Real Life - Television Tropes & Idioms

You're probably thinking that after reading about all that High Octane Nightmare Fuel, you're safe from it because you don't live in Fiction Land, right? Wrong!

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Medical—Genetic Disorders

The disorders contained in this section are those that are solely caused by genetic abnormalities. Most of the time, people are born with them through no fault of their own, which is its own special brand of nightmare fuel. While you may read about the dieases and accidents in the other folders and try to justify them (the emphasis on try) or play blame the victim for not eating right or smoking or whatnot, there is absolutely no such justification for the people who suffer these disorders, except that "the universe and fate was not kind".

Imagine one day not being able to sleep again for the rest of your life
- And with that, "the rest of your life" is not long...
  - Generally, it's a few weeks. Most people reach their limits at the one/two-week point, but if you manage to force yourself past that point, you die.
  - YOU DID NOT MAKE ME FEEL ANY BETTER.
Chimeras. No, not the Greek mythological kind. A chimera is an animal with two different kinds of DNA in its system at once. This troper remembers a picture in his science textbook of a human baby born half-black and half-white...literally. As in, its body was perfectly divided in half by the two colors. Knowing that this was the tip of the iceberg...
- This troper thought that chimeras were cool, until looking on google image search and the third image was...well, a person with about half a face. I learned never google for things you found on the nightmare fuel page.
Progeria. Imagine a seven-year-old child with a seventy-year-old's body.
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). A long, slow death as the body replaces any damaged tissue with bone, slowly paralyzing you. One day you can't move your fingers, or arm, or jaw. Soon there are spires of bone growing into your organs and eventually you can't breathe. The condition reacts to body damage, and as a very clumsy person, this troper would find it terrifying. By the time you're thirty, most, if not all of your joints have been locked into place by newly-grown bones and you die of starvation/suffocation because you can't move your jaw or ribs.
- The scary part is.... everyone is always skeptical of Ossification. Just shows you how scary those who choose to think you're lying think it is.
Look up "harlequin fetus" on Google if you dare.
- This troper has never found harlequin fetus that scary, possibly because they basically all die right away. Now, burn victims, that scares her. They look almost as bad... and they can live!
  - No, Harlequin victims can live even into the double digits. And, unlike burn victims, they never fully recover. Scared now?
- Oh God, Oh God. Why Did I search it on Google IMAGE? I'm never having babies.
- If you think that's bad, try Harlequin Type Ichthyosis (WARNING, PICTURE DEPICTING THE DISEASE IS ON THE PAGE), or Harlequin's disease. A rare genetic disease where keratin (the same stuff nails and hair is made out of) plates form on the skin. This causes plenty of complications including poor temperature regulation, inability to move, no nose, and eyes are damaged to the point where they're just blood pockets, and apparently they're not damaged to the point of blindness! (Or so I believe). It seems FOP doesn't have any immediate signs that someone has it (plus its internal). Harlequin's disease is shown immediately from birth, and you can see it. Fortunately for victims, it's survivable.
  - Yeesh, don't you mean UNfortunately for victims?
  - Oh, you mean these little fellas? I'll be honest with you all, these guys freaked the living hell out of me at first. But now, after I've watched them for a while... there's just some weird part of me that wants to hold one, give it some pity and love, you know? Give it a hug in case it doesn't make the trip home, so to speak. They might be weird looking...but they're still babies, aren't they? I don't know how else to describe it. I just want to make one feel better.
  - For a little bit of levity...those with Harlequin's Disease who survive into their teens don't look that terrifying; they just have shiny, red, flaky skin that looks perpetually sunburned (and, sometimes, reddish eyes). Do they look odd? Yes, and it's startling at first. But they're not terrifying. Here are two examples.
  - What's Juliana Wetmore's? Ba-dum tish! But seriously, I've seen lots worse. Harlequin is only one of the most well-known because you can be born with it. There's a variety of flesh-eating diseases and total-body-failure causing bacterium that surpass that condition by miles. Ossification is a good example of one, though. I guess this all centers on whether you see a slow debilitation of your abilities and mental processes as worse than having to deal with it right out of the gate. For me, I'd rather have a lifetime to learn to deal with a disability, than have experienced perfect health only to have it stolen away with a near-hundred percent projection of never getting it back.
  - Necrotic agents aren't that bad... if you can find them early enough. On a lighter note, quite a few of the deadliest land-based venomous creatures use necrotic venom. Ever see what a Brown Recluse will do to you?
  - This troper doesn't have to see what it will 'do to you'. Because she has firsthand experience. And was ten at the time.
Genetic lymphedema tarda. This troper has it. Picture a birth defect (a faulty chromosome) that doesn't start kicking in until you're in your mid teens (when the adult lymphatic system, which cleanses your body of waste proteins, starts developing) and doesn't cripple you until you're in your twenties. Your arms, legs, groin, etc. (depending on which part of your lymphatic system is malfunctioning) swell to elephantine proportions, creating bulges that permanently disfigure the limbs. The skin hardens and turns red, then purplish-black. The muscles turn fibrotic. Eventually, if untreated, the disease penetrates down to the bone, and the fluid building up in the body drowns the heart. Oh, and did I mention that there's no cure, and that although there are treatments that can alleviate or reverse some of the symptoms (massage, lymphatic pumps to force the lymphatic fluid to circulate, etc.), quite a few doctors either don't know what the treatments are or don't take the disease seriously?
- Fallout from all the nuke tests in the Pacific. Lots of deformities, including "jellyfish babies", who are born without arms, legs, or brains. This may have contributed to the conditions of the Indonesian Tree Man and other freaks.
- Unlikely to be the cause of the Tree Man, as the cause of his condition is the Human Papilloma Virus, or common warts. Other various birth defects, cancers, and malignancies, certainly.
A similar example: ALD, or adrenoleukodystrophy, happens when your body fails to metabolize certain long-chain fatty acids... It basically strips the myelin sheaths from your neurons, causing your brain to turn into mush. And it's caused by a recessive X (female) gene, which means it skips generations and mostly strikes little boys who usually end up in vegetative comas and die before they reach ten. And that's just what we know about it. People are trying to help, though. The Government, on the other hand...
- This troper was forced to watch Lorenzo's Oil for her biology class. The above description pales in comparison to the sheer unrelenting horror of watching a child waste away from it, and knowing that this actually happened in real life does nothing to help. At all.
This Troper is amazed that no one has mentioned Juliana Wetmore. Google her. That child is one of the most tragic human beings I've ever laid eyes on. If ever there was an argument for abortion, she would be it. She suffers from an extreme case of Treacher Collins syndrome. She was literally born without a face.
- Even worse: there is an Encyclopedia Dramatica article mocking the poor child. Dude Not Funny.
Death by carbon monoxide. It's colorless, odorless, tasteless, and is produced by cars. Meaning, it's possible to die from carbon monoxide poisoning and not know it until it's too late.

Medical—Diseases and Infections

A Smallpox outbreak in the early 1900s killed 12 million men. Smallpox still exists, remains untreatable and is just as deadly today. A Smallpox outbreak in a large city such as New York, Paris or Tokyo would probably kill many time more. Should a few carriers get on planes and carry the disease throughout the world, we are all fucked.
- Well, except for the little matter of there being only two samples left in the entire world (locked away in laboratories) and the existence of an effective vaccine. Ebola, on the other hand...
  - I just read that scientists think that there may be patches of the smallpox virus in artic ice. Global warming + a virus that can survive being frozen = Sleep well tonight.
  - Also, smallpox existed for most of human history, most people got it (Excepting milkmaids — rubbing cows on a regular basis works the same way the smallpox vaccine does), and survived with nothing more than some disfiguring scars (Which is why people think milk is good for your skin). Smallpox is deadlier than your more run-of-the-mill diseases, but not "Everyone is fucked" deadly.
  - Making any simple virus that has been gene-sequenced requires a small machine, some widely available chemical inputs, and a bit of knowledge. Polio and Spanish Flu have already been recreated in the lab like this.
  - Fortunately for the world, Ebola, for all its nastiness, is a flash in the pan. It kills victims too quickly to spread, and it's only communicable by fluids. Granted, that's cold comfort to them as will die from it, but it's relatively harmless as outbreaks go. Unless some stupid human engineers it to be otherwise, Ebola's nothing to worry about.
  - Except for that outbreak of Ebola in Reston Virginia. This strain of Ebola was airborne. We were lucky and when it mutated, it was no longer lethal to humans. Read The Hot Zone. The graphic description of Ebola's effect on the human body in the beginning of The Hot Zone should be a treat.
  - Wouldn't that be a good thing? If there's a version that's nonlethal anyone who gets it will be immune to the lethal version.
  - Oh joy. Ebola Reston has been found in pigs. Pigs harbor pathogens like humans. Facemasks, anyone?
  - There are more than two samples of smallpox left in the world. There are two WHO repositories, each of which contains a collection of strains. And then, according to the guy who ran the USSR's biowarfare program, the Soviets violated the international convention by producing at least 200 tons of smallpox in addition to what they officially have in their repository. And it becomes even more nightmare-inducing when you consider another Soviet product, ebolapox, a pathogen composed of ebola with smallpox living inside of it—so ebola that gives you smallpox. Talk about overkill.
  - Sure, smallpox was usually nonfatal. But if you got one of the nastier forms, you WERE fucked.
- The Black Plague.
  - Actually, some research suggests that the original Bubonic Plague was a cocktail of both Yersinia Pestis and anthrax. The latter, of course, is one of the hottest sources of real-life Nightmare Fuel this decade. The former has about a 12% fatality rate these days, which, while not the killer it used to be, still is nothing to sneeze at (or vomit blood at, or...). Thankfully, there is comfort to be had, by way of viewing one's fear as a cuddly plush toy. Those afraid of both the Black Death and dolls may be screwed, though.
  - For some people, the bird masks◊ the doctors had to wear back then. Something about how they looked like bird skulls...
  - Berserk fans may recall that one of Father Mozgus's inquisitors (the one who burned under sunlight) wore one of those. When it makes Berserk, you know it's nightmare fuel.
- For that matter, the flu. In 1830, a quarter of the people who got it died. In the US, it currently kills about 36,000 people every year. It's comparatively treatable, it's comparatively preventable, and yet it kills 36,000 people every year like a metronome because it's just not [s]profitable[/s] possible to keep people vaccinated. (One troper would like to point out that many different strains of influenza come and go every year and constantly mutate making old vaccinations worthless very quickly. This is a bug that can literally change faster than new vaccines can be produced.)
  - Did someone say flu? How about "the greatest medical holocaust in history", which occurred from 1918 to 1920? The Spanish flu supposedly killed off 2.5%-5% of the world's population. Not only did it probably kill more people than the Black Plague (which affected people heavily for centuries), but it only happened in two years. For comparative purposes. World War One killed ten million people. The flu killed between 50 and 100 million worldwide. Interestingly enough, not many people seem to know about it. A long time ago, this troper had to explain it to her disbelieving parents. A doctor and a teacher. The Spanish Flu got swept under the historical carpet even as it was happening; World War I was still raging, and anything that got in the way of that was Simply Not Allowed.
  - When a historian interviewed a lot of Australians who had been children during World War I, they remembered it not as influenza at all, but as bubonic plague, as the symptoms could include a level of cyanosis that could literally turn people so dark a blue they looked black. What boggles this troper is that even history has largely obliterated it—in all the history I took in school, it warranted exactly one line in my senior history book. The deadliest disease in the planet's history, and almost nobody thinks to mention it. Even relatively contemporary literature seems to ignore it—Rilla of Ingleside, the last of the Anne of Green Gables books, was centered around World War I, which the writer lived through, yet makes no mention whatsoever of the pandemic. Even when she talks about some of the male characters being shipped overseas late in the war, she says nothing aboutr how the flu made it next to impossible to do that, or of the very real danger a recruit would be dead of the flu before they even got to Europe.
- Think that's bad? Check out Cracked's list of 5 most horrible disfiguring diseases.
- Well, guess what? There's a pandemic risk of a swine flu mutation happening right now. Try to sleep with that.
  - Well, considering that Swine Flu is comparatively less dangerous than the regular flu, and fairly easy to prevent with proper hygiene and common sense. Yeah.
Autoimmune conditions, in general. It sounds like a brilliant idea. Just boost the immune system. Oops, now your own body is digesting portions of itself, or swelling things shut, or just deciding that maybe it's time to give up the ghost on that whole working brain thing. Oh, and the disasters are unpredictable, and tend to be triggered by unusual or eccentric stuff that you weren't exposed to earlier. Hope you didn't want to see anything new!
- Myasthenia Gravis is the Truth In Television version of Soap Opera Disease. Myasthenics' immune systems attack their motor nerves, severely weakening their muscles, and trying to exercise only makes them even weaker. The disease varies from day to day so you'll have no idea whether tomorrow you'll be almost normal or bedridden. There's even the possibility that it could suddenly flare up to the point that your respiratory muscles seize up and you stop breathing. The immunosuppressive therapy used to treat the disease makes even minor illnesses potentially lethal. And the worst part of all is that myasthenia gravis can cause thymus cancer. The thymus is a gland in your chest that is useless after puberty, but in myasthenics it can become cancerous, and, if malignant, is an absolutely raging cancer that will spread all over your body and probably kill you within a year. This cancer is so deadly that a surgical procedure where they get the gland out by sawing through your breastbone, a brutally invasive surgery that takes months to recover from and can kill, is done as a preventative measure. This disease tends to first show up in early adulthood. Right around the ages of many tropers, in fact...
Locked-in syndrome. On a similar note, sleep paralysis. Especially since it can also be accompanied by (and here I quote The Other Wiki's article on the subject) 'terrifying hallucinations'. And it could happen to anyone.
Tachycardia. It is possible for your heart to go so fast that it is unable to pump blood - it just pumps air. This troper has had bouts with tachycardia, and besides being dangerous it is an extremely strange feeling. Not painful, exactly, but it seems that the entire world is throbbing with you and then you get dizzy and the lack of oxygenation can apparently cause hallucinations.
- Added fun, sometimes one half of your heart resumes normal rhythm and the other doesn't. Then your heart stops. Once that happens it's the most peculiar feeling of absolute silence in your body. Well for about 15 seconds anyway, then you start to pass out. Another note, Tachycardia is exhausting. Your heart hammering away at 300bpm for even a minute or two is tiring, and if you keep moving around it can last for 20-30 minutes.
Brain Eating Amoebas...They're called Naegleria fowleri. To be fair, unless you're going swimming in really gross scummy waters, you're fine, but... yeah.
- Actually, there have been reports of them found in poorly maintained swimming pools as well. Just thought you'd like to know.
- To top it all off, it's nearly impossible to tell if you've been infected. The only symptoms it shows are that of a mild cold or flu, but if not treated will kill a person in about two weeks.
Gangrene. Tetanus, too. You can get both from infected minor injuries.
- This troper is allergic to tetanus shots, so my fear of getting hurt is pretty pronounced. I've developed a fear of rust for crying out loud.
- And then there's Leprosy, which, more than the fabled "falling apart" is kinda terrifying because the subject supposedly has to be very careful and continually check themselves over for any injury no matter how minor, because they may not have felt it and it just makes things worse
- This Troper's stepfather was diagnosed with Buerger's Disease. Essentially, due to tobacco use, your extremeties, beginning with your fingers, begin to die, turn black, and rot. Imagine being a small child, before school-age, watching your beloved stepfather's fingers turn black and rot, until the doctor finally amputates. Worst part is, even if you quit smoking, you're stuck with it. It WILL continue. It moves on to the feet, arms, legs, throughout your life, and there's nothing you can do about it. It begins with numbness. On the same note, said stepfather has begun to feel numbness in his feet.
Alzheimer's disease, or amnesia. Not that fake movie amnesia— The kind of thing where you lose your memories and know that you've lost them.
- Actually, that's not truly Alzheimer's. You mean Pick's disease, right? In Alzheimer's, the sufferer does lose insight and lacks awareness that they have lost anything. Pick's disease is actually creepier to this troper.
This troper is surprised no one's mentioned AIDS and other sexual diseases yet. Stuff like that has her sworn off sex for life.
- I remember reading a long Discover article on AIDS back in the '80s. Having your immune system *shut down* and then be slowly, agonizingly killed by every damn thing in your environment, coming down with weird diseases no one ever heard of? Sweet Christ.
- This troper is not half as terrified of AIDS as of syphilis and gonorrhea. Sure, they can be cured nowadays, but I've read some highly disturbing descriptions about what syphilis did to people before an effective cure was invented. Untreated tertiary syphilis can make your spine rot. Oh, and do you know what the fun part is? They're very easily transmitted. The risk of contracting HIV in unprotected (vaginal) intercourse with an infected person is about 30%, nothing to play with but still much better than syphilis's near certainty. Conversely, you really need to have bad luck to contract HIV in oral sex (again, don't play with the chance, however small it is), but syphilis transmits very easily even that way.
Ever heard of the Human Tree?
Even though it's pretty benign compared to other diseases mentioned, Gastroesophageal Reflux Disorder, also known as Acid Reflux or simply frequent heartburn. It's common and often no more than an after-meal nuisance, but then you realize that the heartburn means your stomach acid is eating away at your esophagus little by little... And the foods that aggravate it most? Anything caffeinated, carbonated, or acidic. You'll never look at a glass of orange juice, a mug of coffee, a can of soda, or a plate of spaghetti, the same way ever again. And anyone can develop it at any stage in their life.
Heart disease. No matter where you are or what you're doing, your heart might just decide to stop working and kill you. Even when you're sleeping.
- At least in much of Asia, it is considered blessed to die in your sleep, because then you (in theory) don’t have to be conscious for the final moments of pain.
Visual Snow Imagine having literal static in your vision, every day, 24/7
- I have that. Probably due to my migraines. It's not that bad, really, just annoying at times.
- Those color-shifting sparklies This Troper sees when he closes his eyes are not normal?
  - Those would be idioretinal light— just your visual system firing in the absence of stimuli. Perfectly normal and healthy thing to see.
- This troper has had visual snow since birth, and in her case, it isn't bad. It's only noticeable on smooth, monochrome surfaces like a blank piece of computer paper or a darkened room, and it doesn't obstruct her vision.
Certain tumors, known as teratomas, can contain almost anything - hair, teeth, even eyeballs.
- Fans of Black Jack will recall that a teratoma was the origin of Pinoko. Subtract the brain, the psychic powers, and the positive results, and that isn't really an exaggeration.
"Phossy jaw," an occupational disease caused by chronic exposure to presently-outlawed white phosphorus, which was present in matches in the 1800's and early 1900's. Symptoms would start as painful toothaches and swelling of the gums, leading to the jaw bone tissue rotting away entirely (This was also accompanied by a foul-smelling discharge, making phossy jaw sufferers a rather unwelcome presence in social circles). The only way to avoid eventual death by organ failure would be to remove the jaw bones entirely, resulting in permanent, horrific disfigurement. And get this — while afflicted, a sufferer's jaw would literally glow in the dark due to a reaction between the phosphorus and air.
Another terrifying thing to have is diabetes and Crohn's disease together. Although not horrifying in of themselves, when you have both, they can be quite a menace. Imagine, if you eat to control your diabetes, you get severe diarrhea from the Crohn's, but if you don't eat to control the Crohn's, your diabetes goes out of control. Catch 22 anyone? Though medication exists now so that having both isn't so nighmare inducing, such things didn't exist this troper's grandfather had both.
Speaking of fun diseases that do debilitating things to people, why not try Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? It's basically Mad Cow Disease for humans. Now what does Mad Cow Disease do? Basically turns your brain and spine into a sponge. Not very pretty. Oh, and it's contagious just like Mad Cow is, but it's up for grabs of how contagious it is. The best way to get it though is eating an infected.
- This troper has a friend who owns a book called "The Hypochondriac's Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have". After reading it, this troper had to recite the Litany against Fear several times just to be able to move. He then read it again.
  - This troper has that book and its sequel, "The Hypocondriac's Guide to Mental Disorders You Just Can Feel Coming On". Compared to easily contagious diseases and horrible parasites (I'm talking to you, Candiru fish, which is not an invention of The Venture Brothers), reading about the many ways your brain can rebel against your body is quite pleasant (but not for the author, a confessed neurotic).
Someone, somewhere, is finding it hard to sleep because of the A1N1 influenza. It might even be you.
- A1N1? If you mean the current (2009) swine flu (Type A H1N1) or a possible Avian flu (Probably still Type A H1N1) then remember that H1 stands for the type of haemagluttinin and the N is for Neuraminidase. And H1N1 flu is not new. In fact the Spanish flu in 1918 was H1N1. Of course now we have far better health care. Swine flu isn't actually much, if any, more dangerous than regular flu. Whether that reassures you that swine flu isn't so bad, or scares you of the danger of regular flu,only you can say
- Dude, this troper just recovered from H 1 N 1. It's annoying, painful, and takes you down for a couple days but unless you're a small child, an elderly person, or otherwise have a compromised immune system, it's really no big deal.
Here's a fun image to look at for the Polycystic Kidney Disease.
- This troper gets more nightmares because of its sibling, Polycystic Ovary Disease. It is because of that she may not be able to have children, just because of her fucking body being out of sync, but what scares her shitless is if it does to her what it did her her aunt. If you looked at the kidney picture, now imagine that on a woman's entire reproductive system. *shudder* Maybe it's because Its Personal for me.
- What's scarier about Polycystic Ovary Disease is the amount of women who don't know they have it. It scares this troper to think of how many relatives could have had it and unknowingly passed it on through the generations to her!
  - One of many genetic reason why this troper isn't having biological children. Her mother had it her entire life, completely unaware. She suffered from all the physical symptoms—and two miscarriages. And yes, she passed it on to me. (Fortunately, I was diagnosed when I was eighteen; it is treatable, but still genetically transferrable.)
  - I sympathize. What's really annoying is when doctors don't help with the "people don't know" thing...This troper has been treated for it since she was about twelve. She wasn't told that's what she HAD until this year. ...I'm nineteen now. *sigh* Nobody bothered to tell me the reason why I had to take medication every night for seven years.
Two words: Liquefactive necrosis. Central nervous system cells (i.e. brain or spine cells) get turned into soup. Sleep tight!
This Troper can't believe that this page is this long without mention of Ebola. The most lethal kind, Zaire, has a 90% death rate. Why? It turns your organs to mush. And the worst part is the symptoms start off similar to a lot of other viruses, and by the time the unique symptoms come along, well, it's too late to be cured.
- If it's some consolation, Zaire 'burn out'. It's too lethal to be successful because it kills hosts too fast for infections to spread very far. It's Ebola RESTON you have to fear. (There's another that has a 'mere' 30% fatality rate) Reston, on the other hand, cropped up right outside Washington D.C. and had...a 0% human fatality rate. It utterly destroyed the testing monkey population and resulted in the lab being quarantined. What makes Reston truly horrifying is that it has one thing other strains don't: aerial transmission. Other forms of Ebola are spread by bodily contact. And remember: Mutation from animal diseases happen, we got AIDS from chimps. The best part of ALL Ebola forms? The origin of the virus has never been found. There have been no confirmed 'vector' animals that live with Ebola inside them. The Hot Zone details all of this.
- Both of you have been watching too many movies. Victims of the disease generally die (relatively) peacefully from shock. There is nothing particularly dramatic about it. As for "burn out", it has an incubation period of about a week, death generally occuring another week or so after symptoms appear. It most certainly doesn't kill too fast to spread. As for vector animals, there are a number of suspected species.
  - The other wiki says bats. And who says they die peacefully? There is much pain that comes with the liquifiying of organs, no? And wouldn't the organ linings come off at earlier stages? Oh, and all the above tropers forgot the blood. All those bloody tears and noses, all that bloody sweat. "Blood from every Orifice."
  - They said they die from shock. Basically, the pain is so intense that you shut down, your brain unable to cope with the pain, blocking the pain out. So, in a way, it is an eerie kind of peaceful
  - There are two unrelated conditions commonly called "shock". The more likely to be associated with a hemorrhagic disease is circulatory shock, which is caused by inadequate blood supply ("bleeding out"). The alternative is also known as acute stress reaction, and is a response to psychological trauma. Neither one necessarily has anything to do with pain.
This troper is surprised nobody has mentioned this yet. Certain neurological disorders or damage can cause one to lose the ability to feel in certain parts of the body. This particular troper cannot feel his left hand except for a little bit around the heel. Not so bad, right? Wrong. Pain is there for a reason, to warn you if you've been injured. This troper once accidentally left his hand on a stove and didn't realize what was wrong until he smelled the flesh burning. And since there's no signals coming in from that sort of the body, the brain doesn't realize to send the appropriate immune response if there's an injury, so infections from something as minor as a paper cut can become uncontrollable. In this instance, doctors "helped" by instilling a sort of OCD, after every action, you *Always* look at the numb part of the body to make sure nothing scratched or damaged it that might require medical attention.
- This is actually one of the major symptoms of leprosy- the nerves die in the extremities, and, if you're not careful, your hand or foot usually gets cut with something sharp, gets infected, then turns black from necrosis. Hence the popular idea of lepers with missing limbs.

