, the stories are all true.

10 “Anyone perched above the crowd with a rifle could do it.”

On the morning of 22 November 1963, John F. Kennedy awoke at the Hotel Texas to find a crowd had gathered outside to see him. He greeted them saying, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” Back inside the hotel he remarked to Jackie that the previous night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. His next words would go down in history as a premonition of what would happen later that day. He turned to Jackie and aide Ken O’Donnell and said, “anyone perched above the crowd with a rifle could do it.”^[1]

Whether JFK truly had a moment of revelation as to what would happen to him, or whether it was just a passing thought, we will never know for sure. What we do know is that at 12:30 pm that afternoon, a bullet struck the American president in the upper back close to the neck as his motorcade moved slowly through Dealy Plaza, followed by two more, one of which tore through his upper right skull. John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 pm.

There is ongoing controversy regarding the premonition, with some believing JFK never knew or felt what was coming and would not have uttered those words. All the same, there were others who had similar premonitions, one of which was Irish president, Eamon de Valera. De Valera spoke of JFK during an interview in 1966. He claimed that when he met the young president in Ireland in June 1963, he had the fleeting thought that JFK would be an easy target and that no man would be able to protect himself if he finds himself in the position of wanting to meet his people.

9 “My mother came for me.”

On the night of 5 April 1936, Mary Hudgins Evans, had a disturbing dream. In the dream she was visited by her deceased mother who had only one thing to tell her: “I’m coming for you.” When Mary awoke the next morning, she told her husband, ‘my mother came for me’. She went on to say that her husband would now be responsible for raising their only child.^[2]

Mary then went to work in the offices of the Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor in Gainesville. Just after 8 am a deadly series of 17 tornadoes struck the South, with one wreaking havoc in Gainesville. A few minutes before the tornadoes touched down, Mary phoned her husband to tell him goodbye for the last time. Shortly after, Mary Hudgins Evans died. More than 200 others also lost their lives, with a further 1,600 injured.

8 “I told him we shouldn’t go there.”

Christine Delcros and her fiancé Xavier Thomas were strolling along London Bridge on 3 June 2017 on their way to the Shard as part of Xavier’s planned romantic night out. He wanted to show his bride-to-be the view of the city from the top of the skyscraper. Christine was happy and in love but couldn’t shake the nervous feeling that had been building inside of her ever since London Bridge came into view. She eventually became so terrified of walking along the bridge that she implored Xavier that they rather go elsewhere.^[3]

Xavier didn’t want to postpone his romantic date idea, and insisted that they carry on along the bridge, despite Christine’s increasing fear of an attack. A few moments later a white rental van struck the couple from behind. Xavier Thomas was flung over the balustrade of the bridge because of sheer impact and he landed in the Thames 30 feet below. It took rescuers three days to discover his body in Shadwell Basin. Christine survived the attack. Eight people in total died in the terrorist attack orchestrated by 3 men who drove the van and afterwards attacked people with knives. The attackers were all shot dead by police.

7 “A feeling grew upon me.”

Edward and Pamelia Bowen were married on 19 June 1893 in Ellsworth. By 1915, they had settled in Newton with Edward working in the shoe manufacturing business and making quite a lot of money. Edward travelled often to countries such as Russia, Holland, Sweden and Norway for work and had to travel to London in May 1915 for important business. The world was nine months into WWI, but the show had to go on, so Edward booked passage for himself and his wife on the next ship traveling from New York.^[4]

However, Edward was uneasy and grew more so as their departure day neared. Later he said, ‘a feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the Lusitania.” He had spoken to his wife and they decided to cancel their trip. Had they not done so they would have been part of the casualties that totaled 1198 after the Lusitania was torpedoed on 7 May 1915 by a German U-boat.

6 “Keiko, today you shouldn’t go to school.”

Eight-year-old Keiko Ogura was probably happy and excited on 6 August 1945 when her father said, “Keiko, today you shouldn’t go to school.” He added “something might happen”, but it probably didn’t register with the young girl who would have been glad to have a day off from studies.^[5]

At around 8:15, Keiko was out in the street near her house when a sudden flash turned the world white. Keiko fainted and when she came to, darkness had descended around her. At first, she thought it was night and that she had been unconscious the whole day. Then she realized the sky was filled with soot and debris. She stumbled to her feet and ran home, only to find it was burning. Hearing her little brother’s cry, she went to look for him and when she stepped out of the house again, it was raining. Only, the raindrops were black.

The world’s first deployed atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 at around 8:15. Keiko Ogura’s father most likely saved his daughter’s life by listening to his gut feeling and keeping her home from school. The explosion killed 80,000 people on impact and wiped out 90% of the city. Thousands of others would die excruciating deaths later due to radiation exposure.

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5 “We’re jinxed.”

On the morning of 11 September 2000, Monica and Michael Iken got married during a beautiful outdoor ceremony. As they were about to say their ‘I do’s” a jet zipped by overhead so loudly that they had to stop the service briefly. Monica wasn’t much perturbed by this incident, but Michael was unnerved. He told his new wife, “we’re jinxed.”^[6]

On 9 September 2001, the couple checked into a Boston airport hotel. Michael was jittery and couldn’t calm down while they were there. He told Monica that they needed to get out of the hotel immediately. Monica was at a loss, but two days later she understood. Michael went to work on the 84th floor of the South Tower on 11 September 2001. He died during the terrorist attacks that followed shortly after. Monica later learned that while they were in the Boston hotel, the hijackers of the planes were there too, casing the joint, so to speak.

4 “I feel like there’s something bad ahead, but I don’t know what.”

On 10 March 2019 Carol Karanja boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 along with her three children and her mother. They were flying from Canada to Kenya to meet her Kenyan family for the first time. A week before the flight, Carol sent a WhatsApp message to her younger sister in Kenya telling her she had a bad feeling. The message read: “My heart isn’t really excited. I feel like there’s something bad ahead, but I don’t know what.”^[7] Before boarding the flight, she sent a similar expression of fear to her father.

Minutes after takeoff, Flight 302 crashed, killing all 157 people onboard including Carol, her mother and her children. In Kenya, Carol’s family had to hear the devasting news that three generations had been wiped out in mere minutes in the second of two fatal Boeing 737 Max crashes that occurred a mere five months apart.

3 “London is safer.”

During WWII, evacuations from London to surrounding small towns and villages were at the order of the day. Mona Miller and her young children were no exception as they were evacuated to Babbacombe in Devon. While these precautions were necessary, Mona couldn’t shake the feeling that she and her children were in the wrong place. Sure enough, while they were happier there, Mona didn’t feel any safer.^[8]

For four months, Mona spent each day in Devon with a little voice in the back of her head telling her that they needed to return to London. She resisted, knowing that London was being bombed. But somehow, something was telling her London was safer at that point in time. One morning she awoke knowing she could no longer postpone the inevitable; she and her children had to go back to London. They left on a Saturday late in 1942. A few days after their arrival in London, a letter came from Devon. Mona’s friend wrote that the day after they left, three bombs had been dropped on Devon, one demolishing the house Mona and her kids stayed in and killing neighbors on both sides.

