32 Disturbing Pictures That Have Equally Disturbing Backstories

You know how some pics look disturbing, until you read an explanation that makes them totally non-threatening. Well, these pics definitely look disturbing…but hearing the explanation isn’t going to make you feel any better.

Just why?

In case the image above doesn’t make things crystal clear, yes, that is indeed a razor blade that someone’s stuck to the handle of a shopping cart with some price tags.

They’ll need an expert in bird law.

Every so often, a would-be smuggler at an airport makes news. At JFK in New York, some guy was caught trying to smuggle 70 poor finches inside hair rollers in his luggage.

Meanwhile in Brazil.

Cartel violence is bad in lots of places, but Brazil seems to be the only one where the cartels are having straight-up anime battles. Seriously, what is that sword even for?

Headache.

This is the CT scan of a patient who’d had a couple of recent seizures. Turns out his head was absolutely full of buckshot from an accident a few years earlier.

Close call.

This is apparently something that can happen while you’re mountain biking. First off, I didn’t know that the body’s pathways really worked that way. Second of all, both a) eww and b) wtf.

You’re in the Batcave now.

An innocent Redditor stepped into the shower one day, only to discover a bat had been chilling on his shampoo shelf. Bats are one of those animals that seems really cute until you have one in your house.

Evolution isn’t always perfect.

Thanks to something called macro mutation, this frog has seen its eyes grow inside its mouth rather than where they’d normally go. Sometimes, the DNA you’ve got just doesn’t work in your favor.

Good enough.

Yes, this is a load-bearing pillar that’s been stripped down to rebar. The disturbing part is the fact that the boss in charge of this warehouse apparently has no plans to fix it.

No, KFC.

I get that fast food chains are always trying to be edgy and out-weird each other, but KFC is really pushing things here. This “prize” was awarded to the winner of a Photoshop contest.

One of the only instances of a person photographing their own assassination.

Filippino politician Reynaldo Dagsa was taking a photo of his family when a member of the Pasaway Gang shot him in the head.

I can’t believe my eyes.

Those who wear contacts know that, even though the lens can be elusive, it always comes out. After all, you wouldn’t want to lose a lens in your eye. One patient had 27 contacts removed from an eye.

Jabroni.

Wrestling is fake in the sense that it’s choreographed. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t leave a mark. If you look really close, you can see the imprint of a hand from a brutal chest chop.

We laugh because we’re just so uncomfortable with the truth.

This looks like a crime scene from a Looney Toons skit, but it’s actually the impact crater from a zeppelin crewman who leapt from his burning ship in WWI.

Careful…

The ocean floor is littered with debris, but sometimes you’ve just gotta drop anchor. This oil tanker did just that and hooked an active torpedo that hadn’t exploded (just yet).

Australia.

An Australian fisherman caught this mystery beast, which I’m going to dub “demon from hell”. It’s fast, it’s slithery, it has some terrifyingly sharp-looking teeth, and, somehow, no eyes.

Australia, part two.

I don’t know that this was taken in Australia, but c’mon. In just a couple of months, a sticky trap somehow accumulated this nightmarish cocktail of bugs and other critters.

This woman’s name was Blanche Monnier.

Her mother kept her locked up in a tiny room without adequate food for nearly 25 years. This photo was taken just after she was discovered in 1901. She was barely 50 lbs.

One tough deer.

This deer was shot pretty bad. In fact, it was shot so badly that the slug left a wound that you can actually see through . Despite this impediment, the deer seems remarkably unperturbed.

Zombies are real.

This spider isn’t really in control anymore, because the white fungus that covers it also controls its impulses. It lurches around, proving once and for all that one should never go into an unfinished basement.

Bonus prize.

A woman in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, bought a box of red, juicy strawberries. When she got home, she realized that she’d also bought a new pet.

Yeah, I’d be creeped out if a strange man kept following me down a secluded trail.

In February 2017, 13-year-old Abby Williams and her friend Libby German were hiking in Delphi, Indiana. Soon after, they were found murdered and the killer hasn’t been found.

Libby took these pics of a man following them during the hike and they were found on her phone.

This shadow is missing the person who cast it.