Medical—Psychopathology and Brain Disorders

Anorexia nervosa. There's something very disturbing about those unnaturally thin actresses and supermodels.
- It gets worse. Now there are those groups of anorexics, who exchange "thinspiration" pics of super-thin women, and encourage each other. These groups are called Pro-Ana and Pro-Mia. "It's a lifestyle choice, not a disease." Shiver.
  - Heh. Check out what◊ "thinspiration"◊ looks◊ like.◊ Yes, these are all legitimate pictures, taken from the blogs of Pro-Anas. Who the hell thinks this is attractive? This is the worst one yet. Half of the women pictured here are mental patients who died as a result of this disease—and these girls are holding them up as role models!
  - Disproven, see: [1]
- Eating disorders in general are terrifying when you think about just how insidious they really are even apart from the physical symptoms.
- Exercise Bulimia. When your friend/child/whathaveyou is eating and then throwing up, it's comparatively easy to see and catch. When they are eating normally and then working out for upwards of four hours a day, it's hard to see the difference until it's much too late. Read anything on the topic by Jamie Lynn Discala (of Sopranos fame).
Let's focus on the emotional consequences as well. It's like there's this voice in the back of your head telling you to just work harder, just eat less and less and you can beautiful. You want to stop but she tells you you can't, you aren't beautiful yet. She's always there, and occasionally she calls you useless and stupid and ugly but mostly she's incredibly sweet and gentle and you know she just wants to help you. Nothing else matters anymore, the only thing that's important is keeping the fat off your body. Any is too much. And when you think maybe you should stop, that voice comes along and says no, and you can't make yourself not listen. You just have to do what she tells you. It's kind of like being possessed, actually.
Brain Disorders. The seat of your being turning against you and breaking your very self. Watch the episode of Secret Life of the Brain titled Losing Reality and tell me the idea of such things happening to you isn't utterly terrifying. You can't.
- This Troper has Paranoid Schizophrenia... This mainly manifests as an unending felling of dread, combined with a general lack of trust for anyone else. And those are the good days... On bad ones, I'm not really sure I'm really there, as everything seems so... false. Just imagine for a second that everyone you know is hiding something about you from you, and that everyone you trust actually hates you... Can you imagine that? Now picture that every single second of your life... Thank science for medication, or else that would be my life all the time...
- Just think... Bipolar Disorder is just the tip of the iceberg. The chemicals in your brain causing mood swings so wide that one minute you're immortal and nothing can harm you and you're the best and happiest person ever and the next minute all you can think about is how your life sucks and what is the best way to remove yourself from the equation and there's little to no in-between mood-state and the entire time all you're doing is indulging a death wish through self-medication of one kind or another To deal with your own delusions if one of the prolonged depressions doesn't force your hand into suicide. The annual suicide rate of bipolar individuals is 10 to more than 20 times that of the general population. And this is what I live with every day. The fear of running away with myself is even worse now that my disorder is under control with medication.
- Depression, purely and simply, isn't the nicest thing. Thinking of yourself as a monster, the worst thing to ever happen, not being able to do anything without thinking you're going to screw with this, not being capable of taking baths frequently because you hate your own body... Yeah.
  - For this troper, my depression got so bad that I would lay on the couch for most of the day and couldn't even get up, I just laid there all curled up under a blanket, constantly crying, with my face turned towards the sofa so as to block out light. Really, even the mere thought of leaving the couch made me feel even more depressed. At that time, it was the only thing that helped me feel at least slightly less depressed. Thank god for group counselling, and anti-depressants, and my parents...
- Aspergers. Usually comes with Tourrettes, ADHD, and symptoms that mimic OCD. This Troper has it. Tourrettes may cause one to swear uncontrollably... Or suddenly go into violent spasms that may look like an epileptic fit. Guess which one I have? Also, OCD may not seem bad, but I am worried about washing my hands so much that I literally wash off my skin. I know that I have may my skin raw before. The ADHD... Ok, that isn't that bad. The Aspergers itself... Well, for starters, I don't get normal social conventions. That may not seem too bad, but it can lead to stressful situations. And the more stressful the situation, the more likely a person with Aspergers is to fly off the handle and try to kill someone, succumbing to raw, primal instincts, the actual person being trapped, either not fully aware of whats happening, or even worse, having to view it all and being left unable to do anything but scream in his head for his body to stop. I once strangled a grade one student when I was in grade six. Luckily, I regained control soon enough to prevent any permanent damage, but still. And I have even turned on my family before. Heck, I've read some articles and seen some videos referring to people who enter this state of rage as Aspergers Werewolves. Yeah, being compared to a monster that loses all control due to a seemingly harmless trigger, trying to kill anyone around... That should tell you how bad it gets.
  - That doesn't sound like any description of Asperger's this troper (who has it) has ever heard. Sounds like some other disorder stacked on top of it. (Tourette's, ADHD and OCD can occur as comorbid conditions but don't always come with it.)
  - Incidentally, we have a page on Asperger's Syndrome.
  - Er, that really doesn't sound like Aspergers to this troper. Sounds more like... some kind of weird violently crazy thing.
  - I've been diagnosed with Asperger's, with several co-morbid issues. The "Werewolf" thing is about right, though I feel it is being possessed by anger and rage. For me, at least, it is a thing that lasts 24 hours tops, then I have to figure out how to fix the mess I caused for myself emotionally.
  - This troper has Aspergers, plus several (fairly) mild comorbid conditions, including OCD and Depression. It's bad enough.
  - This Aspie troper doesn't have any of those symptoms, but has one to match it: not realizing that he's hurting people emotionally. He constantly worries about coming off as odd, inconsiderate, rude as hell, or sometimes just plain evil; if it weren't for the fact that it's specific to a different culture, he'd self-diagnose with Taijin Kyofusho.
- Posttraumatic stress disorder. Imagine the worst thing you can think of happening to you, something that will change your life forever. You never want whatever you saw and experienced that day to happen again, so you start changing around your entire life, living in fear of it happening again. You don't want to even think about it again, but it invades your thoughts, forcing you to relive the worst moments of your life over and over and over again. You lash out at the people you love, and few are willing to understand that you can't control your emotions, but since you don't want to think about it, you don't even want to get help because then you would have to talk about it and remember. And all it takes is one bad day.
- It's tame compared to most of these examples of mental health problems, but, imagine...you can't speak in school or at home. You are constantly ridiculed for it, people go out of their way to antagonize you and put you down, you have about five friends who you rarely see, and only one who really understands you, your parents won't admit you have anything wrong, your condition is barely understood by doctors and psychiatrists, and, because of its effects, usually can't tell if you really have it or not, and you end up suicidally depressed and cynical, that one friend being your only anchor to sanity and keeping you from suicide..and then he gets a girlfriend, because, while YOU don't have a social life, he/she certainly does. All this has happened to me, and I've never seen a psychiatrist for it, or for anything in my life. I have Selective Mutism, and, for me, it's torture.
- This troper would like to throw epilepsy into the ring. It can kill you at anytime, no matter what you are doing, you fall right you're dead, have a seizure while in the bath, you're dead, driving a car, good chance you're dead, not to mention any unfortunate motorists that get in your way, climbing stairs, holding sharp objects, crossing the road on a busy street, even just standing still you can die. Not to mention even if the seizure goes well i.e. no concussions or major wounds, the after effects feel like the love child of a hangover and the day after an over-zealous workout. Luckily this troper only gets a few a year, some people have them every day.
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It's not just constant hand-washing (although that by itself is bad; imagine scrubbing, over and over, because they just can't get clean). It wears many faces.
  - Obsessions: Wear slippers when you leave the bedroom - otherwise your personality will be overwritten by anyone else who has walked on that carpet. If you scrape against something, you must sweep the bit of your soul that got caught off of it and rub it back into the tear. Your mind falls out of your eyes every time you see a crack on the road; scoop it up and put it back in. Time must be balanced - if you fast-forward something, you must then rewind it. Do it, or you will feel the panic again. You don't want to feel the panic again, do you?
  - Compulsions: Imagine that every time you look at a knife, for just a second, you see yourself stabbing the cat or cutting your tongue out. Or worse, seeing a nail and feeling the urge to blind yourself with it - for just a moment. Compulsions take many forms. The worst part is that it's possible to know, on a deep level, that your compulsions are insane, that you would never act on them... but they don't stop. And one day, a tiny part of you wonders, you may just act on them.
  - ...So I really am insane after all. ...Strangely liberating.
  - This Troper has this... erm.. strange obsession that causes her to want to kiss certain special belongings of hers for good luck, or to make sure that this inanimate object/ whatever knows that she loves it, or so that she isn't cursed for being cruel to whatever it is... Okay, here are a few examples: kissing her choir uniform before a concert, kissing her favorite stuffed animal before bed, kissing the shirt she just wore before she throws it into the clothes bin to get it washed later (so it doesn't feel unloved) or even kissing the shirt before she wears it, to remind it that it's one of her favorite outfits. It's... it's strange, yes, but if not done, this troper will start to feel like she's mean or she just doesn't want to do it because she's lazy, and then she'll start to have bad luck.
  - This troper has been working hard and has gotten better about some of her OCD issues. I really don't like my food touching, to the point where I would refuse food it it touched something else. This I've pretty much handled okay now, so I just get kinda annoyed and start separating things now. I have a certain specific way fo organizing things, so rearranging my stuff can cause me to flip out and go ballistic on people. My mom knows better than to mess with this, but my stepmom says I need to "get over it." And I also unconsiously bite the inside of my mouth, to the point where I have permanent slash marks all over my tongue. The only reason I'm not medicated is because my mom worries that it might make me not be able to think as well anymore.
- This troper has epilepsy, bipolar disorder, major depression, brain damage, several symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and has had panic attacks. Imagine, if you will, hurting the people you care most about, by physically hurting them and yourself, and saying the worst things imaginable to them (including making fun of a past rape) and enjoying it. Then imagine the remorse you'd feel after the fact. Now, let's just say that intense stress (like that remorse) causes further mini-seizures, which trigger such psychotic episodes. Now imagine being told that if you took any strong stimulants, like cocaine, you'd be permanently stuck in that psychotic mode. And then imagine being trapped in a treatment center that tried to work you through these (purely biological) issues via psychotherapy, and trying futilely to stop yourself from having seizures. Welcome to my life. It's been years since I've had an episode, and I still have regular nightmares about it.
  - Oh, and I forgot. I also have trust issues stemming from watching my dad die when I was 2 (it's my third or fourth memory ever), and because of that, I think everyone I know will at some point abandon me, and thus I've never had more than 2 or 3 friends at a time, and almost no social skills, having been alone a lot as my mom worked to put food on the table.
Alzheimers. You slowly lose all concept of who you are. That is the worst kind of Nightmare Fuel, mostly because it could happen to you and you won't know until you have it. As Roger Ebert said, "Some films on Alzheimer’s attempt to show an upside. I don’t think there is an upside. At least with cancer you get to be yourself until you die."
- Hell, this troper told his mom to shoot him if he ever gets that and there's not a cure yet.
- Got to agree with this one, since I spent a few years helping my grandfather take care of his sister, who had Alzheimers. By the time we finally had to put her in a nursing home, she no longer qualified as sentient, as far as we could see. I would actually consider suicide if I were diagnosed with Alzheimers or something similar, after having witnessed what it did to my great-aunt.
- Oh, yeah. Paternal grandmother had it for the final ten years of her life, and my father told me to kill him if he ever got it. The fact that this is a 6-foot-tall grown man (known in the family to work out at the gym almost 7 days a week and once chased out some hooligans who tried climbing into the house garden, wielding a big fragging bamboo stick and dropping one Cluster F Bomb after another) sobbing like a hysterical two-year-old while begging to you to stick a knife in his head gives even this slightly-psychopathic tropher pause.
- This Troper's grandmother had it, and it was... dignified, as far as possible. She was in her own daughters' care center, and she didn't appear to suffer whilst she was still responding. As with Locked In Syndrome, the damage may or may not mercifully negate the ability to comprehend the nightmare for oneself. Also, there are many drugs in development, but sadly studies take a load of time.
- Brain tumours do that too, only much much faster. They can turn you from a normal person with headaches to a muttering non-walking vegetable in just six months. And many of the worst ones are utterly untreatable.
  - Most brain tumors don't hurt. Only the lucky ones have the advance warning of a headache.
- Add to that the fact that as we age naturally we all have pathology of Alzheimer's slowly encroaching, it just moves faster in some people and many of us die before actual onset, but pretty much everyone aging naturally is going in that direction at one speed or another.
- HBO's The Alzheimer's Project documents this disease and all its frightening aspects most poignantly with The Memory Losss Tapes. While all of the cases documented are tragic in their own way, the documentary really hits home when one of the people filmed actually dies on camera. Tragic doesn't begin to describe it accurately.
Parkinson's disease. Nowadays there's medication and operations you can get, but before then you lost control of your muscles, so they are shaking all the time; but the difference with Alzheimer's and things like that is you are perfectly aware of what is happening to you. It's being described as a living hell.
- Stephen King unintentionally got more fear reaction from this troper, in his novel From a Buick 8, in telling of major-character police captain Tony Schoondist's contracting Alzheimer's in his later years than from his fascinating descriptions of the titular impossible-soul-eating-car-from-Nowhere.
This troper suffers from rather severe bipolar disorder, although nowadays drug treatment is very effective and the major symptoms have mostly gone away. Similar to the fear of Alzheimers listed above, one of the major problems I have dealing with it is that I am not an outside reference of my own sanity. In other words, if I'm not acting "normally" I won't be able to tell because it's my own, abnormal, brain that's telling me I'm being normal. During the "up" phase you feel great, like nothing can go wrong and everyone is having a grand time and you're perfectly fabulous, which is usually a big lie. During a bad "down" phase, you are absolutely the biggest piece of shit on the planet. There is nobody who is a worse piece of crap than you are. You suck, you don't even deserve to be here. In fact, you should probably just die. And you never question that you might be feeling strange, because your own brain is telling you these things. I don't hear voices, I don't think it's ok to kill people, I do remember where I left my car keys (most of the time) and my "mind" works just fine, but my brain likes to play games with my happiness if I don't keep it under control. Even now with treatment I have to rely on close friends and family to let me know how I'm doing because I know my brain has some faulty wiring and I don't trust it.
- This Troper also suffers from Bipolar Disorder. As mentioned above the thought that my brain offers little in the way of control over myself is terrifying but even worse is my medication. I love my medication (Lamictal), I do, because it makes me relatively sane but the fact that it carries warnings about Stevens-Johnson Syndrome freak my shit right out. The thing that helps me cope may be the thing that causes my skin to rot off my body... *shudder*
  - This Troper also has Bipolar Disorder. When she is having an off day her parents tell her to 'buck up' and when she feels immortal her parents tell her to 'stop acting like you're on drugs'. And instead of having people to comfort her, she has to comfort her sister who has trouble with her boyfriend, one of her best friends who frets because she cannot indulge in her music due to religious reasons and a missing other best friend. Her only thread to sanity is her boyfriend and even he has to live with an abusive father and brother. Oh and did This Troper mention that one of her best friends lives 50 miles away and can only see her three times every year because This Troper's mother hates her and her boyfriend lives on the other side of the world?
Ever heard of Morgellons? No? You probably don't want to. If the Nightmare Fuel isn't enough, add in a layer of Squick, and top with a dash of Paranoia Fuel. Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Anterograde Amnesia. Basically this is the inability to form new memories after a traumatic head injury. The upside is you still keep your old memories. The bad news is, the earlier you get this, the worse it is, and you can get this at any age. While we have the comedy 50 First Dates, Memento is another film depicting this disorder on a level that's heavily realistic, according to psychologists.
- Real Life: A 70 year old man has retrograde and anterograde amnesia due to a disease he caught in his late twenties/early thirties. He now considers himself a twelve-year-old boy, forgets his thoughts as soon as he moves on, and once looked into a reflection of himself and, when asked who the image was, "Oh, just some old guy."
- Real Life 2.0: The Japanese documentary Without Memory follows a Japanese man who developed anterograde amnesia after prolonged hospital stay and B12 deficiency.
Sociopaths. People who simply do not feel love or guilt. Most aren't criminals and/or murders. Many marry and have children. You probably know at least one, and they'll be a nasty piece of work, but at the end of the day they are normal people. Except that if they ran you over they'd never feel a twinge of guilt. Ever. That's the scariest thing for me, at least a decent human being would have their conscience punish them for bad things they've done, even if the law or Karma didn't. Sociopaths won't.
- Even scarier, sociopaths/psychopaths are masters of emotional and social camouflage, and can fool even psychologists into thinking they're perfectly normal. They are real-life Stepford Smilers, a potential mixture of Types B and C, who can and will make themselves appear to be absolutely normal, and the more intelligent they are the greater the chances are that you will never know unless it becomes in their best interests for you to know - say they decide it's in their interests to kill you, and only then do you realize they feel no remorse for what they're about to do.
- Judging by some of the posts on this very wiki, there are more socipaths out there than one might think. Then again, eveyone's hardcore on the Internet...
- Actually, they likely point up something I find even scarier. You don't have to be a sociopath to not care. You just have to convince yourself that someone doesn't count, isn't the same as you. Most of the worst things we have done were done by people with no inherent madness, just a belief that the victims somehow deserved it, or else a refusal to think of them at all.
  - Interestingly enough, many people have exactly that same apathy toward those whom they know to be or discover to be sociopaths. Some (or maybe many) people who by all indications feel empathy and emotion could probably sit and watch a murderous sociopath be slowly and painfully killed in the way he killed his victims, and his screams of pain might not elicit any guilt or remorse from those watching, because he "doesn't count" and is a "monster." This Troper has read a website that describes sociopaths as "Pseudo-human," without irony. It's ironic that many normal people can realize what it feels like to be a sociopath if they turn their thoughts toward sociopaths, and find themselves feeling the very same lack of empathy that the sociopath feels for the world. It's a High Octane Nightmare Fuel Not So Different moment, because even if sociopaths don't inspire that apathy in you, you probably know someone for whom they do.
A psychotic blackout. This Troper was once on anti-depressants and prescribed sleeping pills, then foolishly partook in a drinking game. After passing out, I awoke in the morning with no memory of the night before. A few days later I had found out some of the other people in the house were scared of me, and revealed I had been violent and ranting and apparently even threatened to rape someone. I was so shocked I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut. Since then I've been terrified of the idea of another self inside you, waiting to get out and do horrible things you'll be blamed for. Needless to say, I went off the pills, but things like Jekyll & Hyde stories or doppelgangers are even scarier for me now than they ever used to be.
This troper while spacing out one evening, stared at her name on a page for a bit, and suddenly lost all sense of who she was. (Sudden switch to first person is in order) I am not kidding or exaggerating, I suddenly felt a complete disconnection from my body and everything that made me me. The entire thing only lasted maybe fifteen seconds, but afterwards, I proceeded to hug myself and cry for a good while.
- The mind is a scary, scary thing. This troper speaks from experience- she once spent a terrifying night staring around her room, and everything looked strangely unfamiliar. Also, there are numerous people who suffer from something called Derealization/Depersonalization, which is similar to the previously described sensation. Except it doesn't seem to leave the person for years and years. If there is one benefit to the multitude of horrors people out there face, it is that it makes the rest of us feel quite fortunate indeed to live the life we've been given.
  - This troper once suffered from the aforementioned Depersonalization for several months and can confirm that it belongs on this page. So very much.
  - Totally. This troper developed it after an extremely stressful time when she was fourteen. For me, it manifested as not even being able to see people's faces clearly, complete with micropsia (things looking too small) and myopsia (things looking too large). Aside from that, it also came with creepy feelings of floating and having the ground sway in front of me. It lasted six months and I still get bouts of it occassionally, though thankfully not as much.
- Hmm. This never really bugged me that much. It's happened to me for as far back as I can remember. Sometimes it would last for hours and sometimes just a couple seconds. This troper is a college freshman now and it still happens once in a while (the most recent being a few days ago). Always kinda made me feel like one of the porcelain dolls I own, looking out of little glass eyes and not really controlling anything. I always found it a rather fascinating experience.
Rationalizing your terrifying, terrifying fetish. If you want to have said fetish, fine. If you want to post it online, well, if I stumble on it that's just the Internet for you. But if, out of the blue, you PM me and ask to RP your terrifying fetish, and then attempt to explain the good inherent in raping and devouring ten-and-under girls, you deserve the reporting I gave you. And also to be beaten with a baseball bat embedded with sharp glass and rusting nails, but I digress.
- O.o; I wouldn't even try rationalizing my voreaphilia (a cannabilistic fetish), realising that it is twisted and should never been seen outside of fantasy. The fact that this guy wants to not only rationalize eating, but raping girls under ten? That is... God, that is a nightmare right there.
  - As a soft *not cannibalism/flesh ripping, aka swallowed whole and alive* furry voreaphile, I would like to concur with the other vore above and say that is seriously, seriously fucked up beyond madness and no, vore is not a valid fetish to be played out in RL, even if it wasn't often physically imposable, dependant on exact fetish.
  - I can't even begin to puzzle out how anyone could rationalize it without ludicrous amounts of sociopathy.
Shaar Menashe is the proper way to combine Godwin's Law and Nightmare Fuel: it's a hospital in Israel dedicated to the care of mentally ill survivors of the Holocaust. Post-traumatic stress disorder's ravages have resulted in there being people in the world for whom the Shoah never ended, who are still in the camps after seventy years.
The amount of people in the world who are unhappy. Think about it. The number of people living in poverty, under dicators, starving, getting horrific diseases, considered sub-human because of their gender, race or religion, genicide, the number of children abused by their parents, the number of wives beaten and raped by their husbands. And last of all the fact that people suffering from depression have the most realist world view. I know I'm a teenager and that I might be going though an wangsty stage right now, but I'm not sure I'll ever be the optimist I was again.
- Actually, depressives are not realists. Because, you know... Depression? A mental illness, which like all mental illnesses skews the way you see things. You could throw a depressive the best, totally-paid-for party in the world, for no real reason, with a hundred people who love and respect them and non-alcoholic ice cream that tastes like the best booze in the world, and they'd still see it as though the balloons and streamers were the skulls and intestines of the baby cadavers their demon-guests sacrificed to the Old One.
  - Actually, speaking as someone who struggled with major depression for over a decade, I would say it's more likely a depressed person would take one look at that party and just feel awful, believing they don't deserve it and that those hundred loving people have much better things to do than wasting their time trying to make someone feel better who can't. And then they'd just feel even worse knowing these thoughts are delusions but also knowing someone who wasn't mentally ill would be able to enjoy themselves.
This troper tried to commit suicide once. Many people do not get how people can be that "selfish", or that "unhappy, maybe if they tried to cheer up a bit", or that "stupid", so for your reading pleasure I shall attempt to put the experience in a metaphor: Imagine that one day, you fall down a hole. And it's only a small hole, and you can see people walking past, so you call out, but no-one seems to be able to see or hear you. So you panic, and you try and climb out, and it's only then you realise that the hole is getting deeper. And the sides are too smooth to climb. And sometimes, you think someone has heard, and you even think they may have thrown you a rope, but the rope breaks and you're back in the hole again. And one day, you realise that you can't even see daylight at the top of your hole any more, that you're so far out of sight and hearing of the rest of humanity that you might as well not exist. You realise that you matter so little to the world, you can just die and no-one will ever care. You realise that oblivion is better than the alternative of living in a world where you are so completely alone. And it's all in your head, and knowing that doesn't help at all because you're living in that world regardless of whether it exists in the real world ot not.
- This troper had read this comment just before having a very close friend admit to me that she was suicidally depressed. That was the afternoon of two days ago. My panic attack hasn't let up since. The only thing on TV Tropes that's ever been real, serious nightmare fuel for me. Thanks an effing lot.
- You can fix yourself if you want to bad enough. It's like smoking: Some people struggle for years with patches and support-systems and never kick the habit, others one day say "Well, that's enough," and they quit cold-turkey. Speaking from experience, try getting mad instead of self-pitying. Like at the 'rest of humanity,' or the unsupportive friends and family, or yourself. Whatever gets you through.
  - Speaking from my own experience... this troper has two words for you: Bull. Shit. There's a difference between willfully being self-pitying and depression — depression, you have no choice. Your life could be wonderful, and you could have every reason to be happy as a lark — but because your brain is malfunctioning, you don't deserve any of the wonderful things surrounding you. You have no right to be happy... why not just kill yourself, and make everyone much happier? All the well-meaning advice in the world can't cure you. Now that is nightmare fuel.
  - This Troper tried to kill herself at least four times. The persons metaphor is right. Its like no one is there to help or hear you. You think that ending your life right now would be the only way to end the suffering. And depression itself is bad enough. Its as if you're whole life has became a whole nightmare. Every one and everything is out to get you and theres no real way to ever be really happy agian. Medication can cure long-term depression, but you still have little outbursts every now and then.
  - More reason you (the troper the above two are responding to) are, quite frankly, being what amounts to a (probably well-meaning) troll, is what happens when a person has a phobia of suicide. You don't want to kill yourself? Good for you. You don't intend to kill yourself, but have depression that can last for months, nightmares about falling in the bath and accidentally putting your roomate's razor through your wrist, or worse, having a psychotic blackout that's somehow lucid enough to write a suicide note, and doing yourself in or even leaving it somewhere you won't find but the people cleaning out your stuff will if you have an accident? You worry far more than daily that your obsessive-compulsive disorder may one day cause you to cut your wrist or keep taking sleeping pills until you've reached an uneven cubed number, or finish popping pills to the score of Still Alive (yes, the irony occurs to me, but it was the first tune I could think of aside from "Flight of the Bumblebee"), or that that uncontrollable twitch you sometimes get is getting worse exponentially instead of linearly and will move just a few centimeters closer to your shoulder while you finish up sharpening a knife? That the only way you can control it without worrying about being institutionalized (or worse, dismissed) is by hating the idea of any sort of pain you inflict in death being potentially eternal, as your last instant drags on and on to the end of your life, and that ever giving in to a single, self-pitying thought could start a chain reaction that leads to you killing yourself? Good for freakin' you. Now try that on top of fear of any or all of the other psychological High Octane Nightmare Fuel you read about (or are suggested to be treated for, including a thinly suppressed and easily homicidal [if not just psychological torture] rage-triggered sociopathy), and just tell me that you can "fix yourself" with some happy thoughts and a good kick to the psychological behind to get you motivated.
Think about reality, everything you know, everything you believe in, the people who love you, your own capabilities. Now imagine being told that any or all of it is completely untrue, either because you just woke up and remembered, "oh, hey, that was... just... they're all dead, waking up killed her/him/them, I'll never see them again..." or, and I hope to any gods that govern it that it never happens to me, "We've put you on some pretty strong antipsychotics, hopefully with some proper counseling you'll be able to function normally, even if we never figure out some of the stuff you thought you learned while under."
Anxiety disorders. Everything is Nightmare Fuel in varying degrees. Imagine being so afraid of life, everything around you, and the progression of time and everything that signals it (including your own thoughts, breathing, heartbeat; basically your own entire existence) that you want to kill yourself... and being too afraid of that, too, to do it. And, when you feel relatively good, knowing that it's only a matter of time before you're at that point again.
Total isolation. If you saw that episode of Law And Order SVU you'll know it can drive you crazy. In the absence of stimulation your brain begins to make shit up, and if that produces any kind of reaction it'll keep it up, even if that reaction is "paranoia and abject terror".
- About time this went on here. I once saw a documentary on isolation where a former POW was interviewed about his captivity. He was isolated for months, and was literally in the dark for the whole time; he quickly lost all sense of time, and began to doubt that he even existed, just because his brain had absolutely no stimulation to keep it in order. In his own words, there was "nothing there to even confirm his existance." Try telling me that isn't terrifying.

