The internet, in case you haven’t noticed, has a bit of a fixation with the eerie and generally terrifying. Urban legends and myths pop up all the time all over the place.
Something about our bizarre predilection to be scared drives us to these stories — in the similar way that I am driven to the theater to see horror movies and yet know that I am terrible at watching horror movies, much to my girlfriend’s hilarity.
Well, here for your viewing pleasure (if it can so be called), I have gathered a collection of creepy images with backstories which will chill you to the bone. So, you know, “spooky stuff going on ahead” warnings and all that business!
“A Chernobyl liquidator pushes an abandoned baby found during the disaster cleanup.”
According to reports, this worker was measuring radiation levels when he came across the abandoned baby still in its stroller in the village of Tatsenki.
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A series of one artist’s self portraits after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
William Utermohlen decided to create a series of self-portraits following his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in an attempt to understand what was happening to his mind, and here are a collection of the results.
Art is so often used as a device to project how an artist sees the world, so it’s fascinating to see it being so emphatically being turned back upon the artist’s physically deteriorating brain.
Ruth Snyder’s execution, the first woman to be executed at Sing Sing Correctional.
Ruth Snyder was arrested and sentenced to death for the murder of her husband. This photo was taken at her execution, and never fails to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
A mother posing with her recently deceased daughter.
Postmortem photography was once a prolific thing for families who lost loved ones. The photographs were used, as you would expect, to serve as mementos of lost relatives. Still very unsettling that you would know that the person was dead in the photo, however.
‘Ole Smokey’ electric chair, used to execute 125 inmates at Tennessee State Penitentiary.
Electric chairs are unavoidably creepy, especially when you know exactly how many people have died sitting in that exact chair.
Oh, and the fact that they named it ‘Ole Smokey’ just makes it even more sinister. It’s an electric chair, not a cartoon bad guy.
Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle.
It does seem so absurd that a man such as Ted Bundy would have driven such a car. Once Bundy had removed the passenger side seat, he could lie his victims flat and better conceal them after luring them to the car.
This 17th Century ‘Insanity Mask’.
Well, if you weren’t insane before being forcibly strapped into that metal nightmare cage, you sure as hell would be after.
Throne made of human remains in the Catacombs of Paris.
This is one of those situations where you know that regardless of the context, it’s not good. Any decision that needs to be made from a throne made of human body parts is a decision that is probably not going to have a good outcome.
This terrifyingly spiky device is a Medieval collar.
Unsurprisingly, this torture device was designed to slowly pierce the victim over a long period of time. The olden days were rough times, in case you hadn’t already gathered from this list.
“Colored pencil artwork from serial killer Keith Jesperson that my mom’s boyfriend was sent personally.”
Keith Jesperson murdered eight women and was known as the “Happy Face Killer” due to the smiley faces he drew on letters to the media and court. The idea of receiving something like that in the mail from a serial killer would certainly be an unexpected, and quietly terrifying, surprise.
Stairway to where death row inmates and the criminally insane were kept at Missouri State Penitentiary.
The sheer amount of people who would have walked down these stairs and never come back up them is what I find so disturbing about this image.
“Forgotten and left to die.”
This dead shark was left behind to rot in a tank of formaldehyde when a wildlife park was shut down for offences against the wildlife. Now it remains alone and abandoned.
“Theodore Gericaults, ‘Last self-portrait as a dying man’ (1824).”
Théodore Géricault (1791 – 1824) was a prominent painter in the Romantic Movement. In his waning years, he painted several paintings of insane asylum patients as his focus moved away from military themes towards human subjects. He ultimately died of tuberculosis.
The Last Photo Of Kris Kremers And Lisanne Froon
While this may not seem like the most chilling of the photos on this list, the backstory is tragic and terrifying.
On a trip to Panama, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon went missing. After 10 weeks their backpack was discovered with their phones inside. The call log showed over 77 failed attempts to 911, and the camera reel was full of mysterious photos taken at night. The case still remains unsolved.
The hands of serial killer and cannibal, Tsutomu Miyazaki.
Tsutomu Miyazaki was a Japanese serial killer and cannibal. He was born with a deformity which caused most of the bones in his hands to be fused together. He ultimately murdered four girls and drank some of their blood.
John Wayne Gacy’s clown outfits.
These are two of the clown outfits worn by American serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who became known as the “Killer Clown”.
Gacy murdered around 33 young men and teenage boys between 1972 and 1978. He would also perform at kids parties and fundraisers where he would dress up as his clown characters, Pogo or Patches the Clown.
“Gas masks for babies being tested at an English hospital (1940).”
I found an old wartime gas mask in my grandad’s shed when I was just a kid and I can still remember how scary I found it to this day. Gas masks are creepy okay!
Victorian grave cage.
And no, that isn’t the title of an upcoming Ozzy Osbourne album.
It is sometimes believed that these cages were used to keep the dead from returning. However, they were more likely used for keeping body snatchers from stealing the bodies to sell… and I don’t know which is more creepy really.
“Infectious Disease ward, Ellis Island.”
While the off-kilter camera angle only adds to the creepiness, it’s the lone chair that has been abandoned which is most unsettling.
Cross imprint with hand print from house fire.
Burning alive is almost unanimously agreed upon as the amongst the worst ways to die. I think what I find most eerie here is that in the very act of clutching a cross there is a macabre notion of hope. The person who posted this explained the picture as such:
“I was here to do work after the fire. I was first one in after the fire department. The fire department didn’t remove anything, so whoever was in the house during the fire reached for the cross.”
