Hey friends,
Welcome to another season of Unruly Figures! Thank you to all the listeners who have been with me for a while now, and thank you to everyone who is just joining us! Because of some scheduling wonkiness, I am starting the new season with a bonus episode, so I’m going to make it free for everyone for a week. Enjoy!
It’s Halloween season, which means all things creepy, crawly, and scary are fair game again. Horror movies are everywhere, all of which I’m too big of a baby to see in theatres. Despite that, I thought it would be fun to cover 11 historical moments that sound like they could be horror movies. Writing this episode gave me the creeps and I definitely had to record during the day, so maybe don’t listen at night if you’re as big a baby as I am. So, let’s dive in.
If you like horror, you might be into these episodes of the podcast:
11. Kentucky Meat Shower
We’re starting light! This one doesn’t strike me as scary, just sort of…unsettling. Around 11 am on March 3, 1876, a Mrs. Crouch was sitting on the porch of her home near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, when meat began to fall from the sky.
Chunks of it. Things that looked like beef. Just…fell from the sky and hit the ground around the Crouch home. Keep in mind, planes were invented in 1903, so I don’t think there was a plane flying overhead and throwing out a bunch of meat on unsuspecting ground dwellers, unless we’re talking about some sort of time slip.
The Crouchs chose not to clean it up, and the next day, witnesses came by to see the leftovers of the meat shower. It had begun to rot by then, but someone apparently tasted it and claimed it tasted like venison or mutton.1
The story quickly spread. Just a week later, Allen Crouch was quoted on the front page of the New York Times saying, “The meat, which looked like beef, fell all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it fell like large snowflakes.”2
Samples were collected, preserved in glycerin, and sent to scientists around the country. They put forth various ideas, including a strange cyanobacteria that develops into a gel-like substance in the rain, which was completely unhelpful because it was not raining that day.3 Eventually, a Dr L. D. Kastenbine wrote in the 1876 edition of the Louisville Medical News that “The only plausible theory explanatory of this anonymous shower appears to me to be…the disgorgement of some vultures that were sailing over the spot.”4
Today, this is the generally accepted theory of what happened, though other conspiracy theories do crop up. While rotting meat in your yard doesn’t sound that scary, I can imagine that this would have really freaked out residents.
Horror Movie Pitch:
In a quiet Kentucky town, raw chunks of meat begin falling from a clear blue sky. Scientists search for answers — but what if the sky is just… bleeding?
10. The Execution of György Dózsa
I’ve thought about covering the 1514 Peasant’s Revolt against King Vladislaus II of Hungary, but this next death is so gruesome that I’ve never been able to stomach it long enough to write an episode.
In the late 15th/early 16th century in Hungary, the aristocrats gained a lot of power, which they used to squash the rights of the peasants. Discontent grew with no outlet, until the spring of 1514, when an army was called to go on a late Crusade into the Middle East. About 100,000 peasants from the kingdom gathered for the Crusade, but then the plans were cancelled. Despite being dismissed, the large army refused to leave. They used the fact that they had all been gathered “to voice grievances against landlords and refused to disperse or reap the fields at harvest time. The army announced its intention to overthrow the nobility and end oppression of the lower classes.”5
And they were very successful, if a bit brutal. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, they captured several fortresses, hundreds of manors were burned to the ground, and “thousands of nobles” were killed.6 However, they were eventually defeated and their leader, György Dózsa, was captured on July 15, 1514. His execution… this image would haunt me if someone committed it to film. According to the most graphic account of his execution, György was seated on a heated iron throne that was already smoldering and forced to wear a heated iron crown and hold a heated iron scepter.7 Next, captured rebels who had been starved for days beforehand were forced to eat his cooking flesh directly from his body.8 Apparently, when the first few people refused, they were summarily executed on the spot, and the others quickly fell into line.9
Now. That’s… whew, sickening. I feel like I need an exorcism after reading it aloud. It reminds me of some of the craziest punishments we hear about from the quote-unquote “Dark Ages.” Stuff like the Iron Maiden, which we know is fake, or at least, was not invented until the 19th century. But maybe this execution really happened as is described, which would be horrifying!
