Top 20 Creepiest Historic Events That Are Scarier Than Horror Movies

Pope Pius XII served as the Vatican sovereign from 1939 until his death in 1958 at the age of 82. Due to the Pope’s insistence on keeping his deceased body the way God created it, his personal physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, decided on an unconventional embalming method. Galeazzi-Lisi refused to drain the corpse of its fluids, instead relying on an experimental series of oils and resins, and wrapping the body in plastic afterward. The intense heat in the area, combined with the lack of air circulation caused the cadaver to decompose. During the funeral procession, the chest of the corpse imploded. The body ended up turning bright green.

On August 12, 1819, the whaling ship Essex left Nantucket for a trip to South America. The voyage lasted a little over a year before tragedy struck in November 1820. A massive sperm whale attacked the ship and essentially sank it, causing the survivors to enter small whaleboats. They floundered in these little vessels for over three months on the open ocean, with barely enough food and supplies to survive. Slowly, the men began dying and the others had to resort to consuming their companions. At some point, they even drew lots to determine who would be killed to feed the group. Only eight of the 21 men survived, and the story inspired Herman Melville to write his Great American Novel.

John Edward Jones suffered an absolutely horrific death that is quite literally the stuff of nightmares. On the evening of November 24, 2009, Jones was exploring Utah’s Nutty Putty Cave with his brother when he became trapped. The 26-year-old had mistaken a tight passageway for the infamous “Birth Canal” and found himself stuck upside down. His body remained compressed and inverted for 28 hours. Rescue workers attempted to free Jones using a rope-and-pulley system, but their efforts failed. Due to his precarious position, his heart went into cardiac arrest and he eventually passed away. It was decided that Jones’s corpse would remain in place and that he would be entombed within the now-sealed cave.

New Zealand established capital punishment in 1840, and it was completely abolished by 1989. In that time, 85 inmates were executed. Minnie Dean was the only woman to receive that fate. Dean worked as a baby farmer - basically, she was paid to adopt other people’s children. She took in numerous kids, and many started dying or disappearing. While infant mortality was high at the time, the deaths were exceeding the norm, and Dean started attracting attention. She was eventually arrested for homicide. Due to lax record keeping, it’s hard to determine how many people died under Dean’s care. However, three bodies were unearthed in her garden following her arrest. She was hanged on September 2, 1844.

French lawyer Maximilien Robespierre is one of the defining, and most divisive, names of the French Revolution. Although initially beloved, Robespierre’s ambitions grew too great, which eventually corroded his public reputation. Upon his arrest on July 27th 1794, Robespierre reportedly attempted to take his own life with a pistol but failed. The incident left him with a damaged jaw, which was kept together with a bandage. He was then taken to the Place de la Révolution to be executed. The officer in charge, Charles-Henri Sanson, removed the bandage, leaving Robespierre’s jaw to hang loose. He was reportedly in pain until he was beheaded.

Composed of multiple pioneer families, the Donner Party sought to move from the Midwest to California in the mid-1840s. Halfway into the trip, the group decided to take a new shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff, which was a much more difficult terrain to cross. As they traveled further, they became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and the wagon train was unable to penetrate the snow. To survive the harsh winter, the party was forced to camp at the nearby Truckee Lake. The cold in this region soon became unbearable, leading to the deaths of multiple people. With very little supplies, the survivors had to resort to consuming their deceased companions. In all, of the party’s 87 members, only 48 lived to tell the tale.

Soviet neurologist Ivan Pavlov is famous for his conditioning experiments on dogs, resulting in the widely-used term “Pavlovian response.” But what many do not know is that his tinkerings led to a devastating outcome. Pavlov had an assistant named Nikolay Krasnogorsky, who continued with his mentor’s experiments. However, this assistant conducted his test on young subjects he acquired through orphanages. The subjects were outfitted with a device that measured the amount of saliva emanating directly from their glands when they were given food. Unfortunately, the method of installing these devices was frankly atrocious. Krasnogorsky experimented on these test subjects, presumably in a bid to prove that humans can easily be conditioned, just like dogs.

