96 Fun Facts About Creepy

What did Frau Troffea begin doing uncontrollably in Strasbourg in July 1518, starting an outbreak?

Dancing spread to as many as 400 people within weeks, and the city's first cure was more of it: officials put up a stage and hired musicians so they could dance it out.

The Catacombs of Paris hold the remains of roughly how many people?

About 6 million Parisians lie there: from the 1780s their bones were carted by night from the city's overflowing cemeteries into its old stone quarries.

Which country's Sedlec Ossuary is famous for a chandelier made of human bones?

Czechia's bone church stands at Sedlec, near Kutná Hora, where woodcarver František Rint arranged the heaps in 1870 and signed the wall in bone.

Tollund Man, a 2,400-year-old Danish bog body found in 1950, looked so fresh that his finders took him for what?

A recent murder victim, the peat cutters thought, so they called the police; the plaited noose still round his neck was in fact some 2,400 years old.

Bog acids preserve a body's skin and organs but do what to its bones?

Dissolve them: bog water turns almost as sour as vinegar and eats away the lime in bone, so in the most acid bogs only skin and hair are left.

Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Alps in 1991 after some 5,300 years, died how?

Shot with an arrow: the flint head stayed hidden in his left shoulder until an X-ray found it in 2001, ten years after hikers came across the body.

In 1976 a TV crew found the body of outlaw Elmer McCurdy, killed in 1911, being used as what?

A funhouse mannequin was all he seemed until a crewman pulled at the figure and its arm came off with a human bone inside; he was buried in Oklahoma in 1977.

What verdict did the Cadaver Synod of 897 reach on a pope who had been dead for nine months?

Guilty, and thrown in the Tiber: Pope Stephen VI had the corpse dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne, with a deacon standing by to answer for it.

Which ancient Egyptian treasures did European apothecaries grind into powder and sell as medicine for centuries?

Mummies were swallowed thanks to a mix-up: the remedy's name first meant bitumen, and translators took the black resin on embalmed bodies for the same cure.

The Radium Girls were poisoned partly because supervisors told them to point their paintbrushes how?

With their lips: each lick of the brush swallowed a little radium, yet when the women asked whether it was safe, managers told them there was nothing to worry about.

Scheele's Green, a fashionable 19th-century wallpaper and dress pigment, was made with what?

Arsenic made the green so vivid, and it killed: a 19-year-old London girl who dusted artificial leaves with it died in 1861 with the whites of her eyes turned green.

Post-mortem photography, common in the Victorian era, often posed the dead in what way?

As if peacefully sleeping was the favourite pose, and for many infants this picture was probably the only photograph ever taken of them.

In which US state did anthropologist William Bass open the world's first 'body farm'?

Tennessee: Bass built it at the state university in Knoxville after judging a body to be under a year dead when it was a Civil War colonel killed in 1864.

Why do a dead person's fingernails and hair appear to keep growing?

The skin shrinks back as the body dries out, baring more nail and hair; real growth needs glucose and stops soon after death, so undertakers sometimes moisturise the fingertips.

The 'zombie-ant fungus' Ophiocordyceps makes an infected ant do what before it dies?

Bite down on a leaf is its last act: the fungus then kills the ant, sprouts from its head and showers spores on the ants walking below.

Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills and becomes its replacement what?

Tongue: the louse drains the blood from the real one until it withers and falls away, then grips the stump and does the tongue's job itself.

A horsehair worm grows inside a cricket or grasshopper, then drives the insect to do what?

Walk into water and drown is the worm's doing: the adult can only breed in water, so it drives its host to a pond or stream and wriggles out once the insect is in.

A tarantula hawk wasp's larva eats its paralysed spider alive, saving which parts for last?

The vital organs go last so that the spider stays alive, and fresh, through the several weeks the grub spends feeding inside it.

Which shark, the longest-lived vertebrate known, is estimated to live for at least 270 years?

The Greenland shark's age is read from proteins in its eye that form before birth: one large female was dated to somewhere between 272 and 512 years old.

When threatened, a hagfish defends itself by producing huge quantities of what?

The slime swells to 10,000 times its size in under half a second and clogs a predator's gills; the hagfish then ties itself in a knot to wipe itself clean.

In some deep-sea anglerfish, what happens to the tiny male on finding a female?

Fuses into her body is right: he bites on, their skin and bloodstreams join, and he wastes away to little more than a pair of testes.

The giant bloom of the titan arum relies on which pollinators?