The other very real horror of the story, to me at least, is the punishment the peasants were served after. Once the rebellion was fully crushed by October 1514, the king condemned the entire peasant class—not just the rebels and their families, the whole social class—to “real and perpetual servitude” and bound them “permanently to the soil.”10 The number of days the peasants had to work for their lords was also increased, heavy taxes were imposed on them, and they had to pay for the damage caused by the rebellion.11
Horror Movie Pitch:
A peasant rebel is captured and forced to sit on a throne of fire, crowned in molten iron, and devoured by hunger and hate — as the world watches and learns nothing.
9. Mary Celeste Ghost Ship
On November 7, 1872, the ship the Mary Celeste set sail from New York City, with 10 people on board: 7 crewmembers, Captain Briggs, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. In the cargo hold were more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol destined for Genoa, Italy.12
Now, historically, winter sailing is not preferred because, you know, the weather is terrible. The Mary Celeste struggled across the ocean, encountering harsh weather. 18 days later, on November 25th, Captain Briggs recorded his final thoughts in the captain’s log, noting that the ship was about 6 nautical miles from the Azores.
And then nothing.
Ten days later, the Mary Celeste was spotted floating aimlessly by the British ship the Dei Gratia. Members of the crew boarded the ship and found it abandoned. The cargo was intact, so not pirates, and all the personal belongings of the crew seemed to be in place. There was a longboat missing, suggesting the ten people aboard had abandoned ship on their own, but the crew of the Dei Gratia couldn’t determine why—yes, there was 3 feet of water in the hold, but that amount should not have caused panic and the ship was clearly still seaworthy—it was floating around on its own 10 days later, after all.13
The abandoned ship made modest news at the time, but it wasn’t until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—yes, of Sherlock Holmes fame—published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” a short story about a survivor of a ghost ship called the Marie Celeste. In his story, a former enslaved person seeking revenge killed the passengers, which, of course, inspired people to think that’s what happened to the original Mary Celeste. There was, however, no sign of foul play on the real ship.
Today, what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste remains a mystery, but the creep factor of the abandoned ship, in perfect condition, still freaks people out. It has inspired a couple of movies, including Phantom Ship: The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (1935), starring Bela Lugosi, and Haunting of the Mary Celeste (2000). I’ll be watching Phantom Ship this October—very excited.
Horror Movie Pitch:
The ship was in perfect condition. The crew was gone. In the vast Atlantic, something boarded… and left no survivors.
8. The Dyatlov Pass Incident
On January 23, 1959, ten experienced hikers set out to trek through the Ural Mountains. One had to turn back for medical reasons, and when the other nine neglected to report back from their destination, search parties were sent out. What they found haunted them.
First, the tent was found, collapsed and covered in snow. Belongings inside were undisturbed, but a rip in the fabric showed that it had been sliced open from the inside. Creepily enough, “food was sliced up on a plate as if the hikers were preparing to eat it.”14
But the bodies they found were even scarier. Students Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonishchenko were found first, hundreds of yards away from the tent, lying in their underwear next to an extinguished fire. A medical examiner noted in the autopsy that “Krivonishchenko had burns on his body and a piece of flesh in his mouth that he had bitten off of his own hand.”15
Three more bodies were found soon after: leader Igor Dyatlov, Zinaida Kolmogorova, and Rustem Slobodin all appeared to have died trying to get back to the tent. Cause of death for all five victims so far was determined to be hypothermia which causes, among other issues, paradoxical undressing, hence why Doroshenko and Krivonishchenko were found in their underwear in the snow.
But the other four bodies were still missing, and they wouldn’t be found until May when more snow in the area had melted and made it more accessible. Then, an Indigenous Mansi hunter whose name is never given in records, which is extremely annoying to me, found a den that contained the bodies of Aleksander Kolevatov, Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle, Semyon Zolotaryov, and Lyudmila Dubinina.
