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High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Real Life
Disclaimer: The entries in this section are not healthy for your mind or soul. You were warned.
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!Note: This page is not for those easily scared by books or movies. If you happen to be one of those people, please go here instead. Thank you and have a nice day.
according to a survey, 33% of college aged men would commit rape if they could get away with it, and 25% of those surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if "the woman asks the man out; or the man pays for the date; or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date."
WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH. Dear lord, it's an honest to not their God group of misanthrope supremes who imagine the nigh-entirety of humanity in HELL. And that's not even getting into Fred Phelps, who'd probably be one of the most terrifying supervillains ever in a comic book universe.
Factology believes, according to Wikipedia, "some aborted fetuses survive their abortion to live in the sewers, where they are being gathered and organized to take over the world."
WWE's Hell in a Cell. Imagine being trapped inside a 16 ft. high, 2 ton cage with your opponent and the referee. Since you can only win through pinfall or submission, you or your opponent are bound to get legitimate and severe injuries that could potentially end your career and ruin your life.
That's assuming it doesn't ruin your career and end your life.
To all those in college - you think your roommate is bad? Read this possibly true story, and you will be glad the worst thing your roommate does is snore.
Half of the student body at DigiPen has one-upped that guy (up through The Black Time) in one way or another (except without the drugs).
More roommate horror here. Worst one is the woman who walked in on her college roommate having sex doggy-style with her biological father. The winner was actually someone who killed and skinned a squirrel and left it on her housemate's bed.
Have you ever heard someone die? 9-1-1 calls which end tragically...
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!!
Apparently, it's still a common practice nowadays that when a baby passes away, one of the nurses cleans the body, dresses it up, and wraps it in a blanket for the parents to hold and take a picture with. One sad advantage of doing this with a deceased child is that the baby is no longer covered in tubes and needles to keep it alive, so it appears as it couldn't in life. And it seems rather gruesome, yes, but it seems many people need that picture, that memory, to help them through the grieving process. It's almost as if to show themselves that their baby was alive and real, even if it couldn't stay that way for very long.
This site. Think of it this way, most of those babies are stillborn. The parents NEVER would have gotten a single picture if it weren't for those. They used to be tossed in the trash. Now the parents get to hold their precious child. Much like when you hold a dying friend...
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, Boy in the Box, a cold case from the 1950's where the body of a small boy was found in a box in the woods. The worst part? They still to this day haven't caught the person who did it.
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.
"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.
African tabloid examples take this up to eleven, and even more frightening is that even MORE people take them as the truth than in the US!The Red Pepper is the most notorious. The engrish and hilarious slang seems charming (referring recently to one outed minister as the "notorious bum driller"), until you see how many articles are about outing and advocating the murder of local notable gays among other things. Never has the term 'frighteningly funny' been so apt. You know Adebesi from Oz? Not only is that the paper's target demographic but that's ALSO THEIR REPORTING TEAM. That's right, as amusing as this paper might seem, it regularly gets families murdered by local religious fanatics.
Disused refrigerators with rotten stuff still in them, as seen on YouTube. 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 snopes.com, if you're brave enough to look it up.
The max headroom Pirating Incident. Not the act itself, but the fact that to this day, no one really has the foggiest idea what was going on, who he was or why he was doing it.
There is also the fact that the man who did it is still at large... he could be anywhere, he could even be on this website.
The Church of the Innocents in Paris has an... unusual history. It was one of the first churches in France that allowed actual burials (6th century) and became the largest and most popular cemetery by the 13th century. By the 15th century it was so crowded that the residents of older graves (many were in mass graves by this point) had to be moved to ossuaries. When the Black Death hit, newer corpses had to be moved into the ossuaries, leaving behind fatty residues in the dirt. By the late 17th century the cemetery was essentially a mass of greasy residue that could no longer decompose. Oh yes: a pile of leftovers from thousands of human corpses that could no longer decay. And that's not the worst part- in 1780 the wall of a cellar bordering the cemetery collapsed under the weight of the whole mess. One can only hope that no one was in the cellar at the time, or there'd be an unpleasant combination of the primal fears of drowning and necrophobia. Oh, and it was this incident that led to the creation of the famous Catacombs of Paris.
Train engineers who are forced to watch as their trains mow down anyone unlucky enough to get themselves on the tracks (in this case a young teen who, while listening to her iPod, was killed by a deadly silent Amtrak train while on her trek to school). Because freight trains going 60 mph take about a mile to stop before the emergency brake is applied, the train engineers are forced to watch it happen. When they go through post-traumatic stress counselling, the one thing they talk about is that they see the people's eyes right before they hit them. A lot of those engineers don't return to work.
