Last May, Reddit took to Wikipedia to ferret out some of the creepiest, grossest, and just plain wrong phenomena documented on the site.
But if you want to find the best of the best (or the worst of the worst, depending on your perspective) now you need look no further than Pastebin.
An anonymous guest has posted a list of over 100 “Creepy Wiki Articles” to the text-sharing site—everything from superstitions, urban legends, and paranormal activity to weird natural phenomena, unexplained events, and more.
The posting likely originates from this 4chan thread from 2010, where members could post “creepydumps” of links to various freaky, weird, supernatural, spooky, or otherwise unusual links from around the Web.
Here are some of our “favorites” from the list—the spine-tingling unexplained mysteries, the wild and wacky, and more:
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The Tunguska Event: In a jaw-droppingly close call for humanity, an enormous fragment from a comet or meteoroid exploded above Siberia in 1908, flattening millions of trees and producing a shock wave as powerful as a 5.0 magnitude earthquake. Although the object exploded before it could impact, Wikipedia claims it is still considered the largest impact event in recorded history.
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The New Motive Power: Just 35 years after Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, an American Spiritualist named John Murray Spear attempted to create an electronic Messianic figure out of makeshift copper wiring and a dining room table. Needless to say, the intended generator for all mankind didn’t pan out.
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The Bloop: Recorded by an underwater listening station in the Pacific Ocean, the Bloop is one of several unexplained and mysterious aquatic sounds documented in the late ‘90s.
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The Sedlec Ossuary: Nothing says ”nightmare fodder” like this Czech Republic cathedral built with bones—in this case, thousands of human bones dating from the Black Plague, structured to form elaborate structures, including a massive chandelier made from entire human skeletons. The architect of this grand guignol was, by legend, a local woodcarver
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The Markovian Parallax Denigrate: The Wikipedia page for this topic was deleted due to complete lack of evidence. It’s apparently an elaborately constructed conspiracy theory which postulates that a series of gibberish Usenet messages from 1996 are actually details of elaborately constructed conspiracies. It’s a fascinating look at the logic conspiracy buffs use to build their theories.
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Alien Hand Syndrome. When one hemisphere of the brain is damaged or separated from the other half, the opposite hand of the affected person can sometimes figuratively take on a mind of its own, acting directly counter to the individual’s consciously expressed actions. As they operate their other hand, the rogue hand can spontaneously thwart whatever movement they were trying to accomplish. It gets truly weird when the person thinks the hand belongs to someone else, which often happens in these cases.
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Atuk. Could a bad movie script be the modern day equivalent of cursed Egyptian tombs? Those who document the deadly path this comedy has taken think so.
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Spring-heeled Jack. With his clawed fingers, cheesy costume, and penchant for leaping dramatically in front of things, this Victorian urban legend seems more like the world’s first hammy supervillain than a ghost.
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Aokigahara. In the shadow of Mt. Fuji lies a forest so desolate that hundreds of people travel there each year to take their own lives. Despite numerous signs throughout the forest advertising counseling services and begging visitors not to harm themselves, Aokigaraha is the most “popular” place for suicide attempts in the world after the Golden Gate Bridge. Volunteers sweep the woods for missing victims at least once a year.
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The Green Man. So hideously disfigured from a childhood electrical accident that he could only leave his house at night, Raymond Robinson nonetheless lived to a ripe old age and cultivated many friendships despite being a frequent object of ridicule.
Though most of the items on the list deal with odd phenomena, there are some incongruous mentions, like String Theory. Then again, when viewed alongside all of these extremes, string theory itself begins to seem like just another element of the bizarre.
Photo via izarbeltza / Flickr