Within an instant of looking at each of these photos you’ll realize that something is off, but look closer and you’ll see that they’re absolutely chilling. These snapshots not only offer a look into the dark recesses of every day life, but they show the way in which Mother Nature seems to be conspiring against us at every turn.
These rarely seen photos are sure to shock even the most mature readers. You’ll want to make sure you keep the lights on while you peruse these eerie, photographs from some of the most spine tingling moments in history.
Use caution while reading the stories behind these unforgettable photos… they’re not for all ages. If you look deep into these rare photos they’ll shock you to the core.
An “icebox” facial beauty treatment, 1966
The icebox facial treatment was originally created to help keep a starlet’s makeup in place between, the cold was supposed to make sure that nothing melted under the hot studio lights. Supposedly, once this Hollywood secret got out gals from all over the country started using these bad boys.
These masks didn’t catch on like wildfire, but the cold is definitely good for your skin. Ice facials especially are good for taking care of puffy skin and jet lag, and they’re also great for flare ups and breakouts. You don’t need to wear a mask like this to take care of your skin, on the contrary, you can just hold a cold face cloth against your skin for a few seconds at a time.
Marilyn Monroe in one of her final photos at Santa Monica Beach, 1962. 😘
Hanging out on the beach, enjoying the sand and surf, Marilyn Monroe looks like she’s got her whole life ahead of her. Regardless of her personal ups and downs she was always a welcome presence on the big screen. Sadly, this photo and the rest of the set were some of the last shots ever taken of her.
George Barris, who snapped this photo on the beach in Santa Monica, California, on July 13, just weeks before her death in 1962 had no idea the amount of stress his subject was under. She’d just been fired from Something’s Got to Give, supposedly because of her chronic lateness and absenteeism, and she was still reeling from her divorce with Arthur Miller.
Barris says that the two became lifelong friends on the set of The Seven Year Itch after she caught him taking snaps of her backside. They were so close that she called him a few days before she passed away. In 2012, he told the Los Angeles Daily News:
She called me on Friday, and I was in New York, and she wanted to know if I could come to see her that weekend and that it was urgent…
He never saw her again.
Barbara Roufs ended her life after she left the racing scene
There’s one face synonymous with the drag racing scene in the 1960s, Barbara Roufs. This beautiful trophy girl appeared in the golden era of the two-lane black top and wowed racers and fans alike with her va-va-voom looks and hair that was as straight as a six cylinder engine.
Roufs brought races to life, giving everyone something to look forward to even if they didn’t care about cars, winners, or losers. Many of the photos of Roufs that you’ll see online were taken by Tom West, one of the premiere guys behind the camera of the ’60s. West and Roufs were friends during her heyday, but they lost touch when he moved to New York.
It wasn’t until West tried to reconnect with Roufs in the 2000s that he discovered the sad truth about his old friend. A few years after retiring from the racing circuit she committed suicide. She was 47 years old, she left behind a daughter and a grand daughter.
A photo from inside Japan Airlines Flight 123 as it went down over Japan
There’s a normalcy to this photo of Japan Airlines Flight 123 moments before crashing into the side of a mountain that’s absolutely terrifying. Sure, the oxygen masks have been deployed, but everyone just seems so… calm. It’s horrible.
For the passengers of Flight 123, August 12, 1985, was just another day. Some of them were going on vacation, others were visiting family, but as soon as the plane ascended to 24,000 feet the pilot reported that they were losing altitude. The plane went down to 10,000 feet, it became harder and harder to steer back to the Tokyo airport, they were staring death in the face.
45 minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed headfirst into Mount Takamagahara. It took 14 hours for emergency rescue crews to reach the crash site, of the 524 people onboard only four survived.
Princess Diana on a yacht in Portofino, Italy, one week before she passed in 1997
This shot of Princess Diana sitting on the diving board of the private yacht “Jonikal,” owned by her boyfriend, Mohammed Al Fayed, is from the final holiday she ever took. In the summer of 1997, Diana was trying to reinvent herself, to remove herself from the public eye and become a person again.
In late July she traveled to Saint Tropez in the South of France where she spent time on Fayed’s yacht and the Fayed family’s 30-bedroom villa, Castle St. Therese, with her sons, William and Harry. It’s clear from this photo that even when she was alone she was never really alone.
Photographers were constantly hounding her, even when she was in the middle of the ocean. There was nowhere she could go where she was safe.
Criminals could be locked up in a wooden box in Mongolia
Some countries do things different, and Mongolia is definitely one of them. This photo from 1913, taken by French photographer Albert Kahn shows a woman who was condemned to a slow and painful death by starvation. She was placed inside a wooden crate and deposited the desert.