Carrion beetles and flies come to lay eggs on what smells like rotting meat, and the bloom heats itself to about body temperature to spread the stink further.

'Zombie worms' of the genus Osedax were discovered boring into the sunken skeleton of which animal?

A whale that sinks can feed deep-sea life for decades, and these worms, which have no mouth or gut, push root-like growths into its skeleton and let bacteria digest the fats.

The 'brain-eating amoeba' Naegleria fowleri infects people through which route?

Up the nose while swimming is the usual way in: the amoeba follows the smell nerve to the brain, while swallowing the same water does no harm at all.

Guinea worm disease has no drug cure, so how is the metre-long worm removed?

Wound around a stick over weeks, a few centimetres a day so the worm does not snap; cases have fallen from about 3.5 million a year in 1986 to some 10 in 2025.

The surgery called osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis restores sight by implanting a lens set in what?

The patient's own tooth is shaped to hold a plastic lens, then left in the cheek for about four months to grow a blood supply before it is fixed to the eye.

People with Cotard's syndrome hold what delusion?

That they are dead or do not exist is the classic belief, yet in a study of 100 cases more than half also believed they could never die.

Newfoundland folklore calls sleep paralysis 'the Old Hag' because sufferers report what?

A figure sitting on their chest is the classic report: the mind wakes while the body is still held motionless for sleep, and sufferers feel a presence pressing them down.

What do people with 'exploding head syndrome' experience?

Imagined bangs on falling asleep are all it is: a benign, painless glitch that doctors suspect begins in the brainstem as it switches from waking to sleep.

The Island of the Dolls lies in the Xochimilco canals of which capital?

Mexico City's canals hold the island where Julián Santana Barrera hung dolls for decades, he said to calm a drowned girl's spirit; after his death in 2001 it became a tourist stop.

Robert the Doll, kept in a Key West museum, is regularly sent what by past visitors?

Letters of apology reach the Key West museum addressed to the doll himself, from visitors who blame a run of bad luck on having shown Robert disrespect.

La Pascualita, a Chihuahua bridal shop's dummy from the 1930s, is rumoured to be what?

The embalmed daughter of the owner is the rumour: locals said the bride had died of a spider or scorpion bite around her wedding day and been set in the window in her gown.

Poveglia, the 'haunted' island in the Venetian lagoon, was used from the late 1700s as what?

A quarantine station for ships, and a quiet one: a historian of Venice counts just two plague ships and about 20 deaths there, not the 100,000 of the TV ghost shows.

How had the nine hikers left their tent in the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident?

By cutting the fabric from inside, then fleeing downhill without proper clothes; a 2021 study showed how a small slab avalanche, set up by the ledge dug for the tent, could explain it.

What was missing when the Mary Celeste was found adrift near the Azores in 1872?

The lifeboat and everyone aboard were gone: Captain Briggs, his wife, their two-year-old daughter and the crew were never seen again, yet the ship still carried months of food.

In December 1900 three keepers vanished from a lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in which island group?

Flannan Isles keepers, the official inquiry decided, were caught by a huge wave at the west landing and swept away; the famous uneaten meal was invented by a 1912 poem.

What single word did John White find carved on a post at the abandoned Roanoke colony in 1590?

CROATOAN was the name of a nearby island and its people, and White took it to mean the settlers had moved there, but rough seas drove his ships home before he could look.

Which illustrated book, written in a script nobody can read, has defeated codebreakers from both world wars?

The Voynich manuscript even beat William Friedman, whose team broke Japan's wartime Purple cipher: he studied it for decades and never solved it. Its vellum dates from the early 1400s.

A 1977 radio signal from space is named after which word astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote on the printout?

Wow! was Ehman's note beside a 72-second burst caught by Ohio State's Big Ear telescope, close to the frequency of hydrogen that alien-hunters watch; it has never been heard again.

'The Bloop', a mysterious sound recorded in the Pacific in 1997, was finally attributed to what?

Cracking ice was NOAA's answer: the rumble matched an iceberg breaking away from an Antarctic glacier, after years of guesses that ran from military exercises to an unknown sea creature.

The Kryptos sculpture, carved with four coded messages, stands at which agency's HQ?

The CIA has had Kryptos outside its Langley offices since 1990, and in 2025 its sculptor, Jim Sanborn, sold the answer to the stubborn fourth message at auction for $962,500.

What does 'Tamám Shud', printed on a scrap of paper hidden in the Somerton Man's pocket, mean?

It is finished: the Persian words end the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the scrap had been torn from the last page of a copy that police later tracked down.

