Okay, so…. I am fucked up in the head.

And not just in the usual way I talk about, the way that puts me in the hands of therapy and pharmaceuticals and obsessively self-oriented journaling.

I am also one of those creepy people who have a real taste for the disturbing, the bizarre, the unwholesome, and the macabre. I love murder mysteries and crime procedurals. I have watched tons of programs about the supernatural, ESP, Bigfoot, UFOs, and so on. I know more about various serial killers than is healthy. I adored X-files.

I mean, look at my favorite song off the Police’s epoch making album Synchronicity.

Yes, it’s that creepy song that most people skipped because it was too disturbing. An Andy Summers masterpiece, in my books.

So when that Internet goddess StumbleUpon delivered unto me a web page called 136 Creepy Wikipedia Articles, I knew that me and this admittedly extremely minimal web page were going to be spending some time together.

And well, if I am going to be having so much fun reading about sick, horrible, disturbing, unnatural things, it would be base greed of me not to share my bizarre bounty with you, my faithful, loyal, and demented readers.

Presented here, then, in no particular order, are my faves.

Start off in fairly safe and secure waters, we have the simple yet enchanting tale of the Silverpilen, a set of train cars on the Stockhold Metro line that just happened to never get painted or supplied with ads, and which was only ever used when traffic on the Metro was particularly heavy, or in case of emergencies on the line.

Sounds simple enough, but the intriguing part is that the Silverpilen’s unusual appearance (bright shiny silver when all the other cars were green) and the rarity of its appearances has lead to quite a rich body of myth surrounding the mysterious shining train cars that nobody ever saw twice and that sensible people simply did not believe existed.

Here is the skinny from Wiki :

There are different versions of this urban legend. Some say that the ghost train has only been seen in abandoned tunnels by subway workers. Others say that anyone can see it passing the stations at high speed after midnight. Some even claim that Silverpilen sometimes stops to pick up passengers, who then disappear forever or later “get off” weeks, months or even years after they embarked. The inside of the train is described as being empty, or as containing one or several ghost passengers.

And the sad truth is, it’s just a car that never got painted. Reality is just plain never as fun as imagination, is it?

Then, going a little creepier, we have the Valentich Disappearance.

I have read a lot of reports about UFO sightings, abductions, and so on, but there is something about this one which grabs me.

The quick version : guy takes off in his small plane on a routine flight, then reports his engines are running rough, then tells the tower that a bizarre aircraft keeps passing by him and eventually lands on the roof of his plane… and he is never heard from or seen again.

Read the article for the details.

So what draws me to this story? Partially, it’s the credibility. Sure, it is possible that this guy just came up with a particularly creative way to fake his own death. But if he did, he did so in a way that required an enormously elaborate setup, including building something that fit on the roof of his plane that sure looked like a UFO to a lot of people who were calling in UFO sightings before anyone even know this guy had disappeared.

But partly it is just the vividness of the picture it paints in my mind. A lone plane, a strange object, aliens choosing a victim whom they assume is safe because he is far from human habitations, a few passes to make sure they can capture the craft… chilling.

Finally, going all the way into the darkness in one swell foop, we have the horrifying tale of H. H. Holmes, arguably the most evil man who ever lived.

How evil? Not only was he a serial killer with a real zeal for torturing and killing his victims, he is the only known serial killer who built an entire hotel designed expressly to facilitate his murderous hobby.

Complete with handy dandy corpse disposal chutes.

I am not making that up.

From the Wiki :

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests. He tortured and killed them.[7] Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate.[5] The victims’ bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement,[3] where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? I used to think that there was some mysterious reason why the worst serial killers seemed to come from around the turn of the 20th century. Then I realized duh, the year doesn’t matter, what matters is the level of civilization. Holmes and Albert Fish and the like could get away with they did because there was relatively little in the way of communications technology and so people could not compare notes and figure out that there was a killer among them.

Imagine what people must have been able to get away with in the era of horseback and the quill pen, let alone back when we were but nomads.

And with that cheerful thought, I leave you all to pleasant dreams and safe nights.