Texarkana Is A Sleepy Town That Is Split Between Both Texas And Arkansas. Over The Spring Of 1946, A

Carl Tanzler, a radiologist residing in Key West, Florida, developed an intense infatuation with Elena Milagro Hoyos, one of his patients. Tragically, Elena succumbed to tuberculosis in 1931. Consumed by his obsession, Tanzler took extraordinary measures to preserve her memory. With the consent of Elena's parents, he commissioned a mausoleum to house her remains, convinced that it was preferable to her decomposing underground.

Night after night, Tanzler would visit Elena's tomb, unable to let go of his fixation. Eventually, his obsession took a disturbing turn when he decided to bring her body home with him. In his bed, he kept Elena's corpse, attempting to restore her decaying form by replacing her deteriorating skin with plaster. He adorned her with a new wardrobe and perfumes, meticulously maintaining the illusion of her existence.

The disturbing truth came to light in 1940 when one of Elena's sisters grew suspicious and confronted Tanzler at his residence. To her horror, she discovered Elena's decaying corpse lying in bed, dressed in an elegant gown. Tanzler's grotesque act of necrophilia had been exposed. Subsequently, he was arrested and charged with crimes such as wanton destruction of a grave and unauthorized removal of a body. However, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations on the charges, he was eventually released.

Jane Bielawski and her doll “Missy”. Following the suspicious death of some of her playmates in New York tenement, police attempted to interview Jane. According to reports, the young girl went ‘crazy’ and accused her doll of the murders, before throwing the doll out of her apartment window while screaming “Bad dolly. Naughty dolly!” Jane was taken to Bloomingdale Asylum to be treated for ‘hysterica’. She was never to leave the institution, dying there an old woman in 1968.

In a chilling case reminiscent of the “Swedish Josef Fritzl,” Martin Trenneborg, a 38-year-old doctor, employed a horrifying plan to abduct and imprison a young woman. The ordeal began when he drugged her with strawberries laced with Rohypnol, rendering her unconscious. 

Trenneborg then transported her to his residence, located near Kristianstad in southern Sweden, where he had constructed a dungeon. In an attempt to conceal his identity, he wore two different masks during the entire ordeal.

For a harrowing week, Trenneborg subjected his victim to repeated acts of rape while she remained captive in the dungeon. Disturbingly, investigations later uncovered his intention to keep her captive for up to ten years. However, his twisted scheme took an unexpected turn when he returned to her apartment to retrieve some of her belongings. 

Upon witnessing the police conducting a search in the area, he panicked and brought the woman to a police station, where he concocted a false story about the events that had transpired. In his fabricated account, he claimed to have kidnapped her out of a sense of loneliness and a desire for a partner.

Following a thorough legal process, Trenneborg was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison for his heinous crimes. The severity of the sentence reflects the gravity of his actions and the immense suffering he inflicted upon his victim during her horrifying ordeal.

Tamara Samsonova, known as the “Granny Ripper,” defied the common stereotype of a serial killer, as she was a 68-year-old grandmother. Her arrest in 2015 shocked the world and launched one of the most bizarre true crime cases in history.

Authorities arrested Samsonova on suspicion of murdering 79-year-old Valentina Ulanova, whose dismembered body was found in a pond. Samsonova shared an apartment with Ulanova and was caught on CCTV disposing of her body, which led to her becoming a suspect. When police searched the apartment, they discovered a gruesome diary containing details of not just this murder, but several others.

The diary contained Samsonova’s confession to killing at least 13 people, including her husband, whom she murdered in 2005, and another tenant. She described how she dismembered their bodies with a knife in the bathroom and disposed of the remains in different locations. Shockingly, Samsonova also confessed to cannibalizing her victims and getting rid of unwanted body parts and organs.

Throughout the 18th and 19th century, grave-robbing was quite prevalent. Due to this, many cemeteries were protected with cemetery guns. The one above is from the Museum of Mourning Art. The gun sits on a turret, allowing it to move freely. It would be set up with a tripwire, meaning that when the unsuspecting grave robber got close to the grave that he intended to rob, he would trigger the weapon, killing him.

Pedro López aka “Monster of the Andes”

Pedro Alonso López, more commonly known as the Monster of Andes, was born 8th October the seventh of thirteen child of Benilda López De Casteneda in Colombia 1948. He commonly caught his mum committing acts of prostitution and this would lead his mother finding him fondling his younger sister’s breast in ‘57 when he was eight. As a result he was kicked out of the house. The supposedly a polite boy who wanted to be a teacher (according to his mother), ran away to Bogotá, Colombia. He then said he had been kidnapped and raped. He was later taken in, aged 12, by a US immigrant family and enrolled in a school for orphans. He ran away again after two years either with a teacher or because he was being molested by a teacher.

He was a serial killer and child rapist who murdered a minimum of 110 young girls from the year 1969 to 1980 but claims to have murdered over 300 across Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The monster of Andes claimed that during his imprisonment for car theft, he was brutally gang raped and then, still incarcerated he hunted down and killed the most brutal of his rapists. When he was released he moved to Peru and started murdering young girls. He claimed that by ‘78 he had killed over 100 girls before he was caught and captured by an indigenous tribe. They were about to execute him, before a missionary from the US persuaded them to hand him over to the state police, after which he was quickly released.

López claimed he returned to Colombia and the moved to Ecuador, during which, he claimed he had killed about three girls a week. He stated: “I like the girls in Ecuador; they are more gentle and trusting. More innocent.”

The nonce was arrested when an attempted kidnapping failed and he was trapped by market traders. The Associated Press (AP) reported his arrest to been in march 1980 and that he had boasted about killing anywhere from 200 to 369 young girls. According to CNN, López “Was arrested in 1980 but was freed by the government in Ecuador at the end of [1998]”. During an interview from his prison cell, the pedophile described himself as “the man of the century” (obviously disregarding his rapes and murders of young girls) and said he was being released for “good behaviour”. An A&E biographical documentary reported that he was released from an Ecuadorian prison on 31/8/199, then rearrested as an illegal immigrant and tossed him to the Colombian authorities, who pinned a 20-year-old murder on him. He was declared insane and held in the psychiatric wing of everyone’s favourite Bogotá hospital. In 1998, he was declared sane and released on a $50 bail, subject to conditions. He later absconded. The earlier documentary says that Interpol released an advisory for his rearrest by Colombian authorities over a fresh murder in 2002, he is currently wanted and whereabouts are unknown.

Aside from uncited local accounts, López’s crimes first received international attention from an interview with Ron Laytner, a longtime freelance photojournalist in his Ambato prison cell in 1992. According to Laytner’s story, López got his nickname Monster of the Andes in ‘80, when he purposely led the police to the graves of 53 girls between the ages 9 to 12 in Ecuador.

In 1974, the mummy of pharaoh Ramesses II was issued a valid Egyptian passport (nearly three millennia after his death) so that he could fly to Paris. (Source)

Titus Andronicus: performed in Japanese, it is a 2006 production by the Ninagawa Company staged in Stratford-upon-Avon. There was no stage blood used in this production, instead ribbons of red silk come out of mouths, throats and hands.

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