2 “I’ll haunt him forever.”

Even after 16-year-old Shana Fisher turned down 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtizis’ repeated advances in 2018, the young man continued to pester her for 4 months. Shana finally had enough and stood up to him in front of their entire class in Santa Fe High School, Texas. While gathering up the courage to do this, Shana had told her mother Pagourtizis was going to kill her and that once he did, she would “haunt him forever.”^[9]

A week after the classroom confrontation, Pagourtizis burst into the school’s art room and yelled “surprise” before opening fire on students. He killed 10 of them, including Shana Fisher, with some reports claiming he shot her first. A further 13 were wounded. Pagourtizis was apprehended and held in custody. In March 2020, a Texas judge ordered the teen to remain in a mental health facility for a year to determine his competency for standing trial.

1 “I just had a premonition that I would never see her again.”

One evening, school teacher Christa McAuliffe, had a dream. Along with imparting knowledge to her students, she really wanted to travel to space. Her dream was realized when she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to become the first teacher in space. She was to teach two lessons while on her space mission as well as conduct several experiments.^[10]

A few months before her departure, fellow teacher Mark Hampton chatted with Christa in the cafeteria at Concord High School where they both worked. Hugging her goodbye, Mark felt a chill down his spine. Afterwards he recalled: “I just had a premonition that I would never see her again.”

On 28 January 1986, Christa joined 6 other crew members inside the Space Shuttle Challenger. 73 seconds after its launch, the Challenger broke apart in the air killing everyone on board. The shuttle had no escape system and while the impact of the shuttle with the ocean surface after it fell back down to earth was too violent for anyone to have survived, it is thought that most of the crew would have survived the initial breakup of the shuttle in the air.

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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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Bearded, bloated and on a downward spiral, Jim Morrison of The Doors fled America to find a respite in Paris in the spring of 1971. He would never return. The following ten detail the rock legends sad and untimely death on July 3, 1971.

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10 Heirs

 

As one would imagine, Morrison’s estate became a contentious topic for years to come. Having drafted a simplistic and poorly-written will two years before his death, Jim left everything to Pamela. Three years later, however, Pamela joined Jim after overdosing on heroin at the age of 27. Having died without a will, Morrison’s fortune passed on to Pamela’s heirs, her parents. Seeing as the Courson’s were receiving Jim’s entire estate, the Morrison’s sued contesting their son’s will as well as the legitimacy of Jim and Pam’s common-law marriage. Arguing that Jim was on narcotics at the time his will was drafted, the Morrison’s claimed his lack of competency made the document invalid. Following years of legal battle, the Morrison’s and the Courson’s split everything 50/50. In the end, two parties that Jim loathed ultimately received the fruits of his success; a success that was criticized and belittled in life.

9 Iceman

 

Hours after his passing, Jim’s corpse remained in the tub. At one point in the evening on July 3rd, a small mortician in a dark suit arrived at the apartment. With him was a plastic bag in which Morrison’s body would be wrapped along with twenty-five pounds of dry ice for preservation. “Believe me,” said the mortician “I’ll do my best but the heat is against us.” As he proceeded to leave, Pamela expressed her desire to sleep next to Jim’s body to which the mortician strongly advised against. The following night, the mortician returned warning that decomposition would be impossible to sustain two more days due to the heat wave Paris was enduring. Meanwhile, Pamela was content living beside Jim’s corpse claiming it made her feel “secure” and if she could, they “would live like this forever.” On the afternoon of the fifth, undertakers arrived dressing Jim in a “too-large dark suit, and stuffed him into a too-small wood-veneer coffin.” Pamela commented that she had never seen Jim in a suit before and that he looked “kinda cute.” Before the coffin was sealed, she gathered all the pictures of herself and placed them with Jim to be buried with forever.

8 Piteous and Miserable

 

Jim’s funeral on July 7th was unceremonious to say the least. As one would imagine it being national news with thousands of fans flocking to Pere Lachaise, the actual burial was bleak and uneventful. According to a woman who was visiting the nearby grave of her husband, “Everything was done in a hurry. No priest was present, everybody left quickly. The whole scene was piteous and miserable.” The funeral itself was small with less than six in attendance including the band’s manager Bill Siddons. Following the burial, Siddons stated to Rolling Stone magazine, “There was no service, and that made it all the better. We just threw some flowers and dirt and said goodbye.” When asked by Doors bandmate Ray Manzarek if Siddons actually viewed Jim’s body—which Siddons had not—Manzarek became irate spawning a heated argument between the two. “How do you know it wasn’t one hundred fifty pounds of fucking sand? You buried a sealed coffin, man. We’ll never know the real truth now.” As Manzarek predicted, the lack of physically identifying Jim’s corpse kick-started the conspiracy as to whether or not the Lizard King was truly gone.

7 Poet’s Corner

 

Securing a grave in Père Lachaise – the largest and most famous cemetery in Paris – had to be kept quiet given Jim’s rock star reputation. Thus, in order to be buried among the likes of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and Chopin, Pamela had the death certificate inscribed “James Morrison, poet.” As previously mentioned, Jim’s funeral in the cemeteries “Poet’s Corner” was short and hasty with few mourners and even lacked the presence of a Priest. As the $75 wooden casket – the cheapest possible model ordered by Pamela—was lowered into the ground, few words were said before the party dispersed. The grave would remain unmarked for years with subsequent plaques continuously stolen. In 1981, a sculpted bust was defaced and ultimately lifted as well. As of today, 24-hour security guard Jim’s grave which now houses a permanent marble headstone with a Greek epitaph that reads, “True to his own spirit.”

6 Natural Causes?

 

Nearly 72 hours after his passing, Jim Morrison’s death certificate was finally signed. The doctor who arrived at the apartment listed the official cause of death as heart failure. Due to this, no autopsy was ever conducted given that ‘poor health’ was cited as the leading cause. This open-and-closed approach did not sit well with Jim’s band mates and family who had lingering questions with no answers. Why was there no police investigation or autopsy? Why weren’t Jim’s parents notified? Who was the examining doctor and what were his credentials? Interestingly enough, the doctor’s signature on the death certificate was later deemed illegible in addition to Pamela conveniently forgetting the doctor’s name. To further complicate matters, Pamela lied to the American Embassy informing them that Morrison had no immediate family allowing for a “quick, no-questions-asked burial.” The day after Jim’s burial – five days after his death—Pamela and Doors’ manager Bill Siddons returned to L.A. with Siddons stating to the press, “I have returned from Paris where I have attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. I can say he died peacefully of natural causes.”

