Unsettling Truths: 45 Disturbing Facts You Need to Know

In 1976 during the filming of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man, the film crew discovered the mummified corpse of Elmer McCurdy in a funhouse in a Californian amusement park. McCurdy was an Oklahoma outlaw who had died in a shootout in 1911 and his body had been used ever since as a sideshow attraction. His discoverers only realized it was a human body when his arm broke off, revealing bone and muscle.

27. The Romans used crushed mouse brains as toothpaste. It was mixed with bicarbonate sodium, which formed an excellent dough for the daily care of the mouth and teeth.

28. When male lions take over a pride, they almost always kill the cubs. One reason is those female lions will not be receptive to mating while they are nursing, so killing the cubs enables the male lions to procreate and ensure that his own alpha genes outlive the competition.

29. Tokaimura nuclear accident: Due to not following safety protocols, a tank of radioactive liquid had a much higher concentration of uranyl nitrate than was safe. While adding more liquid, there was a bright flash of Cherenkov radiation followed by gamma radiation alarms. In that split second, both men near the tanks were dead, their bodies just didn't know it yet. One man, Hisashi Ouchi, was kept alive for 83 days before his body finally gave out. Even after his skin fell off, they attempted to graft it back on with tape. He was leaking bodily fluids faster than they could be replenished. He asked to be left to die during a brief moment while he was conscious, but the doctors ignored his request.

30. David Parker Ray set up a sex dungeon and kidnapped women to be basically living sex dolls for himself and his wife and occasionally, his own dogs. Then he washed them up, brainwashed them with a combination of drugs to induce hypnosis and make sure they don't remember anything and let them loose. One of the women he kidnapped had it in her mind that her experiences were just nightmares until the FBI came knocking on her door. That in and of itself sounds super disturbing until you read the transcript of the tape he made for his victims. (Warning: Source below is extremely disturbing. Do not click at work or in public)

When a fly lands on your food it vomits on it to prepare to eat it. They don't only vomit enzymes, they basically vomit their stomach contents in an attempt to pre-digest the food, meaning whatever they previously ate is vomited onto your food.

32. Your brain is actively editing your senses. You can always see your nose. You have a blind spot in your vision but your brain fills in the missing data. Your eyes actually process visual information upside-down. A lot of sufferers of eye conditions like glaucoma don't realize they have these problems until it's too late because of how the brain fills in the gaps in their vision. That's why it's so important to get your eyes checked out regularly.

33. In the human body, bacteria outnumber human cells by approximately 10 to 1. Bacteria comprise ~3% of your body by mass, while your brain is ~2%. So you're something of a minority of your own self. You are nothing but a sentient spaceship sent out to mine the universe for sugars.

34. A “rat king” is a term for a number of rats congealed and bound together in a tangle of tails, dirt, hair, and blood. It has been proven that such rats survive for an extended period of time with their tails tangled.

35. Fatal familial insomnia is a neurodegenerative disease that eventually results in a complete inability to sleep. Many patients go six to nine months without sleep, during which time they develop dementia and become unresponsive. Death follows. It is incurable and untreatable. Inducing a coma still keeps the brain awake. Because it is a form of prion disease, similar to mad cow disease, it's irreversible even by genetic therapy because once the protein exists in the body, it will slowly transform healthy proteins into their prion form.

Chris Benoit was a pro wrestler who murdered his wife and child in their home before committing suicide. About 14 hours before their bodies were discovered, a Wikipedia article noted that he would be replaced by another wrestler in a match due to personal issues including the death of his wife. The IP address of the editor was traced to Stamford, Connecticut, which is also the location of WWE headquarters. After news of the early death notice reached mainstream media, the anonymous poster accessed Wikinews to explain his edit as a “huge coincidence and nothing more.”

37. In 600 million years, the Sun's increasing luminosity will begin to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle thus allowing plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis to completely die off and triggering a mass extinction.

38. James Marion Sims, a southern-born slaveholder, is credited as the “father of modern gynecology” but his research was conducted on enslaved black women without anesthesia. He performed 30 operations on a slave with no anesthesia to learn how to repair a tearing of the wall between the vagina and the anus after traumatic childbirth (fistula).

39. Certain breeds of dogs (Shih Tzus, Pugs, Boston Terriers) with shallow eye sockets are more likely to suffer from proptosis, i.e., eyeballs popping out of their socket and there's a special type of spoon to put them back in.

40. The lead singer of the black metal band “Mayhem” used to carry around a bag with a dead crow in it in order to huff it and have the stench of death in his nose before performing. While performing, Dead (the lead singer) would often cut himself with hunting knives and broken glass. Additionally, the band often had pig or sheep heads impaled on stakes and planted at the front of their stage. Later “Dead” committed suicide to complete his image and left a note saying “sorry for the blood, cheers”. A band member found him and before alerting police proceeded to take a photo of his friend’s dead body. This image was later used as their album cover.

The record for most children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 labors, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets over 40 years.

42. If sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be deafening even though it's 93 million miles away. The sun constantly produces a roar of 290 decibels. If space could carry sound it would still be 125 dB by the time it got to earth. It'd be like a jackhammer everywhere all the time.

43. Horses cannot vomit due to the angle their esophagus enters their stomach and the muscle tone of their esophagogastric junction. If a horse does vomit it means that they are close to death.

44. Sand tiger sharks in the embryo will develop teeth and eat their weaker siblings. The one that is left alive is the only one that is born, whom the mother will immediately abandon after birth.

45. Human Botfly which is common in Central and South America, lays its eggs on mosquitos. These mosquitos then bite humans and deposit the eggs in the bite holes. The eggs then grow into larva under the skin and begin consuming the host's skin, until it matures when they emerge as a fly that resembles a bumblebee. The best way to get rid of one is to attach a piece of meat to the outside of the skin, suffocating it and causing it to re-burrow into the meat.