Their deaths were even stranger. Kolevatov was determined to die of hypothermia as well, but “Thibeaux-Brignolle had a skull fracture so severe there were pieces of bone in his brain, while Zolotaryov and Dubinina had crushed chests. Both Zolotaryov and Dubinina’s eye sockets were empty, and Dubinina was missing her tongue.”16 HORRIFYING. Official reports ended up concluding that the three had died of “compelling natural forces.”17 Which, sure, but also what the hell does that mean?
Had this happened almost anywhere else, the story might end here. But this happened in the Soviet Union, where the citizens didn’t trust their government. Stories of government coverups quickly began to spread. I won’t go into all of the theories, but atomic bomb testing was suggested, as were other weapons. Some people thought the KGB was involved, or maybe the CIA. All reasonable theories, I think, actually, especially since radiation was found on some of the hikers’ clothing. An attendee at the hikers’ funeral remembered, “The coffins were open and I could see that the skin on their faces was a weird colour – the colour of bricks.”18 None of the reports explained this, which fueled the fire for people who thought the reports were bullshit.
First, the racist theories came. Some people suggested that the Indigenous Mansi hunter was able to find the bodies because it had been the Mansi who killed the hikers for encroaching on sacred land.19 Soviet authorities actually arrested several people and they were probably tortured; certainly they were “interrogated for weeks.”20 Members of the Mansi community today believe their parents’ generation were innocent for one simple reason: Had there been any proof that they were guilty, the Soviet government would have committed a genocide and killed all of them as punishment. We’re talking about a government that loved a trial-free firing squad as a way to deal with political dissidents, but all the arrested members of the Mansi community were eventually released and returned home. The Mansi would not have survived if even one of them had committed the crime.
So then came the wild theories. Some people have suggested the hikers got into fights with a group of yetis. Others have suggested aliens, because of course. Members of the Mansi community did see what sounds like a comet around the same time, and saw it as a bad omen, but there’s no proof that a comet hit the site or something.21 The idea that the hikers were the subject of Soviet military experimentation in Moscow or a secret location and that their bodies were discarded on the mountain after death is a common one, but it doesn’t explain the hiker who started the trip with them and turned back.
Today, the most common scientific theory is that the hikers hadn’t accounted for the heavy winds that would drop the temperature even further than they anticipated—Mount Otorten in the Mansi language means Mountain with Swirling Winds22—which explains the hypothermia and paradoxical undressing. While some of the hikers were starting a fire or hunting, a slab avalanche hit the campsite and trapped some of the hikers in their tent, so they had to cut their way out. That caused the severe injuries found on three of the hikers, but the avalanche missed the others. The missing tongue/eyes could be explained by scavenging animals or even cannibalism.
Since this is an internationally famous story, unsurprisingly, there already is a horror movie based on this: Devil’s Pass came out in 2013 and I simply will not be watching it. Let me know how it was in the comments.
But here is my horror movie pitch, which is slightly more historically accurate:
Horror Movie Pitch:
Nine hikers enter the Ural Mountains. They flee their tents in the night — barefoot, terrified — and die under baffling, brutal conditions. What made them run?
7. Flannan Isles Lighthouse Mystery
125 years ago, three mariners stationed at the Flannan Isles Lighthouse disappeared without a trace. It was a station in the Outer Hebrides islands, north of Scotland, so removed from civilization that the men had to live at the lighthouse full-time… and it took days to report issues.
Now, the lighthouse in question had only been built the year before; until then, the island had been used by sheep herders during the day. However—and here’s where the creepiness begins—the herders refused to stay on the island overnight “as they feared the various ghosts and phantasms that lurked there.”23 The lightkeepers on duty, of course, had to stay overnight, which has led to lots of paranormal explanations over the years.
The three lightkeepers on duty were James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur, who was on duty for William Ross, who was absent on sick leave.