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5 Cover Up and Lies

 

When Pamela returned to L.A., Doors’ second manager Danny Sugerman pressed her for exact details as to how Jim died. According to Sugerman, Pamela had told him numerous contradictory versions of what occurred, oftentimes blaming herself and going as far as saying that she killed Jim. According to Alain Ronay—Jim’s close friend who arrived at the apartment shortly after—upon finding Jim in the bathtub, Pamela “nodded off” instead of phoning for medical help. What’s even more disturbing is that 20 years after Jim’s passing, Ronay confessed that he helped her cover up the circumstances of his “friends” death. By lying to police who responded to the scene, he corroborated Pamela’s deposition that Jim never once took drugs. This ultimately added to the narrative that Jim had poor health and simply died of heart failure negating the fact that he overdosed on heroin after a night of drinking.

4 Eviction Notice

 

Père Lachaise cemetery in north-east Paris attracts millions of visitors every year, most of who flock to one particular grave, the Lizard King. Such notoriety, however, has been a continuous nuisance for cemetery staff. From litter, graffiti and at times unorthodox tributes by fans – taking drugs and having sex – groundskeepers have had enough. Christian Charlet, who is responsible for the cemetery, went as far as creating a petition to evict the rock star stating, “We’d like to kick him out, because we don’t want him, he causes too many problems,” Charlet told Reuters news agency. “If we could get rid of him, we’d do it straight away.” Though a security guard has been hired to watch over the singer’s plot, vandalism in the area continues. In fact, relatives of neighboring graves created their own petition for Morrison to be exhumed and sent home. “People come here not to worship the dead, but think they can do what they want, as if it was a rave party,” said Charlet. Interesting note: Aside from Morrison, the second most-visited and vandalized grave is that of Oscar Wilde.

3 Break On Through…

 

In 1997, rock historian Brett Meisner ventured to Pere Lachaise with the sole intention of visiting Jim’s grave. While standing beside the singers plot, Meisner had his picture taken. Five years would pass until he reexamined the snapshot when he discovered something unsettling; a white figure in the background with its arms seemingly stretched out. The ghostly apparition is uncanny to a famous photograph of Morrison in the same pose, prompting stir among believers and skeptics. Following analysis, it came as a shock to many when researchers deemed the photo authentic stating that it was “in no way manipulated.” Furthermore, any possibility that the blur was merely a trick of the light was ruled out with researchers concluding the image is simply “unexplainable.” As for Meisner, he claims that he’s been plagued by eerie events ever since his visit to Pere Lachaise. From the breakdown of his marriage to losing a close friend from a drug overdose, his life hasn’t been the same. To date, Meisner is haunted by people who approach him to say that “Morrison’s ghost is haunting them, too,” stating, “At first it was sort of interesting to see how many people felt a spiritual bond with Jim and the photo, but now the whole vibe seems negative.”

2 Nightclub Theory

 

As rumors circulated, one that has stood the test of time is that Jim did not die in his bathtub but was moved there as a part of a cover-up. According to journalist Sam Bernett, he found Jim’s lifeless body slumped over the toilet of a nightclub’s bathroom after scoring heroin 30 minutes prior. “We were certain he’d been snorting heroin because there was foam coming out of his lips as well as blood,” Bernett says. Moments later Bernett brought in a customer who was a medic who proclaimed the Lizard King was dead. With the insistence by Jim’s dealers that he was still alive, albeit passed out, they carried the singer out of the club to an awaiting car. Later that evening, Bernett claimed to have received a phone call by someone representing the club’s owner warning him not to tell anyone what occurred. Bernett went on to state that singer Marianne Faithfull was also present in the club that evening and that she too was sworn to secrecy. “Marianne never mentioned Jim again. She won’t talk about what happened in the club to this day.” As for Barnett, he has chose to come forward simply to “get rid of my heavy load. At least everything is now out there to be discussed. I’ve said what I have to say.”

1 Murder

 

Ever since Jim’s lifeless body was found in his Parisian bathtub, numerous conspiracy theories emerged and continue to this day. Of all the far-fetched speculations, perhaps the only one that may hold merit is Marianne Faithfull’s account. English singer/songwriter known for her hit single “As Tears Go By” claimed to Mojo magazine that Jim’s death was in fact a murder involving her ex-boyfriend Jean de Breteuil. According to Faithfull, de Breteuil – a heroin dealer with several high-profile celebrity clients – stopped by Jim’s apartment on July 3rd after picking her up from the airport. “I could intuitively feel trouble. He went to see Jim Morrison and killed him.” As she eagerly waited for her beau, her anxiety became overwhelming leading her to take “a few Tuinal” and conking out.” Never witnessing what occurred, Faithfull remains adamant that de Breteuil is to blame given that the “smack” provided to Jim was too strong. “I mean I’m sure it was an accident. Poor bastard. And he died. And I didn’t know anything about this. Anyway, everybody connected to the death of this poor guy is dead now. Except me.” Jean de Breteuil—who Faithfull described as a “horrible guy, someone who had crawled out from under a stone”- died of an overdose in Morocco that same year.

10 Crazy Conspiracy Theories Clouding The Music Industry

Often, facts are stranger than fiction. In fact, sometimes real-life stories are more terrifying than those in horror movies. Some are equal parts horrifying and tragic. All of them serve to remind us yet again that there is true darkness to be found in our world, far beyond what our imaginations could ever conjure up.

See Also: 10 Creepy Facts About Cadavers

10 Child of rage

The story of Beth Thomas is as heartbreaking as it is frightening. She was a beautiful little girl with striking blue eyes who lost her mother when she was a year old. Beth and her brother, Jonathan, were left with their biological father, who sexually abused them. She was only 19 months old and Jonathan seven months when they were taken away by child protective services. The little boy had been left in his cot all day, every day, leaving him with an oddly shaped head.

The siblings were adopted by a childless couple who soon realized all wasn’t well with Beth. By the time she was six, a documentary had been made about the young girl and her extremely worrying and violent behavior. In the documentary, released in 1990, Beth talks about her adoptive parents’ habit of locking her in her room to prevent her from stabbing them to death. She also talks about how she herself had sexually abused her younger brother, tortured the family dog, and killed baby birds she had found in a nest. At one point Beth even smashed Jonathan’s head into a concrete floor, trying to kill him.

Beth was diagnosed with RAD (reactive attachment disorder), which left her unable to form any attachment to a caregiver. Her adoptive parents, Tim and Julie eventually turned to controversial therapist Connell Watkins who offered to help them. Within a year, Beth’s symptoms improved to the extent that she could show remorse for her actions towards her brother.

Years later, Beth Thomas has turned her situation around. She is a qualified nurse and has published a book with the help of her second adoptive mother, Nancy.^[1]

9 Horror on Chichijima

On 2 September 1944, 20-year-old George H.W. Bush was piloting the U.S. Navy’s Avenger aircraft. He and eight other airmen were on their way to the island of Chichijima, which forms part of Japan’s Bonin Islands, to attack a radio tower. Japanese soldiers on the island shot the aircraft down, along with the aircrafts of his comrades; all of them landing in the water. Bush made sure to drop the four bombs he had in the plane before he bailed out over the water.

All his comrades were captured, tortured, and executed by means of decapitation or stabbing. Japanese Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana ordered that four of the corpses be cooked and their livers and thighs eaten alongside vegetables and drenched in soy sauce.