One famous case of 'the Hum', a low drone only a few residents can hear, is named after which New Mexico town?

Taos lent the drone its name, and a study there in the early 1990s found at least 2% of residents could hear it; a similar hum in Windsor, Ontario, faded when a nearby steel plant shut down in 2020.

Which animals have repeatedly leapt, for no clear reason, from Overtoun Bridge near Dumbarton in Scotland?

Dogs have jumped so often that locals call it the Dog Suicide Bridge; one theory is that the scent of mink in the ravine lures them over the parapet, onto rocks 15 metres below.

The eerily preserved child mummy Rosalia Lombardo lies in the Capuchin catacombs of which city?

Palermo's Capuchin catacombs hold her glass-topped casket: she died in 1920, a week before turning two, and her embalmer's lost formula was later found in his handwritten memoir.

Two Brazilian technicians found dead on a Niterói hill in 1966 wore eye masks made of what?

Lead masks give the case its name, and a notebook found beside the men deepens the puzzle: it told them to swallow capsules at 18:30, then 'protect metals, await signal, mask'.

The death mask of an unknown woman, said to have drowned in the Seine, became the face of what?

A CPR training dummy named Resusci Anne wears her features. Norwegian toymaker Åsmund Laerdal picked a woman's face because he thought male trainees would be reluctant to kiss a man's.

The real 'Annabelle', kept by Ed and Lorraine Warren in a museum display box, is what kind of toy?

A Raggedy Ann doll, soft and smiling, was handed to the couple by a student nurse in the 1970s. The films swapped in a menacing porcelain version, partly over trademark worries.

What do the largest sand tiger shark embryos do inside the womb, so that only two pups are born?

Eat their siblings: once an embryo reaches about 10 cm it devours every smaller one, leaving a single pup in each of the mother's two uterine horns. Biologists call it adelphophagy.

Whose brain did pathologist Thomas Harvey remove at a 1955 autopsy and keep in jars for decades?

Albert Einstein's brain was cut into about 240 blocks, apparently without his family's permission. A journalist tracked it down in 1978, stored in two mason jars inside a cider box.

The Texas horned lizard can drive off coyotes by squirting what from the corners of its eyes?

Blood can shoot up to 1.5 metres and is laced with a chemical that tastes foul to canine predators. The lizard chokes off the flow leaving its head until tiny vessels around the eyelids burst.

For a study published in 1907, physician Duncan MacDougall weighed six dying patients, hoping to measure what?

The human soul came out at 21 grams, the weight one patient lost at death, and the figure stuck in popular culture. Scientists rejected the study, which had just six subjects.

Which farmyard bird, named Mike, lived for 18 months after a Colorado farmer cut off its head?

A chicken named Mike survived because the axe missed most of his brain stem, so he could still perch and walk. His home town of Fruita holds a festival in his honour every May.

Rats and mice infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii lose their fear of which predators?

Cats are among the only animals in which the parasite can reproduce sexually, so it profits when its rodent host gets eaten. Infected rats even stop avoiding the smell of cat urine.

The beak of a 17th-century plague doctor's mask was packed with what, to guard against 'bad air'?

Herbs and dried flowers such as lavender, peppermint and roses filled the beak, sometimes with a vinegar sponge. No evidence shows the costume was worn during the medieval Black Death.

'Green Boots', a climber's body left beside the trail for years, was a landmark on which mountain?

Mount Everest climbers on the north-east ridge passed the body, curled in a limestone alcove at 8,500 metres, until it was moved in 2014. The man died in the mountain's 1996 disaster.

The famous 'bodies' of Pompeii were made by filling hollows left in the volcanic ash with what?

Plaster was first poured into the voids in the 1860s by archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who realised they were spaces left by decayed victims. Once it set, the ash was cleared away to leave a replica of the body.

H. H. Holmes's so-called 'Murder Castle' stood in which city at the time of its 1893 World's Fair?

Chicago's three-storey 'castle' hid trapdoors, gas chambers and a basement crematorium, or so the yellow press claimed. The tales were false, though Holmes did murder and was executed in 1896.

Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, ruled which principality in the 15th century?

Wallachia was his in three separate reigns before he died in battle. Bram Stoker's notes for the novel never mention Vlad directly, though the vampire count seems to have borrowed his name.

How did Giles Corey die during the Salem witch trials after refusing to enter a plea?

Pressed under stones piled on boards, he died still refusing to plead. That summer he had deeded his farm to two sons-in-law, and the land passed to them.

