Below is a list of some photographs with a particularly bizarre if not twisted background.

Not all of them are necessarily scary in the sense that they will haunt your dreams — though I sincerely hope that at least one of them does — but they are a mixture of strange, interesting, and puzzling images that are still likely to make the reader go:

Huh…

On April 26, 1865, the Sultana began sailing up the Mississippi River with hundreds of passengers, and upwards of two thousand Union prisoners who had been freed following the end of the American Civil War.

The photograph above — taken as the ship was leaving dock — is the only known image of the Sultana taken in her two-and-a-half years of service.

Within hours of her departure a boiler would explode.

Over a thousand people, and perhaps upwards of sixteen-hundred people would be killed.

The photograph above shows nine men from the “Eight-Nation Alliance” taken in 1900, shortly after the suppression of the Qing Dynasty-initiated Boxer Rebellion — United Kingdom, United States, Australia, India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan respectively.

Apparently, the intention had been to make the British soldier the tallest in the photograph to demonstrate their genetic superiority, only for the Americans to snuff this mandate by sending a taller man from their country — prompting the British to place a tall hat on their man.

According to some claims, everybody in the above photograph, except the American, would die a violent death, with the British soldier dying during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, the Indian being hanged for treason in 1915, and the Japanese soldier dying in an air raid in 1944 among other examples.

Douglas Spedden was a six-year-old boy when he boarded the RMS Titanic with his parents.

A photograph taken by Roman Catholic Priest Frances Browne shows Douglas Spedden playing the topper on the deck of the “Unsinkable Ship”.

Days later, the vessel would go down.

Spedden would be among the survivors.

However, on August 6, 1915, Spedden was killed at the age of nine in an automobile accident near his residence in Maine.

This was the first documented case of a fatal motor collision in the state.

Lavrentiy Beria and Nestor Lakoba detested one another intensely.

For many years, Joseph Stalin had sided with the latter, but by 1934, his attitude was gradually changing in favour of the former.

In 1931, Lavrentiy Beria, Nestor Lakoba, Joseph Stalin, and Stalin’s daughter — Svetlana Aliluyeva — gathered for an afternoon “get-together” at Stalin’s dacha.

According to some stories, it was during this moment that Stalin began turning on Lakoba — sitting unassumingly in the background to the right — while Stalin sits across from him with a pipe with stacks of paper situated across the table.

Meanwhile, a confident Beria looks on grinning while Svetlana — presumably unaware of what was about to happen — looks on smiling.

Since Stalin never liked to get rid of people without getting the most out of them first — after all, Stalin still liked him on a personal level — Lakoba’s downfall was gradual, with his closest allies being slowly picked away, most notably during the Great Terror of 1936–1938.

In official Soviet historiography, Beria would later poison Lakoba at a dinner party five years after the photograph was taken.

Even though there is no signature of Stalin ordering the assassination, speculation is that Beria would not have acted on this without support from the Vozhd.

Adolf Hitler was known to like children.

So much so, that it did not matter to him where they came from, or what their background was.

On April 20, 1933, a woman presented Hitler her daughter — seven-year-old Rosa Bernile Nienau.

Hitler invited her and her mother Karoline to the Berghoff to have tea and cakes after he found out that Rosa shared his birthday.

Officials working for the Fuhrer quickly discovered that both the mother and her daughter were Jews.

And yet, Hitler did not seem to mind.

Many photographs would be taken of her and Hitler, who would sometimes invite her on outings, in which Rosa would describe him as “Uncle Hitler” in surviving letters to her family.

Eventually, Martin Bormann forced the relationship to end for “security reasons”, which was reportedly done with Hitler’s chagrin.

Nienau would die on October 5, 1943 from spinal poliomyelitis.

Hitler would commit suicide less than two years later.

Her mother Karoline would survive the war and live until 1962.

On March 8, 1935, a group of Japanese train station workers at Shibuya Train Station gather together with Yaeko Sakano — the common-law wife of Hidesaburo Ueno — at the bottom-right.

