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If nightmares came to life, they might look a lot like these real-life things straight out of horror movies.

Art imitates life, and the sheer volume of terrifying movies out there suggests Earth is far scarier than scary movies. The more you delve into human history, the more stories you uncover plenty of stories that would work well on American Horror Story. Real-life scares, unlike fictional fears, force you to face reality, all the sharp, spooky, and sinister sides of it. Killers and psychopaths reveal depths of human depravity worse than any jump scare, and enough actual monsters exist in the world to fill up a Guillermo del Toro film. Life is beautiful, but it is also extremely frightening.

The horrors below highlight some of the freakiest facts about planet Earth and her inhabitants. After reading them, you may ever feel like leaving your home again, but as the facts below show, even your home is susceptible to real-life horror.

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Armin Meiwes, The Man Who Ate Someone Alive

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY

Everyone has different tastes, but Armin Meiwes possesses a truly disturbing palate. In the early 2000s, the computer repair technician posted on a website looking for “a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.”

Despite being less appealing than a Craiglist missed-connection, someone responded to this post: an engineer from Berlin by the name of Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes. Meiwes cut off a certain part of Brandes’s body, both men ate said body part, and then Meiwes eventually stabbed Brandes to death. Over the next ten months, Armin consumed the rest of Bernd. Even more terrifying, Meiwes recorded it all on video.

The story understandably caused a media sensation, partially because the trial revealed that cannibalism was technically not considered illegal in Germany at the time. In the end, thankfully, Meiwes received a life sentence.

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Someone Living In The Walls

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY

There’s no place like home . . . to scare the crap out of you.

One Imgur user, TwoBiteBrownie, took the internet on a tour of a secret passageway they and their brother discovered in their parents’ room behind a bookcase. It opened to a spiral staircase that lead down to a tiny crawlspace. As freaky as the stairs and crawlspace looked, they paled in comparison to what lay inside the space: the signs of someone living there. A sheet laid on the floor, with strange trinkets, toys, and finished foods strewn about. Even more unsettling, TwoBite suspected the candy came from his Halloween basket, meaning the crawlspace’s guest lived in the house alongside them.

Though it sounds like a hoax or one-time phenomenon, people manage to hide out in other people’s homes undetected for months. In Japan, one woman hid in a man’s closet for a full year, only getting discovered after the man installed cameras in his home. How do you feel safe knowing you might be sharing your shelter with some unknown guests?

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The Horror House Of H.H. Holmes, America’s First Serial Killer

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

H.H. Holmes, America’s first known serial killer, carried out his reign of terror in a haunted house of his own design. The former medical student-turned-business owner opened a hotel in Chicago in 1890. The hotel served as his own personal murder house.

During its construction, he hired and fired different workers every week, so no one knew the layout of the building but him. Trapdoors, secret walls, stairways leading nowhere, and a basement straight out of a Saw movie include a mere handful of Holmes’s twisted gruesome renovations designed to maximize torture and fear.

At the time authorities discovered his murder den, the bodies inside grew so decomposed it became difficult to tell how many there were. Estimates place Holmes’s kills anywhere between 28 to 200 people, with Holmes confessing to 28. Today, Holmes’s house no longer stands, but its infamy lives on.

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Real Prop Dead People

Photo: MGM/UA Entertainment Co.

Remember the scene in Poltergeist where the mom falls into the pool filled with decaying dead bodies? She looks genuinely terrified, and for good reason. You see, the producers decided to use real bodies as props because plastic skeletons ran too expensive. Rather than take a quick stop at Party City, producers just well full Dr. Frankenstein and utilized actual corpses to create their monster. On the surface, this bit of artistic planning paid off, with Poltergeist frightening audiences into two more installments. But many say it also contributed to the Poltergeist curse, a supposed evil which led to the deaths of many of the franchise’s stars.

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Krokodil, The Heroin Alternative That Eats Your Flesh

Photo: uploaded by Atom_Murray

Most drugs do terrible things to the human body, but desomorphine, aka, krokodil, might be the most damaging. The drug, a mixture of red phosphorus, kerosene, and other dangerous chemicals, gives the user the same feeling as injecting heroin for much cheaper. However, krokodil comes with a terrible side-effect worse than blackened lungs or ruined livers: it eats away at your flesh.

Potent and inexpensive to produce, krokodil swept through Siberia and into the rest of Russia. A great way to resist the temptation to try krokodil simply involves putting the world into Google image search, but don’t do it unless you have a strong stomach.

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Japan’s Suicide Forest

Photo: Guilhem Vellut / Wikimedia Commons

The Aokigahara Forest, a beautifully lush, green ocean of leaves at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, also the site of the most suicides in the world. Every year, dozens bodies turn up in the woods, most of them hanging from trees. It happens so frequently the Japanese government posts signs throughout the forest telling people, in short, “Don’t do it.”

