Morbid Knowledge

In 2021, Brandon Soules did not want to go to his shift at the tyre store. So he gagged himself with a bandana, tied his own hands behind his back with his belt, lowered himself to the ground, and shuffled to the side of the road to wait for someone to find him. When police arrived they found the 19-year-old bound and gagged. He told them two masked men had kidnapped him, knocked him unconscious, driven him around demanding to know where his father had buried a large sum of money in the desert, and then abandoned him there. Detectives spent days investigating. They reviewed surveillance footage, interviewed witnesses, checked his phone records and text messages. None of it matched his story. Hospital records showed no concussion or head injury. There was no evidence of any kidnapping whatsoever. When confronted with the evidence, Soules admitted he had fabricated the entire story to avoid going to work. He was fired from the tyre shop. He was charged with false reporting to law enforcement. His plan to get a day off resulted in a criminal record and national media coverage. Calling in sick would have worked better.

The “What's in the box?" scene from Se7en. The box delivered to Mills (Brad Pitt) contains the s*vered head of his pregnant wife, Tracy. The contents are never shown on screen. Director David Fincher later said the box contained a wig, some fake blood, and a 7-8 pound shot bag.

Selfie taken by North Korean man Kim Kang-woo inside North Korea after he secretly reentered after previously escaping. He returned just to help his mother. Kim Kang-woo was a poor farmer's son in a North Korean border town, top of his class but barred from university for being the wrong social class. He and his mother sometimes didn't have enough to eat. His father had already died attempting the same escape Kim was about to make. It was pouring rain the night in May 2016 when Kim crossed the Yalu River alone. His mother gave him a boiled egg as he left, he pressed it back into her hands. She couldn't risk seeing him off, and cried silently for nights after. He reached Seoul after a five-month journey through China, Laos and Thailand. Then he worked. Construction sites, a mattress store, a cellphone store, every job he could land, thinking of his mother each night on the walk home. By 2019 he had saved enough and found a broker he trusted, and flew to China to oversee her escape himself. It fell apart in a single dropped phone call. His mother called from a borrowed phone, frightened, saying she couldn't find him on the Chinese side and maybe they should try another time. Then the line went dead. His money was nearly gone, his visa almost expired. So he made his choice. "There was really only one path," he said. "I had to go back. And if I got caught crossing back in, I was ready to die." He spent two days watching the border guards from the Chinese side, and the moment they broke for dinner, he crossed back in and ran for the woods. He knocked on his mother's door. She was stunned, they held each other in silence and cried and then she was terrified. “If he's caught, he would be immediately exec*ted and the rest of us would go to a prison camp." For 22 days he scrambled to arrange brokers on both sides of the border. Then surveillance caught a call. Soldiers raided the house while Kim was out, detained his mother, and beat her to make her admit her son had returned. She denied it. The day after she was detained, Kim crossed the Yalu a second time, without her. South Korean intelligence had tracked his whole journey by phone records and interrogated him for weeks as a suspected spy. Because defectors legally become South Korean citizens, entering the North is a crime he was sentenced to six months in prison and two years' probation. But it worked. While he was still being questioned, a broker called, his mother had escaped on her own. He arranged for his contacts to guide her out through China, Laos and Thailand. She wrote him a letter every week he was locked up, about her new driver's license, about a young man on the subway who looked just like him. On the night of his release in September 2020, she waited at the prison gates at midnight, and they reunited more than four years after he first fled.

A man rigged his front door with a handgun to shoot anyone who walked in. He accidentally triggered the trap himself and k*lled himself. On Thanksgiving night 2019, 65-year-old Ronald Cyr of Van Buren, Maine, called 911 to report he had been shot. When officers arrived, they discovered that the front door of his home had been outfitted with a device designed to fire a handgun at anyone who attempted to enter. Cyr had accidentally triggered his own trap. An investigation confirmed he was fatally injured by the unintentional discharge of one of his own homemade devices. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced d*ad. Police also discovered numerous other unknown devices throughout the home, prompting the Maine State Police bomb squad to respond.