Ueno was a professor of agriculture who died unexpectedly from cardiac arrest while teaching at Tokyo Imperial University on May 21, 1925.

Hachiko would spend all day everyday for a decade waiting for his owner to return — sometimes even sleeping at the station overnight.

In the first years of his stay, Hachiko was regarded as a nuisance, and was reportedly often kicked about by citizens and even staff members who were apprehensive of his presence.

This did not dissuade the Akita, who eventually won the respect and admiration of many, who proceeded to dedicate a statue on his behalf, to teach Japanese citizens to be as loyal to their emperor as Hachiko was to his deceased owner.

Eventually, Hachiko died from cancer at the age of eleven-and-a-half years — making him over eighty in dog years.

His body was found in the snow across the street from the station, where he continued waiting for Ueno until his eyes closed for the last time.

In 1968, a White Australian by the name of Peter Norman — a runner athlete with a religious background owing to his father being an officer in the Salvation Army — agreed to stand in solidarity with two Black athletes, John Carlos and Tommy Smith in trying to promote the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

As a consequence, Norman was never permitted to participate in any Olympic event ever again — even being denied an invitation to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

Needless to say, Carlos and Smith respected Norman for his stance, knowing full well the controversy and backlash this was going to initiate, with the former even going so far as to say:

“If we [Carlos and Smith] were getting beat up, Peter was facing an entire country and suffering alone."\

Though Carlos and Smith are still with us, Norman himself died in 2006 — reportedly a bitter and broken man.

Only in the last few years has the Australian Olympic Committee elected to rehabilitate his image, at least in part, with its president, John Coates, stating:

"I'm absolutely certain from all the history I've read that we didn't do the wrong thing by him. But I absolutely think we've been negligent in not recognising the role he played back then."

Theodore Robert Bundy — best known as ‘Ted Bundy’ — posing beside his yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the late summer of 1974, during the height of his abduction-killing spree.

Several months later, the vehicle would be seized by the police after he became a suspect in the murders in Colorado, Washington, Idaho, and elsewhere out west before fleeing east to Florida.

Then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter posing with John Wayne Gacy in 1978.

Gacy would later be convicted in the deaths of at least thirty-three young boys and adolescents, whose remains he usually disposed of under his house — criminologists and historians consider this a conversation estimate — following his arrest shortly after the photograph was taken.

This would make Rosalynn Carter one of the last people to speak with John Wayne Gacy while the latter remained a freeman.

On December 8, 1980, Beatles lead performer John Lennon signed a copy of Double Fantasy for Mark David Chapman.

The photograph was taken at approximately 5:00 PM, and is widely believed to be Lennon’s final photograph.

Several hours later, Chapman confronted Lennon a second time, only this time, he did not requested an autograph, but instead proceeded to shoot him twice.

By the time Lennon arrived at Roosevelt Hospital at 11:15 PM, the musician was deceased.

Lennon was forty years old.

On August 19, 1981, Kim Jong Il — known as the “Dear Leader” — posed with his son, Kim Jong Nam (seated front right), his sister-in law Song Hye-rang (top left) and her two children, daughter Sam Il Ok, and son, Lee Il Nam.

Some years earlier, Kim Jong Il had started a relationship with Song Hye-rang’s sister Song Hye-rim — much to the disapproval of Kim Il Sung, due to her social status, as well as the fact that she was already married.

Kim Jong Il continued anyway, and eventually, he impregnated her.

In a panic, he ran to Song Hye-rang’s house and asked what should be done.

Eventually, the successor to North Korea concocted a plan to hide the pregnancy from both the public and his father.

Everybody who was known to Kim Jong Nam’s maternal family — including neighbours, distant relatives, family friends, etc. — were purged and sent to concentration camps alongside their own families.

This process was then repeated at the hospital, where the doctor and nurse who delivered the baby, plus other witnessing staff members, as well as their relatives, were also sent to concentration camps.