People first realized something was wrong on December 15, 1900, when the ship Archtor passed the lighthouse and realized that the fires weren’t lit.24 But there wasn’t much they could do from the ship, so it wasn’t until a few days later that the captain was able to report it to the Northern Lighthouse Board. A relief ship was sent out and arrived on December 26th. They sent up a flare, but there was no response from the lighthouse.
Joseph Moore, a lightkeeper on leave, was asked to return to the Flannan Isles Lighthouse to see what was going on. According to some stories, Moore “reported that he had an immediate sense of foreboding the moment he set foot on the island.”25 He found the lighthouse empty, “lamps trimmed and ready, the lens and machinery cleaned, the kitchen tidied, and two sets of outdoor clothing missing.”26 Some reports say that a meal was prepared, but a chair flipped over as if someone had gone out in a hurry. Though there hadn’t been any entries in the keeper’s log since December 13th, further investigation revealed “clear evidence of the work of the forenoon on the 15th having been completed;” This suggested the men disappeared on the afternoon of the 15th.27
The Nautical Lighthouse Board found evidence of a terrible storm having hit the island that afternoon. The prevailing theory is that two men went out into the storm, prepared to secure something to prevent damage. Though the lighthouse landing platform was almost 200 feet above sea level, there was a supply box smashed up, contents strewn across the platform.28 The idea is that the third lightkeeper inside saw the huge waves and hurried out to help his coworkers, then all three were swept out to sea.
But, of course, many other theories get trotted out. Some wonder if one of the men, William MacArthur, who was known to be a bit bad-tempered, killed the other two before killing himself. The only evidence of foul play was the turned-over chair, which is pretty loose as far as that sort of evidence goes. Still, I suppose it’s possible they had words, and he jumped out of his seat and chased them out, then any blood was washed away in the subsequent storm.
But other theories include the paranormal. People think that “they were devoured by some dark sea monster, carried away by giant birds, or even abducted by aliens.”29 Like the story of the Mary Celeste, it’s the not knowing what became of them that was so creepy.
Naturally, there have been adaptations of the historical moment—The Vanishing from 2019 stars Gerard Butler and looks too scary for me.
Horror Movie Pitch:
Three lighthouse keepers vanish without a trace. No sign of struggle, no escape route, no bodies — just wind, sea, and an empty tower staring into the void.
6. Villisca Axe Murders
114 years ago, the Moore family of Villisca, Iowa, was murdered overnight… and the killer was never found.
On the night of June 9, 1912, the Moore family and their two guests went to bed. In the house were parents Sarah and Josiah (sometimes Joseph or just Joe), their four children: Herman, Mary, Arthur, and Paul. They were an affluent family and very well-liked within the community. In addition to the members of the Moore family, their daughter Mary had invited her friends Ina Mae and Lena Gertrude Stillinger to spend the night. The family went to bed sometime before midnight, unaware that their fate waited hidden in the attic above their heads.
According to a later event reconstruction, which is extremely specific, sometime after midnight, the intruder descended from their hiding place and “took an oil lamp from a dresser, removed the chimney and placed it out of the way under a chair, bent the wick in two to minimize the flame, lit the lamp, and turned it down so low it cast only the faintest glimmer in the sleeping house.”30 He grabbed Joe’s own axe and set about destroying the family.
The intruder first proceeded to the bedroom where the adults slept, raised “the ax high above his head—so high it gouged the ceiling—[and] brought the flat of the blade down on the back of Joe Moore’s head, crushing his skull and probably killing him instantly.”31 He did the same to Sarah immediately, to prevent her from screaming out and waking the household. He then proceeded to the next room, killing the four Moore children the same way he had killed their parents. He then proceeded downstairs and killed the two Stillinger girls; only the older Stillinger is thought to have woken before her death.