Completed under Saddam Hussein's government in 1986, Iraq's Mosul Dam is often described as one of the world's most dangerous dams. Built on a foundation of water-soluble gypsum, the ground beneath it is constantly eroding, requiring continuous grouting with concrete around the clock to help maintain its stability. Experts have long warned that a catastrophic failure could unleash devastating flooding across northern Iraq, threatening cities including Mosul and potentially reaching Baghdad, with some estimates suggesting up to 1.5 million lives could be at risk.

Argentine footballer Lucas Trejo rushed back home after Venezuela's devastating earthquakes and spent 74 hours searching for his missing family. Tragically, rescuers found his wife and two young children d*ad beneath the collapsed building. On June 24, 2026, two massive earthquakes struck Venezuela's northern coast just 39 seconds apart, a rare "doublet" that levelled entire neighbourhoods. The d*ath toll has risen to over 1,400, making it one of the worst natural disasters in the country's modern history. Lucas Trejo, a 38-year-old Argentine centre-back playing for Venezuelan club Sport Marítimo de La Guaira, was in Caracas with his team when the quakes hit. His family's apartment building in Playa Grande, La Guaira, collapsed. "Our building in Playa Grande collapsed. I don't know anything about my family," he wrote on online, before rushing to the disaster zone to search himself. His brother-in-law told CNN Español that Trejo was "emotionally overwhelmed" and that "absolutely nothing" was left of the beachfront home. After 74 hours, rescuers recovered the bodies of his wife Yanina Maranella and their two children, Aarón and Ainhoa.

In 1984, drummer Rick Allen from Def Leppard lost his left arm in a car crash at the age of 21. Instead of quitting, he learned to play a custom electronic kit using his left foot. Rick Allen joined Def Leppard at just 15 years old, and by 21 he was drumming for one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. Their album Pyromania had turned them into stadium headliners almost overnight, with a US Gallup poll that year naming Def Leppard America's favourite rock band, ahead of AC/DC, Journey, and even the Rolling Stones. Then came New Year's Eve, 1984. Rick was driving back from Ladybower Reservoir near Sheffield with his girlfriend Miriam Barendsen when he lost control of his left-hand-drive Corvette Stingray on a sharp bend, hitting a wall. The car flipped. His seatbelt came undone, and as he was thrown through the sunroof, it tore off his left arm at the shoulder. What few people know is that he'd also badly broken his right arm, and at one point doctors warned him there was a chance he could lose that one too. The man who made his living with his hands was staring down the possibility of having none. Surgeons initially reattached the arm, but on 4th January 1985, it had to be amputated due to infection. Within three months of the accident, he was drumming again, working with engineers to build something the world had never seen. Drum manufacturer Simmons collaborated with him to design a custom electronic kit that reassigned his left-hand parts to a series of foot pedals, so his one arm and both feet could cover what most drummers need two arms to do.

Football fan who mysteriously vanished while traveling to the World Cup and was found in a pub 10 days later, blissfully unaware that a search was underway. On June 20, 2026, Michael Hewitt, a 65-year-old Leeds United fan from Yorkshire known to everyone as "Little Mick", flew to Barcelona for a layover en route to Boston, where he had tickets to watch England play Ghana at the World Cup. He lost his phone. His tickets were on his phone. His contacts were on his phone. With no way to get to Boston and no way to reach anyone, Little Mick made a very sensible decision, he stayed in Barcelona, kept his passport and his bank card, found a pub, and started watching the World Cup from there. For ten days. Back home, his family hadn't heard from him since the early hours of June 21. The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Interpol became involved in efforts to track him down while family members circulated missing-person posts online. The breakthrough came when British officials managed to trace Hewitt through card transactions linked to his hotel in Barcelona before making contact and informing him that his disappearance had triggered widespread concern. His brother Gary posted to social media after he was found safe that Michael was "blissfully unaware" that anyone had been looking for him.

The photograph was taken by photojournalist David Turnley during the Siege of Sarajevo. It shows Bosnian sniper Nadia Jeriagic aiming a rifle at Serbian snipers in the mountains from her position on the 20th floor of a Sarajevo building. Jeriagic, who worked a regular shift sniping at Serbs, had been an artist before the war. The eighteenth to twentieth floors offered long sightlines across intersections that had become k*ll zones, which snipers on both sides fought to control as civilians sprinted across them clutching bags of food or buckets of water.

