Pictures don’t only speak a thousand words; they also elicit strong emotions. They can move you to tears, bring an ear-to-ear grin on your face, or send frightening chills down your spine.
These images are about the latter. Seeing them at first glance likely won’t induce the instant creeps, but reading about their backstories may do that. Some were taken moments before disaster, while others were just downright disturbing.
Scroll away and see for yourself. If you’re a fan of the occasional jolt from slightly unsettling content, you may find this list enjoyable.
#1
Douglas Spedden was a six-year-old boy when he boarded the RMS Titanic with his parents.
A photograph taken by Roman Catholic Priest Frances Browne shows Douglas Spedden playing the topper on the deck of the “Unsinkable Ship”.
Days later, the vessel would go down.
Spedden would be among the survivors.
However, on August 6, 1915, Spedden was k**led at the age of nine in an automobile accident near his residence in Maine.
This was the first documented case of a fatal motor collision in the state.
Image credits: David Frigault
#2
Wedding rings retrieved from the Jewish victims of the Holocaust…
Image credits: Abhik Kumar Mohanta
#3
This creepy yet normal seeming photo was the last picture of the 18-year old Jolee Callan before her boyfriend shot her two times in the head and pushed her down the cliff.
Image credits: Abhik Kumar Mohanta
#4
This picture was taken just a few minutes before both brothers were struck by lightning in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1975. Luckily for both Michael and Sean, they survived the lightning strike.
Image credits: Ok_Sun3327
#5
Photo of scratch marks on the walls of an Auschwitz gas chamber.
Image credits: Dante Caloia
#6
When this selfie of three happy teenagers was taken, two of the girls had approximately 10 seconds left to live. The third girl lived for three more days but the injuries were too severe.
They are standing right by the wind and noise from a passing westbound train and can not hear a second train coming in from the opposite direction. At right is the halo from that train and the railroad track.
Life is incomprehensibly fragile.
Image credits: Vidar Bonsak
#7
It is the last known picture of Chester Bennington, leader of the rock band Linkin Park, with his family. Less than 24 hours later, he committed suicide. It reminds me of the overwhelming power that depressive states have on human being, totally annihilating the very soul of this artist, who could not overcome whatever black and silent abyss prevented him to feel the love of his 6 children and the one of tens of thousands fans adoring his concert performances. Che la terra ti sia lieve, Chester, you left great art and a painful void.
Image credits: Stefano Gelati
#8
In 1870, the American bison was hunted wildly by European colonists and nearly extinct. On a flat area, uncountable American bison skulls were piled up.
Image credits: Forrest Harris
#9
Tsunami before striking Hat Rai Lay Beach in southern Thailand.
Image credits: Sneha Mathews
#10
At first you think she’s just a cute old lady cooking outside. Obviously the topic is who is this lady and who was she, what did she have in that cauldron.
Leonarda Cianciulli was an Italian serial killer. Better known as The Soapmaker of Correggio, she killed three women in the town of Correggio, Reggio Emilia, between 1939 and 1940, and turned their bodies into soap and pastries using caustic soda or sodium hydroxide.
Image credits: José Alberto
#11
Before the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland. Almost immediately after this photo was taken, a bomb was set off in the red car beside the boy on his dad’s shoulders. The father and child survived miraculously, but the photographer and 28 others died, while around 220 were injured.
Image credits: [deleted]
#12
Ayano Tokumasu, a person in a red sweater in the background, lost her footing while posing for a picture and fell into Niagara Falls.
Image credits: [deleted]
#13
This photo of what looks like a few people in jumpsuits walking out of a building.
In actuality it’s the last moment the crew of Challenger was photographed, a few hours before their launch. Their shuttle exploded just a minute after launch, but they didn’t die then- evidence indicates they died a few minutes later when the capsule hit the ocean.
