1. A boy set himself on fire in front of his parents

“Guy down the street got in an argument with his folks. Sat down on the porch swing, dumped a gas can on himself and lit up. Parents and neighbors had to listen to his screams while they tried to put him out. Died before they could…” — Anna_Namoose

2. My teacher murdered his entire family

“We had a middle school teacher murder his wife, his wife’s lover, and the two children of the lover. When I was in his class years before, he would do things like call 8th grade girls whores in front of the class. He also said he had a gun and would kill anyone that ever messed with his family. I guess the warning signs were there.” — Zaffarhai

3. He chopped up his girlfriend’s son

“A man was babysitting his ex girlfriend’s son. He stabbed the boy, cut him up and scattered his body parts around a banana plantation.

He lived a few houses down from my grandmother.” — sweetpurplepotato

4. They hung a thief by a lamppost

“I lived in a pretty violent city in Brazil. They did not have any mercy when they caught thieves. One day, a year or so ago, they hanged a thief on the light post on my street. No one talked about it, which made it even scarier that it wasn’t a big deal.” — curzpemmel

5. A drunk driver hit kids selling lemonade

“Drunk driver was speeding through the streets, hit 5 kids that were selling lemonade in front of their house. Two died on the spot, two died in the hospital, 11y/o gets home from school months after it happened to find that her mother killed herself. Her father ditched the family years before, so this girl was left an orphan.” — Definitelynot_a_duck

6. The father bashed the mother’s head in

“I went to school in the northern part of Dublin for a couple of years. One day two sisters who also went there didn’t show up for school. Some nasty rumors started floating around but nobody really knew why they were gone. Turns out their mom had her head bashed in with a brick. Two days later they found out who the perpetrator was. It was their dad. The girls eventually returned to school, but they were never the same.” — sindrimars

7. He stuffed his wife’s head in a box

“Husband and wife owned a taco shop. Husband went crazy one night and saw his wife transformed as the devil (supposedly husband had just had a large blood clot removed from brain recently). Killed her and dismembered her. Put her head in a box on a neighbors porch.

Had to get rid of the rest of the body.” — lauralouhoo

8. They poured paint in his eyes before murdering him

“A little boy was taken from his mother in a shopping centre by two little boys and murdered in the most brutal way. The boys who took him were only 10 and 11 and the little boy was two. They had watched a child’s play movie if I recall. They poured paint in his eyes and put him on a train track, and a train severed him in two. Its shocking. The little boy was the same age as me at the time, but I remember how horrified everyone was.” — AllAboutTheFairytale

9. He had nails dug into his skull

“In our street there was a ceramics shop owned by a Sicilian family, with an industrial oven and all that type of equipment. The Dad of the family went to Sicily for a few days, and when he came back he found his only 20-year-old son burning inside the industrial oven, with several nails in his skull. This was 5 years ago, and the case was never solved, and the dad turned his ceramic shop into a little supermarket.” — tal-ostja

10. 36 people were shot to death

“The Port Arthur massacre when Martin Bryant killed 36 people. My stepdad and his family lived in Port Arthur and could hear the gun shots and everything in between because they lived about five minutes from the old jail site.

They had seen him around town because it’s a small place where everyone knows everyone. They said he was a very strange kid growing up.” — TheMagnet69

11. Three dead bodies landed on my street

“I live close to a huge international airport and my house is, unfortunately, at the precise spot where planes tend to lower their wheels for landing. Stowaways from countries such as Mozambique sometimes try to hide in the wheel arch, but usually die of hypothermia en route.

Three bodies have landed in the streets around my house in the time I’ve lived here.” — hardly106106

12. He murdered three children and their teacher

“In my hometown a 19 year old guy with a knife entered kindergarten and murdered 3 kids and their teacher, wounded a nurse. After that he left and was spotted and captured by responding police car while calmly walking down the street drenched in his victims blood. It happened in 1998 I think.

I wouldn’t say I knew him, but I have seen him on couple of occasions before it happened. Due to this being really small town you couldn’t help noticing people. He was weird, quiet dude. Studied law for a half a year, but got booted for poor academic performance if I remember correctly. He got life in prison.” — Dubious_Squirrel

13. There’s a serial killer that hasn’t been found

“In the mid 1990s, a girl named Heather Teague was kidnapped from rural Newburgh beach in Henderson County, Kentucky. The entire tri-state area was on full alert. She had been tanning naked on the beach alone and allegedly was meeting someone there. A man with a telescope saw her kidnapped by a bald man with a beard while he was watching her from across the river in Newburgh, Indiana. Her remains have never been found. The primary suspect committed suicide when the sheriff was coming to talk to him, and his wife still won’t speak of it. There rumors have circulated. Around the time of her death, a concrete porch was poured at trailer in Bluff City, perhaps holding her remains, but the owner of this trailer recently died of a heroine OD. A long standing rumor was that she’d been thrown down a well in Robards, but a recent search turned up nothing. It’s also been rumored that she was simply fed to hogs at a farm in Smith Mills.

Motivations for the kidnapping have never been ascertained. Some say it was to pay a drug debt. Some alleged that the Cornfield Mafia or Cornbread Mafia were involved. Heather was 23 at the time of her kidnapping.

