The reason I ask is because I was in NYC last weekend, and I paid a visit to the Jewish Heritage Museum. Now, I’m sure you’ll all thinking “Wow, those pictures/films of skeletal bodies piled in heaps and people being gratuitously shot/abused” must have been horrifying. And they were. But that’s not what got me.
What really baked my noodle was the section on the second floor that deals with the remnants of the Hitler Youth. This organization was akin to today’s Boy Scouts. Seriously. There were manuals, membership rolls, meetings, uniforms, badges, etc. But the one thing that made my jaw absolutely hit the floor was a board game. A German version of Life or Monopoly…except rather than the goal being to make money or raise a family and collect personal possesions, this game’s ultimate goal was a bit different. You see, in this game, the first player to round up six Jews for “relocation” won.
I can’t even begin to get my mind around this concept. For some reason, the existence of this game horrified me far more than those videos and pictures of Holocaust victims ever could.
What’s the most disturbing image you’ve come across?
Not quite on the same level, but going through a market in Canton and seeing a shop that had a little corral full of cats and kittens. I like cats. Then I look up and read the sign in Chinese that says that the store’s offering fresh cat meat for just 50 RMB per pound.
Hempress, is it? Three cheers for the Hempress of Colony 'Atch!
The most horrifying I’ve seen up close and personal was a friend of mine getting hit and killed while we were crossing the street together.
One of the most horrifying things I’ve seen on a news program is a story they did on “dog fur” and “cat fur” coats created in Asia. They didn’t show the whole video but the beginning of a german shepherd being skinned alive. They said the dog still wagged his tail until they started, so desperate for love. I cried for hours.
This is a videotape image, from I believe the Vietnam war, although it may have been the Korean. It shows a Vietnamese (or Korean) general pointing his revolver at a young boy’s head and blithely pulling the trigger. The man calmly looks back to whoever he was talking to before and continues the conversation, as a huge gout of blood spurts from the boy’s skull and he collapses to the ground.
I will never, ever, be able to get this out of my mind. One of my college history professors showed it to us.
Compared to the violent things you guys have been writing about, this may be kind of lame. This last summer, our dog drowned in our pool sometime during the night. I was really attached to this dog; we had owned her for almost fourteen years. She was a miniature schnauzer who was probably on her last leg. Unfortunately I was the only one at home. I pulled her out, but was so hysterical my sister and some close friends came over to calm me down and take her to the vet to cremate her. Just thinking about what happened makes me want to cry. (sniff)
{{{{{{{{Jadis}}}}}}}}}} Think of it as therapeutic, getting that stuff out of you and having others share their stuff with you, makes us more human.
My three year old son was in his car seat and I looked back at him in the rear view mirror, his head was thrown back, and white foam was coming out of his mouth. THAT was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. [It was a seizure]
The most horrifying image I’ve ever seen was the aftereffects of fireworks abuse. This one kid (18-20ish) had been playing around with some friends and some fireworks and one of them dared him to hold it in his mouth. He put it in his mouth and didn’t get it out before it went off. The resuting explosion destoyed his face. Everything below his eyeballs was missing. If you’ve even seen Preditor than I can relate it like this: remember when the Preditor thing roared and it’s second jaw opened up, seperated, and kinda hung down in front of it’s face? Well, It kinda looked like that. All the skin that had been on the sides of his mouth and covering the bottom of his mouth was missing. All he had left was a jaw in two pieces hanging down limply with the rest of his face missing.
Jadis, don’t feel bad. With me, every little bit of talking helps.
Anti Pro- I am sorry that happened to your son. Is he all right now? I am just asking because I suffer from seizures, too. Not very awful ones, but I still have to take medication for it.
An image of the crucified Chist which was made by superimposing a holocaust elecrocution victim over a cross. The body was absolutely rigid with pain, the jaws clamped open. It made both the holocaust and the crucifixion a good deal more real.
For the longest time it was the news images of the Jonestown suicides. The very idea that they had willingly given their own children cyniade laced kool-aide.
:: shudder ::
But the most personally horrific was working during the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Made me make that hour and a half drive back to Stillwater every night so I could hug my kids.
This may be lame but it is the most horrifying thing I ever saw in person.
I’m seven years old. My parents,older sister and I are going to the movies. We’re driving down the road and we see a man on a motorcycle hit something and go flying off the bike. My dad pulls the car by where the guy landed and gets out to help him.
The man-no helmet,wearing shorts and a tank top,looks ok.
Then my dad rolls him over.
OMG
His arm is broken so badly you can see the bone poking out of his skin. Blood everywhere. And to top it off-his face.Lips pretty much torn off,tooth fragments on what’s left of them,nose mangled and the skin from his forehead is hanging on by a teeny thread.
I can still clearly remember what this guy looked like 24 years later.
15 years ago when my dad was dying of cancer. The carcinoma had metasticized to just about everywhere.
