THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU SH!T YOURSELF
Copyright © Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2020
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CONTENTS
Title page
Important Note
Introduction
This Book Will Make You Sh!t Yourself
IMPORTANT NOTE
The conspiracy theories contained in this book are just that: theories. The author and the publishers make no claim that any of these theories have any basis in fact. They are merely theories that have at some point been expressed in the public domain. Such theories are reproduced herein for entertainment purposes only and are not intended to be taken literally.
INTRODUCTION
Why do people like scary stories? The shudder in the chest? The sinking stomach? The racing heart rate and the tingle in the limbs? That feeling of being genuinely under threat?
This book contains a selection of the world's scariest, creepiest and most unnerving stories, legends and facts. From tales of extraterrestrial encounters and ghostly happenings to true crime and unsettling conspiracies, it will send a shiver down your spine, and, well… you've read the title.
Many of the entries originate from a fear of the unknown: unidentified flying objects, unfathomable terror attacks, things that go bump in the night, the fear that secretive global elites are pulling our strings.
Whether the following stories are fact or fiction, reality or fantasy, is for you to decide. Are some things just too far-fetched to be a work of the imagination? After all, we all know that the world is scary place, but for you, it's about to get even scarier.
SCAREGROUND
In 2011 a new water ride at Thorpe Park Resort in Surrey, UK, was moved after workers reported a feeling of being watched, cold sensations, objects moving of their own accord and visions of a headless monk. The park managers called in paranormal experts who scanned the land and discovered evidence that the ride's foundations had disturbed an ancient burial ground. The area, known as Monk's Walk, was built in the year 666AD and was used by monks from nearby Chertsey Abbey.
OFF WITH HER HEAD
In 1864 Major-General James Durham Dundas was on duty in the Tower of London when he noticed a hooded woman gliding toward a guard in the courtyard below. The woman had no face. The guard thrust his bayonet into the intruder, but the figure walked right through him, giving him such a shock that he fainted. Only the testimony of Dundas as eyewitness saved the man from punishment for sleeping on the job. The ghost is said to have been Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, executed in 1536 on charges of high treason.
HOLY SH!T
Anne Boleyn is said to stalk many of her old "haunts", including Hever Castle and Hampton Court Palace.
Each year on the anniversary of her death, she is said to arrive at the place of her birth, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, in a carriage drawn by a headless horseman, carrying her own head in her lap.
ANCIENT ALIENS
Our fascination with UFOs has spanned many civilizations, including ancient ones. In Lombardy, Italy, 10,000-year-old rock drawings depict figures wearing what look suspiciously like space helmets; hieroglyphs in 3,000-year-old tombs at Abydos, Egypt, depict helicopters and planes among birds and flying insects; and Hopi cave drawings in the South-Western United States feature what Native Americans called "star people" – legendary beings that arrived from space. Surely this can't be one huge coincidence?
HOLY SH!T
"Ancient alien" theorists believe that extraterrestrials were responsible for the erection of Stonehenge, the giant stone figures of Easter Island and even the extinction of the dinosaurs. It may sound a bit out there, but the seminal book on the topic, Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods, has sold over seven million copies.
SLENDER MAN
In 2009, pictures began circulating online of children who had reportedly gone missing. All the images had something in common: looming in the background was a tall, thin figure dressed in black, with freakishly long arms and its face always obscured. In one image, a girl appears to be holding hands with the unsettling figure, and rumours spread that these were the last known photographs of the missing children. In 2014, the internet bogeyman made a shocking entry into the real world when two young girls killed a friend in Wisconsin, USA, telling the police that they did it to protect themselves from Slender Man.
STIR-CRAZY IN STANFORD
In August 1971, 12 students were "arrested" by the Palo Alto Police Department, California, and transferred to cells at Stanford University, where they were strip-searched and each assigned a number. It was an experiment, with 24 students enlisted as "prisoners" or "guards" in a fake prison. The prisoners rebelled within 48 hours, barricading their cells. The guards responded with fire extinguishers and psychological abuse, forcing prisoners to strip naked, sleep on concrete and defecate in buckets. With the guards becoming increasingly sadistic and prisoners showing signs of "extreme stress", three of the students were released early and the experiment, set up to explore the effect of prisoner and guard roles on normal people, was abandoned after six days.
HOLY SH!T
Psychologists now cast doubt on the validity of the prison experiment, suggesting that the guards were encouraged to play up to the stereotype of a cruel prison guard, and that some were "acting" in order to help the experiment. It's also been alleged that the cruel treatment that the guards inflicted were suggested to them by the researchers in charge, undermining the idea that they became sadistic of their own accord.
THE BIG ONE IS OVERDUE
California is overdue for a massive earthquake. The past 100 years have been "unusually quiet" according to geologists. The last "Big One" hit San Francisco in 1906, killing 3,000 people and destroying 80 per cent of the city. In July 2019 the state experienced the biggest quakes for ten years, making some suspect that something is brewing underground. Los Angeles is thought to be the area most at risk. The city sits near the southern leg of the 800-mile San Andreas fault and hasn't experienced a big quake for more than 250 years.
DEADLY DIET PLAN
The Codex Alimentarius is a set of internationally agreed food standards, developed by the United Nations over decades. Not everyone thinks it's as healthy as it sounds and suspicious types have theorized that the codex is actually a secret plan for control of the global food supply by a shadowy elite who hide in plain sight. The cynics claim that the rules dictate that all food will eventually be irradiated and genetically manipulated, nutritional supplements and organic foods will be restricted and natural foodstuffs such as garlic will be reclassified as illegal drugs. The aim is to keep the population under control, in league with big drugs companies who will profit from providing "remedies" for malnutrition.
HOLY SH!T
Codex Alimentarius might sound obscurely ominous and like something out of The Da Vinci Code – some even claim that the codex was written by Nazis after World War Two – but it just means "book of food" in Latin.
VACUUM DECAY
According to a branch of physics called quantum field theory, the universe may have a fatal flaw. The Higgs field, a vital "quantum field" that gives all objects their mass, could be what scientists call a false vacuum. This means it is unstable and has huge amounts of potential energy. A high-energy random quantum event – which is not impossible – could create a "bubble" of energy in the Higgs field that would rampage across the universe at the speed of light, destroying everything in its path. Earth would be destroyed in a fraction of a second, and we wouldn't even see it coming.
SUB-ZERO SURPRISE
A rise in sea levels is not the only threat we face from climate change. The Arctic permafrost is thought to harbour bacteria and deadly viruses that have been there for thousands, even millions of years. These deadly microbes that are said to have infected early humans and Neanderthals could be resurrected as the ice melts. In fact, scientists have suggested that smallpox, anthrax, the Spanish flu and the bubonic plague are likely to be buried in Siberia.
HOLY SH!T
Climate change can also have unpredictable effects on other bacteria. It is believed that it was only a 1.5 degree change in temperature in the fourteenth century that caused a small microbe to develop into the Black Death, killing between 75 million and 200 million people.
THE MANDELA EFFECT
Darth Vader never said, "Luke, I am your father" and Humphrey Bogart never said, "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca
