Creepy Trivia
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96 free Creepy trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free creepy trivia questions with answers. This creepy trivia quiz is built from things that are true, which is what makes them creepy. Nature supplies the parasites: the fungus that steers ants onto leaves before sprouting from their heads, the louse that becomes a fish's tongue, the worm that marches crickets into rivers, and the wasp larva that eats a tarantula alive. History supplies the rest: the dancing plague of Strasbourg, the six million dead under Paris, a chandelier of human bones, a pope's corpse on trial, mummies ground into medicine, and radium dial painters licking their brushes. Then come the mysteries and the mind: the Mary Celeste and the Flannan Isles keepers, the Wow! signal, the Bloop, the Voynich manuscript, the Somerton Man, sleep paralysis and the Old Hag, and the delusion that you are already dead. It works for Halloween parties, campfires and anyone who likes their facts unsettling. Nothing here is gore for its own sake, and there is no true crime; the site has separate quizzes for horror films and serial killers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and reference sources, and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Frau Troffea begin doing uncontrollably in Strasbourg in July 1518, starting an outbreak?
Dancing
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.
Q 02The Catacombs of Paris hold the remains of roughly how many people?
6 million
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.
Q 03Which country's Sedlec Ossuary is famous for a chandelier made of human bones?
Czechia
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.
Q 04Tollund 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
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.
Q 05Bog acids preserve a body's skin and organs but do what to its bones?
Dissolve them
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.
Q 06Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Alps in 1991 after some 5,300 years, died how?
Shot with an arrow
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.
Q 07In 1976 a TV crew found the body of outlaw Elmer McCurdy, killed in 1911, being used as what?
A funhouse mannequin
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.
Q 08What verdict did the Cadaver Synod of 897 reach on a pope who had been dead for nine months?
Guilty, and thrown in the Tiber
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.
Q 09Which ancient Egyptian treasures did European apothecaries grind into powder and sell as medicine for centuries?
Mummies
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.
Q 10The Radium Girls were poisoned partly because supervisors told them to point their paintbrushes how?
With their lips
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.
Q 11Scheele's Green, a fashionable 19th-century wallpaper and dress pigment, was made with what?
Arsenic
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.
Q 12Post-mortem photography, common in the Victorian era, often posed the dead in what way?
As if peacefully sleeping
As if peacefully sleeping was the favourite pose, and for many infants this picture was probably the only photograph ever taken of them.
Q 13In which US state did anthropologist William Bass open the world's first 'body farm'?
Tennessee
Q 21In some deep-sea anglerfish, what happens to the tiny male on finding a female?
Fuses into her body
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.
Q 22The giant bloom of the titan arum relies on which pollinators?
Carrion beetles and flies
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.
Q 23'Zombie worms' of the genus Osedax were discovered boring into the sunken skeleton of which animal?
A whale
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.
Q 14Why do a dead person's fingernails and hair appear to keep growing?
The skin shrinks back
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.
Q 15The 'zombie-ant fungus' Ophiocordyceps makes an infected ant do what before it dies?
Bite down on a leaf
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.
Q 16Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills and becomes its replacement what?
Tongue
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.
Q 17A horsehair worm grows inside a cricket or grasshopper, then drives the insect to do what?
Walk into water and drown
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.
Q 18A tarantula hawk wasp's larva eats its paralysed spider alive, saving which parts for last?
The vital organs
The vital organs go last so that the spider stays alive, and fresh, through the several weeks the grub spends feeding inside it.
Q 19Which shark, the longest-lived vertebrate known, is estimated to live for at least 270 years?
Greenland shark
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.
Q 20When threatened, a hagfish defends itself by producing huge quantities of what?
Slime
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.
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.
Q 24The 'brain-eating amoeba' Naegleria fowleri infects people through which route?
Up the nose while swimming
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.
Q 25Guinea worm disease has no drug cure, so how is the metre-long worm removed?
Wound around a stick over weeks
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.
Q 26The surgery called osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis restores sight by implanting a lens set in what?
The patient's own tooth
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.
Q 27People with Cotard's syndrome hold what delusion?
That they are dead or do not exist
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.
Q 28Newfoundland folklore calls sleep paralysis 'the Old Hag' because sufferers report what?
A figure sitting on their chest
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.
Q 29What do people with 'exploding head syndrome' experience?
Imagined bangs on falling asleep
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.
Q 30The Island of the Dolls lies in the Xochimilco canals of which capital?
Mexico City
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.