Bush, who had avoided capture, floated in the water on a life raft for hours and was eventually rescued by an American submarine.

The Japanese officers responsible for the horrific cannibal incident on Chichijima were later found guilty of and executed for war crimes during trails held in Guam.

George H.W. Bush went on to become the 41st president of the United States between 1989 and 1993.^[2]

8 The porthole murder

Eileen Isabella Ronnie Gibson, better known as Gay Gibson, was an English actress who was rumored to have had a heart condition and would often ‘go blue’ at the lips and faint during play rehearsals.

Gibson appeared in a production of Golden Boy by Clifford Odets in South Africa in 1947. When the play wrapped, she boarded the Durban Castle which was headed from SA back to England. It didn’t take long for one of the cruise ships’ stewards to notice the beautiful 21-year-old actress. According to James Camb’s later claims, he and Gibson were intimate in her first-class cabin before both the steward and stewardess buttons sounded, and a night watchman arrived. Camb was found inside the cabin, but Gibson had vanished.

Camb’s story about Gibson’s fate changed several times, but he insisted that Gibson had had a fit during (consensual) sex and died. He later admitted that he had panicked when he realized she was dead and pushed her body through the ship’s porthole. He vehemently denied murdering her saying that he only got rid of the body because he was afraid of losing his job and his family.

Despite all his changing stories and denials, Camb was convicted of Gay Gibson’s murder and handed the death sentence. Soon after, however, the death penalty was suspended for all crimes in Britain and Camb served only 11 years for the crime. Up until his death in 1979, he denied murdering Gibson.

Gay Gibson’s body was never found.^[3]

7 Demon in disguise

35-year-old Danielle Harkins seemed to be a run-of-the-mill, harried but kind teacher who had a great relationship with her students. She taught at the Lealman and Asian Neighborhood Family Center in St. Petersburg, Florida and was going through a divorce and custody battle over her two young children.

Soon after her divorce was finalized in 2012, Harkins began acting strangely. She developed a fanatical interest in religion, in particular angels and demons, and pitched up at a fellow teacher’s house one day telling her ‘you’re okay’ and ‘you don’t have any demons.’

On 9 June 2012, Danielle Harkins got a group of her students to join her in creating a small ‘bonfire’ near the St. Petersburg Pier. The students thought that their teacher had planned a campfire evening for them and were completely shocked when she started accusing them of being infested with demons and demanding they be exorcised.

Confused and shaken up they half-heartedly followed her instructions to dance around the fire while chanting but drew the line when Harkins told them to cut each other in order to ‘free their demons.’ Infuriated by their refusal, Harkins doused one of the young people’s hands in perfume and set them alight. She slashed another student with a broken bottle and cauterized the wounds with a key she had heated in the fire. She forced several others to cut themselves and similarly ‘close’ the wounds, to keep the demons out.

It took a few days for the students to speak up about the incident and even after Harkins was arrested the students weren’t terribly forthcoming with information on what had happened. Harkins, too, refused to provide any details.

She was released from prison after serving only 6 months.^[4]

6 Pool of blood

Returning to their posts after a mellow and relaxing school holiday, teachers at Riverwood Primary School in Sydney’s southwest were expecting to have a lazy first day back. Nothing could have prepared them for what they stumbled upon when they entered the school’s cubby house that day, however.

On the floor was a pool of blood, later established to be human and being more than a litre’s worth. Police noted that whoever’s blood it was would have needed extensive medical treatment because of the extreme blood loss. Despite an extensive search of the surrounding and extending areas, no victim was found. There was also no blood splatter or trail leading to or from the cubby.

The lack of a victim was extremely strange considering the school was enclosed with a 2-metre high barbed wired fence and it would have been impossible for the injured person to scale it.

Tests later showed that the victim was male. The case remains unsolved.^[5]

See Also: 10 Weirdly Disgusting And Creepy Facts About You

5 Halloween prop that wasn’t

Residents of the Marine del Rey apartment building in Los Angeles were amazed to see a very realistic-looking Halloween prop on one of their neighbors’ balconies in October 2009. The prop consisted of a figure slumped over a chair and what looked like bedding draped over the railing.

However, when deputies were called to the building a few days later, residents were beyond shocked when they realized the ‘Halloween decoration’ they’d been gawking at that week, was in fact the decomposing body of 75-year-old Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed. Zayed had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. A suicide note was found near the corpse.

Zayed had lived in the building for 34 years and was a structural engineer who had worked on high-rise buildings in downtown Los Angeles.^[6]

4 Isle of Bute terror

Six-year-old Alesha MacPhail was visiting her grandparents on the Isle of Bute in 2018 when the unthinkable happened. 16-year-old Aaron Campbell crept into the family’s home, looking to steal cannabis. When he saw the little girl sleeping, all thoughts of the drug escaped his mind. Instead he abducted her, carried her to an abandoned hotel and raped her. He then applied pressure to her face and neck until she stopped breathing.

Alesha’s body was found within 3 hours of her being reported missing on 2 July 2018. A post-mortem revealed the little girl had suffered 117 injuries. Campbell was arrested two days later.

After initially denying that he had anything to do with the horrific crime, Campbell confessed that once he had laid eyes on Alesha, he couldn’t stop thinking about killing her. During his trial he also claimed that in the year preceding the murder, he constantly thought about killing or raping someone.

Campbell was amused that it took police two days to arrest him and said it took great restraint on his part to keep from laughing during the trial. While confessing to the murder, he even told authorities that he was ‘quite satisfied with the murder.’

He was handed a 27-year sentence, which was reduced by 3 years in 2019.^[7]

3 The Fresno case

On 20 January 2016, a dead man was found in a burning home in central Fresno. The Fresno police department’s public information officer, Lt. Joe Gomez, reported at the time that 51-year-old local activist, John Lang, was found with stab wounds to his abdomen and upper back. Later, a spokesperson for the Fresno County sheriff refuted these claims, saying that Gomez had released incorrect information and that John Lang had three self-inflicted stab wounds to his chest only and had started the fire in a suicide mission.

Five days before Lang’s body was discovered in the blazing house, he left a Facebook message for ABC30 reporter, Corin Hoggard, stating “Corrupt Fresno cops are going to try and kill me this weekend, possibly tonight. This is no joke.” On his own social media accounts, he posted several rants about the Fresno Police Department and County Sheriff’s Office being corrupt. Lang followed this up with videos of a security camera outside his house which he claimed was being used by police officers to watch him. Lang also believed that his car was being tracked.

Several websites and forums have since claimed that Lang may have been truthful in his claims that he feared the police would kill him, expressing doubt about the ‘bungling’ of the information that Lt. Gomez originally provided. Some are also convinced that there are several corrupt police officers in the Fresno police department who would have done anything to silence Lang.^[8]

2 Left alone for hours

On 16 November 2015, 25-year-old Racqual Thompson and her 21-year-old boyfriend, Cornell Malone, left her four children unattended in their northeast Houston apartment to get pizza and visit Malone’s brother. They returned after midnight to the sound of the children (all under the age of five) crying.