American preacher Jim Jones created a doomsday cult called the Peoples Temple. In the 1970s, Jones moved his congregation to an isolated area in Guyana, where they established a remote settlement called Jonestown. That became the site of one of the most infamous crimes involving American lives. After disturbing details from the settlement came to light, U.S. congressman Leo Ryan traveled to Guyana with some concerned relatives of the Jonestown members. Concluding that his cult had failed, Jones reportedly ordered the killing of Ryan, who was later shot at a nearby airstrip. He then led his entire congregation to ingest a drink poisoned with cyanide. This resulted in the deaths of 909 people, becoming one of the worst massacres in American history.

If you need proof that power corrupts, look no further than the highly controversial Stanford Prison Experiment. This social test was conducted from August 14th through 20th, 1971 and saw student volunteers playing fake prisoners and prison authorities. The goal of the experiment, led by professor Philip Zimbardo, was to study the effects of unchecked power in prison guards. The experiment quickly flew off the rails, with some of the “guard” students veering into psychological torture by enacting extreme measures, including psychological abuse and harrassment. That said, the experiment’s methodology is extremely contentious, as it had repeatedly been compromised by Zimbardo’s goading. Some of the “prisoners” also knew the study’s hypothesis and acted accordingly, which is an unwanted variable in psychological experiments called “demand characteristics.”

The story of Octavia Hatcher is a popular one around the small town of Pikeville, Kentucky. The legend states that the young mother fell sick and passed away a few months after she gave birth to a son - who died shortly after delivery. Due to the southern heat, they buried her very quickly. Soon after her death, however, other locals seemingly showed similar symptoms, only to recover. The culprit, retrospectively, was likely encephalitis. Locals promptly dug up Hatcher’s grave and realized that she didn’t die, but had fallen into a coma. They found evidence of her having woken up, including scratches on the coffin and Hatcher’s bloody nails. The veracity of this story has been questioned, but according to a member of Big Sandy Heritage Center’s board of directors, “Most local historians do agree that [Hatcher] did fall ill and was buried alive.”

Even if you don’t believe in curses, there’s no denying that there’s something spooky about this story. Egyptologist Howard Carter found the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, and various members of his team were immediately struck with health issues. The first to die was financier Lord Carnarvon, who passed away from blood poisoning after a mosquito bite became infected. Within a dozen years, more people involved in the excavation were dead, including Carter’s personal secretary, Richard Bethell. Carter himself died in 1939, nearly twenty years after opening the tomb, but his death is still attributed to the curse. The story even attracted the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who linked Carnarvon’s death to mythical beings called “elementals.”

Can you imagine killing your own pet? Unfortunately, that was a reality that many in pre-World War II Britain were forced to face. Pets were seen as an unwanted nuisance in wartime, as they would either roam the streets following a bombing or eat the already limited and rationed food. A committee was formed to solve the problem, and their solution was unimaginably horrific. They released a pamphlet advising pet owners to either release them into the countryside or have them euthanized. Included in the papers was an ad for a captive bolt pistol, said to be “the standard instrument for the humane destruction of domestic animals.” All told, an estimated 750,000 pets were killed in a week - more than 107,000 per day.

Turns out, there’s nothing better for farming than human bone. The Napoleonic Wars cost upwards of two million soldiers their lives, and it was common practice for the survivors to loot the dead for supplies. This included tearing out teeth with pliers for use in dentures. The Battle of Waterloo proved especially fruitful for the denture market, and the resulting products became known as Waterloo Teeth. Battlegrounds were also looted for bones after the dead had decomposed, and these bones were ground into dust and sold to farmers. A British paper from 1822 reported that human bone made for “a substantial manure” and that “the good farmers of Yorkshire are… indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.”

