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“Fatal Familial Insomnia”: 30 Creepy True Stories That Might Give You Nightmares
No matter how terrifying a horror film may be, you can always remind yourself that it’s not real. Those are just actors in costumes on a set, and no, the Babadook isn’t actually coming after you.
What’s much more disturbing, however, is any story that’s actually true. And if you’re looking to have some nightmares tonight, pandas, you’ve come to the right place. Redditors have been sharing the most chilling true stories they’ve ever heard (or experienced themselves), as well as terrifying tales that have photographic evidence, so we’ve compiled the creepiest ones below. We’ll warn you right now that you might not want to read these stories before bed, but if you’re a fan of horror, be sure to upvote the ones that leave you seriously unsettled!
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#1
This is second hand from my mom so I dont remember everything, but when I was younger (like 3 or 4) and she was home alone with me some guy came up to the door. This was before cellphones and people were nicer so she answered it even tho it was like 8 or 9 at night. Well the guy was asking if he could come in and use her phone but she said no. He asked a couple more times before walking in and immediately got stop by the family dog grabbing his hand and holding it tightly. He started to get nervous and my dads dog led him back to the door (he had walked further in at this point) my mom was able to push him out and lock the door before running upstairs and calling the police. The cops picked him up a little while later and they found out he had been in a bar fight and stabbed a guy a bunch of times. Without my "older brother" my mom and I could've been seriously hurt. He was the best dog ever and lived till the ripe age of 15.
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#2
Last summer in my city a 14-year old girl was r***d near a train station. After her a****r left her she tried to get help and flagged down a vehicle and was r***d a second time in the car of the man who stopped. Two complete strangers r***d her on the same day, it happened only a few miles away from my house and I still think about it from time to time.
#3
Check the m****r of Junko Furuta story.
To sum it up : 44 days of h**l for a girl who was kidnapped by teenage boys. She went through every possible t*****e imaginable and finally died after she was pushed to her limits. A mangaka called waita uziga made an adaptation. I could not even finish reading it without feeling physically sick.
According to the wiki, they :
* R***d her over 400 times.
* Hanged her body from the ceiling and used her as a "punching bag"
* Dropped barbells onto her stomach several times.
* Forced her to eat live cockroaches and drink her own urine.
* Forced her to m*sturbate in front of them.
* Shoved a still-lit light bulb into her v****a.
* Set fireworks into her a**s, v****a, mouth and ears.
* Burnt her v****a and [private part] with cigarettes and lighters.
* Pierced her [private parts] with sewing needles.
The horrific nature comes from the complete lack of empathy from her captors (who looked like completely innocent youngsters), and the fact she was a random girl, who were at the wrong place, at the wrong time. She could eventually be saved by the couples living in the building, but they feared the teenager boys. Imagine : having the hope you'll eventually make it out with your sole will because you wanna see your family again, until your body finally shut down of exhaustion. I've never felt more rage personally for such a disturbing story...
To find out what inspired this conversation in the first place, we got in touch with the Reddit user who invited readers to share the "scariest stories [they] know of with actual photographic proof," Dan_The_PaniniMan.
"At the time, I was watching a lot of short horror stories on TikTok, but I never knew if they were true or not, which took away most of the intrigue," the author says. "So I decided to make a post on Reddit asking people to share their best stories, but with photographic evidence to back them up."
#4
I just watched a documentary about Colleen Stan, who survived being kidnapped by a s*xual s****t, who kept her in a coffin-sized box he built under his bed, 22 hours a day, for seven years while he r***d and tortured her.
The ~~victim~~ survivor is the primary interviewee in the documentary and tells her story, on camera, for most of the documentary. The cops made mention of her bravery and ability withstand her t*****e, and manipulate her kidnapper to increase her safety.
#5
Serial r*pist Marc O'Leary was caught in 2011 and charged with several r***d. Now, none of these women's stories are particularly pretty, but there's one woman whose story takes the cake. In 2008, an 18 years old woman went to police claiming she was r***d. They didn't believe her and ended up charging her with filing a false report. She had to pay a fine, have a crime on her record, and get this: to stay in subsidized housing, they made her confess that she made the whole thing up. Her photo was later found among his belongings.
#6
This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away.
Judy Kirby m******d six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit s*****e. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in d**g trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest.
She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a h**h rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride.
The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.
We also asked the OP if he could share the scariest story he's ever heard. "I would probably have to say the Hinterkaifeck m*rders. In 1922, in a small village near Munich, a family of five and their new maid [lost their lives] at their farm," the author shared. "The k*ller or k*llers lived with the six corpses for three days, during which time they ate food from the house, fed the animals on the property, and used the home’s fireplace to burn something unidentified."
