Though the sensation has probably been around since our ancestors developed emotions, it wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that we started describing the uncanny as something that gives us "the creeps." Charles Dickens, who enriched the English language with plenty of new words and expressions, is credited with the first use of the phrase in his 1849 novel 'David Copperfield,' to mean an unpleasant, tingly chill up the spine.
A few days ago, Reddit user Mimiqttt set out to find out what the definition means to different people, and posted a question on the platform, asking, "What are some creepy facts you know?" From natural phenomena to the biological workings of our bodies, here are some of the most popular answers they've received.
This post may include affiliate links.
Hearing is the last sense you lose before dying.
d**konajunebug:
My dad is a retired EMT/Paramedic/fire-fighter. Years ago he told be about a guy in cardiac arrest that they brought back to life. The guy ended up coming by the station a few weeks later to thank my dad personally because he had heard - while dead - someone say it was time to call it but my dad said to keep trying.
That story has terrified me. To know you’re dead, but not quite dead, and hear other people call it before you’re fully gone. Geesus, no thank yo.
One of the most horrific things I have ever experienced as a paramedic was the phenomenon of “CPR induced consciousness.” It’s where in some individuals who are in full cardiac arrest will regain consciousness during active CPR and beg you to stop due to the agonizing pain of the chest compressions in progress. The first time I ever had that happen to my patient it almost completely broke me. Unfortunately, they could not be resuscitated in the end despite us using every ACLS tool available. I’m considering a DNR for myself due to witnessing it.
One of the most common places to find a dead body is on the toilet. Cause when they're alive and not feeling well, the first thing they do is go to the toilet thinking it could be a bowel issue.
When you have a kidney transplant, they don’t remove your original organs, and the Transplant does not go in the place of your old organ.
Source: have had three kidney transplants in my lifetime. I have a total of five kidneys in my body.
Due to human artificial selection, dogs are evolving eyebrows.
My dog definitely has eyebrows!! Taken just after a bath so she's wrapped up in a towel. Just-had-a...86a6f9.jpg 
Your eyes have their own immune system that works separately from your body’s immune system. If your body’s immune system found out it would attack your eyes. I read this here and at my last eye appointment I asked if it was true. The eye doctor said “Yeah, it’s kinda weird” and I was like “Kinda?”
Ducks become cannibals due to boredom, of all f*****g reasons.
I mean what other way is there to make your life more exciting?
If you get skinned alive, you'll die from hypothermia, not blood loss.
gamedev_9998:
If you were burned alive, you'll die from suffocation, not from the fire itself.
Your immune system can just decide that the rest of your body is offensive and goes on the attack. I have this with psoriasis which started as flaky skin and now has become psoriatic arthritis where my fingers, hands and feet are unreliable because my body decided that my body is a foreign object.
F**k you my body!
Also, Guillain-Barre Syndrome or Parsonage-Turner Syndrome where your nerve sheathes are attacked. I lost use of a lung, much tactile feeling in my upper body, and much muscle usage. Most people it will return, some, like mine, is permanent. Just woke up one morning with my skin burning and difficulty breathing. Fun times, eh?
I believe around 5-10% of the ocean has been explored. We have the technology to study space but it’s not advanced enough to see what’s down there (due to water pressure and darkness and stuff)
Some species of Vultures can projectile vomit if they feel threatened.
Missing-Digits:
It is called defensive vomiting and I was an unwitting victim of it once. It is HORRENDOUS!!!
There are about 40 supervolcanoes in the world that have yet to erupt. One supervolcano is in Yellowstone National Park and has a magma chamber that is large enough to fit the entire city of Tokyo inside it.
There's no indication we're due for a super eruption in our life time, but the thought it could happen still creeps me out.
For every 9 people on death row 1 is found to be innocent. Sometimes after death and sometimes after the innocent was on death row for 30 years.
There are many innocent people in prison. Mind you, I wasn't one of them. I deserved what I got. Several of the women I hung around, though, had not committed the crime of which they were accused. The feds use scare tactics to get people to plead out. Several of the women were told to sign the plea, or the feds would go after their kids. The government can ALWAYS afford a better lawyer.
Just after their WWII surrender, the Japanese government created a system of brothels in case American soldiers thought of taking out frustrations on Japanese women. After the rate of STI's shot up among American GI's the Army made the Japanese government shut them down, the number of *reported* r*pes went up by 800%. Take note that Japan is a very traditional society with plenty of stigma about reporting rape so the actual numbers were probably even more horrific.
