14 Photos with the Creepiest Backstories

Today we look at 14 Photos with the Creepiest Backstories

14. The Solway Spaceman
On a quiet summer day in 1964, the Templeton’s took an afternoon outing to a local marsh and decided to photograph their young daughter in her new dress. Aside from the girl and her two parents, the marsh was empty that day. However, when the father later took the footage to be developed, this strange figure appeared in the background of one of the photos. UFO believers argue that the photo is proof of extraterrestrial visitors, a claim that is bolstered by Kodak’s insistence that the photo was not faked. Keep in mind this is long before photoshop.

13. Christopher McCandless
Christopher McCandless, made famous by his posthumous biography, Into the Wild, which was penned by Jon Krakauer who apparently has moved way beyond Happyhour, was an American hiker who travelled into the Alaskan Bush… with few supplies in order to “live simply.” This photo, taken by a trucker who had picked him up as a hitchhiker, captures the last moment he was seen alive by another human being. He succumbed to starvation months later.

12. Chernobyl’s Elephant Foot
This photo was taken 10 years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophically failed in April of 1986 in Ukraine. What you’re looking at in this picture is radioactive material mixed with concrete, melted to the point of looking like lava.  It’s estimated that, at the peak of its radioactive power, this liquid nuclear waste would kill someone directly exposed to it for more than 300 seconds. In 1996 when this photo was taken, ten years after the meltdown, one hour of exposure would be enough to kill you. The radioactive ooze is still in liquid form after 30 years, and threatens to trigger future explosions and contamination if it burns through the cement structure and reaches groundwater below. doh!

11. Mount St. Helens Eruption
Robert Landsburg was a photographer and native Washingtonian who visited Mount St. Helens in the months leading up to the eruption to capture its volcanic changes. On the morning of the eruption, May 18, 1980, Landsburg was only miles from the volcano’s summit and took these photos documenting the approaching ash cloud before securing his camera in his backpack and laying down on top of it to protect the film. His photos were recovered with his body weeks later.

10. Kamikaze Pilots
WWII’s Battle of the Pacific was fought between Axis Japan and Allied forces. Toward the end of the conflict, Japanese forces resorted to suicidal kamikaze attacks. Kamikaze pilots, often young, inexperienced flyers who were drafted into military service, were ordered to crash planes laden with explosives into US naval vessels. This photo shows one kamikaze squad playing with a puppy minutes before their final mission began.

9. Columbine
This photo, taken just weeks before the infamous Columbine shooting, shows Columbine High School students posing in their class yearbook photo. In the top left corner, future shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold point finger guns at the camera. The two would go on to kill 12 classmates, a teacher, and themselves on April 20th, 1999.

8. John Lennon
John Lennon, arguably the most famous member of the Beatles, was killed on the evening of December 8, 1980.  He was 40 years old. His assassin, Mark David Chapman, shot Lennon four times in the back as he entered his residence building. Several hours prior to the murder, Chapman had greeted Lennon outside his building and asked for his autograph which Lennon provided. This photo was taken during that encounter. Chapman can be seen on the right. Just two days before, when asked about giving autographs during an interview, Lennon said “people come and ask for autographs, or say ‘Hi’, but they don’t bug you.” Three beatles fans committed suicide in response to the murder.

7. Wind Turbine
Captured in the Netherlands in 2013, this photo shows two wind turbine engineers embracing while trapped atop a 220ft (67m) turbine being engulfed in flames. Wind turbines of this kind offer only one escape route, a vertical ladder along the shaft, which was blocked by the inferno. One of the men jumped to his death following the moment captured by this photograph, while the other was later found by firefighters.

6. R. Budd Dwyer
Robert Budd Dwyer was a Pennsylvania Treasurer and politician accused and subsequently convicted of accepting a bribe while in office. The day before his sentencing, Dwyer called a press conference. Everyone in attendance, including his press secretary, believed he had called the conference in order to publicly resign, but after a half hour speech, Dwyer instead pulled a gun from a manila envelope and shot himself in the head. The entire event was recorded, and this frame, moments before the shot, shows Dwyer warning onlookers not to approach him so they wouldn’t be injured by the blast. The man whose testimony helped convict Dwyer later confessed that he had lied on the stand to get a reduced sentence.

5. Reynaldo Dagsa
Reynaldo Dagsa was a vocal Filipino anti-violence and anti-corruption politician. On January 1st, 2011, Dagsa and his family stopped for a holiday family photo in the middle of the street. The photo was taken just seconds before the politician’s assassination. Behind his family, the shooter can be seen aiming a .45 caliber pistol at Dagsa, who was taking the photo. The photo was later used by authorities to identify and convict the killer.

4. The Shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two cities remain the only population centers to ever be subjected to nuclear attacks. Radiation travels in a straight line from the blast site so anything that blocks the radiation can potentially leave a “shadow”.  Some argue that these victims were so close that the blast would have instantly vaporized them, while others argue that they most likely died by fire.

3. Tara Calico
This polaroid photo of who is believed to be Tara Calico was discovered by a shopper in a supermarket parking lot in 1989. The year before, Tara Calico, age 19 at the time, disappeared during a 34 mile (55 km) bicycle ride on a New Mexican road. She was sighted several times across the southern United States, but, even after this photograph was found in Florida, she was never found. Witnesses told police that they had seen white ford pickup truck parked in the lot in the hours before the photo was found.

2. Regina Kay Walters
The woman in this photo, 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters, was abducted with her boyfriend in 1990 by Robert Ben Rhoades, the Truck Stop Killer. Evidence later collected by authorities from Rhoades residence suggested that Rhoades held and tortured Walters for several months. Rhoades himself took this photo of his victim just moments before murdering her in an abandoned Illinois barn.

And now for the number 1 creepiest photo.

1. Nail Scratches
This photo shows the wall of an Auschwitz gas chamber. The gas chambers of Auschwitz killed over one million Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution.” The white scratch marks were left by those condemned to die in the chambers in their final moments. Members of the camp’s Sonderkommandos, which were the prisoners forced to run the chambers and furnaces, attested after the war that they could hear the walls being scratched as the gas was administered.