Accidents and General Body Horror

Charla Nash. The victim of a chimpanzee attack. Good god, do not look up photos from Google of her face from her appearance on Oprah. As a matter of fact, it's not advisable that you look up any article about her appearance on Oprah, considering that that article might inadvertantly have photos of her face (yes, this Troper had a huge shock and following nightmares from seeing it accidentally). Absolutely horrifying. This troper has now developed an immense fear of chimpanzees (especially after hearing about many other stories of people being horribly maimed by them). The lady's arms were literally ripped and pulled off, her eyes, eyelids as well as her lips... she looks almost like Pale Man from Pans Labyrinth, except more horrifying in that she actually has a huge, bloody hole in the middle of her face. AGGGGHHHH.
This troper was curious and decided to read about the "Byford Dolphin diving bell accident" after reading the entry on Explosive Decompression. Hoo boy. Just the description about what happened to the bodies (including gas bubbles forming in the eye tissue) is enough to cause shivers. Sure, the victims probably died instantly and painlessly, but can you imagine having to clean up or autopsy one of these corpses? The people in charge of that must have been scarred for life.
- Jesus Christ... Reading that article, it was probably like autopsying a wheelbarrow of mincemeat, there wasn't anything else left.
Subsequent investigation by forensic pathologists determined that diver D4, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient, exploded with violence due to the rapid and massive expansion of internal gases. All of his thoracic and abdominal organs, and even his thoracic spine, were ejected, as were all his limbs. [...] Chunks of his body were found scattered about the rig.
Even worse, they once had a story about a girl whose hair was caught in a machine which ended up separating her face from her head. They then showed you both the girl with her musculature exposed, and the face, in two pieces, resting on the plastic bag the girl's mother brought it in.◊
- In fairness, the face was successfully reattached in the first ever operation of its kind, and the woman, now in her twenties, looks really good for someone who had her face torn off and replaced. This picture◊ was taken just after the reattachment, and this picture◊ was taken ten years later.
  - Not to mention that this sort of operation would later pave the way for more radical procedures—like total face transplants (which, in this troper's opinion, is nothing short of amazing).
William Harvey. A very important 17th century scientist, who made his biological discoveries in horrifying ways. Some of his highlights include performing unanaesythetised dissections on live animals, and draining all of the blood from most of a person's vessels into one vein, making that one vein swell up like a balloon.
- This troper went to a private high school named in his honor. Isn't that nice! Every year, we had to watch a slideshow about the sick fuck with blown-up helpful etchings made at the time, cutting open live puppies and horses and goats. Seriously, the guy was like Count Rugen from The Princess Bride. But hey, he discovered that blood didn't just radiate from the heart to the fingertips and disappear into ether! Don't you feel better now?
You want to teach kids not to smoke cigarettes? Have them visit with someone who's had a laryngectomy.
- I'll top that. Have them visit someone who had to get a laryngectomy because of secondhand smoke.
  - When this troper's Year 8 class was shown pictures of this, along with many others, the only issue from smoking she and her friend were really worried about was the wrinkles. Before you call her ignorant, just ask yourselves, how many people do you think smoke? And how many people have you ever seen with a laryngectomy?
  - This Troper would say a million things about the above statement, but whatever.
Spontaneous Human Combustion. It's highly unsettling to think that one day you could burn to death from the inside out for no apparent reason, with nothing left but a big black spot, a pile of burnt oily mess and bone, and maybe a leg or two sticking out. Crematoria use furnaces of up to 1000° C to burn human bodies - but in cases of SHC, only materials above and next to what's left of you will be burned. Images of victims' charred remains can be found, but having a few gallons of Brain Bleach handy would be highly advisable if you plan to search for them.
- The probable cause: 1) Your clothing or chair catches fire from a dropped cigarette, or some other conventional source of heat. 2) The fire melts exposed body fat, which soaks into your clothes. 3) You burn like a candle, with your clothes serving as a wick, and your body is cremated inch by inch over many hours... probably days. (This is why there won't be massive fire damage to your surroundings - crematoria need temperatures that high to incinerate the body in a small fraction of the time.) 4) If you're very lucky, then your house won't catch fire around you, because that would just be reported as "died in a house fire". What's left of you will be the craziest thing your local sheriff ever saw, and you'll become (posthumously) world-famous. But on the bright side, it's extremely unlikely that you were alive or conscious when the process started. Feel better now?
  - At the time, Nero's use of Christians as gladiator bait didn't catch much attention in Rome. That wasn't particularly unusual, and they were convenient scapegoats for the Great Fire. What did catch attention was the extreme cruelty of the spectacle he made of it, including the "innovative" use of their living bodies as candles to provide light for it. It was widely seen as his Moral Event Horizon.
This troper saw several videos on Jacqueline Saburido◊, and can't help but want to give the poor woman a nice big hug. But still, the fact that this can easily happen to anyone is pure Nightmare Fuel.
This troper's science teacher told her class a story about an event her friend witnessed once: it goes like this. A car rammed into a carrier truck at a red light, causing a bunch of incredibly corrosive acid to spill out and wash across tarmac for twenty metres or so. (This was probably back in the 80s or something because of the truck's poor protection.) Anyway, some spilt over the woman in the car, and she started screaming. The truck driver leaned out of his window and began to scream as loudly as possible "Get back, get the fuck back!" (This was only partly necessary, as most people had run to a safer area when they saw the tarmac start to bubble.) So one onlooker started shouting "Why is nobody going to help her?!" The rest of the bystanders tried to reassure the onlooker, but she broke free and started to run across the acid to the woman in the car . . . yes, she did. Within a few seconds, it had eaten through the soles of her shoes and then her feet. The woman fell over from the pain, face-first into the acid. Then she started to roll around in agony, after which point she passed out. This story made most of this troper's classmates start to feel sick. Not her, though, for some reason. It takes an incredible amount to Squick her out.
- Now, the moral of that story is that if you ever see a pool of acid on the floor that you need to cross, throw your shoe into it first. (The woman in the car was way less hurt than the other woman, incidentally. If they're screaming, they're still alive. Remember that.)
This troper was shown images and video of Saburido on her first day of driver's ed back in high school. It terrified her so badly she fled the room. She never continued the class. And on that note, driver's ed snuff in general.
- I agree. It's more the idea of getting burned like that that scares me. Seeing V's hands in V For Vendetta was enough to give her the shivers. Imagine if most of you looked like that...
A whole host of birth defects, fetus in fetu, anencephaly, etc.
Perhaps the worst is in a documentary about fetus in fetu, a medical condition where a developing fetus envelops his/her identical twin - and the enveloped twin develops inside as a parasite! Naturally, being a television documentary, it was complete with pictures of the removed twin, which looked like a shrunken head with a proportioned body.
- I'm also told that happens with people who are left-handed, which I am. It's a myth (left-handedness has absolutely nothing to do with weird embryonic events), but I've always wanted a twin, and the prospect of having one living inside me right now scares me.
  - Now I will forever look at my left-handed brother differently. Especially since my mother is believed to have miscarried his twin. Or did she...
  - I've not heard of this myth until now. It's likely a myth, but my mother is left-handed, and she's got this thing where she had two kneecaps in her knee, one growing in behind the other, and it turns out that she absorbed a twin.
- This prospect is taken to gruesome extremes in the Stephen King book The Dark Half. The protagonist's parasitic twin is first discovered in brain surgery as an eye and a few fingernails. Removed in body but not in spirit, the twin returns years later as his brother's "murdered" writer's pseudonym, willing to kill to see one more book written.
- This idea is, of course, turned into Nightmare Retardant by that one episode of The Office where Dwight comments that he has the strength of a grown man plus a baby, or something to that effect.
Fasciotomy. A huge, gaping, inches-wide wound running halfway down your arm or leg almost down to the bone, inflicted by a doctor to prevent your own muscles from crushing themselves after a severe limb injury. The muscles puff out, forcing the wound wide open so your limb looks like a slab of raw meat. Closing the wound is even worse—you get three horrible options: a skin graft which leaves you hideously scarred and without feeling in much of your affected limb, "primary dermal apposition" where they use literal ropes threaded through your flesh to slowly and painfully force the wound closed, and "secondary intention", where they just pack and cover the wound, wait for it to close naturally, and hope you don't get infected and die. If you get it on your forearm, the scarring and damage to your muscles will cause your hand to lose much of its function. If you're really unlucky, by the time they operate your limb is already dying and they have to remove large amounts of necrotic muscle tissue, leaving you even more crippled and disfigured. If you decide to Google Image Search this surgery, be warned that the pictures are really, really horrifying. Things like this give this troper an extreme fear of having to go to the hospital. I haven't been there since I was a year old. It would take something really horrible to happen to me to make me think that the hospital wouldn't be worse.
Lobotomies. Thank you.
- Now I'm done covering my eyes, it's history lesson time. The first lobotomies were lengthy, costly operations that were as precise as possible for the 1930's. Then Walter Freeman found the ice-picks in his freezer, remembered the bone behind our eyes is quite thin, hammered a couple into someone's head and jiggled them about a bit to get pretty much the same effect. The goal of these operations was to get people out of mental institutions - not necessarily well, just well enough...at first. As lobotomies first became popular then were progressively considered barbaric operations, Walter Freeman felt the pressure to prove they were indeed a medical breakthrough. An operation once reserved for an absolute last resort in the treatment of severe mental illness was eventually performed on unruly children. Meet one. The history of lobotomies fuels more nightmares in me than the thought of the actual operation, since it's a prime example of how humanity sucks in many, many areas and how few of those we keep an eye on to this day.
  - Another lobotomy fun fact—Freeman used to perform lobotomies with a showman's attitude, sometimes shoving in two ice picks at once. He even accidentally killed a man by briefly leaving the ice picks in while he went looking for a camera.
- Lobotomies are one of the best examples, but the entire medical profession prior to the last fifty years or so is pretty creepy. As for the pharmacological industry before the FDA - just don't go there. Actually, the thing that horrified me the most about the Exorcist wasn't any of the actual possession-related stuff, but that barbaric-looking brain scan that required bleeding the subjects neck arteries.
- Poor Rosemary Kennedy had the misfortune of being the "slow one" in a family full of ambitious, gifited children (experts think she had an IQ of around 90). The pressure of trying to measure up to her more sophisticated siblings caused her to act out and ultimately her parents ended up having a doctor perform brain surgery on her at the age of 23 to curb her mood swings. He succeeded...in reducing her mind to that of a literal infant, a state she remained in until she died at the age of 86. One wonders if the Kennedy family would have been alot happier if Papa Joe hadn't been so hellbent on creating his own dynasty.
  We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. "We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.
- One of the things that make it really frightening is how the media whitewash lobotomies to a state of numb mindlessness. If only. Imagine being able to remember caring, feeling, thinking as you do now, and then that just... stops, but the rest of you knows it and keeps on going.
- By far the scariest thing about lobotomies? The inventor won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. (Remember that, the next time someone tells you that something must be true because a Nobel Laureate says so...)
Dentists. 'Nuff said.
- Anything with teeth. This Troper actually gets chills thinking about any sort of tooth disorder, injury, whatever.
  - Ditto. Due to the immense amount of nerves and pain-related receptors...yeah not a good place. Feet are also very nasty. Think about how much it hurts when you stub your toe, especially directly on the nail. Okay, good? Now go watch the movie Payback.
- The only thing that caused me true nightmare fuel was the case of a guy that told about shaving gingivas. Ugh.
- This Troper thinks what caused anything with teeth to become nightmare fuel was during the time the permanent teeth started coming in. There was one case where a canine refused to come out but simply got looser. It was to the point where it could be turned all the way around but pulling it stillæ °tt. The final thing to set it free? Brushing teeth. Oh and the tooth left a nice crater. This Troper's still surprised it wasn't the actual permanent tooth. And then there was another when a premolar (or whatever they're called) was loose and so this Troper thought it'd be a great idea to sort of ease it out. Only instead of easing it out, it came right out, ensue half an hour of non-stop bleeding.
  - Well, how about this? This troper had extremely stubborn milk teeth — some of them haven't come out yet (she's 20). The front ones were no problem, they just hung around for a long time being extremely loose, but a couple of doubles have come out and they didn't want to. The adult teeth simply grew under the milk teeth, putting them under severe strain until they simply shatter under the normal process of chewing (the nerve is detached by this point so it doesn't hurt much), resulting in this troper spitting blood for a couple of days and picking shards of teeth out of her gum for a week. (No, I don't think this merits a dentist visit.)
  - For some reason, this troper has recurring nightmares about his teeth. Teeth falling out by the bunch, teeth chipping and broken while eating, having a mouthful of teeth shards, etc. Scared me enough to get me to brush my teeth and gargle with Listerine three times a day.
  - A dentist visit would probably involve the dentist informing you that for him or her to do something would be worse than just sitting it out. That’s how it was for this troper.
- This troper was once left with one particularly stubborn tooth hanging on by a small strip of flesh that wouldn't detach. His mother didn't want him to go to bed until it came out, being afraid of it falling out and choking him in his sleep, but it was getting to be ten o'clock and he was damn tired, so he calmly took a pair of scissors and snipped the gum strip in half, freeing his tooth (and a large quantity of blood). It didn't bother him at all back then, but looking back on it now he's more than a little grossed out. Hardcore seven-year-old was hardcore.
- This troper once had his molars removed to make way for his wisdom teeth, which were coming in too fast. It would have gone perfectly, but there was problem. The dentist wanted to take his time. *Cue nearly an hour of some guy poking around in my mouth, pushing the gums back from the tooth and not even mvoing the tooth itself* My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think he took so long, the anaesthetic wore off.
  - Oral surgery in general is horrifying: after having one's wisdom teeth out and having to endure an extra hour of surgery due to inept dentists who didn't look at the x-rays before operating, one really gets a sense of this. Your mouth is forced open, rendering you unable to speak or breathe through it, and complete strangers proceed to shove all manner of scissors, calipers, scalpels, and drills into the most sensitive area of your body while you lie there, unable to move, and realizing that the nitrous oxide they gave you to dull the pain doesn't really do shit. You can't even scream, or you'd choke on your own blood and saliva. And even after the procedure is over, you're incredibly weak for a while due to your nerves going haywire and your muscles tensing up every time they dug into your jawbone with some new bladed implement. What follows is several days of intense pain and swelling which can only be equated to being smacked in the mouth with a sledgehammer several dozen times. The things people do for a nice smile...
  - In [[ ThisTroper this troper's]] opinion the surgery isn't so bad in the hands of a competant dentist. The creepy vacuum noises scare her more than the scalpels. But what is really terrifying for her is REMOVING STITCHES. The sheer anticipational horror of having bits of string pulled from your gums, feeling the thread which has "grown into your flesh". I now have a fear of getting stitches removed.
- This troper has had problems with his teeth his entire life. Many of his milk teeth refused to fall out, leaving him with two almost perfect sets of teeth at one point, practically every tooth has been filled, despite being diligent about brushing, he now has 3 wisdom teeth, two of which are still growing in and each one of which has managed to get a still attached lump of gum in the center of the tooth providing a nice amount of pain with every bite. Additionally he has a very small mouth, and weak jaw to the point that even routine exams are hard for him. However due to a very good dentist, he isn't scared of them. This troper also admits to making his own situation worse at times by once refusing anaesthetic of any kind during a filling, and at one point being unable to afford a trip to the dentist allowed a very far back molar to crack, then splinter, leaving only one very sharp spike of tooth which required surgical extraction, done with a single shot of anaesthetic.
  - EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEE~
- On top of everything else related to dentists that you just read, remember this next time you lean back: A. Dentist. Invented. The. Electric. Chair.
- Hell, three words could make anyone shit their pants if uttered by a dentist. Is it safe?
This troper finds nightmare fuel unleaded in the two books published about the Body Farm. Mixed in with the fascinating descriptions and applications of forensic science is a high dose of Body Horror as you learn in excruciating detail exactly what happens to a human body after death. But the worst parts by far are all the descriptions the horrible ways real people have died in certain cases. (No photos are included; you won't need them.) Especially the explosion at the illegal fireworks operation. Her brain fell out...
- Stephen Fry was "lucky" enough to be granted access to it during his documentary on Eagle Land. As a special bonus he claims to have never seen a dead body before and his tour guide admits she has gotten into the habit of figuring out what people's skulls look like under their skin.
Anesthesia awareness, which is where you wake up during surgery, but you can't communicate for some reason. Happens to 20,000 people a year.
- Well... 20,000 out of every 2 million surgeries, or one tenth of one percent.
  - Or by real math, exactly one percent.
  - Still, that's 20,000 people who have experienced the horror of invasive surgery without proper anesthesia. Note to self: do not watch Awake the night before any kind of surgery.
- The fact that there's a movie (Awake) that uses this as the premise does not help at all.
Three words, Faces Of Meth. Type in those words if you want to see some of the nastiest deformites a face can get (Other than Harvey Two Face of course). Better yet these are based on REAL STUDIES. Scare'emStraight was never this scary. Sorry for the trauma guys but you've been warned.
Tapeworms. No? Just me? The thought of a parasitic worm living in your stomach doesn't freak out out at all?
- Oh, god yes! I’m terrified of them. If I even see a picture I freak out and have to wash my hands. It doesn't help that my cats get worms like every summer
Abortion. Pro-life, pro-choice, doesn't matter, the basic concept is still sucking the baby/mass of cells/what have you out of the uterus with a giant vacuum. This troper didn't blink at most of the entries on this page, but has had various nightmares involving abortion.
- I'm pretty sure I did in fact have a nightmare about being aborted once. Naturally, I was hyper-aware of the painful death I was about to endure...
These deformed Iraqi babies as a result of Uranium deposits - http://www.aztlan.net/du_deformed_iraqi_babies.htm, just goes to show that even new born infants are not safe from life's unbelievably cruel sense of humor.
What would happen to you if you were exposed into the vacuum of space without space gear. You will wish that one and a half minute of remaining life were much, much shorter. In the absence of atmospheric pressure, water will spontaneously convert into vapor, which would cause the moisture in a victim's mouth and eyes to quickly boil away. The same effect would cause water in the muscles and soft tissues of the body to evaporate, prompting some parts of the body to swell to twice their usual size after a few moments. In the absence of air pressure the gas exchange of the lungs works in reverse, dumping oxygen out of the blood and accelerating the oxygen-starved state known as hypoxia. After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim's mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosis would become evident. At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. As a side bonus, with no bacteria present, your frozen, non-decomposing body will drift off into space for millions or perhaps billions of years if left untouched.
This troper is baffled that there hasn't been a single mention of internal decapitation on this page. It's pretty much what its name would imply, and it's the very definition of this trope.
There's this video floating around on the Internet, a public service announcement made by a Middle Eastern country where two men jump off a bridge into water. The bridge isn't too high (about 20-30 feet). One of the men makes it. The other? He slips at the last second only to have his face smash against the corner of a concrete pier at the bottom. The later show him in the emergency room, with his face split open and still alive.
Elevator Failsafe Failure. Example: that Japanese guy who got his head ripped off by a elevator with faulty sensors. And the other passenger was trapped in the car with the severed head for an hour.
- This troper, the other day, was stuck in an elevator for about 15 minutes. Said elevator was supposed to go up to the upper floors, but at the 2nd floor, it, for no reason, changed direction and went down insteadhat to the basement floor. Then it went to the 2nd floor again, and as it tried to go up further, it stalled between floors. Between an emergency call and the elevator being remote-controlled to return to the first floor, about 10 minutes passed. This troper was worried that the elevator was going to give at any second.
- You mean the sensors that prevent the door from closing? This Troper (who works in the same asbestos filled building mentioned above) has a recent elevator that only has two sensors. If you're not tripping one of them, which can be an easy thing to do, you have a nice crushing door. Funnily enough, the older elevator has a better door sensor, but it's so crappy that vibrates randomly in what this Troper's coworkers call "the moan".
- This troper stayed at a condominium whose elevators, on top of feeling a little wonky, requires you to hold the door open or hold down the "Door Open" button because the sensors simply don't work.
- Happened in Italy, June 2009: during a heavy rainstorm, an old woman rode her elevator down to her cellar. Too bad the cellar was flooded. The elevator stopped when it touched the water, then the flood got worse, and worse, and worse...she drowned in there. Not so much about sensors, but hey...
- This troper has a friend who went to a school with an elevator. Said elevator crashed. That friend would've been in it had it not been full.
Ectopic pregnancy. The fertilized egg doesn't make it to the uterus and starts growing "inside" the fallopian tube. Even though this is extremely rare and usually only happens to older mothers, it is more than enough to give this tropper shudders.