And let’s not forget the huge numbers of Korean and Chinese women that the Japanese kidnapped and forced into séx work in their brothels during the WWII era! And the number of rápes perpetrated by Japanese soldiers during their invasion of China! The Japanese aren’t innocent victims here, but their WOMEN were.
The only double-hanging of women to be carried out in modern times was the execution of the Finchley baby farmers. Amelia Sach and Annie Walters would "adopt" unwanted babies for a fee. Then, supposedly, find homes for them. They did not find homes for the babies.
Cotard’s syndrome is a condition where you just think you’re dead or don’t exist. People who have it sometimes stop eating because they think they’re dead.
PurdueJohn:
Similarly there are high anxiety conditions of depersonalization and derealization, where someone doesn't believe the world around or them exists or are real at all, or that they don't exist themselves. My daughter had this when she was young. Quite unsettling.
Capgras delusions are interesting to learn about as well. It's where you believe that a loved one has been replaced with an identical double.
Youngest "woman" (I use that term loosely) to give birth was 5 years old.
Today there are more slaves in the world that at any other time in history.
When salmon begin their famous spawning run, they shut down unnecessary systems so they can channel all of their energy into swimming upstream to mate. That includes the immune system, so spawning salmon are highly susceptible to disease and infection. They basically start to rot before they die. You can see many discolored salmon during their run, and there are even some missing pieces of their bodies.
I read about this last year. We are recent transplants to the PNW, so this is all new to me. My daughter and I went to a nearby creek this week to see if the salmon were still doing their thing. Sure enough, we saw one swimming upstream with a big, gaping hole in its back, complete with visible flesh and stringy white things protruding from it. It was awful, but we couldn't look away, either.
She asked me not to cook salmon for dinner this week. It's one of my favorite meals, but...yeah, I'm good for now.
When a star dies it explodes and releases a gamma burst and it destroys all in its path, if one goes off near Earth it’ll lead to extinction and there's no warning because it happens immediately.
Well, there will be a warning, and that's the fact that a star is close to dying, which NASA and other space programs can quite accurately predict
mummy brown--or Egyptian Brown--is an old pigment that the pre-Raphaelites used for paintings. it's a rich color that was made from myrrh, pitch, and the decayed flesh of humans (yup, mummies). artists, for a very long time, did not know the contents of said pigment and we're turned off by it by 1915 because they found it gross and despicable.
still, a plenty of famous works feature a paint that is essentially dried-up human tissue.
There are also many books in the world that are bound with human skin.
Hundreds of people die every year… from being strangled by their bedsheets.
GlitzBlitz:
I had a heavy blanket that was pretty much coming apart at the seams. The lining was detaching from the blanket itself.
I woke up one morning and found my son’s head/neck completely entangled in the detached lining. I shook him in a panic and he woke up confused but fine.
It looked like if someone had actually taken the thing and tried to strangle him with it. I threw that thing straight in the garbage.
*throws bedsheets in the trash* Thanks but I don't want to be strangled
Statistically the person who is most likely to kill you at any given time is living with you right now.
Drinking too much water can kill you. some people who have survived drowning later die because of water intoxication. solution is simple, give them salt or electrolyte fluids to balance their sodium ph in the body.
That reminds of this, from Wikipedia: "A US jury has awarded $US16.5 million (NZ$22.8J million) to the family of a 28-year-old woman who died after participating in a radio station's water-drinking contest. [I've redacted her name], a mother of three, died of acute water intoxication in January 2007 after the challenge to see which contestant could drink the most water without going to the bathroom." The winner's prize was a new Wii
Sewer treatment plants have lifesaver rings around the treatment tanks, in case someone falls in.
The power of my revulsion would simply levitate me above the surface
Carmine, a red food dye commonly used in food and makeup, is made of COCHINEAL INSECTS.
Also used in clothing dye as well. My dad spent a summer when he lived in Tucson gathering them in coffee cans to mail back to Virginia for my great grandmother to use in dyeing her hand spun wool.
In a strange and semi creepy coincidence, Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was saved from falling off a train platform and being run over by Edwin Boothe, brother of John Wilkes Boothe.
All tolled, Robert Lincoln was at or near three presidential assassinations. After William McKinley's murder, Lincoln vowed never to come near a president again. And he didn't.
When you eat figs you are quite likely to be also eating the mummified carcass of a wasp.
At any given time, there are 40-50 active serial killers in the United States.
depends on who you ask. some experts have estimates as high as 200
Sometimes if their diet is lacking protein deer will actually search out birds nests on forest floors, stamp the chicks, and then eat them.