Then it got creepy. The intruder returned upstairs and delivered 29 more blows to Joe Moore’s head, reducing it to a bloody pulp. He then did the same to the other seven people in the home, leaving everyone completely unrecognizable. He then covered them with various cloths before “ritually hanging cloths over every mirror and piece of glass.”32
The killer then began to make himself at home. He took a slab of bacon, wrapped it in a towel, and then placed it on the floor of the downstairs bedroom for no reason that anyone has ever figured out. He filled a bowl with water and possibly washed his hands in it. He smoked some cigarettes, then locked up and left, taking the house keys with him.
The next morning, their neighbor, Mary Peckham, rose as normal. She hung some laundry outside and was startled that the Moore family was not awake yet. She was used to their schedule—Joe should have been up before sunrise to feed the horses, and Sarah usually got her children up early as well, meaning that the house was loud and boisterous every day by, say, 7 am.33 So when Mary Peckham saw that the curtains were still drawn at 8 am, she approached the house and knocked. When no one answered, she called Joe’s brother Ross and asked him to come investigate.
Ross Moore used his spare key to enter the house and discovered the horrifying scene. He rushed out and raised the alarm—in addition to local law enforcement and a doctor acting as coroner, over 100 residents entered the scene to see what had happened to the family, destroying any hope of collecting evidence.
A manhunt was launched, but the killer had several hours of a head start. One suspect did rise to the top: Frank Jones, a local business rival of Joe Moore. The two had a bad history: Frank Jones had been Joe’s boss, and the parting when Joe left to start his own business was not amicable. There were also rumors that Joe had had an affair with Frank Jones’s daughter-in-law, who was not discreet about her many affairs around town.34 Nevertheless, two investigations could not establish Jones’s guilt—people had trouble believing a 57-year-old man could have physically committed the level of brutality of the murders, for one. The rumors sure ruined his political career.
A second suspect emerged: A “peculiar” preacher, Reverend Lyn Kelly, confessed to the murders but later recanted, saying police brutality had led to his false confession.35 Kelly had been caught around town peeping into windows and had documented severe mental health problems. Most frightening, he had a connection to the family: He had attended the Children’s Day service held at Villisca’s Presbyterian church on the evening of the murders, which was organized by Sarah Moore. The Moore children, along with the Stillinger girls, had held prominent parts in the service, all dressed up in their Sunday best. A lot of people began to believe that Kelly had spotted them in the church and had become obsessed with them before following them home. Nevertheless, other evidence didn’t hold up in court, and Kelly was acquitted twice.
In the end, no one was convicted of this octuple homicide, but a “bizarre chain of ax murders seemed to suggest that a transient serial killer was at work.”36 All the crimes were committed in towns like Villisca that were situated near train tracks, and involved families whose heads were covered after the murder. In some cases, the murderer washed their hands afterward and left the weapon at the scene; in others, they covered windows, mirrors, and a phone that looked like a face. None was a perfect replica, but many held strange similarities.
Henry Lee Moore was the popular suspect for a while. He was convicted of killing his entire family, including his own child, with an axe. That murder came at the end of the string of other murders, however, and usually with serial killers the family is killed first in a spree, not last. He’s not considered a good suspect today.
But that leaves us with no one. While surely deceased by now, the murderer seems to have gotten away with their crime, which is terrifying. Every detail of this was horrifying, in fact. This is the kind of story that haunts me well into the night.
Horror Movie Pitch:
Eight people. One axe. A killer who slipped into the house and murdered every soul inside while they slept — and was never found.
5. H. H. Holmes & His Creepy Murder Castle
Many folks familiar with true crime have heard the name H. H. Holmes—he’s America’s first recorded serial killer. Born Herman Webster Mudgett in 1861, his childhood was “shaped by physical abuse, difficulties in socializing with peers, and cruelty towards animals.”37 He showed an early interest in medicine, which became a large part of his terrible behavior later in life.
He was, as one criminologist colorfully put it, “a criminal for all seasons.”38 He committed insurance fraud, swindled women, and more. But he’s most famous for his depraved architectural venture outside Chicago, a hotel people would come to dub “the Murder Castle.”