Crime and (probably undeserved) Punishment

The Arthur Dozier School For Boys in Marianna, FL. It was a reform school where, at least in the 1950s and 1960s, sadistic guards raped, tortured, and sometimes killed the children left there. Nobody knew about it until 2008, when some of the boys, now grown adults, began to tell stories of the horrors inside, provoking the state governor to begin an investigation. One of the most disgusting things is that the guards that did this probably died of old age unpunished or, if living, will spend the last years of their life under scrutiny like Nazi war criminals.
On a similar note, the Tranquility Bay facility in Jamaica. (The original article in The Observer is here and here.) To summarize: children, usually from well-off families, are essentially kidnapped with the parents' consent, and taken outside the United States. The kids are placed in a prison-like atmosphere for an indefinite period of time, possibly until they turn eighteen. They are emotionally abused to break their spirit, and return to the family docile and compliant. If you try not to obey, they'll make you lie on your face on a concrete floor until you submit. One girl did this for eighteen months until they broke her. Compliance brings privileges, along with the responsibility of policing those below you in the hierarchy—there is no solidarity among prisoners. As The Observer put it, "These children do not just obey rules. They seem to have been psychologically rewired." The families seem happy enough. As one said: "Oh, you would not believe the change in her! It's amazing, the way they change a kid's life. She's so polite now, I wouldn't know her." The offenses for which one might have one's personality demolished, like something out of 1984 or The Invisibles? It might be something as simple as dating an unapproved partner, being "defiant", smoking weed, or "promiscuity".
- They are a real life Boarding School Of Horrors with Room101 overtones, but they aren't all located outside of the US, just that one (and I thought it was shut down?) Regardless, there's still more of them in the state where the parent organization is actually based out of: Utah.
- Thankfully, Tranquility Bay has been shut down, and there are multiple pending lawsuits against the owners. Here's hoping justice will be served.
Was it Japanese or Chinese? In any case, one of them featured such horrible torture methods as-
- Tying the victim, naked, up above a plant known as quick-growing bamboo. Apparently, quick growing bamboo is measured in MPH. It does grow an awfully fast 24 inches a day. Yeah. And Mythbusters proved that bamboo can actually grow through a human.
- tying the victim up and allowing water to drip on his face. Not pour, just drip. Apparently the inconsistency of the dripping drives most people insane. (You subconsciously start to count the drops and try to find a rhythm.) Apparently this was never used in China, but still...
- Mythbusters also proved that you can actually torture someone by dripping water on their forehead. Wrench Wench Kari Byron had a nervous breakdown after a few hours. (...and she'd been voluntarily tied down, and was surrounded by friends. Imagine being in enemy hands and enduring that.)
  - It's not the water that does it, it's the restraints. The water dripping merely keeps you distracted so you cannot space out and ignore the feeling of not being able to move.
- Speaking of torture, this Troper recalls from a history class in high school about communist torture techniques.
  - The North Vietnamese caught a teacher teaching his elementary students about democracy and freedom. The military promptly took the teacher outside with the class, forced the students to watch the teacher be executed, with their hands tied behind their backs. To make matters worse, they jabbed chopsticks into their ears, so they wouldn't be able to listen to anymore of that.
  - Somewhere in Eastern Europe, I forget which country, but one torture technique described locking someone in something that could be used as a locker filled with glass sand. Then a fan would blow to spread the "locker" with this glass sand. Anyone that survived were pretty damn bloody internally.
  - Also used for a time in Vietnam and North Korea was the punishment of sedating a rat, putting it in the person's chest cavity, and sewing them back up. Apparently, with the lungs lacerated, enough air escapes to keep the rat alive for quite some time after it wakes up and panics.
  - This troper heard this torture technique was used in North Vietnam: The torturers would insert a thin, hollow glass tube into the victim's urethra. Then they would get a prostitute to arouse the victim, causing an erection, thus causing the glass tube to shatter. And upon reading this, all men will scream and want to vomit.
- At the Maryland's Renaissance Fair, there is (or was, haven't gone back) an exhibit of old torture methods. In one method shown, the victim was hung upside-down with his legs spread, and then sawed in half starting at the groin. Because you were hanging upside-down and the blood was beginning to pool into your upper extremeties, the saw would have to get about halfway through your body before you would pass out. Commence to shuddering.
  - Also, consider the practice of impalement; the victim's legs would be spread, hanging him upside-down, and then a blunt pike was shoved up their ass and out their mouth, pushing the internal organs aside so as to keep the victim alive (and conscious, and suffering audibly) for hours, sometimes even days. Consider also that Vlad the Impaler would take his meals in a garden of impalement victims, moaning as they died.
- The Chinese, for some reason I probably do not want to know, had invented many...... creative ways to execute people. One of them is particularly horrifying. Basically, the executer need to slice literally a thousand pieces of flesh off the victim while he is still alive, otherwise the executer will be punished. The worst thing is surrounding crowd had been known to buy the flesh for, above all, food and medicine. Now imagine being cut to thousands of pieces alive while the crowd is buying your flesh.
- Horrors occur on a daily basis—in penitentiaries worldwide. If you don't believe me, ask any seasoned prison guard. Or better yet, don't.
  - This Troper recently listened to an NPR radio documentary on supermax prisons. Holy. Fucking. God. I'll kill myself before I go to one of those hell holes.
Katherine Knight, murderer/butcher. The woman was mentally ill, and decorated the whole house, even the ceilings with everything to knives from animal remains. Then when she was fed up with her fourth husband, she stabbed him with a knife, even chasing him down when he tried to get away, then afterwards skinned him, cut him up, cooked the remains, and served it to her children. For anyone who's curious, the details are here. Sweet dreams!
Two words: Josef Mengele.
- This troper found, quite by accident, Josef Mengele porn. Played straight. *shudders*. Rule 34, No Exceptions God Help Us
- This troper is prone to compulsively flip any picture of Mengele the bird she sees, though it barely makes up for his atrocities.
- When this troper first heard the Slayer song "Angel of Death", I was pretty young, so I just thought of it as a particularly gruesome-sounding song. After learning the entire song was about Mengele's very much real human experiments, now chills run down my spine every time I listen to the song.
  - He managed to freak everyone out even in death. He escaped to South America and died of a heart attack in 1979. Then in 1985, Nazi-hunters managed to pinpoint his grave and exhumed his corpse to determine his identity. His rotting remains were plastered in newspapers throughout the world. A history book with that picture was how this Troper became acquainted with the name of Joseph Mengele.
This Troper is surprised that the Chernobyl disaster has yet to be mentioned. The idea that over 700 children now have thyroid cancer due to the disaster, the rise of deformites amongst inhabitants, to say nothing of the environmental effects the explosion held, and what the disaster says about the danger of nuclear power, should just outright frighten most people.
- Environmental effects? Interesting reading from the other wiki. So there is no nightmare fuel here, a nuclear disaster has comparable enviromental impact with human presence in the ecosystem.
- This troper was in first grade when that happened, and her school, bright sparks that they were, decided to do a whole unit on radiation—not its effects on people, but how long it lingers and what it can do to the ecosystem. She had nightmares for years after that, terrified by a thing you couldn't see or hear or smell but that could, in sufficient doses, kill you horribly in a matter of hours. (A Nova special called, cheerfully, Suicide Mission to Chernobyl didn't help. At all, because it did go into the specifics of how radiation could kill you.) Whenever she feels the need to creep herself out, she looks up pictures of Pripyat, the abandoned city near the reactor. That's enough to creep almost anyone out.
- Sorry, Berserk Button moment here. How many things had to go wrong for Chernobyl to happen? The reactor had been modified to change fuel rods while running (to facilitate breeding of bomb fuel), which meant it had a fraction of the protective shelling of any other reactor design at the time. The design itself was outdated even for its time, lacking the vast majority of passive safety features. The accident happened while most of the personnel were gone, while running a test with the safeties off, and proceeding to bungle it spectacularly enough that it could pass for an episode of The Simpsons. Honestly, the greater Nightmare Fuel is how people can be so cowed by one extreme outlier accident whose preconditions weren't even physically possible in the design of any other reactor of the day — much less a modern reactor — that we instead continue to use coal. Even though coal causes several orders of magnitude more waste, and coal mining regularly causes more deaths through excruciating lung problems, dust explosions, and tunnel collapses than nuclear power has claimed over the last collective 50 years.
The Dunbar Village Rape. For those of you who hadn't heard of it, in June of 2007, a group of teens broke into the apartment of a mother and son, beat them both, raped the mother while forcing the son to watch, and then forced the son to rape his own mother at gunpoint. They then beat the son, poured cleaners into his eyes, stole several hundred dollars in cash and jewelry, and escaped. All this would be horrific enough on its own until you realize that this assault took place in an apartment complex. The kind of place where the neighbors hear you when you yell. Nobody called the police.
- Don't forget the Kitty Genovese rape/murder, which drove Rorschach into the first stages of his psychosis. Alan Moore did not make it up. It really happened.
  - Actually, it's been proven that the Genovese murder didn't actually happen like that. There was a case in Rochester, NY that happened in a manner similar to how the Genovese murder is said to have played out, but I don't have a link.
Terrorists, assassins, spree killers, etc.: anyone who wants to kill people but doesn't wear a uniform. It's rather disturbing to sit in a cafe and know that there is a small possibility that one of the people in that room has a gun or bomb under their jacket, and that this might be the last day of your life.
- This troper, back in high school, was part of a special class in which better-than-average students had to do a special presentation on something they researched. After seeing the one about serial killers (with Chop Suey! for the soundtrack, thankyou mental scarring), he had difficulty sleeping for a week.
  - This troper finds spree killers, at least as shown in fiction, far scarier than Serial Killers. Serial Killers have a pattern, they do things. Spree Killers just kill. And then the stop. And maybe later they start again. But there's generally no link between victims.
- It Gets Worse. I believe there is an estimate in the psychology profession that one out of every hundred or so people could be diagnosed as some flavor of psychopath (there are much more technical terms for it, but that's what it boils down to). The good news is, most of those psychopaths do not ever start randomly killing people. But the very bad news is that there are a lot more of them than you think.
Sex slavery. Millions of women and children locked inside brothels. They never agreed to it, they never see any of the money, they are raped, sometimes up to ten times a day, a different man each time. Most are told to pretend they enjoy it, and are beaten by the brothel owners if they don't. In other words customers may think they're visiting a willing prostitute and have no idea they are commiting rape. And then there are the ones that know, and don't care. Sex slavery is most common in South-East Asia and Easter Europe, but it does occur in every country in the world. So all you well off educated westerners? It's happening in your country too.
- Slavery in general is pretty nightmarish, particularly when you consider that there are more slaves in the world now then there were when it was legal
Rape itself in all its terrible forms is Nightmare Fuel. Consider what it must be like to be beaten up and savagely ravished in a dark alley by some big-bodied thugs. Consider how ofteb it happens every day somewhere in the world. Then consider how the 96% of rapes are not committed by total strangers, but people known to the victim - people known by the victim. People like spouses or parents... those who you are supposed to protect you, and that you're supposed to love, trust and never be afraid of. Consider how a woman was once considered the property of her husband and therefore if he forced her to have sex with him against her will, it wasn't legally considered rape. Consider how the last laws permitting the practice weren't repealed until 1975, in Mississippi. (And in Great Britain, it was totally legal for a husband to rape his wife until the late 1980s. It was finally outlawed by court decisions - not legislative action - in Scotland one year and in England the next.) Consider the large number of people who assume the victim of such brutality to be at fault if they were drunk, or if they knew the attacker, or were too scared to try to fight off the rape, or because they were known to date the rapist, or just because they think the victim is trying to get the attacker in trouble. Consider the stigma of being a rape victim and how, in order to report the crime you have to describe and relive your horror, and in the vast majority of cases, the rapist won't be convicted or even ever identified. Consider how often it is never reported at all. Consider how the vast majority of children being raped goes unreported. Consider how often media (especially homosexual rape) considers it comedic trope. Or somehow love. Or somehow redemptive. Or Ok If Its Female On Male. Consider it happening to you or your sister or your mother or your favorite teacher or your best friend or your child, and how ruined a life could be. Consider it. Then go and hug someone you love and who loves you.
- This troper was gang raped, is what some rape survivors refer to as a 'four-percent-er'—that is, one of the four percent of victims who was raped by a stranger. That means 96% of rapes are carried out by people the victim knew—friends or family members. She can also make very badass grown men cry or have nightmares with her descriptions of the attack. For her, the worst part of it is that of the six men that attacked her, only four were identified, and in the end only one of them was actually convicted, which is actually far better than the typical result in rape cases.
Speaking of horrific physical abuse, the case of Elizabeth Smart deserves a mention here. Although she has the somewhat unfortunate distinction of being one of the catalysts of modern Missing White Woman Syndrome, there's a reason her case was so well-covered and sensationalized by the media: it reads like a cornucopia of every single thing a parent would ever fear happening to their child, ever. Consider: two people broke into her home in the dead of night. They then proceeded to kidnap her at knife-point, while her then-nine-year-old sister was watching and pretending to be asleep. Her abductor then took her from her home, leaving no good evidence to locate them quickly, and proceeded to "marry" her when they had made good their escape. She was then raped. Constantly. For nine months. That she is even coherent, much less a successful college student and activist now, is a bit of a miracle in and of itself.
Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped at age 11 (in front of her horrified stepfather) and held captive for eighteen years, during which her kidnapper/rapist got her pregnant. Twice. They lived in a "tent prison" in the kidnapper's backyard, which is easily seen from Google Maps. Her kidnapper was only caught when people saw him with his two daughters (he's a registered sex offender) and he idiotically went to the police station with his entire family, at which point Jaycee told police what had been going on, btw, for eighteen years.
If I ever have children, especially daughters, I would have nightmare fuel filled days because of this concept. Mostly started from a philosophy class I was taking where the professor was discussing the justice system. He provided an example of a man who if you consider for a second is innocent, you must be equally sick. I forget his name, but he was from San Diego, kidnapped a 10-11 year old girl from her home while she was asleep (her parents were home to boot, and it was 11PM-12AM). She was later found raped and brutally beaten with teeth knocked back, and shoved off the side of a road. Basically he was found mentally clean (to avoid any chance of innocence by. Mental Disease or Defect), his past was fairly normal, so basically he was just twisted in the head enough to do this.
This Troper was audio teching for a rape victims gathering. It was very hard to sit through even a minute of it.
Imagine a man. A nice young man, mid-to-late 20s, good looks, charming personality; everyone adores him, especially his wife. Now imagine that same young man going out late every night, riding the bus, and checking out all the young girls that come on. He eventually finds one that he likes, and he observes her. Eventually, her stop comes, and she gets off, with him following behind. As she gets to her house, he quickly grabs her, subdues her, and rapes her on her front lawn. He does this for about 5 years, in several places. He loves it. He enjoys it. His wife, who knows full well what her husband does when he goes out on these late night excursions, loves it too. So much so, that she gives him her sister as an "engagement gift". Several times. She eventually dies during an attack, and neither of them care. In the 5 years that these crimes occur, nobody really becomes suspicious of either of them. You're probably thinking "No way; such people don't exist!" You only wish. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
And then, of course, there's that charming fellow Joseph Fritzl and what he did to his daughter. Yeah. Locked in a basement for 24 years, never allowed to see the sun, and repeatedly forced to have sex with your own father, without any way of knowing if you were ever getting out of there? Nightmare Fuel indeed.
- The guy had six children, and then he had six more. SIX. MORE. (Shudders)
- What this troper finds most disturbing is the fact that she had to watch one of her children DIE with no hope of getting help. She knew he was sick. Her father knew he was sick. And it didn't matter how much she begged and cried he wouldn't take the kid to a doctor. When it began to happen a second time, by some miracle she convinced him to take the girl to the hospital. Probably because he couldn't figure out how to dispose of a full grown girl (the first to die was an infant) and had no other choice. Could you imagine watching your baby die, knowing that someone can help and refuses to?
This Troper once did a term paper on Forensic Odontology (the study of bite marks). Most of the case studies were rape-murders, including some pictures of the bite marks. Seeing pictures of a human who's been used and discarded like garbage is sickening enough, but the image of the victims curled up in agony put it over the edge. Having an excellent imagination, this Troper spent the next two days imagining just exactly what the last few minutes of these womens' lives were like.
The fact that I was slightly relieved to be reading about screw worms rather than some insane atrocity that humans have done. I've read through this whole damn page (after midnight[bit of a nightmare fuelist, which is no help for my OCD, eh]) and the posts mentioned the sheer cruelty that humans can cause is the most disturbing. And the knowledge that people like them[cruel bastards] will always be around. It is interesting to be able to hold optimism in one hand and realism in another, and now I feel compelled to carry a small weapon on me, which isn't advisable at high-school.
Child abuse. Yes, many (usually those who haven't experienced it) think it's something you should grow up and "get over". But think about what you were doing when you were seven years old. What were you doing? Were you playing video games or watching TV? Imagine hearing a noise while you're watching TV and running out to find your Mommy and Daddy fighting with a knife. Imagine saying you wouldn't do something minor to Mommy when you were nine and getting scratched across the face and bleeding. Imagine being 20 and so afraid of Mommy's new husband that you barricade yourself in your childhood bedroom with your bed. And This Troper was lucky. A close friend of this troper's was nearly raped by her father because he mistook her for her mother (she later stopped him from murdering them all). Two girls This Troper went to school with were molested by their father... and are doing time for helping him molest a little girl. A friend of mine beat his stepfather for threatening his little sister; another tried to defend himself from a beating from his stepfather and got community service and a juvenile record for it. If you had been born to different parents, in different financial circumstances, any of this or worse could have happened to you. It was either sheer luck or the divine grace of a deity that placed those of you who grew up safe and happy where you did.
- When This Troper was seven, she was being beaten with electrical cord for looking too much like her father. It Got Worse. The nightmarish part is that this is still happening, all over the place, and so many people just accept it as Shit Happening.
- A friend of This Troper was severely beaten and threatened by her father when she was a child. Her mother and her moved to another state TWICE in an attempt to get away from him. She's prone to sudden aggressive outbursts, which I only started to understand after I was told by her ex-boyfriend that her father once held her at gunpoint.
David Iredale, an Australian teenager who went missing in rugged bushland in late 2006. He was found dead from dehydration and exposure about a week after he was first declared missing, but that's not the worst part of it. From reports, he was able to make several calls to 000 on his mobile phone (that being our equivalent of 911) and, although he was delirious, he was mostly lucid - but the operators refused to believe him when he said that he was lost in the bush. They kept asking him for his address, what street he was on, what town he was in. And they never reported the calls he'd made. Imagine being lost in the bush, dehydrated, feverish, making useless call after useless call as your mobile phone battery slowly runs down, only for some idiot operator to keep dismissing you as a pranker. He was so close to help and nobody helped him. If they'd just reported his calls to the search party, he almost certainly would have been found in time.
- Isn't there a law that 000 operators aren't allowed to do that?
  - Probably. That just makes it worse.
- That's only the tip of the iceberg. How about the woman who called in tears begging for police to arrive, because her boyfriend - audibly swearing and pounding on the door in the background of the call - was going to kill her? The operator blah-blah'd her until the phone was yanked away and the line went dead, and the recording catches the operator's words on the matter: A muttered "I couldn't give a damn what happens to you." And then there's the little boy who tried calling 911 because his mom wasn't moving or breathing...
  - Thankfully, that second one didn’t end quite as badly as it might have; the poor woman got out of it alive (though undoubtedly permanently scarred in more ways than one) and the offending operator was found and fired. Although one can’t help but think that a more fitting punishment might have been being slowly stabbed to death while a bunch of cops stood around watching and telling him how much they don’t give a damn about him. Regardless, hopefully his "I'm so badass 'cause I don't care about you, nyah" attitude will now be restricted to people calling tech support.
The Hi-Fi murders in Utah in 1974. Even typing this out makes This Troper feel ill. They made them drink liquid drain cleaner!!! !!!! Bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there bleach doesn't go there...
- On top of all the other horrors, which I will not mention here because I have a weak stomach, the Drano things was because the killers saw it in a movie. My god, the sheer idiocy! The only small comfort is that the other prisoners made their lives a living hell for the five years prior to their lethal injection. One can only assume/hope/pray said Hell is now literal for them.
  - That was, according to The Other Wiki, Magnum Force.
- Holy shit the ballpoint pen holy shit the ballpoint pen hoooly shit
- It was so bad, for a while, Wikipedia had a "disturbing content" disclaimer at the top. Yes, the compendium of knowledge that gleefully plasters harlequin babies or burn victims had a warning.
Gangs. Want to die? Piss off a gang member.
- There used to be a feasible explanation for this. After all, much gang activity happens outside of public jurisdiction, much of it being illegal, so they have to create their own tribalistic rules and punishments. They don't punish, they lose face, get seen as weak, someone else tries to move in. Case in point, most schoolyard gangs during the 70s were not quite as bad as today, but in new immigrant areas in the early 20th century... At any rate, gang life seems to be cyclical as now we're moving back towards insane sociopaths of the 1920s stripe (ie compare Purple Gang with MS 13 with Crips/Bloods). But the gang this troper was a member of growing up certainly didn't do anything like that, in fact it was formed to protect his community from a legal gang. (If you guessed LA, no, but if you guessed somewhere in the Midwest, you're very close.)
- The way some see it, a gang is a society that has risen to maintain peace and order, usually because the society calling them "a gang" has failed to do so. Still not much justification.
- This troper recently went to a church group where a woman was giving us a small sermon on general safety. She said she knows a girl who was kidnapped (in broad daylight, alone in front of the mall) and held hostage for several days, beaten and raped, by gang members as an initiation right (meaning she's not alone). The girl escaped, but she has to live with that now... You hear all these urban legends about gang initiation rights, but there's truth to them—some real messed up stuff that actually goes on.
Look up the story of Mary Bell. This Troper is fiercely protective of children and their welfare, but when she reads about a ten year old who would willfully and maliciously kill another child, it makes her want to throw up.
- Don't forget the part that she's free now. With a new identity... and a child of her own. She's most likely a psychopath with no remorse for any of her actions. You don't recover from a personality disorder. She's as sick now as she ever was, and she's raising another child to be just...like...her.
- The worst part? She’s not a unique case. Remember the James Bulger case? Or even more recently and gut-churningly horrifying, the Doncaster torture case? How does one even begin to contemplate the idea of a ten and a twelve year old inflicting Cold Blooded Torture upon two kids their own age for no discernable reason other than to watch them suffer? If children of today are capable of that, maybe we really are beyond hope.
A little girl was abducted on her way to school, raped repeatedly, and sexually tortured to the point that her digestive system and genitals were permanently damaged. She will have to live the rest of her life with a bag attached to her bladder. You know what makes this even worse? The monster who did this only got 12 years in prison. You can find the whole story here. [2]
I'm a bit surprised The Matthew Shephard murder has not been mentioned yet, as it provides nightmare fuel to quite a few LGBT people.
- It also provides nightmare fuel to us straight folk who have gay brothers and other homosexual friends and accquaintances. I personally believe homosexuality to be wrong (no, I'm not going to go into the details, and yes, my brother knows my stance but that I love him regardless of what he does), but that absolutely does not mean I think they should be murdered.
  - This troper is a homosexual Christian man. I'm barely 26, and I know deep in my heart that I'm going to be alone. Forever. And I'm going to grow old, watching as friends, family-members and colleagues date, fall in love, get married, have kids, get divorced, get married again, and live happily ever, after living lives full of healthy and normal sexual and romantic relationships. While I have nothing. And I'm going to die alone and forgotten about in my home, and the neighbours won't even realise until they break into my house investigating a strange smell, because I have no brothers or sisters, and no family of my own. I'm going to be alone, forever, because of religious beliefs, and because of something I had no say in, and no control over whatsoever. So I'm so incredibly sorry that you believe what I am is wrong. How tough this must be for you, as a person, to deal with. You have my sincerest sympathy.
  - Okay, you can't control being gay. I get that. Who's forcing you to be Christian? For that matter, who's forcing you to believe that God hates gay people? There are Christians out there that chalk that up the social conventions at the time and not of God himself. The Bible also says that women should always be submissive and listen to their husbands, and despite popular belief, I do not know a ton of Christian women like that. I'm not trying to preach or criticize, I'm trying to understand. What's the deal?
  - The thing about faith for a lot of people is that it's not a choice either. For me, my faith in God is a big part of me, it's how the Universe works for me. Ceasing being faithful, would be about as easy as ceasing being gay. It's who I am, it'd be an impossible task. And for those of us with these two warring ideas in our heads, it can be really hard sometimes. It's why I find statements by the above troper (or even by the Catholic Church, who really seem to have jumped on the "Gay people can't go to Heaven!" bandwagon lately) so frustrating. I respect and appreciate their opinion, but did they stop to think for a second how hard it is for those of us caught in the middle? It's not easy. As for me personally, some days I wish everything was different, and other days I'm okay with being alone. There are worse fates, right?
- Furthermore, Brandon Teena's murder and the knowledge that there is at least one murder of a transperson a month, not to mention numerous other acts of violence commited against people simply because their biological sex and gender are different.
How on Earth has Katherine Callaway Hall not been mentioned?! After reading her story, this troper vowed to never give anyone a ride, ever. She's even more creeped out at the fact that she has the same name as that woman, and even looks a bit like her. If you plan to go to a supermarket anytime soon, stay well away from that story.
The description of Emmett Till's body as he was found. His mother's description, as well as images of him. Not for the weak-stomached.
- His tongue is choked out, one eye is out of its socket and the other is gone, the bridge of his nose is hacked to bits, his teeth have been knocked out except for two, his ear is gone, there's a bullet hole that runs all the way through his head, and the front and back of his skull are seperate.
  - And the worst part of it is how the murderers more or less got away with it thanks to the Southern judicial system.
Baby P. Google it if you don't know the case. I live a few roads away from where it happened, and the knowledge that there are probably more families like that nearby is horrific.

