9 ordinary-looking pictures with scary stories behind them

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, words only add weight to photos. Here are nine pictures that at first glance seem completely innocent, but in fact they conceal a terrible secret - you only have to find out their history.

The photo shows the American volcanologist David A. Johnston, who is comfortably seated on a folding chair. However, on May 18, 1980, just thirteen hours after this photo was taken, Mount St. Helens erupted, killing 57 people, including Johnston. Johnston was the first to report the eruption of Mount St. Helens, broadcasting his last words on the radio: "Vancouver! Vancouver! It's started!". His body was never found, but in 1993 the wreckage of his trailer was discovered.

This photo of the father and daughter was taken shortly before the terrorist attack in Om on August 15, 1998. The bomb was planted in a red Vauxhall Cavalier car, captured in this photo. The explosion killed 29 people, including a photographer. The father and daughter from the photo survived, and the camera was later found in the ruins.

The photo shows physicist Harold Agnew holding a nuclear atomic bomb "Fat Man" in his hand, which will be dropped on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. It is inconceivable that a small object in the hands of this man killed 80,000 people.

David "Chim" Seymour's 1948 photograph depicts a girl named Tereska, who grew up in a concentration camp during World War II. In 1948, she lived in an orphanage for children with emotional disorders in Warsaw. Researchers identified the girl in the photo in 2017. The house of four-year-old Tereska was destroyed during the bombing of Warsaw by the German Luftwaffe, and the girl herself was wounded by shrapnel, which caused her brain damage.

Fleeing from the bombing of Warsaw together with her 14-year-old sister Jadwiga, Tereska starved for three weeks while trying to reach a village 65 kilometers away. Since the mid-sixties, she lived in the Creative psychiatric hospital near Warsaw, where she died in 1978.

In the photo, Michael and Sean McQuilken are laughing at the fact that their hair is standing on end, not even suspecting that lightning will strike them in just a few seconds. The brothers and their sister Mary went hiking and on August 20, 1975 were on Moro Rock in California's Sequoia National Park. Fortunately, both brothers survived the lightning strike.

Michael McQuilken later recalled:

In the spring of 1954, Los Angeles Times photographer John Jayant was in the yard of his house on the coast when he heard a noise coming from the beach. He grabbed the camera and rushed to the water. On the spot, he saw a couple from the photo above, they were hugging each other. Their one-and-a-half-year-old son was playing in the yard in front of the house, but at some point he got to the beach, where he was swept away by a wave. His body was later found a couple of kilometers from the shore.

This photo of the ship "Grankan" was taken on April 16, 1947. The people on the dock are members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, who are trying to put out a fire in the hold of the ship. However, there were 2,200 tons of ammonium nitrate on board the Grankan. Just a few minutes after this photo was taken, the ship exploded, initiating one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the history of mankind. All the firefighters in the photo above, except one, died instantly, and with them about 500 more people.

These pictures from the League of Nations meeting in Geneva in September 1933 show Nazi propagandist and politician Joseph Goebbels before and after he found out that he was being photographed by a Jew. The pictures were taken by Alfred Eisenstadt (the author of the iconic photograph of a sailor and a nurse kissing in Times Square on Victory Day), an American photographer of German origin. At first, Goebbels allowed Eisenstadt to photograph himself several times in a good mood. However, when he learned that Eisenstadt was a Jew, he frowned, and Eisenstadt captured "eyes full of hatred."

In this picture, we see former Beatles band member John Lennon signing an autograph to the man on the right. Although it was commonplace for Lennon to sign autographs, he left this one just six hours before his death on December 8, 1980. The man on the right is Mark David Chapman, who will shoot Lennon in just a few hours. In the photo, Lennon signs a copy of the album "Double Fantasy" for him.