55 Creepy Pictures From History And The Eerie Stories Behind Them

For her entire life, her father had abused her viciously, keeping her in a makeshift straitjacket and tying her to a children’s toilet in a locked room all day. When she made any sound or did anything he didn’t like, he’d growl and bare his teeth at her like a dog.

Under such brutal conditions, Wiley never learned how to walk or speak. When this creepy photo was taken at a hospital just after she was rescued, her life inside a series of abusive institutions was only beginning. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

But when the British moved in during the 1840s, they soon pillaged the mokomokai for themselves. Major General Horatio Gordon Robley (featured in this creepy old picture with his collection), who served in the British Army during the New Zealand Land Wars in the 1860s, was particularly fascinated by the Maori and stole at least 35 heads for himself.

After making his human dolls, he kept them in his home as his companions and lovers. “I kissed her once, then again, then again,” Moskvin wrote about one of his dolls, made from the body of an 11-year-old girl.

Police finally caught Moskvin in 2011, after years of increasing suspicion at the growing number of desecrated graves in his home city of Nizhny Novgorod. When they searched his home, they found 26 life-sized dolls — or rather, mummified corpses — scattered throughout.

The room’s odor was so rank that officers couldn’t even continue their investigation, but they were able to learn that the 55-pound woman still clinging to life after 25 years trapped in that same room was named Blanche Monnier — and that her captor was her own mother.

So, when young children passed away, their parents often dressed them in their finest clothes to sit for their first portrait, creating eerily lifelike images of kids who had already been gone for days.

While certainly an ominous sight, the men, women, and children depicted here were merely members of the Young Pioneers, the Soviet youth group that was akin to the Boy Scouts.

They’re seen here donning gas masks during a military preparation drill in the Leningrad area — uncertain of what tomorrow might bring in the years just before World War II, while their home country was seeing waves of death and terror under dictator Joseph Stalin.

Though members of the Chalifoux family have claimed that the mother was paid to stage the image, the children in fact were sold to different homes within two years.

Worse yet, the children — Lana (six, top left), Rae (five, top right), Milton (four, bottom left), and Sue Ellen (two, bottom right) — were known to have been terribly abused by their new families thereafter.

Michel claimed to be possessed by the devil, and her parents soon came to the same conclusion. They ultimately subjected her to 67 exorcisms, none of which improved her condition before she died of malnutrition at age 23 in 1976, weighing just 68 pounds.

Her story was so disturbing that it eventually inspired the 2005 horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Local authorities were unable to determine any cause of the blaze and the rest of the apartment was largely devoid of fire damage. When they sent the case to the FBI, they determined that Reeser had gone up in flames like the wick of a candle, with her own body fat steadily feeding the fire — but they too were baffled as to how the blaze started in the first place. To this day, it’s widely believed that this was a case of spontaneous human combustion.

Seen here on his first trip there in May 1960, Rockefeller’s smile belies his grim fate. It’s believed he was killed and eaten by the Asmat people — a cannibal group known to behead their enemies and consume their flesh.

Just before Rhoades murdered 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters in an Illinois barn in early 1990, he took a series of photos of her cowering in fear as he moved in for the kill. Authorities found this photo and a collection of others like it inside Rhoades’ home after he was finally caught several months later.

Although the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone slowly seems to be returning to semi-hospitable conditions for wildlife, the animals who inhabited the area in the late 1980s weren’t as lucky. This piglet, on display at the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, is a prime example.

Labeled simply as “mutated piglet,” the creature was born with dipygus, a congenital deformity that causes the body to fork left and right along the torso, and the pelvis and legs to duplicate. Nearly 40 years later, this animal is a stark reminder of the havoc that nuclear power can wreak.

Overacker planned to ride through the water on a jet ski and then open the parachute on his back as he went over the edge and let his vehicle plummet down into the river below the falls. But when his parachute failed to open, it was the 39-year-old Californian who fell 180 feet to his demise.

“It’s like hitting cement,” said Niagara Parks Police officer Thomas Detenbeck of Overacker’s last moment alive. “I don’t really think people respect the power of the falls.”

When the bomb detonated at 1,900 feet above the city center, the subsequent explosion caused temperatures of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit to annihilate nearly everything within 1,600 feet of the bomb’s blast zone. Almost anything and anyone within a mile was destroyed.