In 2004, at the peak of his fame off the back of Get Rich or Die Tryin', 50 Cent travelled to Iraq with his G-Unit crew to perform for American troops. He flew into Camp Anaconda, a base so volatile it was nicknamed "Mortaritaville" because of the constant bombardment. The base, also known as Logistics Support Area Anaconda near Balad, was one of the most frequently attacked US installations in the country, taking regular indirect fire from mortars and rockets. Wearing a bulletproof vest and surrounded by military personnel, he delivered an energetic concert that lifted the spirits of the soldiers By multiple accounts of the visit, an officer warned him before he went on, "You could die today," and he opened the set with "What Up Gangsta."

Strange photo shows Hermann Göring and Benito Mussolini with Göring's pet lion, in September 1937. The setting was as extravagant as the pets. Carinhall was a vast estate Göring built in the Schorfheide forest north of Berlin, named after his dead first wife Carin, whose body he had exhumed from Sweden and reburied on the grounds. His possessions there included a bowling alley, a model train set appraised at hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a private zoo that "required enough meat to feed a village."

In 2008, Rachel Lee and Nick Prugo, found Paris Hilton's spare key under her doormat and broke into her $5.9 million mansion five times before she noticed. They became known as the Bling Ring, seven teenagers and young adults from around Calabasas, California, who broke into celebrity homes between October 2008 and August 2009 and stole roughly $3 million in cash and belongings. The ringleaders were Rachel Lee and her childhood friend Nick Prugo. It began small, checking handles on unlocked cars after parties, until they found a website listing celebrity addresses and treated it like hitting the jackpot. Their first target was Paris Hilton, chosen because they assumed she was careless enough to leave a door unlocked. In late 2008 they drove to her $5.9 million home, rang the bell to see if she was in, and when no one answered, found a spare key under the mat and let themselves in. Lee treated Hilton's closet like a personal shopping suite. They returned at least four more times, and Hilton didn't notice anything was gone until around $2 million in money, clothing and jewellery had vanished. Lee reportedly added Hilton's spare key to her own keychain. From there the spree widened, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, and the home Brian Austin Green shared with Megan Fox, where they took Green's semi-automatic handgun. At Orlando Bloom's house, shared with model Miranda Kerr, they spent about three hours going through the couple's things and took close to $500,000 in Rolex watches along with luggage and art. For Lee it was less about money than the thrill, the anxiety before, the adrenaline during, the rush after. Walking into a star's home and trying on their clothes, she later said, let her "live in their world." Planning was chillingly easy, they found houses on Google Maps and worked out when owners would be away by tracking their event appearances on social media. Their undoing came from a security camera at Audrina Patridge's home. The footage hit the media, a tipster recognised Nick Prugo, and he confessed and named the others. When police arrested Lee in Las Vegas, they found a coat belonging to Lohan and topless photos of Hilton taken from a safe in her house. Lee served about sixteen months of a four-year sentence; Prugo served one year of two. The whole saga was later turned into Sofia Coppola's 2013 film The Bling Ring, filmed, fittingly, inside Paris Hilton's actual house.

While battling Stage 4 cancer, Brett Yancey refused to use a wheelchair so he could walk his daughter onto the field as she was crowned Homecoming Queen, determined not to let his illness stop him. and an oxygen tank refused a wheelchair and walked his daughter across the field as she was crowned Homecoming Queen. In October 2023. Brett Yancey, 47, of Southside, Alabama, had been undergoing treatment for stage 4 esophageal cancer for six years. His illness began when he struggled to swallow, leading to a stage 3 diagnosis, after surgery and a brief remission, the cancer returned and progressed to stage 4, spreading to his lungs, brain, carotid artery and nerves. Before he became ill, he had been the head football coach at Southside High School and had coached all three of his daughters in sports. In the lead-up to homecoming, Brett experienced paralysis in his left leg and changes in behaviour. His wife Carrie suggested alternatives, riding in a golf cart, or letting their daughter walk the field alone, but Brett refused. "I'm going to walk her across that field. I'll walk my baby across that field," he told her. When the moment came, he did exactly that. Carrie watched from a high vantage point as Brett walked steadily across the field. Once the pair reached the other candidates, his youngest daughter, 17-year-old Sara Kate, was crowned homecoming queen.

