10 Photos With Chilling Stories Behind Them
John Lennon gives an autograph to his killer, an unsuspecting father and daughter take a photo next to a car with explosives, a girl takes a selfie a few minutes before her death... Yes, there is a terrible story behind each of these photos.
Look at these photos without reading the captions. What do you see? Happy children, bright clowns, strange skeletons and school photos. They seem like just photos. But each of them has its own backstory - creepy and shocking. Now look and read what each of these photos hides, which at first glance seem ordinary.
Two seconds after Mary McQuicken snapped this photo of her brothers Michael and Sean atop Moro Rock in California's Sequoia National Park, they were struck by lightning. Of the three, hiking in the Sierra Nevada in August 1975, only Michael (right) survived.
In this photo taken on December 8, 1980, John Lennon signs an autograph for Mark David Chapman, the man who would kill him less than six hours later. Chapman was originally a Beatles fan but became a religious fanatic and turned his back on his favorite band, enraged by John's comments that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus."
When Lennon left his apartment to go to the recording studio, Chapman stopped him and asked for an autograph. The unsuspecting musician signed the record and went about his business. A few hours later, when Lennon returned from the studio, Chapman, seeing him, called after him, “Hey, Mr. Lennon!” and then shot him five times. Chapman remained at the scene of the crime, sitting on the pavement and serenely reading “The Catcher in the Rye” when the police arrived.
A Victorian era photograph that belongs to the postmortem genre. What is it? If you don’t explain anything, these photos won’t scare you. Perhaps you can note some strangeness of the captured characters, but this can be attributed to the peculiarities of 19th century photography, when the shutter speed was several minutes, during which you had to sit still. In fact, the people in the postmortem photo are dead. For example, the woman in the photo died in childbirth.
In photo studios of that time there were special devices for fixing corpses. For example, tripods that allowed the body to be held vertically. The most impressive were the dead with open eyes. Often the eyes of the dead were opened and a special solution was dripped into them so that the mucous membrane did not dry out and the eyes did not become cloudy. Sometimes the eyelids were cut off, sometimes the iris and pupils were drawn on the closed eyelids.
At first glance, it seems that the photo shows an ordinary clown. However, behind his mask is serial killer and rapist John Wayne Gacy, known as the "killer clown." This maniac raped and killed 33 people, including children and teenagers. When John was 9 years old, he himself became a victim of a pedophile. In adulthood, he was known to society as an exemplary family man and a workaholic who fed his family by working as a clown at parties. About a dozen films have been made about him, including "To Catch a Killer" and "Gravedigger Gacy." Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson dedicated songs to him. He became the prototype for the clown Pennywise in King's novel "It."
This photo looks like a typical school photo, but if you look in the upper left corner, you can see two teenagers pretending to point guns at the camera. They are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the infamous Columbine High School massacre in 1999. During the massacre, they wounded 37 people (13 of them fatally) before turning the gun on themselves.
A newspaper reporter who was photographing the fog covering the Yangtze River in Wuhan later looked at the photo and was horrified to discover that the photo showed a man falling off a bridge, with his girlfriend jumping after him a few seconds later. Unfortunately, such incidents are not uncommon. According to official data, every two minutes someone in China tries to commit suicide.
Omayra Sanchez, 13, was one of the 25,000 people killed in the mudslides that followed the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano on November 13, 1985. Trapped in the rubble of a building, the girl stood in water up to her neck for three days before dying. She gained worldwide fame thanks to photographs taken by photojournalist Franck Fournier shortly before her death.
A photograph of Frenchwoman Blanche Monnier, who spent 25 years isolated in a dark room, naked and hungry, surrounded by rats. She was locked in the room by her mother, who did not agree with her daughter's choice of lover. Following an anonymous tip-off in 1901, the unfortunate woman, who had once been a vibrant brunette, was discovered by the French police. It was initially thought that she would not recover, and although she later recovered physically, her sanity was never restored.
This photograph of a father and daughter was taken on August 15, 1998, in Northern Ireland, minutes before a red car packed with explosives detonated, killing 29 people and injuring nearly 220. The attack, claimed by the IRA, was the deadliest in the conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted more than 30 years. The photo was found on a camera pulled from the rubble, and shows the man and daughter miraculously surviving.
A 17-year-old Russian schoolgirl, Ksenia Ignatyeva, took a selfie on a bridge in St. Petersburg in an attempt to impress her friends. However, upon reaching the highest point of the bridge, the girl tripped, lost her balance, and grabbed a live cable 10 meters above the ground. The shock threw her off the bridge, where police found Ksenia's body.