58 Unsettling Stories And Facts That Should Give You The Creeps (New Pics)

Kim Kang-woo was a poor farmer's son in a North Korean border town, top of his class but barred from university for being the wrong social class. He and his mother sometimes didn't have enough to eat.

His father had already died attempting the same escape Kim was about to make.

It was pouring rain the night in May 2016 when Kim crossed the Yalu River alone. His mother gave him a boiled egg as he left, he pressed it back into her hands.

She couldn't risk seeing him off, and cried silently for nights after. He reached Seoul after a five-month journey through China, Laos and Thailand.

Then he worked. Construction sites, a mattress store, a cellphone store, every job he could land, thinking of his mother each night on the walk home.

By 2019 he had saved enough and found a broker he trusted, and flew to China to oversee her escape himself.

It fell apart in a single dropped phone call. His mother called from a borrowed phone, frightened, saying she couldn't find him on the Chinese side and maybe they should try another time. Then the line went dead.

His money was nearly gone, his visa almost expired.

So he made his choice. "There was really only one path," he said. "I had to go back. And if I got caught crossing back in, I was ready to die."

He spent two days watching the border guards from the Chinese side, and the moment they broke for dinner, he crossed back in and ran for the woods.

He knocked on his mother's door. She was stunned, they held each other in silence and cried and then she was terrified.

“If he's caught, he would be immediately exec*ted and the rest of us would go to a prison camp."

For 22 days he scrambled to arrange brokers on both sides of the border. Then surveillance caught a call.

Soldiers raided the house while Kim was out, detained his mother, and beat her to make her admit her son had returned. She denied it.

The day after she was detained, Kim crossed the Yalu a second time, without her.

South Korean intelligence had tracked his whole journey by phone records and interrogated him for weeks as a suspected spy.

Because defectors legally become South Korean citizens, entering the North is a crime he was sentenced to six months in prison and two years' probation.

But it worked. While he was still being questioned, a broker called, his mother had escaped on her own. He arranged for his contacts to guide her out through China, Laos and Thailand.

She wrote him a letter every week he was locked up, about her new driver's license, about a young man on the subway who looked just like him.

On the night of his release in September 2020, she waited at the prison gates at midnight, and they reunited more than four years after he first fled.

A powerful wave knocked him off balance, and he could only watch as the boat, still in gear, sailed away into the darkness without him.

He was wearing just shorts and a T-shirt in freezing Pacific water.

"The panic set in," he said. "This is a pretty heavy situation." An expert diver and experienced swimmer, he knew land was too far.

His only option was an offshore oil platform called Platform Gail, visible only as a faint glow in the blackness. He set off for it.

He pushed himself forward by thinking of his family. "I was devastating myself through my mind, just picturing my girls and my son growing up without me, and my wife not having a husband."

He kept telling himself: "Just keep swimming. You gotta get home to your family." Then he heard a splash.

"It was a medium-sized harbour seal. The seal would go underwater and he came up and nudged me, like a dog comes up and nudges your leg."

Thompson wrote in a blog post that the seal twice bumped him in the back of his legs with its nose when he stopped swimming and started treading water.

He began talking to it, singing it Grateful Dead songs and telling it jokes, which he said took his mind off his situation.

Five hours after entering the water, freezing and exhausted, he reached the platform.

"It started getting brighter and I'm just like, I'm crying. Shouting at the sky."

Crew aboard hauled him out, warmed him up, and called the Coast Guard. He was airlifted to hospital and treated for hypothermia.

The tow boat crew that later recovered his vessel said they couldn't believe he survived.

"Even putting on a wetsuit, being prepared, getting in that water, and swimming to that platform was horrendous," one crew member said.

“I can't imagine being in the water with shorts and a T-shirt at night. There was no moon. It was pitch black."

Thompson called the seal an angel. Nobody has ever offered a better explanation

Many doctors urged his parents to institutionalise him, saying he would never be more than a "vegetable."

His parents, Dick and Judy, refused, and brought him home to raise like any other child.

The prognosis about his mind proved completely wrong. At age 11, after his parents pushed for it, Rick was fitted with a computer he operated with head movements, and it revealed he was fully intelligent.

That breakthrough changed everything, he attended public school for the first time and went on to graduate from Boston University in 1993 with a degree in special education.

In 1977, Rick asked his father if they could run a five-mile race to raise money for a paralysed lacrosse player. Dick, not a runner, pushed him the entire way and they finished next to last, but not last.

Afterwards Rick typed: "Dad, when I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped."

What they went on to achieve would be remarkable for any elite athlete, let alone a father pushing his son.

