6 MORE Creepy Urban Legends (That Happen to be True)
As we are fond of pointing out, fact is usually much creepier than fiction.
So around this time of year we like to share some of the most gut-wrenchingly disturbing stories, the kind we would tell around the campfire if we ever actually went outside. And most importantly, they're all true.
#6.
Something Off About That Picture
The Legend:
A young man is dropping off groceries at the house of an eccentric old lady when he notices an old photo that makes the hair on his arms stand on end. The photo's normal enough--a young boy in his Sunday best--but something just seems off. He asks the old lady who it is.
"Oh," she replies, trying to stuff a cat in the dishwasher "isn't that beautiful? You can hardly tell he's dead."
The Truth:
While most folks today are too squeamish to take more than a glance into the casket during a funeral, in the late 19th through early 20th centuries someone dying meant it was time to break out the camera for a family photo. The practice was known as memorial photography.
And, while it all sounds like the set-up for some terrifying practical joke on the photographer, there was actually a somewhat reasonable explanation for the practice. The process used to take pictures back then was expensive enough that it was a once in a lifetime (er, or shortly after a lifetime) thing for most, and required people to sit perfectly still for a couple minutes for it to turn out properly. And if there's one thing dead people are good at it's sitting still.
So, the bodies were dressed and propped up, with their eyes held open. And in case they still weren't giving off that lively "I'm not a corpse harnessed to a chair" vibe, some color was added to the faces in the photo. And just look what they could do with special effects in those days!
Some photographers also offered to add stink lines, but it never really caught on.
Eventually the practice of memorial photography went out of style, maybe because picture-taking became more affordable and didn't have to be reserved for special occasions such as death. Or, possibly everyone just sat up all at once and said, "Wait, what the fuck are we doing?"
#5.
The Corpse in the Carpet
The Legend:
You can find this tale of ill-advised interior decorating on angelfire pages across the web lumped in with old chestnuts like "The call is coming from inside the house!" According to the story, somebody finds a beautiful old rug in an alley, takes it home and finds something horrifying wrapped inside (what some call "the Taco Bell burrito scenario"). Variations of this one include bodies being found in discarded refrigerators or wardrobes, but the message remains the same; don't do your home decor shopping anyplace that smells of crackhead urine.
The Truth:
In 1984, three Columbia University students found a rolled-up carpet on the sidewalk and decided to drag it back home (we assume they were mainly looking for something to absorb vomit and Doritos crumbs, rather than accessorize their milk crate furniture).
Once they got the carpet back to their dorm they unrolled it and found the rotting corpse of an unidentified man with two bullet holes in his skull. Yes, three students from a 50 thousand dollar-a-year college carried a carpet all the way home without noticing it contained a 200-pound stinking mass of decomposing flesh.
At the very least we hope these fine young leaders of tomorrow didn't just push the body into the corner and go back to playing Atari.
#4.
The Toxic Woman
The Legend:
A sick woman arrives at a hospital and when the nurses withdraw blood it is so toxic that it begins making everyone around her sick too. Realizing they're dealing with the human embodiment of the creature from Alien, the nurses flee for their lives.
The Truth:
On the evening of February 19th, 1994, Gloria Ramirez was admitted to a California emergency room, suffering from an advanced form of cancer.
When a nurse drew Gloria's blood she detected a foul odor, so foul in fact that hospital staff started gagging and even collapsing around her. Eventually as many as 23 people were affected. The ER was evacuated and a decontamination unit brought in. So more like the creature from Alien crossed with a fart, but still.
The case was quickly written off as mass hysteria, but considering that the worst affected victim spent two weeks in intensive care suffering from hepatitis, pancreatitis and avascular necrosis (a condition which literally causes your bones to die) we'd say either this was some serious damned hysteria or the guy who decided that got his degree from Dumbass University.
As for Gloria, she died just 40 minutes after arriving at the hospital. Her autopsy was performed by men in full hazmat moon suits and, despite one of the most extensive forensic investigations in history, it's still not known what exactly turned this woman's blood into toxic sludge. Granted, the experts on the case have refused to take off their hazmat suits since that day, and have now retreated to a small island which they have surrounded with barbed wire, but those are probably just the usual precautions.
Not to be a hipster or anything, but I've known about the living head thing and the funeral photography since I was a little kid . . . I watched a lot of morbid documentaries . . .
