13 Real Things Straight Out Of Horror Movies

Everyone has different tastes, but Armin Meiwes possesses a truly disturbing palate. In the early 2000s, the computer repair technician posted on a website looking for "a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed."

Despite being less appealing than a Craiglist missed-connection, someone responded to this post: an engineer from Berlin by the name of Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes. Meiwes cut off a certain part of Brandes's body, both men ate said body part, and then Meiwes eventually stabbed Brandes to death. Over the next ten months, Armin consumed the rest of Bernd. Even more terrifying, Meiwes recorded it all on video.

The story understandably caused a media sensation, partially because the trial revealed that cannibalism was technically not considered illegal in Germany at the time. In the end, thankfully, Meiwes received a life sentence.

There's no place like home . . . to scare the crap out of you.

One Imgur user, TwoBiteBrownie, took the internet on a tour of a secret passageway they and their brother discovered in their parents' room behind a bookcase. It opened to a spiral staircase that lead down to a tiny crawlspace. As freaky as the stairs and crawlspace looked, they paled in comparison to what lay inside the space: the signs of someone living there. A sheet laid on the floor, with strange trinkets, toys, and finished foods strewn about. Even more unsettling, TwoBite suspected the candy came from his Halloween basket, meaning the crawlspace's guest lived in the house alongside them.

Though it sounds like a hoax or one-time phenomenon, people manage to hide out in other people's homes undetected for months. In Japan, one woman hid in a man's closet for a full year, only getting discovered after the man installed cameras in his home. How do you feel safe knowing you might be sharing your shelter with some unknown guests?

H.H. Holmes, America's first known serial killer, carried out his reign of terror in a haunted house of his own design. The former medical student-turned-business owner opened a hotel in Chicago in 1890. The hotel served as his own personal murder house.

During its construction, he hired and fired different workers every week, so no one knew the layout of the building but him. Trapdoors, secret walls, stairways leading nowhere, and a basement straight out of a Saw movie include a mere handful of Holmes's twisted gruesome renovations designed to maximize torture and fear.

At the time authorities discovered his murder den, the bodies inside grew so decomposed it became difficult to tell how many there were. Estimates place Holmes's kills anywhere between 28 to 200 people, with Holmes confessing to 28. Today, Holmes's house no longer stands, but its infamy lives on.

Remember the scene in Poltergeist where the mom falls into the pool filled with decaying dead bodies? She looks genuinely terrified, and for good reason. You see, the producers decided to use real bodies as props because plastic skeletons ran too expensive. Rather than take a quick stop at Party City, producers just well full Dr. Frankenstein and utilized actual corpses to create their monster. On the surface, this bit of artistic planning paid off, with Poltergeist frightening audiences into two more installments. But many say it also contributed to the Poltergeist curse, a supposed evil which led to the deaths of many of the franchise's stars. 

Most drugs do terrible things to the human body, but desomorphine, aka, krokodil, might be the most damaging. The drug, a mixture of red phosphorus, kerosene, and other dangerous chemicals, gives the user the same feeling as injecting heroin for much cheaper. However, krokodil comes with a terrible side-effect worse than blackened lungs or ruined livers: it eats away at your flesh. Potent and inexpensive to produce, krokodil swept through Siberia and into the rest of Russia. A great way to resist the temptation to try krokodil simply involves putting the world into Google image search, but don't do it unless you have a strong stomach.

The Aokigahara Forest, a beautifully lush, green ocean of leaves at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, also the site of the most suicides in the world. Every year, dozens bodies turn up in the woods, most of them hanging from trees. It happens so frequently the Japanese government posts signs throughout the forest telling people, in short, "Don't do it."

Also known as the "Sea of Trees," Aokigahara rests atop an area rich in volcanic activity, a quality that softens the earth and contributes to the natural silence of the area. A famous novel where a couple commits ritual suicide in the forest solidified its somber reputation by the '60s, though many say suicides occurred there long before then.