They competed in over 1,100 endurance events, including 72 marathons and six Ironman Triathlons, and ran the Boston Marathon 32 times between 1980 and 2014.

In the triathlons, Dick towed Rick in a boat for the swim, pedalled him on a special bike, and pushed his chair for the run.

In 1992 they crossed the United States, biking and running 3,735 miles in 45 days.

Dick Hoyt passed in 2021 at 80, and Rick passed in 2023 at 61. A bronze statue of the pair still stands near the Boston Marathon starting line in Hopkinton.

He founded the River Roding Trust, a community organisation working to restore the river through litter removal, habitat restoration and tree planting.

For years, he asked the Environment Agency to address the crisis on Alders Brook, a tributary choked with waste. Nothing happened.

So in February 2026, Powlesland and his volunteers took matters into their own hands. Over ten days, they hired an excavator for roughly £1,000 and cleared a heavily polluted 250-metre stretch of the brook.

The team removed more than 200 bags of rubbish, along with branches, thick silt, invasive weeds, discarded household appliances, used needles, and even abandoned weapons.

The results were immediate. Within weeks, the restored stretch began flowing again.

Fish, dragonflies, herons, irises and reed beds returned to a section of river that had been ecologically dead.

Then came the letter. The Environment Agency informed Powlesland he was under investigation for carrying out "unpermitted works," alleging the dredging constituted a flood risk activity requiring an environmental permit.

The offence carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

Powlesland's response was pointed. "After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, the Environment Agency has finally decided to act.

But it's not action against Thames Water for dumping billions of litres of sewage, or the waste criminals who dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against the River Roding Trust for restoring a river without a permit."

After six months of chemotherapy and 18 surgeries, Omar showed no signs of recovery. Doctors had no more options. He had days left.

So she made a choice no parent should ever have to make. She told him he had beaten cancer and let him ring the hospital bell, the moment usually reserved for patients in remission, while nurses and doctors clapped around him.

He was beaming. She was quietly falling apart.

"One of the worst days of my life lying to him," she later said.

Omar passed in January 2022.

On 4 March 2016, Natalie Queiroz was walking through Sutton Coldfield, England, when she was set upon on Trinity Hill at around 3.15pm.

She was st*bbed 24 times by her then partner, Babur Karamat Raja, known as "Bobby." She was 37 weeks pregnant, just over three weeks past her 40th birthday.

Natalie and Raja had known each other since their school days in Birmingham, had got together as adults, and in August 2015 had thrown a party to announce her pregnancy.

But Raja had been concealing the truth about his life. Natalie later described him as having lived a "double or triple life" and that hidden world, along with the collapse of their relationship, formed the backdrop to the attack.

The a***ult was sustained and frenzied. He st*bbed her 24 times in the heart, lung, liver and uterus, and attempted to slit her wrists, survivors' accounts describe it as lasting around nine minutes.

The wounds were so severe that her abdomen was opened, she was left holding her own organs in the street.

What saved both lives was the courage of passers-by and the speed of the medical response.

Three bystanders, John Mitchell, Anthony Smith and Callum Gibson, stepped in to wrestle the carving knife away from Raja.

Of the 24 wounds, one was just 2mm from their unborn daughter.

A Midlands Air Ambulance crew landed on Sutton Coldfield High Street to reach her, and she was airlifted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in critical condition.

Natalie was in a coma when her daughter was delivered by Caesarean section shortly before 8pm; she underwent emergency surgery and pulled through.

Mother and baby both survived against the medical odds.

Justice came swiftly. Raja was charged with attempted m**der and attempted child destruction of his biological daughter, pleaded guilty to both, and was jailed for 18 years on 23 June 2016.

The most extraordinary chapter is what Natalie did afterwards. Within 18 months of the attack, she completed a mud run and an abseil to raise money for the air ambulance charity that helped save her, despite having only limited use of one hand.

She went on to be appointed MBE for services to young people and the prevention of knife crime, became a victims' advocate for West Midlands Police.

By 2000, she had been completely blind for over a decade, living with the support of her guide dog, Ami, and New Zealand's Blind Foundation.

On the evening of 16 November 2000, the 24-year-old bent down to kiss Ami goodnight and knocked her head against a coffee table. It didn't seem serious. She went to bed as normal.

When she woke the next morning at 9:30am, she could see. She kept it to herself for a few hours at first, content to play with Ami in the back yard.

Then she called her mother and read aloud a health warning from a cigarette packet down the phone.

Auckland Hospital eye surgeon Ross McKay confirmed she had regained 80 per cent vision in her left eye.

He had no explanation for the recovery and said he had never encountered a similar case in 25 years as an eye specialist.