War and Crimes Against Humanity

The Holocaust. Just... the Holocaust. Force your way past your "it's just history" shields for a moment and really think about the fact that it actually happened. Everyone who was killed was real. Everyone doing the killing was real.
- This troper managed to sit through a one hour documentary by Sidney Bernstein featuring footage of liberated death camps and detailed descriptions of the conveyor belts used to funnel the corpses into mass graves. But even he had to look away at parts of an amaeteur documentary on Unit 731.
- It's far worse when you're related to people who went through it. This troper's grandparents are Holocaust survivors (my grandma survived Auschwitz), and it's best not to think about what they went through because it's absolutely soul-crushing.
- Which is why when this Troper had to write a paper on the Holocaust for a scholarship contest, she wrote about Denmark's role. Seriously, look into it sometime. It's probably the single greatest Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming in history... And yet it came from one of history's most horrific events. Yin Yang Bomb indeed.
- Think about this: While the Holocaust took the lives of ~20 million people, it doesn't hold the death count record for human atrocities. Josef Stalin killed 30 million and Mao Tsetung killed upwards of 50 million. Also consider the literally hundreds of millions more who died in the famines Communism caused in China and Eastern Europe. We can't even reassure ourselves that something as horrible as the Holocaust will never happen again when it's already happened twice more in the 20th century alone.
  - This troper read a book on Hitler wherein the prologue brought up the question of who was more "evil", Hitler or Stalin (can't remember if Mao was mentioned). Sheer numbers are one thing, the mentality and dehumanization in the minds of all three is another. Let's call all three the nadir of humanity. As the book put it, this question is "demonology", not historiography.
  - That is, of course, if you subscribe to the view that the Holocaust perpetrated by the Axis Powers in Europe does not include people who were killed in the German invasion of the USSR. Many people do consider it as a Holocaust, since it was launched for similar reasons of racial and ideological hatred, or at the very least an act of genocide. Within postwar borders, that includes more than 26 million people, primarily civilian deaths, raising that number to upwards of ~46 million people. And that was just lower-end estimates of one country....the numbers go higher.
  - This Troper actually mentioned the comparisons between the Third Reich and Soviet Union under Stalin in the the discussion page for From Nobody To Nightmare. I believe it is reasonable to reproduce this portion from my original post:
  And when it comes to claims about the casualties caused by governments acting in the name of communism, it seems to be common among some people to deliberately use differing standards when evaluating these governments and comparing them to other governments. One of the most common examples seems to be using relatively inclusive criteria when discussing the casualties caused by Stalin's regime while concentrating solely on the Holocaust when discussing the deaths caused by the Third Reich. For example, the estimation about 100 million casualties in the Black Book of Communism also includes the people, who died due to the famines caused by policies of Mao (accounting for dozens of millions of casualties in the 100 million figure). So, if somebody insists on using the estimates from the Black Book of Communism when evaluating and discussing the ideology and policies of those regimes, it can be said that he/she should apply the very same standards to other countries and governments (such as including the casualties from famines caused by colonialist policies of the European countries) if he/she wants to act in intellectually honest manner.
  Also, in the case it needs to be said: I have no illusions about those regimes and I think that their crimes need to be brought to light. However, my motives for that are grounded in the larger dedication for human rights and I have certain contempt for people, who try to use those actions as excuse to act as apologists for the crimes of the Western countries and their allies. I understood the principle of opposing human rights violations regardless of the perpetrator when I was child. How should I react to adults failing to grasp such an elementary concept?
  - As an addendum to the above quote, the Black Book of Communism specifically claims that Mao didn't mean to cause those famines and the casualties in question. However, it also states that Mao wasn't terribly bothered by those "unintended consequences", either. Something to think about, when you next time see someone defending civilian casualties caused by actions of the Western countries and/or their allies by claiming that those casualties weren't "intentional" while having little interest in making any changes to the policies and actions which caused thosed casualties in the first place.
- And to compound the creepy, the perpetrators of these thought that their victims were fundamentally sub-human. A lot of other people have had similar beliefs. Including your ancestors.
  - Many people may still even unconsciously have similar notions about other people. One example may be when somebody defends attacking/invading other countries while calling the resulting death and suffering a "necessary evil". If the person in question can hold such mindset while refusing to accept the possibility that subjecting his/her own country and the people close to him/her to the same treatment could be similarly "acceptable" or "necessary evil" under certain conditions, it could be argued that he/she is already considering the people of those countries less valuable and at least to some extent "sub-human". This Troper found out that his own mother was guilty of this kind of hypocrisy at some point (although he did eventually point this out to her).
  - This troper actually finds in that some measure of comfort—it allows her to think of the torturers as horrifically deluded rather than inhumanly evil. It's something, at least.
  - One of my ancestors (in his rôle as king), prohibited cruel punishments, allowed appeals on the death penalty, and created penalties for masters who beat slaves. Far, far more than fair for his day, he is celebrated as an icon of enlightened rule in the nation that occupies part of the kingdom he once ruled (sort of a “father of the country” in lieu of a prominent figure not tied to mythology or a military dictatorship). But torture and slavery were still the law, and after he died there were regressions. Most of us here probably want history to one day gloss over our own sins: the best we can attempt is to prove we deserve their esteem.
  - Unfortunately, most of our ancestors weren't royalty or tycoons who would've had more access to higher education and therefore been more open to religious and ethnic tolerance. Most of us are decended from the unwashed peasantry who were more susceptible to minority-baiting.
- And then there's Josef Mengele... pretty much the definition of it got worse if you were picked to be one of his experiments. Here's one example, spoilered in case you don't want to read it(the idea nearly made this troper vomit): "I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents – I remember the mother's name was Stella – managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.
- It also happened in the 19th Century. Some historians attribute ~100 million deaths to what they call the American Holocast. This is, of course, a continued source of debate and discussion.
  - This, in turn, joins the hundreds of millions relocated, enslaved, or killed by strongest colonial powers right up to the early 20th century. In pursuit of, among other things, giving birth to the world's most vibrant capitalist economies. Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave, if it hadn't already been dug up and sold on the free market.
  - Of course many of the most ardent opponents of slavery were champions of the free market... for that matter, the Confederacy was vigorously opposed to 19th century capitalism. Ever wonder who first invented the term "wage slavery?"
No one's mentioned the Colonial El Nino famines of the late Victorian era yet? The British regime in India was responsible for aggravating several famines over a 30 year period to the degree that over 30 million people died because of British colonial governors who didn't care or who thought that instead of growing things like rice, that the Indians should have been growing cash crops instead.
This isn't the lone example of imperialism or free market economics giving us nightmare fuel on a continental level, unfortunately. Does this count? Disease, fighting, and starvation is estimated to have killed ~41 million between 1492 and the 16th century alone.
On a smaller, but no less disturbing, scale, the Dutch East India Company. Beyond ruthless, they managed to seize the Malucu Islands, only source of cloves at that time, from the Portugese. The Portugese had largely made the islands into dependent client states, importing European goods and getting cloves in return. D Issatisfied with their deals with the Dutch, the natives of the Banda Islands (a part of the Malucu archipelago) tried to trade with the English instead. The Dutch East India Company's directiors hired mercenaries to wipe out the entire native population, then turned the islands into giant slave plantations, which allowed them to cut costs, manipulate the supply, and reap obscene profits. And there are still schools of economic theory that claim any interference in private enterprises is evil?
Everyone knows about how evil Those Wacky Nazis were, and I'm never going to dispute that. However, we do tend to put too much focus on the atrocities that they committed and let others fly under the radar. Let me tell you a story that can be read in full in the book 'Keen As Mustard'. In World War II, Britain had a great fear of being gassed again, like they were in World War I. To this end, they decided to do tests. Setting up shop in Northern Australia, they asked for volunteers among the Australian soldiers who had already served overseas. They were not informed of what the test would entail, simply that if they chose to go through with it, they would not have to serve another period overseas. They also asked for volunteer secretaries who could write shorthand. Situating each secretary at a window to a gas chamber, the British scientists then subjected the Australian volunteers to mustard gas, while the secretaries wrote down what they observed. Mustard gas is perhaps one of the most horrible ways to die; it blisters the skin, the eyes, the air tracts...everything. At the time this experiment was conducted, Australia and Britain had both ratified the Geneva convention, whereas America and Japan had not. Further, the scientists involved in this experimentation got away with no punitive measures. If, in Britain today, you might meet an old man who was -is- on the same caliber as Josef Mengele. If you would like to see an interview with this 'gentleman' and the effects of the mustard gas on the Australian volunteers, find the documentary title 'Keen As Mustard'. Further, because these were scientists who did the video recording, the clip of the gassing is in colour.
- A somewhat similar experiment, but which lasted for 40 years: The Tuskegee Study. The government took 400 black men infected with syphillis and kept them untreated from 1932 to 1972, even after effective cures were discovered and made the original experiment unnecessary. Imagine having a potentially deadly, highly painful disease, and being told by The Government that they were under orders to kill you if you sought treatment.
This Troper has a friend who was a Chinese citizen. Four years ago she and her husband violated China's One-Child Policy by getting pregnant with their second child. They tried to keep it a secret but somehow the authorities found out and they forced her to get an abortion. Now, this has nothing to do with the current debate in America over whether or not abortions are morally right; we're talking about being dragged to a facility and forced to abort your child that you wanted to keep. To me, that is both terrifying and heartbreaking.
- There was an HBO documentary about this, but with a twist: Chinese officials and procurers were working together to kidnap children for profit, even if the parents had gotten permission to have a second child, or even if it was their first child.
- This troper read a Reader's Digest article by a Chinese doctor. He was helping a woman abort her second child... unfortunately, the child came out alive. He tried to argue for getting it adopted or something, but his superior told him to kill it. He wouldn't do it. So his superior killed the baby.
- This troper was originally suppose to be a twin. But come day of birth, only I came out. My dad is still paranoid that the hospital took the other child (who was suppose to be a girl or something). And that was before I read about all the twin horrors on this page. Maybe that explains the voices I've been hearing...
The present Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was formerly a political prison known as S-21 during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. An estimated 20,000 inmates passed through its gates during the Khmer Rouge's 3 years in power; only 12 are known to have survived. The place has been preserved in close to its original state, with exhibits of cells, torture devices and graphic depictions of the torture carried out there. Those are awful, but the worst part is the thousands of photographs of inmates, taken just after they entered the prison. Thousands and thousands of blank, anxious, staring faces, each a friend, a father, a daughter, a grandmother... almost certainly all innocent and almost all dead in exceedingly cruel ways. The place is a fearsome monument to Man's inhumanity to his fellow Man. To add to the horror, those who perished there are likely only a small percentage of the total number killed - estimated at up to 2 million - by the brutal Khmer Rouge.
As a person who reached his teen years in the 1980's and now has a family, I still have the occasional actual nightmare about the height of the Reagan-years Cold War. The "bombing begins in 5 minutes" so-called gaffe, the constant military escalation and sabre rattling, the constant uncontrollable fear of seeing contrails in the sky at any moment because someone gave the President decaf that morning or the Premier had a particularly bad night's sleep. These were the days when TV shows like "The Day After" were made because people weren't already scared enough about the possible realistic effects of nuclear war. Terms like "Nuclear Winter" were coined in this time. I grew up close to a major airbase (MacDill AFB, aka US CENTCOM and a key bomber base at the time) that would have been considered a key strategic nuclear target and likely have been host to several missile detonations. When I went out I used to think about how far I was driving from my family to wonder if I would have enough time to get back home to say goodbye if I heard that "birds were in the air". I didn't consider myself a particularly cynical or paranoid teen. I was old enough to think I knew just how precarious the situation appeared, and now that I'm grown up, looking back, I can't see that I was that far from reality. The thought of seeing multiple incoming (or outgoing) contrails is still one of the scariest images I can imagine.
- You were lucky. You lived under a possibility of a war. I grew up in a war... I was born in '89 in Zagreb, Croatia. Third child of a rather happy couple. Dad managed not to get drafted, and ended up in "Civil defense"(aka, local neighborhood military assigned people who were responsible for getting people to shelters and preventing mass panic) due to his age (he was born in '45, those born in '47 and after were drafted) Cue 2nd May '95, the first rocket attack happened around 10am if i remember correctly. I was scheduled to go to the Klaićeva childrens hospital for a medical checkup. Mother and I left our home around 10:30 so we didnt know that an attack happened already (the media was a bit more "controlled", so to say...) On our way there I noticed that the streets were a bit more silent and emptier than usual. We got off the tram some time around noon and were walking rather slowly towards the hospital. We were barely 100 meters away from the hospital, ready to cross the road, when we heard a whistling sound. Then an explosion at the hospital. We ran away as fast as we could. Air raid alarms started wailing again. I do not remember how exactly we got home or when. Most i remember was that after the whistling and screams, my mother grabbed me and we ran as far as we could. I remember my father being extremely scared when we got home, and we immediately proceeded to our bathroom (the way our buildings were built, there were a few centerline walls and 4 "main beams" for lack of a better name that ran through the building, luckily one went straight through our bathroom...) Due to some bureaucratic oversights, our building ended up without a shelter in the basements, so the reasoning was that near the main support walls we'd have a bigger chance of surviving if something did hit our building. Anyhow, later that day we found out that that was the 'second' rocket attack that day. We were scared shitless and didnt dare go out of our flat for the next few days. Alarms didnt stop glaring for the next three days. I will also never forget the overflights of JNA's Mig's... That sound and the whistling sound of an incoming rocket are my high octane nightmare fuels. Unleaded. A few days ago I was checking out some sound sample collections. Ran across one called "High speed jet fighter overpass" guess which one... Mi G 21bis... Cue panic attack and running to hide to the beforementioned bathroom. To anyone reading this wall of text, thank you. To anyone interested into some more details.. here's a wiki link
  - This troper who was lucky enough to be born in Wichita Falls, Texas, that same year wants to give you a hug.
The looming possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb, if you live in Israel. Various tidbits of thought: "I should set a rendezvous point with my girlfriend in case suddenly the alarms go off one day so I can at least die with her, seeing as the cellular network is likely to crash within seconds". "I should look into whether there's anywhere within ten minutes' running time from here which could reasonably serve as nuclear shelter." "Ooh what if there was some great intelligence screw-up and suddenly the alarms go off NOW? What do I do with the remaining twelve-odd minutes of my life?". Fun.
- Iran had one of its own, namely the Iran-Iraq war. Imagine the First World War, with the added bonus of Iraqi Scuds. If "Project Babylon" was completed, then Tehran would be the crater formerly known as Tehran. Oh, I almost forgot about the mustard gas...
How come no one has mentioned Stalinist KGB prisons yet? This example is from the one in Vilnius. Prisoners were kept in small cells up to 20 of them together, with absolutely no furniture or anything at all, they were under constant watch and eavesdropping, allowed outside 10 minutes a day to walk in silence in a circle, allowed to shower (all of the cell together) once a month and the wards would play with the water temperature, torture was commonplace and they had to make a room on the prison floor since prisoners would get so badly injured they couldn't walk up the stairs. Imagine being locked into the isolation cell, with no clothes expect your underwear, it's cold, completely dark, no human contact and you get just enough food to not starve to death nothing more, and being locked up like that for days. And forced feeding if you did try to starve to death. Or the fact prisoners buttons had to be removed so they didn't get creative and tried to chock themselves to death rather than take the torture. Or the fact the only two to ever escaped was recaptured and taken back.
The Rape of Nanking. Absolutely terrifying, especially considering most people don't even know about it.
Mutilation of war dead. Just the thought that war turns you into a merciless being with no regard for others besides nationalism is such a disheartening idea. For that matter, the Vietnam War, with stuff like the My Lai Massacre going on. For those that were brought up to believe the US were the "good guys", the descent into Black And Grey Morality becomes even more shocking.
The battle of Okinawa. Imagine all of the horrors of the previous battles of America's island hopping campaign and then imagine the scale of them turned to eleven. The mistreatment of the native population by the Japanese, the Americans burning caves often holding civilians and the massive scale of Japanese Kamikaze attacks. And then we get into the mass suicides. Hundreds of people, either believing themselves to be subject to mass rape and massacres at the hands of the victorious American forces or even forced to commit suicide by the Japanese, threw themselves off of cliffs, among other ways. Sad thing is that Japanese propaganda was somewhat correct, some estimates say that American troops commited over 10,000 rapes during the three month campaign.
[3] Check out this lovely list of major corporations—historical and current!—that unabashedly engaged in horrifying atrocities. Of particular note include the tremendously toxic pigshit lagoons maintained by ridiculously titanic corporate farming ventures in America, in which dozens have drowned and died pointlessly, and Blackwater, the reprehensible mercenary group which is headed by a Christian dominionist who believes it is his divine mission to rid the world of Islam. But in terms of sheer inhumanity, nothing tops Congo Free State. Belgium's King Leopold treated Zaire as his own personal playground and subjected the natives to awful tortures and maimings if they failed to comply with their forced servitude. While other imperialist powers crafted ideologies to mask their exploitative greed, good ol' Leopold didn't even bother. Zaire is still a violent hellhole, and with such a nightmarish legacy it's not hard to understand why: Leopold was so insanely greedy that his armed thugs had to report in a human hand for every bullet they shot, to make sure they weren't wasting ammunition. But since these soldiers were given only meager rations, they would often chop up random people's hands in advance so they could expend bullets to hunt game in the bush. This is stuff that would make fucking Voldemort blush.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you were lucky, you disappeared in a white flash without ever knowing what happened. If you were unlucky, you lived for a very short time as your body slowly (and literally) fell apart from radiation poisoning.
- Now imagine that you were in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing. You survive, suffering serious burns before heading to Nagasaki — your home town. You arrive, only to be hit by the second bomb. It wasn't until March 2009 that it was found that Tsutomu Yamaguchi, had survived being hit by the nuclear bomb twice. He was reportedly three kilometers away from the epicenter of both blasts. Although he sustained injuries, he lived to be 93 years old.
Most people focus on the atomic bombing and ignore the firebombing of cities during WWII, which killed several times the number of civilians. Under the direction of Churchill and Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the Allies figured out how to be re-enact what happened to them at Coventry much more efficiently. Pound a dense city center with high explosive, then drop as many incendiaries as you can within a very short time, and you create a self-feeding, unquenchable inferno with temperatures comparable to a blast furnace. The fire sucks all oxygen out of the vicinity, so people drop like dolls or are even sucked into the flames by the high winds. What's left of a bustling city was compared by Kurt Vonnegut to a moonscape with "corpse mines" of groups huddled in underground air shelters, untouched by flame but dead from suffocation. Horrifically effective in Japan, where firefighting equipment was woefully inadequate and houses were made of wood and paper. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed more than the nuclear strikes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It would be a huge mistake to assume the horrors Japanese civilians were subjected to demonstrate that the Japanese military were the heroes of World War II. They were arguably the nastiest of the lot, possibly aside from concentration camp guards. They documentedly raped, tortured, butchered, experimented on, and buried alive millions of civilians in conditions that make a lot of High Octane Nightmare Fuel look like The Good Old Days.
This troper was lucky enough to be born in 1990 and managed to miss the Cold War. He still finds the idea that anyone could have considered the conflict between two political/economic structures worth putting the entire human race on the brink of destruction, for several decades, terrifying. Especially when you consider that the man making jokes about outlawing the Soviet Union, "we start bombing in five minutes", was the President. Yeep.
War itself is the biggest HONF/RL-generator of all time, no matter which side you're on.
The history of Africa's colonization is full of nightmare fuel. During the triangular trade time period, the majority of Africa's healthy, young population was removed from the continent and exported to a foreign continent and forced to work under highly brutal conditions. This caused Africa's population structure and economy and society to go out of whack.
This◊ is the Trinity explosion, 0.016 seconds after detonation. The fireball is about 200 meters, or 600 feet wide. Trees may be seen as black objects in the foreground for comparison. Yeah.
Recorded human history goes back about seven thousand years. How many of those years do you think have passed without some kind of war? How many years of true, global peace have we had in all our combined lifetimes? Twenty-nine.

