Real life horror stories
Because reality is much scarier than fiction
Melissa Hiebert, Staff
Forget renting SAW or telling ghost stories about things that happened to “a friend of a friend” of yours — this Halloween, scare (or gross) the hell out of your friends by telling them stories about some of the most twisted serial killers real life has to offer.
Armin Meiwes — “The Roternburg Cannibal”
Armin Meiwes was tried and convicted of murder in 2002, after murdering and eating the remains of a consenting Bernd-Jurgen Brandes.
Meiwes, who claimed to be obsessed with the idea of eating people since childhood, (and had an unusual fascination with the story “Hansel and Gretel”) posted an advertisement on the Internet, looking for a male who would willingly be slaughtered and then eaten.
Brandes, who had the desire to be eaten, responded to the advertisement and came to Meiwes’s house. The pair first cut off Brandes’s penis and ate it together. At first, they tried to eat it raw but eventually realized that it was too tough, and so eventually fried it up in a pan.
Meiwess filmed the entire process. Eventually, after cutting off Brandes’ penis, he stabbed him repeatedly in the neck and then strung him up on a meat hook and cut off chunks of his flesh to be stored and eaten later.
“The first bite was, of course, a peculiar, indefinable feeling at first because I had yearned for that for 30 years, that this inner connection would be made perfect through this flesh,” Meiwes said in a television interview.
He was examined by a psychiatric official during his trial and was found not to be insane, but just severely disturbed. He claims that he should probably undergo therapy at some point and urges other cannibals to seek help.
Meiwes, 46, is currently serving a 15-year sentence in a German prison. After his sentence, he could be eligible for parole.
H. H. Holmes — “63rd Street Killer”
Henry Howard Holmes was always a swindler. As a medical student in the late 1800s, he used to steal cadavers, horribly disfigure them, tell insurance companies that they had died in accidents, and collect on the insurance policies that he had previously taken out on them under their name, payable to him.
Holmes sought out work in a drugstore owned by a woman whose husband had passed away. Eventually, he bought the store from her, on the condition that she was to live upstairs. However, when he failed to pay her for the store, she took legal action. Shortly after, she disappeared.
Holmes eventually bought a plot of land across from the drugstore and began construction of a house. He designed the house himself and never let any contractor work on the house for more than a week, so that none would know the layout of the house.
The first floor just contained stores that were open to the public. The second and third floors, however, contained 71 rooms, which locked only from the outside, each equipped with gas pipes leading back to a control panel in Holmes’s office. Among the numerous trap doors, stairways leading to nowhere, mazes, and doors that opened to brick walls, he also had metal chutes that lead to the basement to a huge vat of acid, and a crematorium.
Many guests came to stay in Holmes’s castle, and many were never seen again. Eventually, when Holmes’s was arrested on minor charges of fraud, it came to light that he had murdered, by some estimates, over 200 men, women, and children, though exact numbers were hard to assess.
Holmes was hung in 1896 and was considered one of America’s first serial killers.
The Bender Family — “The Bloody Benders”
The bender family immigrated to Kansas in the 1870s and set up a general store and an inn where travellers could stay.
The family consisted of a couple, their son, and their daughter Kate. While the rest of the family was aloof, Kate was outgoing and attractive, and attracted men easily. She claimed to be a psychic and a healer, and was well-known in the community.
In the Benders’ home, there was a dining room pressed against a canvas curtain, which divided the room in half. Often, guests that were staying there were offered a “special” seat next to the curtain. Shortly after the meal, they would be hit over the head with a sledgehammer by a family member who was waiting behind the curtain, and then one of the Benders’ would slit their throats to ensure death. The body was then crammed into the cellar, to be buried later in a nearby orchard.
Eventually, after a doctor reported he was going to stay at the inn and never came home, his brother travelled to the inn in search of him. After spotting the father and the son burying what looked like a body, he fled to the next town and came back with the sheriff, but the Benders were gone.
However, in a field beside the house, over two dozen bodies were discovered. Though the search continued on for several years, the family was never found. It was suspected that they were eventually shot down by vigilantes, but no one knows the truth.
Karl Grossman — “Berlin Butcher”
Grossman was arrested in his apartment in 1921, after police found the body of a murdered woman on his bed after being called to the building by his neighbours, who had heard screaming and banging.
However, police soon realized that the murder was just the tip of the iceberg. According to neighbours’ accounts, Grossman had lured over 50 women into his apartment in the last few years.
Grossman, during the Second World War, sold meat on the black market and also owned a hotdog stand. Though the police only found evidence of three murders, it was thought that he was murdering his victims and selling them to unknowing consumers to eat. Grossman was sentenced to death but hung himself in his cell first.
