Though the sensation has probably been around since our ancestors developed emotions, it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that we started describing the uncanny as something that gives us “the creeps.” Charles Dickens, who enriched the English language with plenty of new words and expressions, is credited with the first use of the phrase in his 1849 novel ‘David Copperfield,’ to mean an unpleasant, tingly chill up the spine.

A few days ago, Reddit user Mimiqttt set out to find out what the definition means to different people, and posted a question on the platform, asking, “What are some creepy facts you know?” From natural phenomena to the biological workings of our bodies, here are some of the most popular answers they’ve received.

#1

If you get skinned alive, you’ll die from hypothermia, not blood loss.

gamedev_9998:

If you were burned alive, you’ll die from suffocation, not from the fire itself.

Image credits: wish-com_gaster

#2

When a star dies it explodes and releases a gamma burst and it destroys all in its path, if one goes off near Earth it’ll lead to extinction and there’s no warning because it happens immediately.

Image credits: wetlettuce42

#3

Carmine, a red food dye commonly used in food and makeup, is made of COCHINEAL INSECTS.

Image credits: LemonMeringue26

#4

Youngest “woman” (I use that term loosely) to give birth was 5 years old.

Image credits: Sassysewer

#5

The floating specs you see probably aren’t dust but dead skin cells.

Image credits: sleepy_potatoSalad

#6

You have millions of mites, known as demodex, living on your face.

Image credits: Gr8hound

#7

Last year in the US alone over half a million people were reported missing. About 1% are found.

Image credits: buntybop

#8

When you eat figs you are quite likely to be also eating the mummified carcass of a wasp.

Image credits: stilloldbull2

#9

When you have a kidney transplant, they don’t remove your original organs, and the Transplant does not go in the place of your old organ.

Source: have had three kidney transplants in my lifetime. I have a total of five kidneys in my body.

Image credits: Blackthorne519

#10

Ducks become cannibals due to boredom, of all f*****g reasons.

Image credits: PenCreepy2451

#11

For every 9 people on death row 1 is found to be innocent. Sometimes after death and sometimes after the innocent was on death row for 30 years.

Image credits: Loud_Advertising_947

#12

At any given time, there are 40-50 active serial killers in the United States.

Image credits: Prince_Pancake69

#13

Lobotomy and the guillotine were both used in France through the 1980’s.

Image credits: SailorVenus23

#14

Dead bodies can get goosebumps.

Image credits: Delicious_vanilla611

#15

I believe around 5-10% of the ocean has been explored. We have the technology to study space but it’s not advanced enough to see what’s down there (due to water pressure and darkness and stuff)

Image credits: OffBeatBerry_707

#16

Cotard’s syndrome is a condition where you just think you’re dead or don’t exist. People who have it sometimes stop eating because they think they’re dead.

PurdueJohn:

Similarly there are high anxiety conditions of depersonalization and derealization, where someone doesn’t believe the world around or them exists or are real at all, or that they don’t exist themselves. My daughter had this when she was young. Quite unsettling.

Image credits: BlueCanary434

#17

A female mantis eats her mating partner after having “sex” with him.

Image credits: balevika

#18

Today there are more slaves in the world that at any other time in history.

Image credits: Separate_Mango_666

#19

Hundreds of people die every year… from being strangled by their bedsheets.

GlitzBlitz:

I had a heavy blanket that was pretty much coming apart at the seams. The lining was detaching from the blanket itself.

I woke up one morning and found my son’s head/neck completely entangled in the detached lining. I shook him in a panic and he woke up confused but fine.

It looked like if someone had actually taken the thing and tried to strangle him with it. I threw that thing straight in the garbage.

Image credits: bender0x7d1

#20

mummy brown–or Egyptian Brown–is an old pigment that the pre-Raphaelites used for paintings. it’s a rich color that was made from myrrh, pitch, and the decayed flesh of humans (yup, mummies). artists, for a very long time, did not know the contents of said pigment and we’re turned off by it by 1915 because they found it gross and despicable.

still, a plenty of famous works feature a paint that is essentially dried-up human tissue.

Image credits: Garbouliak

#21

Hearing is the last sense you lose before dying.

d**konajunebug:

My dad is a retired EMT/Paramedic/fire-fighter. Years ago he told be about a guy in cardiac arrest that they brought back to life. The guy ended up coming by the station a few weeks later to thank my dad personally because he had heard – while dead – someone say it was time to call it but my dad said to keep trying.

That story has terrified me. To know you’re dead, but not quite dead, and hear other people call it before you’re fully gone. Geesus, no thank yo.