The bomb’s light and heat were so extreme that they bleached the city’s exposed surfaces, except in places where an unsuspecting person shielded the building or sidewalk or bridge from the blast with their own body in their final moments alive.

Although the photograph became famous around the world, McHale’s dying wish was that no one see her body. Time magazine nevertheless printed the photo in full and called it “the most beautiful suicide.” Even Andy Warhol used it in one of his prints, Suicide (Fallen Body).

While the photograph remains recognizable to this day, her motive for jumping is still a mystery. We may never know why a seemingly happy young woman who was a month away from her wedding decided to end her own life.

The goal was to assess how quickly and intensely even educated and intelligent people can turn cruel and sadistic under the right conditions — and find out once and for all whether humans are inherently good or evil.

In just six days, before the experiment had to be called off, the “guards” had repeatedly abused and humiliated the “prisoners” by spraying them with fire extinguishers and forcing them to clean toilet bowls with their bare hands. The study and the creepiest photos left behind provide a chilling look at what humans are capable of.

The prolonged exposure to radium — used in the luminous paint that coated the watch faces — caused their vertebrae to collapse, their jaws to swell up and fall off, and their lives to slowly end in agony while battling cancer.

He grafted one head onto the other’s body, sewed their circulatory systems together, and connected their vertebrae with plastic strings. After the procedure was completed, both heads could hear, see, smell, and swallow.

Sadly, his methods were still relatively crude and the dog only lived four days before dying. While his research was a pioneering foray into head transplantation, experts debate the ethics of such procedures to this day.

But long before his murderous reign, during which he worked as a clown at children’s birthday parties, John Wayne Gacy was just a normal boy. However, knowing what was to come after this photo was taken makes it one of the most undeniably creepy images of all time.

To this day, she has never been found. But in June 1989, a mysterious Polaroid turned up in a parking lot in Florida, nearly 1,500 miles away from where Calico had disappeared. Though unconfirmed, it appears to show Calico — based on matching scars and the dog-eared paperback next to her — and a young boy, both bound, gagged, and absolutely terrified.

Long before his stay at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado prompted author Stephen King to write The Shining, this Rocky Mountain lodge was leaving its visitors terrified. Seen here under construction in the early 1900s, the hotel was home to an unexplained explosion in 1911 that left a chambermaid maimed. She returned to work, but after her death years later, guests reported seeing her ghost stalk the halls, especially the scene of the incident in Room 217.

This was the exact room where King spent his fateful and terrifying night at the Stanley in October 1974.

As Lennon made his way back into the building at about 10:50 p.m., Chapman stepped out of the shadows and fired four shots into his back. Lennon was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital some 25 minutes later.

“He was very kind to me,” Chapman later said of their encounter earlier in the night, “very cordial and decent man.”

The Australian teenager had just run away from boarding school and longed to see the world. After sneaking onto the tarmac of Sydney International Airport, he hid inside a Tokyo-bound plane — but fell to his death soon after takeoff.

“All my son wanted to do was to see the world,” his father Charles Sapsford later recalled. “He had itchy feet. His determination to see how the rest of the world lives has cost him his life.”

The “Ruhr Cannibal” took at least 14 lives, with victims as young as four and as old as 61. His preferred method was to strangle them to death, engage in necrophilia, and then slice off parts of their flesh to eat.

Kroll was finally caught in 1976 after police discovered that the intestines from one of his victims had clogged the plumbing in his apartment building. Taken soon after his capture, this photo shows Kroll reenacting one of his murders for the police.

After getting stuck in a harrowing blizzard with a wind chill of 100 degrees below zero, he fell into a hypothermic coma. Frostbite set in on his nose and hands, both of which were later amputated. Miraculously, he managed to survive, walk back to camp, and be airlifted for treatment.

“Initially I thought I was in a dream,” Weathers later recalled. “Then I saw how badly frozen my right hand was, and that helped bring me around to reality.”

Kelly was far more mutilated than any of the other four victims that Jack the Ripper had killed in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London in the preceding months. Concealed behind Kelly’s closed door, the Ripper took his time and spent nearly two hours carving up her body in various ways before sneaking away, never to be caught or even heard from again.

