“Fatal Familial Insomnia”: 50 Creepy True Stories That Might Give You Nightmares (Trigger Warning)

This is second hand from my mom so I dont remember everything, but when I was younger (like 3 or 4) and she was home alone with me some guy came up to the door. This was before cellphones and people were nicer so she answered it even tho it was like 8 or 9 at night. Well the guy was asking if he could come in and use her phone but she said no. He asked a couple more times before walking in and immediately got stop by the family dog grabbing his hand and holding it tightly. He started to get nervous and my dads dog led him back to the door (he had walked further in at this point) my mom was able to push him out and lock the door before running upstairs and calling the police. The cops picked him up a little while later and they found out he had been in a bar fight and stabbed a guy a bunch of times. Without my "older brother" my mom and I could've been seriously hurt. He was the best dog ever and lived till the ripe age of 15.

Last summer in my city a 14-year old girl was r***d near a train station. After her a****r left her she tried to get help and flagged down a vehicle and was r***d a second time in the car of the man who stopped. Two complete strangers r***d her on the same day, it happened only a few miles away from my house and I still think about it from time to time.

Check the m****r of Junko Furuta story.

To sum it up : 44 days of h**l for a girl who was kidnapped by teenage boys. She went through every possible t*****e imaginable and finally died after she was pushed to her limits. A mangaka called waita uziga made an adaptation. I could not even finish reading it without feeling physically sick.

According to the wiki, they :

* R***d her over 400 times.
* Hanged her body from the ceiling and used her as a "punching bag"
* Dropped barbells onto her stomach several times.
* Forced her to eat live cockroaches and drink her own urine.
* Forced her to m*sturbate in front of them.
* Shoved a still-lit light bulb into her v****a.
* Set fireworks into her a**s, v****a, mouth and ears.
* Burnt her v****a and clitoris with cigarettes and lighters.
* Pierced her breasts with sewing needles.

The horrific nature comes from the complete lack of empathy from her captors (who looked like completely innocent youngsters), and the fact she was a random girl, who were at the wrong place, at the wrong time. She could eventually be saved by the couples living in the building, but they feared the teenager boys. Imagine : having the hope you'll eventually make it out with your sole will because you wanna see your family again, until your body finally shut down of exhaustion. I've never felt more rage personally for such a disturbing story...

Not the scariest thing that I know about, but the scariest thing that ever happened to ME:
I worked at a pretty well known record store in Los Angeles in the 90s. A guy in his early twenties used to come in and ask me about records a lot, and one day in conversation he let a weird detail about my life slip that I hadn’t told him (my dad is not American). I brushed it off, thinking my co-workers has mentioned it to him since he was such a regular. About a week later I was driving home and my car broke down. It was incredibly hot and I had to walk several miles to get to a payphone, which was outside an elementary school. I called a cab and hung up the phone, and after sitting a moment, it started ringing, so I picked it up. The person on the other end said, “bad luck about your car- talk to me until your ride gets there. “ I hung up the phone, but it was definitely that guy. He had to have followed me from home, trailed me from the car, called the school to ask for the payphone number, and found a way to call me at that number. There weren’t really cellphones at that time, but there was a gas station and a grocery store across the street so who knows.
I immediately quit my job and moved back in with my parents within 48 hours. I went in to visit old friends from work a few months later and they told me the guy was arrested for kidnapping. Fml.

Over the course of 70 years, the Catholic Church in Ireland r***d and a****d tens of thousands of children.
They starved orphans to death and buried them in mass graves.
They sold children into adoption.
They allowed babies in their care to be used in experimental d**g and radiation tests.
They forced women who got pregnant out of wedlock into indentured servitude for life.
And they actively and deliberately worked to cover it all up.

I just watched a documentary about Colleen Stan, who survived being kidnapped by a s*xual sadist, who kept her in a coffin-sized box he built under his bed, 22 hours a day, for seven years while he r***d and tortured her.

The ~~victim~~ survivor is the primary interviewee in the documentary and tells her story, on camera, for most of the documentary. The cops made mention of her bravery and ability withstand her t*****e, and manipulate her kidnapper to increase her safety.

The story of Mary Vincent. I love true crime and don't usually get squeemish, but this story is probably the most disturbing true crime story I have heard yet.

