Updated March 4, 2021 132.8K votes 25.8K voters 2.6M views
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The annals of Wikipedia are full of some seriously creepy stuff. As the makeshift source for all human knowledge, Wikipedia has plenty of tales of the weird, macabre, and unexplained. If Wikipedia were a house, this would be the creepy attic that everyone thinks is haunted. Excluding the unverified, poorly sourced, and completely made up, these are the creepiest pages that Wikipedia has to offer.
Perhaps what makes all these stories so scary is that the events really occurred. Here, we are visiting some seriously dark corners of the human psyche. Some of the events will shock you. Some even cross over into the supernatural realm, or at least raise the question, could the supernatural be real? You can judge for yourself, thanks to the great sourcing structure of Wikipedia.
Reading on, you might encounter some facts that you wish you hadn't learned. You've been warned.
In 2001, Armin Meiwes put out an online solicitation "looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed." On March 9, 2001, Meiwes met up with fellow German Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, who had agreed to be eaten. The two filmed each other frying Brandes's cut-off member and attempting to eat it before Brandes's ultimate demise.
Over the next ten months, Meiwes proceeded to eat Brandes's body. Meiwes was eventually convicted for ending the man's life and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The Hinterkaifeck farm was located roughly 70 miles north of Munich, Germany. The Gruber family lived there, including Andreas, his wife Cazilia, their middle-aged daughter Victoria, and their two grandchildren. In 1921, their maid quit. She claimed the farm was haunted and that she heard footsteps in the attic. It took until 1922 for the Grubers to find a new maid.
One day, Andreas reported that he found footprints in the snow leading from the forest to the house, but he could not find any leading back to the forest. He began hearing footsteps in the attic and reported other strange events. On April 4th, five days after the Grubers had last been seen, a search party uncovered a gruesome scene. All of the household occupants, including the new maid, had been skillfully slain with a pickaxe. It had been the maid's first day of work on the farm. Four of the cadavers, including that of Andreas, were stacked neatly on top of each other. The autopsies revealed that the time of passing was Friday, March 31.
Perhaps the strangest part of the case is that they found evidence of the culprit staying at the farm for several days afterward. The livestock were fed, and witnesses had seen smoke coming out of the chimney over the weekend. Despite this, no arrests were ever made and the case still remains unsolved to this day.
On June 11, 1912, an awful slaying occurred in rural Villisca, Iowa. The Moore family was sleeping when an unknown person raised an axe and terminated Joe Moore with one blow from the flat end of the axe blade. The same fate met his wife, Sarah, all four of their children, and two visiting neighbor children.
What's more, the culprit then proceeded to beat the heads of the cadavers into a pulp with his axe. He then covered the remaining pulp with clothes, covered every mirror and piece of glass in a similar way, and washed the evidence from his hands. After that, he took out a two-pound slab of uncooked bacon from the icebox, wrapped it in a towel, and laid it on the floor next to a short piece of key chain that did not belong to the Moores.
The case has never been solved, but one theory links this case to several others that occurred across the country during this period.
On February 12,1993, two-year-old James Patrick Bulger was taken from a shopping mall where he had gone with his mother, tormented, and slain by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. The two were sentenced to custody until they reached adulthood.
Upon appeal, it was found that they were denied a fair trial. In 2001, they were released on life-long license under new aliases after serving eight years.
On October 21, 1978, Frederick Valentich was flying a Cessna 182L light aircraft from Moorabbin, Australia, to Kings Island. At 7:06 PM, Valentich radioed Melbourne Flight Service to report an unidentified aircraft flying roughly 1,000 feet above him. He reported four landing lights visible above him that were moving erratically.
His last words were, "It isn't an aircraft" - interrupted by a strange metallic sound.
Herman Webster Mudgett, AKA Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was perhaps the first modern serial slayer. In 1889, he built a hotel in Chicago nicknamed "The Castle" due to its imposing nature.
The castle was designed to his specifications, with hidden passageways, secret rooms, a pharmacy, and his personal residence on the top floor. Soundproof and air-tight rooms were used to asphyxiate targets, and a gallows room was used to hang them. The hotel also had pits of corrosive acid, bottles of various poisonous substances, and even a stretching rack. A secret metal chute and dummy elevator were used to transport cadavers. Holmes would dissect the cadavers and even sell some of them to medical schools.
In all, Homes confessed to 20 slayings, nine of which were confirmed. Some estimates, however, place the number as high as 200.