ReplyGah. That decapitation story would just be scary, except it was a true story... Is it odd that I found it really sad, and felt terribly for that man in his final moments?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThat, my friend, is called empathy. It means you're a totally normal human being who can relate to the situations of others in a sympathetic manner. That's a good thing and I felt exactly the same. Poor guy :c
I don't feel sorry for him at all, it said he was a murderer, do you feel sorry for the murderers today getting executed? Probably not.
Umm yes Roedericf1, yes i f*****g do
When you think about it, why WOULDNT a head be aware for a few dozen seconds after decapitation?
ReplyNo spinal cord should make your brain malfunctional, making it painless anyways.
Wow, I didn't know taking pictures of the dead was so rare in other countries. My family has always taken photos at funerals. We don't gather around the open casket for a group picture or anything, but we do take pictures of the deceased loved one. With the eyes closed, of course. And just before the burial we take a group photo with the closed coffin. It is kind of creepy to look at the pictures afterwards and I try to avoid it, but I guess it's the last chance to take a photo of the person who has passed away. And I think we might take the group photos because our whole family gets together very rarely, only on weddings and funerals. Sadly, the funerals happen more often...
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesWhich fucked up, third world country is that exactly?
Haha, I'm from Estonia. It might be fucked up but it's not a third world country.
When I read #6 I thought that it sounds like Estonia. I can confirm that it used to be very common here not so long ago and many families still do it (Taking pictures of the dead but not exactly family photos with them and I haven't seen anyone hanging those pictures on the walls or smthing like that)
Actually #1 is false. It was even addressed in the Journal of the America Medical Association in Sept 9, 1939 edition that the other witness state that 10 seconds was at best the maximum that any movement was detected, and some and couldn't corroborate the story beyond a few twitches. The brain still fires electrical pulses throughout anything it can when dead (the JAMA also notes the stimulation to a part of the brain during a head being severed). The pent-up energy if you will tends to appear to animate the face as an aware person might but it's essentially the blood draining out as the brain tries to pump. The best guess is 5 seconds but even that is shaky since the aforementioned occurrence happens to decapitation victims. Since the brain is responsible for the flow of blood impulse, without a heart it's still trying to operate the heart through that energy. Aside from that, the eyes draining blood would appear to affix on you if you stare directly at them up close (think of that picture of a winding road that follows you). But really, you are blocking the entire field of vision... unless the person dies looking off to the side, they'll remain "looking" at you as well.
ReplyConsidering this info came from the source for the story about the friend's head, it seems pertinent that Nathan should have included the disclaimer the author writes before the anecdote, which is this:
"In 1905 another doctor claimed that when he called the name of the murderer Languille just after decapitation, the head opened its eyes and focused on him.
Is it possible? The aforementioned Dr. Fink believed the brain might remain conscious as long as 15 seconds; that's how long cardiac arrest victims last before blacking out. (Dr. Fink's colleague put the window of awareness at 5 seconds.)"
There are oodles of other documentation that state quite a few problems in the "study" of Languille.
the brain doesn't 'pump' so i'm a little confused by this.
I really really wanna know what killed the toxic woman!
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesFor some reason, yet another bad entry aside from #1 - the source itself (and hasn't been updated since this was written) already notates she had died of DMSO:
The health department’s report triggered another flurry of news reports; these featured Gorchynski and her lawyer, physician Russell Kussman, who denounced the mass hysteria conclusion. By this time Gorchynski had filed a lawsuit against Riverside General Hospital, the coroner’s office, and several others, seeking $6 million in damages. A report suggesting Gorchynski experienced psychosomatic symptoms would certainly not play well for her in court. The report may be based on politics or ignorance, but it’s not based on science, Kussman told the New York Times. These are all professional emergency room workers. They don’t become hysterical because of a heart attack.
The state report also angered some of the other emergency room staff, including Welch. She was convinced that neither she nor anyone else that night had been party to mass hysteria. She wanted someone to look at the case more closely, and in her opinion Livermore was the only laboratory involved without a vested interest. Welch called Andresen at Livermore and implored him to take another look. To help lure him back to the case, she sent him a copy of a scrapbook of material she had accumulated, including news stories, the Riverside coroner’s report, legal briefs, and toxicology reports.
