You can find nearly everything on Wikipedia. This includes some pretty, well, weird stuff. These are some of the absolute creepiest stories on Wikipedia. Warning: Some of them are pretty freaky.
The Creepiest Stories On Wikipedia
Many of us are fans of spooky campfire stories, scary movies, and suspense novels. When these stories are real, however, they take on a bit of extra meaning. The creepiest stories on Wikipedia will have some of your favorite films looking like child’s play. Warning: There are themes of rape, torture, and murder in some of these stories.
1. Lori Erica Ruff
Lori Erica Ruff was a married mother when she killed herself in Texas in 2010. After she died, family members found a lockbox containing surprising documents that showed she had changed her name from Becky Sue Turner years back. The REAL Becky Sue Turner, however, was a 2-year-old who had died in a fire. “Lori” had stolen her identity, got an ID that said “Becky”, then legally changed her name to Lori. Who this woman was before becoming “Becky” and then “Lori” is a total mystery. It was later discovered that her real name was Kimberly McLean. She had cut off all ties with her family in 1986.
2. Marcus Wasson
Marcus Wasson is described as the most prolific mass murderer in Fresno California history. He essentially created an incestuous and highly strange version of Christianity. Wasson fathered numerous children, many of them with his own daughters. The children were even homeschooled from a handwritten bible that said Jesus Christ was a vampire. Eventually, police found in his house nine children’s bodies, two of whom were his own children, in his house. They were all in a room filled with antique coffins and had been shot in the eye.
3. Murder of James Bulger
James Bulger was a two-year-old little boy in England. In 1993, two 10-year-old boys abducted him from his house. They tortured and then murdered him. Both boys were sentenced to life in prison but then released upon turning 18 in 2010. One of the boys was later sent back to prison for breaching his parole and having child abuse images on his computer.
4.Genie The Feral Child
Genie was born in the United States in 1957. Her father began keeping her in a locked room when she was only 20 months old. He nearly always strapped her into a child’s toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized. He forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. Because of this, she developed hardly any language skills. She was discovered by Los Angeles Child Welfare Authorities when she was 13 years old.
Scientists studied her and tried to help her develop language and social skills. While she did develop the ability to communicate in other ways, she never fully acquired a native language. She was bumped around to various homes, where she eventually was abused and isolated again. Currently, it is believed that she is living in California. Her mother forbade further testing on her.
5. Takuya Nagaya
One day when he was 23 years old, Takuya Nagaya began slithering on the floor saying he had become a snake. His mother thought he’d been possessed by one, so she called his father to come help. He spent two days biting and head-butting him to “drive out the snake”. Takuya then died.
6. Geoffrey Haywood
Geoffrey Haywood, 65, pretended to be blind for pity. One day, he fell into a ditch and died. He apparently did not see it. The coroner working on this case said it was the most extraordinary case he had seen in 30 years. We call that karma.
7. The Fritzl Case
In 2008, Elizabeth Fritzl in Austria went to the police and told them that her father had held her captive for 24 years. During this time, he assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment inside a concealed area in the cellar of the family home. This abuse resulted in her having seven children with her father. Three of them remained in captivity with their mother, one had died just days after birth at the hands of Josef Fritzl who disposed of his body in an incinerator, and the other three were brought up by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, having been reported as foundlings.
8. Amelia Elizabeth Dryer
Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was a British serial killer in the 1800s. She was a widowed trained nurse who turned to what is called baby farming to support herself. This is the practice of adopting unwanted babies in exchange for money. At first, she cared for the children, including two of her own, however, eventually, some of them died. She was convicted of hard labor for six months for neglect. Afterward, however, she began directly murdering the babies, usually by strangling them. She would dispose of the bodies to avoid attention.
Eventually, one was found in a bag in the river. The evidence pointed to her and she was convicted of murder. She was then connected to nearly 400 deaths, if not more, making her one of history’s most prolific serial killers.
9. Junko Furuta
Junko Furuta was a highschool student in Japan in the late 1980s. Four teenage boys abducted, raped, and tortured her. Her case was called the “concrete-encased high school girl murder case” for the way in which she was found.
The boys raped her repeatedly. They threatened to kill her family if she didn’t do as they asked, forced her to call her parents and tell them she had run away but was safe, and also made her call the police and get them to call off the investigation. They held her captive for 40 days, raping, beating, and abusing her incessantly. She eventually died from her wounds.
Afraid to be persecuted for murder, they wrapped her in blankets, put her in a bag, put the bag in an empty drum, and filled the drum with concrete. They then disposed of the drum in a cement truck. The police came to the house to investigate another case, but the group was confused and one of them accidentally confessed to Junko’s murder.
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10. Katherine Mary Knight
Katherine Knight was the first woman in Australia to be sentenced to life in prison without parole. In February 2000 authorities found her guilty of the murder of her husband. She stabbed him to death and skinned him. Next, she put his skin on a meat hook and cooked his head and other parts of his body with the intention of feeding them to his children.
11. Rosemary Kennedy
Born to the famous Kennedy family of the United States, they kept the sad secrets of Rosemary (born in 1918) quiet for decades. When Rosemary was born, the doctor was not on hand and her mother Rose was ordered to keep her legs closed until the doctor arrived. This meant that Rosemary spent two hours in the birth canal, resulting in a lack of oxygen that caused her developmental problems for the rest of her life.
