Poltergeist actress Heather O'Rourke was just 12 years old in 1988, when she died from a bowel obstruction that her doctors had previously dismissed as Crohn's disease.

These iconoclasts shunned the modern world and ventured into the most remote reaches of planet Earth to live in total isolation — sometimes for decades on end.

Debra Jeter picked up her daughters on June 5, 2009, and drove them to an abandoned house. After brutally attacking them, she called 911 with a chilling admission: “I just killed my children.”

Discovered in a Neolithic tomb in Italy, the Lovers of Valdaro are a pair of skeletons that have been holding each other for 6,000 years.

"Ring Around the Rosie" was likely created as a children's singing game in 18th-century Germany — but some people believe it has much darker origins.

Kuchisake onna is said to be a vengeful spirit who covers her disfigured face and asks strangers: "Am I beautiful?" She then attacks them regardless of how they answer.

Konerak Sinthasomphone was just 14 years old when he managed to escape from Dahmer's lair in 1991 — but unwitting police officers handed him right back over to the "Milwaukee Cannibal."

On November 27, 2007, Washington Redskins player Sean Taylor was shot inside his Florida home while trying to protect his family during a botched burglary.

According to centuries-old folklore, La Lechuza has the face of an old woman atop the body of an owl and preys on drunk men and children in the dead of night.

After a year of robbing banks, John Dillinger died on July 22, 1934, when federal agents shot and killed him as he left a movie theater in Chicago, Illinois.

When she was 11, Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped on the way to school in Lake Tahoe by Phillip and Nancy Garrido. She was held captive for the next 18 years until her miraculous rescue in 2009.

A few days after murdering Lauren Giddings, Stephen McDaniel posed as a concerned neighbor on the local news — but his charade crumbled when he learned from the reporter that her body had just been found.