Aware that any escape attempt would be futile, he stayed in the thick of the action and took as many pictures as he could before securing his camera in his backpack. As the ash grew thicker, Landsburg covered the backpack with his body, determined to ensure that his images would survive — even though he knew he wouldn’t.

For almost three days, rescuers tried in vain to free her as she slowly succumbed to gangrene and hypothermia in the water. Finally, on Nov. 16, she passed away as helpless relief workers watched from mere feet away.

Just before she died, photographer Frank Fournier captured this haunting image. Fournier later recalled that he “felt totally powerless in front of this little girl, who was facing death with courage and dignity.”

Soon, the tsunami struck Hilo, Hawaii, leaving more than 170 people dead in what remains one of the worst disasters in Hawaiian history.

This chilling image captures the final moments of the unknown person at the bottom left.

On Nov. 13, 1974, DeFeo stalked from room to room and shot his sleeping family dead with a .35 caliber rifle. The Amityville murders were said to leave the house haunted, a story that eventually inspired The Amityville Horror.

Though skeptics have since called the haunting story into question, DeFeo claimed that otherworldly voices emanating from the house itself ordered him to kill.

After the DeFeo murders, the house’s next owner, George Lutz, claimed that the home was haunted and called in famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren to help.

One night, the automatic camera they’d set up on the second floor caught what appeared to be a ghostly boy staring back. Some believe it is the ghost of young John DeFeo — who was murdered in the house by his brother years earlier.

Although Dagsa was dead, his photo survived and helped police catch the killer, Arnel Buenaflor, who was arrested a few days later.

On December 10, 1945, William Heirens left this note scrawled in lipstick on the wall of Frances Brown’s Chicago apartment. Just before writing this message, Heirens brutally stabbed Brown to death and left a knife sticking out of her neck.

Heirens became known as “The Lipstick Killer” and took one more victim before police finally caught him six months later.

Already a known thief, Spence became the prime suspect in the 1882 murder of Morgan Earp, brother of legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. But there was only one witness — Spence’s own wife. The judge decided to rule her testimony inadmissible due to spousal privilege, despite the fact she claimed to have heard Spence plotting the murder with several friends.

However, a year later he was arrested for pistol-whipping and killing a man. He served only 18 months of a five-year sentence, as the governor decided to pardon him.

Within a matter of weeks, the Japanese troops that had invaded this Chinese city raped as many as 80,000 people and killed up to 350,000.

Beheading by katana, as seen here, was a regular occurrence during this horrific invasion. Two Japanese soldiers even held a contest to see who could kill 100 people with their sword first and newspapers covered it like a sporting event.

Officers’ search of Gein’s Wisconsin home turned up furniture and kitchen utensils made from human remains, a gutted corpse in his shed, a belt fashioned out of human nipples, and jars of organs.

Though Gein was quickly locked away in an institution for the rest of his life, the creepy photos taken in his home remain chilling to this day.

Whether or not any such rumors are true, Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s Surrealist Ball at Chateau de Ferrières in France has only stoked outsiders’ imaginations about what goes on behind closed doors at parties attended by the rich, powerful, and famous.

In this case, attendees included Salvador Dalí and Audrey Hepburn while dessert was a life-sized naked woman made of sugar.

The creepy historical image of the shell-shocked soldier seen here starkly highlights the horror of war—and what being stuck in a trench during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette could do to a man. Captured in September 1916, this photo was taken years before World War I even ended. By the time the end came, countless other men would suffer a similar fate.

After more corpses like this one were found in the ensuing decades and centuries, locals and experts alike were long baffled as to how these bodies had been naturally mummified. Since the early 20th century, many have believed that a certain fungus was responsible, while more modern theories say that the particular soil and water conditions are the explanation. However, the mummies of Venzone remain largely mysterious to this day.

Some have claimed that the lights are simply reflections in the window through which it was taken. Others point to incidents throughout the 1950s in which supposedly similar crafts were seen. But the truth will likely remain a mystery forever.

This disturbing historical photo taken in 1892 in Michigan shows an actual mountain of buffalo skulls waiting to be ground down for uses such as refining sugar, producing fertilizer, and making bone china. More disturbing still is the fact that the U.S. government purposefully slaughtered some buffalo in order to deprive Native Americans of this crucial natural resource.