"Four of the bodies were found stacked in the barn, the victims likely having been lured there one by one," the OP continued. "The frightening part is that, prior to the incident, the family members and their former maid had reported hearing strange noises coming from the attic, which led the maid to quit her job. She had left the household six months [prior to this], and the perpetrator or perpetrators were never caught. The case remains unsolved to this day."
#7
For me, I was walking back home at like 11PM when I notice this hooded guy behind me. I do what I read somewhere you should do and took 3 right turns in a row to see if he was actually following me, and he was. I managed to gather all my courage and yelled at him "What the [darn] do you want" with the most menacing tone I could muster and he just turned around and left.
#8
This is ongoing. Maybe too late to get noticed. I live in a modest house on a quiet street. 9 years ago, someone bought the house next to me to basically shelve their 18yo schizophrenic son. They pay the rent and utilities and occasionally drop off cash. He has done about as well as an unmanaged schizophrenic can do on his own. To paint an image, he is a muscular black guy with telltale crazy eyes. He stands on his balcony around 3am most nights screaming and threatening... someone (voices, me, I can’t tell). The first major incident was when he shot a deer from his second-story balcony. It was standing across the street about 4ft from a neighbor’s bedroom. The police came and left when he didn’t answer. I woke up to swat in my bushes the next morning with some serious scoped weapons. He left with them but returned in a few weeks. Astonishingly, I discovered that he incurred no charges for this. Aside from this, it has been general weirdness: running down the street yelling, wearing winter clothing in the summer/sometimes boxers in the winter, collecting shopping carts, breaking windows, etc.
Over the last 2 years, he has become focused more on me. I first noticed when he told me to stop contacting him. As in, I had become one of the voices. I had always been neighborly to him and helped how I could, but it is becoming clear that he is directing his paranoia at me (40ish dude). He is becoming more aggressive. Slashed tires, trampled plants, things missing. I call the police, they take a record and say there is nothing they can do. I call his father and he tells me he is an adult and can’t make him check into a facility. He won’t sell the house or move him. For reference, they are from somewhere in the world that attempting an exorcism is a reasonable course of action.
Last week, he began banging on my door at 3am nightly. He thinks I am stealing his rap lyrics (like I am going to publish an album about k*****g and [forced intimacy] white people). My family is terrified and he runs by the time I make it outside. I report it every time, but he doesn’t answer the door and the cops/crisis team just leave. I really feel like the system is dropping the ball here, and it is going to take an incident for something to be done. Maybe not the scariest thing in the world to you, dear reader, but it is in mine.
Edit: Thanks for all of the thoughtful replies. Thought I would answer some. I’m pretty broke, so moving or lawyering is not really an option. We are in the process of a protection order, but that requires several trips to the downtown courthouse. I am saving for a few cameras. I’m a bit ashamed, but I did purchase a handg*n a few years ago (because of him). I wouldn’t use it unless he forced his way into my house. I have done everything I can think of to get the system to work. We have gone to the police station multiple times. We have the mobile health crisis unit’s number and call them when it seems like he needs an evaluation. We have asked his parents to intervene. We have asked him personally to contact his case worker to get help. We really want him to be able to live a good life, but I can’t personally do it for him, and the *system* seems to be reactionary.
#9
Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal who admitted he still fantasizes about k*****g and eating women (after k*****g and eating a woman in Paris) walks free unmedicated and unmonitored in Japan to this day. Pretty creepy to know people like that walk around freely.
Wikipedia
Finally, we asked Dan_The_PaniniMan what he thought of the responses his post received. "I was amazed by the sheer number of replies, and while I wouldn’t say I exactly enjoyed reading the stories, they were undeniably intriguing," he shared.
"One story that stood out to me was that of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who, in 1981, k*lled and cannibalized Renée Hartevelt in Paris. The most shocking part is that, due to a legal loophole, he was released shortly after being extradited to Japan," the author continued. "He went on to live freely for the rest of his life, appearing on talk shows, writing manga depicting the m*rder and cannibalism of Hartevelt, and even becoming a minor celebrity in Japan, all while openly discussing his desire to commit a similar crime again."
#10
Not sure if posted here but a woman was abducted and r***d by 2 men and then stabbed over 30 times. Her neck muscle completely removed, her guts spilling out. She crawled to the hospital WITH HER HEAD ALMOST DETACHED and survived. She wrote a book and now is a motivational speaker with 2 kids, despite the fact that she was disemboweled.