Robert the doll If you thought regular old dolls were creepy, how about a haunted one?
Walking around a pitch-black room with only a flashlight, fearing and believing that there is something or someone that will be standing in or pass in front of your flashlight beam.
Roadkill. Especially the real gory, mutilated sort, even better when baking in the sun for a few days, or when the guts have partially burst out and been scattered around the carcass. Who needs a gory horror movie or video game when there's plenty of gruesome carnage right along your local road, perhaps on the commute to work or school.
And the fact that sometimes you can no longer tell what it was before it was killed is unsettling.
I dare you to stay up until the wee hours of the morning (say, about 1:00 - 2:00 in the morning), in a room with very little light in it, and read as many missing persons' cases from this site as possible. Start with the earliest ones. 1945 should be good. Also, while you're at it, go to this other website and peruse their "Unidentified Victims" index. Start off with the first entry there, the Caledonia Jane Doe discovered in 1979. Pleasant dreams...
The forum websleuths; notably the "unidentified" pages.
It's common for schools to hold assemblies which provide kids with safety and emergency information. In the U.S., some schools have taken a "scared straight" approach to this. Famously, one school had chosen a few students to be absent all on the same day. On that day, with the selected kids nowhere in sight, the staff announced an accident that killed those children. Predictably, some of the students found this to be extremely traumatic and needed psychological care after the caper was revealed. Furthermore, some schools have held assemblies in which students are cast as fire, accident or other victims while their classmates are ushered around the scenes by teachers describing the terrible situations being portrayed. The latter usually occurs with some fore-knowledge on the part of the students so that they know it's fake, but these assemblies are prone to extremity in the young actors' make-up.
That's nothing. There was a school that hired an actor to run into a school and start "shooting" a fake gun (sounded real) between classes. Think only school was stupid enough to do it? Of course you're wrong!
Winnipeg, Manitoba did the same thing in 1942, calling it If Day. "Nazis" (citizens in costume) took over Winnipeg, "arresting" the mayor and premier and turning one section of the city into a concentration camp. They also went around beating people up. They would go into schools and ask for the Jewish students to stand up, then they would take them away. For someone who wasn't in on it, especially the schoolkids, that would be absolutely terrifying. It was a ploy to try to get people involved in the war effort.
Bullying. The thoughts of how many Adults Are Useless - Do you guys know what it's like to have been beaten up, or see someone else beaten up, only to tell an adult because someone is literally in danger, only to be told off or not believed? The adults could literally just turn their head two centimeters to the right and see a kid with paint splattered all over him and a black eye, yet they don't see anything. And just imagine how many target(s) in western countries are being bullied for whatever reason, only for adults to encourage it with their own inaction?
Let's not forget the disproportionate retribution. The minute the victim has had enough and decides to stand up to the bully, sometimes violently, the victim is the one that gets the severe punishment despite being the one that was pushed around in the first place.
The climatic moment of Dangerous Minds is based on cases such as these.
It isn't just kids. I worked in a bar for a few years, and so had the unpleasant experience of heading home, completely sober, when all the local bars were emptying. Fights were a pretty common occurrence, and if the police showed up they'd arrest anyone involved who they could lay their hands on. Unfortunately, this was invariably the poor bastard who had just been beaten up who was too dazed to run away, or the good Samaritans who stepped in trying to break up the fight.
Burglars, anyone? No? The thought of creepy Faceless Goons walking around your house and stealing things at random doesn't terrify you at all?
It most certainly does - more so than ever for this troper at the moment; in the past few weeks her neighbours and friends have seen and heard prowlers in their gardens, trying their car doors, LOOKING IN THROUGH THEIR WINDOWS etc. It being pitch-black at four in the afternoon doesn't help the paranoia that comes from standing in your well-lit living room and wondering who might be out there in the dark...
The GIFT. To sum up several quotes from the quotes section, coarse people won't say what they really think to your face - because they aren't free from consequences, meaning they're within punching or kicking range. They may act nice to you in real life, but they have an image to maintain. They may not say something like "Barack Obama deserves to be institutionalized" or "All of Israel should just be nuked" if you asked them in real life, but on the internet, of course they'd say that - that's what they really think. And you know what is even scarier? Imagining what'd happen if, even if you could attach a face to someone, what if this was like Real Life? People would probably just murder children so they wouldn't have a threat to their power, steal everything, just go on a shooting spree with a complete disregard for who they're killing, and just flat-out bastardy cranked Up to Eleven.