The hotel was built over four years, and finished in 1892, just in time for the World’s Fair in 1893. Once complete, the hotel “engulfed an entire city block.”39 When people began to pour into Chicago for the event, Holmes rented out rooms in the three-story building. But the hotel had secrets: “hidden passageways, an insulated, room-sized vault, gas jets in some rooms, and peepholes in all.”40
As best as historians can tell, Holmes had already committed several murders by this point, including that of his business co-owner, Mrs. E. S. Holton. The castle was his way of perfecting it.
He invited people in both as guests of the hotel and with employment ruses. The huge influx of travelers in the city, as well as the relative ease with which people could disappear if they wanted to in the 19th century, made it easy for Holmes to take victims and for their loved ones not to connect their disappearance with his hotel. He also allegedly used the castle as a staging ground for his business of selling corpses stolen from nearby graveyards to medical schools.41
It’s believed he “imprisoned guests and spied on them, gaining a sense of power and sexual thrills.”42 He almost certainly “used the gas to incapacitate women and molest them.”43 In addition to the rigged guest rooms, there were “intricate” torture chambers upstairs and a harrowing basement, which “held a dissection and a torture table, mysterious wooden tanks, and an iron stove—eight feet tall by three feet wide—containing remains such as jewelry, clothing, and bones.”44 As many people have pointed out, the house was a perfect symbol of Holmes himself: “disturbing and distorted on the inside, yet prosperously elegant on the outside.”45
After the fair, Holmes was caught committing insurance fraud. It was only in the subsequent investigation into his life that his many dead wives and mistresses, as well as the Murder Castle, came to light. Naturally, a lots has been written about this, including the famous The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which is narrative nonfiction. Rumor has it that an adaptation from Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio is back in pre-production, so I’m excited to see where that goes. While a lot of horror movies and slasher flicks have drawn inspiration from The Murder Castle, I couldn’t find an explicit horror movie based on his life. Feel free to leave me a comment if you know of one I missed!
Horror Movie Pitch:
In the shadow of the 1893 World’s Fair, a handsome and charming doctor built a hotel with secret chambers, gas lines, and a basement of bones. Check in… if you dare.
4. The Black Plague
Today, we’re familiar with the Black Plague as a disease spread by infected rats and fleas, but consider how terrifying it was for people in 1347 who had no idea what was happening. It killed an estimated 25 million people a death toll completely unheard of from any other disease, famine, or war up until that time. It struck almost indiscriminately, killing seemingly otherwise healthy people in days if not hours. With no sense of what caused it or good ways to protect yourself, some people began to believe that God was punishing them; others believed that Jewish populations were poisoning wells. As fear spread, they turned into violent anti-Semitic mobs, which led to rounds and rounds of violent attacks on local Jewish enclaves.46
Nearly 40% of the population died. People you might have dined with on Friday would be dead on Monday. The Plague wiped out entire families, leaving no one to mourn them, and that’s before we count the countless Jews killed. COVID is the closest thing we have to a similar event in recent history, and it wasn’t nearly as deadly.
Several novels and movies have dealt with the Black Death, including the 2010 movie Black Death starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne.
Horror Movie Pitch:
The rats came first. Then the boils. Then the dead. Town by town, street by street, the Black Death swept across Europe like a curse from hell.
3. The Chernobyl Disaster
Just after midnight on April 26, 1986, alarms began to sound at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Reactor 4 had been shut down for routine maintenance the day before and a few operational tests were scheduled. But due to a flawed design and inadequate personnel training, the routine test became a catastrophic explosion.
