33 Disturbing Facts That Will Haunt Your Mind

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20-07-2025

Fun facts should be entertaining, but some are downright disturbing. On the popular subreddit r/AskReddit, Reddit user u/MaterialRub675 asked people: What's a disturbing fact you wish you could unlearn? Some of these answers made me feel like I watched that cursed video in The Ring, and now all these facts will happen to me in the coming week. Read at your own risk:
"We got a dog that had heartworms. They got treated and are doing perfectly fine now. The thing is, it prompted me to look into them. They're spread by mosquitoes and can live in most large mammals. Huh... So, what stops humans from getting them? Nothing. The answer is nothing. They just aren't harmful to humans because they can't breed properly in us. You and I might have a few right now... And that goes for most parasitic worms, btw."
"A dingo really did eat that woman's baby, and everyone still just makes fun of her to this day. Put your phone down and sit in silence for thirty seconds while you imagine what it would be like to: 1) be eaten alive by a dingo, and 2) find out what happened to your baby, have nobody believe you, and become an international laughingstock. What the f*ck, guys."
"Scurvy makes scars reopen."
"When I had open heart surgery nearly 20 years ago at age 28, the doctors placed 'pacer' wires in my heart just in case they needed to stimulate my heart electrically after the surgery (my words, not theirs). So I wake up and find two yellow copper electrical wires protruding from my torso. Later that day, the nurse came to remove them. This is done by simply tugging until they come free from small hooks or barbs on the end of the heart wall. The nurse warned me that I'd feel my heart physically pull down in my body. She was not kidding. It was unpleasant, to say the least. But now, years later, I literally can't forget what it feels like to have someone tug on my heartstrings."
"Dominant female meerkats will kill the pups of subordinate female meerkats, then force the subordinate females to feed their babies as 'tribute' or 'rent' to be allowed to remain in the group. That shit is hardcore af."
"The whistle of an artillery or mortar shell falling towards you is actually the deviation from its trajectory and where you're currently standing. The closer you are to where it'll land, the less you hear. If it's a direct hit, you won't hear anything at all."
"Children under the age of five try to hide from fires and not run from them."
"There's a condition called Cotard's Delusion, where a person genuinely believes they're dead, like fully dead, but their body just hasn't noticed yet. Some even stop eating or ask to be buried. The mind is terrifying when it breaks."
"Everything about rabies, especially the fact that once symptoms show, it's already too late."
"It was believed for a long time that babies do not feel pain and no anesthesia is required when a surgery is performed. This only started to change in the late 1980s after the mom of an infant who underwent open heart surgery without anesthesia started a campaign to raise awareness. Whenever I think of it and imagine those poor babies who had to go through excruciating pain with a muscle relaxant that prevented them from moving and fighting back, on top of that...I'm in tears. I don't understand how medical professionals could have subjected them to such horror."
"Centipedes let their young feed on their bodies and die while the babies just have a feast on their mother's corpse."
"People don't die immediately when you cut their throat like in the movies."
"Lots of creatures eat their newborn if there isn't enough resources to go around. At age twelve, I learned this by discovering the small, half-severed pink bodies of hamster pups while changing their mom's cage litter. Apparently, she wasn't just a cuddly, soft, huggable ball of fur."
"Once I read that as a research project, someone put a fake turtle in the road to observe driver behavior, and something like 6% of people deliberately went out of their way to hit the turtle."
"The youngest mother ever confirmed was four years old when she got pregnant and five when she gave birth."
"When the Soviet Union launched the street dog Laika into space before launching a man, they had no intention of bringing the pup home alive. Although they provided food and water, they hadn't planned for her to return to Earth. She lived a few hours and likely died from heat-related stress. The capsule orbited for a few weeks until our atmosphere and gravity dragged it back in, burning up during re-entry. This has always been a sad story to me since the day I learned it long ago."
"The number of women who have experienced traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to domestic violence is estimated to be 11-12 times greater than the number of TBIs experienced by all military personnel and athletes combined."
"How much of modern medicine relies on a hunch or trial and error. Before I worked in a hospital, I used to think doctors knew everything and that curing illness was straightforward. That will apply to some diseases, but there are many more that are vague, and treatment isn't well established or doesn't always respond as expected. Makes you afraid to get sick after a while."
"Untreated dental infections can lead to abscesses on the brain that result in a brain injury. A 40-year-old guy went from bad teeth to paraplegia and brain injury, from living a normal life into a group home on government benefits."
"Most of the Challenger crew were conscious for the entire 2-minute fall back to earth; they even put on their emergency oxygen masks..."
"Basically, every scene in movies where someone dies in lava is wrong. Your body is 80% water, and molten magma or lava is just rock that's so hot that it's in a liquid state. Rock is a lot denser than water, even in a liquid state so that you wouldn't sink into it: your body would float on the surface of the lava, burning to a crisp while you scream in agony. It might be even worse, given that when water (i.e., the water in every one of your cells) is suddenly exposed to extreme temperatures all at once, it instantly boils. If that exposure is fast enough, it boils explosively. And since your body isn't a perfect sphere being exposed to the +800 °C lava all at the same time, what (might) happen could be parts of your body exploding and popping as little steam explosions rupture your burned skin as you burn alive, floating on the superheated rock smoothie."
"There is a kind of tumor (Teratoma) that can have hair, teeth, and even eye tissue."
"How bad a decomposed body smells."
"All the foods that make me feel good are killing my body. WTF kinda nonsense 'truth' is that? I know why, but I disagree."
"You can live with one lung, one kidney, and half your liver."
"How much pain a damaged nerve near the spine can output."
"Coffin Births. When someone pregnant dies, as gases build up in the body from decay, it can push a baby out. I think the first records of this happened in Pompeii."
"I noticed some spots on my puppy's eyeballs two weeks ago. I took her to a dog ophthalmologist. It turns out they are diamonds, which are 'stray' skin cells that are growing where skin shouldn't. That's not the worst part. There's a hair growing out of one of the cells. My puppy's eyeball is growing hair."
"According to organizations like the International Labour Organization and the Walk Free Foundation, an estimated 28 million people are living in modern slavery, including forced labor, human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced marriage. It's unsettling because it highlights how widespread and invisible these systems can be, even in supposedly advanced societies. Once you know, you start seeing the signs in supply chains, industries, and global economics."
"Your organs moving around make sounds that your brain just cancels out."
And finally, "Echidnas have four penis heads coming from one shaft. Four. Why the hell do they need four?"
What's a disturbing fact you wish you could unlearn? Comment below!