Entering the kitchen, they found their oven range overturned. When Malone picked up the range, the youngest child, 19-month old J’Zyra, fell out of it. She had been severely burned. It was revealed that one of the children had put J’Zyra inside the oven and then turned it on. The kids panicked when the toddler started crying and kicking the door from inside, but it was too late by the time Thompson and Malone arrived home. Thompson attempted CPR on her daughter, but the infant had already died.

Thompson and Malone both faced two years in prison on charges of child endangerment. At the time of her court appearance, Thompson was eight months pregnant with her fifth child.^[9]

1 The girl on Church Hill

On 12 June 1977, George Childs and his son were driving down Holicong Road in Buckingham Township when he spotted an object in the underbrush of a steep rise known as Church Hill.

He drove across the railroad tracks and headed up the hill to get a closer look. He and his son then made the terrifying discovery of the naked body of a woman lying face down about 10 feet down the slope. They continued driving on to the next house and asked that the owner call the police.

15 minutes later the area was swamped with police officers. A team of officers and paramedics were tasked with turning the body over, and it was only then that the true extent of the crime was revealed. 20-year-old Shaun Eileen Ritterson had been eviscerated, with nearly all her lower organs removed. Her insides had been washed out and stuffed with a towel. She had bruising at the back of her scalp, indicating that she had been struck with a heavy object and had multiple stab wounds to her chest.

At the time, detectives thought the viciousness of the murder may have been part of a dark ritual or even to tear out an unborn child.

The young woman’s uncle, Harry Ritterson, was initially suspected of her murder and many family members also believed that he was the murderer. However, he was never charged, and no other suspects were ever identified.

Shaun Ritterson’s murder remains a mystery.^[10]

See Also: 10 Creepy And Surreal Moments Caught On Video

Humans are fighting a relentless battle against deadly diseases. These microscopic threats can wield immense power. From global pandemics to almost eradicating societies, the world’s deadliest diseases have left an indelible mark on history.

Here are ten truly unsettling facts about these deadly afflictions. From their mysterious origins to the staggering toll they’ve exacted, these facts show how delicate the balance between health and sickness is.

Related: Top 10 Diseases You Can Get from a Dirty Gym

10 Cardiovascular Disease Death Rate

This statistic is as serious as a heart attack—literally. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. But do you have any idea just how many deaths they make up?

According to Campbell County Health, “1 in 4 deaths in the United States is a result of heart disease.” Over 800,000 people die in the U.S. annually because of it; that’s one death every 36 seconds.

With the high death toll, it’s important to be aware of the symptoms that could lead to death. Here are the signs you might want to watch out for:

• Chest pain or discomfort

• Shortness of breath

• Fatigue or exhaustion

• Arm or Leg pain

• Jaw or stomach pain, especially in women

• Swelling in the legs, ankles, or feet

• Heart palpitations

If you’re having any of these symptoms, you might want to talk to your doctor before you become another statistic.

9 Cancer Prevention

Cancer is the second most common deadly disease causing more than 600,000 deaths in the U.S. alone in 2022. At least one-third of cancer deaths could have been prevented through routine screenings, early detection, and treatment.

But how often should you get screened? Talk with your doctor to get a personalized plan, but here are a few of the basic guidelines:

• Breast cancer: It’s recommended women who are over 40 choose to have annual mammograms. Once women are 45, annual screenings are strongly recommended as long as they are expected to live another ten years or longer.

• Cervical cancer: Women should start screening at age 25 with a Pap test every three years, an HPV test every five years, or a combination of both tests every five years.

• Colorectal cancer: Both men and women starting at 50 should be screened for colorectal cancer and adenomatous polyps, even without risk factors.

• Lung cancer: An annual screening is recommended for heavy smokers.

• Prostate cancer: Most men should start screening when they are 50.

8 Children with HIV

When you think about people living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), it’s typical for sexually active adults to come to mind. But the number of children living with this lifelong disease might shock you. And the geographic concentration of those suffering with it will catch you off-guard too. “70% of all people living with HIV (24.7 million) live in sub-Saharan Africa, including 91% of the world’s HIV-positive children.” HIV weakens the immune system, leading to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which increases the risk of severe infections and certain cancers.

HIV in children can be difficult to diagnose, and symptoms can vary depending on the child’s age. It’s tough to determine in infancy, but some signs include trouble gaining weight, diarrhea, and pneumonia. As children get older, they might show slowed growth, swollen lymph nodes, infections, and developmental delays. They may also have joint pain or swollen stomachs. Older children and teens might also develop a sickness similar to the flu.

7 You Could Have Tuberculosis Bacteria

If you’re a hypochondriac, you might want to skip this one. The World Health Organization says, “About one-quarter of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis (TB) bacteria.” You could be walking around with TB and not even know it.

TB is an infectious disease caused by bacteria (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) that primarily affects the lungs and can be life threatening if left untreated. In most people who breathe in TB bacteria and become infected, the body is able to fight the bacteria to stop them from growing. This is called latent TB infection.

People with latent TB infection have no symptoms and don’t feel sick. The bacteria are “asleep” in their body and cannot spread. However, the bacteria can become active if the immune system can’t stop them from growing. When TB bacteria are active (multiplying in your body), this is called TB disease. People with TB disease are sick and may also be able to spread the bacteria to others.

6 Diabetes—the Silent Killer

Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disorder characterized by high blood sugar levels, leading to various complications affecting the heart, kidneys, eyes, and nerves. Unfortunately, too many people either don’t know or simply ignore the signs. In fact, “More than 37 million people in the United States have diabetes, and 1 in 5 of them don’t know they have it.”

Since diabetes is one condition that needs monitoring and care, that’s a sobering thought. If you’re concerned that you might have diabetes, it’s a good idea to watch for signs and talk with your doctor. The signs and symptoms of diabetes can vary, but here are some common signs that you might have diabetes based on the search results:

• Frequent urination (especially at night)

• Excessive thirst

• Unexplained weight loss (despite eating normally)

• Fatigue and weakness, even with rest

• Blurred vision

• Slow healing of cuts or wounds

• Frequent infections (UTIs, yeast infections, or skin infections)

• Increased hunger, even after eating

• Numbness or tingling in your hands or feet

• Dry and itchy skin

• Mood changes and irritability

5 Seniors with Alzheimer’s Disease

A common misconception about Alzheimer’s disease is that it only affects your memory. And that’s true—Alzheimer’s and other progressive neurodegenerative disorders do result in memory loss and cognitive decline. But its effects can also be deadly. Based on research from the Alzheimer’s Association, “1 in 3 seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.”

This disease attacks the brain and causes healthy cells to die. Alzheimer’s is one of the top 10 causes of death in American adults. However, Alzheimer’s in and of itself does not kill a person. The most common cause of death among Alzheimer’s patients is aspiration pneumonia. Because patients’ immune systems are often impaired, pneumonia is often fatal.