To make matters worse (if that’s possible) the bowls on the ground were filled with water and when they were empty the prisoner could beg for food and more water if they wanted, but it would really just be prolonging death.
Kahn claimed that the woman was condemned to death for adultery, but researchers doubt the authenticity of his claim.
Underage Phoebe Cates rocking a bikini in 1982 🔞
Phoebe Cates came to prominence in the 1980s playing sultry, barely legal babes in films like Private School and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. On the surface, these sexually charged roles may not seem out of the ordinary for a young star, but Cates was incredibly young when she filmed her first nude scene in the film Paradise. Although, to hear Cates tell it, that’s what she had to do if she wanted to be in film:
I was only 17 when I did my nude scenes in Paradise. They were serious and more difficult because they were not easily justified. But the topless scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was funny, which made it easy. In this business, if a girl wants a career, she has to be willing to strip. If you’ve got a good bod, then why not show it?
At least 10 men being buried at sea from the USS Intrepid
This shot of a burial at sea on the USS Intrepid was taken after a kamikaze attack in November 1944, just over a year after it went to sea. The USS Intrepid was commissioned on August 16, 1943, joining the U.S. Navy in the middle of World War II, and it fought its way through the Pacific Ocean, earning accolades along the way.
While in the Philippines, the Intrepid was embroiled in brutal warfare with Japanese fighter pilots who did their best to crash in the middle of the ship’s flight deck whenever they were hit. Across the Intrepid men fought fires, tried to get rid of smoke, and they still had fighter pilots to worry about.
The crew managed to save the ship but the damage was terrible. There were two gaping holes in the flight deck leading down into a burnt out hangar. Two of three aircraft elevators were out of operation, twenty-two planes were destroyed, and the ship was out of commission for the foreseeable future. On top of it all all, many men lost their lives in an attack and were buried deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A politician in the Philippines, Reynaldo Dagsa photographs his own assassination
This chilling image of an assassin pointing his gun right at the camera is absolutely horrifying. Taken by Philippine councilman Reynaldo Dagsa on New Year’s Day, this shot features Dagsa’s family and his killer, and while it’s absolutely mortifying to think that this was the last thing that Dagsa saw before his death, his quick thinking helped catch his killer. The Philippine Daily Inquirer writes:
Chief Inspector Cresencio Galvez, Caloocan police intelligence chief, said the suspects were known car thieves and holduppers out on bail. It is likely that they bear a grudge against Dagsa who had them arrested last year, he said.
Thanks to the photo the assassin was caught, and his accomplice was picked up in a different police raid on the same day.
A very pregnant Sharon Tate lounges by the pool on Cielo Drive
This photo isn’t just a shot of a beautiful woman relaxing around her pool while waiting to give birth, it’s the very pregnant Sharon Tate who is blissfully unaware of the fate that awaits her. Eight months pregnant when she was killed, Tate was settling at her home on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. She was surrounded by friends Jay Sebring and Abigail Folger when Tex Watson and members of the Manson family broke into the home.
Everyone in the house on Cielo Drive was slaughtered, but things could have been different if one of the members of the Manson family had done something. Manson girl and accomplice to Tate’s murder, Linda Kasabian remembers:
I saw a woman in a white dress and she had blood all over her and she was screaming and she was calling for her mom. I saw Katie stabbing her. I thought about going to a house where there were lights down the road and then I said, ‘No, don’t do that, because they’ll find me and kill all those people’. So I went down the hill and I got into the car and I just stayed there and waited.
Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor aboard LANSA Flight 508, she lived in the jungle for 11 days following the crash
On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane Koepcke was ready to go home for the holidays. When she boarded LANSA Flight 508 at the Lima Airport in Peru with her mother, Maria, Koepcke thought it was just be another day, but when the plane was hit by lightning over the Peruvian rainforest it was anything but ordinary.
Koepcke survived a two-mile fall into the jungle, and at just 17 years old she maneuvered though the trees with a need to get to safety. She had a broken collarbone, cuts across her body and ruptured ligaments in her knee, but she could walk, so that’s what she did.
All alone in the jungle, Koepcke avoided dangerous animals, sucked maggots out of her wounds, and survived on nothing but a bag of candy that she found before passing out in a hut that she came upon along the way. When she woke up she was surrounded by a group of locals. She told the BBC:
When [the locals] saw me, they were alarmed and stopped talking. They thought I was a kind of water goddess – a figure from local legend who is a hybrid of a water dolphin and a blonde, white-skinned woman. I introduced myself in Spanish and explained what had happened. They treated my wounds and gave me something to eat and the next day took me back to civilization. The day after my rescue, I saw my father. He could barely talk and in the first moment we just held each other.