Cosmic Horror, Eschatology, and What Comes After

The ultimate fate of the universe. This troper finds it very difficult to read that entire article without feeling afraid, or at least depressed.
- You don't need to worry, you'll be long dead by then! ...Wait.
- Also, see the "deep time" entry above.
- Oh god... Two words from the above that now have scarred this troper: false vacuum. The universe being instantaneously obliterated... *shudder*
- This troper finds an alternate possiblity even scarier- that the universe will never die. Time will go on. And on. And on. And on.
  - Barring a total catastrophe (like everything falling into a black hole, or something), the universe will have to live forever. Matter can't be destroyed, remember? It just gets reformed into something else over time. Hell, in a very real sense, we're just recycled stars that blew up billions of years ago.
  - That's true up to a point, but between the expansion of the universe, the finite amount of matter in it, and the laws of thermodynamics, there's nothing to guarantee that the remaining structures (inasmuch as there are structures; the most entropic systems tend to be bland and uniform) would be at all interesting. More the opposite, in fact.
  - Proton decay. Currently hypothetical, but it may be that in the truly deep depths of infinite time there won't be any matter left - just photons (red-shifted to almost nothing), neutrinos (don't interact in any meaningful way), and a vanishingly thin haze of electron/positron pairs that haven't quite got around to annihilating each other yet. Oh, and whatever it is that Dark Matter turns out to be... assuming it doesn't decay too.
Two words: Olduvai Cliff. "A rash of permanent electrical blackouts... and the Stone Age is just around the corner." And coincidentally, or not, it's forecast/predicted to hit in 2012. And scarier, no one has come forth with a refutal against this doomsday argument so far.
- The numbers are all based on geometric progression, which actually hasn't happened. Further, it assumes the power can only come from really only Coal, Oil, and Natural gas. There's a hell of a lot more coal then assumed. Not to mention Nuclear power. It might be distasteful politically now, but if brownouts become widespread that's gonna change quick...
- Really.
- Plus there's been recent talk of using Thorium as a new nuclear fuel and we have fast-breeder reactor technology which can further extend the longevity of fissile materials. The big problem with getting those deployed, at least in the US, are the stupid NIMB Ys who're still living in the nuclear-scare era of the 60s-80s and think that every reactor is a 3MI or Chernobyl waiting to happen.
From recent news: two words, Cyber Terrorism. By Russian and Chinese spies. The new Red Scare. They are reported to have penetrated our infrastructure networks. And if we end up going to war with them... Prepare for a possible return to the Dark Ages(if the oil peak or Olduvai Cliff or whatever doesn't do it first).
Take the time to actually contemplate the vast, absurd distances between just, say, the Earth and the Moon. Then try to contemplate the Earth and another planet, or the Earth and the sun. Or the sun and another star. Your brain may start hurting and crying in fear at a glimpse of the true meaning of such a size, just the thought of all that emptiness...
- This YTMND says it better than I could.
  - I prefer the one that ends with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  - Here you go.◊
  - Eta Carinae, for this troper, is nightmare fuel in and of itself. Real-life Unicron, bleeding from tears all over itself. Just imagine it chewing the center out of the Earth, or the sun, and realize it would have to be 100 or 1000 times smaller to do that.
- This troper watched a video for ninth-grade science class in which it showed the Moon against the Earth against the other planets against the Sun against other stars. The sizes increased by like three times every time it zoomed out to show a new sphere. (They were all lined up.) The troper started laughing, then nearly crying, then nearly breaking down. And it didn't stop. The video went on, showing us larger and larger stars, for about five minutes. Just thinking about it...well, I don't like to think about it.
  - Some people would call that a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for the Universe.
- Behold the Powers of Ten. The Universe on both a macro and micro scale is almost incomprehensible.
- This troper just read about a "glimpse of ancient dying stars": scientists had only recently witnessed a distant supernova that had occurred 11 billion years ago. With that being said, he thought this meant that there's nothing out there in the Universe, right this very minute.
- Well...there's always the possibility that we're not alone, and the vastness of space includes the possibility of untold, fascinating new lifeforms.
  - ...But then again....
  - This troper agrees, and finds the size of the Universe as beautiful as it is terrifying. Existence, life, always somewhere out there floating in infinity.
Speaking of celestial bodies and whatnot- Black holes. They are scary as hell when you really get into what they are and what, precidely, they are doing. They warp the fabric of space-time, for crap's sake. They are absolutely huge, they eat everything, and you can't even see them unless there's a backdrop of, say, interstellar gas to provide a contrast. If one should happen to drift in the direction of our planet -and this is, in fact, entirely possible-, even if we saw it coming years in advance, there would be nothing we could do about it. You do not stop a black hole. Ever. Plus, once you cross the event horizon, you are not ever coming back. And although it's unknown what, exactly, happens inside a black hole (though there are plenty of theories), it's safe to assume that it's probably something fairly horrible. If there are in fact Real Life Cosmic Horrors, they are probably black holes.
- To be fair, everything warps space-time. There's good evidence that warps in space-time are what things are. And you could deflect black holes; the first thing that would occur to this troper is to slingshot matter at an extremely fast speed so it passes to the side of a black hole and the slingshot effect moves the black hole's path.
Deep time. The fact that when you think about a long enough stretch of time, everything will die. Not only that, but that our current understanding of the universe implies that with enough time everything in existence will be converted into ever more widely scattered heat energy. That ultimately, it's not just that you will die, or that the human race will die, but that anything that could possibly show that either of those ever even existed will cease to be, and there is nothing you can do about it.
- Though on a hopeful note, quantum mechanics being what they are, its entirely possible that, even in that soup of scattered heat energy at the "end" of the universe, some fundamental particle somewhere with spontaneously decide "hay, I feel like being a new universe" and will. Indeed, forever being a long time, it is inevitable that this will happen.
- For super brick shits, try reading the House on the Borderland.
- Watch Life After People.
- You know, I may be missing the point, but if there's nothing I, or any of us, can do about it then why bother worrying?
- This troper is still on a Gurren lagann high and believes that nothing is impossible. Therefore the end of the universe by heat dispertion can and will be stopped and the universe WILL restart in The Big Crunch. It's just a matter of determination and your own belief.
  - That's basically this troper's philosophy. The world is but a tiny spec in the infinite vastness of the cold, unforgiving void, the lifespan of our whole species is but a blink of an eye. Nobody out there will mourn when we all die, for they never even knew we existed. We are nothing. However, as there is nothing we can do to change this we shouldn't worry about it. We might not matter to anybody else but we do matter to ourselves, and in the end that's all that counts. If more people would realize the true nature of the universe and our place within, the world would probably be a better place, or at least more humble.
  - Truth In Television: Earth really is an Insignificant Little Blue Planet...
  - This troper would like to assert that Danny Elfman said it best:
    No one beats [Death] at his game
    For very long but just the same
    Who cares, there's no place safe to hide
    Nowhere to run—no time to cry
    So celebrate while you still can
    'Cause any second it may end
    And when it's all been said and done
    Better that you had some fun
    Instead of hiding in a shell
    Why make your life a living hell?
    So drink a toast, and down the cup
    And drink to bones that turn to dust ('cause)
    No one (x13)
    No one lives forever!! (hey!)
  - Then there's Isaac Asimov's contribution to this problem, with a Twist Ending.
  - The ending of that is beyond amazing. We were told this story in my African Storyteller class, as an example of the art of storytelling. I actually went up to him after class (in college, mind you) and asked him where he got it. He said he would send us all a copy of this by email, and he did.
  - On the other hand, even when you live only for personal pleasure, going nuts with desire probably isn't the best way to get the most out of our time. Ask Epicurus!
- It's thoughts like these that make This Troper glad she's a Christian with a very firm belief in the afterlife. At times she wonders how people who believe only in a great nothingness and total loss of consciousness can even cope with the idea. But what's kinda neat is that it lends a level of betting strategy to religion: If the end is nothing, then even our decisions in life don't have any ultimate meaning or usefulness - even our cruelties and kindnesses shall fade - but if the end is something, then it may indeed be Serious Business and we better get to finding out what evidences there may be about the ultimate answer. (Even if it is 42.)
  - Well, this Troper is of the view that Religion is at best a crutch. Growing up, everyone learns that life is not fair,and about how big the world really is. The new world, the solar system, the universe and now string theory, every increase in perspective that science has brought has decreased the objective significance of our own lives.
  - Eternity is terrifying, I'd agree, but being nothing is almost worse. Also, "religion is at best a crutch"? A crutch for what exactly? I've never really been all that much more terrified of living as the tiny and meaningless creature than I've been of being a creature of infinite and eternal significance.
  - Different option: We figure out how to upload our consciousness to a super computer and live millions of eternities in a mere few years, if that, and after exhausting every possible reality we can think of, end ourselves knowing that we have truly lived, willing to accept what happens, whether that is eternal life or nothingness. Ironic thing is that I am a pessimist most of the time, so me having this view is quite unusual, to say the least.
- Oh, and about the whole 'haze of heat' thing, not strictly true. See, in quantum theory it is accepted that now and then particles just poof into existence (indeed every electron may in fact be the same one that's on a journey through eternity), it won't amount to anything in trillions of years, but in an infinite amount of time, we may live again.
- While that sounds very poetic, I'm afraid it doesn't really work like that. Sure enough, the vacuum is brimming with particles, popping out in particle-antiparticle pairs just to be annihilated again an unmeasurable tiny ammount of time later. And surely enough, you can interpret an antiparticle as the particle going backwards in time, with negative energy, so that since all electrons are identical, they could all be the same electron, zipping back and forth trough spacetime. Unfortunately, no one regards this interpretation as much more than a calculational aid used in Feynman diagrams, since, for one thing, there's much more matter than antimatter in the known universe (just look around you), plus, it really doesn't change the fate of the universe, as stated, it seems the future is destined to be cold, dark and lonely, utterly devoid of life, or indeed, any sentience... it seems depressing and nightmarish, but really, no one will be here to feel depressed, it's like that time before you were born. Do you remember how terrifying it was? No? Yeah...
- "The universe freezing in half-light. Once I thought to escape... Escape would make us god..."(Durandal from Marathon, at the end of the universe)
From the And I Must Scream page, Yes this is a real medical condition. Holy Nightmare Fuel Batman!: Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). A horrible, horrible genetic disease where, if you muscles are damaged in any way at all, your body decides to replace the damaged muscle- not with more muscle, but with bone.
The fact that someday, Mercury and Venus will be consumed by the Sun, And everything else will be burned to ash. Even though this will happen long after I die, the thought of it makes me uneasy. In fact, let's just say anything pertaining to the end of the world.
- Cheer up! After everything is burned to ash, there's still some excitement left. The sun will eventually expand enough to absorb the Earth into itself, and being rather hot will also reduce the Earth to a ball of mostly molten iron that will sink into the sun's hellish core, where pressure and heat exceed all human capacity to understand. This Troper is always happy to help.
  - Not to mention that the humans still on Earth will be saved from life in a wartorn, hellish landscape.
  - Besides, at the rate we're making tech advances, we'll be off this rock and cruising the cosmos long before it happens. If we're not, then we either nuked ourselves to oblivion, or we were going so glacially slow we probably deserved to stick around for the environmental catastrophe that happens long before Earth gets absorbed.
- Ditto for this troper. Especially brought on by my hyperawareness of my own consciousness. It's more or less related to an absolute mortal fear of my own cessation of existence. In fact, the generally shared atheist view of the afterlife, or lack thereof, is much more terrifying than any vision of Hell.
  - Really? Contemplating an eternity of pain and suffering, not dulled by any bodily mechanism (is not your body what's suffering, it's your "soul") is less terrifying than complete annihilation after a little less than a century of living? You must have a very, very different definition of "terrifying" than ThisTroper.
  - The concept of torture exists. The concept of pain so unbearable you want to die exists. Now, imagine not being able to. Yeah, Hell is scarier than oblivion, my pants.
  - C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He points out in The Problem of Pain that most Western ideas of the Christian Hell come from Dante, rather than the Bible. And that all the Biblical references to Hell contain a concept less of suffering and more of finality. So the atheist idea of "no afterlife at all" is arguably a closer match to the Biblical Hell than "eternal torture and pain."
  - Imagine being locked in a black, unlit box the size of a tight coffin, unable to move at all, ever, forever; awake, never allowed to sleep, ever; screaming noise without musical order being blasted in your ears all the time, constantly; and strangely ethereal, raspily-laughing voices saying things you just can't make out the words to while your skin feels like it's being burned off without your nerves ever getting damaged. This was one individual's reported near-death, "to Hell and back" experience. ...Hell is scarier than oblivion.
  - Congratulations. You just made this troper open his eyes in horror and start to tremble and cry. I really, really hope this was an hallucination or something he made up, not what afterlife is actually like. I'll stick with oblivion anyday, thank you.
  - Oh, and top it off with a recording of the famous, even-if-it-is-fake Sounds of Hell audiocassette tape that was mailed to Art Bell.
  - It's fake. To clarify, it supposedly came from when the atheist Soviets literally dug to Hell. At the time, the Soviets were indeed drilling a hole intended to study the Earth's interior, but encountered nothing supernatural. They were forced to stop because it was hotter than expected, and would have melted the drill bit. They did manage to reach about 40,000 feet down though. Of course, the idea of drilling to the Earth's molten core is pretty scary. Instant volcano, anyone? And then, my dad once told me that, theoretically, if you did drill a hole through the Earth, the planet's spinning around the hole would tear the planet apart. And Americans like me all daydreamed about digging to China at one point...
  - This Troper never understood people's fear of oblivion. It's not like you'll know you're oblivonised. If you're oblivonised, then you would have no sense of self, nothing to realise that you've ended, no mind that'll get bored or insane or whatever. Just nothing. And if you're unable to think, then you won't care. Because there won't be a you to care about. Or with.
  - The above troper has inadvertantly explained why this troper finds the idea of oblivion so freaking terrifying.
  - 1) Fear of the unknown (or High Octane Nightmare Fuel in general) is neither irrational nor pointless. It is a goad to go discover or otherwise try to prepare for the nasty stuff out there that you don't know about so that it doesn't whack you when you aren't ready. 2) Choosing to believe in a deity because it seems the only means to lasting fulfillment and happiness is also hard to fault. You certainly can't find eternal happiness in oblivion, so why bother accepting that road? 3) If we're talking about appeasing a deity, don't bother trying. The Christian God is interested in having a relationship, not appeasement.
  - Indeed... and often Christians are the ones responsible for alienating people from Him. In all the time I've spent with Him, He's never gotten angry with me, just sad. You would assume that after all this time and all the bullshit we make Him endure, He'd go all Jonathan Edwards on us and drop us into hell. Luckily enough, that appears to be the furthest thing from His heart.
  - Fear of cessation of existence is not fear of the unknown. It is infinately easier to envisage not existing at all that it is to envisage eterenal torture. Not existing means you don't exist. That's hard to deal with, but not hard to grasp. But eternal torture? After your body had has ceased functioning, and your nervous system has become obsolete? What in the name of quantum mechanics is that going to be like?
  - Being Buddhist, I'm comfort with idea that my own action will decide my afterlife. The real High Octane Nightmare Fuel would be if there is really an Eldritch Abomination whose will trap you in eternity of torment even if you live a virtue life, simply because you don't belive that it is God.
  - Just so you know, not all Christians think it works that way.
  - We may not all agree about whether Hell exists, but regardless of that anyone who truly believes it does, and who truly believes that belief in their religion equals salvation from Hell, would understandably want to spread their beliefs to every last person.
  - On the subject of Hell, consider this: Anyone who doesn't believe in the Christian God goes to Hell. Christianity in its modern form has been around for 2,000 years. Abrahamic-Judaic monotheism has been around for maybe 5,000 years. Humans have been around for about 500,000 years. What do you think happened to all those people who didn't worship the Christian God because they didn't know of its existence? (And that, my friends, is why this troper is an atheist.)
  - Most doctrines have a few ways they deal with this issue. Predestination is a common one, albeit heavily debated among Christian groups. It states that if a person was destined to worship God, the nature of God will have become known to them somehow. Another solution says that if one worships any monotheistic, benevolent God, it "counts" so to speak. If that was the case, anyone could have "figured God out" through natural revelation, or in other words, revelation of God through nature. Of course, this is all heavily debated. In fact, this is probably no the place for this. Just making the point that most doctrines don't ignore this problem. For better or worse, I suppose.
  - Better yet, the most ancient form of Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, is surprisingly generous in this regard. All of humanity is being reconciled, whether dead or alive, and universal salvation remains a possibility. The point of Christianity isn't to save one's soul from hell, per se, as commonly imagined, but to restore humanity to its godlike potential. Any form of Christianity that doesn't have this kind of charity, I would argue, is not Christianity, but something sinister. I certainly don't blame folks for being atheists when the Christianity they know seems like supernatural tyranny.
  - I'm surprised nobody brought up this scholarly treatise on the topic.
- Ironically, reading up about end-of-the-world scenarios actually makes this troper feel safer. It's hard to describe- it's like, if all these horrible things can happen, but they haven't happened, then it's almost like we have nothing to worry about.
- This Troper is another person who finds her own cessation of existence to be utterly terrifying, and also finds the idea of the sun burning out and destroying the Earth terrifying, and also finds the idea that the universe will eventually run out of usable energy terrifying. And she's an atheist who has been so far unable to convince herself to believe in an afterlife. And you wonder why she had to be proscribed Zoloft.
  - This is so very odd... Ms.Byrd is a theist, and there are many days when the idea that her existence could go on forever-and-ever-amen is the most despressing, terrifying thing ever. However, the idea of her loved ones' existences going on = very comforting, and same for the idea of a deity's (because if humanity is it that's just...lonely or disgusting, not sure which)... *facepalm*
- This troper is afraid of oblivion and of Am-mut ("the Swallower of the Dead"). Realising that She is (hopefully) a metaphorical representation of a theological concept does not make the underlying concept any less fearful.
- This troper is an atheist and, as such, makes a point of never contemplating death. He doesn't know what it'll be like, but every time he tries to think about what it feels like to not exist, he gets very, very scared.
Watch the History Channel or Discovery Channel, eventually they'll have a "How the world ends" special. If you're religious, the History Channel provides you with plenty of cases of prophecies coming true. If you're the scientific nut, you're treated to many scientific ways the world will end including the super volcano at Yellowstone bringing nuclear winter on its own, a Deep Impact or Armageddon worthy asteroid impact, and the infamous Large Hardon Collider making exotic particles or micro-black holes. Doubly worse for the religious as the scientific ways the world will end are in fact, very possible. Especially the asteroid (we have a higher chance of impact than you getting struck by lightning).
- Who says the science and religious interpretation are mutually exclusive? I find that to be the real personification of High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- Not the LHC, though. One particular cosmic world ending scenario that is terrifying for me is the explosion of a nearby supernova (I don't know if that was featured in said show or not). In case that were to happen, the Earth would be bathed in high energy radiation capable of sterilizing the planet and maybe even boiling the oceans. What makes it most frightening is that there's no way to see it coming, since what is coming is high frequency light, and well, nothing travels faster than it that could warn us. Thankfully, there's no nearby star we know of that could blow up on us, and in fact, the lack of such stars in our vicinity is one of the lucky facts that has guaranteed the emergence and survival of life on Earth for the past billions of years.
  - Not exactly nightmare fuel since Earth's star is too small to ever supernova, but a fun fact; supernovas produce neutrinos in such immense amounts that, despite how rarely they interact with matter, the neutrino radiation from a supernova explosion is lethal within about ten AU. Since neutrinos are the first thing to escape from the core of an exploding star, this lethal dose of radiation would be the first detectable sign that your sun was blowing up. And since neutrinos pass through solid matter so easily and aren't charged there would be no form of shielding in existence that could protect you - you'd receive just as big a dose if you were on the far side of Jupiter. Of course you'd probably be incinerated by the star's explosion long before you finished dying of radiation poisoning, but it's not a good start.
- Gamma Ray Bursts. When huge, dying stars are consumed from within by black holes they release vast amounts of energy at very near the speed of light. Some of these blasts of energy can exceed in a matter of seconds the amount of energy that our sun will release in its entire lifetime. If one of these hit the planet then we'd probably all die before we knew what had happened. Even if one passed too close it would be like every place on one side of the planet being hit by a nuclear missile at once, and the other side of the planet dealing with the resulting wall of fire and death. The real problem is that these bursts are basically impossible to predict, and even if we could there's absolutely nothing we could do about it. The entire planet could die a horrible, firey death within minutes of you reading this and nothing short of direct intervention by Almighty God himself can stop it. Fuck.
  - Hell for this troper, even the thought of the world ending is sheer Nightmare Fuel! And I wish people would just stop talking about it on TV, I'm paranoid enough as it is, I really don't need this right now!
There's a super volcano underneath Yellowstone. If it explodes, it's predicted that the entire United States will be covered in at least few centimeters of ash (in areas farthest away from the volcano)cars and planes won't function since the ash is finer and heavier than snow (causing all the engines to clog), and the ash in the atmosphere will block out the sun for several years. Oh, and it's overdue for its next eruption. At least scientists speculate that humanity itself won't necessarily go extinct, just that civilization as we know it might end.
Care to know how the world and/or humanity might end? Go to Exit Mundi. Excellent, witty, and sometimes disturbing reads. This troper's personal favorite? "Eternity".
Two more potential ticking depopulation bombs: Mass infertility due to pollution, malnutrition/undernourishment, obesity, etc.(many kids may die before their parents), and mass insanity due to overmedication (we're seeing some of the effects already).
- "Insanity due to overmedication"? Can we get a study on that, because it sounds dubious at best.
  - This troper is a psychologist and can tell you that it is bullshit. However, due to now being able to treat mental illnesses instead of just locking sufferers away from society, a much larger percentage of the population is genetically predisposed to them. It's not that big a deal—there are new and better drugs and therapies being created every year to treat them. If you want some real nightmare fuel, check out personality disorders. Borderline personality disorder has no definitive cause (though being abused as a child raises your chances considerably.) Having it sucks. Almost everyone with the disorder makes at least one attempt at suicide. About 20% of them succeed—this isn't including the ones who died from the less documented forms of self harm (accidental drug overdoses, drink driving, picking unwinnable fights, etc.) It can't be cured, and we still don't have a truly effective way of treating it, and you can get it at any time.
  - This troper could make an arguable case that schizophrenia is almost worse. After spending most of her teenage years hanging onto a semblance of normality by a thread, she was diagnosed with it at nineteen. As if the thought that she was going to have this for the rest of her life wasn't bad enough, she's got several family members who also have it, so she could look at them and know exactly what she was in for. Fortunately it was caught early enough that she's still fairly functional, though she can't work and is more or less a shut-in. There's no cure, no definitive treatment, and you get to be a medication guinea pig until your doctor finds one that works best for you. Left too long undiagnosed, however, and you can wind up like this troper's aunt, who has been institutionalized since the age of thirty and will likely never be able to live on her own.
Antimatter. That is all.
- This geeky troper finds it more awe-inspiring than awful. The reason antimatter is so powerful is due to the fact that when it contacts normal matter, it annihilates the sum of both masses into energy according to the formula E=mc^2. Since the value of c is so high, it means even small masses contain ludicrous amounts of energy. I actually created a Calc (Openoffice.org's version of Excel) spreadsheet that would let you plug in any value for m (mass in kilograms) and determine E, in joules and kilowatt/hours. A total mass of 1 gram yields 89,875,517,874 joules, or 24,965.42 kilowatt/hours. To put that in perspective, a US penny masses 2.5 grams. Annihilation yield of a penny and an "anti-penny" of mass: 2,246,887,946,842 (that's 2 trillion) joules/624,135.54 kilowatt/hours.
- Also, antimatter is perfectly natural, despite its name, and, in fact, necessary for the consistency of natural laws (to elaborate, it comes out of the union of Special Relativity plus Quantum Mechanics). It is the same as regular matter, only, things such as charge, handedness and other quantum numbers have the opposite sign, that's all. Finally, it's quite impossible, currently, to produce in meaningful amounts for destructive purposes, and it's used in medical scaning, such as PET (positron emission tomography). They throw positrons at your brain tissue, for instance, where they quickly annihilate after travelling a short distance and the resulting gamma rays are detected. I hope that's not too squicky for you.
  - That's not actually correct. A PET scan involve injecting you with chemical (most likely glucose, since cancer LOVE them) that contains a radio-isotope that emits positron. The positron then quickly encounter some electron, annihilate each other, gives off a pair of photon in gamma ray range, which is in turn detected by the PET camera.
  - And it's not frying your brain. All the antimatter ever produced on Earth, if annihalated, would produce enough power to about light up a light bulb for a few seconds.
Antimatter is mentioned above, but it's got nothing on negative matter. A kilo of antimatter will turn you to vapor too fast to be felt, while a kilo of negative matter will merrily unmake a kilo of your flesh... and no energy release to cauterize your already horrific wound.
- Fortunately physicists have never found negative matter and there are many indications that negative matter would simply pass through you harmlessly.
Though it's more Paranoia Fuel if anything, think about this: everything here, everything that is listed, is happening on this planet. Now, remember that there are millions, no...maybe billions of planets out there like ours. Of course, it's quite possible that any sapient species on these planets will develop mindsets with qualities similar to ours; but also, it's equally as possible that they've thought and created things that we've never thought of. Then take into fact that we don't know what could evolve and form on the planet itself, sapient race(s) not included. Imagine, if most of the items on this list are found here, what would replace them on another planet's High Octane Fuel for Real Life? Horror is infinite.