Image credits: Andromeda321
#14
A group of thirteen years old girls went camping in America in July 1945. They swam at a river in Ruidoso, New Mexico. The girl in front of the picture is called Barbara Kent. What the girls did not know is that nearby, the Manhattan Project detonated a nuclear bomb as a test…
In an article, Kent described what happened that day:
“We were all just shocked … and then, all of a sudden, there was this big cloud overhead, and lights in the sky,” Kent recalls. “It even hurt our eyes when we looked up. The whole sky turned strange. It was as if the sun came out tremendous.” A few hours later, she says, white flakes began to fall from above. Excited, the girls put on their bathing suits and, amid the flurries, began playing in the river. “We were grabbing all of this white, which we thought was snow, and we were putting it all over our faces,” Kent says. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. And we all thought, ‘Well, the reason it’s hot is because it’s summer.’ We were just 13 years old.”[1]
The flakes were fallout from the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation. It took place at 5:29 a.m. local time atop a hundred-foot steel tower 40 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, in Jornada del Muerto valley. The site had been selected in part for its supposed isolation. In reality, thousands of people were within a 40-mile radius, some as close as 12 miles away. Yet those living near the bomb site weren’t warned of the test. Nor were they evacuated beforehand or afterward, even as radioactive fallout continued to drop for days…
Barbara Kent and all her friends developed cancer. Every single one of the girls you see in that photo, died before the age of thirty. The only one who lived longer was Kent. And she, too, developed and survived several bouts of cancer. People often forget of the heavy price paid not only by those the atomic bombs were dropped on in Japan, but even by those who lived nearby as they were first developed.
Image credits: Jean-Marie Valheur
#15
The picture was actually found on the camera of two vacationers who were swept away in the 2004 tsunami, which resulted in over 230 000 deaths.
Image credits: [deleted]
#16
This picture seems pretty innocuous, but if you look a bit closely, you can begin to see the terror that is deep within; at first, it just looks like several people of a different culture sitting around on a porch. However, when you look closely, it appears that a human foot and hand sit in front of the man.
The man was a rubber worker in Congo, who, unfortunately, did not meet his quota for the day. As punishment, his young daughter was k**led and all that was left was her foot and hand given to the man as a reminder of what would happen when you don’t perform well at work. Even when that wasn’t enough, the other part of his daughter was cannibalized.
This is truly a horrifying image.
Image credits: Simon-Lee Lambert
#17
This is a photograph of Michael Rockefeller. If you don’t recognize his first name, you certainly recognize his last. Michael’s great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, the world’s wealthiest person. Michael’s father was Nelson Rockefeller, Vice-President of the United States. His uncle, Winthrop Rockefeller was governor of Arkansas and his first cousin, Jay Rockefeller, was governor of West Virginia.
Greatness was the low bar every Rockefeller had to surpass. For Michael, who had recently graduated from Harvard with honors, greatness was inevitable. But, as it is with most of the aristocracy, there is a quest for adventure before having to confine oneself to the governor’s mansion or capital building. Michael decided to study and collect the art of the people in New Guinea, one of the islands near Indonesia.
In his 40-foot canoe (13-meters) and three miles (five kilometers) from shore, Michael’s adjoined pontoon capsized. His two guides swam ashore to get help.
After two days of waiting, Michael decided to brave the waters. He jumped out of the canoe he was sharing with a Dutch anthropologist and started swimming.
The picture above may have been Michael’s last. He disappeared.
Hundreds of reporters went to New Guinea to find out what happened. Private detectives were hired. Planes, helicopters, ships and thousands of locals scoured the island and the sea hoping to find something…anything. Rumors were spreading like wildfire.
Fifty-seven years later, the most disturbing rumors were confirmed by a National Geographic research team. Two missionaries who had lived with the natives and spoke their language came forward to tell the story, as did several members of the community. Dutch cololonialists had k**led four natives in 1958. Vengeance had to be taken.
Michael had survived the swim. Pulled ashore, his body was pierced with spears. His head was removed and the brains eaten raw. The rest of Michael’s body was boiled in a pot before being consumed by the natives, each sharing in the meal. His thigh bones were made into daggers, and the bones from his lower legs were made into fishing spears.
