1.As fellow lovers of truly dark stories, you’re probably familiar with the 2014 Slender Man stabbing case, where two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods and then tried to kill her (stabbing her 19 times!!!) in an attempt to please a fictional internet monster called Slender Man. If not…now you’re caught up.
Well, just when we thought we’d moved on from that horror, one of the attackers, Morgan Geyser, resurfaced in the headlines last week after she cut off her GPS monitor and vanished from the group home overseeing her release. 🥴
The good news is she didn’t make it far. Police found her the next morning, and you can see video of her capture here. But the bad news is that we (and especially her victim, Payton Leutner) got dragged back into a case nobody wanted resurrected.
2.While many of us were busy prepping for Thanksgiving, a full-on nightmare was unfolding in Hong Kong on Nov. 26. A massive fire erupted at Wang Fuk Court, a high-rise housing complex that was under renovation, after flames caught onto bamboo scaffolding wrapped in flammable netting and plastic sheeting.
The materials apparently acted like a fuse, carrying the fire up and across multiple towers in minutes. By the time the fire was finally contained, more than 150 people were dead, dozens were injured, and entire families had been displaced, making it one of the deadliest residential fires in the city’s history.
Authorities have launched a wide-ranging investigation, and the details of how this disaster became so catastrophic are still unfolding.
3.The horrifying tragedy of Gabriela Cedillo, a college student who worked as an extra on Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011). During a 2010 shoot, the car she was driving for a scene near a high-risk stunt was struck by a metal bar that snapped loose from equipment meant to flip another vehicle, causing catastrophic head trauma.
She was airlifted to a hospital and, according to early reports, placed in a medically induced coma before undergoing emergency brain surgery after losing a significant portion of her skull and a large part of the right side of her brain. The long-term effects were devastating: permanent brain damage, partial paralysis, serious cognitive impairments, and the loss of vision in one eye.
She later filed a lawsuit, arguing that the setup wasn’t just flawed, but reckless, with poorly secured rigging and non-stunt extras positioned dangerously close to a stunt that had clear potential to go wrong. In 2012, the film’s producers agreed to an $18.5 million settlement. Gabriela still suffers from severe, lifelong impairments and faces an uncertain future.
4.The horrifying story of the Order of the Solar Temple, a religious-based sect, that was created in the late 1970s or early 1980s by French founders Luc Jouret (pictured below) and Joseph Di Mambro. They operated on the basis of the beliefs of the Knights Templar and eventually established roots in Switzerland and Canada.
In 1994, members of the cult violently killed a 3-month-old baby, along with his parents, because they thought the baby was the Antichrist. A few days later, several members took part in a series of mass murder-suicides in Switzerland.
Dimebag Darrell (born Darrell Lance Abbott) was the iconic guitarist of Pantera and later Damageplan. He was just 38 years old when he was murdered onstage during a 2004 Damageplan show in Columbus, Ohio. Moments into the first song, a 25-year-old fan and ex-Marine named Nathan Gale stormed the stage with a handgun and opened fire at point-blank range, killing Dimebag instantly with multiple shots, including one to the head.
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The venue erupted into chaos as Gale killed three others, took a hostage, and attempted to reload before a police officer fatally shot him. Investigators later learned he’d been suffering from paranoid delusions, including the belief that Pantera had stolen his lyrics and were “spying” on him.
6.Finally, the story of Gary Alan Walker, also known as “The Roaming Rapist,” a serial killer in Oklahoma who, over a few weeks in May 1984, murdered five people and committed multiple rapes, kidnappings, and robberies.
Raised amid severe physical and sexual abuse and later diagnosed with serious mental-health disorders, he nonetheless was found legally sane and responsible for the crimes. His spree included the killings of one man and four women, several of whom were tortured and strangled. Arrested in June 1984, Walker received one death sentence and multiple life terms and was executed by lethal injection in 2000.