There's a type of be called a vulture Bee that feeds on decomposing flesh, they have wild looking hives, and they will in fact make honey from the dead flesh. Honey that is referred to as "meat honey". The honey is in fact edible according to researchers.
You have millions of mites, known as demodex, living on your face.
The floating specs you see probably aren’t dust but dead skin cells.
Box Jellyfish are not only the most venomous jellies to humans, but they also possess at least 24 functional eyes (of various degree) on its body despite having no centralized brain. Four of its eyes always peer up out of the water regardless of the animal's body position; some eyes can make out images, others are more primitive.
During the merger of two black holes,a black holes can occasionally get ejected from the system and get shot out into open space and become a wandering black hole, the creepy part for me is that because a large part of the way in which we see black holes is through their interactions with their surroundings we wouldn’t really be able to see it coming towards us
Really just the fact that we can die or have our lives unimaginably ruined at any moment from a basically endless number of ways and that eventually within a handful of decades (or maybe seconds or any time in between) or so it IS going to happen.
My life was destroyed on Thanksgiving Day, year 2000. My dad was putting up Xmas lights after we ate our meal. He fell off of the ladder, crushed his skull, and sustained a catastrophic brain injury. His body lived, but I lost my beloved father that day. Not only did it destroy his life (he was only 58) but it destroyed mine as well, as my mother decided selfishly to ignore my father’s well-known wishes not to be kept alive in a near-vegetative state. We took care of my dad at home. I loved him, but I lost my 20s and 30s to caring for him. I never moved out, never married, never got a normal job. He died in 2021. I held his hand as he died. My mother refused to even be present. I have never forgiven her for any of this. And I miss my dad terribly. My mother’s a toxic narcissist; my dad was a wonderful dad. Hug your loved ones, everyone. Regret is a bítch, I should know.
Last year in the US alone over half a million people were reported missing. About 1% are found.
No, about 1% stay missing. The majority are found within the first 24 hours.
Many victims who survive bear attacks report the sound of the bear’s teeth scraping against their skulls.
Cadaver dogs can smell bodies through waters (lakes, etc).
After decapitation you would still be conscious for about 10 seconds and technically would still be alive for 3-6 minutes.
There was a chicken with its head cut off lived several weeks. The farmer fed it by putting grain into its esophagus.
People are still dying from the radioactive fallout generated by the Chernobyl disaster.
31 people died at Chernobyl, and all of them died from direct exposure to radiation, not fallout. If you want to hear something rather interesting, there are fundamental differences in the number of people who died from fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nagasaki had a much lower death rate from fallout than Hiroshima.
There is a website called The Marshall Project, which, from 2015 to 2021, recorded and counted down the time until execution of every death row inmate in the United States, categorized by state. It was accurate up to the second, and had real-time updates about appeals, stays of execution, time of death, method of execution, etc. It was fascinating and gave me major creeps at the same time. The site is still up, and the records can still be read.
Not sure if considered creepy but the ancient Romans went around collecting urine. It was big business. They used it to clean clothes as well as for mouthwash.
Herculaneum is better preserved than Pompeii it just hasn't been excavated as much.
Pompeii was essentially destroyed by falling volcanic rock, its dead later being buried by ash after rigor had set in.
Herculaneum was destroyed by pyroclastic flows so hot that the liquids in people's bodies turned to vapor and exploded instantly. Brain matter turned into glass. Bone and metal were welded together. All that happened before Pompeii.
Currently, the population in the area is so large that the Italian government is having a hard time deciding whether or not it's worth it to warn or evacuate them or not
Only one victim has been found to have brains that turned into a glassy, vitrified material. This post kind of makes it sound that ALL victims’ brains turned to glass, which isn’t true. Nearby charred wood showed that the heat was probably as high as 520C/928F.
The only thing preventing you from dissolving your own stomach is a layer of mucus that pores in your stomach lining constantly secrete. If something happens to prevent them from working completely, your stomach will be dissolved within a couple of days.
If we could hear the sound that the Sun emits, it would be the equivalent of standing next to a speaker at a rock concert.
Most of us are highly succeptible to suggestion when hypnotized, including attempts to instill false memories. Our brains *cannot* tell the difference between real and false memories. Imagine the possibilities.....
Hardly need hypnosis to do that. All you need is an imagination and a lack of awareness during a flight of fancy. Lots of kids get fake memories of things that saw in movies really happening to them, and if their parents never correct them, they can go on believing those things for a very long time indeed!
