Dark Facts

The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire since 1962. An underground coal seam ignited, creating sinkholes that vent toxic gas, forcing nearly everyone to leave. The fire still burns today and could continue for 250 more years.

In the late 1990s, a South African inventor created the 'Blaster,' a car-mounted flamethrower designed to repel carjackers, which briefly became legal to sell due to a loophole in self-defense laws.

There is a poisonous plant that leaves the victim with a smile on their face at the time of death.

When a queen bee becomes too old or diseased to serve the colony, worker bees form a tight cluster around her until she dies from overheating—a process scientists call "balling" and others have nicknamed "cuddle death."

In the late 1600s, London was plagued by an attacker who would spank his victims with a rod and shout "Spanko!" before running away.

A man from Newport, UK, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013. Now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he has spent over a decade trying to get permission to excavate the landfill where it's buried.

A year after his wife's disappearance, a Dutch crime writer named Richard Klinkhamer wrote a suspicious book about seven ways to kill your spouse. He became famous and spent the next decade hinting in print and on TV that he had murdered her. Finally, it turned out that he really had.

Elvis had a twin.

In 2013, a homeless man from Oregon robbed a bank for $1, then casually sat down and waited for police to arrest him so he could receive healthcare in prison.

After octopuses breed, they develop dementia. They then live the rest of their lives in this confused, seemingly lost state, with apparently no knowledge of previous events.

In the 80s, a Japanese director released gore movies that were so realistic, he was investigated by the police and had to prove that no one was actually murdered.

In 2008, a beach was stolen in Jamaica. The 500 truckloads of sand remain missing to this day.

In 2015, Britain will ban smoking in cars carrying children.

Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your food begin to eat you.

It has been reported that rich people in China can hire "body doubles" to serve their prison time.

A Missouri family sued the previous owners of a house that they had just bought after Brown Recluse Spiders "started bleeding out of the walls." An expert came in and estimated that the house was infested with 4,000 — 5,000 of the spiders.

In 1968, a car driven by bank employees was pulled over by a motorcycle cop claiming the car had been rigged with a bomb. The cop got under the car to “defuse” the device. When the car started to smoke, everybody ran. Then the “cop” just drove the car away. The 300,000,000 Yen robbery remains unsolved to this day.

Daniel Webster, who ran for president and lost three times, declined the Vice Presidency twice, thinking it a worthless office. Both presidents who offered it later died in office, meaning that if he had accepted, he would’ve become president after all.

According to biblical scholars who have tallied deaths directly attributed to God in the Bible, the count ranges from 2.4 to 25 million people, while Satan is credited with killing only 10—the children of Job, and only with God's permission.

When Pocahontas met John Smith, she was around 10-12 years old. He was 27.

Critic Michael Crowley gave such a poor review of author Michael Crichton's novel 'State of Fear' that, in his next book 'Next,' Crichton created a character named 'Mick Crowley' who was a child molester with a small penis.

If NYC were its own country, and the NYPD was its army, it would be the twentieth-best-funded army in the world, just behind Greece and just ahead of North Korea.

On April 4, 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jimi Hendrix opened a concert in Newark by performing a haunting, improvised instrumental elegy. The spontaneous tribute was never officially recorded, and no known audience recordings exist.

The widow of Winchester rifle heir William Wirt Winchester built a sprawling mansion with mazes, doors to nowhere, and staircases leading into ceilings—allegedly to confuse the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles.