73 Terrifying Things That Happened To Real People And Sound Straight Out Of A Nightmare

On August 20, 2026, 34-year-old Christopher Boone Crimmins and 26-year-old Tyler Anthony L***h were working for a tree-trimming service in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Crimmins was operating a truck-mounted hydraulic grapple while L***h worked on the ground clearing branches.

According to the criminal complaint, the two noticed the sunlight casting shadows of L***h and the grapple onto the street. Crimmins began maneuvering the machine so the grapple’s shadow appeared to grab L***h’s shadow. While watching the shadows instead of the actual grapple and L***h, Crimmins closed the grapple on L***h’s head. L***h was pronounced d**d at the scene.

The following day, Crimmins was charged with one count of second-degree mans***ghter, with prosecutors alleging culpable negligence creating an unreasonable risk.

In November 1986, 39-year-old flight attendant Helle Crafts disappeared from her Newtown, Connecticut home. Her husband, Richard Crafts, gave conflicting explanations for where she had gone. Investigators later learned that around the time Helle vanished, Richard had purchased a freezer and rented a large wood chipper.

A snowplow driver remembered seeing a rental truck and wood chipper near Lake Zoar during a snowstorm. Investigators searched the area and recovered human tissue, bone fragments, a painted fingernail, thousands of strands of blond hair and a dental crown. The crown was positively matched to Helle’s dental records. A chainsaw recovered from the water was also traced back to Richard.

Prosecutors concluded Richard k****d Helle, froze her remains, dismembered them and used the wood chipper to dispose of them near the water. Although virtually no body remained, the forensic evidence was enough. After an earlier mistrial, Richard was convicted of Helle’s m****r in 1989 and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

In 2015, 61-year-old Mary Cerruti seemingly disappeared from her bungalow in Houston, Texas. Neighbors became concerned as her mail accumulated, her yard became overgrown and the normally private homeowner was nowhere to be found. She was eventually reported missing, but investigators could not determine where she had gone.

The house was later foreclosed on, renovated and sold. In March 2017, the new residents made a horrifying discovery while moving in: human bones were inside a narrow space within the home’s walls. A pair of red eyeglasses resembling the ones Mary wore was also discovered there.

The remains were ultimately identified as Mary. Investigators found no evidence that she had been m******d, and the evidence suggested she had somehow entered or fallen into the wall space and become trapped. Her disappearance had been a mystery for nearly two years while the answer was apparently hidden inside her own house.

In December 1989, 25-year-old Debra Milke allowed her roommate, James Styers, to take her 4-year-old son Christopher to a shopping mall in Arizona to see Santa Claus. Christopher never made it there. Styers and Roger Scott instead took the boy into the desert, where he was m******d. Investigators soon accused Debra of arranging her son’s d***h.

The case against Debra centered on Phoenix detective Armando Saldate’s claim that she confessed during an interrogation. The alleged confession was not recorded and no one else witnessed it. Debra denied ever confessing. She was convicted in 1990, sentenced to d***h and ultimately spent more than two decades on Arizona’s d***h row.

In 2013, a federal appeals court overturned Debra’s conviction after finding that prosecutors had withheld evidence concerning Saldate’s history of misconduct, including instances involving false statements and violations of suspects’ rights. Debra was released that year, and in 2015 the m****r charges against her were formally dismissed, ending a case that had kept her incarcerated for roughly 25 years.

On April 20, 2019, 21-year-old Angela Valle was inside her Brooklyn apartment with her friend Savannah Rivera when Angela’s boyfriend, Jerry Brown, attacked both women with an axe. Angela’s four-year-old daughter was also inside the apartment but was not physically harmed. Rivera, who was pregnant, was k****d.

Angela survived severe injuries including a fractured skull, broken ribs, collapsed lungs and multiple wounds. After Brown left, she managed to get out of the apartment and approached an Uber vehicle stopped nearby. The driver called 911, and Angela was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital in critical condition.

