50 Fun Facts About Creepy

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

Between 50 and 400 people joined in over the following weeks; the leading theory today is stress-induced mass hysteria, though ergot poisoning has also been blamed.

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

The bones were moved by night from overflowing cemeteries into old limestone mines from 1788; Robespierre and Danton are somewhere down there.

The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is famous for a chandelier made of what?

Woodcarver František Rint arranged the bones of 40,000 to 70,000 people in 1870 and signed his name on the wall, in bone.

What message greets visitors to Rome's Capuchin Crypt, decorated with friars' bones?

New friars were dug up after about 30 years so their bones could join the decor; Mark Twain wrote about the place.

Tollund Man, a 2,400-year-old Danish bog body found in 1950, was so well preserved that his finders assumed what?

He still had a plaited noose around his neck; his last meal was barley porridge eaten 12 to 24 hours before he was hanged.

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

The acid has a pH like vinegar and pickles the flesh, while eating away the calcium phosphate of the skeleton.

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

The arrowhead is still lodged in his left shoulder; he also carried 61 tattoos and was lactose intolerant.

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

The Six Million Dollar Man crew were filming at a Long Beach amusement park when an arm came off; he was finally buried in Oklahoma in 1977.

The Cadaver Synod of 897 was the trial of a pope who had been dead for nine months. What was the verdict?

Pope Stephen VI had Formosus's corpse dressed in vestments and propped on a throne; three fingers were cut off before the body went in the river.

For centuries European apothecaries sold 'mummia', a medicine made from what?

The word originally meant bitumen; a mistranslation set off the trade, and artists used the same stuff as the pigment 'mummy brown'.

The Radium Girls dial painters were poisoned partly because supervisors told them to shape their brushes how?

The 1928 settlement gave each of five New Jersey plaintiffs $10,000; radium dial paint was not banned until the 1960s.

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

Journals reported children wasting away in bright green rooms; a Greenock taste for green blancmange left locals wary of green sweets for generations.

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

For many infants it was the only photograph the family would ever have; photographers sometimes tinted the cheeks pink.

How many people are documented as having been saved by a 19th-century 'safety coffin'?

Decomposition gases set off false alarms; the claim that 'saved by the bell' comes from these coffins is a myth.

In which US state was the world's first 'body farm' set up in 1981?

Anthropologist William Bass founded it in Knoxville; the US now has eight, and the biggest is a 26-acre ranch in Texas.

Do fingernails and hair keep growing after death?

Dehydration tightens the skin, exposing more nail and hair; it is one of the most persistent myths about corpses.

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

The fungus then grows a stalk out of the ant's head and rains spores on the trail below; the whole process takes 4 to 10 days.

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

It is the only parasite known to functionally replace a host's organ; the fish carries on using it like a prosthetic.

Horsehair worms grow inside crickets and grasshoppers, then drive their host to do what?

The worm, up to two metres long in extreme cases, then wriggles out to breed in the water; some can even escape from a predator that eats the host.

The tarantula hawk wasp lays its egg on a paralysed tarantula. What does the larva do?

The wasp's own sting rates near the top of the Schmidt pain index: 'unrelenting pain that shuts down one's ability to do anything except scream'.

About how old was the oldest Greenland shark, the longest-lived vertebrate known, estimated to be?

It does not reach maturity until about 150, and most have a parasite dangling from each eye that leaves them nearly blind.

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 when he finds a female?

Their unusual immune systems make the fusion possible; the female fishes with a glowing lure grown from a dorsal spine.

The titan arum, or corpse flower, smells of rotting flesh to attract which pollinators?

It blooms only every three to seven years for about a day and a half, and heats itself to human body temperature to spread the stink.

The 'immortal jellyfish' Turritopsis dohrnii cheats death by doing what?

It is the only animal known to reverse its life cycle, though individuals still get eaten; ships' ballast water has spread it around the world.

'Zombie worms' of the genus Osedax feed on what at the bottom of the ocean?

A single whale fall can feed a deep-sea community for decades; a 40-tonne carcass carries as much carbon as centuries of normal seafloor deposits.