On 14 June 2025, Croatian freediver Vitomir Maričić held his breath underwater for 29 minutes and 3 seconds in Opatija, Croatia, setting a World Record for the longest time breath held voluntarily underwater. He did it lying motionless in a three-metre-deep pool inside the ballroom of Opatija's Bristol Hotel, watched by five judges and around 100 spectators. The time beat the previous record by nearly five minutes. His time was roughly twice as long as a bottlenose dolphin is thought to hold its breath, and approached the ability of a harbour seal, animals whose lungs are vastly better adapted than ours, replacing up to 90 percent of their air with each breath compared to about 20 percent for humans.

In 2019, a mother named Kertisha woke up from a 7-month long coma after doctors told her family to ‘pull the plug’ on her. In September 2018, Kertisha Brabson, a 31-year-old mother of two from Alliance, Ohio, began acting strangely, reaching for things that weren't there, talking incoherently, and dancing as if at a concert. Her mother, Kertease Williams, knew immediately something was deeply wrong, saying something had "taken over" her daughter. A seizure then put Kertisha into a coma that would last seven months. The cause was eventually identified as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a disease in which the body's own immune system attacks its brain cells. It's a rare condition, only identified in 2007, and notoriously difficult to recognise, which is part of why her case became so dire before it was understood. As doctors struggled to diagnose or treat her, the outlook turned grim. "They told me she was brain-dead and pull the plug and all those things," Williams recalled. But she refused to accept it. "I don't have no doctor's background. I've never been to school for anything, but when it's your child, you're going to do everything in your power to bring your daughter back." She had Kertisha moved to the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, where a team treated her condition and seizures aggressively. Then came the moment no one expected. Kertisha woke up on 7 April 2019. To her, no time had passed at all, she thought it was still September, the same moment she'd fallen asleep seven months earlier. A nurse told her, "Ms. Brabson, you've been asleep for seven months." One of her doctors, Shraddha Mainali, recalled a resident texting her in disbelief that Kertisha was opening her eyes and following simple commands. By that Christmas, she was home with her mother and her two children, Diamonique and Perez.

A man suffered a massive heart attack at 4 AM while driving alone, his Tesla remotely rerouted by his son from miles away drove him straight to the ER and saved his life. On 15 November 2025, John Brandt, 55, was driving his 2026 Tesla Model Y Launch Edition along Interstate 20, travelling between Atlanta and Birmingham in the early hours. His car had recently received the Full Self-Driving v14.1.3 update, and crucially, FSD was engaged and keeping the vehicle steady on the highway. Around 3:50 a.m. he began experiencing severe chest pain, could barely stay conscious, and could no longer safely control the vehicle. Fading in and out, he managed to phone his son, Jack. That's where the connected-car technology became a lifeline. As an authorised driver on his father's Tesla account, Jack was able to remotely change the car's FSD navigation from his own 2014 Model S, redirecting it to Tanner Medical Center in Carrollton, Georgia, and alerting the hospital that the vehicle was inbound. Despite fighting to stay conscious, John himself managed to switch the car's speed profile to "Mad Max" to get there as fast as possible, and the ER staff, forewarned, were waiting when he arrived. Doctors diagnosed a massive STEMI heart attack requiring immediate intervention on three blocked arteries, and told the family that if he had pulled over to wait for an ambulance or kept driving toward Birmingham, he would not have survived. He received treatment and recovered.