Two workers were killed in the initial explosions. Fires broke out in the facility and people rushed to put them out. But the insidious danger was in the plume of smoke rising a kilometer above their heads: when the reactor blew, it launched “radioactive fission products and debris from the core.”47 Heavier debris was deposited close by, but “lighter components, including fission products and virtually all of the noble gas inventory were blown by the prevailing wind to the northwest of the plant.”48
Evacuation efforts began about 36 hours later: Residents of Pryp’yat, just 3 kilometers—less than 2 miles—away Chernobyl were told they needed to evacuate just for 3 days, though they were never allowed to return. By then though, they had been breathing in radiation for 36 hours, and many came down with radiation poisoning. Local Soviet officials attempted a cover-up but that was quickly abandoned when Sweden called to ask, “Hey, why are our monitoring stations reporting really high levels of “wind-transported radioactivity?”49 The world quickly learned there had been a disaster at Chernobyl.
Like the Black Plague, the fear spread by the Chernobyl disaster was based largely on its invisibility. No one could see radiation poisoning in the air (though, of course, they could see the smoke). In fact, radiation poisoning wasn’t completely understood by the general public. Early consequences soon became clear when, “by the end of July, six firemen and a further 22 plant staff” had died of radiation sickness.50 But it wasn’t over yet:
Radioactivity was spread by the wind over Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and soon reached as far west as France and Italy. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated, and, although many thousands of people were evacuated, hundreds of thousands more remained in contaminated areas. In addition, in subsequent years many livestock were born deformed, and among humans several thousand radiation-induced illnesses and cancer deaths were expected in the long term.51
In the aftermath, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was established to keep people out of the area, and included much of the irradiated forest around the nuclear plant. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, control of the area passed to Ukraine, but during the recent invasion of Russia into Ukraine, battles were fought around Chernobyl in 2022, sparking concerns about damage to the reactor’s containment facilities. Today, the site is back under Ukrainian control, but it certainly raised the spectre of invisible-but-deadly poisoning carried by the wind.
There are dozens of movies about the Chernobyl disaster, ranging from documentaries to horror films.
Horror Movie Pitch:
There’s something in the air, something silent, invisible, and deadly. When Reactor 4 blows, the nightmare begins... and it doesn’t end for thousands of years.
2. Eruption of Mount Vesuvius
Like the Black Plague, I think a lot of us have grown so used to the story of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD that we forget how terrifying it must have been in the moment. I mean, we’re familiar with the violence of the eruption, how the pyroclastic flow buried and eerily preserved everything in its path. We’ve seen photos of the people frozen in place and covered with ash.
Not only could Pompeii or Herculaneum today feel creepy and scary—imagine wandering the excavated areas alone at night—but the moment of eruption itself must have been terrifying.
When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it had been dormant for at least 150 years.52 There are reports of earthquakes leading up to the explosion, but it had not seen a volcanic eruption in at least the living memories of the people in Pompeii and Herculaneum. They assumed the scenic mountain that formed the background of their sky was just that—a quiet, peaceful mountain.
When the explosion came, there was no warning and very little time to get out. What came out of Vesuvius wasn’t garden-variety lava: It was a pyroclastic flow. In addition to being extremely hot—reports suggest that what hit Pompeii would have been a minimum of 510 degrees Celsius (950°F)—this flow is full of toxic gas and moves very fast, more than 60 mph.53 The further people were from the mountain the better chance they had, but only if the wind didn’t carry toxic fumes to them first.
Pliny the Elder and Younger both lived in the area. The Younger gives us the famous account of Vesuvius’s eruption; the Elder died when he tried to go assure to reassure locals after witnessing the eruption from his ship in the Bay of Naples. He was killed by the toxic gas that hung over the area.54
The terror of these final moments must have been akin to the Black Plague: wondering if the gods were punishing them for some reason. The people who escaped must have been haunted by what they had seen.
Though film treatments of Vesuvius usually treat it less like true horror and more as a disaster/adventure, the 1958 film Curse of the Faceless Man, is a cult classic B-movie where a Roman centurion buried under the pyroclastic flow for 2,000 years returns to reclaim his beloved after she’s reincarnated.
Horror Movie Pitch:
They partied in Pompeii, unaware that death boiled beneath their feet. When the mountain exploded, there was no escape — only ash, fire, and frozen screams.
