You’ll Never Forget These Bone-chilling Dark Web Stories

What do you think about when you hear the name “Dark Web”? It’s a moniker that conjures a mysterious online world where nothing is what it seems. It makes sense since the Dark Web contains strong protections against anyone’s identity being revealed. Which means that whomever you’re communicating with could be anyone. Nothing on the Dark Web has any reason to be real, which provides the perfect situation for strange tales to emerge.

As with almost any other internet community, there’s plenty of unique lore that has arisen around this hidden part of the internet. Forums on the clearnet as well as communities on the Dark Web play host to all sorts of tails. Usually third-hand or without any claims about providence.

Whether these are true stories or just tall tales is virtually impossible to determine. Stories that have a supernatural element are probably the product of twisted fantasy, but that would depend on your personal stance when it comes to magic and miracles. Other stories are somewhat plausible and could actually have happened to the original teller, but simply be hoaxes. After all, if you do it on purpose it’s not hard to trick people into believing they’ve seen and heard something that was never as it appeared.

As such, dear reader, we don’t present these chilling tales from the Dark Web as either truth or fiction. Instead, we’ll leave it up to you to decide what’s real and what’s simply a good story.

The Cannibal Cookbook

Cannibalism refers to the act of eating a member of your own species. We see this happen in nature all the time, but for most human societies, this is one of the greatest taboos possible. Still, plenty of cultures in the history of humanity have practiced the act of consuming human flesh. Often for ritual purposes. We also have people like Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered and ate a long list of victims. Still, in modern society cannibalism is far from normal! So you can imagine that someone browsing the Dark Web may have been quite shocked to find a cannibal cookbook.

Redditor Baconboyloiter was one such victim, according to this creatively-named user, it was typical in computer science class. In other words, they were bored out of their skulls and decided to trawl the Dark Web for something interesting.

Something's Cooking...

It was during this lazy search that they happened upon a cookbook. Not just any cookbook, but one that details exactly how to go about butchering and cooking a woman. This matter-of-fact digital tome even went as far as instructing the reader on how to keep the victim alive for as long as possible.

Obviously, there’s no clue as to who the author is, but with so much detail it's hard to imagine that the document is the result of pure imagination. We all just hope it’s an expression of sick fantasy.

The Sad Tale of “Daisy”

We’ve written about some of the worst Dark Web criminals in known history and among this rogue’s gallery, you’ll find the name, Peter Sculley. Sculley is a Dark Web pedophile and may not be remarkable compared to most of his ilk. That is, until the day he released a now-infamous video known as “Daisy’s Destruction”.

The details of what’s in this video are so extreme, so unbelievable and violent, that most people simply didn’t believe it was real. The very existence of the video itself was essentially a creepy story told on forums to disgust and general disbelief. Yet, it turns out that what happens in Daisy’s Destruction was very real and shows the extreme torture and sexual abuse of three girls. The youngest, Daisy, was only 18 months old at the time the video was made. Why was this story nothing but a creepy legend for so long? Well, it might have had something to do with the asking price for a copy - a cool $10 000. Obviously we strongly, strongly advise against any attempts to look for this material. Not only would you go to jail, but you’d also become a trash human being in the process.

I Know Who You Are

This isn't just one story, but a sort of trending overall type of story we hear coming from the Dark Web often. The Dark Web is meant to be a place where everyone is anonymous. However, it is actually possible to use a number of methods that reveal people's true identities. One of the scariest moments anyone browsing the Dark Web can have is when they realize a stranger somewhere out there knows who they are and have proven it in the creepiest ways possible.

Consider hapless Redditor Cletch. After a long night of browsing whatever depraved stuff kids like to look at on Tor these days, Cletch starts to get those hunger pangs. So off to the Five Guys Burgers and Fries for tasty dinner. Sated and ready for more Dark Web browsing, he stumbles across a very familiar picture - him having dinner just hours earlier.

But Wait, There's More

Not creepy enough? How about this? A guy watched a video on the Dark Web and liked it so much, he left a comment on it. Later when he went back to watch the video again, someone had left a reply for him. That's pretty normal, right? However, the comment in question addressed him by his real name!

That's terrifying! But the last one of these takes the cake without any doubt. First, let me say that anyone new to Tor or the Dark Web should read up a bit and take some precautions before they just start browsing sites willy-nilly. You really aren't as protected from being outed as you may think.

This is what a guy learned the hard way, after being on Tor for just 20 minutes when he suddenly received a phone call with no one on the other side. OK, this could have been pure coincidence, but we'll never know and that's creepy.