Brown later surrendered to police and admitted attacking Rivera, according to prosecutors. In June 2024 he was convicted of second-degree m****r, second-degree attempted m****r and first-degree a*****t, and that August he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

In May 2025, Kell Morris and his wife, Jo Roop, were hiking near Alaska’s Godwin Glacier when Morris fell down an embankment during a rockslide. A roughly 700-pound boulder came down with him and pinned him face-down in the freezing creek below.

Unable to move the boulder, Roop positioned herself in the water and helped keep her husband’s head above the surface. She eventually found enough cell service to call for help, while Morris remained trapped for roughly three hours and began drifting in and out of consciousness.

Rescuers were flown into the remote area after a nearby sled-dog tour company offered the use of its helicopter. Seven men and inflatable lifting bags were eventually used to raise the boulder and free Morris. Despite the ordeal, he survived with relatively minor injuries and was released from the hospital after two nights.

In September 1978, 15-year-old Mary Vincent accepted a ride while hitchhiking through California. The driver, Lawrence Singleton, a***ulted her before severing both of her forearms with a hatchet and leaving her for d**d in a remote ravine.

Despite her injuries, Mary climbed out of the ravine by pressing her arm stumps against the dirt to stop herself from falling. She then walked approximately three miles until she found help, surviving blood loss that doctors believed should have been fatal.

Singleton was convicted of attempted m****r but, because of California sentencing laws at the time, served only eight years in prison. Mary later testified against him, rebuilt her life with prosthetic arms, and became an artist, while Singleton was later convicted of an unrelated m****r in Florida.

On June 19, 2016, 27-year-old actor Anton Yelchin, best known for playing Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek films, was found d**d in the driveway of his Los Angeles home. Anton had apparently stepped out of his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee near the bottom of his steep driveway. While he was outside the vehicle, the SUV suddenly rolled backward, pinning him between its rear end and a brick mailbox pillar and metal security gate.

Anton was crushed so severely that the impact bent the heavy iron gate. Friends discovered his body after he failed to appear for a scheduled rehearsal. The Los Angeles County medical examiner determined that he d**d from blunt traumatic asphyxia, meaning the pressure of the vehicle against his body prevented him from breathing.

The tragedy became even more disturbing when investigators discovered that Anton’s Jeep model was among approximately 1.1 million vehicles recalled just two months earlier. Federal regulators had found that its electronic gear selector could confuse drivers into believing their vehicles were safely in park when they were not. Although the precise cause of Anton’s rollaway was never conclusively established, his parents filed a wrongful d***h lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler. The family reached a confidential settlement in 2018.

On December 7, 2007, 37-year-old Alcides Moreno and his younger brother Edgar were preparing to wash windows on a Manhattan skyscraper when their suspended platform failed. Both men plunged from the building, falling nearly 500 feet. Edgar d**d, but when rescuers reached Alcides, they discovered he was somehow still alive.

Alcides suffered devastating injuries, including multiple broken limbs, a shattered vertebra, a collapsed lung, internal injuries and bleeding around his brain. His condition was so unstable that doctors performed his first operation without even moving him from the emergency room. He eventually underwent numerous additional surgeries and received roughly twice his body’s normal blood volume in transfusions.

Against extraordinary odds, Alcides recovered movement in all four limbs, regained his ability to speak and eventually walked again. Doctors believed remaining with the falling window-washing platform may have helped distribute some of the impact, although precisely how he survived could not be established. NewYork-Presbyterian’s president described surviving a 47-story fall as “virtually beyond belief.”

On December 17, 1968, 20-year-old Emory University student Barbara Mackle was kidnapped from a motel room in Decatur, Georgia, while recovering from the flu. Gary Steven Krist had posed as a police officer to gain entry, accompanied by Ruth Eisemann-Schier, who was disguised as a man. After restraining Barbara’s mother, the pair forced the young woman into a vehicle and drove her to a remote wooded area outside Atlanta. There, they placed her inside a specially constructed wooden and fiberglass box containing food, water, a light, and a battery-powered ventilation system. Before burying her, they photographed Barbara holding a sign reading “KIDNAPPED.”