"For some reason she's got her sight back, and don't ask me for an explanation, because I don't have one," he said.

Among the most emotional moments of her recovery was seeing her brother for the first time since he was a boy.

"He was a man, with a goatee and everything. My brother's a man," she said. When she saw her mother, she told her: "You look the same but older."

"It's the little things," Reid later reflected. "Like the colour of the grass, how blue the sky is, the things we all take for granted."

She went on to write a memoir about her experience, titled Angel Eyes.

Walmart staff took the items back from her and she began walking home. Police were called anyway.

Officer Austin Hopp pushed her to the ground and handcuffed her.

In the footage she appears confused and scared, at one point pleading: "I am going home." The arrest fractured her arm, dislocated her shoulder, and sprained her wrist.

She was then held in a jail cell for hours without medical attention.

Back at the station, precinct cameras caught Hopp and two colleagues eating popcorn, laughing, and fist-bumping as they replayed the bodycam footage.

One officer said: "Ready for the pop? Hear the pop?" Another said: "Body-cams are my favorite thing to watch."

Hopp pleaded guilty to second-degree felony assault. Garner's family opposed the plea deal.

Four officers in total were placed on administrative leave.

The city of Loveland ultimately paid Karen Garner $3 million to settle the civil lawsuit. She had forgotten to pay for $13.88 worth of shopping.

He responded by sending 200 letters, copying her desk keys, obtaining her home address through deception, and following her to her aerobics class.

The company eventually fired him in 1986. He found work at a rival firm and kept stalking her.

When Black finally filed a restraining order in February 1988, Farley arrived at the ESL building the day before the court hearing carrying 98 pounds of weapons.

He blasted his way through the building toward Black's office. Seven people were ki*led. Black was shot in the shoulder but survived.

The standoff ended when a negotiator convinced Farley to surrender in exchange for a sandwich and a soda.

California passed the first anti-stalking laws in the US directly as a result of this case. Every other state followed.

Rick Allen joined Def Leppard at just 15 years old, and by 21 he was drumming for one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. Their album Pyromania had turned them into stadium headliners almost overnight, with a US Gallup poll that year naming Def Leppard America's favourite rock band, ahead of AC/DC, Journey, and even the Rolling Stones.

Then came New Year's Eve, 1984.

Rick was driving back from Ladybower Reservoir near Sheffield with his girlfriend Miriam Barendsen when he lost control of his left-hand-drive Corvette Stingray on a sharp bend, hitting a wall.

The car flipped. His seatbelt came undone, and as he was thrown through the sunroof, it tore off his left arm at the shoulder.

What few people know is that he'd also badly broken his right arm, and at one point doctors warned him there was a chance he could lose that one too.

The man who made his living with his hands was staring down the possibility of having none.

Surgeons initially reattached the arm, but on 4th January 1985, it had to be amputated due to infection.

Within three months of the accident, he was drumming again, working with engineers to build something the world had never seen.

Drum manufacturer Simmons collaborated with him to design a custom electronic kit that reassigned his left-hand parts to a series of foot pedals, so his one arm and both feet could cover what most drummers need two arms to do.

Tommy McHugh was born in Liverpool in 1949, left school at 14, spent his teens and early twenties in and out of borstals and prisons for violence and theft, overcame a four-year h****n a*******n in the 1980s, and eventually settled into life as a builder.

He had never painted, never written a poem, and had no interest in either. He once joked that the only reason he'd ever entered an art gallery was to case it.

In January 2001, Tommy was sitting on the toilet when a knock at the door made him strain to finish quickly.

The sudden pressure severed arteries in both the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain.

In his own words: "I suddenly felt an explosion in the left side of my head and ended up on the floor. I think the only thing that kept me conscious was that I didn't want to be found with my pants down. Then the other side of my head went bang."

His wife Jan found him and called an ambulance. He underwent five hours of emergency neurosurgery and spent a week in a coma.

When he came round, he looked out of the hospital window and saw a tree sprouting numbers, 3, 6, and 9.

Then he started talking in rhyme and couldn't stop. Within days he was painting compulsively, covering walls, ceilings, and floors with vivid murals. No surface in his house was safe. He worked for up to 18 hours a day.

Neurologist Dr. Alice Flaherty from Harvard, who studied McHugh, said the aneurysms had altered the temporal lobes l, the parts of the brain linked to visual processing and emotional response, and that his case was extremely rare.

“He's pretty straightforward and says this wasn't a talent that was hidden," she said. "He had no interest in art. And I have to believe him."

His case is one of only three known examples in the world of "sudden artistic output following brain injury."