Trolls and cyberbullies in general. Picture this, an adult troll who uses the internet as a personal haven for their inner bastardry intentionally harasses someone, that someone being a teenager with low-self esteem that he doesn't know, by teasing him, calling him names, and encouraging him to commit suicide. All the while thinking that this is funny!
Here's an example that fits the exact description above. You might take some consolation in the fact that this man was arrested, however. Seems people are becoming more willing to prosecute the internet version of threats/harassment/etc.
Check out these well-known photographs. Now, read the stories behind the pictures; in many of these cases, the photographer gazed upon unmitigated human suffering and did absolutely nothing to help. All for the sake of capturing "the perfect photograph". Welcome to the world of photojournalism.
The sad thing about the Omayra Sanchez photograph was that nothing could be done. The girl was trapped in that water for three days before she died, because it would be impossible to free her without amputating her legs, which would have made her bleed to death. A water pump was sent to the village...which arrived broken. Basically, the reporters stayed with her so she wouldn't die alone, as most of her family members were already dead.
Having read the above, imagine YOU are a photographer dealing with such things. That link shows a photograph by Kevin Carter. Carter was haunted by nightmares and visions of death after he took that picture of the starving girl being stalked by the vulture. He was also heavily criticized by people who didn't understand how little he could have intervened. Eventually, Carter took his own life. And now you feel bad.
I accompanied some documentary film makers who had just gotten off a job making a TV show about road safety. They had followed around an ambulance crew for the night, when luckily there were no serious accidents ... they complained about not getting any interesting footage.
You don't have to be a vegetarian, vegan, or even value animal life very much to be outraged or disgusted at this. What kind of things the animals have to go through in slaughterhouses is bad enough, actually imagining yourself as one of these animals is probably one of the most terrifying and depressing thing that you can think of.
You are now imagining you are an animal in a slaughterhouse....In Australia. Next to a forest of stinging trees. (Two such places actually existed in 2005 but this troper doesn't know if those slaughterhouses are still open, or in the same locations.) Likely the leases for the land were ridiculously cheap because of their 'neighbors.' Not only is a man-made travesty dicking with you, but a NATURAL one the turns your body to FIRE every time there's a slight breeze. For those that don't know, read this link and then think of what those poor, poor cows went through before they get anywhere NEAR a blade.
Tar Pits. Getting stuck in them is one of the worst ways to die. Unlike quicksand which sucks you in, death by tar pit is slow. The only way you can die is if you starve (humans can survive for about two weeks without food), dehydration (lack of water), or if you somehow commit suicide. Thankfully, if you have a cell phone you could call for help, unlike the poor wild animals that became trapped thousands of years ago. Those animals either starved, became dehydrated, or were killed by a predator. Hundreds of skeletons have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits in California.
The book Ganz Unten ("Lowest of the Low") by Günther Wallraff describes first-hand accounts on working in one. He describes of the working conditions of Turkish immigrant workers in the post-WWII West German steel industry. One of the workers stumbled at work and fell in the blast furnace.
What makes it Fridge Horror is that you realize it is West Germany. How about working in an East German hell factory...?
My chemistry teacher told us of an accident that occurred while she was working as an intern in a chemical plant in Leuna, Eastern Germany. About a dozen workers were cooked to death by superheated steam when a door fell shut behind them.
An episode of Unsolved Mysteries had the story of a nuclear power plant worker who disappeared mysteriously, then one day his work keys were found in the plant's reactor. Worse; they concluded somebody threw him in there.
An unfortunate individual was locked in some oven-thing over a weekend. When the next work day rolled around, the oven was automatically turned on.
It doesn't even need to be a traditionally-scary type of factory like a steel mill. There was a case of two workers in an innocuous bread factory, who were sent inside an oven to do some maintenance work. They were sent in on a conveyer belt, like the loaves. It was switched off, but no one had ensured it had actually cooled down- and there was no way to reverse the conveyer.
Think 9/11 was bad when you were just sitting there watching the attacks on TV? In some places, the power went out. Of course, it had nothing to do with terrorists, but you can bet more than a few people were thinking they were all going to die.