Meany types of Gas don’t smell naturally it is added later for safety, so by theory there can happen a mistake…
Re-written for ease: Many gasses don't have a natural smell. They are odorless. Additional chemicals are added to give natural gas a distinct odor so that if there is a leak we can smell it. I think the OP is worried about what happens if they forget to add the additional chemicals. But I would hope that is very unlikely as gas companies should theoretically be strictly monitored :)
Victorians collected and made art and jewelry from the hair of their loved ones:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-curious-victorian-tradition-making-art-human-hair
I don’t know if it counts as “art” or jewelry, but I have a lock of my late father’s hair in a glass-tube pendant. I also have two bracelets with small glass cylinders in them that hold tiny amounts of my heart-dog’s cremains and my beloved gray cat’s cremains.
Hepatitis ranges from A-E, with A being the most transmissible in contaminated water sources.
Infant flesh is like fish when cooked. White and falls right off the bone.
Thank you, Last Podcast On The Left.
In the US, Most missing persons cases that take place in the wilderness happen around places with large cave networks.
Body odor isn’t caused by dirt or sweat on one’s body. It’s the bacteria that’s produced by dirt and sweat that emits the BO.
Falling down can kill you, legit. If you hit ur head on something sharp most likely ure dead in the next second. Is not very creepy but it makes me rethink life time to time lol
Or it can cause a catastrophic brain injury that could render you near-vegetative, or worse - aware, but unable to communicate, move, etc. My dad fell off of a ladder in 2000 and was bedridden in diapers, with a feeding tube, for the next 21 years. He did NOT want to live “that way” (as his mom had had a similar brain injury and he had seen how horribly she died), but my mom ignored his wishes and told the doctors to “do everything to keep him alive”. It was horrible. He lived 21 years in a near-vegetative state. I can only hope that he was not “aware” of how bad his condition/situation was.
That in pharmaceutical labs, once they are done with the animals with whatever they were testing, the ones that are still alive are put down and thrown in a freezer. When the freezer is full they are dumped in a furnace.
Pelicans will just Eat smaller birds sometimes. they snatch them up in their bill and just keep chewing till the bird stops moving.
Many people have a parasitic infection and don’t even know it…
If there's no negative influence to the host, then it's commensalism, not parasitism.
A female mantis eats her mating partner after having “sex” with him.
not after, DURING. She starts with the head which the male does not need to finish the act... :D
Its against the law for a pharmacist to tell seniors on part D they are paying 2.5 times the cost for lets say metformin than someone off the street w/ no insurance. In my hypethetical trans action , The drug costs the pharmacy $2 ,HE charges $4. if grandma comes in w/ her medicare card she is charged $10 copay.. The drug maker then takes $7 leaving $3 instead of $4 as the profit margin to the pharmacy. He is bound by law to say nothing about the scam.
Minor warning for those who have functional eyes. If you are sensitive just scroll by.
.
.
Some women cook and eat their placenta after birth, has got to be the most horrific thing i know. There are even f*****g recipies online.
Heard of this before... Better alternative would be planting a tree, with the placenta placed underneath the roots.
I didn't cook or keep my placenta, but I asked to have a good look at it. It's marvelous. My body grew an entire new organ (as well as a human being). I was absolutely fascinated by the size of it. And the only time I would ever be comfortable seeing one of my own organs outside of my body..
Something something “regaining lost nutrients”? I imagine that’s (maybe) one of the reasons why primitive cultures practiced it. Here’s what I read about modern placentophagy: “People who support eating the placenta say that it can raise your energy and breast milk quantity. They also say it can level off your hormones, lowering your chances of postpartum depression and insomnia.” Of course, NONE of that is scientifically proven or even scientifically tested. So, basically, it’s a lot of woo-woo.
Load More Replies...
remember that one time when some dude made a teddy bear out of placentas
Saturday Night Live had a hilarious fake ad for Placenta Helper.
A cow will eat the placenta shortly after giving birth, and I assume other animals do also. I always assumed it was to not attract predators to the newborn calf, but I don't have any scientific research to back up that theory.
Yes, I grew up on a cattle farm. My father said, yes it does help eliminate the draw of predators, but he also believed it boosted nutrition after giving birth. Probably just assumed, but it made sense to me.
Load More Replies...
Well, some animals do this. Humans are animals as well. Why do people find this more horrifying or disgusting than drinking other species' milk or eating meat? (I'm not a vegan, but just from a rational point of view - it's no less weird)
Animals do it to prevent predators from finding the newborn. The humans that do it today have this idea that it replaces nutrients lost during pregnancy. There is no scientific evidence of that being true. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/labor-and-delivery/expert-answers/eating-the-placenta/faq-20380880#:~:text=While%20some%20claim%20that%20placentophagy,the%20placenta%20provides%20health%20benefits.