#11
I work at a pizza place in St. Louis called IMO’s. About 10 years ago, there was a guy who was a manager at our store named Michael Devlin. He abducted 2 children in total but quickly got caught a few days after abducting the second child. The terrifying thing is that he had held the first child (who was 11 when abducted) captive for over 4 years and pretended that he was his son. The kid even went by the last name Devlin after the whole charade was over! He abducted the second kid by following a school bus to somewhere in buttfuck Missouri, somewhere where hardly anyone would be able to see him. When he pulled up in his truck, a kid in the back of the bus noticed how it was weird that there was a car in the area other than the usual one’s he saw on most commutes. Next thing he knew, the kid they dropped off went missing, so he gave the police a description of it. A few days later, after reading the paper, my pizza shop owner, Mike, recognized the description and ended up filing a report on his own manager. Devlin is serving like 70 life sentences or some crazy s**t.
Also, I work with some people who worked with him- most I’ve heard them say about him is that he was a d**k 😂.
#12
There was a serial k****r known as the Weepy Voiced K****r. He would k**l people then call 911 from a payphone, crying and begging them to catch and stop him. You can find the recordings of his 911 calls on YouTube.
#13
The guy who died in nutty putty cave. He basically crawled into narrower and narrower passageways thinking it would eventually open up. He was trapped for many hours unable to get a full breath. After he died, they decided it would be too difficult to get him out so they closed the cave and left him in there. I can't think of anything worse than dealing with that kind of claustrophobia. Edited to include detail I forgot: he was trapped *upside down*.
#14
Ronald Stoecker picked up an underage teen(Jean Marie Humble) near Peoria, IL. He then drove her several miles out to the country, proceeded to r**e her with a knife in a very old and unused farm shed. She crawled her way at least 500 yards to nearest house and got help. That was my house. She ended up dying a week or so later. Parents never liked talking about it and still don't, really. He fled to Costa Rica and eventually was caught. What a piece of garbage. Happened around '97 or '98
#15
The serial k****r H.H. Holmes is the man that the term psychopath was created for. He would visit the fair and dazzle women with his beautiful eyes. Sometimes he'd k**l them pretty immediately. Sometimes he'd take them as lovers or even marry them and live with them for a while before k*****g them. Of course, psychopaths can't actually feel love, so it was really just to escalate the trauma once he k****d them.
He k****d them merely because he was curious. Sometimes using surgical tools. Sometimes by suffocating them in an airtight room. Sometimes by letting gas into said airtight room. And he'd take notes on his observations as they died. Then he'd dig around in their insides for a bit to further sate his curiosity.
He was jailed and hanged for unrelated crimes (back when capital punishment wasn't just for murderers). Only later did they find the meticulous documentation of everything he'd done.
#16
My great aunt was buried alive when she was only in her 20s. The casket was brought up when the cemetery had to be relocated. The casket had broken, and she was upside down. Claw marks everywhere inside the casket.
#17
So, over 3k comments in this thread so I doubt this will get any attention but~~ I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this rather recent case yet - but the security footage inside of Danvers Highschool showing Philip Chism following his math teacher Colleen Ritzer through a hallway and into the womens bathroom only to emerge a few moments later with what appears to be blood on his jeans. He comes back some time later with a large heavy duty trash can, where he then wheels it out of the bathroom and out of school grounds into the woods where he dumps her body and makes off with her wallet. Of which he takes and goes to the movies with.
She was just trying to help the new kid in class adjust to the new school. She cared about her students and he was visibly struggling. He brought a knife to school that day- no idea if this was premeditated for *her* specifically, or if he was just waiting for someone to p**s him off that day and she just happened to be the one to be there. The security footage is… chilling, to say the least.
#18
The toolbox killers. Since one of the k****r accepted a plea deal of a life sentence with parole after 30 years, he gave very detail explanation on what happened during the m*****s. It's a lot to read but man you really get the feel for what those poor girls went through when they got abducted.
Edit: since a lot of people are shocked read at your own risk. Just know that it's a m******r confession, very detailed. Their gruesome actions include inserting foreign objects into the body.
#19
My Aunt's ex-husband was the last victim of the Ohio Craigslist killer (who offered jobs to men through Craigslist to steal their money/credit cards). He only survived because the man's g*n jammed before a fatal headshot. He ran and hid in the woods for hours before finding a house and someone to call 911. Richard Beasley was charged with killing 3 men and the attempted [end] of my Aunt's ex. It's the closest a [end] has come in my family (and hopefully it stays that way. We have been lucky in this day and age).
#20
A friend of a friend was travelling in the UK and had to hitch-hike. He dropped her off at home. The next day police came knocking and proceeded to take her to the station and demand how she knows this man, what is their relationship etc. She finds out that the man had k****d another female hitch-hiker that same day and had her in the trunk at the same time he was driving her (the friend). For some unknown reason he hadn’t k****d her. She couldn’t sleep and cried for days and her home was placed on watch.