Railroad foreman Phineas Gage became a medical celebrity in 1848 by surviving what accident?

An iron rod through his head, more than a metre long, destroyed much of his left frontal lobe. Friends said the changed man was no longer Gage, yet he went on to drive stagecoaches in Chile.

Which Latin term names the stiffening of a corpse's limbs that can begin four hours after death?

Rigor mortis peaks about 13 hours after death, because muscles need the energy molecule ATP to relax and the supply has run out. The body loosens again only as decay breaks the muscle down.

Coulrophobia, a modern word coined on informal lists of phobias, is an irrational fear of what?

Clowns have a long record as villains: the Joker made the evil clown a stock figure from 1940, and Pennywise in Stephen King's It revived the type in the 1980s.

Whose embalmed body has lain on public display in a Red Square mausoleum since 1924?

Vladimir Lenin was first laid in a wooden tomb built within six days of his death. From 1953 to 1961 the building was shared, and it bore Stalin's name beside his.

People with Capgras delusion become convinced that a spouse, parent or close friend has been what?

Replaced by an impostor who looks identical, the loved one feels like a stranger in disguise. French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras first described the delusion, which can even fasten on a pet.

The jewel wasp stings the brain of which insect, then leads it by an antenna to a burrow?

A cockroach stung in the part of its brain that controls the escape reflex stops trying to flee, so the far smaller wasp can walk it home on a leash. Its larva then feeds on the living host.

In a Tibetan sky burial, the dead are cut up on a mountainside mainly to feed which birds?

Vultures are given the whole body in most accounts, and the bones are then ground with barley flour for the smaller birds waiting their turn. The rite's Tibetan name means bird-scattered.

At Madagascar's Famadihana, families lift ancestors from the tomb, rewrap the bodies and do what?

Dance with them: the family carries the freshly wrapped bodies overhead to live music and circles the tomb. Known as the turning of the bones, the reunion is usually held every five to seven years.

The Darvaza gas crater, nicknamed the 'Door to Hell', lies in which country's Karakum Desert?

Turkmenistan's crater formed when drilling punctured a gas cavern and the roof fell in. By some accounts Soviet engineers lit the leaking gas in 1971 to stop poisonous fumes spreading.

The 'Elephant's Foot', a solid mass of melted reactor fuel, lies beneath which nuclear power plant?

Chernobyl's Reactor 4 left the black, layered lump in a maintenance corridor, where it was found eight months after the explosion. It is only a small part of the fuel that melted down through the building.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, was all but abandoned because what has burned beneath the town since 1962?

A coal mine fire has spread through the maze of abandoned tunnels under the town, though how it began is still debated. At its present rate it could burn for more than 250 years.

Ilha da Queimada Grande, off the coast of Brazil, is closed to visitors because it teems with what?

Venomous snakes called golden lanceheads live nowhere else on Earth. They were cut off when seas rose after the last ice age and survive by hunting birds; only the navy and vetted researchers may land.

In 1986 Cameroon's Lake Nyos suffocated over 1,700 people by suddenly releasing a cloud of what?

Carbon dioxide, heavier than air, sank onto villages up to 25 km away and also killed 3,500 livestock. Pipes were later installed to vent gas from the lake's depths and cut the risk of a repeat.

Which never-identified murderer mailed cryptograms to San Francisco Bay Area newspapers in 1969?

The Zodiac Killer sent four cryptograms in all and threatened more murders unless the papers printed his letters. One was solved in 1969 and a second not until 2020, while two have never been cracked.

A 1919 letter claiming to be from the Axeman of New Orleans promised to spare any home playing what?

Jazz bands, professional and amateur, played at hundreds of house parties across the city that night. Nobody was murdered, and the attacker was never identified.

Elizabeth Short, whose 1947 death in Los Angeles was never solved, is known by which nickname?

The Black Dahlia was a name the press gave her after death, possibly borrowed from a 1946 film noir with a similar title. Her killing is among the oldest unsolved cases in Los Angeles County.

The 1945 loss of Flight 19, five US Navy bombers on a training run from Florida, fed which legend?

The Bermuda Triangle legend grew when a flying boat sent to search for the five Avengers was also lost, with its 13 crew. The Navy finally recorded the cause of the loss as unknown.

In 1987 a never-identified pirate hijacked two US TV broadcasts while wearing a mask of whom?

Max Headroom, a fictional TV host, was the disguise for both break-ins on a single November night. The first briefly cut into a newscast; the second ran for about 90 seconds during an episode of Doctor Who.