In recent years, there have been kidnappings of women of similar build and physical appearance of Heather. A few of these women have been found alive, but not all have been so lucky. It’s quite possible there’s a serial killer who strikes infrequently in the area.” — [deleted]

14. Her own brother shot her to death

“Hm, I suppose it was when a young muslim woman was gunned down at the train station, because she had married against her family’s wishes. She wanted to run away. It was her father and other family members (9) who arranged to have her killed, so that the honor of the family could be kept. It was her brother who shot her. All 9 were found guilty and received long sentences and 3 of them sent out of the country forever.” — jacobtf

15. He set a bag of kittens on fire

“So this kid in my town (Monmouth County, NJ) was arrested for taking a bag of kittens, soaking them in gasoline then lighting it on fire. He was not held for more than a couple hours before he got out despite desperate attempts by the local animal safety officer to hold him.

The next week he walks into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, grabs a knife from a display, and stabs a mother shopping with her infant daughter 10 times in her back.

There’s been several successful and attempted murders in Middletown but none were as avoidable as this.” — GoldenGalluch

16. A teenager raped an elderly woman

“We have a few nasty ones, but one of the most recent was a 18 year old breaking in raping and killing a 98 year old woman. Another 18 year old raping a 6 year old on her way home from school.

Then there was this case some 25 years ago were a guy kidnapped a girl and raped and killed her before dumping her in a well. That’s the worst public cases. I am pretty sure worse is happening all the time in this city.” — Dimdamno

17. They drained the blood from animals

“The second is creepier but no people died. About 6 or 7 years ago, a ‘satanic cult’ was busted. It was a group of about a dozen 7th-10th graders trying to be satanists. They had been murdering cats in a spot in the woods not far from the center of town. They’d hang them up and drain the blood into buckets to use in their rituals.” — Cryptokhan

18. He shot his entire family and fled the country

“In summer, I used to regularly get ice cream after school from a little Ice Cream Café. The owner was pretty humble and I went there pretty often.

Someday I heard the news a morning. The owner shot his family of 2 sons under the age of 7, his daughter at the age of 17 and his wife and fled to Turkey.

Didn’t expect him to do such stuff.” — Bockwurstmann

19. Her corpse was dumped into the harbor

“A woman on her way home from a julefrokost (A kind of christmas party we do in my country, where we get exceedingly drunk) was killed and dumped in the harbor.

Having people go missing was very unusual, so police dispatched choppers and a huge crew. I remember a chopper hanging over my house as it was searching the fjords.

It was extremely odd for something like that to happen in a town where the front page of the newspaper usually talk about the eating habits of the elderly, or a new patch of apple trees being planted in the park.” — dalsgaard

20. He chopped off a head and ate it

“The Greyhound bus beheader was from here. His apartment was only two streets over from me actually. You know the story: mentally ill guy gets on bus, sits next to a guy with headphones. Voices tell him headphone guy is a demon, pulls out a knife and chops his head off. Then eats part of it.” — castlite

21. He dismembered his six children

“Probably not the most horrific, but most recent. A man killed and dismembered his 6 kids and pregnant wife. He is also suspected of killing his mother.” — AGuyWithARaygun

22. Dozens of people beat the shit out of him

“Mob justice. A thief tried to steal a man’s suitcase full of jewelry, he was not successful in doing so which lead to about 100 people beating the ever living shit out of that thief. Was not a pretty sight.” — get_shrekd

23. An old woman accidentally ran over a young man

“In our town by the Sainsburys (a food retail shop chain in the UK) an old woman accidentally pressed the wrong foot pedal in her car and accelerated over the road, over grass and into the bench outside the shop where a young man was sitting and it killed him.” — Taking-a-Break

24. My neighbor was kidnapped and raped

“When I was in primary school, the girl who lived three or four houses away from me was taken out of her bedroom window at night and raped in a nearby park. I was about 9 so she would have been maybe 6 or 7.

The scary part is, roughly the same time that the police thought she was taken (2am), our dog started barking like crazy and woke my parents and neighbors up. Weird to think what might have been.” — yllekleahcimnire

25. He tied her up and watched her burn to death

“Sadly, someone raped, murdered and set fire to the house of a very sweet elderly lady in the very small town I grew up in a few years ago. According to his confession, to what was stated with his own sick pride, he had let her burn to death while she screamed tied up in her own bed.

He had just gotten out of jail for doing the same to other old ladies, which he had served 25 or so years for.

She was really a wonderful woman. She sang in the church choir with my mother and I, and when my mom passed she was the first to send her condolences and bring us food. Her husband had died many years ago, so she lived by herself out in the country.

This was one of the first murders in the whole county for many, many years. It really changed everyone. Doors and cars that were once unlocked all day now had stronger locks and alarms.” — thatg33kgirl

26. A sweet woman was murdered by a serial killer

“While not in my neighborhood it was very close. My father runs a fairly successful company, attracting many customers. There was one lady in particular who I saw quite often and would stop by and say hi from time to time, she genuinely seemed like a very kind person. Anyways I live in Australia home of infamous serial killer Ivan Milat (yes he went on a hunger strike for a ps3), who began murdering local backpackers. This made news headlines, where One day I watch one of the reports on TV and see her listed as murdered. Turns out she was brutally murdered by Ivan.” — xRaw-HD

27. He bled out in his own garden

“Guy slits his wrists, panics, runs out into the garden to try and call for help, bleeds out and gets found by his 13-year-old son. (old classmate of mine was the older son).” — Ratelslangen2

28. He murdered little girls inside of their school

“A guy walked into an Amish school house and killed five girls between seven and thirteen.” — LearningLifeAsIGo