Animals

The Great White Shark. This Troper has a cousin whose friend stayed out surfing just a little too long a few months back; they found most of his body later. Strangely, she didn't think much of it until she watched a programme on deadly creatures and found out that, to kill their prey, the shark bites into it and shakes it to bits. Anyone up for a swim?
Another article from Cracked concerning the evils of nature. None of these are threat to humans; however, the fact that nature would spawn such sadistic and clever predators is a tad unnerving (and one of those is a plant). The pictures don't help either (the ones with the beetle grubs and the assassin bug actually made this Troper shudder). And the entries start out with the POV of the prey. Oh, and arachnophobes should steer clear of this article. Just saying.
Coconut Crabs and Japanese Spider Crabs. Not fun stumbling on pictures of the former when all you were doing was innocently looking up information on New Caledonia. The latter? Thanks, Alton Brown.
Wasps, especially yellow jackets and hornets. This troper recently had a nightmare about there being a nest in the mailbox. And have you read any news stories about "super-sized" nests? This nightmare scenario happens more often in real life than you think.
- The grand champion of nightmare fuel-errific stinging insects is the Japanese Giant Hornet. I dare you to search on You Tube. 2 inches long, and its lethal venom dissolves human flesh. And its horrifying helicopter-like buzz.
- The fine folks at Cracked bring you the Giant Hornet (and more!) in The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs.
Two words: Box Jellyfish.
- Cone ~~shells~~ snails. Blue-ringed octopi. Recommendation: stay the hell out of the water in Australia.
  - Even worse (and, in a twisted way, cooler) are the facts that the cone snail hurts about as much as a bee sting, the octopus doesn't hurt at all, and both of them use the poison Tetrodotoxin, for which there. Is. No. Cure.
- If that's so, that would simply apply to the whole area of Indo-Pacific. Here's a saccharine-sweet addition: Synanceia verrucosa, (in)formally known as Stonefish. Armed with one of the most powerful fish toxins and can easily induce even the most stoic bruisers into gasping sobs. A fair trip to the reef flats of Indonesia can yield at least an encounter or two, if your eyes are sharp enough to see them.
  - In case you don't appreciate how hard it is to see a stonefish, look at this. That's right. These fish are invisible.
  - As an anecdote, This Troper and her mother were eating at a restaurant in Indonesia that had stonefish on the menu, and over near the kitchen was an aquarium with that label, ostensibly empty of fish. We figured it must be a popular dish. Then Mom came back from the bathroom and told me to go look closer at the aquarium. What I had initially taken for decorative rocks, were actually the stonefish. There were about six or seven of them, sitting in a clear glass aquarium with nothing in it but water. These fish are so good at camouflage that they are hard to spot even an otherwise empty tank of water.
- Worse than this is the Irukandji Jellyfish, the demonic little brother of the Box Jellyfish. The Irukandji has the most painful sting of any creature on this planet. Morphine does next to nothing to dull the pain, and unlike the box jellyfish, where you either die in 20 minutes or the pain goes away, Irukandji syndrome can last for up to two weeks. To quote the other wiki, 'even under the "maximum dose of morphine" Teresa remarked that she "wished she could rip her skin off."' I live in a wonderful country.
  - As terrifying as that is, this troper had a hard time taking that Discovery Channel program seriously, due to the fact that the whole thing was incredibly narmy
- No Stone Fish? These little ugly fish are known for their venom which isn't deadly per se. It's just the worst pain in the world that anyone will experience to the point that most will request the doctor at hand to cut the limb. Even giving birth doesn't do this to women (or so I think).
- While we're on the subject of deadly creatures found on one of Australia's greatest tourist attractions, the GREAT BARRIER REEF, we seem to have forgotten sea snakes and sting rays. Seventeen species of sea snake are on the GBR, all of which are fatally poisonous, but generally easy-going as long as they stay in the water. And sting-rays are really in the same boat: docile until provoked (ie, stepped on or trapped between a legend and a camera).
  - You're not much better out of the water in Oz, either. The Australian Outback is a damn scary place. I learned that after reading Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country. 120-degree temperatures, spinifex bushes (they have hypodermic-like tips that break off and become lodged in your skin, inviting flies and infection), all manner of poisonous snakes and scorpions, and did I mention the flies? Bryson's book has a lovely anecdote about how one of the outback explorers brought a camel along which got such a bad bite that they were scooping out maggots with a coffee cup. When a camel starts suffering in a desert, you know you're in a damn nasty place.
Hog farming.
The lagoons [holding ponds for pig manure, urine, blood, afterbirth, and stillborn piglets] themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
- As a permaculture and self-sufficiency enthusiast, all industrial-scale farming qualifies for me.
Puppy mills. Ever wondered where those adorable puppies in pet store windows come from? Well it turns out they're farmed, much like battery hens. That's right, there are battery farms for puppies. The dogs are kept in cages their entire lives and forced to breed continuously, sometimes until their uteruses fall out. Because the dog breeding industry has little regulation, the law does not require these dogs to ever receive vet care, any kind of human contact, or, y'know ever be let out of their cages. Oh, and there are also kitten, bird, rabbit and ferret mills. Good luck ever looking at a pet store the same way again. Moral of the story? Always, always, always adopt from an animal shelter. Seriously. For those who absolutely must have a pure-breed of some kind, at least go to a breeder directly where you can see the mother.
- This dog-loving troper finds this news to be more of a Tear Jerker than nightmare fuel.
- You'll never see a dog for sale in a pet shop in the UK; almost all are bought directly from breeders or owners whose pets have had a litter. The RSPCA and Scottish SPCA take a very dim view of puppy farming.
Snakes, though depending on who you ask... Even if you're not scared of snakes, how easy it is to buy and own some of the most venemous ones in the world should be enough to skeeve you out.