The kidnappers lowered the box into a trench and covered it with dirt, leaving ventilation tubes reaching the surface. Barbara was trapped underground, unable to escape, while Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded $500,000 from her wealthy father, Florida developer Robert Mackle. As the hours passed, she remained alone in the darkness, relying on the box’s air supply and electrical equipment to survive. Her father eventually paid the ransom, but the kidnappers initially provided no precise location. Investigators faced the terrifying possibility that Barbara might run out of air or water before they could find her.

On December 20, Krist contacted the FBI and provided vague directions to the burial site. Agents flooded the area and searched the woods until they located the concealed box. Using tire irons, sticks, and their bare hands, they dug through approximately 18 inches of dirt and opened the screwed-down lid. At 4:32 p.m., Barbara was lifted out alive after spending approximately 83 hours underground. Krist was arrested two days later in Florida, and Eisemann-Schier was captured in Oklahoma in March 1969. Both were convicted, and Barbara later wrote a book about her ordeal titled “83 Hours Till Dawn.” The original kidnapping photograph and rescue-site images remain chilling evidence of one of America’s most extraordinary survival cases.

On June 16, 2019, Indian magician Chanchal Lahiri, known professionally as “Jadugar Mandrake,” prepared to perform a dangerous escape stunt in the Hooghly River in Kolkata, India. Wearing a bright yellow and red costume, he allowed assistants to wrap his body in thick ropes and steel chains secured with multiple locks. His plan was to be lowered underwater, escape his restraints and emerge before a crowd of spectators. Photographers captured him smiling and preparing for the stunt.

Lahiri had successfully completed a similar underwater escape 21 years earlier. But this attempt would be different. Shortly before being lowered into the river, he told reporters that succeeding would be magic, but failing would be tragic. At approximately 12:30 p.m., a crane lowered him headfirst into the murky water. His family, assistants and spectators waited for him to resurface. Minutes passed, but he never returned. Witnesses reported seeing someone struggling in the river, prompting an emergency search.

Police divers searched the river throughout the following day. On June 17, Lahiri’s body was discovered approximately one kilometer downstream, reportedly still bound by his chains. Investigators examined whether insufficient safety precautions had contributed to his drowning. The photographs taken moments before the stunt became especially haunting, showing a man willingly allowing himself to be restrained for a performance that would ultimately cost him his life.

In June 1991, Charles Holden picked up a hitchhiker while driving in Delaware. After an argument between the two men, Charles left the stranger behind and eventually returned to the farmhouse where he lived with his mother, 72-year-old Dorothy Donovan. Later that night, Dorothy was found m******d inside the home.

Charles told investigators that he believed the hitchhiker had somehow located the secluded house after their encounter. Police struggled to believe the coincidence and initially scrutinized Charles, but blood evidence inside the farmhouse included a bloody fingerprint that did not belong to him. Investigators created a composite sketch from Charles’s description, but the case remained unsolved.

Years later, investigators revisited the evidence and ultimately identified Gilbert Cannon as Dorothy’s k**ler. The bizarre explanation Charles had given police from the beginning was essentially true: a stranger he had encountered on the road had managed to find the home he shared with his mother and k****d her.

In May 1999, 34-year-old Debbie Griggs disappeared from her home in Kent, England, while three months pregnant with her fourth child. Her husband, Andrew Griggs, claimed she had simply walked out after an argument, but investigators quickly doubted that story.

Years later, Andrew was convicted of Debbie’s m****r even though her body still had not been found. Then the case took an even darker turn. After his conviction, he told one of their sons where Debbie’s remains were hidden and tried to get him involved in a plan to make it look like she was still alive.

In 2022, police excavated the garden of Andrew’s former home in Dorset and found Debbie’s remains inside a barrel-shaped container buried beneath the concrete base of a shed. The case became even more disturbing because her k**ler not only hid her body for more than two decades, but later tried to manipulate his own son into digging her up.