The smiles of the three natives in the picture appear to be in anticipation of Michael’s fate.
Image credits: Scott Goldman
#18
This photo. Looks innocent enough right? Unless you know the backstory. The man in the middle is Darren Vickers. Vickers abducted, r*ped, m*rdered, and dismembered 8 year old Jamie Lavis. Then a few days later showed up at the Lavis home saying he wanted to help find the missing boy.
He became friends with the grieving parents and even moved in with them. The parents started to trust him over the police. He began grooming Jamie’s 10 year old brother and interfered in the investigation into Jamie’s disappearance. The police knew it was him the whole time but couldn’t prove it.
One day Vickers approached some children and asked them to help him look for Jamie in the woods. The children ran home and told their parents who phoned police. This finally gave the police an area to search for Jamie’s body and they found the clothes he was wearing the day he went missing along with a few bones. The rest had been tossed in the river. They charged him with m*rder and the Lavis family was finally able to bury their boy.
Image credits: Lisa Mohr
#19
This is one of the most celebrated pictures of the post-war era shot in 1945, celebrating USA victory in the Second World War. While it may seem very romantic and merry, some people claim that this is a picture of a s*xual a*sault. The sailor and the nurse are not actually a couple. It’s the first time they met and the sailor simply spun her and kissed her. The sailors actual future wife, is standing right beside him, out of the frame.
The identity of the nurse hasn’t been identified, and her opinion on this is still unknown. But it’s worth knowing the backstory of this picture.
Image credits: John Galew
#20
A CCTV footage shows 2-year-old James Bulger, who was abducted by 10-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. They would later torture and m**der James and leave his body on a railway line.
Image credits: Sam Lee
#21
This photo of Travis Alexander was found on a damaged camera, was taken by his girlfriend, Jodi Arias. Couples like to take pictures, what else could it be? This photo was captured just minutes before she stabbed and shot him to death.
Image credits: https://qr.ae/pA8pcV
#22
This one. It’s a wedding reception, people are dancing and celebrating, not a care in the world. In a few seconds, the floor that they’re dancing on will collapse and they will fall two stories. Many of them will die.
This is from the wedding hall disaster that occurred in Jerusalem in 2001. I watched this incident when it was first reported on, one time, and it scared me in a way that I’ve never been scared before. It scared me more than watching 9/11. Watching those faces turn from being joyous to terrified, the sounds go from a locomotive of happy chatter to a chorus of helpless screams, for just a second before they all disappeared, shook me to my core. To this day I cannot bring myself to watch the incident again, my fingers won’t dare press play.
Image credits: Scott Eden
#23
The above seemingly innocent picture is a big clue to a crime scene.
That selfie is taken by Antoine with her friend Brittney Gargol (right), who was later found dead on the side of the road in 2015. What’s more is there was a belt, just near Brittney’s deceased body.
The police could not solve the crime, because they could not find the owner of that belt.
By now, almost everyone reading this would have guessed that Antoine was the owner of that belt. The police noticed the belt in Antoine’s facebook post, and hypothesized that Antoine had used the best as the murder weapon.
Their theory proved to be correct, Antoine pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was convicted. She received seven years in prison.
Thank god for facebook, as well as cameras.
Image credits: Mohnish Agrawal
#24
Baby dolphin dies after swimmers pass it around.
And there wasn’t even one nice human being to say how WRONG this is.
Makes me really sad every time I see it on social media.
Image credits: Lilly Brant
#25
This is a series of photos taken by two Dutch hiking women (Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon) before their disappearance in Panama.
Image credits: Johnny S
#26
This story is about coworkers and friends. Five men whom at first did not know each other but grew to trust each other and have unwavering faith in each other as was needed in any dive team that worked on oil pipelines.
The photo above seems unassuming…
All 5 men looking at the camera without an idea of what would become of their lives.
