Photos that look normal until you know what's really going on
At first glance, innocent photographs can be far more disturbing than you might think. And it shows how important context is and that we should never judge a book (in this case photography) by its cover. There are secrets behind the cute smiles of happy people. And don't forget that even the villains laugh and have fun.
16 PHOTOS
1. Camp staff takes a day off.
These are photos of the Auschwitz staff enjoying a pleasant weekend. They look like camp leaders, but their job is to kill people, and they loved it.
2. This is a photo from a 1970s game show, The Dating Game.
The man in the circle is serial killer Rodney Alcala. By the time he appeared on the show, he had raped several women and killed at least one.
3. Father and daughter in Omah, Northern Ireland.
This happy photo of a father and daughter was taken shortly before the 1998 Oma car bombing. A bomb planted by a group known as the Real IRA was in this red car and killed 29 people, including the photographer who took the photo. Both father and daughter survived.
4. Franklin Delano Floyd and Suzanne Marie Sevakis.
This is the main character of Franklin Delano Floyd. In fact, the little girl is Floyd's stepdaughter, Suzanne Marie Sevakis, whom he kidnapped around 1974 when Suzanne was less than 10 years old. He will continue to raise her as his daughter, teaching her in high school under several pseudonyms, give birth to a son from her in 1988, and marry her in 1989 under the name Tonya Hughes. By 1990, Suzanne decided to leave Floyd and take her son Michael with her. In April of that year, she was found beaten and bruised on the side of a highway, after which she died in hospital. Michael ended up in a foster family and was adopted, but in 1994 he was kidnapped by Floyd and was never seen again.
5. American physicist Harold Agnew.
This is physicist Harold Agnew holding the nucleus of the Fat Man atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
6. Genie.
The genie was a "wild" child. Throughout her childhood, she was tied to a chair in the room and punished when she made a noise. They found her, rescued her, tried to teach her to speak, and she really managed to learn a little to communicate. As far as we know now, she was curious, intelligent, and eager to learn. Her brain literally missed the opportunity to learn the language. As far as we know, she's somewhere in a nursing home
7. Hartley's violin.
This is a Hartley violin, owned by Wallace Hartley, conductor and lead violinist on the Titanic. It was the one he carried with him and played on the night the ship sank. Survivors reported seeing Hartley and his group on the deck of the ship during the sinking, playing to calm passengers as they boarded the lifeboats. Hartley and all members of the group died during the flooding. We have his violin because at some unknown point before his death, Hartley hid the violin back in the monogrammed case for safekeeping. This is how she was found floating in a field of debris. They were able to identify it as a Hartley violin due to the engraved brass plate, and it was returned to his bride, who kept it until her death.
8. John Edward Robinson and his family.
This is serial killer John Edward Robinson (yellow sweater) with baby Tiffany Stazi, whose mother he killed the day before. He later gave the baby Tiffany to his brother, saying that she had been adopted. His brother, along with Tiffany, did not know the truth for 15 years. Only eight of his victims have been identified, and he has been on death row since 2000.
9. American volcanologist David A. Johnston.
13 hours after the photo was taken, on May 18, 1980, the volcanic eruption killed 57 people, including the volcanologist.
10. Flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force.
This picture was taken by a group of survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes. They were eventually saved, but in order to survive, they had to resort to cannibalism. They all smile in the photo, but when you see the human spine to their right in the photo, it gets creepy.
11. This is a photo of Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken, who wrote the lyrics and music for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, respectively. In this photo, they just won an Oscar for The Little Mermaid.
Ashman told Mencken that night that they needed to have a serious talk when they returned to New York, and when they returned a couple of days later, Ashman told Mencken that he had AIDS and would die. They have been songwriting partners for over a decade and have been in the process of working on Beauty and the Beast. So it looks like a happy photo of two friends fulfilling their wildest dream, but it's actually a recording of the last normal moment they had together. And although Mencken is smiling all over, if you look closely at Ashman, you will see that something is wrong.
12. Celebrating the Day of the Constitution of Poland in Chicago.
This is a photograph of First Lady Rosalyn Carter in 1978 shaking hands with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was an active politician at the time. By that time, he had already killed more than 20 young people. The lapel has the letter "S" given to him by the Secret Service to indicate that he has received security clearance. The photo was even captioned: "Best wishes to John Gacy, Rosalyn Carter."
13. Two trails in the snow. Only one leads to life.
This is a photograph of Kurt Demberger after his companion, the outstanding climber Herman Buhl, fell into an abyss on the Himalayan mountain Chogolis. Buhl followed Dimberger and left the path for a moment, after which he fell through the overhanging cornice. It stays in the ice.
14. Photo of serial killer Christopher Wilder lurking in the background during the Seventeen Magazine fashion show at the Meadows Mall in Las Vegas, April 1, 1984.
Wilder kidnapped and killed 17-year-old Michelle Kaufman after meeting her at this fashion show (Stands in the foreground).
15. Two guys are going to have coffee at a gas station.
It is Salah Abdeslam and his driver returning to Belgium. The night before, he ordered a terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, which killed 131 people.
16. Whitakers at the graduation dinner.
The guy on the right, Bart Whitaker, paid two of his buddies to kill his family that night. They killed the mother and brother, but the father who took the picture survived. Bart was later sentenced to death, but after his father strongly opposed it, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned him and he is now serving a life sentence.
Keywords: Photographs | Secrets | People | Extraordinary | Life | Society | History | Strange thing | Picture | Tragedy | Accident