1. The Hinterkaifeck Murders
And topping my list of terrifying historical events that could be horror movies is the truly terrifying story of the Hinterkaifeck Murders. This is similar to the murders of the Moore family of Villisca, but somehow even worse!
Our setting is a bucolic-seeming farmstead in Bavaria, about 40 miles from Munich. In the months leading up to March 1922, strange occurrences kept happening around the Gruber farm, named Hinterkaifek. The patriarch, Andreas Gruber, found a strange newspaper from Munich and reported that a key to the house was missing; the Gruber family’s maid, Kreszenz Rieger, quit after hearing strange noises coming from the attic of the house. When her concern wasn’t investigated or was dismissed as ghosts, she got the hell out of there. Smart girl. A new maid, Maria Baumgartner, was hired and arrived on March 31.55 She truly has the worst luck in this story.
The family was known to keep to themselves, and stories of terrible goings-on at the farm had been circulating for a while, not least of which was the ongoing sexual abuse the 63-year-old Andreas Gruber was inflicting on his 35-year-old daughter Viktoria.56 Andreas had actually served time for this crime, but it continued after his 1-year sentence was served.57 There are additionally some reports that Andreas had murdered Viktoria’s younger sister, Sophie, by locking her in a freezing cellar in the winter as punishment.58
On the night of March 31, the intruder began his attack. One at a time, the family was lured out to the barn and killed with a mattock. Once Viktoria, her mother Cäzilia, her daughter, also named Cäzilia, and her father Andreas had all been killed, the attacker moved into the home. There, he killed Viktoria’s 2-year-old son, Josef, and Maria, the new maid. Horrifyingly, later autopsies showed that all the adults had died nearly instantly, but the younger Cäzilia had probably clung to life for hours, suffering alone in the barn.59
Meanwhile, the killer lingered at the house for three days.
He took care of the family’s animals, made some meals for himself, and lit fires in the hearth. Just made himself at home.
Even more chillingly, people stopped by over the following days but didn’t notice the problems. On Saturday, April 1st, coffee sellers Hans and Eduard Schirovsky arrived at the house to solicit an order, but left when no one answered the door.60 On Sunday, April 2, Viktoria’s friends stopped by to pick her up for church, but left when, again, no one answered the door.61 On Monday, April 3, the postman dropped off the newspaper, but noted that things seemed out of place on the farm; specifically, the baby Josef was nowhere to be seen, but he was usually in the kitchen with his grandmother by the time the postman arrived.62
It wasn’t until Tuesday, April 4th, that people noticed an issue. Mechanic Albert Hofner had stopped by to fix an engine, spent a couple of hours on the farm performing the service, but had been unable to find anyone to confirm it was done. He had heard the dog barking inside the house when he arrived, but while leaving he had noticed that the dog was tied up outside.63 He’d proceeded to the family’s nearest neighbors, the Schlittenbauers, and told them that something was off.
Lorenz Schlittenbauer sent his sons over to check on the family, but they didn’t see anybody or anything wrong. But Lorenz clearly had a foreboding feeling because he went over himself and, finally, looked in the barn, where he found the first four bodies. He raised the alarm, and an investigation was launched.
Despite the fact that someone had clearly been on the farm that very day, no one was ever convicted of the crime. Over a hundred suspects were put forth, including Lorenz himself, as he’d had a relationship with Viktoria and had publicly accused her father of abusing her. German police brought in clairvoyants out of desperation for answers, but neglected to even take fingerprints of the scene.64 Eventually, the case went cold and was eventually closed.
Naturally, there are several documentaries of the case, but few fictionalized accounts. One German-language film, Hinter Kaifek (2009) does look absolutely terrifying though, and I won’t be watching it. Let me know if you do!
Horror Movie Pitch:
In the snow-covered silence of rural Germany, a family with their own dark secrets, begins hearing footsteps in the attic. Days later, they’re all found butchered — and the killer might have never left.
And that is my top 11 list of terrifying historical events that are as bad as horror movies—or worse. Happy Halloween!
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