Image credits: HorrorPusherr

#22

I don’t know why I find this creepy, but our brain cannot create a new face. Every single person we see in our dreams, is someone we have seen in real life before.

#23

You can marry a dead person in France.

#24

Meany types of Gas don’t smell naturally it is added later for safety, so by theory there can happen a mistake…

#25

People are still dying from the radioactive fallout generated by the Chernobyl disaster.

#26

Sometimes if their diet is lacking protein deer will actually search out birds nests on forest floors, stamp the chicks, and then eat them.

There’s a type of be called a vulture Bee that feeds on decomposing flesh, they have wild looking hives, and they will in fact make honey from the dead flesh. Honey that is referred to as “meat honey”. The honey is in fact edible according to researchers.

#27

There is a fish ( the sounderfish) that likes to swim up penis holes that needs surgery to remove and sometimes amputation is the only form of removal.

#28

The mosquito is the deadliest animal.

#29

The human body has roughly 200 grams of bacteria.

#30

Not sure if considered creepy but the ancient Romans went around collecting urine. It was big business. They used it to clean clothes as well as for mouthwash.

#31

Most of the koala population has rampant chlamydia.

#32

During the embalming process in a funeral home, internal organs are sucked out and replaced with embalming fluid. The organs that are sucked out go right into the sewer system. So not only are dead people’s organ bits in the sewers but so too are any medications they were on, diseases they had, etc.

Kind of a head scratcher when you go to a hospital or doctor’s office and see the bio hazard waste bins – yet a funeral home, which process a higher volume of bio hazard waste, has no such disposal protocols

#33

That armadillos are natural carriers of leprosy.

#34

After decapitation you would still be conscious for about 10 seconds and technically would still be alive for 3-6 minutes.

#35

Drinking too much water can kill you. some people who have survived drowning later die because of water intoxication. solution is simple, give them salt or electrolyte fluids to balance their sodium ph in the body.

Image credits: The34Zero

#36

Many victims who survive bear attacks report the sound of the bear’s teeth scraping against their skulls.

Image credits: DinerDuck

#37

There are about 40 supervolcanoes in the world that have yet to erupt. One supervolcano is in Yellowstone National Park and has a magma chamber that is large enough to fit the entire city of Tokyo inside it.

There’s no indication we’re due for a super eruption in our life time, but the thought it could happen still creeps me out.

Image credits: BansheeBallad

#38

During the merger of two black holes,a black holes can occasionally get ejected from the system and get shot out into open space and become a wandering black hole, the creepy part for me is that because a large part of the way in which we see black holes is through their interactions with their surroundings we wouldn’t really be able to see it coming towards us

Image credits: rflok34

#39

The only double-hanging of women to be carried out in modern times was the execution of the Finchley baby farmers. Amelia Sach and Annie Walters would “adopt” unwanted babies for a fee. Then, supposedly, find homes for them. They did not find homes for the babies.

#40

Really just the fact that we can die or have our lives unimaginably ruined at any moment from a basically endless number of ways and that eventually within a handful of decades (or maybe seconds or any time in between) or so it IS going to happen.

Image credits: DontDiscRedditMe

#41

Sewer treatment plants have lifesaver rings around the treatment tanks, in case someone falls in.

#42

Infant flesh is like fish when cooked. White and falls right off the bone.

Thank you, Last Podcast On The Left.

#43

One of the most common places to find a dead body is on the toilet. Cause when they’re alive and not feeling well, the first thing they do is go to the toilet thinking it could be a bowel issue.

Image credits: pumpkinthighs

#44

Some species of Vultures can projectile vomit if they feel threatened.

Missing-Digits:

It is called defensive vomiting and I was an unwitting victim of it once. It is HORRENDOUS!!!

#45

Cadaver dogs can smell bodies through waters (lakes, etc).

Image credits: PlaysTheTriangle

#46

Victorians collected and made art and jewelry from the hair of their loved ones:

https://ift.tt/DF1MIYK

#47

Your eyes have their own immune system that works separately from your body’s immune system. If your body’s immune system found out it would attack your eyes. I read this here and at my last eye appointment I asked if it was true. The eye doctor said “Yeah, it’s kinda weird” and I was like “Kinda?”

Image credits: McSmackthe1st

#48

Due to human artificial selection, dogs are evolving eyebrows.

Image credits: Light_of_Niwen

#49

Minor warning for those who have functional eyes. If you are sensitive just scroll by.

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Some women cook and eat their placenta after birth, has got to be the most horrific thing i know. There are even f*****g recipies online.