As the quote scrawled on the table in this photo explained, it was this particular students’ dream to change places with the cadavers and have them “pose” with him. How exactly he arranged all of the cadavers before taking the photo remains a bit of a mystery.

Although the dangers were clear, no one was willing to back out and risk disappointing the Soviet high command.
Even Komarov refused to back out because doing so would have doomed the next pilot in line, friend and fellow cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Sure enough, upon re-entry, the craft’s parachute failed and Komarov burned to death as the Soyuz hurtled through the atmosphere at unthinkable speeds. With that, Komarov became the first human to ever die in space flight. Even before his fateful flight, he was so sure that he would die that he asked for an open casket funeral (pictured above) that’d force his superiors to see what they’d done to him. To this day, this creepy historical photo of his remains continues to tell his tragic story.

The German mountaineer and her husband embarked on their journey in 1979 with high hopes. But during the descent after reaching the summit, Schmatz grew weak from the trek and succumbed to exhaustion and the cold.

For years after Schmatz died, her body lay frozen on the mountainside just as she had fallen — sitting down against her backpack, her hair blowing in the wind, and her eyes wide open. Other climbers who passed her corpse on the trail would say that they could feel her eyes follow them as they walked by.

Seen here is one of countless patients being restrained in a French mental institution in 1900. It’s unclear what condition this unfortunate patient suffered from. At the time, people could get committed for anything from depression and shell shock to schizophrenia and learning disabilities.

With the abuses of patients like this one happening behind closed doors, we’ll surely never known the extent of the trauma that these people suffered inside the institutions of old.

This creepy photo shows the determined group traversing the harsh terrain just before they met their fate on the night of February 1.

Even though the Russian government reopened the case in 2019, it remains unsolved.

Determined to master germ warfare and test the limits of human suffering, Unit 731 conducted a wealth of torturous tests on captured Chinese civilians that ranged from purposeful frostbite and vivisection on conscious patients to weapons testing on live prisoners and rape.

Seen here is Unit 731 personnel conducting a bacteriological trial on a test subject in November 1940.

The 134-man crew set out on two ships, determined to find the elusive shortcut to Asia and thereby further open up British trade. But soon after departing England in May, they were never seen again.

It was only in the 1980s that an anthropologist finally found some of the buried bodies, preserved by the cold, on an icy island in the Canadian Arctic. Hartnell’s twisted expression here makes for one of the creepiest images of seafaring expeditions ever taken.

In the aftermath, everyone attempted to make sense of how the shooting could have happened, how two “normal” teens could be capable of something like this. Parents, police, pundits, and survivors alike searched for clues and retroactive warnings in the pre-shooting behaviors of Harris and Klebold.

Perhaps the most chilling artifact uncovered in the wake of the shooting was this class photo taken a few weeks before the massacre, which appears rather standard at first. But a closer look at the top left corner shows the two shooters posing their hands like guns and pointing them at the camera.

Arguably the most chilling photo taken during the entirety of the Troubles, this image shows a happy father and his carefree son standing next to a car in Omagh that was wired with explosives and about to blow. They both died moments later.

Tragically, the three men had even voiced concerns about the craft’s amount of flammable materials to Joseph Shea, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. They then took this portrait and presented it to Shea shortly before the fatal accident with a caption that read: “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

There’s no ominous story behind this photo, but it’s certainly one of the creepiest vintage pictures of the 20th century.

Armstrong-Jones, meanwhile, went on to have enormous personal and professional success. His photography captured the imagination of millions, while he himself captured the heart of Princess Margaret and became the 1st Earl of Snowdon after they married in 1960.

Indoctrinated by cult leader Marshall Applewhite, who claimed that a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet would transport them to a utopian planet, devotees eagerly followed his instructions.

On that fateful day in March, the 39 cultists consumed a mixture of barbiturates and applesauce and washed it down with vodka. Group by group, bags were tied over their heads to ensure asphyxiation. Applewhite himself was the 37th to die. They were found wearing matching Nike sneakers and “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” armbands a few days later.

Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones convinced his followers that the government was coming to kill them and take their children — and that swallowing a fatal dose of cyanide was the only answer. So, on November 18, 1978, 918 people died at the cult’s Jonestown settlement in Guyana after drinking a poison-laced fruit drink.

This creepy picture shows Jones (center) and a number of his followers pleasantly enjoying life at Jonestown not long before the massacre.