Mary Vincent was 15 years old when she decided to run away from home on September 28th, 1978. She was hitchhiking along the highway in Soquel, California, standing with two other hitchhikers. A man pulled up in a van and said he only had room for her, but not the others. The man driving the van was 51-year old Larry Singleton. He offered to drive Mary to the I-5 freeway. As he drove, Mary realized that he had passed the ramp to the I-5 and demanded he turn around; Larry said it was an honest mistake and turned around. Soon after, he pulled over and told Mary he needed to go to the bathroom and couldn't wait for a rest stop. When he got out of the van, Mary realized her shoe was untied, and got out to tie it.

As she was tying her shoelaces, Larry came behind her and hit her over the head with a sledgehammer. He then proceeded to r**e and sodomise her. This is where it gets even worse: Larry took a f*****g **hatchet and cut off both of her arms**, just below the elbow. BOTH OF HER ARMS. He then threw her down a 30 foot culvert in a canyon, and drove off. The most astounding part of the whole story is that Mary survived. She used what was left of her strength and made her way 3 miles out of the embankment, **with no f*****g arms below the elbow, n**e,** and was stumbling down the road when she saw a car. The first car she saw sped away in fear. The second car she saw was driven by a couple who were on vacation. They stopped the car, helped her into their truck, and drove her to a nearby airport where they were able to get an ambulance and she was taken to a hospital.

Mary is a f*****g badass. She then testified twice against Larry, but he only served 8 years and 4 months for attempted m****r, forcible r**e, sodomy, kidnapping, mayhem, and forced oral copulation. Seriously the most f****d up story, he got out on "good behavior." Later, he m******d a s*x worker and was sentenced to death, and died in 2001 on death row.

**edit:** okay I didn't really expect this to blow up this much. Some things to address: first: the judge was not a bad judge, he gave him the maximum sentence (14 years) that was allowed by the law at that time. During the sentencing, he even said that he would have given Larry a life sentence if the law allowed him to. Second: Mary survived because she is a badass. She didn't give up, and was able to pack mud around what was left of her arms in order to stop the bleeding, this in addition to keeping her arms raised was how she stayed alive. Third: I first heard this story on My Favorite M****r Podcast, but it has also been covered on other podcasts and shows like I Survived. If you like true crime, definitely check out My Favorite M****r, tons of other interesting stories.

Serial r*pist Marc O'Leary was caught in 2011 and charged with several r***d. Now, none of these women's stories are particularly pretty, but there's one woman whose story takes the cake. In 2008, an 18 years old woman went to police claiming she was r***d. They didn't believe her and ended up charging her with filing a false report. She had to pay a fine, have a crime on her record, and get this: to stay in subsidized housing, they made her confess that she made the whole thing up. Her photo was later found among his belongings.

Fatal Familial Insomnia. The whole story is batshit and perhaps the most terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole I've ever gone down. Only a few families have this genetic disorder, iirc, and once you develop it, that's it, you die an agonizing death from an inability to sleep. It starts off like regular insomnia, but progresses over a few years until you legit go insane and finally shut down. NOTHING, not even the most potent d**g, can induce sleep. Even when they tried to put them in comas, the brain remained completely active.

This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away.

Judy Kirby m******d six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit s*****e. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in d**g trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest.

She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a h**h rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride.

The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.

I lived in an apartment in Marina del Rey, California. 9 years ago, just before Halloween, a third-floor balcony was decorated with a prop of a dead man slumped over in a chair. For a few days, every time I'd come home I'd look up and think how cool looking it was and wondering why they didn't have lights shining on it at night. After a few days, people realized it was actually the resident of the apartment who k**led himself. I was looking at a corpse thinking how cool it was.

For me, I was walking back home at like 11PM when I notice this hooded guy behind me. I do what I read somewhere you should do and took 3 right turns in a row to see if he was actually following me, and he was. I managed to gather all my courage and yelled at him "What the f**k do you want" with the most menacing tone I could muster and he just turned around and left.

This is ongoing. Maybe too late to get noticed. I live in a modest house on a quiet street. 9 years ago, someone bought the house next to me to basically shelve their 18yo schizophrenic son. They pay the rent and utilities and occasionally drop off cash. He has done about as well as an unmanaged schizophrenic can do on his own. To paint an image, he is a muscular black guy with telltale crazy eyes. He stands on his balcony around 3am most nights screaming and threatening... someone (voices, me, I can’t tell). The first major incident was when he shot a deer from his second-story balcony. It was standing across the street about 4ft from a neighbor’s bedroom. The police came and left when he didn’t answer. I woke up to swat in my bushes the next morning with some serious scoped weapons. He left with them but returned in a few weeks. Astonishingly, I discovered that he incurred no charges for this. Aside from this, it has been general weirdness: running down the street yelling, wearing winter clothing in the summer/sometimes boxers in the winter, collecting shopping carts, breaking windows, etc.