Andresen asked Grant, his deputy director, to sift through the file. To refresh Grant’s memory of the case, he also showed him his results, including the puzzling compounds he had identified. Andresen laid out a paper with the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry results, a graph with spikes similar to earthquake readings on a seismograph, and pointed at the dimethyl sulfone peak.
Grant was a bit hesitant. I’m a nuclear chemist, and my organic chemistry knowledge truthfully is minuscule, he says. Grant mistook dimethyl sulfone for dimethyl sulfoxide, or dmso--the only difference between the two chemicals is that dmso has one oxygen atom, not two. Grant was more familiar with dmso because, he says, I’d used dmso in a former life as an athlete. dmso is sold in a gel form at hardware stores as a heavy-duty degreaser, and it has long been a folk remedy among athletes for achy muscles and joints. Andresen corrected him, saying the spike was dimethyl sulfone. Grant didn’t get to Welch’s file until a few days later when he was on a flight to a business meeting in Washington, D.C. There were a lot of things we hadn’t seen before, he says. One thing that particularly struck him was a speculation in the autopsy report about the source of the garlicky odor of Ramirez’s body and its oily sheen: dmso.
Dmso has a checkered past. During the mid-1960s a flurry of research showed it had remarkable healing powers, easing intractable pain and reducing anxiety. But the rise of this potential wonder drug was stopped suddenly when animal tests showed that prolonged exposure to dmso altered the lens of the eye. Fearing that a dmso drug might ruin people’s eyesight, the Food and Drug Administration ordered companies to cease clinical trials of the drug in 1965. The FDA later relaxed that policy and in 1978 approved a 50 percent solution of dmso as a treatment for interstitial cystitis, a condition marked by painful urinary tract lesions that occurs predominantly in women.
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Another source from 1996 states this too:
What killed the 31-year-old Ramirez was no big mystery. She died of kidney failure due to advanced cancer of the cervix.~~~ Because of those compounding issues, the DMSO built up in her system rather than passing it like most of us would do.
Actually, there are still problems with that explanation.
Cool story bro.
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Staring into the eyes of a decapitated head as it slowly dies... and how did Dr. Beaurieux sleep at night after that?
ReplyIs the first picture of #6 the actual dead boy the article refers to? For some reason, it's making me want to s**t myself. Perhaps it's the boy's blank, ominous stare; perhaps it's all the Benadryl I took before bed.
ReplyAbout the toxic lady...they later found out that she had been using DMSO as a home cure, and it underwent a funky chemical reaction in her dying body, which caused the toxicity problems.
ReplyThere's actually still problems with that explanation.
I'm pretty well sure that i won't be very glad to see my body a distant long complete with a red hole where my head used to attached to.. Neither to see my friend done the same thing. Yeah. I'm sure.
Replydate rich here-----------sugarcupid_com
ReplyI have some hard-core hillbilly relatives in VA that still take photos of the dead- they actually gather at the coffin at viewings and whip out the disposable cameras. Horrifying, but apparently still going on.
Reply#5 reminds me of the X-Files episode Je Souhaite. Except in that case the person(?) wasn't dead.
ReplyI won't be getting much sleep tonight. xD
Reply"In Beaurieux's own words: "Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine, the pupils focusing themselves," and the good doctor continued to get similar results for up to 30 seconds."
ReplyAAuuuuAAAghh!! MOTHERFUCK! What in the goddamn HELL, JESUS CHRIST!
"Pretty chilling stuff, so let's leave you on a lighter note.
In Africa, there have been certain tribes who will tie your head to a springy sapling before chopping it off, so that your head is then catapulted into the distance after the final blow. Thus your last few moments of awareness are of your head sailing breezily through the air."
Yeah...that helps a little, I guess. Thanks Cracked, I know what my dreams are going to be about tonight.
Memorial photography. Seriously. What. The. Ever-loving. FUCK?!?!
ReplyThat headless lover thing is pretty disturbing, too. I'm so glad I read this article right before eating!
Yay, more reasons for me to be terrified of randomly having my head decapitated.
ReplyThe one where the husband cuts off Glovers head and brings it to his wife in the hospital? As sweet as it was, cracked says he knew she was cheating because he'd had a vasectomy a year prior. The linked article says no such thing. IT says she decided to tell him the truth after they decided to divorce. In any case, never does it ONCE mention a vasectomy.
ReplyThat! That is the point of the article you choose to focus on?
WHO GIVES TWO FUCKS?????
I love Urban Legends.... =)
Reply