Also known as the “Sea of Trees,” Aokigahara rests atop an area rich in volcanic activity, a quality that softens the earth and contributes to the natural silence of the area. A famous novel where a couple commits ritual suicide in the forest solidified its somber reputation by the ’60s, though many say suicides occurred there long before then.

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The Island Of Malformed Dolls In Mexico City

Photo: uploaded by Atom_Murray

La Isla De La Munecas, or “Island of the Dolls,” lies in a canal to the south of Mexico City. Though no one lives on the island, it has plenty of residents: hundreds of dolls hanging from the trees.

Each doll supposedly appeases the spirits of the dead, robbing them entirely of any association with the word “toy.” The former caretaker of the island, Don Julian Santana, said he started stringing up the dolls decades ago after finding a young girl drowned in the river. Though his family said no little girl ever existed, Santana himself turned up lying facedown in the river in 2001.

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96% Of The Ocean Remains Uncharted

Photo: Sylke Rohrlach / Wikimedia Commons

Though the world’s oceans comprise 70% of the earth’s surface, scientists only know about 5% of everything in them. Another way to interpret this data: more than two-thirds of the Earth is uncharted territory for humans. You spent all this time worrying about incoming aliens when a hostile Atlantis or kaiju could just as easily rise from the depths of the Mariana Trench. What’s that sound, you ask? Oh, nothing, just one of the many booming, unexplained noises the ocean just makes.

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Welcome To Centralia, PA, The Real-Life ‘Silent Hill’

Photo: JohnDS / Wikimedia Commons

You know that series about a town where demons with geometric heads roam the foggy streets wreaking havoc and terror? Well, the series in question, Silent Hill, is based on a town stuck in a perpetual inferno. Over fifty years ago, a massive garbage fire tore through Centralia, PA, igniting an exposed coal seam and turning the underground into a corporeal hell. The disaster destroyed homes, split roads in half, and forced 1,400 residents to abandon a devastated rural town.

Unfortunately, unlike most other disasters, this fire never went out. The coal beneath the fire keeps it burning to this day, and experts say it could sustain the blaze for another 200+ years. As of 2017, the population was listed at seven people, each likely representing a different deadly sin.

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The Floating Ghost Ship Full Of Cannibalistic Rats

Photo: Lilpop, Rau, and Loewenstein / Wikimedia Commons

As you read this, an abandoned Soviet cruise liner might be drifting through the ocean, making its way towards Scotland’s shores. The vessel in question, Lyubov Orlova, carries a horde of rats, rats that have been out to sea for some time with nothing to eat but other each other. A ghost ship filled with cannibal rats, drifting towards Scotland like a floating Ramsey Campbell novel.

How did this happen? Apparently Canada kept it sitting in a harbor after repossessing it from the private owners. In 2013, they decided to cut it loose and leave somebody else to deal with the modern day plague ship. Yet instead of turning up in Scotland or Ireland as predicted, Lyubov Orlova came ashore in California.

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Fungus That Turns Ants Into Zombies

Photo: David P. Hughes, Maj-Britt Pontoppidan / Wikimedia Commons

As much as people pretend zombies only exist in movies, they do exist in the insect world thanks to ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus native to Brazil, Thailand, and Africa. The fungus falls from trees, burrows through the heads of ants into their brains, and causes the ant to lose control of its body. The ant then climbs a tree, clamps its pincers onto a leaf, and dies while the fungus continues to grow and sprout more spores.

Pretty sure this is in a Lovecraft story somewhere.

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Incoming Space Objects Are A Constant Threat

Photo: Alex Alishevskikh / Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes, people forget planet Earth lies suspended out in the middle of billions of miles of empty space, where it is hardly the largest or even most-defended object. A very tangible reminder of Earth’s tiny standing in the universe arrived in the form of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which hit Russia in February 2013. No one died, but 1,200 sustained injuries from shattered glass caused by the explosion, which registered at monitoring stations on the other side of the world in Antarctica. The damaged caused at Chelybinsk reveals how susceptible Earth is to a large-scale impact from a foreign body. But how do you defend against a frontier you know next to nothing about?
In 2004, another asteroid Apophis 99942 made headlines when scientists feared it might strike the planet. Though most believe the threat has passed, some still worry an asteroid like Apophis could present a threat to Earth at any time.

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The Man Who Hasn’t Bathed In Decades

Video: YouTube

You definitely don’t need to shower every day of the week, but you need to make more of an effort to shower than Amou Haji. Haji, an 80-year-old Iranian man, hasn’t bathed in over 60 years. He’s caked in dirt and who knows what else, smokes animal dung out of a plumbing pipe, lives on the outskirts of a village in a concrete shack, and sleeps in a coffin-like bed. All of this sounds like the description of the worst fairy tale character ever written.

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