I Wish I Could Unsee That

If you've ever read the work of HP Lovecraft, you'll know there's a sort of existential horror where someone can simply see something so disturbing that it induces madness. Lovecraft imagined a strange dimension, filled with eldritch horrors, but if he were alive today there may have been novels of people seeing things that should not be on the Dark Web.

Of course, there are plenty of sites on the surface web that have awful, disturbing imagery and video, but on the Dark Web, you might see things that are too hot even for sites like LiveLeak.

One user going by the name Semper_Fi_Cerberus had a really close call with only the crappiness of their internet connection saving them from the need to scrub their brains clean with iron wool.

As a Dark Web newbie, Semper was just trying out whatever came up. One site, a very inviting link called out to newcomers to the Dark Web. "Oh boy," Semper surely thought. "This is just what I need!" Except, the link was a lie, it wasn't a guide or a collection of fluffy bunnies. It was, well. We have no idea what it was. After clicking on the link Semper saw an image loading slowly. It was the head of an elderly Asian man, being revealed line-by-line as bits of information slowly reached his computer. By the time the image reached the man's chin, it was clearly covered in blood.

It was at this point that Semper chose to preserve his mental hygiene and closed the window with a big old "nopenopenope" and went on with his life blissfully unaware of what the final picture would have revealed.

The Red Room Girl

One of the most persistent stories on the Dark Web refers to the existence of so-called "Red Rooms". These are live streams where viewers can supposedly see the real-time torture and killing of people. Seemingly the victims of kidnappings.

There has never been any proof that red rooms exist, other than as a hoax or faked video. Still, there are stories aplenty. Usually without any sort of source.

The most interesting has to be about a red room featuring just a lone young woman, but that didn't mean the show couldn't go on. This is what I imagine it might have been like.

Patiently sitting in a chair, she waited for her audience to log in. Nothing else is visible but this one slight woman and her spartan chair. She looks directly into the camera and says "what would you like me to do? How much will you pay?" It's an innocent enough question, but this audience knows the true meaning behind her words.

"Cut yourself", one anonymous viewer writes. Dutifully the girl retrieves a knife from off screen and slices deeply across her forearm. This is serious. Like hungry dogs, others begin typing. Within a few minutes, she's sporting bruises, cuts, and a partially gouged-out eye. Clearly, there's not much more she can take. The orders stop, as her new fans wait to see what will happen next. Weakly she reached for the knife again, but this cut will be the last. Without a word, this tortured soul end it right there and the picture fades out...

Mysterious Logins

This isn't so much a single story, but more of a mystery from the Dark Web itself. While most hidden services on Tor are actually pretty easy to find thanks to links on the clear web, not everyone is so welcoming.

There are numerous sites on Tor that are a complete mystery. If you visit them you'll just see a nondescript login page. There's not even a tiny clue as to what sort of sites lie behind these stony digital walls. It could be a cult, the FBI or something too horrible to imagine. All we can do is pretend they don't exist or become obsessed with these mysteriously locked doors to some sort of even darker web.

Human Experimentation Records - From The Present!

The Second World War was a low point for humanity, there’s little doubt about that. The blackest of black spots has to be the way that Jewish prisoners were treated on concentration camps. Among those victims, the ones that suffered the most were certainly human experimentation subjects. All sorts of incredibly painful and torturous experiments were done on prisoners by the Nazis. Often to bolster the war effort.

Today, human experimentation is strictly regulated and restricted. It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to get human research approved and test subjects are protected from harm as much as possible.

That is unless you’re running a human experimentation service on the Dark Web.

The Human Experiment seems like a hoax, but it has such attention to detail that you have to wonder if it really is too horrible to be true. It's a site that claims to keep human subjects and perform all sorts of torturous "experiments" on them. The results of which are published on the site. Is it just some horrible joke? Or are there currently a few dozen kidnapped people being forced to drink bleach or bear exposure to extreme temperatures, until they die? I honestly hope for the sick joke explanation.

A Girl Named Janice

If something about a website seemed odd, how would you know if you were really experiencing something supernatural or were simply being messed with? That's a question I have some serious thought when I first heard the "Janice" story from the depths of the Dark Web.

The "hero" of our story is a bit of a strange character himself. "Mark Spielman", is the ultimate internet hermit. He never leaves the house, or can't. In the original tale, Mark himself says he just doesn't like going outside. His only joy in life is sitting in front of a computer and trawling the internet for the most messed up stuff he can find. Murder, torture, child pornography and everything else that represent the most horrifying things the net spews out. This was just an average day for Mark, whose mental hygiene could not have been great, to begin with.