Load More Replies...
There is a fish ( the sounderfish) that likes to swim up penis holes that needs surgery to remove and sometimes amputation is the only form of removal.
This one is more myth as far as I understand - '' There are very few reports of candiru attacks in scientific or medical literature. Additionally, many of the historical reports are anecdotal accounts relayed by early explorers or travelers to the region. If a candiru has ever entered a human urethra, it was likely by mistake. The limited space and lack of oxygen would make it almost impossible for the fish to survive.''
It only takes twenty minutes to die from a black mamba snake bite, and it hurts the entire time.
Untrue. If untreated, black mamba bites cause death anywhere from 7 to 15 hours, not 20 minutes. Even the most venomous snake on the planet, the inland taipan, can only cause death ~45 minutes after being bitten. No snakebite causes death in 20 minutes. (A person might collapse ~45 minutes after a bite from a black mamba, but it takes hours for the symptoms to progress to respiratory failure and death.)
I don't know why I find this creepy, but our brain cannot create a new face. Every single person we see in our dreams, is someone we have seen in real life before.
This is ridiculous and is a stupid urban myth. OF COURSE our brains can imagine a face it hasn't seen before, just as it can imagine a tree or mountain or building it's never seen before. Also the dream thing is so stupid - what, are we to believe that scientists have gone into people's dreams with some magical technology then matched the face of every dream person with the face of one of the billions of people on the earth?
Lobotomy and the guillotine were both used in France through the 1980's.
That's flat out incorrect. The last execution by guillotine occurred in France on September 10, 1977.
During the embalming process in a funeral home, internal organs are sucked out and replaced with embalming fluid. The organs that are sucked out go right into the sewer system. So not only are dead people's organ bits in the sewers but so too are any medications they were on, diseases they had, etc.
Kind of a head scratcher when you go to a hospital or doctor's office and see the bio hazard waste bins - yet a funeral home, which process a higher volume of bio hazard waste, has no such disposal protocols
I don't believe this. First of all, you can't just 'suck out' an organ nor will they fit down a drain, and second, if they replace it with fluid, to what purpose? How is this better? How do you keep the body from making sloshing noises? What will that do to the weight of the body, since it has to be dressed after embalming? Why would you want to remove the organs anyway? To my knowledge, they rinse out the bodily fluids and replace it with embalming fluid, but the organs are left in place.
Take a lot of these with a grain of salt. Most of them don’t even qualify as factoids; they’re misleading at best and misinformation at worst.
I cannot agree more. This is what happens when one is unable or unwilling to create an original content, but instead just mindlessly copy and paste from random platforms without verification. It says that the author is a writer with a BA in Communication with significant experience. He really should have known better.
Load More Replies...
The amount of time it takes for pain to make it from your skin to your brain (so you actually sense the pain) is more than the time it took for the Oceangate sub to implode. Which means that one moment in time these folks were there, thinking, breathing, hearing the creaking, scared out of their minds. Then, they just weren't there at all. They didn't know that the sub had imploded because it took less time for the hull of the sub to reach their brains than the nerve impulses did.
Really? I have wondered about that. Might have the captain heard it first, freaked out, but it was already too late? Or what if they all did know it was coming and knew they only had minutes or seconds to live?
Load More Replies...
A lot of interesting facts, but nothing that I would consider disturbing or unsettling.
I think the subtext of Lina giving birth disturbed me. Who impregnated a 5 year old.
Load More Replies...
Take a lot of these with a grain of salt. Most of them don’t even qualify as factoids; they’re misleading at best and misinformation at worst.
I cannot agree more. This is what happens when one is unable or unwilling to create an original content, but instead just mindlessly copy and paste from random platforms without verification. It says that the author is a writer with a BA in Communication with significant experience. He really should have known better.
Load More Replies... The amount of time it takes for pain to make it from your skin to your brain (so you actually sense the pain) is more than the time it took for the Oceangate sub to implode. Which means that one moment in time these folks were there, thinking, breathing, hearing the creaking, scared out of their minds. Then, they just weren't there at all. They didn't know that the sub had imploded because it took less time for the hull of the sub to reach their brains than the nerve impulses did.
Really? I have wondered about that. Might have the captain heard it first, freaked out, but it was already too late? Or what if they all did know it was coming and knew they only had minutes or seconds to live?
Load More Replies... A lot of interesting facts, but nothing that I would consider disturbing or unsettling.
I think the subtext of Lina giving birth disturbed me. Who impregnated a 5 year old.
Load More Replies... 