Doctors discovered she has a rare genetic condition causing hyper-ovulation, her ovaries release an unusually high number of eggs per cycle, making multiple births almost inevitable every pregnancy.

Her 44 children came from just 15 pregnancies, she had four sets of quadruplets, four sets of triplets, six sets of twins, and six single births.

Doctors advised her to stop having children due to the health risks. She said she had little choice, her husband kept her from accessing contraception.

Her husband eventually abandoned her and the children, leaving her to raise them alone while working as a herbalist and event decorator.

She would wake at 7am, prepare food for all the children, work all day, and return home to cook again.

Tragically, six of her children have d*ed, leaving around 38 surviving. The eldest was caring for the youngest when she spoke to the BBC.

"God gave me all these children and I have to take care of them," she said. "If you are given a burden you carry it."

Savanna was 22 years old, eight months pregnant, and a member of the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe.

She and her boyfriend had just signed a lease on their own apartment. She was due to start a new job as a nursing assistant the following week.

Brooke Crews, 40, had been lying to her boyfriend William Hoehn for months, faking a pregnancy using old sonograms and recordings of a heartbeat found online to keep him in the relationship.

When August arrived and no baby appeared, she lured Savanna upstairs to her apartment.

Crews instigated a fight, pushed Savanna, causing her to hit her head on the bathroom sink and lose consciousness.

While Savanna drifted in and out of consciousness, Crews retrieved a knife and cut the baby from her womb.

Police searched the apartment three times and found nothing. Savanna's body was hidden in a bathroom closet during the first two searches.

The baby was lying on the bed covered by a blanket next to Hoehn.

Savanna's body was eventually found by kayakers in the Red River, wrapped in duct tape and plastic.

The baby, a girl named Haisley Jo, was found alive on the fourth search, weighing 4 pounds 13 ounces and in astonishing health.

Crews was sentenced to life without parole. Hoehn received 20 years.

Savanna's m*rder directly inspired Savanna's Act, passed by Congress in 2020 to address the crisis of missing and m*rdered Indigenous women across America.

On August 21, 2020, Officer Aristides Paulino came home from a midnight shift and left his marked SUV in the driveway of their Miami Shores home.

As he slept, his wife Clara climbed into the backseat, possibly looking for something and the doors closed behind her, triggering the self-locking mechanism.

The SUV had bars on the windows, a metal cage separating the back from the front, and doors that could only be opened from the outside.

She was completely sealed in, with no phone, no way to honk the horn, and no passersby in the quiet neighbourhood who might have spotted her.

Temperatures reached over 90°F as she spent roughly four hours trapped inside.

When Aristides woke around 5 p.m. and couldn't find Clara, he found her phone on the back patio.

He and his son searched and found her unconscious in the backseat. They performed CPR, but she was pronounced de*d at hospital.

The medical examiner ruled her de*th accidental heat stroke.

She was trapped in plain sight, in her own driveway, just steps from her front door.

When police arrived they found the 19-year-old bound and gagged.

He told them two masked men had kidnapped him, knocked him unconscious, driven him around demanding to know where his father had buried a large sum of money in the desert, and then abandoned him there.

Detectives spent days investigating. They reviewed surveillance footage, interviewed witnesses, checked his phone records and text messages.

None of it matched his story.

Hospital records showed no concussion or head injury. There was no evidence of any kidnapping whatsoever.

When confronted with the evidence, Soules admitted he had fabricated the entire story to avoid going to work. He was fired from the tyre shop.

He was charged with false reporting to law enforcement.

His plan to get a day off resulted in a criminal record and national media coverage. Calling in sick would have worked better.

On 29 August 2016, Mark Tromp (51), his wife Jacoba (53), and their three adult children, Riana (29), Mitchell (25), and Ella (22), inexplicably fled their berry farm in Silvan, Victoria.

In the days leading up to the disappearance, Mark had become increasingly paranoid.

He was convinced someone was watching the family, that their phones were being tracked, their money wasn't safe, and that disappearing was the only way to protect them.

They took a large sum of cash and left behind their bank cards, phones, and passports.

Mitchell secretly brought his own phone, but his parents discovered it about 32 kilometres into the trip and made him throw it out the window, convinced it was being used to track them.

Then, one by one, the family began to fracture. The next day, Mitchell decided to turn back.

Later, the two daughters left their parents at Jenolan Caves, somehow acquired a car, and drove to Goulburn, where they reported their parents missing.

Ella stole a car and drove home alone. Police found Riana in a catatonic state, unable to speak, as if trapped inside her own mind.

Mark was eventually spotted walking on the outskirts of Wangaratta and taken in for a mental health assessment.

Jacoba was hospitalised in severe distress.