His body was distorted from all the tumors…and voids where they tried to cut tumors out. They pumped him full of so much shit he didn’t recognize me when I visited.
One thing about cancer…It eats up your store of bodily fat. Stretches the skin tight against the skull, ans the eyes sink back deep into the sockets.
Mine is another kinda lame but most horrifying thing I’ve seen in person.
When I was 11, we had two very pregnant female white German Shepard in our house. One dog whelped 10 pups. My sis and I went to school. (Both parents worked). We came home from school, no puppies. Sis searched the house, I searched the yard. I fiannly started following the mama dog around the yard. She went to the side of the concrete dog run and dug up a one day old headless puppy. I burst into tears, ran in the house, grabbed my sis and dragged her to the neighbors to call our mom. I wouldn’t let my sis see it. Later, our stepdad dug up the other nine dead pups, whose necks were only broken. For some reason, I never found the Barnes and Barnes song Dead Puppies amusing.
I was watching one of those crash films in drivers education, made sometime in the 50’s, while in high school in the late 60s. After a crash scene, the most horrible thing I saw was the police lifting lumpy, pulpy fragments of meat out of the dirt and placing them on stretchers. These big, shapeless chunks had been the occupants of one of the cars!! The film was in B&W.
An acquaintance of mine had a cat which had kittens and a big, dopy, ill trained dog. A couple of the kittens died a few days before I visited him. Unknown to me, when I walked up his trashy yard to his door, that instead of taking time to bury them, he had just dumped them in the garbage can. As I waited for him to get his lazy ass out of bed and answer the door, his dog came up, playing with what looked like a dirty rag; throwing it up, catching it, pieces falling off, shaking it and so on.
When the stench hit me, I realized that it wasn’t a rag but a kittens body! I chased the dog away, used rags to gather up the mess, nearly threw up in the process because of the stink and placed them in the garbage can, where I found the remains of the other kitten. I fastened the lid on real tight to keep the dog out and went and bitched at the guy for being too damn lazy to bury the cats.
I love cats. That screwed me up a bit that day. Some people should, by law, not be allowed to own pets.
SpyderA48, my stepdad said “the other female dog got in with pups and mama when she started labor and the dogs got into a fight over them.” It’s probably close to the truth, but as no one was there when it happened, I won’t ever know for sure. I do know the puppies mama dog buried each one because she did nose the dirt/show him where to dig for each one.
#1: The last childhood visit to my paternal grandfather in the nursing home. His mind had died already, had been for years except for painful flashes of lucidity that showed the man he had been. Curled up fetally in the bed, not much more than skin over bones. Not so much horrifying as gross-out, but just coldly grim, first sight of what dying really looked like. (He died literally the next day, which was, speaking of grim, good timing–it was one of our few larger family reunions, so everyone could make the funeral, whereas any other time many probably couldn’t have.)
#2: Snowball the cat had gone missing, which was unusual as she was the friendliest of the litter. Pure white, possibly albino or at least a good impression of one. Found her in a corner of the upstairs of the barn, where we kept hay and such for the horses. Very still, dead for a time to attract flies, locked in rigor. Head arched back, her throat was a gaping torn open hole from jaw to chest, crawling with bugs.
About three years ago, I happened to come home a little early, and started to watch the afternoon news. Breaking story, everything being shown live, some guy had blocked off a part of the 105 (SoCal freeway), and had unfurled some message painted on a bedsheet (it was in regards to unfair practices by HMO’s–later found that this guy was HIV+). The helicopters were there, catching the guy’s every move. He went back into his truck, with his dog, and it looks like he’s lighting a cigarette, when the cab of his truck explodes. He comes out (the dog doesn’t); he’s severely burnt, and strips off his clothing. He eventually goes to the edge of the freeway, looking like he is going to jump (there’s about a good 40 foot drop); he stops, goes back to his truck. He pulls a shotgun from the back, kneels down, and blows his brains out. All captured on live TV.
I couldn’t stop crying for hours, and kept my dog by my side the entire night.
(and for anyone who asks, why didn’t you change the channel, the whole explosion/suicide happened SO fast, that by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late)
Some of the people that went to AmsterDope may agree with me on this.
In the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, there’s one room that displays what happened to all the occupants of the house. The camps they were deported to, when they died. In one of the displays (I’m thinking it’s the one about Anne, but I could be wrong), a tiny TV-screen is mounted in the back. It shows a 30 second clip, shot by British soldiers literally minutes after they liberated Auschwitz. The images display nearly starved to death people, skin over bones, wandering aimlessly -often crying- amongst smoking remains of barracks, dead bodies of SS soldiers, dead bodies of Jews. Also, there’s a three second shot in there from a mass grave they found, in progress. The grave is as long as a football pitch, it is open, and the bodies are stacked 2 meters high. It is about 3/4 filled.
The end shot is a woman sitting on the ground, cyring. I’ve never seen such despair in human eyes, and I doubt I ever will again.
(sniff)