Rick Hoyt was born in 1962 in Massachusetts. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth after his umbilical cord became twisted around his neck and cut off the flow of oxygen, leaving his brain unable to control his muscles. Many doctors urged his parents to institutionalise him, saying he would never be more than a "vegetable." His parents, Dick and Judy, refused, and brought him home to raise like any other child. The prognosis about his mind proved completely wrong. At age 11, after his parents pushed for it, Rick was fitted with a computer he operated with head movements, and it revealed he was fully intelligent. That breakthrough changed everything, he attended public school for the first time and went on to graduate from Boston University in 1993 with a degree in special education. In 1977, Rick asked his father if they could run a five-mile race to raise money for a paralysed lacrosse player. Dick, not a runner, pushed him the entire way and they finished next to last, but not last. Afterwards Rick typed: "Dad, when I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped." What they went on to achieve would be remarkable for any elite athlete, let alone a father pushing his son. They competed in over 1,100 endurance events, including 72 marathons and six Ironman Triathlons, and ran the Boston Marathon 32 times between 1980 and 2014. In the triathlons, Dick towed Rick in a boat for the swim, pedalled him on a special bike, and pushed his chair for the run. In 1992 they crossed the United States, biking and running 3,735 miles in 45 days. Dick Hoyt passed in 2021 at 80, and Rick passed in 2023 at 61. A bronze statue of the pair still stands near the Boston Marathon starting line in Hopkinton.

A shipyard worker set a US Navy nuclear submarine on fire in 2012 just because he wanted to leave work early, the resulting 12-hour blaze caused over $400 million in damage and the Navy scrapped the vessel entirely. On 23 May 2012, the USS Miami, a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine, sat in dry dock at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, midway through a 20-month overhaul. A 25-year-old civilian painter and sandblaster named Casey James Fury set fire to a plastic bag full of rags and left it on a bunk inside the submarine. The flames tore through the forward compartments. The blaze burned for around 12 hours and took more than 100 firefighters to extinguish, gutting the submarine's command and control center, crew living quarters and torpedo room. Five people were injured fighting it. Crucially, the fire never reached the rear of the boat, where the nuclear reactor and propulsion systems were housed, The Navy first blamed an industrial vacuum cleaner, but on 23 July 2012 Fury was indicted for arson after confessing that he had set the fire to get out of work early. He told investigators he lit it after an upsetting exchange of text messages, and he was taking multiple medications for anxiety, depression and insomnia at the time. It also wasn't isolated, he set a second fire weeks later, on 16 June, which was quickly extinguished.

Evan Peters for his portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer. Peters wore lead weights on his arms and lifts in his shoes to mimic Dahmer’s rigid, robotic walk. He also wore the serial killer’s actual jeans, glasses, and shoes for months to get into character.

Natalie Queiroz was 8 months pregnant and left holding her own intestines on the street after her lover st*bbed her to satisfy his mother. On 4 March 2016, Natalie Queiroz was walking through Sutton Coldfield, England, when she was set upon on Trinity Hill at around 3.15pm. She was st*bbed 24 times by her then partner, Babur Karamat Raja, known as "Bobby." She was 37 weeks pregnant, just over three weeks past her 40th birthday. Natalie and Raja had known each other since their school days in Birmingham, had got together as adults, and in August 2015 had thrown a party to announce her pregnancy. But Raja had been concealing the truth about his life. Natalie later described him as having lived a "double or triple life" and that hidden world, along with the collapse of their relationship, formed the backdrop to the attack. The assault was sustained and frenzied. He st*bbed her 24 times in the heart, lung, liver and uterus, and attempted to sl*t her wrists, survivors' accounts describe it as lasting around nine minutes. The wounds were so severe that her abdomen was opened, she was left holding her own organs in the street. What saved both lives was the courage of passers-by and the speed of the medical response. Three bystanders, John Mitchell, Anthony Smith and Callum Gibson, stepped in to wrestle the carving knife away from Raja. Of the 24 wounds, one was just 2mm from their unborn daughter. A Midlands Air Ambulance crew landed on Sutton Coldfield High Street to reach her, and she was airlifted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in critical condition. Natalie was in a coma when her daughter was delivered by Caesarean section shortly before 8pm; she underwent emergency surgery and pulled through. Mother and baby both survived against the medical odds. Justice came swiftly. Raja was charged with attempted murder and attempted child destruction of his biological daughter, pleaded guilty to both, and was jailed for 18 years on 23 June 2016. The most extraordinary chapter is what Natalie did afterwards. Within 18 months of the attack, she completed a mud run and an abseil to raise money for the air ambulance charity that helped save her, despite having only limited use of one hand. She went on to be appointed MBE for services to young people and the prevention of knife crime, became a victims' advocate for West Midlands Police.