We asked the BuzzFeed Community for the scariest true-crime conspiracy theories they knew of. Here are the spine-tingling results.
🚨 Note: This article contains disturbing images, but the following are all theories. So have fun with it. 🚨
1. JonBenét Ramsey’s dad was a part of the Illuminati, and her death was a sacrifice.
OKAY, SO: Her name is similar to an Illuminati term for the devil, "Jonbet," and it's supposedly common for the Illuminati to groom mind-controlled mom/daughter sex slaves, so apparently some evidence lines up. VERY disturbing.
2. Ted Bundy was encouraged to carry out his murders by a demon that'd taken over his body.
Yes, he was a terrible person all on his own, but he'd say in interviews that he’d be taken over by “the entity.” His girlfriend even said she sensed something strange in the weeks before he carried out his first murders.
3. The government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Though the FBI apparently did send ominous, anonymous letters to MLK Jr. prior to his death, ultimately they are not linked to the actual assassination itself. Still, CREEPY.
4. Courtney Love was responsible for the death of Kurt Cobain.
Though the official story is that Cobain committed suicide in 1994, many believe Love either hired someone to do her dirty work or conspired with her nanny to kill Cobain herself. What the fuck.
5. The Unabomber, Zodiac Killer, and Tylenol Murderer were all Ted Kaczynski.
Though there was lots of evidence linking Kaczynski to his Unabomber crimes, there is nothing that directly ties him to the Tylenol or Zodiac killings — but people have pointed out some small similarities in the cases that could prove otherwise.
—Jen Price, Facebook
6. Elisa Lam was possessed by a demon before her death in 2013.
7. The Sodder children didn’t die in the house fire, and instead were kidnapped.
Five of nine kids disappeared after a fire demolished their family’s home in West Virginia on Christmas Eve, 1945. Their remains still haven’t been found, and so it's believed they were kidnapped instead of burnt. WHERE THE HELL DO FIVE ENTIRE BODIES GO???
8. The most prominent men in the world gather at Bohemian Grove every year to do unspeakable acts.
Only a few know what REALLY happens at this giant campsite in the redwoods of California every July, but there are few accounts of demonic worship and sacrifices, while some say men just drink and watch plays. WHO KNOWS.
9. Novelist Michael Peterson's wife, Kathleen, was killed by an owl.
Kathleen Peterson's autopsy showed she'd suffered from blunt force trauma after falling down her staircase in 2001. Though many signs pointed to her husband, a new theory appeared in 2009, saying she was attacked by an owl outside before her staircase fall. Uh, okay.
10. Johnny Gosch is still alive, but lives under another name.
He was a 12-year-old paperboy in Iowa who was kidnapped in 1982. He's never been found, but his mom claims he's visited her once or twice. The scariest part? No one can back up her claims, and no one else has seen him since his disappearance.
11. Ursula and Sabina Eriksson experienced an episode of folie à deux, aka a "shared delusion," that told them to jump into traffic and attack officers.
They weren’t allowed to board a bus after denying security access to search their bags, so they ran across a motorway. After both sisters got hit by cars, Sabina was taken into custody, and after she was released, she found one of the men who had tried to help her off the motorway and stabbed him to death. People are still baffled by their unprovoked, inexplicable actions.
12. Pretty much everything about the Dyatlov Pass incident.
Nine hikers died in mysterious circumstances in 1959 in the northern Ural Mountains of Russia. Evidence showed they'd torn their tents from the inside out, and their bodies showed no signs of struggle, even though they were found facedown in the snow. WHAT HAPPENED?!
13. D.B. Cooper is still alive and living in San Diego under the name Robert Rackstraw.
In what is known as “the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history,” mystery man Cooper hijacked a plane mid-flight in Oregon in 1971, extorted ransom, and parachuted away — never to be identified. One filmmaker claimed to have found him and even created an entire documentary on this Rackstraw dude. K.
—Kimberly Touketto, Facebook
14. There was a child prostitution ring in Nebraska in the late '80s and early '90s that served US politicians.
It was called the Franklin Credit Union Scandal, and though a grand jury ultimately dubbed these allegations to be baseless, it's still a terrifying and disgusting thought that this could have existed — or that someone would even fictionalize something like this.
—analaurarios and marisaxo1129
15. The murderer of the Black Dahlia, George Hill Hodel, was also the Zodiac Killer.
Most theories about Hodel were created by his own son, but derived from real evidence — like how his surname is in one of the Zodiac ciphers said to contain the killer's name. And the police conducted tests on soil from the back of his house at the time of the Black Dahlia murder that proved positive for human remains.
16. Ted Cruz’s father assisted in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The National Enquirer apparently used photo-scanning to determine that Ted Cruz's father, Rafael, was in a photo with presumed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, also concluding that he must have assisted Oswald in his master plan.
—cv26
17. Stephen King killed John Lennon.
This one's pretty far-fetched because there were witnesses to Lennon's murder, but some hardcore believers of this theory say Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan secretly communicated to the writer through magazines, giving him orders to kill Lennon. Hmm.
18. And Charles Manson’s killings were a social experiment ordered by the CIA.
A guy named Chuck Schlund claimed to have found the "Don Bolles Papers," which detailed the CIA's involvement with the Manson Family murders. He said, "The CIA needed a way of showing the American people that these pretty [protesters] were really Satanists and evil and that the government was right and just in the war."
CORRECTION
Sabina Eriksson actually found one of the men who had tried to help her and stabbed him to death. An earlier version of this article stated that she had stabbed an officer. Shout out to our commenters for pointing that out!