Amelia John
Hello, buddies! I’m Crystal, and I write the That Got Dark newsletter, BuzzFeed’s weekly roundup of all things creepy, macabre, and horrible AF. And if you absolutely adore content like this, you should sign up for a subscription to get your weekly dose of the macabre straight to your inbox! This week’s topics covered in the newsletter are as follows:
1. Have you ever heard that rumor about fans secretly scattering loved ones’ ashes at Disneyland and Disney World? Well, it’s real and probably not uncommon.
According to cast members, it occurs as frequently as once per month, particularly within the Haunted Mansion. And when it does, Disney quietly triggers a “HEPA cleanup,” vacuuming up the remains before reopening the ride like nothing happened. Obviously, the practice is against the law, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it (and probably never will).
In 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean man named Lee walked into an internet café, sat down to play StarCraft…and died nearly 50 hours later.
He barely ate, barely slept, pausing only for quick bathroom breaks. Sadly, Lee never logged off again after skipping work to continue gaming, which reportedly cost him his job. He eventually passed out from exhaustion-induced heart failure.
Lee’s death sent shockwaves through South Korea and sparked a national reckoning over gaming addiction. The infamous “Shutdown Law,” which prohibited minors from gaming between midnight and 6 a.m., was soon implemented by the government. However, that law was repealed in 2021.
The tragic and haunting story of Erica Baker, a 9-year-old girl who went missing in Kettering, Ohio, in 1999 while walking her dog near a park. Erica was never seen again, though the dog was eventually found safe.
For years, the case haunted the community until 2004, when a man named Christian Gabriel confessed to accidentally hitting her with his van and hiding her body with help from a friend. However, Erica was never found, despite extensive searches and Gabriel’s story changing frequently. He was convicted of abusing a dead body and served six years in prison before moving away in 2011 upon his release.
After years of speculation, police in 2024 discovered that Gabriel was living in Oregon. Officials referred to the discovery as a potential “big break” for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it offered investigators yet another opportunity to question the one and only man who has ever admitted to being involved.
In the vicinity of Kettering, new searches were carried out in 2024 and 2025 using cutting-edge scanning technology and cadaver dogs. Erica’s disappearance remains unsolved despite these renewed efforts to locate human remains and conclusive evidence.
This Wikipedia page about something called the “Wow! one of the creepiest space mysteries is “signal,”
It was basically a 72-second burst of radio energy that was found in 1977. It looked too precise to be random, but it was also too brief to be explained. It came from deep in the constellation Sagittarius, then vanished forever, leaving only a strange printout marked with astronomer Jerry Ehman’s stunned handwritten note: “Wow!”
Scientists still don’t know where it came from, whether it was a glitch, a cosmic anomaly, or something that whispered once and never came back.
This extremely disturbing image from 2018 of a note a man in Portland, Oregon, found on his car, at his HOME, after his tires were slashed.
According to KOIN News, the night before the incident, car owner Mark Holzmann had been driving into a parking garage when he may have accidentally cut off a bicyclist. Later, Holzmann stated that the cyclist appeared “out of nowhere” and quickly became enraged, yelling and pounding on the vehicle. He thinks the man may have used his personalized license plate to find him afterward, turning what should have been a road rage incident into something straight out of a stalker movie.
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