These disturbingly informative Wikipedia articles will help remind you that, sometimes, ignorance is bliss...
Let’s start with something particularly ungodly- the rat king. Arguably the most repulsive monarch in recent memory (though we admit this could be a close-fought race), a “rat king” is what happens when a number of rats become entangled at their tail-end. Finding it impossible to disentangle themselves from one another, the trapped rats (or ‘trats’, if you will) perish, leaving behind one monstrous “king”…
From one monster to another…
For some, this is the most barbaric act to be performed thanks to the web; for others, it’s a perfect match which could only have been facilitated by its existence- either way, the story of Armin Meiwes inviting a guest (steelworker Bernd Brandes) to his home in Germany, where said guest was willingly killed and eaten, is a chilling one. The Wikipedia article outlines Meiwes’ initial advertisement and Brandes’ reply, before going into graphic detail of the intimate, fatal meeting. (Trust us, you can’t unread this wiki).
One positive to come from the story: while serving his eight year jail sentence for manslaughter, the regretful Meiwes gave up his love of meat products, animal or “other”, and has since gone full veggie.
An alien encounter in Flatwoods, West Virginia is the subject of our next entry. Two young brothers and a friend claim to have witnessed a bright object cross the sky and crash into the hills of a nearby farm. Upon telling their mother, the boys were (slightly irresponsibly?) rushed to the crash site to investigate. Once there, they found a large pulsating “ball of fire”, and beside it… a huge cryptid, which looked like this-
Pretty much everything about this one is grisly:
In November 1988, teenage student Furuta was abducted, tortured and killed by four boys in one of their parents’ houses in Adachi, Tokyo (the article mentions that the parents were present for at least part of the time Furuta was locked up, but were too scared of their son to answer the Furuta’s cries for help). The girl’s corpse was then hidden in a 208-litre oil drum, which was filled with concrete and then disposed of in a tract of land in Koto.
An eerie mystery which to this day hasn’t been solved, the Roanoke Colony wiki tells of an English settlement on Roanoke, an island in what is known today as Dare County, North Carolina. After being left completely alone on Roanoke Island for three years, some scouts were sent from England to check on the settlers.
However, when the scouts arrived they found the island completely empty, with only one cryptic clue to the settlers’ disappearance remaining: the word “Croatan”, carved into a tree…
In the years following her death on the operating table, Gloria Ramirez – dubbed “the toxic lady” – has been the subject of episodes of The X Files, Grey’s Anatomy, The New Detectives, Weird or What?, Law & Order and anime film Memories. Why? Well…
Gloria, who was suffering effects of advanced cervical cancer, was rushed to the emergency room, where surgeons soon decided that their only option was to defibrillate her heart. This turned out to be a bad idea- not only did Gloria die, but the home remedy she’d been using to fight the cancer (a remedy which bizarrely included a solvent commonly used as a powerful degreaser), reacted to the defibrillation, forcing a stinking noxious gas to emit from Ramirez’s corpse. This poisonous, garlic-smelling odour was so strong that it caused three staff to pass out almost immediately, and eventually left twenty three people ill, with five more requiring hospital treatment.
Nobody likes long bus rides. But even the bumpy, stuffy, fart-filled confines of a long-haul bus ride can be made worse. How? Well, just imagine you’re sat beside a knife-wielding cannibal who’s missed his last meal, and you’ll get an idea of the horrible, fatal end young Canadian Tim McLean met on a Greyhound Canada bus on 30th July, 2008.
Only minutes after passing out with his earphones in, Tim was stabbed in the throat repeatedly by Vince Weiguang Li while other terrified passengers were forced to watch. The driver quickly pulled over and everybody rushed outside, leaving Li alone with McLean, who Li promptly beheaded, before he began eating the corpse.
How many of these creepy historical figures do you know?