When she was 22 years old, she began experiencing seizures and wild mood swings that would often put her into absolute rages. In an attempt to control these, her father ordered a prefrontal lobotomy. They kept her awake for the operation and kept going further into her prefrontal lobe until she stopped responding. Unsurprisingly, the procedure went poorly and left her unable to speak intelligibly and incontinent. The family then put her in an institution for the rest of her life.
12. Lead Masks Case
In Brazil in 1966, two bodies were found in very odd circumstances. The bodies were side by side, partly covered by grass. Each was wearing a formal suit, a lead eye mask, and a waterproof coat. Next to them was an empty water bottle, a packet with two wet towels, and a notebook with written instructions inside. The instructions said: 16:30 be at the specified location. 18:30 ingest capsules after the effect, protect metals await signal mask.
The two men were eventually identified. They had no injuries and there were no signs of struggle. The coroner’s office was busy at the time so no autopsy for toxic substances was completed. By the time they got around to it, the internal organs were too far decomposed to give any information.
13. Tamam Shud Case
This case is also known as The Mystery Of The Somerton Man. In 1948, someone found an unidentified deceased man on Somerton Park Beach in Adelaide, in Australia. Months later, they found a scrap paper in the pocket of his trousers that had the words tamám shud written on it. This is Persian for “it’s over” or “finished”. It was torn from the final page of a book by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyam. Authorities eventually located the book that had indentations from previous handwriting and phone numbers but was never able to decipher what was written.
14. Ed Gein
Edward Gein is also known as The Butcher of Plainfield and The Plainfield Ghoul. In 1957 in Plainfield, Wisconsin, authorities found that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards. He then made trophies and other keepsakes from the bodies’ bones and skin. He eventually admitted to the murder of two local people that same year.
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15. Dancing Mania
Also known as the dancing plague, choreomania, St. John’s Dance, tarantism, and St. Vitus’ Dance, this social phenomenon happened in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. Essentially, it was when large groups of people (sometimes thousands) would dance erratically and were unable to stop. Men, women, and children would dance until they collapsed either from exhaustion, injuries, or both. It spread across Europe with thousands of different outbreaks that baffled doctors and other professionals. Still to this day, no one knows what caused these to happen.
16. Richard Chase
Richard Chase was a serial killer, rapist, cannibal, and necrophile in Sacramento, California. His nickname was The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victim’s blood and then ate their remains. Authorities convicted him of at least 6 counts of murder, and each of these stories of what he did to his victims is highly disturbing.
17. The Axeman of New Orleans
The Axeman of New Orleans was a serial killer active in Louisiana and the surrounding area in 1918 and 1919. Authorities were never able to identify the culprit and all murderers remain unsolved. The targets were all either Italian immigrants or Italian-Americans. The murderer attacked all their victims with an ax. Usually, the ax belonged to the person they were killing. The killer left a letter stating that they would never be caught. In the letter, they mentioned when the next attack would be and how to be spared:
“Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to you people. Here it is: I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it out on that specific Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.”
18. Who Put Bella In The Wych Elm?
In 1943 in England, three boys playing in a tree discovered an entire human skeleton in the trunk of a Wych Elm. The skeleton was wearing a shoe, a golden wedding ring, and some fragments of clothing. There were still tufts of hair stuck to the skull and almost a full set of teeth. The only thing missing was a hand, which was later found some distance away from the skeleton.
A forensic specialist determined that it was a woman who had been dead for about 18 months, placing her dead sometime in 1941. They were able to relatively accurately determine what she had looked like, however, the number of missing person reports during the War made it impossible to pick out of the crowd.
In 1944, a graffiti message appeared in Birmingham that read “Who put Bella down the wych elm – Hagley Wood”. This launched a further investigation to determine who Bella was. The graffiti appeared in other locations throughout England over the next few decades. Though there are several theories, authorities were never able to identify the woman or the circumstances of the murder.
19. The Highway Of Tears
The Highway of Tears is in British Columbia, Canada. This 725km stretch of highway is the location of missing and murdered indigenous women since 1970. This stretch of road is remote and is easy to hide or stash human remains. Each story of how the women went missing has similar themes. The main theme is that investigations either weren’t done or were conducted poorly. This is largely linked to racism towards indigenous people in the country.
20. The Toy Box Killer
David Parker Ray was an American kidnapper, torturer, rapist, and serial killer nicknamed The Toy Box Killer. Though none of the bodies were ever found, authorities suspected him of killing at least 60 women in Arizona and New Mexico. His accomplices were the ones who turned him in to the police.
He had a sound-proof truck which he called his “toy box”. Inside were various items used for sexual torture. He kidnapped between five and six girls each year and held them each captive for about three or four months. While captive, he abused and tortured them sexually using various instruments, and his dog. His wife also willingly participated. He would then either kill the women or drug them with something that would erase their memories and abandon them along a roadside.
21. The Toolbox Killers
The Toolbox Killers were two men who kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed five teenage girls in 1979 in Southern California over a period of five months. They were given their name because most of the items they used to torture and kill their victims you can find in a standard toolbox. They would either force or coerce teenaged girls into their van before they would repeatedly rape and eventually kill them. Their victims ranged between the ages of 13 and 18.
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