Mines. Not the explosive kind, the underground ones. Claustrophobic, dark, potentially filled with spiders, and could collapse if not safe. You'd need to worry about the ground crushing you against the ceiling in a landslide than about the roof collapsing. Needless to say, surviving that would be less desirable than dying. Crawling along in the dark, bones probably broken, exit probably shut... that's the stuff High Octane Nightmare Fuel is made of... if you could move at all.
Don't forget how many of them have portions that are CONSTANTLY ON FIRE to boot.
Radio signals. Find a weird spike producing noises that'll haunt your nightmares for years to come? Well good luck finding what in the name of Jimmi Hendrix was making it, unless you've got some good equipment. And who knows? It may not even be from Earth.
When you put in earphones while listening to music, you'll find you'll be hearing back vocals and certain instruments (that you couldn't hear before) in one ear. One song that abuses this is "the Greatest Show Unearthed" by Creature Feature.Remember, it only works with earphones.
The Dyatlov Pass incident. Nine hikers in the Ural mountains left their camp for no apparent reason and were later found dead. While this isn't that creepy on its own, five of the hikers had a variety of weird injuries (one was missing her tongue), and four had elevated levels of radiation on their clothing. And no one knows what happened because no one who was present survived. We're probably better off not knowing the whole story.
While looking up pictures of the Franklin Expedition, you might find a mugshot of one of the dead explorers they dug up from Beechy Island named John Torrington. Go look him up. You have been warned.
Premature burial. It's real, it's been happening as long as humans have walked this planet, and in some parts of the world it still happens.
More to the point, buried alive after being presumed DEAD, not by a landslide or anything natural like that. Read up on what started the idea of vampires or their forebearers strigoi existing some time...
This video of abuse captured on tape (warning may trigger for abuse victims) is disturbing enough in it's own right. But there are a few things special to this case that make it pure HONF.
2. The comments. There are many who see nothing wrong with what he did to her and some even applauding him. Others claiming that they recieved worse than that, while still thinking that it did them good. here is an example of one of the articles and the comments. Some of these people even go as far to blame this girl for the abuse she suffered through, claiming that she set him up just to provoke a beating and was faking her cries. The fact that people can see obvious abuse and still find ways to blame the victim is absolutely horrifying.
3. He was a family law judge who dealt with child abuse cases of all things. He had denounced the testimonies of children, claiming they were fantasizers, no we know why.
4. The daughter in question had cerebral palsy and almost all sources on the abuse scandal don't bother to mention it and/or gloss over it. Given the examples of people who murderedtheir disabled children and have had people defend their actions, it's pretty much safe to say that somehow, the abuse of a disabled person matters less than that of a nondisabled person in the exact same situation in they eyes of the writers of the sources that omitted this fact.
They have straight camps. Places people are sent, told their way of live is wrong, and taught how to lie about who they are so they are accepted by society. Parents actually send their children to these places for being curious.
Modern day "de-gaying" camsp/organizations/facilities are hellish, but it is literally nightmare-inducing for this troper to think of what happened to institutionalized GLBT individuals in years past. And right now, in countries that don't happen to be mine. That's not Fridge Horror necessarily, that is High Octane Nightmare Fuel of the highest order and seriously triggering to many people — but think of how many people were sent to these things, not just out of their parents and caretakers' bigotry, but because that was the reigning medical opinion. It wasn't just a bunch of fundamentalist nuts turning over their gay, transgender and gender-nonconforming kids so they could expect grandkids. These people were scared... and they thought they were doing the right thing. Their pastors, their doctors and teachers and trusted family friends thought they were doing the right thing too. Subjecting their children and loved ones to hellish treatment to "fix" them, turning them over into the hands of people who would beat them, rape them, starve them and mistreat them until they were "well" or dead or physically compromised — most certainly traumatized — for life. To make them normal. Safe, healthy, sane, good. Someone you loved might have done that to you.
Book banning controversies. Sounds geeky in text but they can get freakin' brutal. For example there was this giant controversy in Panama City about a book (I think it was I Am the Cheese) that people wanted removed from the shelves. When a group of teachers and an Intrepid Reporter tried to defend the book, how do they get repaid? By receiving threatening phonecalls, death threats, letterbombs, and one of them almost getting her house burned down. Worse still, the people contending this bookaccused them of lying, or even doing these horrible things to themselves to gain sympathy. And to think, all of this trouble is over a book. Thank God the author of the book set the record straight or who knows what could have happened...
Spontanious Human Combustion. Imagine one minute you're enjoying life, then out of the freaking blue you're engulfed in a burning fire without warning and will likely burn to death without even knowing what hit you.