Imagine you’re an astronaut, and you’re all alone floating through the quiet vacuum of space in your cozy little spacecraft. And then, you hear someone - or something - knocking. It’s enough to make you go mad! Luckily, astronaut and famed knock-hearer Yang Liwei didn’t go mad, but he was understandably creeped out. Liwei attempted to replicate the knocking sound after returning to Earth, but nothing proved successful. Future Chinese astronauts also reported hearing the eerie knocking sound, leading some to believe it was caused by the spacecraft itself. The source was later attributed to changes in air pressure and temperature morphing the capsule’s inner wall. Mundane explanation aside, we couldn’t imagine how utterly terrifying that experience would be...

There are literally countless creepy true crime stories, but there’s just something really unsettling about the infamous Hinterkaifeck murders. These took place at a farm in Bavaria, Germany in 1922. Prior to the murders, Andreas Gruber found human foot tracks in the snow leading from the nearby forest to his house. That night, the family heard footsteps coming from the attic but failed to notify the police. On March 31st, every member of the household, including their daughter, her grandchildren and their maid, were killed with a mattock. It would be four days until the bodies were discovered; the still-unknown murderer had long made their escape. This unsolved case truly has it all - gruesome violence, no survivors, an unidentified culprit, and an incredibly creepy case of home invasion.

Everyone knows of Lincoln’s assassination, but the role played by Major Henry Rathbone is less common knowledge. Rathbone and his fiancée were attending the play with Lincoln, and Rathbone tried subduing John Wilkes Booth after he shot the president. His artery was severed in the process. Rathbone survived, but he blamed himself for Lincoln’s death and spiraled into insanity. On December 23rd, 1883, he assaulted his own children, and when his wife intervened, he 'took care' of her before stabbing himself in a failed attempt at his own life. When police arrived, they found a deranged Rathbone and his wife’s corpse. Rathbone was deemed insane and committed to an asylum while his children were sent to live with a relative.

The world held its breath throughout the spring of 1986, desperately hoping that their respective areas wouldn’t be inundated with radiation. On April 26th, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, sending enormous plumes of radiation into the atmosphere. This radiation was then carried far and wide by the wind. It was given the maximum severity on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and it resulted in an extensive clean-up effort that took years and billions of dollars to complete. Nearby cities were completely evacuated and are now eerie ghost towns. Many people also suffered unimaginably horrible deaths from acute radiation syndrome, as their bodies shut down. Chernobyl was a living nightmare that struck the fear of radiation into millions.

The Ancient Romans experienced Hell on Earth in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius famously erupted. The eruption launched a massive cloud of gas and debris 21 miles into the air, effectively blocking out the sun. This in turn caused a tsunami in the Bay of Naples, and ash rained down on nearby cities. The volcano later released pyroclastic flows, which are essentially 1,800 degree Fahrenheit clouds of gas and volcanic matter that can travel upwards of 400 miles per hour. The flows decimated the nearby cities and killed people instantly, vaporizing their blood and organs. All told, the eruption buried the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis , and Stabiae, killing at least 1,500 people - based on the human remains uncovered - but likely many more.

Ghost ship stories are a dime a dozen, but none is as arguably popular as the Mary Celeste. This was a sailing vessel built in Canada and named the Amazon before it was wrecked and sold to American buyers, who renamed her the Mary Celeste. On December 4th, 1872, the ghost ship was found floating off the Azores Islands. The ship was in good condition, there was nothing recent in the captain’s log, her provisions were undisturbed, and the crew’s belongings were still on board. However, the lifeboat was missing, leading many to wonder why the crew had abandoned ship. Naturally, conspiracy theories abound to this day. And while numerous sound theories have been put forth over the years, the mystery remains unsolved.

The Black Death wasn’t just the deadliest epidemic of infectious disease in human history; it killed an estimated 30 to 60% of Europe’s entire population! Seriously, the entry can just end here. But it also turned into what’s probably the closest thing we’ve ever had to a real life zombie movie. London quarantined plague victims inside their homes and armed guards were reportedly stationed nearby to prevent escape. This didn’t sit well with the quarantined, and they often fought back by attacking, and in some cases, murdering the guards. This led entire neighborhoods to be quarantined, which only instigated rioting and more death. If some plague victims happened to escape, they wandered the countryside pretty much like zombies, as no towns or villages would permit them entry. In some cases, they were even attacked on the road by the healthy.