This is the Paria diving incident…
The incident claimed the lives of Christopher Boodram’s colleagues; Fyzal Kurban, Yusuf Henry, Kazim Ali Jr and Rishi Nagassar.
These men worked for Land and Marine and Construction Services (LMCS) and were repairing a defective portion of Paria Fuel’s Sealine 36’s riser off the Port of Pointe-a-Pierre on February 25 when the deadly accident happened.
A Delta P event aka a Differential pressure event happened shortly after lunch that day and caused all of these divers to be sucked into the an oil pipeline. The Delta P event happened when the divers removed an inflatable plug, causing a vortex and inevitably led to the deaths of four men with only one surviving (Chris).
Image credits: Montego Cruz
#27
On April 26, 1865, the Sultana began sailing up the Mississippi River with hundreds of passengers, and upwards of two thousand Union prisoners who had been freed following the end of the American Civil War.
The photograph above — taken as the ship was leaving dock — is the only known image of the Sultana taken in her two-and-a-half years of service.
Within hours of her departure a boiler would explode.
Over a thousand people, and perhaps upwards of sixteen-hundred people would be k**led.
Image credits: David Frigault
#28
The happy man in the middle is Kevin O’Higgins. He has just been married to the lovely lady in front of him. On his right is his best man, Rory O’Connor.
This was taken in October 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. O’Higgins, and O’Connor were leading figures in the Irish nationalist cause.
Now flash-forward a year. Much has changed since then. Two and a half years of warfare has finally dragged the British to the negotiating table, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 essentially made Ireland an independent nation, apart from one crucial point; the King would still be our head of state.
Of course, some in the nationalist movement took exception to this. Took so much exception, in fact, that they decided that those who supported this Treaty were traitors, and deserved to be treated as such.
O’Higgins, being the fine and moral man that he was, supported the Treaty. O’Connor, being the fine and moral man that he was, rejected the Treaty.
So one thing led to another, and before you know it, the nationalist movement had split, and the two sides were tearing each other apart in the Irish Civil War. In December 1922, four anti-Treaty leaders who had been captured earlier in the war were executed, in reprisal for the killing of a pro-Treaty leader the day before.
The name of one of those men?
Rory O’Connor.
The name of the man who signed their death warrants?
Kevin O’Higgins.
When later accused of personal vindictiveness in carrying out these executions, O’Higgins responded: “Vindictiveness! Great heavens! One of these men was a friend of mine.”
Image credits: Jimmie Byrne
#29
This 17-year-old boy, Tyler Hadley, looks like he must be chilling at a party, right? However this photo was taken just sometime after Tyler m**dered his parents, cleaned the house and called his friends over to party. Their bodies were hidden in the bedroom when this photo was taken.
Image credits: Greyswand
#30
This is Jeremy Worthy. Whilst kayaking in Batemans Bay on the south coast of New South Wales, Worthy was live streaming on Facebook. Only, whilst live streaming, viewers had the unfortunate experience of watching Jeremy plead for his life.
He was struggling to deal with a heavy swell that was pushing him away. Jeremy was found dead (by drowning) after.
Image credits: Kyle Dring
#31
Into the jaws of death, 1944
US Army 1ID in their beach assault of Omaha sector of the Normandy landings, not a horrific photo for its content, but a horrific photo because we know what followed, an emotional and awe inspiring photograph. Truly, the greatest generation.
Image credits: Hai Ling
#32
The Thousand Yard Stare
This is 27-year-old Italian Corporal Antonio Metruccio of the 3rd Eagle Company, 66th Regiment aircraft Trieste.
Corporal Metruccio was asked to pose for the camera by a photographer moments after a 72-hour long continuous (three straight days) firefight in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan. In that fleeting moment, he couldn’t muster even a faint smile after a heavy encounter with the enemy, but rather he could only show a very haunting Thousand Yard Stare, which characterizes shell shock.