Like most people who are obsessed with these sorts of materials, Mark was always pushing to find the bottom of the cesspool. Curiously, it was a job application with the police that gave him the perfect excuse to freely look for and find the worst the Dark Web has to offer. As a child porn hunter, Mark was meant to find and report the material and nail any users who failed to protect their identity.

Mark Hits Paydirt

Spiraling deeper and deeper into this internet hellhole, until he hit the jackpot. A site simply titled Sweet15.com. The "biggest child porn site I had ever seen", was how the man described it. Taking down this site, he thought, would make him a legend and earn him a massive commission.

All Mark needed to get the go-ahead, was a single picture of illegal porn. This site avoided image embedding, but he was looking at huge lists of jpeg files, all with the names of girls.

Ah, now we're talking! Clicking on the first link, an image of a girl appears on the screen. This isn't porn, however. It's just some waifish young girl with a creepy smile. OK, next link. Same picture!

Who was this girl? The image is named janice.jpg. No matter which links he tries, it all leads back to Janice. Great, instead of being the biggest find in child porn history, it turns out this is some sick joke. So Mark calls it a day.

A Drug Deal Gone Wrong

The Dark Web was shoved into public consciousness when black markets such as the Silk Road started doing millions and millions of dollars in the drug business.

The whole point of these markets is that they provide a safe way for dealers and buyers to do business. Yet, somehow there seems to be one very unlucky buyer who got way more than he bargained for.

This story has floated around Reddit and is presented as having happened to “a friend”. This friend was apparently an avid customer of Dark Web markets. He’d buy just about anything you could think of. From stolen goods to hardcore drugs.

One fateful day, our intrepid junkie wanted to spend his seemingly deep pool of funds on something new. So he hit up a dealer that had never sold him anything before. So far so good, but the rookie mistake of the year has to be giving your real address to a Dark Web drug dealer.

On top of this bone-headed move, he also asked that the drugs be delivered in a disguised case so that his mom won’t get suspicious.

This is Your Brain On Drugs

Instead of drug delivery, our genius gets a note at the front door warning him that the deal has been compromised. If he wants the goods, a new neutral location is proposed. So without thinking things through at all, he heads off to meet a stranger in person, in order to pick up some very illegal drugs.

Arriving at the arranged spot, out drug-addled protagonist noted a man in a Jeep. One with number plates covered in duct tape. Not suspicious at all. Taking delivery of his drugs, our hero leaves the scene, only to notice the aforementioned Jeep following him. Now seriously freaking out, it became time for evasive maneuvers. Eventually, he gave the Jeep the slip, except apparently it slipped his mind that the dealer already had his address.

Heading home, all seemed to be well. Except mom wasn't anywhere to be found. Heading to her room, a figure appeared armed with a knife. Escaping our genius hero's own attempts at instigating a knife fight, the mysterious man gets away. Mom, however, has no such luck. She's found with not only a slit throat, but 23 (count 'em) stab wounds and a mouth covered with the same duct tape obscuring the Jeep's plates. And that's why morons shouldn't buy stuff on the Dark Web.

The Mom's Who Can't Let Go

Few things are as strong as the bond between a mother and her child. Which is why when newborns don't make it the effects can be truly devastating. However, most mothers who lose their babies eventually get over it, but for one group of women, a site on the dark web provides them the most macabre form of relief.

The site is dedicated to stillborn babies. Just row upon row of baby corpses, dressed up and accompanied by eerie music. Is it sweet, or just very, very messed up? Either way, I can't find any actual links to first-person evidence, but this one is too creepy not to include in this list.

Unhappily Ever After?

The really scary thing about the Dark Web is that it's such a mysterious and lawless place, that almost all of these stories seem like they could have happened. Sure, the supernatural stuff is less likely to be literally true, but there are plenty of ways people could be tricked into thinking something truly beyond the laws of physics is happening.

While I doubt anyone really went mad from simply seeing a video or picture from the Dark Web, the truth is there's plenty of real horrifying content and people hidden in the depths. If you ever venture onto the hidden web yourself, you might just be unlucky enough to find out for yourself.

Do you have any scary stories from the Dark Web to share? Let us know in the comments. Lastly, we’d like to ask you to share this article online. And don’t forget that you can follow TechNadu on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks!