Scary Facts

A list of scary facts about life, death, space, the world, the universe and everything.

Scary Facts About Dreams

The average person spends 6 years of their life dreaming. Most people have between 4 and 6 dreams every night. You forget 95% to 99% of all the dreams you have.

In dreams, we can only see faces that we have seen in real life before. It’s impossible to keep track of thousands of faces that you come across each day. You might not remember the people in your dream, but they are all real people you have encountered in your life.

You can’t read when you’re dreaming. If you are unsure whether you are dreaming or not, try reading something. Sometimes the text will be fuzzy, garbled, just symbols or it won’t make any sense. Sometimes if you look away and then look back, it will say something different or there will no longer be any writing there.

You can’t tell the time when you’re dreaming. Look for things with numbers on them… clocks, phones, etc. Each time you look at a clock, it will tell a different time or the numbers will be garbled or the hands on the clock won’t move.

You can’t turn the lights on or off in a dream. Often light switches and other knobs don’t do what they are supposed to do in a dream.

Look at your hands when you are dreaming. Count the number of fingers. Often you will have the wrong number of fingers and the number may change while you trying to count them. Sometimes the fingers are deformed or the wrong color or have other abnormalities and they may keep on changing when you look at them.

When you are dreaming, try looking at your face in a mirror. There will be something wrong with your reflection. Your hair or skin may be the wrong color, you may be wearing a weird costume, your reflection may be blurry or you may not even recognize yourself.

In dreams, you can’t see your nose. Check it next time you’re dreaming. Close one eye and try to look at your nose. It won’t be there.

During REM sleep, your body becomes paralyzed. This is to prevent you acting out your dreams.

Some people suffer from sleep paralysis. During REM sleep, they wake up, unable to move and sense an evil presence in the room with them.

Other people suffer from the opposite problem, called REM sleep behavior disorder. It causes people to act out their dreams, sometimes with violent thrashes, kicks and screams and they usually end up injuring themselves.

Dreams are more often negative than positive. The three most widely reported emotions felt during dreaming are anger, sadness and fear. 30% of all dreams are horrible nightmares.

People who stay up late are more likely to experience nightmares. People who sleep in a cold room are more likely to experience nightmares.

Between 18 and 38% of people have experienced at least one precognitive dream in which they dreamt about something that later came true. 70% of people have had a déjà vu dream, in which they experienced something in real life that had previously happened in a dream.

In the 1940s, studies showed that 75% of Americans “rarely” or “never” saw any color in their dreams. Nowadays, less than 5% of people dream in black and white. Scientists say this is because of the change from black and white movies and TV to colour media. People who grew up watching black and white movies and TV were more likely to dream in black and white.

Scary Facts About The World

We are all standing on a rock that is hurtling through space at over 100,000 KM per hour.

It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for light to travel from the sun to the earth. That means if the sun suddenly ceased to exist, we wouldn’t know about it until 8 minutes and 20 seconds later.

Our galaxy contains approximately 2 billion planets like earth. However, there is no other life that we know of in the galaxy. Where is everybody?

The earth is struck by lightning 100 times per second or 8.6 million times per day.

Every year, there are over 500,000 earthquakes.

We are the only planet in the solar system that can experience a total solar eclipse.

Scary Facts About Spiders

They say you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep every year. However, that “fact” is just a myth. The truth is, nobody swallows any spiders in their sleep.

The average house has about 30 spiders living in it at any one time. Wherever you are, you are only ever three feet away from a spider.

The biggest spider in the world is the Goliath Birdeater Tarantula from South America. They weigh as much as a new-born puppy and eat mice, frogs and earthworms.

In 2012, in India, a group of people was attacked by a swarm of mysterious jumping spiders. Two people died from being bitten by this still-unidentified species of spiders.

Some spiders get their food by stealing it from other spiders. They enter the other spider’s web, steal the food and often kill the other spider. This is common behavior for the spiders that live in your house.

Spiders can swim and they can survive underwater for up to a day. THink about that next time you wash a spider down the drain.

The Funnel Web Spider delivers a venom called Atraxotoxin into the body that can kill a human in 15 minutes.

Scary Facts About Space

There is a planet called Gliese 581 c that scientists want to colonize in the future. It orbits a red dwarf star. One side of the planet is always facing the star and one side is always facing away. If you step out onto one side of the planet, your face would immediately melt off and if you stepped out onto the other side of the planet, you would freeze to death instantly.

On earth, sound travels by vibrating air molecules. In space, there are no molecules to vibrate because of the large areas between planets and stars. In space, no one can hear you scream…

If the exterior of your spaceship is punctured, it will rapidly depressurize, and you will be violently sucked out into the vacuum of space.

If you aren’t wearing a space suit, your body will swell up like a balloon until you are twice your normal size. This is because the human body is 70% water and it would expand until it forms water vapor. It wouldn’t be enough to burst your skin, but it would be extremely painful.

In space, there is nothing to filter out the harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun. You would be horribly burned over any portion of exposed skin and if you looked directly at the sun, it would fry the retinas in your eyes and blind you.

Your eyes, mouth and lungs will freeze over as the liquid in them evaporates.

If there is air in your lungs, the low pressure in space would cause your lungs to depressurize and burst like balloons.

Without earth-like pressure, tiny nitrogen bubbles begin to form throughout your veins and arteries, causing blockages. They would also cause extreme pain in your joints. Bubbles in your brain would cause a stroke and seizures. A bubble in your heart would cause sudden heart failure and death.

Without earth-like pressure, the oxygen in your bloodstream begins to reverse-dissolve and escape from your blood. No oxygen will be delivered to your muscles or vital organs. You can’t breathe in any new oxygen either. In less than 10 seconds, you would suffocate and your skin would turn blue.

Scientists are planning a mission to put humans on Mars. The mission will take place in 2025. The journey will take 210 days. 200,000 people have already applied to go. Once the settlers get there, scientists have no plans to bring them back to Earth. They will be left there for the rest of their lives.

In 1977, scientists received a signal from deep space that lasted 72 seconds. They still don’t know where it came from.

If you live on the International Space Station, your pee is collected, processed and turned into drinking water.

Scary Facts About Death

In total, about 100 billion people have died so far. Approximately 153,000 people will die today.

You are more likely to be killed by a coconut falling on your head than you are to be eaten by a shark.

Every year, 12 people are killed by sharks.

Every year, 13 people are killed when a vending machine falls on top of them.

Every year, 600 Americans are killed by falling out of bed.

Every year, 6,000 Americans are killed by texting while driving. It is now the leading cause of death among teenagers.

You are more likely to die from slipping in the shower, drowning in the bath or getting hit by lightning than you are to be killed by terrorists.

You are less likely to die in a plane crash than you are to be killed in the taxi you take to and from the airport.

After you die, your hair and fingernails do not continue to grow. What actually happens is your skin dries out and retracts from your hair and nails. This makes it seem like your hair and fingernails get longer.

After you die, the bacteria in your stomach continue to work. A dead body often makes noise, caused by gas escaping. Basiclly, after you die, your body will continue to fart.

Scientist say that your head remains conscious for about 4 to 20 seconds after you have been decapitated. A passenger in a car crash said he saw the driver’s severed head change expression from shock to confusion and then to terror.

Right-handed people live nine years longer than left-handed people. This is because most of the machines and tools we use on a daily basis are designed for those who are right handed, making them somewhat dangerous for left-handed people to use, which results in thousands of accidents and deaths each year.

On average, people fear spiders more than they do dying. However, statistically you are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by the bite of a poisonous spider.

About 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens each year.

A murder is committed in the USA every 23 minutes, which is about 22,852 murders each year.

There are over 200 dead bodies on Mount Everest. Many of them are well-preserved and the area where they are lying is called The Death Zone. Climbers have to pass by them on their way to the top. The air is so thin up there, that it is impossible to recover the bodies, so the victims are just going to lie in the spot where they took their last breath for the rest of time.

Scary Facts About Sleeping

You spend 25 years of your life asleep.

Scary Facts About The Human Body

About half of the world’s population has mites living on their eyelashes. They are about one third of a millimeter in length and survive by feeding on your skin cells and oils. They also poop on your eyelids…

If you sneeze hard enough, you can fracture a rib. But if you try to suppress a sneeze, you might rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and drop dead. Some people say that if you try to suppress a fart and a sneeze at the same time, you could blow your head off like a champagne cork (but that’s probably not true).

The acid in your stomach is so powerful that it can dissolve a razor blade in less than a week. Your stomach must produce a new lining every few days to protect itself from its own acid.

Only 10% of the cells in our bodies are actually human. The rest are the 90 trillion bacteria that live on or in us, covering our bodies from head to toe. But don’t worry, most of these are harmless or even helpful bacteria. Your bellybutton has around sixty-five different species of bacteria living in it.

Your heart pumps with enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet across a room.

It is actually possible to be “scared to death”. The body’s protective mechanism, the fight-or-flight response, pumps adrenaline into the blood, causing the nervous system to increase blood flow to muscles, dilate the pupils and can sometimes make you poop your pants. But adrenaline is toxic in large amounts and can cause death if it floods the heart unchecked.

Humans shed about 1.5 million skin flakes every hour. In your lifetime, you will shed around forty pounds of skin.

The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels. If you laid all of your blood vessels (veins, arteries, and capillaries) end to end, they would circle the earth more than twice.

You are about 1 cm taller when you wake up in the morning than when you went to bed at night. This is because, during the day, the cartilage in your knees and other areas slowly compresses.

If you are a smoker, every cigarette you smoke takes eleven minutes off your life.

There is a spooky skeleton living inside you.

Scary Facts About Halloween

Parents often warn their kids about the dangers of Halloween candy being poisoned, but the only people who have ever poisoned Halloween candy were parents who were trying to kill their own kids.