UVB-76, a radio station nicknamed 'The Buzzer' for its endless drone, broadcasts from which country?

Russia's military is the best-supported guess for who runs it. The buzz repeats about 25 times a minute around the clock and is occasionally interrupted by a spoken message.

Which philosopher's clothed skeleton, topped with a wax head, sits in University College London?

Jeremy Bentham asked in his will to be dissected and then kept as an 'auto-icon'. The attempt to mummify his real head left it so macabre that a wax one, fitted with his own hair, took its place.

Which astronomer's middle finger, cut from his body in 1737, is displayed in a gilded glass egg?

Galileo Galilei lost the finger, with a thumb, an index finger, a tooth and a vertebra, when his remains were moved to a grand tomb in Florence 95 years after his death.

Whose corpse was dug up and beheaded in 1661, the head then set on a pole above Westminster Hall?

Oliver Cromwell had died of natural causes in 1658, but the restored monarchy wanted revenge for the execution of Charles I. His head passed between collectors until it was buried in Cambridge in 1960.

After Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated on an Italian beach, his widow Mary kept which part of him?

His heart, or what was taken for it, would not burn and was pulled from the pyre by his friend Trelawny. A year after Mary died, its remains were found in her desk, wrapped in one of his poems.

Which author died in 1849, days after being found delirious in Baltimore in someone else's clothes?

Edgar Allan Poe was never coherent long enough to explain what had happened, and the cause of his death is still unknown. He is said to have called out the name Reynolds the night before he died.

A 1974 night at Colorado's Stanley Hotel gave Stephen King the setting for which novel?

The Shining was born when King and his wife checked in just before the winter shutdown and found they were the only guests. The Stanley became the Overlook Hotel in the 1977 novel.

Priests' 1949 rites over a Maryland boy, recorded as 'Roland Doe', inspired which horror novel?

The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel, drew on the claims made about the case. One account says 48 people witnessed the real ritual, nine of them Jesuits.

In European folklore the 'Hand of Glory', said to hold a household motionless, was cut from whom?

A hanged man's hand, dried and pickled, held a candle made from the same man's fat. Thieves believed it could also open any lock, and that only milk would put the flame out.

Fatal familial insomnia, an inherited disease that robs its victims of sleep, is caused by what?

A prion, a misfolded protein, does the damage after a mutation in a single gene. By 1998 only 40 families worldwide were known to carry it, and death follows within months to a few years of the first symptoms.

The parasitic barnacle Sacculina sterilises which sea creatures and reshapes males to look female?

Crabs carrying the parasite are sterilised, and a male's abdomen widens and flattens into a female's shape. He may even perform female mating dances, and up to half of a population can be infected.

Which Caribbean tree, whose fruit the Spanish call the 'little apple of death', has blistering sap?

Manchineel sap is so caustic that sheltering under the tree in rain can raise blisters, and smoke from burning it can injure the eyes. Its fruit and leaves resemble an apple tree's.

The plutonium 'demon core' killed two physicists in accidents at which laboratory in 1945 and 1946?

Los Alamos had prepared the core for a third wartime atomic bomb that was never needed. In the second accident a screwdriver holding two reflector halves apart slipped, and the core was melted down that summer.

Scotland's Gruinard Island was off limits from 1942 to 1990 after tests of which biological weapon?

Anthrax bombs were set off beside 80 tethered sheep, which began dying within days. The tests served a plan, never used, to scatter spiked linseed cakes across the German countryside.

Mercy Brown was dug up in 1892 as a suspected vampire after her mother and sister died of which disease?

Tuberculosis, then called consumption, was wasting her brother too, so their Rhode Island neighbours blamed the undead. Some of her organs were burned and the ashes mixed into a tonic for him to drink.

Which caustic red lake in Tanzania can calcify dead animals so that they look turned to stone?

Lake Natron's brine can pass pH 12, yet it is the only regular East African breeding ground of 2.5 million lesser flamingos. Salt-loving microbes give the water its colour.

Kuru, a fatal brain disease of Papua New Guinea's Fore people, was spread by which funeral custom?

Eating dead relatives was thought to help free their spirits. Women and children, who usually ate the brain, were hit hardest, and cases kept appearing for decades after the custom ended around 1960.

Ethnobotanist Wade Davis claimed Haitian 'zombie powder' relied on a nerve poison from which fish?

Pufferfish flesh carries tetrodotoxin, often fatal on its own. Davis said it worked with a second powder of delirium-causing drugs to produce a deathlike state that left the victim in a sorcerer's power.