25 Creepy Facts to Make Your Skin Crawl
From the truth about Leprosy to the eerie reason that puppies like squeaky toys — they are just tiny wolves — here are 25 creepy facts to make your skin crawl.
Published 5 months ago in Creepy
Though often touted for its beauty, the world is as creepy as it is stunning. Cases in point? Alligators that can gallop like horses, the deadly pathogens emerging from defrosting glaciers, and even the real-life skeleton that's watching your family enjoy your Disneyland vacation.
From the truth about Leprosy to the eerie reason that puppies like squeaky toys — they are just tiny wolves — here are 25 creepy facts to make your skin crawl.
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“Locusts aren’t a type of animal, they’re a condition some grasshoppers experience. Many species of grasshoppers become locusts when they’re too crowded (literally their legs rubbing together triggers the change). Once grasshoppers start to swarm they will join up with others, physically grow larger, change color, and eat basically anything they find. Most of a swarm will be born as part of the swarm (increased mating is part of swarm behavior). This is why it often seems like locust swarms come out of nowhere.” -
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“Blobfish in its natural habitat looks like a normal fish, but it lives so deep under water that it doesn't use a normal gas bladder to keep itself balanced. Instead, it has a spongy skin that is slightly less dense than water, which becomes damaged and bloated when fishermen bring it up too quickly. It's not really the ugliest fish. It has just experienced something worse than one of us being thrown into outer space. Between sea level and space, there's one atmospheric pressure of difference. Between sea level and 2000 feet under water, their upper limit, there's 60 atmospheres of difference.” -
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“When watching Monsters Inside Me, I discovered that individuals can still contract leprosy. While on a hunting excursion, two adolescents saw and removed a dead armadillo. The armadillo's blood got on his boots, which he wiped with his bare hands. This proved to be a near-fatal error, as the armadillo became infected with the bacteria that causes leprosy. He had to have surgery to remove damaged sections of his body.” -
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“There is a black hole called Phoenix a, and it is estimated to be 100 billion times the mass of our Sun, comparable to the mass of an entire galaxy. Its event horizon is 590 billion kilometers wide, or more than 100 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto, or about 1/16 of a lightyear wide. To get a visualization of how big that is on a human scale, lets shrink our solar system by 1 trillion times. The Sun would be 1 millimeter wide, and Pluto would be a little more than 5 meters away, and that black hole would be 590 meters wide. For reference, Alpha Centauri would be about 40 kilometers away at that scale.” -
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“Elmer McCurdy was a failed old west “outlaw.” His preserved body was put on display in a traveling carnival and years later he was eventually assumed to be a mannequin until he was used on set for the TV show the Six Million Dollar Man. His arm accidentally fell off during the shoot, revealing bone and muscle and that he was a corpse, not a mannequin.” -
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“The crew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia was still alive for several minutes during the fatal and futile reentry attempt. The first signs of trouble were observed at 8:53:46. More and more started to go wrong but Mission Control was able to maintain communication through 8:59:32. Sometime after that, the shuttle entered a flat spin while traveling approximately Mach 15, which is enough to cause disorientation and very painful injury, but most likely not unconsciousness or death. Review of recovered data recording shows that Commander Husband and Pilot McCool were still attempting to restore systems and recover control past 9:00:05. The first lethal event was depressurization, which occurred between 9:00:35 and 9:00:59. All that means that the crew was very much alive and very much fighting to maintain/regain control for more than 7 minutes despite knowing that realistically their chances of success were pretty much zero.” -
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“One reason that crows and ravens are associated with death is because they would often follow armies as they marched to battle. Being both carrion birds and extremely intelligent, they realized that a large group of armed men marching on one direction meant that there would be a tasty meal of corpses to eat soon afterwards.” -
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“Imagine being totally aware of someone preforming CPR but you physically can't move or respond. Well that's what happens when you get bitten by a blue ringed octopus, you have approx 6minutes between being bitten and someone starting CPR to keep your heart and lungs functioning to ensure you survive, all whilst being totally aware of what is happening to you. Neurotoxins are fun!”