Anywhere between several hundred to several thousand people were politically purged, with the majority dying in the country’s penal system — all that to cover up a pregnancy.

It was then decided that Song Hye-rang should raise Kim Jong Nam as her own, and have him taught at her residence, instead of a school.

A year after this photograph was taken, the older son, Lee Il Nam would flee — and be assassinated by North Korean agents in 1997.

Sam Il Ok would flee the country in 1992 and go into hiding in South Korea.

Song Hye-rang would also flee North Korea in 1996 and end up somewhere in Europe.

Kim Jong Nam would fall out of favour with his father, lose the succession, and later be assassinated at Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia in 2017 — probably by North Korean agents.

Charla Nash was a family friend of Sandra Herold, her husband, and their new chimpanzee, Travis.

In this photograph taken around 1996, Charla can be seen smiling while a baby Travis looks on in the background at the Herold family home in Connecticut.

Travis would go on to star in many commercials, including those endorsed by Pepsi.

Many years later, Travis would become increasingly agitated with human life.

One day, Sandra — now a widow — requested Charla to come to their home and help her get Travis back inside.

Charla — who had recently cut her hair — said she did not think much of it when she presented Travis his favourite “Tickle Me Elmo” doll as bait.

Rather than coming in uneventfully as he had always done, Travis bared his teeth before charging across the yard, where he instantly proceeded to thrash about — ripping Charla’s face, devouring her eyes, plucking out one of her hands, and snapping off most of the fingers in her second hand before chewing on her flesh.

Sandra tried to save her friend by stabbing Travis in the back, though this only infuriated him further.

Eventually the police were called, and after Travis tried ripping off the door frame to one of the cruisers, a volley of fire was returned, prompting him to retreat inside, where he was found dead in his blanket.

Though Charla survived the onslaught, her skull was largely dismembered, she remains permanently blinded, and can barely feed herself.

Broken-hearted by everything, Sandra Herold died from grief the following year.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the sky was sunny with not a cloud in sight.

A photographer by the name of David Monderer took this photograph of downtown Manhattan at approximately 8:30 AM.

This would be the last known image to depict the World Trade Centers in clear view before the first plane was to strike sixteen minutes later.

Less than two hours later, both towers were to collapse and be a symbol of the past.

Harry Patch was the last known veteran in the world to have experienced the calamity of the First World War from the trenches of the Western Front.

On the opposing side, Charles Kuentz was to be the last German to experience combat on the Western Front.

Patch had been a machine-gunner at Passchendaele, while Kuentz was an artilleryman in the same battle.

On September 22, 1917, while advancing across the Western Front, a shell struck Harry Patch and his crew.

Three of his four comrades were blown to pieces at once, while he himself remained gravely wounded with a splintered shell — the injury would later render him paraplegic.

Patch became so enraged by this experience that he vowed never to speak to another German.

The Last Tommy would also not speak about the war until he was over a hundred, when he was invited to do so for a documentary on BBC.

On September 22, 2004 — eighty-seven years to the day after the incident that changed Patch’s life — he was invited to meet Charles Kuentz on the battlefield of Ypres, near the site where his friend had fallen.

Despite wishing never to speak to another German, Patch made an exception with Kuentz, who turned out to be one of the German artillerymen who had fired on Patch’s unit.

A news reporter then asked Patch if he would still hold it against Kuentz if he found out he fired the fatal shell, to which Patch said: “No, not today. No.”

Kuentz would die the following year, with Patch speaking about how grateful he was to have met him, so as to get that sense of closure.

With the death of Harold Lawton in December 2005, Patch would become the last combat veteran in the world until his own demise on July 25, 2009 at the age of 111 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day.

Coincidentally, the last living veteran of the war lived precisely long enough to coincidence with 11/11/11 — the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month.

That is all for today.

I hope my readers got something out of all this!

Cheers!