Ten Stomach-Turning Facts That We Wish Weren’t True

We’re going to go ahead and get this out there right now: You probably shouldn’t read on from here if you’ve got a queasy gut. Some of the stomach-turning facts we’re about to drop on this list are not for the faint of heart. (Or, uh, the faint of digestive tract.) But for those of you who are into having your stomachs turned over a bit and your minds very much blown at the same time, boy, have we got the list for you!

The following ten items are among the most disturbing facts we’ve ever come across. Not in a gory way or something that’ll give you nightmares. These are more creepy, eerie, and unsettling. After you read this list, you’ll never look at your coffee cups in the same way ever again. You’ll start thinking twice about every chicken you ever see. And you’ll begin to actively wonder exactly how much skin you’re losing every time you walk out the door. Confused? Read on. We’ll clear it all up for you—and give you the heebie-jeebies at the same time.

Related: Top 10 Grossest Facts About Beef

10 Creepiest Island Ever

You want creepy? Here’s creepy: There’s an entire island near Mexico City that is filled to the gills with nothing but scary, decrepit, used-up old dolls. Yes, dolls. Think of the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland, but turn it from mildly annoying to downright scary.

Officially, the place is called La Isla de la Muñecas, and it’s located in the middle of a small lake just outside Mexico City. Many people consider the island to be one of the world’s most haunted places. And when you see pictures of the place, you’ll understand why. There are old, dirty, lifeless dolls lying and hanging and strewn everywhere. EVERYWHERE!

Legend has it that a man named Don Julian Santana had been the caretaker of the island. One day, he came to learn of the terrible fate of a little girl who’d visited the island. She had supposedly drowned while swimming in one of the place’s many small canals. Heartbroken, he made it his life’s mission to honor her. And for him… that move to “honor” the dead little girl manifested itself in collecting lots and lots and lots of dolls.

Santana began displaying them on the island. Before long, the island was literally filled with them. Over time, the sun and rain made the dolls turn from beautiful to weary to creepy. Now, we’re left with one of the creepiest places in the world. Thanks, Mr. Santana…^[1]

9 PB & Rat Hair

That peanut butter in your pantry? It contains rat hairs. If that seems like a shocking and unsettling sentence, let’s follow it up with one even more terrifying: the Food & Drug Administration actually ALLOWS there to be rat hair in your peanut butter!

Basically, the FDA has determined that it’s really hard to get rat hair completely out of peanut butter at the manufacturing level. So they’ve come to allow one rat hair to be found in every 100 grams (or about a quarter of a pound) of peanut butter before it’s considered “defective.”

As for why this is the case, like we said, peanut butter manufacturers and the FDA have realized over time that it is impossible to completely keep rats away from peanut butter—and from peanuts during harvesting. No matter what they do, the little buggers keep showing up.

Instead of fighting over it for years, they simply commissioned scientists to figure out the most realistic allowable level of rat hair that could be left behind in peanut butter when it gets shipped off to the grocery store. And now, here we are. Think about that the next time you eat a PB&J sandwich!^[2]

8 Real Remains?

There used to be actual, legitimate human remains housed within the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in Southern California. That’s the story, at least. And some people say there might even still be real remains on the ride today. Maybe.

The Pirates ride was first created and debuted to the public in the 1960s. That is significant because it was the last of the amusement park rides to be personally supervised by Walt Disney himself. And ol’ Walt, well, he had high standards. His standards were so high, in fact, that he became irate when the bones and skulls strewn around throughout the ride appeared to be completely unrealistic-looking.

The solution? Go get some real bones and skulls. But not in THAT way. The folks at Disney didn’t, like, murder a ton of people for their bones. (We hope not, at least!) Instead, they contacted the anatomy laboratory at the UCLA Medical Center on the other side of Los Angeles. UCLA sent them a host of real bones that had been used for medical studies and the like and weren’t needed anymore.

Disney’s team promptly placed the bones around the ride. A few years later, ride design technology got better, and the real bones were swapped out and replaced with fake ones. And those fake ones remain as part of the Pirates’ experience today. We hope…^[3]

7 Skinned Alive

We’ve all been there: We find some dead skin flakes that have fallen off our arm or shoulder and onto something very nice and very black that we’ve chosen to wear out on the town for a big night out. Or, perhaps we find flaky, dry skin falling from our legs and feet right around the time the weather turns really cold every fall. Not great! Embarrassing, in fact. But thankfully, that rarely happens. Heck, it’s only a few flakes a year (well, if you moisturize regularly and drink a good amount of water). No biggie, right?

Uh, not quite. In actuality, the average human sheds about 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) of skin every single year. Yep. You read that right. Every single one of us (including you reading this!) sheds skin constantly. You’re shedding it right now, in fact. Your entire epidermis (aka the outer, visible layer of your skin) regrows itself once every 27 days. That’s a lot of skin. And a lot of shedding!

Thus, over a 365-day period—with roughly 12-13 total skin regrowth cycles therein—you wind up losing 1.5 pounds of your beloved skin. Spread out across the average lifespan of a human being in the modern era, and that means you’ll have lost about half of your entire body weight in skin across your entire life.^[4]

6 A Load of Crap!

Every single day, an elephant produces enough, um, excrement to outweigh most adult humans. Sure, elephants are huge animals. So it makes sense that their poops are, um, rather large. But it’s truly difficult to conceptualize how large they are—and how many times they actually poop in an average day—without looking at it in relative terms.

So here’s a number to help with that: 220. That’s the number of pounds (100 kg) of waste (on average) that an elephant produces every single day as it goes about its business. Think of how many people weigh less than 220 pounds. Most of them! And now imagine an elephant pooping that much Every. Single. Day. Of. Its. Life.