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

Swallowing it is harmless; once it reaches the brain the fatality rate is above 97 percent, but the US sees only a few cases a year.

Guinea worm disease has no drug cure. How is the metre-long worm removed?

Cases have fallen from 3.5 million a year in the 1980s to about ten, and it may become only the second human disease ever eradicated.

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

The tooth is first grown into the patient's cheek for months to build a blood supply; Benedetto Strampelli pioneered it in the 1960s.

People with Cotard's syndrome hold what delusion?

Jules Cotard described it in 1880 as 'the delusion of negation'; it is sometimes called walking corpse syndrome.

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

The person is conscious but cannot move; the cause is REM-sleep paralysis leaking into wakefulness, and up to half of people have had one episode.

What do people with 'exploding head syndrome' experience?

It is painless and harmless, thought to come from a glitch in the brainstem as it switches between waking and sleep.

What actually explains many of the Winchester Mystery House's stairs to nowhere and doors onto walls?

Sarah Winchester built from 1886 to 1922, but historians say she took breaks and there is no evidence she believed spirits demanded it.

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

Julián Santana Barrera hung them for decades after allegedly finding a drowned girl; in 2001 he was found dead in the same canal.

Robert the Doll, kept in a Key West museum, receives what from visitors who fear they have offended him?

The century-old Steiff doll wears a sailor suit that matched its owner's; it inspired a horror film franchise in 2015.

La Pascualita, a mannequin in a Chihuahua bridal shop since the 1930s, is rumoured to be what?

Legend says the bride died from a spider or scorpion bite the day before her wedding; staff claim the figure blinks and shifts position.

Poveglia, the 'haunted' island in the Venetian lagoon, was used from 1776 as what?

The story that 100,000 plague victims are buried there was invented by a 2009 TV show; a historian puts the real number nearer 20.

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

Six died of hypothermia and three of blunt trauma; a 2021 Swiss simulation supported the official slab-avalanche explanation.

The Mary Celeste was found drifting near the Azores in 1872 with cargo and provisions intact. What was missing?

Captain Briggs, his wife, baby daughter and seven crew were never seen again; one modern theory blames an explosion of alcohol vapour from the cargo.

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

The official verdict was that a giant wave swept them off the landing 110 feet above the sea; the 'uneaten meal' detail was added by a 1912 poem.

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

About 115 colonists, including the first English child born in America, Virginia Dare, were never found.

The Voynich manuscript, written in an undeciphered script, has been carbon-dated to which period?

Its 240 pages of plants, stars and bathing women sit in Yale's Beinecke Library; wartime codebreakers failed to crack it.

A telescope in which US state picked up the 1977 'Wow!' signal?

Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the reading 6EQUJ5 on the printout and wrote 'Wow!'; it sat right by the hydrogen line SETI expects aliens to use.

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

It was heard by sensors 4,800 km apart, louder than any known animal; NOAA blamed an icequake in 2012.

The Kryptos sculpture, whose fourth message is unsolved, stands at which agency's HQ?

Jim Sanborn installed it in 1990; in 2025 he auctioned the solution to K4 for $962,500 without making it public.

What does 'Tamám Shud', found on a scrap of paper in the Somerton Man's hidden pocket in 1948, mean?

It was torn from a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; in 2022 a researcher used DNA to name him as Melbourne engineer Carl Webb.

"The Hum", a low droning noise reported in places like Taos, is heard by roughly what share of local people?

Windsor, Ontario's hum stopped when a US Steel plant on Zug Island shut in 2020; other hums have never been explained.

Overtoun Bridge near Dumbarton, Scotland, is nicknamed the 'Dog Suicide Bridge' because of what?

The house's owners believe the scent of mink and pine martens below lures excited dogs over the parapet onto rocks 50 feet down.

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

She died of pneumonia in 1920 a week before turning two; embalmer Alfredo Salafia's secret formula of glycerin, formalin, zinc salts and salicylic acid was rediscovered in a manuscript.

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

A notebook beside them read '18:30 ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask'; the cause of death was never determined.