However, seniors with advanced dementia are usually too frail and immunocompromised to fight bacterial infections, even with the assistance of these drugs. Because of this secondary cause, deaths with a primary cause of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are seriously underreported.

4 Diarrheal Disease and Children

No one likes having diarrhea, but few realize it can become a disease. Unfortunately, this is one deadly disease that children are especially prone to. The World Health Organization stated that “Each year, diarrhea kills around 525 000 children under five.”

Contaminated food or water can cause severe diarrhea, leading to dehydration and death, particularly in developing regions. Diarrheal diseases can be prevented through a combination of measures.

• Hand washing with soap before eating, after using the bathroom, and after changing a diaper.

• Access to safe or treated drinking water.

• The use of sanitation facilities and avoiding defecating in any body of water.

• Food should be washed with safe water, cooked thoroughly, and served hot.

• Vaccines for rotavirus and measles can help prevent diarrheal disease.

• Exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life.

• Good personal hygiene, including bathing regularly.

• Health education about how infections spread.

• Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) can help replace lost fluids and electrolytes.

Because it’s so preventable, sharing best practices for prevention can be a helpful way to lower those depressing numbers:

3 Drop the Cigarette for COPD

What if there was a way to significantly lower your odds of contracting a deadly disease—would you consider it?

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a group of progressive lung diseases that include chronic bronchitis and emphysema, often caused by smoking or exposure to harmful pollutants. In fact, “up to 90% of COPD cases could be prevented by not smoking.”

People with COPD who continue to smoke will experience more rapid lung damage compared to those who quit smoking. Quitting smoking is the best thing you can do to protect your lungs and prevent COPD from worsening.

Knowing these frightening facts doesn’t make quitting such a hard habit any easier, but it just might give you more motivation to try and quit. And it’s certainly a reason to never start.

If you have concerns about COPD or smoking, it’s best to consult a healthcare professional for personalized advice and guidance.

2 Pneumonia in Developing Countries

Pneumonia is an infection that inflames the air sacs in one or both lungs. The signs and symptoms of pneumonia can vary from mild to severe, depending on factors such as the type of germ causing the infection and your age and overall health. Apart from pneumonia and influenza, other lower respiratory tract infections can be severe and life-threatening, particularly in vulnerable populations.

With so many treatments available in Western medicine, the extreme dangers of pneumonia might seem like a thing of the past. But it’s still a life-threatening reality in many places around the world. Based on research by the National Library of Medicine, “150 million new episodes of pneumonia are identified per year worldwide, more than 90 % of which occur in developing countries.”

So what does deadly pneumonia look like? You might get a cough with colored or bloody mucus. Many patients experience sweating, fevers, and trouble breathing. From headaches to muscle pain and fatigue, there are plenty of physical signs to watch out for.

1 Hepatitis B Can Lead to Cancer

You’ve heard about Hepatitis B, but not many people understand just how serious this condition can grow to be. Chronic infections with these viruses can lead to liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, making them significant causes of morbidity and mortality globally.

Based on a study by the CDC, “25% of chronic hepatitis B infections progress to liver cancer.” In fact, the relationship between hepatitis B and liver cancer is pretty well-established. HBV attacks the liver and weakens its ability to perform important functions, such as filtering toxins from the blood and maintaining blood sugar levels. This leads to long-term inflammation and damage to the liver, which increases the risk of developing liver cancer.

Thankfully, there are a few ways to help prevent and treat this. Vaccination against HBV is an effective preventive measure to reduce the risk of both HBV infection and subsequent liver cancer. And regular monitoring, early detection, and appropriate treatment of chronic HBV infection can help reduce the risk of liver cancer.

A series of portraits, dubbed the Crying Boy paintings, features a young ragamuffin with large eyes that meet the viewers to establish an instant connection. Complete with fresh tears streaming down his face, the perfectly captured expression of despair evokes a strong emotional reaction. The image was designed to pull at the heartstrings of its viewers, and it did just that.

The Crying Boy series gained fame in the UK, and other parts of the world, with thousands of prints purchased and displayed in homes and businesses. However, when terrifying events accompanied the paintings, many began to question if there was something sinister attached to them. Rumors spread of a curse that was so evil it destroyed its subject and creator and damaged the homes and lives of anyone who purchased one of the prints. Skeptics, on the other hand, provided other explanations. Many seem to have an opinion on this story, from urban legend and a cursed myth to media hysteria and a bid to sell more papers.

Decide what you believe about the curse after hearing these ten unsettling facts about the Crying Boy paintings.

Related: Top 10 Cursed And Haunted Household Items

10 The Artist Used a Pseudonym

The Crying Boy paintings were signed by Giovanni Bragolin, an Italian painter who doesn’t really exist. The true artist was a Spanish painter named Bruno Amadio, although he was also known to go by Franchot Seville on occasion. Amadio was one of the most mysterious artists of the mid-1900s. He painted over 60 portraits in his Crying Boy collection from the ’50s through 1980, with each printed, reprinted, and widely distributed through mass productions. The prints became very popular, with over 50,000 copies purchased in the UK alone.

The Crying Boy series was the only artwork of Amadio’s that saw success. However, it was a double-edged sword for Amadio as the images—depicting horror, suffering, despair, and longing of the innocent—also brought about speculations of abuse. Many questioned whether Amadio “specifically frightened them, terrified them, and then painted them,” with some even going so far as to liken Amadio to the devil himself.^[1]

9 The Subject Was an Orphan

According to Amadio, the subject of one of his paintings was “a little street urchin” that he came across in Madrid in the 1960s. The young boy was a mute orphan with a sorrowful expression that instantly captivated the artist. Amadio had stopped to paint the child when a Catholic priest came over to issue him a stern warning. He said that the boy, named Don Bonillo, had run away after seeing his parents die in a fire.

Since then, fires of unknown origin would break out wherever the boy went. It happened with such frequency that he was given the nickname, “Diablo,” which translates to “devil.” The priest warned Amadio against having anything to do with the child. However, the painter ignored him and adopted the boy. He brought Don Bonillo home to live with him and painted the Crying Boy series.^[2]

8 Amadio’s Studio and Apartment Caught Fire

The unique relationship between the painter and his favorite subject came to a sudden fiery end when Amadio’s studio and apartment mysteriously caught on fire. He lost everything and, as a result, Amadio was ruined. He remembered the priest’s warnings and accused the boy of starting the blaze. He kicked him out and never saw Don Bonillo again.

The situation continued to worsen for Amadio when reports of the curse of the “Crying Boy” paintings started to spread across Europe. His fame quickly turned to suspicion, and he became known as a jinx. No one wanted to look at any of his paintings, let alone commission him to paint something new.^[3]

7 Did the Subject Suffer a Tragic Death?

Unfortunately, Don Bonillo’s life ended much like it began: in a blaze of fire. In 1976, police responded to the report of a car crash on the outskirts of Barcelona. The car exploded after crashing into a wall. When officers arrived on the scene, they found that the driver had been burned beyond recognition. He was the only one in the car at the time of the crash.