Local police Sergeant Mark Knight called it "the most bizarre case in 30 years."

Psychologists suspected a phenomenon called folie à plusieurs, a rare form of shared delusion where paranoia spreads like an infection from one person to those closest to them.

Mark later apologised for what he called a "family breakdown," but never revealed what triggered it.

The Tromps have never fully explained what they were running from.

On 24 May 2026, Rushabh Patel, 28, was enjoying a picnic with his family in Newport Pagnell, Milton Keynes, when two people from the group got into difficulty while swimming in the River Great Ouse at a popular open water spot known locally as "The Beach."

Without hesitation, he jumped in. Their lives were saved, but in the process of rescuing them, Rushabh suffered a cardiac arrest and drowned.

He was airlifted to Milton Keynes University Hospital, where doctors worked tirelessly for days to save him.

Tragically, despite every effort, he passed away on 28 May 2026. His wife Mili and their 18-month-old daughter Vrumi were present that day.

In an interview, Mili described the moment: "I just see his head up in the water and I can't explain that feeling."

She also spoke of their daughter waking at 5am every day to look for her father.

His brother Aman said: "Rushabh's final act on this earth was one of extraordinary courage and sacrifice. He gave his life while saving others. He was a hero in every sense of the word."

In d*ath, Rushabh's generosity continued. Through organ donation, he gave five to six people a new chance at life.

He had no ID, no memory of his name, his home, or his fiancée Penny Hansen.

He was diagnosed with dissociative fugue. After a month with no leads, he appeared on Good Morning America asking the public: "If anybody recognises me, knows who I am, please let somebody know."

Penny's brother saw the broadcast and called her immediately.

When Penny arrived and said "Hi, I'm Penny, your fiancée," he didn't recognise her. He asked: "Do we have kids? What's my life like?"

She offered to sleep in the spare room so as not to overwhelm him.

When he finally settled in at home, Jeff called Penny's mother and asked for Penny's hand in marriage, again.

Her mother told him she'd already said yes.

They married on New Year's Eve 2006. Jeff says his biggest regret is forgetting the wedding.

Penny told him they'd get married again so he could remember it.

"It's harder for you because you have the memories and the heartache," he told her.

It wasn't his first episode, he had disappeared for nine months in 1994 and was found in Seattle with no memory of that period either.

He has had three fugue episodes in total.

In September 2018, Kertisha Brabson, a 31-year-old mother of two from Alliance, Ohio, began acting strangely, reaching for things that weren't there, talking incoherently, and dancing as if at a concert.

Her mother, Kertease Williams, knew immediately something was deeply wrong, saying something had "taken over" her daughter.

A seizure then put Kertisha into a coma that would last seven months.

The cause was eventually identified as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a disease in which the body's own immune system attacks its brain cells.

It's a rare condition, only identified in 2007, and notoriously difficult to recognise, which is part of why her case became so dire before it was understood.

As doctors struggled to diagnose or treat her, the outlook turned grim.

"They told me she was brain-dead and pull the plug and all those things," Williams recalled.

But she refused to accept it. "I don't have no doctor's background. I've never been to school for anything, but when it's your child, you're going to do everything in your power to bring your daughter back."

She had Kertisha moved to the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, where a team treated her condition and seizures aggressively.

Then came the moment no one expected. Kertisha woke up on 7 April 2019. To her, no time had passed at all, she thought it was still September, the same moment she'd fallen asleep seven months earlier.

A nurse told her, "Ms. Brabson, you've been asleep for seven months."

One of her doctors, Shraddha Mainali, recalled a resident texting her in disbelief that Kertisha was opening her eyes and following simple commands.

By that Christmas, she was home with her mother and her two children, Diamonique and Perez.

In October 2023. Brett Yancey, 47, of Southside, Alabama, had been undergoing treatment for stage 4 esophageal cancer for six years.

His illness began when he struggled to swallow, leading to a stage 3 diagnosis, after surgery and a brief remission, the cancer returned and progressed to stage 4, spreading to his lungs, brain, carotid artery and nerves.

Before he became ill, he had been the head football coach at Southside High School and had coached all three of his daughters in sports.

In the lead-up to homecoming, Brett experienced paralysis in his left leg and changes in behaviour.

His wife Carrie suggested alternatives, riding in a golf cart, or letting their daughter walk the field alone, but Brett refused.

"I'm going to walk her across that field. I'll walk my baby across that field," he told her.

When the moment came, he did exactly that. Carrie watched from a high vantage point as Brett walked steadily across the field.

Once the pair reached the other candidates, his youngest daughter, 17-year-old Sara Kate, was crowned homecoming queen.