Whether or not those creepy clowns currently terrorizing America are real, one thing is for sure: sometimes, real life can be scarier than fiction. Here are some true scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween.
1) The severed human feet that keep washing ashore in Canada
In 2007 news, 16 human feet have washed ashore along the Pacific Northwest. Yep, feet. Severed feet. The majority were right feet, and there were only three pairs. All these feet were wearing running shoes or hiking boots; no other body parts have washed ashore. This bizarre phenomenon first made headlines when two feet—both right—were found six days apart that year, and since then, they haven’t stopped turning up. The two most recent discoveries—one pair—were found in February 2016.
2) The island covered with creepy dolls to appease the spirit of a dead girl
Isla de las Muñecas (“Island of the Dolls”) is a small island in Mexico that is home to hundreds of discarded, broken, and otherwise terrifying dolls hanging from trees.
The island is technically a floating garden, and many years ago, Julián Santana Barrera, the caretaker, found the body of a little girl who had drowned in a river. He hung up the doll in tribute, and then, for the next 50 years, continued to hang more and more dolls in an attempt to appease the girl’s spirit. The island has since become a tourist attraction, and it’s hard not to find the whole thing incredibly creepy, because one, the island is covered with hundreds of broken dolls; two, you have to take a two-hour boat ride to get this isolated, uninhabited locale; and three, Barrera died in 2001…by drowning in the same spot where the girl died. There’s no need to be alarmed, though. According to this not-at-all-suspicious actual sentence on the island’s website, “Of course these witnesses are exaggerating and the island is in no way possessed.”
3) The Buddhist monks that underwent mummification…while still alive
Ancient Egypt had nothing on the self-mummified Buddhist monks of Japan, China, and India. Sokushinbutsu was a rare but gruesome practice that attempted to leave a body naturally preserved after death. A monk would eat nothing but tree bark, leaves, and roots, slowly eating less and less over time in order to strip the body of fat and moisture. Some monks would even drink tea from poisonous sap in order to kill any maggots that would decompose the body. He would do this for several years before finally burying himself alive in a stone chamber just big enough to sit in. After all that, very few monks succeeded in leaving mummified corpses, but those that did were worshipped—and you can visit them!
4) The man who was so obsessed with a woman that he dug up, preserved, and slept with her corpse
Have you read the story “A Rose for Emily”? How about seen the classic horror film Psycho? Do you not like where this is going?
Carl Tanzler was 53 years old when he met Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, a 21-year-old tuberculosis patient at the hospital where he worked. She was his dream girl—for years he had dreamed that his true love would be a beautiful dark-haired woman, and he became convinced Elena was his vision come to life. When she died, Tanzler stole her corpse from her tomb. To keep it from decomposing, he encased it with wax and plaster, strung the bones together with coat hangers, filled the abdominal cavity with rags, and inserted glass eyes. By the time his macabre love was discovered, he had been sleeping with Elena’s corpse for seven years.
Photos of the poor woman’s desecrated body do exist, but I won’t include them here. I’m Chinese; we don’t screw with the dead. The same cannot be said of Tanzler: on top of everything else, he had apparently inserted a paper tube inside the body. Draw your own conclusions.
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Thumbnail courtesy of Pexels.