Over the last 2 years, he has become focused more on me. I first noticed when he told me to stop contacting him. As in, I had become one of the voices. I had always been neighborly to him and helped how I could, but it is becoming clear that he is directing his paranoia at me (40ish dude). He is becoming more aggressive. Slashed tires, trampled plants, things missing. I call the police, they take a record and say there is nothing they can do. I call his father and he tells me he is an adult and can’t make him check into a facility. He won’t sell the house or move him. For reference, they are from somewhere in the world that attempting an exorcism is a reasonable course of action.

Last week, he began banging on my door at 3am nightly. He thinks I am stealing his rap lyrics (like I am going to publish an album about k*****g and raping white people). My family is terrified and he runs by the time I make it outside. I report it every time, but he doesn’t answer the door and the cops/crisis team just leave. I really feel like the system is dropping the ball here, and it is going to take an incident for something to be done. Maybe not the scariest thing in the world to you, dear reader, but it is in mine.


Edit: Thanks for all of the thoughtful replies. Thought I would answer some. I’m pretty broke, so moving or lawyering is not really an option. We are in the process of a protection order, but that requires several trips to the downtown courthouse. I am saving for a few cameras. I’m a bit ashamed, but I did purchase a handg*n a few years ago (because of him). I wouldn’t use it unless he forced his way into my house. I have done everything I can think of to get the system to work. We have gone to the police station multiple times. We have the mobile health crisis unit’s number and call them when it seems like he needs an evaluation. We have asked his parents to intervene. We have asked him personally to contact his case worker to get help. We really want him to be able to live a good life, but I can’t personally do it for him, and the *system* seems to be reactionary.

Two engineers died when the windmill they were working on caught fire this is the last picture of them alive hugging.

The "honour k*****g" of Mona Heydari. Her husband chased her across the country (Iran), before k*****g her, decapitating her body and walking around smiling with a knife in his right hand and her head in his left.

Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal who admitted he still fantasizes about k*****g and eating women (after k*****g and eating a woman in Paris) walks free unmedicated and unmonitored in Japan to this day. Pretty creepy to know people like that walk around freely.

Wikipedia

Not sure if posted here but a woman was abducted and r***d by 2 men and then stabbed over 30 times. Her neck muscle completely removed, her guts spilling out. She crawled to the hospital WITH HER HEAD ALMOST DETACHED and survived. She wrote a book and now is a motivational speaker with 2 kids, despite the fact that she was disemboweled.

This is a series of photos recovered from the camera of a Canadian couple who died during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

It shows the water level flowing out from the shore before surging back in.

The very idea of a wall of water crashing towards you, completely unstoppable, and you have no where to run, no where that is safe is perhaps one of the most terrifying things that could happen to you. By the time one could take these photos, all you can do is watch death march inexorably towards you.

My idiot distant (emphasis on distant) cousins started a church/cult that prayed instead of going to doctors.

Wife of one of them had a breach birth that they attempted to rectify at home by giving her an apiseotomy with a pair of kitchen shears. Baby died, wife got an infection that could have easily been cured if they had gone to the hospital and died a month later.

Wife's family sued them and won 100M for wrongful death. They were still appealing last I knew.

Edit: if you want the details. The appeal itself is public and goes into even more detail if your want to see how a cult works.

There is a a rural cemetery outside the small town where I live and grew up where something that sounds like a scene from a horror film took place. In the late 80s/early 90s there was a rash of serial r*pes/m*****s around the area. One of the victims, a young woman, escaped from the car of the r*pist and found herself running away from the car and into the cemetery. She saw lights on a farmhouse in the distance and hope for survival flickered in her eyes. Unbeknownst to her, the darkness hid the fence surrounding the perimeter of the cemetery. She ran blindingly into it and was knocked down allowing the r*pist to catch up to her. He then beat her to death with a toppled headstone.

Terrifying.

Here is a link for the curious: Keen M****r Solved.