Their digestive tracts are highly specialized, and they eat grasses and plants all day long, so much of their waste actually goes relatively undigested. Wildlife biologists have found that these mammoth creatures spend as much as 80% of their day grazing and eating, too. So they are constantly wolfing greens into their mouth, digesting (or partially digesting) them, and pooping out all the rest.

Officially, the average elephant defecates somewhere between 12 and 15 times in a normal day, as well. Doing a little bit of math tells us that every single one of an elephant’s “average” poops logs in at around a 15-pound release. Gross!^[5]

5 The Carnivorous Walking Fish

There is a type of predatory fish that can walk—and survive—on land. If you’ve never heard of this incredible biological adaptation before, let us introduce you to the snakehead fish. These animals can literally walk up out of the water thanks to their so-called “gill arches.” Those are highly specialized organs that allow them to breathe oxygen when out of the water.

Their fins are specially designed, too. They are strong enough and angled in such a way that these fish can flop around on land and move quickly to get to food. We’re not talking about right there on the riverbank, either. Snakehead fish have been known to walk as far as a quarter of a mile on land in search of their next meal.

Here’s the other creepy part of this story: They are absolutely everywhere! They have been found in dozens of states, from the southern half of California out west to all across New England and even down in Florida. So they can survive (and thrive) in pretty much any climate. They even grow to weigh as much as 14 pounds (6.4 kg). That is no small fish!

Even worse, while they are native to both Africa and Asia, they are considered an invasive species in North America. That means two things: They were introduced unnaturally (aka, by human hands), and they have no natural predators. Yikes!^[6]

4 One-Way Street…

Here’s a creepy fact that you can drop on your friends at parties or in pubs: Horses can’t vomit. You will never see a pony or a thoroughbred or any other type of horse puke. That’s incredibly strange because nearly every single other animal with a spinal column has the ability to vomit. And the fact that they can’t vomit actually becomes a major issue for a horse’s health when things start to go wrong.

Unlike pretty much every other vertebrate on earth, when horses get sick or suffer an upset stomach, there’s no way for them to upchuck the thing causing all their problems. Because of that, what would be a very mild, forgettable issue for a dog, cat, or other animal can become extremely life-threatening incredibly quickly for a horse.

There are all kinds of weird reasons for this, though. For one, horses have incredibly strong esophagus muscles within their neck. Furthermore, their esophagus connects with their stomach at a very low angle, making the act of vomiting an impossibility from a physics standpoint. Third, horses’ stomachs aren’t surrounded by abdominal muscles—and thus, those non-existent muscles obviously can’t contract to push out the offending item.

What science doesn’t know, however, is why this weird evolutionary trait is unique to horses. Why did they not get what all the rest of us got?^[7]

3 No Head? No Problem!

Chickens aren’t the smartest creatures in the world. But this next fact takes things to the next level! In 1945, a farmer beheaded one of the chickens on his farm with the intention of eating the animal for dinner. But the chicken promptly got out of the farmer’s grasp, ran off, and… didn’t die. For a whopping 18 months!

It wasn’t a zombie chicken, either, but very much a bird that remained alive and perfectly healthy. You know, perfectly healthy except for the fact that it literally didn’t have a head! Even so, it’s not actually that unusual that a chicken can live (for a little while) without a head. Chickens’ spinal cords hold residual oxygen, and the spine can even fire neurons to keep the chicken moving.

Still, that usually goes on for a few minutes—or a few hours at most. This chicken, who came to be known by the farmer and his family as Mike the Headless Chicken—managed to last an incredible 18 months without his head. The farmer eventually dropped the idea of eating the chicken for dinner and embraced the crazy story. He even started taking him around to nearby towns and other farms and showed him off to people who didn’t believe that he had a headless chicken.

Eventually, Mike became a bit of a local celebrity. The farmer even took to feeding him with an eyedropper (yes, the food went straight down the esophagus!) before the chicken finally kicked the bucket after a year and a half without a head.^[8]

2 Tears of Blood

If the walking fish didn’t freak you out, this one certainly will: There is a species of lizard that can shoot blood from its eyes. The Texas horned lizard is a fierce and feisty little creature. And though he may not look like much (besides being really weird!), he’s got aggression many times the size of his tiny body.

See, this little lizard scares off his predators (and captures his prey) by squirting hot jets of blood straight from his eyeballs at them. The blood has evolved to contain a very specific chemical that repels common predators, including wolves and coyotes. As soon as they smell it, they’re gone. And the lizard can live another day!

Amazingly, these little lizards can shoot blood with incredible accuracy. They aim well, they shoot straight, and they very often hit their target. The blood shots can travel up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) away to hit a target, too—so the wolf or coyote doesn’t even have to get right up on the lizard.

If the blood fails to ward them off, though, the little reptile will puff up his body and push out all of his spikes to seem much bigger and more imposing than he actually is.^[9]

1 There’s WHAT In Your Coffee?!

We saved possibly the grossest of all these facts for last. According to a 2017 scientific study conducted by the Journal of Dairy, Food, and Environmental Sanitation, more than 90 percent of office kitchen coffee mugs tested by researchers were found to contain some type of harmful bacteria on them. Even worse? A whopping 20 percent of those same office kitchen coffee mugs had fecal matter on them. Yes, FECAL MATTER! As in, well, you know…

The study found that there was one very specific culprit involved in the crappy situation: kitchen sponges. See, sponges are almost always the dirtiest thing in the kitchen because they are always cleaning up everybody else’s messes. In office kitchens, with sanitation generally being laxer than in your kitchen at home, the sponge situation is apparently a whole lot worse.

After all, the numbers don’t lie: one in every five office kitchen coffee mugs contains at least trace (but measurable) amounts of fecal matter. Gross! One thing is for certain here: those of us lucky enough to work from home are really, really fortunate.^[10]