● The more we learn about the world, the more wonderful it seems, but some discoveries
have the opposite effect.
What dark horrors have we unearthed about the past?
What terrifying truths are waiting to be unveiled?
Here are the creepiest discoveries on Earth.
15 - Willard Asylum Suitcases ● When the Willard Asylum for the insane
was closed in 1995, former employees were given the task of emptying the old buildings.
One employee stumbled into an attic where the belongings of the long-dead patients were
stored in over 400 suitcases.
Their possessions included normal items like clothes and books, as well a baseball bat,
a clown doll and a false leg.
14 - Stone Balls ● In the 1930s, a banana company in Costa
Rica was clearing space for plantations, and they began to unearth strange, perfectly round
stone spheres.
Since then, over 300 of these balls have been found, with some weighing 16 tons and measuring
two metres across.
There has been a lot of speculation about their purpose, from the magical to the extraterrestrial,
and while we’re sure that’s nonsense, they do date back over 1000 years and we still
have no idea why they were made.
13 - Neanderthal Behaviour ● Humanity has a pretty bloody past, but
it seems like the more we discover, the worse it gets.
A hoard of sliced-up bones found in Belgium suggests that our early relatives, the Neanderthals,
engaged in cannibalism during cold winters.
There is also evidence that the neanderthals were killed off by our homo sapiens ancestors,
who may have mated with them too.
Modern human DNA is actually a mix of homo sapiens, neanderthal, a third species called
Denisovan and a mystery fourth type of mankind.
12 - Entropy ● In 2011 physicist Brian Schmidt won the
Nobel Prize for his evidence that the expansion of the universe since the big bang was actually
speeding up, rather than slowing down.
What this means is that the universe, already a pretty cold place, is getting colder and
colder.
Eventually, it will be so cold that all matter and energy will no longer interact and reality
will cease to exist as we know it.
Thanks, Brian.
11 - Girolamo Segato ● Girolamo Segato was an Italian archaeologist
and medical scientist, who became fascinated with the process of preserving dead bodies
during his various expeditions to Egypt in the 19th century.
When he returned to Florence he discovered and developed his own method for preservation,
where the skin and muscle tissue of the corpse was turned to stone, in a process called petrification.
These eerily well-preserved cadavers are still around today, but Segato’s methods are lost
to history.
10 - Shackled skeletons of Athens ● Archaeologists digging near Athens in
2016 found the mass grave of over 80 skeletons.
The bodies were all shackled at the wrists with iron handcuffs and arranged in an orderly
row, which suggests that these were not slaves or peasants, but important men or soldiers.
Experts believe that these men were the supporters of a military coup by a man named Cylon in
around 600 BC, and were executed and buried still wearing their manacles.
9 - Dark Matter ● Many of us think of the universe as a
big empty space full of galaxies.
But scientists have noticed that other galaxies are moving away from us and spinning around
themselves much faster than is possible for the amount of matter that they seem to contain.
This led to the discovery that only 5% of the universe is made of stuff we can see and
interact with.
The rest is a mysterious and unknown quantity known as dark matter and dark energy.
8 - East River Monster ● In July 2012, a strange dead creature
washed up under Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
At first look, it appeared to be a bloated pig with a rotting face, but a look at its
feet shows it has five toes and claws, like a dog.
The monster has some similarity to another dead creature with a pig’s body and a strange
beak that appeared further up the coast four years before in Montauk.
Some believe the corpses to be a terrifying new breed of giant rat.
7 - The Bloop ● With an array of microphones in the ocean
called hydrophones, scientists are able to listen to the sounds of the sea.
In 1997, they regularly picked up a strange sound that they called ‘The Bloop’.
Experts were sure that the noise was not man-made, and resembled the soundwave pattern of an
animal call.
Except it was picked up by sensors over 5000 kilometres away, making it one very big animal.
The current theory is that it is the sound of Antarctic ice-shelves cracking up.
6 - Baigong Pipes ● The caves of mount Baigong in China contain
a series of rusty pipes that connect some of the openings and waterways inside the caves.
These features have been found all over the mountain, suggesting that someone designed
them to carry water.
This sounds believable, except for the fact that the pipes date back to over a 150,000
years ago, but humans didn’t start making metal until around 12,000 years ago.
So either the formations are natural or...alien.
5 - Ashkelon Baby Grave ● On the coast of Israel, the bones of nearly
100 babies were found in one grave beneath a Roman house dating back to around 2000 years
ago.
Experts were curious as to why so many seemingly healthy babies were killed and hidden over
a 50-year period.
The leading theory is that the house was a Roman brothel, and the illegitimate and unwanted
children were disposed of and their tiny bones dropped into one grave.
4 - Peter Pan Mummies ● In 2010 The Los Angeles Police began investigating
the discovery of the mummified remains of two infants found wrapped in newspaper in
a trunk from the 1930s.
Strangest of all was that the name on the trunk was JM Barrie, the same name as the
author of Peter Pan, a story where children live forever in Neverland.
The investigation uncovered that the owner was actually a woman named Janet Barrie, a
Scottish nurse who may have killed and hidden her own kids.
3 - Gamma Ray Bursts ● US military satellites in the 60s started
picking up flashes of extremely bright gamma ray radiation from distant galaxies.
These bursts of unbelievably powerful light come from rapidly rotating pulsars or the
collapse of two stars into each other.
Gamma Ray Bursts usually last for around thirty seconds, are completely invisible and largely
unpredictable.
If one struck Earth from a nearby system, all life would be incinerated in seconds.
2 - Llullaillaco frozen children ● The Children of Llullaillaco are three
mummified bodies which were found frozen on the slopes of the Andes in South America.
All evidence suggests the children were part of a ritual sacrifice where they were drugged
with coca leaves and alcohol and left in the snow to die by the Inca civilisation around
500 years ago.
The cold, dry conditions on the mountain mean that these coked-up popsicle kids are the
best preserved mummies ever found.
1 - Long Skulls of Mexico ● A cemetery dug up in Mexico revealed the
bodies of 25 people, but thirteen of the skeletons had bizarre, alien-shaped skulls.
Their craniums were tall and cone-like, and several had mutilated teeth.
Archaeologists have long been aware of the Mesoamerican practice of deforming children’s
skulls, where wooden boards are used to apply pressure to the infants’ head to achieve
the desired shape.
Most of the bodies were those of children, suggesting that it was not a process many
people survived.