This one might just be unique to me, but spring-mattresses. The springs can easily form very sharp, long spines. It happened to me and I couldn't use my left hand for a while because there was a giant bloody cut on it from about an inch below my wrist up to my fingertips. It made a mess all over it. I now use springless mattresses.
- To sum it up, we sleep on giant spine-filled cloth sacks. Feel happy?
- Oh god, that can actually happen?! I thought I was just being paranoid!
Fire whirls; tornadoes made of fire. One of the many freak causes of death during the Great Kanto Earthquake, caused many to die when their feet got stuck in melting tarmac; however, the single greatest loss of life occurred when approximately 38,000 people packed into an open space... were incinerated by a firestorm-induced fire whirl.
Eugenics. The idea of applying selective breeding to humans. This so-called "science" that attracted numerous white supremacists who believed that they could purify the Nordic race with some perversion of science. Of course, this idea really caught on with Those Wacky Nazis, but the worst part about eugenics was, it started in America. Though some of its early proponents supported execution as a means to eliminate the unwanted members of the population, they felt that America was not ready for it, but shifted to other methods that were more insidious, but as, if not more disturbing than the idea of mass executions: forced sterilizations, mostly done on women, sometimes for things as trivial as having an abnormally large clitoris. The Nazis got their ideas from America, Hitler mentions American eugenics in Mein Kampf. Fortunately, the ideas of eugenics were discredited when evidence of what the Nazis had really been up to behind the scenes was uncovered.
- Of course, this is America, where there are steps people can take when their Constitutional rights are being violated. One woman who was sterilized against her will took her case all the way to the Supreme Court. In Buck v Bell, they ruled that forced sterilization was totally legal. Oh, and the kicker? She was sterilized for being the mentally retarded daughter of a mentally retarded mother who had just given birth to another retarded girl. Stephen Jay Gould researched the case. Guess what two people definitely, provably weren't mentally retarded? Yeah. Oh, and the second gen "moron"'s sister was sterilized as well. They never told her. The real reason this family was deemed worthless? The girls were bastards. Yes, violate societal norms and you will be institutionalized and have your reproductive rights taken away!
This Cracked.com article lists six fashion trends throughout history that actually could kill you. Most of them are just goofy period wear that could kill in predictable ways, but most disturbing of all is the section on the infamous tradition of foot binding. Unfortunately for this troper, the section actually had photos of the end result...
- Yeah, footbinding is definately one of the worst things ever. I had to do a school report on it. Yes, you heard me right. I had to read seven books on the subject for the report. SEVEN. FUCKING. BOOKS. And all of them had pictures and were horribly detailed. This is why I now buy shoes one size larger than my feet. Oh, and the worst part? To demonstrate the process in my report (I have no idea what the hell I was thinking) I wrapped gauze around my own foot. It wasn't actual binding, but still.
An example of truly literal nightmare fuel can be found in Chlorine Trifluoride, once experimented with as a flamethrower and liquid-fuelled rocket oxidiser. It is very close to being real-life Alien blood and it would be easier to list the things it doesn't burst into flame with on contact. It eats through or otherwise burns concrete, sand and asbestos, not to mention common-or-garden flesh and protective gloves, releases horribly toxic, corrosive byproducts in the process and scares the crap out of established chemists.
- To drive the point home, ClF3 is, at least according to Ideal Chemistry, an utter impossibility.
  - Sorry, no. Non-metals don't combine the way you learn in high school; there is more to chemistry than organic chemistry and metal + no metal. Go read up about ClF3 on the other wiki, or if you want more bizarre compounds look at compounds of boron and hydrogen, or xenon - so much for being a noble gas, fluorine attacks everyone.
  - It's very real. The Germans experimented with it before the Second World War for possible use in chemical warfare, as well as a potential filling for incendiary bombs. It turned out to be much too expensive for them to mass produce with the technology they had at the time. But there is some produced currently, for experimental purposes (rocket fuel) and certain industrial processes involving semiconductor manufacture.
  - Chlorine trifluoride attacks 99.999%+ of anything that can be oxidized and isn't in a compound with fluorine, the strongest oxidizer among the elements, already. If a compound or element does not react, it's probably for kinetic reasons - in other words, the reaction goes really slow. When you consider that the world is almost entirely made up of oxides, including water, and compounds with even weaker oxidants (chlorine, bromine, etc.) or free elements that have yet to be oxidized (metals) there isn't much that wouldn't combust on contact with the stuff.
  - This begs the question "why hasn't this stuff eaten the entire world yet?"
  - Because there isn't any. Besides what's made in labs, that is. The fluorine needed to make it, and the chlorine for that matter, have been tied up in ionic (and a few covalent) compounds for about as long as they've been on Earth. You don't need to worry about this compound.
  - And because what little there is, isn't ClF3 anymore once it reacts with something — a gram of the stuff won't keep burning and burning forever or anything. The whole point of being so reactive is that it's on a very delicate energetic balance, and the burning is it throwing off all that energy as it comes down into something stabler (still toxic and nasty, but at least not obscenely explosive).
- Is it possible that the original citation refers to chloro-trifluoromethane?
  - A quote on the substance that I found interesting: "It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers [emphasis mine], not to mention asbestos, sand..." Bread Eggs Milk Squick, anybody?
  - Many other fluorine-based compounds are delightful chemicals. Hydrofluoric acid for example... if you get any on you, it can seep through the skin and damages nerves and bones. Yep: it can melt your bones and leave the flesh intact.
  - To put it another way, John D. Clark's (above) quote ends, "For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes." High Octane Nightmare Fuel indeed.
  - And hydrofluoric acid happens to be one of the delightful byproducts when chlorine trifluoride combusts. This stuff's all kinds of fun.
  - According to the Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual, Alien blood is hydrofluoric acid. This actually does match some of its shown properties, such as eating through metal quite easily, and being lethally toxic, even beyond its corrosive properties. Oh, and on top of reacting with bone calcium and melting your bones, it will react with calcium in your blood and stop your heart. Lovely, lovely stuff, that.
  - Boron trifluoride. Melts your bones too.
Trimethylaluminum ignites instantaneously upon exposure to air and burns at over six thousand degrees, emitting blinding, searing white light with a very large percentage of very damaging short-wavelength ultraviolet light. Just looking in the direction of the flame for a moment can cause permanent blindness via retinal damage. It reacts extremely violently (read: explodes) upon contact with even a trace of water. Once burning it cannot be extinguished with water or carbon dioxide.
Piranha solution is used in inorganic chem labs to clean glassware of even the tiniest trace of certain types of inorganic residues, and also in some types of semiconductor manufacture. There are multiple possible ways it can explode if mixed or used by an unwary person, such as touching any trace of acetone—another solvent frequently used to clean laboratory glassware. And what piranha solution does to living tissue is what earned it the name in the first place.
Same goes for Acrolein, a component in polyurethane and antifreeze. Spilling a 55 gallon drum of it is enough to force the evacuation of an area at least 50 square miles, since concentrations of 2ppm in air are immediately ~~harmful~~ deadly.
- Just to make things worse, the already-nasty chemotherapy drug Cytoxan gets metabolized into acrolein inside the body.
  - Just to make worse things worse, Cyclophosphamide/Cytoxan doesn't just get metabolized into acrolein. It also gets metabolized into phosphoramide mustard, a nitrogen mustard and distant cousin to the sulfur mustard used in mustard gas. In fact, the chemistry of antineoplastics (many chemotherapy drugs) and cytotoxins (chemicals toxic to cells) in general is pretty much nightmare fuel by itself.
- This troper had a senior engineering project to synthesis a small amount of Acrolien as a precursor chemical for more mundane chemicals. Fortunately we used a bad method to produce any at all. If we did, we might have killed ourselves along with our entire campus of 22,000 students.
  - And that's why my personal Nightmare Fuel on campus is not the chem lab, but the chem students.
"Chat", "That's Life" and similar magazines sold at supermarket checkouts. In the words of Charlie Brooker, they look at first glance like they're full of word searches and knitting patterns. In reality they're full of the kind of Body Horror and Gorn that rotten.com is built on, alongside more mundane adult fears, with the odd "kids say the funniest things" feature for added Mood Whiplash goodness.
- For those who have no idea of what these magazines are...well, here's◊ for◊ reference◊. "Life! Death! Prizes!" Actual tagline.
  - And the attractive woman on the cover? She won't be seen in the magazine, has no bearing on any articles whatsoever. Eye candy to get you into the back of the van, as it were.
Scientology. The beliefs seem more like Nightmare Retardant, at least when portrayed by South Park. But its history, on the other hand certainly qualifies.
- This troper once found the case of a scientologist woman who died on the Sea Org under dubious circumstances that pointed to enforced suicide. Before her death she sent her father an extremely enthusiastic letter that seemed to have been written under some mix of sugar rush and LSD trip, where she invited her dad to join. Under the transcript there was a photography of the letter, and the thing was a whole Room Full Of Crazy condensed in a single paper sheet. This troper is so haunted for the memory that she is unable to search the pic or the site where she saw it; it really is that compelling.
- Oh, you mean this one?◊
  - If this is the case that this troper has heard of, it's pretty much certainly murder; the weapon used was a long barrelled revolver, and the entry wound had no powder burns. More details here.
The man with an axe that is standing behind you right now.
- OH hai Kefka! :o
- *leans back against wall*
- (from an old Potter board) Of course, werewolves don't reflect in monitor screens.
- Oh, that one. But that's not very sca-*THUD*
- Don't worry, it's just Eugene.
Children's beauty pageants seem to be exercises in how much one can make a young girl look like something out of the Uncanny Valley. From what I've seen, the judges of these things' idea of "beauty" for kids under the age of 13 is: fake tans; heavy makeup; tacky, overly sparkly, and poofy short-skirted dresses that look more like they belong on a doll than a person; huge hairdos that went out of style back in the late 1980s; perfectly straight, perfectly white sets of adult teeth (courtesy of special dentures called "flippers"); robotic walking and smiling; meticulously perfect "pro-am" (basically upbeat walking and turning to music) routines during the 'talent' section. And the mothers (who usually look like they would be laughed out of the first round of judging for a beauty contest themselves) have the nerve to complain when people say that these things are disgusting and perverted...
- It's sickening to watch six year olds strut around in drag queen makeup and borderline Fetish Fuel outfits. you just end up with the uncomfortable feeling that someone photoshopped a grown woman's face on their bodies.
- And if you spend any time around ACTUAL children, just looking at some of the 'photocorrected' images people are selling to pageant moms for entry of their precious darlings can give you the worst case of the jibblies possible. That is not a child. That is not a child. That is NOT a child. Please... somebody, anybody, hold me. I don't find it perverted, just very, very frightening.
  - You◊ mean◊ like◊ these◊ pictures?◊
  - Wait, those aren't particularly well-made dolls?
  - Yes. Yes, like those. GRAAAAAAAR. This troper (probably the same as the troper above the above troper, if that makes any sense at all) also spent some time researching child murder cases— particularly Judith Barsi, whose case is solved (and who I can only pray is at rest now, poor girl. It's on the Tearjerker page for a reason.) and JonBenét Ramsey, whose case is not. The only thing creepier than seeing what people do to deface photographs of the latter out of spite or for shock value (A SIX YEAR OLD GIRL, guys, CHRIST, leave her ALONE... yes, Berserk Button, I know. I have nieces that age. My brother's that age.) is seeing what some people will do out of even less pure motives. Imagine what people did to Nevada-Tan, except even more loli, and happening to the victim. Ew.
  - This troper has just spent of her time browsing that website, and came across the creepiest one of all: here◊. That is frightening. The problem being that they are real people, altered to look like that — well, in the photograph. If they were altered to look like that in real life, you could conquer the world with them. Those aren't children. Those aren't even idealized, lolicon-bait children. Those are the scary dolls that come out in the night and steal your face to replace their horrifying, unnatural one.
  - Oh hey, want to know what the person who makes those does in his/her/its spare time? This!
  - After I got past the squick and disgust factors, I realized that those... creations... are either slightly out-of-proportion or extremely out-of-place—not to mention that her excessive skin corrections read like inexperienced shading. Those are all extremely common art mistakes. I keep wanting to tell her to brush up on her anatomy, stop being so heavy-handed with the skin, and practice her shading—but then I realize that these are based off real people who actually wanted a sub-par portrait of themselves, and... no. So she's not even a good artist when it comes down to it! Why do people like her?!
- Poor, poor Swan Bruner. Pageants in general just depress this troper to no end. Come on, people, we're better than that.
- Okay, let me engage in some WMG here: The parents of the girls want to vicariously be recognized as beautiful. So, they take little girls and perform some insane, extremely painful, and gory ritual that traps the girl's soul in a body that is like a doll. This creates an And I Must Scream situation for the poor girl. Man, I could go on about this for pages and pages.
Anthony Comstock's single-minded obsession, which made him one of the most brutal and cruel Moral Guardians of all time, and one of the most powerful. Realising that this man really lived, in the United States, and died less than a hundred years ago, is enough to put one beyond mere fear.
- I fear America's inability to recognise hypocrisy. The man was proud of driving fifteen people to suicide. Most ethicists agree that bullying is bad; bullying to the point that a person takes their own life makes the tormentor partially responsible for that person's death. He prevented certain anatomy books from being sent to doctors. Preventing what could be life-saving treatments is far more immoral than the pictures that could oh, yeah help with the treatment. So, basically, the man played a part in people literally dying, yet, he was considered a guardian of morality. Damn, how I wish for a sarcastic clapping icon.
  - Always handy◊.
- Thanks a lot, Tony. You took an idea that sucked in England and brought it over here. You'll pardon me if I have to tamp down Berserk Button rage at that NYSSV logo. "Just remember, it's over; they're all dead..." Censors and especially book burners are...an issue. On the other hand, the group that came immediately to mind when I read the Society's name... those jackholes are very much alive. So too, unfortunately, are these oxygen thieves. Turning off rant mode. Although, multiple such censorious groups having power in various societies counts as High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- In a quite frankly awesome bit of irony, there is a studio called Comstock Films. It makes Erotic Documentaries.
  - That Other Wiki points out that the choice was deliberate.
- This troper gets regular doses of irony every time another comic book story or arc shows up whose title is or is based on the phrase "Seduction Of The Innocent. And there seem to be quite a lot of them.
- You want nightmare fuel? "Before his death, Comstock attracted the interest of a young law student, J Edgar Hoover, interested in his causes and methods."
  - For those who don't know, J. Edgar Hoover founded the FBI, and directed it for 37 years. His antics on the job are the reason directors are currently limited to 10 years.
To all those in college - you think your roommate is bad? Read this true story, and you will be glad the worst thing your roommate does is snore.
- O_O Like someone on the forum the story came from, I read that as my "one last link of the night" and am now (ironically) disgusted sh*tless.
- I go to Digi Pen. Half of the student body has one-upped that guy (up through The Black Time) in one way or another (except without the drugs). Once you get to the "call the fire department, the landlord, the police, and an ambulance" part, all I can say is I'm not personally aware of something like this happening although I wouldn't be too surprised.
- Honestly? The worst part to me is that the guy writing it didn't fucking do anything for as long as he did. Not even after finding toxic mold all over the place.
  - After reading the whole story, this troper feels disgusted...and sad. Disgusted...well, for the obvious reasons. Sad because (after reading the author's additional comments regarding the guilty party) it's evident that the young man had some serious mental issues—which were clearly ignored and swept under the rug by his parents for far too long.
Asbestos. This Troper works in a building that was built before it was outlawed and it's pretty much in everything: doors, wall and floor tiles, even the grout and glue. The problem with asbestos is that it looks and acts like normal dust, until you inhale it. According to accounts, it's pretty much like inhaling microscopic glass shards and your body can't get rid of it. What's worse, not that many people know that it exists in the building. As if the warning labels on the doors weren't a sign enough.
Pat Robertson among many others. Even the supposedly friendly ones like Joel Osteen have this in between the lines. Thankfully they are quite fractured and tend to consider other denominations also "the enemy." Nightmare fuel is imagining they didn't.
- Your Mileage May Vary. While this troper does admit that it'd be very bad if they (and all the others like them) joined forces, he also believes that turning them into one giant, unstoppable force would romanticize those of us on the other side, in a David Versus Goliath sort of way. (Irony intentional.) Right now I just look like a Rebellious Spirit.
- That...I guess, you'd call it a "pledge" they do at the beginning of Osteen's shows. Something like "This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have...". Hundreds, even thousands of people in the same room, holding books in the air, chanting robotically. Holy crap.
  - Now think about the fact that, all across the country, people are chanting this, mindlessly obeying this man's words. You're welcome.
  - This Troper and her mother once tuned in to a Catholic radio station playing a mass service. We nearly had to pull over from laughing when we noticed they sounded like the Borg.
  - In all fairness, you guys are really overblowing this. After all, it's not like he's preaching Nazism or violent anarchism - he's preaching a widespread religion that thousands of people already follow anyway, and which, aside from a few isolated cases, has hardly brought much harm to the world (people like Robertson are the exception, not the rule, and even he doesn't do much beyond shoot his mouth off). There are plenty of things in the world to be terrified of...harmless mainstream religion isn't one of them.
  - Fundamentalists would be "just harmless cranks" if they didn't have so damn much power in America. But as I'm sure most of you know, they've built an almost symbiotic relationship with Republican Party over the past 30 years. Arguably, it started out as a conservative reaction to the hippies in The Sixties and the feminist, gay and sexual "revolutions" of The Seventies, but talk about Disproportionate Retribution. And of course, during GeorgeWBush's tenure, well, just add two collapsed skyscrapers, two apocalyptic worldviews (already boiling), set the food processor on its highest setting, and run. It's bad enough that a number of Americans literally believe the War on Terror is a glorious Christian crusade to wipe out Islam and pave the way for the Second Coming, but when they're at the controls of the world's largest nuclear arsenal...well, Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't work when one of the parties actually wants the Apocalypse to come. Sweet dreams everybody; I'll probably literally see you in Hell for writing this.
  - If you think just shooting one's mouth off with the wrong messages is harmless, in this context, then be aware that there are people who are willing to follow even the worst of those words with complete devotion, and even vehemently ignore any and all evidence or religious correction to the contrary... and, in fact, the worst sufferers will grow more and more convinced they are right the more convincing the case is made to them that they are factually and theologically wrong!
  - Yeah, people repeating something in a religious context is pretty much universal, and national anthems and pledges have the same effect. It's kind of unreasonable to consider such people "Borg" or mindless conformists... because we all conform to something. Besides, according to some scientists, aren't we supposed to be evolving into a highly efficient, insectoid, and Borg-esque society anyway? Now that's Nightmare Fuel!
  - Regarding a few posts up, This Troper could contend that when dealing with religion, you may choose either Mainstream or harmless, perhaps neither, never both. This idea applies to any religion with a rewards/punishment system based on beliefs, doubly so with monotheism. An all knowing, all seeing, all jealous, self obsessed super being that punishes anyone who doesn't shine his shoes often enough? Yes, that is nightmare fuel that has been bottled, labeled, and shipped world wide for easy consumption.
  - Not all persons with monotheistic beliefs subscribe to the reward/punishment idea; there are some espouse all reward/no punishment. That said, those are far and few between....
In Americas Best Dance Crew, the crew the Ringmasters. They were already grotesque to begin with, their gimmick being unsightly flexibility, but their challenge during Britney Spears week was to create the illusion of gigantic performers. So what did they do? They wore hoodies and somehow came up with these monstrosities.◊ Or perhaps seeing them in motion will have a stronger effect (the fifth section, about 30 minutes in)? (And by the way, their song was "Circus.")
Aokigahara. A forest just at the base of Mt. Fuji, known for its stunning natural beauty, as well as for being one of the most popular places to commit suicide. The trees are so thick that it's dark no matter where you go, and it's filled with dead bodies. In 2002, they found 78 bodies. 78. And now think about all the ones they didn't find. Do not look at these pictures if you value your soul. Sweet dreams.
Pfiesteria piscicida, called the "Dinoflagellate from Hell" by scientists, is a microscopic protista that eats living flesh; the species name literally means "fish-killer" but its not picky on the type of flesh it devours. It can enter through just skin contact, and you won't know it's inside of you until you get sores that won't heal. The only way to get rid of them is to cut out the chunck of infected flesh. If you don't catch them in time to do that then they can cause headaches, skin rash, eye irritation, upper respiratory irritation, muscle cramps, and gastrointestinal complaints, acute skin burning, confusion, and memory loss. By the way, these protists are mainly found off the coast of North Carolina. So when the signs say don't go in the water, don't.
- According to this chart,◊ it's found primarily around coastal Maryland and North Carolina. As a Maryland native who vacations annually in N.C., this troper finds it extremely disturbing.
There's a ton of outer space horrors that come in mind. However, is this enough to keep Tropers away? Two that comes to mind are pressurization failure (e.g., a hole in your space suit) and life support failure.
The Budd Dwyer tape. Strangely enough, there's something slightly disturbing about watching a real suicide that was broadcasted on LIVE tv. Due to a major snowstorm throughout Pennsylvania that day, many schools were closed and many school-aged children witnessed the suicide.
Prenatal genetic testing. While I'm past the point where it directly impacts me, the thought that somewhere out there, there's some kid whose life is being cut short because the parents decide the life isn't worth living. Conditions tested for range from genetic disorders that would kill the child within a year to blindness to autism. Heaven help us if we ever figure out a genetic sequence for homosexuality or acting up in school...
- Some of them (such as the "death within a year" ones) are arguably comparatively acceptable; Fate Worse Than Death is Older Than Dirt for a reason.
- Given that we don't actually know the biological basis of autism, and can't even say it's genetic, merely that it certainly is caused by something well before the onset of the obvious symptoms, and current research seems to point to prenatal exposure and not genetics. If you want to top this off with some Paranoia Fuel, The Government shut down testing of gene-altering therapies because a person in the test pool died of something completely unrelated...which means the genetic tests will merely serve as Paranoia Fuel, if they come in positive.
- Goes to show how subjective this trope is. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. More choice for parents and less children that aren't wanted/with disabilities.
  - Yeees, but then you consider the fact that in some places, 'disabilities' includes being female. Not so warm and fuzzy then.
Live Action Role Playing seems harmless right? After reading the Stanford Prison Experiment you'll never see LARPing the same way ever again. It is extremely disturbing to see the video of this experiment in action. The High Octane Nightmare Fuel starts flowing once you find out that the college students in the study and even the scientist himself, Dr. Philip Zimbardo got so caught up in the experiment that they thought it was all real is incredibly scary.
- This Troper had to watch a series of videos in AP Psychology narrated by Philip Zimbardo. Hearing him eventually talk about the experiment was a little...odd. And once he did, it was hard to look at him the same way again. That experiment, along with the Milgram Experiment, were two of the creepiest. It's amazing how far people can go.
  - Funnily enough, Zimbardo and Milgram knew each other: both attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx. So...Yeah.
This might count more as Everything Is Trying To Kill You, but... Everything has an LD50 — which means the lethal dose for 50% of the population. And I mean everything. Somewhere, somebody out there is trying to figure out how much of some innocent chemical can be consumed before killing you, For Science.
- It's called drowning.
  - Or water intoxication is perhaps more to the point.
95% of chemicals approved for commercial use in the United States have not been adequately tested for their health effects on living things. Much of the 5% that actually has and has been found to cause massive problems has only been banned recently. You're probably inhaling all manner of horrific chemicals right this very moment.
Two words: Telecoms Package
- Four words: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Have you ever heard someone die? 9-1-1 calls which end tragically are... I won't put any of you through it right now.
The most terrifying thing of all, to me at least, is that I read all of this, and all I'm thinking is "This is unbelievable. Nope, no way I'm believing this. No way." Okay, there's a bit going "yeah, it's real. It's real", but I can't believe it. Methinks it's a defence mechanism so I don't go completely batshit, but it's still scary.
- This troper is now frightened—by the fact that she was already aware of much of this information, and that so much of it doesn't bother her. Does that make me a bad person...or just incredibly stupid?
- I'm with you there.
- And for This Troper examples that I consider not belonging in the High Octane page kinda drag down the seriousness of the others. Josef Fritzl, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Khmer Rouge, 911 calls ending in tragedy... clowns, wasps, and dentists. Barring phobias and the like, which is individual... some of these things are not like the others...
  - Though, if you have any kind of phobia yourself, you'll know why they in themselves are High Octane Nightmare Fuel, especially if it's the kind that affects you in your daily life. Feeling like you're going to die on a semi-regular to regular basis, all because your brain is screwy?
Cracked has done it again: 6 Real, Terrifying Islands. One features a snake population of around five per square meter. Another has the charred bones from 160,000 plague victims still wash up on the shores. And those are near the bottom of the list...brr.
- This BBC documentary shows the effects of just two days worth of isolation, which even in the most humane conditions caused despair and terror. This is interspersed with interviews of an American prisoner and a hostage from the war in Lebanon who were completely isolated for two decades and still suffer from severe psychological problems.
Ever seen a Jenny Haniver◊? No, I won't tell you what it is. Google it.
- This Troper is too afraid to. Dear God, what is that thing? Her guess is something turned inside out. At least it apparently isn't real.
  - A Jenny Haniver isn't scary. It's a dried up ray or skate carcass carved and varnished into a "sea monster." The name comes from 'jeune d'Anvers' (Antwerp girl), the port where British sailors would create them. The story of mermaids may have come from them, though, and they were used to provide evidence for all sorts of cryptids.
- This troper found that quite cute. Look- it's smiling!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBi4sYK5rjI. If you do not weep you have no soul.
"Baby Eaten By Rats". That is all.
Foot binding. The idea of that actually happening wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I can't go back. Sheer terror.
"This place is NOT a place of honor". Schmuck Bait has never been creepier.
This troper suffers from taphephobia, and is surprised nobody mentioned it before. She can be reduced to a puddle of goo just by thinking of how many people have actually been buried alive and could not handle Kill Bill.
Disused refrigerators with rotten stuff still in them, as this troper saw on You Tube. Some have been sitting around for 20 years or more.
- Speaking of that, there have been many cases of dead people going unnoticed for a decade or more.
- There's actually an article on the above on snopes.com, if you're brave enough to look it up.
Rotten.com. Contains graphic, real photos of horrific deaths and injuries, such as actual photos of the famous, gruesome Black Dahlia murder. Possibly the highest of High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
The American Culture War. It's all over the internet in huge waves of wishful thinking and intolerance, I guarantee you'll run into it at least once even if you do your utmost best to avoid it. See Creator Provincialism, Strawman Conservative and Strawman Liberal to get the tip of the horrible iceberg.
Have you ever seen so much all in one place?
- If by "My God, that blogger is deranged/pyschotic/off his meds/offensively inane and unoriginal," then This Troper, for one, concurs. Never before has the urge to reach through the Internet and throttle someone been quite this strong.
The Island of the Dolls in Mexico. You're welcome :D
Mannequins just do it for some people. The right mixture of Creepy Doll and Faceless Masses with some Uncanny Valley thrown in for good measure.
This thing. Especially at 2:00, which is a fast-paced demonstration with slightly sinister techno in the background. It's like a cross between Aliens and Terminator, and the description that it will someday be able to squeeze through tiny cracks is even less comforting.
IN 2003, a man named Hitoshi Nikaidoh walked inside an elevator and had his shoulders pinned by the elevator doors due to faulty wiring. Despite struggling to pull himself inside, the elevator kept ascending until the ceiling sliced off most of his head. His left ear, lower lip, teeth and jaw were still attached to his body, which fell to the bottom of the elevator shaft, as the elevator continued moving upward. A surgery resident, who was in the elevator at the time, witnessed the gruesome spectacle and spent more than an hour trapped in the elevator with Hitoshi's head.
Memorial or Post-Mortem Photography: A "mostly" extinct practice where family members photograph themselves and their dead in such positions, (like opening the eyes, moving the mouth, setting the body correctly, and dressing it up) to make their relatives look 'almost' like they're still alive. Most of these photos are babies!!
Hurricane Katrina. Imagine the water suddenly rising, and you and your baby are stuck in the attic. The water's still getting deeper. The half-dead batteries in your flashlight have given out. There's rats, roaches, and God knows what all else in the water with you, and some of them are trying to climb up you to get out of the water. You've beaten your hands to a bloody, nailess pulp trying to get out or even to get heard. And help. Isn't. Coming. That description comes from a woman who was rescued by a couple of cajuns in a boat who heard her last feeble attempts at pounding on the inside of her roof. A few hours later, her house was totally submerged. Over 1400 people weren't so lucky.
- The disturbing part is the number of people who blamed the victims for being there. Tell you what, you try to get out of a city without a car or money....
  - This troper would like to provide a little comfort. She lives in Louisiana, and her house was having construction during Hurricane Katrina. Upon her family's return, they found that not even one of the loose bricks laying around was moved.
This Troper was going to get icecream with her friend when oh, by the way- guess what? She was at the doctor's office the day before! And guess what? They think the meds she was taking didn't help like they hoped so now she has until 18 years of age to live intead of 21! (Shudders)
- What? o.o
The thought of being arrested in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home.
This Troper is surprised the Dyatlov Pass incident hasn't been mentioned yet O:
And this!
Codeine - literally. In 1% of patients, it causes very vivid and horrifying nightmares. In 33% of these cases, the nightmares are so bad they cause post-traumatic stress disorder. This Troper is in the unlucky 1%.
The For Want Of A Nail entry of Adolf Hitler's page almost makes one believe in fate. Very disturbing fate.
All the horrors of the past are still out there and all it takes to unleash them again is a few days without power or clean water. Enjoy your 'improved society' while it lasts. Mwahahahahahaha...
And always remember... With every atrocity fixed by society and technology, another is made.
- Nonsense. Seems like "Things can't really change" mysticism with no basis in reality. While there are certainly new horrors created there are far less than the horrors removed. The quality of our society is improving.
  - Quality of society, maybe, but if you're talking about an improvement of humanity in general, hell no. Humans will never, ever stop being bastards.
  - This troper begs to disagree - consider that some tropes only apply to Star Trek. Genuine improvements to human nature within 10-15 years, check. Improvements to the germline in 20 more, most likely.
Cracked again! This article for the 5 Creepiest Unexplained Broadcasts For this troper, the first one scared him more than anything else.
- Oh my good the third one oh my goooood why did I have to watch the video ;_;
The Haiti earthquakes. That is all.
Balut. Whatever you do, don't consult Wikipedia. It has pictures.
Charles Ng. That is all.
Ink, the stuff in pens and home printers, contains aniline. A highly flammable poison. It can also be absorbed through skin. Going to write with a pencil instead? There's a reason they didn't want that on the space shuttle: inhaling powdered carbon isn't good for your lungs. Oh, and toner is just powdered rust and plastic. In short, the three main ways of putting information on paper will eventually kill you.
The Voynich Manuscript. It's just unsettling to this troper; even if there's a high chance it's a hoax.
I wasn't quite sure whether to put this here or Other (or New Media, who the hell knows), but here goes. Have you ever been on the rollercoaster X2 at Six Flags Magic Mountain? Quite simply, it's unlike anything you've ever seen, and quite possibly twice as scary. The ride starts with a bit of happy music, which promptly gets covered in static, then shifts to ominous music. Cue the voices. This goes on for at least a minute. Oh, and did I mention this all occurs going up the lift hill, when nothing's really happened yet? The first drop has you looking straight down a vertical 18-story fall while suspended upside down. Your only restraints are akin to a vest. Yeah, shit is scary as hell.

You've done it! You've made it through all these pages of mind-numbing horror. What more can be said? As you go about your day and try not to break down, try to remember to do one thing: Always look on the bright side of life...

But you all probably need these three links as much as I do.

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