Some say that while ghosts can upset you, they can't actually harm you, regardless of what horror films would have us believe. However, there are those who believe in deadly paranormal encounters, from cursed objects that trap their owners in misfortune to mysterious deaths attributed to hauntings.
A creepy tale from a Thailand village blames the death of 10 men on a ghost who can only be warded away with an item of clothing, while an American town has embraced a legendary beast who appeared numerous times shortly before a horrific disaster. Other encounters with ghosts resulted in death when flippant naysayers ignored ancient warnings, while another ghost managed to contact the living to solve her own murder.
We're sure there's a logical explanation for all of this, but perhaps you'd like to turn off the lights and decide for yourself.
Villagers in Tha Sawang, Thailand, claimed in 2013 that a ghost was responsible for the deaths of 10 men. The men had all been perfectly healthy before they suddenly died. A medium told them the men were killed by a vengeful apparition known as the Widow Ghost who was attracted to homes with only one son.
To get her to stay away, the medium advised hanging a red shirt outside the home.
If you were particularly bad while incarcerated at Alcatraz, they might put you in the Hole. The cells in the Hole were lit with one dull bulb and contained no furniture. Prisoners lived there alone, mostly on bread and water, with a full meal only every three days.
One inmate was locked in the Hole and began to scream that he was not alone but in the company of a beast with glowing eyes. His cries were ignored and eventually, they stopped. In the morning, they found he had been strangled. While some assume a guard did it to put an end to the screaming, others believe that the inmate was killed by a ghost rumored to haunt the jail. Some guards said they saw the recently deceased inmates appear for a routine count, only to vanish moments later.
John Bell and his family settled in Robertson County, Tennessee, in the 1800s. Bell claimed to see a dog with the head of a rabbit and the Bell kids claimed that some spirit was pulling their bedding away at night while rats chewed at the beds themselves. The family claimed to hear a woman's voice singing and reciting sermons and hymns. Even General Andrew Jackson visited the house, only to encounter some kind of spirit that temporarily stalled his horses.
The ghost tormented Bell's youngest daughter until she broke off her engagement with a man the ghost did not fancy, and the ghost was ultimately blamed for Bell's declining health and subsequent death via a poison that was discovered in the home's cabinets.
Nowadays, people like to blame the Bell Witch (a name reportedly given to the entity by Jackson) for various paranormal phenomena in the area, such as unexplained voices and lights.
In the early 1800s, a number of people in Hammersmith, a neighborhood in London, claimed that a vicious ghost had attacked them. The ghost was widely believed to be the restless spirit of a person that had killed themselves prior to the alleged attacks.
The residents decide to set up armed patrols to guard the area. One night, Francis Smith, 29, was sure he saw the spirit, a ghostly figure in white. He shot the ghost and killed it. However, it turned out to be a plasterer named Thomas Millwood. A witness testified in the subsequent trial that she had warned Millwood that his all-white plasterer's dress could be mistaken for the ghost. Smith was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to a year of hard labor.
Later, an old man admitted that he had been donning a white sheet and pretending to be a ghost to scare his apprentice, who had been tormenting his grandchildren with scary stories.
Robert Laursen, 37, was staying at the Villisca Axe Murder House in November of 2014 conducting a "paranormal investigation." During his visit, he stabbed himself in the chest at about 1 AM. Though Laursen survived, it's unclear why he harmed himself.
Yet the Villisca home's early history is even stranger. In June 1912, someone killed the couple that lived there, their four children, and two other children who were staying the night, all with an ax. The murder was never solved.
The house can be rented for the night, and many visitors claim to have had ghostly encounters, though Laursen's self-injury was the first of its kind. Laursen declined to comment on his actions after recovering.
The Crying Boy is a painting of - well, a crying boy. According to The Sun, a British tabloid not necessarily known for being the most reputable, firefighters were claiming to find several Crying Boy paintings completely unharmed within homes that had otherwise been destroyed. While some claimed that the painting came with some kind of pyro curse, a more reasonable explanation could be that the paintings had been slathered with a fire-repellant varnish.
An even more reasonable explanation could be that The Sun is well-known for coming up with curses and far-fetched tales.