#21
I have two, and they’re both tangentially related.
The first is of the ant-walking alligator people of Hiroshima. Of all the horrifying things that happened in the wake of that nuclear strike, in my opinion, the alligator people are by far the most horrific. They were horribly marred and disfigured by the blast, should much so that they could no longer speak. Apparently, the only sound they made was a scream that sounded like cicadas buzzing.
The other is Hisashi Ouchi. He was a worker on a nuclear plant when an accident occurred, and a tank of radioactive material reached critical mass. He received a fatal dose of radiation, but was kept alive for 83 days. At one point he even told the doctors to “stop treating me like a guinea pig”, but they still kept him alive. They should have let him die after a few weeks, but they used him for experiments.
#22
The [end] of Yvonne Pearson, she was targeted by Peter Sutcliffe (A serial killer known as The Yorkshire Ripper) for being a prostitute.
He hit her on the back of her head with a hammer several times, He then noticed that there was a taxi nearby so he dragged her behind an old sofa and to stop her from making noise, he shoved horse hair down her throat while pinching her nose shut. When the taxi left she was still alive, so he kicked her and even jumped on her chest with all his body weight and eventually she died.
She had two young children which makes the story even worse.
#23
A relative of mine (distant, like 5th or 6th cousin i think) was a professional diver for an oil company, he would dive to check things below the surface at depths great enough to require mixed gas air tanks. He had a suit malfunction, and had to be kept in one of those pressure chambers to slowly let the gasses out of his body.
While he was breathing through a sealed face mask, someone changed the tank at the end out, and a safety device meant to keep the air from being pulled back through the (from inside the chamber to the outside) failed and literally pulled his lungs and stomach out through his mouth, k*****g instantly.
My mother has the news article somewhere, this was in the late 8os i think, and happened off the coast of Louisianan in the Gulf of Mexico.
#24
That Netflix documentary about the pizza guy in Erie, Pennsylvania who had a b*mb collar put around his neck then was forced to rob a bank. As a former delivery driver I was scared shitless the entire time, but also super intrigued by the investigation and the people involved.
I’m really blanking on the name of the mini series right now, but I’ll try to find it and make an edit if no one comments before.
#25
Pictures of the Black Dahlia. S***s not high definition but it is awfully f****d up. If you look it up, you’ll find Elizabeth Short was m******d on skid row. Her body was found a day after she was m******d. She was found with a Glasgow smile, her body was severed in half at the hips with all of the blood drained out and the killer communicated with the cops but was never found.
#26
Hinterkaifeck. On a small farm in Germany in 1922, someone brutally m******d the entire family and their maid, then lived in the house for days after. The killer lured family members to the attic one by one - the daughter was m******d in the barn with a pickaxe, and evidence shows she stayed alive in agony for hours.
The father had reported hearing footsteps in the attic in the days leading up to the killings, but could find no one. He also saw footprints in the snow leading to the machine room, where the lock was broken. It took four days for the bodies to be discovered, in which time people reported seeing and smelling smoke from the fireplace - the smell was “disgusting”. It’s unknown what was being burned.
The previous family maid had quit six months before the killings, citing sounds in the attic and claiming the place was haunted. Six months.
To this day, there has been nothing close to a conclusive end to the story. It still haunts me. There are pictures of the bodies online if you look for them. Gruesome stuff.
#27
That one underwater proposal where the guy’s girlfriend was in an underwater hotel room and the guy swam outside of it to propose. You could see him struggling, couldn’t hold his breath any longer and swam up but never made it to the surface. One of the happiest moments in their lives only to end in tragedy.
#28
The final photo of Regina Kay Walters, who ran away from home with her boyfriend and they were picked up and m******d by a serial killer.
#29
Got told this story the other day. There was a girl in England who had been using the tinder app and met a guy and planned to go on a date with him. He picked her up from her apartment and they went to a restaurant however during the entree just started to feel ill and asked him to drop her home. While at home she went straight upstairs to her room and was just chilling in bed as she felt ill. Eventually she hears something happening downstairs and as she lives alone, she freaks out and called the police that there was an intruder in her house. Eventually the police come and arrest the dude she had been on the date with but tell her not to come downstairs until they can clean up. The police beg her not too but she insists as it’s her house. She comes down and all the furniture in her lounge has been moved to the sides, there were white sheets covering everything and a set of machetes lined up perfectly. Her date had planned to [end] her and had spiked her drink hence her feeling ill.
#30
Cant see if someone mentioned it, but that guy on Japan that was exposed to so much radiation his skin fell off and they kept him alive to monitor him.
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