After undercover cops arrested her, this exotic dancer showed off in court, Florida 1983
It’s insane that in a state like Florida in a time like the *checks notes* early ’80s would bust exotic dancers for wearing “revealing” bottoms, but that’s how we got to this photo. This dancer figured that the best way to prove to a judge that she was dressed appropriately for work was to bend over and give him a show… but not too much.
The photo ended up going around the world thanks to getting picked up by Playboy. Tampa Bay Times staff photographer Jim Damaske snapped this classic photo, and he remembers that it was just like any other day at work… just with exotic dancers showing off their underwear:
I was shooting freelance for the Clearwater Sun and UPI when the Sun got a tip what was going to happen. I got the call. Exotic dancers said that their shorts were too big to show what the undercover officers said they saw. The judge agreed with the dancers after they bent over. The photo went out on the UPI wire, which is how it got picked up everywhere.
German General Anton Dostler moments before he was executed by firing squad
This chilling photo tells you everything you need to know about the trials that followed World War II. German general Anton Dostler waiting stoically for death as members of the Allied forces go about their duty; it’s as if they’re all performing in a play. Dostler was killed by a firing squad shortly after this photo was taken, but if he had been more cautious during the war it’s likely he never would have been in this position.
On March 22, 1944, Dostler learned that some of his men had captured 15 U.S. soldiers, so he sent a memo out ordering the German soldiers to execute the commandos. The soldiers tried to convince him otherwise, after all it was a breach of the contract of war, but Dostler told them to carry out his wishes.
Following the war, Dostler was taken prisoner by the U.S. Army. When they discovered his order he was placed on trial on May 8, 1945. Dostler gave he famous defense that he was only following orders, but that didn’t do much. He was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death by a 12-man firing squad on December 1, 1945.
Photographed in 1880, Myrtle Corbin was born a dipygus having two separately functioning pelvises and four legs
A leader of the feminist movement, Gloria Steinem went undercover at the Playboy Club during its heyday
Ask 99 out of 100 people and Gloria Steinem’s name will be associated with the 1960s and ’70s waves of feminism, not Playboy Magazine. However, early in her career she went undercover at the Playboy Club in New York City to write an expose on the day to day of working for a company that claimed to hip with women’s lib, even while it was exploiting their bodies.
This photo doesn’t show Steinem, but it’s an accurate representation of her outfit. Steinem ended up working the floor at the club, and discovered that the women were paid poorly and expected to wear tight fitting clothes, very high heels, and to undergo invasive medical procedures if they wanted a job. Her two part expose, “A Bunny’s Tale,” ran in Show magazine and made major waves.
Playboy owner Hugh Hefner paid lip service to the problems in pay and the treatment of the women brought up in the expose, and Steinem didn’t work again for years.
Known as P.T. Barnum’s “Four-Legged Girl From Texas,” this photo of Myrtle Corbin is anything but an optical illusion. Corbin was born with two sets of legs, as well as two sets of internal and external reproductive anatomies. Corbin’s seven brothers and sisters were all born without extra appendages, but Myrtle came out of the womb with two sets of legs, one average sized, and one small. The two small legs were side by side, flanked on either side by two normal legs, although one of those had a clubbed foot.
Corbin move her smaller, inner legs, but they weren’t strong enough for her to walk on and not long enough to touch the ground. In 1881, when she was only 13 years old, Corbin became a sideshow performer and her father charged people a dime a piece to take a look at her.
It wasn’t long before she was earning $450 a week and attracting so much attention that P.T. Barnum hired her for his sideshow. She worked for Barnum for four years before retiring at the age of 18 and settling down with a doctor in 1885. After marrying and giving birth, Corbin passed away in 1928 from a streptococcal skin infection.
A leader of the feminist movement, Gloria Steinem went undercover at the Playboy Club during its heyday
Ask 99 out of 100 people and Gloria Steinem’s name will be associated with the 1960s and ’70s waves of feminism, not Playboy Magazine. However, early in her career she went undercover at the Playboy Club in New York City to write an expose on the day to day of working for a company that claimed to hip with women’s lib, even while it was exploiting their bodies.
This photo doesn’t show Steinem, but it’s an accurate representation of her outfit. Steinem ended up working the floor at the club, and discovered that the women were paid poorly and expected to wear tight fitting clothes, very high heels, and to undergo invasive medical procedures if they wanted a job. Her two part expose, “A Bunny’s Tale,” ran in Show magazine and made major waves.
Playboy owner Hugh Hefner paid lip service to the problems in pay and the treatment of the women brought up in the expose, and Steinem didn’t work again for years.
