This web page contains creepy facts for kids, parents, teachers and anyone who wants to be creeped out by some true facts. Our goal is to provide you with creepy, but accurate facts on a wide variety of topics. In addition to facts that will creep you out, we provide additional resources to help you find more facts that are creepy.
We gathered the below creepy facts to help you learn about things that are creepy, but true. We cover a wide variety of topics and continuously keep adding new facts that will creep you out. If you’re easily creeped out or have a medical condition that can be affected by being creeped out, we recommended you avoid reading the below creepy facts.
If any of the below creepy facts are inaccurate, please contact us and let us know.
14 Creepy Facts for Kids
- Don’t lose your head over this one, but a popular chicken known as “Mike the Headless Chicken” survived for 18 months after having his head cut off. Mike was a Wyandotte chicken owned by Lloyd Olsen. On September 10th, 1945, Olsen chose Mike and with an axed removed his head. However, Mike’s jugular vein was missed, and his brain stem was left mostly intact. Olsen took care of Mike, prolonging his headless life for 18 months until he died on March 17th, 1947.
- If you think your great grandmother is old, then you need to meet Jeanne Calment. Calment holds the record for being the oldest living person ever recorded. She was born on February 18th, 1875 and died in August 4th, 1997. This means she lived for 122 years and 164 days. She lived through some of the darkest events in human history. She was 39 years old at the start of World War 1 and 64 years old at the start of World War 2.
- When you attended a funeral, you’re probably not snapping selfies with the deceased. However, in the 19th century it was quite common to take pictures with the recently deceased. This practice was known as post-mortem photography. During this time, it was quite expensive to get photos taken of you and your family. So, most people would have photos taken with a family member after they died.
- Speaking of selfies and your cell phone, you may want to clean it after hearing this. Researchers at the University of Arizona studied cell phones and the bacteria found them. They identified over 17,000 bacterial gene copies on young adult cell phones. They estimated that the average cell phone is home to ten times more bacteria than a toilet seat. So, the next time you’re on the toilet using your phone, think about which one is dirtier!
- We bet you love playing with your dog and his squeaky toy. However, you may think twice about that squeaky toy when you realize why your dog loves it. The noise generated by a squeaky dog toy mimics a scared and/or injured animal. That activates the primitive hunting instincts in your dogs’ brain. It drives your fury and loving friend to keep biting the toy until it stops, or in primitive terms the animal is killed.
- It’s estimated that four million people visit Yellowstone National Park every year. What these four million people and even you may not know is a massive super volcano lurks beneath Yellowstone National Park. This super volcano is known as the Yellowstone Caldera. If this super volcano erupted, the entire world would feel its effects. The global climate would cool for years if not decades. Ash would fall all over the United States. For example, Chicago is over 1,300 miles from Yellowstone National Park, but would get .3 to 1.1 inches of ash fall from an eruption. States like Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming would be covered in three feet of ash.
- Everyone is annoyed by flies, especially when you’re having a picnic on a warm summer day. Shockingly, some flies are more than annoying, their parasites. A fly known as the human botfly (Dermatobia hominis) has larvae that can grows in the subcutaneous layers of human skin. The scary part, they use mosquitoes to spread their eggs. A mosquito is captured by a female human botfly and she then attaches her eggs to the mosquito. When they mosquito feeds on a human, the eggs fall of and embedded themselves in your skin… another reason to hate mosquitoes!
- Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. Climbers from all over the world attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest every year. It’s a dangerous climb and over 300 climbers have died trying. The crazy part is more than 200 of those dead bodies are still on the mountain! It’s dangerously and costly to remove the bodies, so they’re left on the mountain. What’s even more crazy is many of these bodies are landmarks used by climbing expeditions. It’s hard to imagine an Everest guide saying, “Ok everyone, we’re going to be making a right at the corpse”.
- Many people play the lottery every single day, spending hard earned money on a chance to become a millionaire. The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 300 million, and in some cases the odds are higher! If you play the lottery think about this, you have a 1 in 106 chance of dying in a car accident. In the United States, the leading cause of death not caused by a disease or disorder is a vehicular accident. Think about that the next time you drive to the local store to buy a lottery tickets, your chances of dying are exponentially greater than becoming a millionaire!
- Our birthdays are time to celebrate our birth and being another year older. As we get older, we ultimately get closer to death. Oddly, the day you die is statistically most likely to be on your birthday. Estimates claim a human has a 6.7% chance dying on their birthdate, higher than any other day of the year. Researchers are quite sure why this is the case, but it’s most likely related to party accidents and mental health (depression and suicide).
- We’ve all heard the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid” in reference to believing something. What you may not know, is the phrase comes from the largest event of mass murder-suicide in United States history. On November 18th, 1978 a total of 918 died at Jonestown (Peoples Temple Agricultural Project). Most of the deaths were caused by people drinking Kool-Aid laced with several toxic chemicals, like cyanide. The next time you innocently use this phrase, remember you’re reciting a phrase based on the deaths of over 900 people.
- Some horror stories can really dig deep into your mind and scary you. What’s scarier that a fictitious horror story? People believing a horror story is real! In 2009, Slender Man was created Eric Knudsen. Stories started to popup across the internet regarding Slender Man. One or more of these Slender Man stories convinced Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser that he was real. They attacked Payton Leutner in the woods and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser did this to prove that Slender Man was real… at the age of 12!
- Haunted houses pop up everywhere during the month of Halloween. They contain all sorts of things to scare people. They’re a safe to get your blood pumping, adrenaline flowing and totally scared. However, the scariest haunted house in the world is McKamey Manor in Lawrence County, Tennessee. It can take up to eight hours to complete and is so terrifying that visitors need a medical examination and sign a liability waiver to visit the haunt. Visitors can expect to be physically and psychologically tortured. Maybe we’ll stick with the local carnival haunted house this year.
- Has anyone told you that you looked heated because you’re so mad? Better be careful, if you get to heated you could end up being another victim of spontaneous human combustion. No, you won’t burst into flames for getting to mad, but they’re cases of human beings spontaneously bursting into flames and being consumed. The best example of a human spontaneously combusting is Mary Reeser on July 2nd, 1951.
Additional Resources with Creepy Facts
- People Sharing Creepy Facts – Find tons of creepy facts on this /r/AskReddit thread on Reddit.
- 13 Creepy Facts About Animals – Learn about thirteen creepy facts about animals on the Smithsonian website.
- 8 Creepy Facts About Sleep – You may never want to sleep again after you read these eight creepy facts about sleep.
- 29 Creepy Facts About the Middle Ages – Read twenty-nine true creepy facts about the Middle Ages on the MSN website.
- 10 Creepy Things Found on Google Maps – Discover ten creepy things that were found on Google Maps in this YouTube video.