Police officers searched the glove box, which survived the fire, and found part of a driver’s license. The name on the license revealed the victim to be Don Bonillo. For many, the fiery manner of his death served to add validity to the Crying Boy curse.^[4]

6 The Prints Survived over 60 House Fires

The first reported house fire occurred at the home of Ron and Mary Hall in Rotherham in 1985. The fire destroyed everything on the first floor of their terraced council home, save for one item: a print of the Crying Boy that hung on their living room wall. During the fire, the painting fell from the wall, landed face down, and, strangely, was only slightly charred. Though the cause of the fire was found to be a chip pan (deep frying pan) that overheated and burst into flames, the couple became convinced that the painting was cursed and that it, not the pan, was to blame for the destruction of their home.

The Halls were not alone in their experience or theory. Many similar fires followed, with homes, and even a pizza parlor, falling victim to the curse. Despite starting from typical causes, each fire left behind a Crying Boy painting. The curse evolved to cause injury and death, with some people reporting accidents after purchasing the print. Many others were horrified to find they could not burn it when they tried.^[5]

5 Firefighters Fail to Explain Why Paintings Did Not Burn

Fire service investigations pointed to discarded cigarettes, over-heated chip pans, and faulty wiring, leading firefighters to believe that the house fires resulted from human carelessness rather than a supernatural curse. Rotherham fire station officer Alan Wilkinson personally logged 50 fires where the Crying Boy paintings survived. Wilkinson was skeptical but could not explain how the artworks survived the flames. His wife, on the other hand, had her own theory: “I always say it’s the tears that put the fire out.”

Wilkinson’s disbelief in the curse did not save him from some superstitions. When presented with a framed print of the Crying Boy upon his retirement, he politely declined the gift. The widespread panic eventually led Chief Divisional Officer Mick Riley of the Yorkshire Fire Service to issue a statement meant to debunk the curse. “The reason why this picture has not always been destroyed in the fire is because it is printed on high-density hardboard, which is very difficult to ignite.” His statement did little to convince the public. Neither did the fact that the paintings were often of different children and even from different artists.^[6]

4 An Article from a British Tabloid Started All the Fuss

On September 4, 1985, the Crying Boy paintings received the first of what would be six weeks of news coverage with an article titled, “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy.” Published on page 13 by a British tabloid newspaper called The Sun, it detailed the harrowing experience of the recent victims of a house fire: Ron and Mary Hall. A follow-up article on September 5 brought new terrifying stories from readers that claimed to be victims of the curse.

In addition to fires, injuries, and deaths, some accounts included supernatural occurrences, with readers alleging they saw the print sway from side to side on the wall or that it returned to its place after being destroyed. The Sun also claimed that the firefighters believed in the curse, despite conflicting statements by the fire service. Readers were captivated. Due to a wide-reaching audience, awareness of the “Crying Boy” curse spread very quickly. The Sun fanned the flames—no pun intended—with additional articles, each more sensational than the first. By the end of October, panic reached an all-time high, and many looked to The Sun for an answer.^[7]

3 The Paintings Were Burned in a Mass Bonfire

The Sun’s editor Kelvin MacKenzie, credited as the father of the “Crying Boy” curse, was the one to announce, “Enough is enough, folks. If you are worried about a Crying Boy picture hanging in YOUR home, send it to us immediately. We will destroy it for you—and that should see the back of any curse.” Soon, the Bouverie Street office of The Sun was overrun with Crying Boy paintings “stacked twelve feet high in the newsroom, spilling out of cupboards, and entirely filling a little-used interview room.” Readers had sent in about 2,500 copies of the print in total.

MacKenzie had to scramble for a solution to destroy all of the paintings. He eventually decided to burn them in a mass bonfire near the River Thames. In a highly-publicized event on Halloween, the paintings burned under the supervision of the fire brigade. The Sun put out an article with the headline “Crying Flame!” that claimed the curse was dissolved once and for all. It offered readers a reassuring quote from one of its police officer chaperones, “I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now.”^[8]

2 The Materials May Have Had Something to Do With It

After the mass bonfire, talk of the curse died down but never really went away. British writer and comedian Steve Punt investigated the Crying Boy series in a “BBC Radio 4” production called “Punt Pi” some years later. Punt purchased a Crying Boy picture, then was “inexplicably delayed on his destination several times,” before attempting to burn the print with construction researcher Martin Shipp.

The two men found that beyond the string, the artwork didn’t really burn. Punt and Shipp surmised that a fire-retardant varnish was used. The test also explained how the string holding the painting on the wall would burn and cause it to fall face down on the floor. Another investigation suggested that Amadio’s use of a compression board could also explain why it was so difficult to burn.^[9]

1 The Curse Became an Urban Legend

Despite the various attempts to debunk the curse, people have continued to believe, leading it to become a full-fledged urban legend. One that has expanded to include paintings by different artists. For example, the portraits of Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen similarly feature crying girls and boys and have often been attached to the “Crying Boy” curse. Season 3, Episode 4 of “Weird or What?” with William Shatner examined the legend of the paintings as recently as 2012. Different online groups also popped up, such as the Dutch “Crying Boy Fan Club,” but many have since disappeared. However, a forum on the Unexplained Mysteries website is still open for viewing. You can also find talk of the curse on social media. On February 2, 2022, Hanbury Arms Haunted Hotel & Museum posted that they currently have several Crying Boy paintings on display, proving that this urban legend isn’t going away anytime soon.

Esotericists argue that when an artist paints a portrait of a person, part of their soul is sealed on paper. People have created plenty of legends and lore about cursed paintings, some of which black magicians could even seal the person himself or tie his life to the portrait. In the case of these paintings, the faces of these children reflect them: wide-open eyes full of fear, resentment, despair, misunderstanding. The viewer’s heart breaks looking at them, so it is quite possible that the picture, after its completion, retained this energy. And through the painting, these small sitters took revenge on those who hung their images at home. But it’s just legend, right?^[10]

We all like to get away from time to time. To visit the places we have never seen before or to return multiple times to our own favorite locations. Whether for rest, exploration, or just to immerse oneself in another culture, traveling to different places undoubtedly enriches a person’s life.

However, for some, there is a whole other type of getaway, one that might see a person on the edge of a warzone or at the scene of a recent disaster. Dark Tourism has been around for a long time and still looks set to continue well in the future.

Related: 10 Macabre Tourist Attractions

10 It’s Been Going On for Over a Hundred Years (at Least!)

While it might be tempting to think that dark tourism is a recent fad, the fact is it has been going on for over 100 years. In the book Dark Folklore, Mark and Tracey Norman document this point. They detail wealthy people taking trips in the late 1800s to such areas as Whitechapel in the East End of London, the location of the Jack the Ripper murders. This was largely to observe how the masses lived in poverty. Similar tours also took place in the Manhattan areas of New York around the same time.