That’s because this photo is said to have been taken after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The blast of such a bomb is enough to “bleach” everything its light touches. Since a person was standing there during the blast, their shadow was preserved.

Tip: if you’re ever out in a storm and this happens to your hair, find cover.

This pic was taken just seconds before they were both hit by lightning. Thankfully, they survived.

If you’re a fan of true crime, you may recognize the name Tina Watson.

She died in 2003 while scuba diving in Australia on her honeymoon. Her husband Gabe says that she panicked and slipped away from him, while others contend that he purposely turned off her air for insurance money, but it could never be proven.

This photo shows Gabe in the center as another diver rushes by to reach Tina’s body on the ocean floor.

Really old photography is naturally kind of creepy.

This was taken at Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and the man in the tall hat below the statue is John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate the president a month later.

The wink that launched a thousand conspiracy theories.

This photo was taken on Air Force One just after Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president after the death of JFK. In it, the new president is turned toward Texas congressman Albert Thomas, who is giving him a wink.

Which is a weirdly sinister thing to do when just out of frame, Jackie Kennedy’s coat is still splattered with her husband’s blood.

Japan gonna Japan.

There’s a reason that these solar-powered robotic wolves are roaming fields in Japan. They’re an energy-efficient way to scare pests away from crops. But still, just look at that thing.

Sometimes the lack of backstory is what makes it creepy.

This is a brightened image someone found in their phone’s camera roll. They have no memory of taking it or whatever might be occurring.

They also say that it kind of looks like them and the lack of surety adds to the creep.

These are the final images taken by a photographer when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980.

Photographer Robert Emerson Landsburg was only a few miles from the summit when the eruption occurred. Presumably knowing there was no escape, he snapped a couple last images of the approaching ash cloud.

Then he rewound the film, placed him camera in his backpack, and laid atop it to protect it. He was found 17 days later under a mountain of ash.

Here’s a “last photo” that’s equally eerie.

Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashed into Mt. Erebus during a sightseeing flight in Antarctica. All 257 people died, but one took a photo as the plane crashed.

Vintage baby photos can be really creepy.

If you grade on a curve, this one isn’t even that bad.

Except that it’s Hitler.

Some hikers were climbing rocks and snapping pics right before realizing what was below them.

Down in the rocks you can see a red-looking thing. That’s a girl laying face down with both legs broken after falling the previous day. She was still alive and after finding her , the hikers got help and she was airlifted to safety.

Unfortunately, she had been hiking with a friend, who didn’t survive the fall.

The Chernobyl “Elephant’s Foot” looks like something from a sci-fi horror movie.

This is part of what remains of the nuclear core after the disaster. While it was burning, it turned into molten sludge, which eventually cooled into a solid, blobby mass.

While far less radioactive than it once was, it’s still dangerous to spend too much time nearby.

If this immediately made you yell “Serial killer!”, you’re right.

Edward Paisnel is also known as the Beast of Jersey. He would break into homes and terrorize his victims before murdering him. He was convicted of 13 killings, but likely did many more.

This seems like a nice overhead shot of a wedding…until you notice the top right.

Nope. Nothing creepy about that, AT ALL.

These apparently weren’t dementors, but part of an art project being shown in the same location.

Between a rock and a hard place.

This looks pretty uncomfortable, and the fact that this guy was stuck like this for four whole days is almost unimaginable. But after rescuers chipped away the surrounding rock, he was taken to a hospital, alive.

This is one of the few photos hinting at the story behind the disappearance of Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers in 2014.

The two women went on a hike in Panama during a visit to study Spanish and never returned . Ten weeks later bone fragments, a backpack of supplies, and a shoe with a foot still inside were found. DNA confirmed the foot was Kremers’.

In the backpack was a phone containing pictures from their trip. Most troubling were 90 eerie photos taken in the dark, 10 days after their disappearance was reported.

Ratatouille.

A homeowner woke up to find 15, count ’em, 15 rats had drowned themselves overnight. Some rat poisons dehydrate animals to the point that they’ll seek out any water source.

When I say ‘backstory’, I don’t usually mean it so literally.

I’m sure you’ve heard of people who have discovered masses in their bodies that could have been a twin that never developed. But this case is particularly unsettling.

It has a fingernail…