Bala Murghab is located in Badghis Province of northwestern Afghanistan, near the border of Turkmenistan where gun and drug smuggling in addition to Taliban activities are known to take place.
The Thousand Yard Stare is an acute stress reaction characterized by a limp, blank, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier who has survived some terrible fighting. However, it can also occur to persons who have undergone other types of trauma.
By the looks of it, Corporal Metruccio had seen death at close range determined to claim his life and the life of his comrades. His Thousand Yard Stare shows death is real.
Image credits: Raymond Martinez
#33
Remember when it was in the news that a Russian ambassador had been murdered in Turkey?
Here he is moments before his death.
That man anxiously standing behind him?
His assassin.
Image credits: Elias Fredericks
#34
Not so scary? Just women and kids sitting and “busy” in their lives while two guys are just smiling for a selfie. But wait! This picture requires some background to know how scary it is.
The pic was taken from Syria and the “smiling guys” are soldiers of Bashar al Assad who have captured all these women and kids from Eastern Ghouta (their men already sent to detention centres) and what happened with those poor women and kids, one never knows; but based on the long history of tortures and systematic use of rape as both a lust of the soldiers and a “weapon” to terrorize other civilians daring to get the freedom from Bashar, whenever I think of this image, it gives me nightmares.
Image credits: Talha Khan
#35
This picture shows an overcrowded graveyard and the skeletons dug up from their graves and became a popular photo-op for tourists, here in the picture, American Soldiers.
Image credits: Thors
#36
One of the most tragic incidents in history was the Chernobynl powersteam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the environment, with the deposition of radioactive materials in many parts of Europe.This picture show how an old armchair with a doll’s head sits in what was once a kindergarten in the Chernobyl zone.
Image credits: Thors
#37
The photograph above shows nine men from the “Eight-Nation Alliance” taken in 1900, shortly after the suppression of the Qing Dynasty-initiated Boxer Rebellion — United Kingdom, United States, Australia, India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan respectively.
Apparently, the intention had been to make the British soldier the tallest in the photograph to demonstrate their genetic superiority, only for the Americans to snuff this mandate by sending a taller man from their country — prompting the British to place a tall hat on their man.
According to some claims, everybody in the above photograph, except the American, would die a violent death, with the British soldier dying during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, the Indian being hanged for treason in 1915, and the Japanese soldier dying in an air raid in 1944 among other examples.
Image credits: David Frigault
#38
On the morning of 17 January, Muhammad Yusuf Pujwala (the father of Asia Bano (was sitting outside his home in Kathua, Kashmir, when one of his neighbours came sprinting towards him. He told Muhammed Pujwala, they had found his eight-year-old daughter, Asifa Bano. Her body was found in the bushes of a forest.
The 8 year old’s legs were broken. Her fingers were black and blue. Asifa was confined in a local temple for several days and given sedatives that kept her unconscious. The charge sheet alleges that she was “r**ed for days, tortured and then finally m**dered”. She was strangled to death and then hit on the head twice with a stone.
The worst thing is, she isn’t the only girl and she won’t be the last.
Image credits: Sofia Lindemann
#39
The Remains from the Titanic
The Titanic was a famous cruiser that was dubbed “unsinkable” due to its compartment design that were able to keep the ship afloat so long as only five air tight compartments are flooded with water. On the fateful night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg and more than five compartments were filled.
The ship sank and took 1496 lives with it. In this image, we see the clothing of someone who sank with the Titanic. Officials believe that they still contain remains of the victims though some argue that the bodies of the victims are gone due to the water pressure.
Image credits: Phillip Gabriel Alcantara Mercado
#40
The 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens was the deadliest volcanic event to take place in U.S. history. It caused over $1 billion in damages and k**led around 57 people.
These are pictures taken by Robert Landsburg, who was a photographer from Oregon. He had traveled to Mt St Helens on multiple occasions in 1980 to take pictures of the mountain before the eruption.
Image credits: Henri Bergeron