#50

Pelicans will just Eat smaller birds sometimes. they snatch them up in their bill and just keep chewing till the bird stops moving.

#51

The only thing preventing you from dissolving your own stomach is a layer of mucus that pores in your stomach lining constantly secrete. If something happens to prevent them from working completely, your stomach will be dissolved within a couple of days.

#52

It only takes twenty minutes to die from a black mamba snake bite, and it hurts the entire time.

#53

There is a website called The Marshall Project, which, from 2015 to 2021, recorded and counted down the time until execution of every death row inmate in the United States, categorized by state. It was accurate up to the second, and had real-time updates about appeals, stays of execution, time of death, method of execution, etc. It was fascinating and gave me major creeps at the same time. The site is still up, and the records can still be read.

#54

Its against the law for a pharmacist to tell seniors on part D they are paying 2.5 times the cost for lets say metformin than someone off the street w/ no insurance. In my hypethetical trans action , The drug costs the pharmacy $2 ,HE charges $4. if grandma comes in w/ her medicare card she is charged $10 copay.. The drug maker then takes $7 leaving $3 instead of $4 as the profit margin to the pharmacy. He is bound by law to say nothing about the scam.

#55

Box Jellyfish are not only the most venomous jellies to humans, but they also possess at least 24 functional eyes (of various degree) on its body despite having no centralized brain. Four of its eyes always peer up out of the water regardless of the animal’s body position; some eyes can make out images, others are more primitive.

#56

Your immune system can just decide that the rest of your body is offensive and goes on the attack. I have this with psoriasis which started as flaky skin and now has become psoriatic arthritis where my fingers, hands and feet are unreliable because my body decided that my body is a foreign object.

F**k you my body!

#57

That in pharmaceutical labs, once they are done with the animals with whatever they were testing, the ones that are still alive are put down and thrown in a freezer. When the freezer is full they are dumped in a furnace.

#58

All mammals have belly buttons.

#59

Statistically the person who is most likely to kill you at any given time is living with you right now.

#60

Prawns are cannibals. They eat their babies.

#61

Herculaneum is better preserved than Pompeii it just hasn’t been excavated as much.
Pompeii was essentially destroyed by falling volcanic rock, its dead later being buried by ash after rigor had set in.

Herculaneum was destroyed by pyroclastic flows so hot that the liquids in people’s bodies turned to vapor and exploded instantly. Brain matter turned into glass. Bone and metal were welded together. All that happened before Pompeii.

Currently, the population in the area is so large that the Italian government is having a hard time deciding whether or not it’s worth it to warn or evacuate them or not

#62

Falling down can kill you, legit. If you hit ur head on something sharp most likely ure dead in the next second. Is not very creepy but it makes me rethink life time to time lol

#63

If we could hear the sound that the Sun emits, it would be the equivalent of standing next to a speaker at a rock concert.

#64

Just after their WWII surrender, the Japanese government created a system of brothels in case American soldiers thought of taking out frustrations on Japanese women. After the rate of STI’s shot up among American GI’s the Army made the Japanese government shut them down, the number of *reported* r*pes went up by 800%. Take note that Japan is a very traditional society with plenty of stigma about reporting rape so the actual numbers were probably even more horrific.

#65

When salmon begin their famous spawning run, they shut down unnecessary systems so they can channel all of their energy into swimming upstream to mate. That includes the immune system, so spawning salmon are highly susceptible to disease and infection. They basically start to rot before they die. You can see many discolored salmon during their run, and there are even some missing pieces of their bodies.

I read about this last year. We are recent transplants to the PNW, so this is all new to me. My daughter and I went to a nearby creek this week to see if the salmon were still doing their thing. Sure enough, we saw one swimming upstream with a big, gaping hole in its back, complete with visible flesh and stringy white things protruding from it. It was awful, but we couldn’t look away, either.

She asked me not to cook salmon for dinner this week. It’s one of my favorite meals, but…yeah, I’m good for now.

#66

Body odor isn’t caused by dirt or sweat on one’s body. It’s the bacteria that’s produced by dirt and sweat that emits the BO.

#67

Most of us are highly succeptible to suggestion when hypnotized, including attempts to instill false memories. Our brains *cannot* tell the difference between real and false memories. Imagine the possibilities…..

#68

Many people have a parasitic infection and don’t even know it…

#69

In the US, Most missing persons cases that take place in the wilderness happen around places with large cave networks.

#70

Hepatitis ranges from A-E, with A being the most transmissible in contaminated water sources.

#71

In a strange and semi creepy coincidence, Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was saved from falling off a train platform and being run over by Edwin Boothe, brother of John Wilkes Boothe.

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