As we will explore over our next few points, there are many off-branches of dark tourism that cater to an individual’s desires. The underlying detail, though, is no matter what type of destination you wish to go to and why, there will be a way to go there. And it also shows there has been a long-held desire, at least among some in the wealthy community, to visit locations of the darker kind.^[1]

9 Locations Of Battles and War

Perhaps some of the first examples of war tourism can be dated to the early 1860s. During that time, many wealthy citizens would buy tickets to picnic within sight of the battlefields of the American Civil War. What is even more intriguing—several of these wealthy citizens came together to buy the land on which several of the battles took place. They planned to then sell tours of the battlefields once the war was over—which many of them did.

The previously mentioned Mark and Tracey Norman documented even earlier cases of war tourism. Many of noble standing happily paid “good prices” as far back as 1815, for example, in order to sit and dine while observing the Battle of Waterloo unfold.

Perhaps most bizarre of all—at least from a modern perspective—are the tours offered by Thomas Cook. For a price, they would offer to take people to the battlefields of the Second Boer War. Interestingly, the same company also offered what we would call “bus trips” to public hangings around the same time.^[2]

8 A Discreet Tour of the Slums

There are, of course, many modern examples of what is known as slum tourism that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900. Gaining underground popularity during the 1990s and 2000s, many people would travel to poverty-hit areas in Brazil, India, and South Africa.

What is particularly ironic about the South African slum holidays is their origins lie in an official program. This program was designed to educate white Africans on how the black population lived. As the 1990s unfolded, many people from other countries around the world also wanted to take part in these tours. And while this was largely for educational purposes, an increasingly distasteful element crept in. More and more people were appearing to take such tours for no other reason than spectacle.

As the twenty-first century has gone on, many cities around the world that have notorious poorer areas have experienced this slum tourism. However, there is a particular part of dark tourism that appears to be increasing in popularity. And it is there where we will turn our attention next.^[3]

7 Fascination with Scenes of Disasters

If there is one other niche location within dark tourism, it is the desire, by some, to visit areas recently hit by a disaster of one sort or another. Although they are perfectly legal, we might look at the tours of Pripyat in the decades since the Chernobyl disaster as a good example.

More recently, in the years following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many companies offered to take tourists around the flood-hit areas. What made these particular tours even worse (the moral aspect aside) is that many claimed these tours were actually getting in the way of recovery efforts and programs.

The fact is, wherever a disaster hits—be it natural or man-made (such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill)—many will pay good money to see the devastation for themselves. And with floods, wildfires, and even volcanic eruptions happening (relatively speaking) all the time, these destinations will likely continue to increase in number.^[4]

6 People Do It Without Realizing It

In many ways, it could be argued that many people take part in dark tourism without even realizing they are doing so. Perhaps the most obvious way to demonstrate this would be to highlight the many millions of people who visit Auschwitz in Poland or the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in Holland. Both are locations that have experienced significant horror and distress. And while both are important visits from an educational experience, each could very much be described as dark tourism locations.

Perhaps another good example would be the many locations of the former Soviet Union, particularly sites with a direct connection to the Cold War, such as abandoned military facilities. Some would even argue that trips to Venice in Italy are a form of dark tourism known as doom tourism. This is primarily because it is a certainty that Venice will sink into the sea one day in the future.

These tourist trips, it could be said, have an educational purpose to them. Perhaps, then, some good comes out of dark tourism. We will return to this notion a little later on our list. Next, though, we will examine one of the most popular dark tourist sites of recent times.^[5]

5 The Golan Heights Tourists

Perhaps one of the best examples of dark tourism can be found in the organized trips that venture to Golan Heights on the Israeli-Syrian border. And these tourists arrive there “armed with binoculars and cameras, eager for a glimpse of smoke and even carnage.”

One of the people who take these tourists on such grim journeys is retired Israel Defense Forces colonel Kobi Marom. He would claim in an interview with The Atlantic in 2014 that these tourists “gaze down on Syrian’s bloodletting.” He would even state that during one particularly bloody battle when rebels captured a United Nations checkpoint, many there that day were eager to see the event unfold and “gaped down at the action below…safe beyond the buffer zone.”

These tours to the brink of the battle zones are identical in nature to those of the 1860s on the sidelines of the American Civil War. And Golam Heights is far from the only example in our modern world of dark locations, as our next point examines.^[6]

4 It’s Still Happening Today–In Many Ways!

As we know from some of our previous points, dark tourism is very much alive and well in the twenty-first century. What’s more, while we have examined some of the examples of dark tourism above, as the 2000s unwind, there appear to be more and more grisly locations that people are willing to spend good money to see.

Many people, for example, often travel to see locations where cults have been based. Or to buildings where serial killers might have lived while committing their crimes. Even places such as abandoned medical facilities that still have medical jars with all manner of remains inside on site.

In short, if there is a dark edge to it, you can guarantee that at least some people would wish to see it close-up. And for those who are willing to take people there, there is, and will continue to be, a lot of money to be made.^[7]

3 A Future of Many Dark Locations Available

With our last point in mind, we might think that the future for such an industry will be a grim one, and well, it might be. With various tragedies and disasters unfolding around the world at any given time, there is certainly no shortage of locations to choose from. Indeed, might we see such tourist trips to Afghanistan in the near future? Or to Ukraine after the conflict ends there? The chances are, we would.

In short, locations of genocide, mass murder, areas of great conflict, and both man-made and natural disasters are many. And all are locations that some people might wish to visit. And with the world ultimately becoming increasingly smaller as technology develops, the ways in which these somber vacations can be delivered will also increase and diversify.

Before we move on to where dark tourism might go as the 2020s unfold, we will return to a point we made earlier—that there could be a good side to these morose holidays.^[8]

2 A Bizarre Need For It?

Might it be that not only can some good come out of dark tourism but also that there is a need to have people visit these locations? The previously mentioned Auschwitz camp and Anne Frank House are great examples of this. After all, most would agree that the horrors of the Second World War, particularly the Holocaust, must not be forgotten. To see such locations first-hand certainly plays a part in this.

There are, though, many other locations around the world that could serve in an educational way. For example, such places that have suffered environmental disasters would only show the potential consequences of our collective actions. Visits to the Chernobyl plant and its surrounding areas could serve in a similar capacity.

If dark tourism does continue, for good or bad, there is one area where it will undoubtedly grow, and it is there we will turn our attention for our final point.^[9]

1 Virtual Dark Tourism

It is perhaps no surprise that in the modern age in which we live that one could take part in dark tourism without actually leaving their living room. Virtual tourism, rightly or wrongly, is likely to increase over the years. In 2017, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, intentionally or not, made this idea a reality. He would go on a virtual tour of recently flood-hit Puerto Rico. This tour was live-streamed, leading to much criticism. This was mainly due to an apparent lack of empathy on the Facebook founder’s part.

An argument, though, could be made that such virtual tours to areas hit by tragedies could be used for good. They might be a good way to raise funds if people can see the distress for themselves, for example. And, once more, they would also perhaps serve as an educational tool.

Whether we can expect to see such virtual tours being offered anytime soon, though, remains to be seen.^[10]