We all love a true story. Whether it’s a true-crime documentary or a podcast detailing the life of an infamous con artist, audiences will devour a story that actually happened. So it’s no surprise that “The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating” Facebook page has become so successful. With over 75k followers, this page has gained a loyal audience by sharing some of the most bizarre, entertaining and harrowing true stories we’ve ever heard. Anything from fascinating images of animals to details about the tragic deaths of celebrities, this page is the place to learn something interesting. We’ve gathered some of the most compelling posts from the page to share with all of you, so enjoy reading them below, along with an interview we were lucky enough to receive from Ryan, the creator of “The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating”.
Then if you’re looking to learn even more from Bored Panda, be sure to check out this informative piece next.Read More: 30 Weird, Fascinating And Disturbing Facts You Might Have Never Heard Before, As Shared On This Facebook Page
#1
This is Keanu Reeves. He was abandoned by his father at just 3-years-old and grew up with 3 different stepfathers. His dream of becoming a hockey player was shattered by a serious accident. His daughter died at birth. His wife died in a car accident and his best friend, River Phoenix, died of an overdose.
No bodyguards, no luxury houses. Keanu lives in an ordinary apartment and likes wandering around town and is often seen riding a subway in NYC. When he was filming the movie “The Lake House,” he overheard the conversation of two costume assistants, one crying as he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 – On the same day, Keanu deposited the necessary amount in his bank account.
In his career, he has donated large sums to hospitals including $75 million of his earnings from “The Matrix” to charities.In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery & bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him. In 1997 some paparazzi found him walking one morning in the company of a homeless man in Los Angeles, listening to him and sharing his life for a few hours.
In life, sometimes the ones most broken from inside are the ones most willing to help others.
This man could buy everything, but instead he wakes up and chooses one thing that cannot be bought, to be a caring person
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#2
The Greek government has decided to legally ban overweight tourists from receiving rides from donkeys. The ruling comes after animal rights groups garnered media attention surrounding the poor treatment of the donkeys, which included carrying burdensome loads.
The law was created after animal rights groups complained about spinal injuries and open wounds that the donkeys suffered from due to carrying heavier tourists.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#3
Sadly, this giant wolf-dog was dumped at a kill shelter after growing too large and becoming too much of a burden on the owner. Thankfully, a sanctuary took him instead and saved his life! His DNA testing came back as 87.5% Gray Wolf, 8.6% Siberian Husky and 3.9% German Shepherd. Wow!
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#4
At age 17, Juliane Koepcke was sucked out of an airplane after it was struck by lightning. She fell over 2 miles to the ground still strapped to her plane seat and somehow lived. She then had to endure a 9-day walk through the Amazon jungle before eventually being rescued by loggers. She was the sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508 that killed 93 people in December 1971.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#5
The moment you realize this is only one photograph.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#6
“If I don’t make it, please call my family and let them know how much I love them.”
Todd Beamer was just 32 years old when his flight was hijacked by terrorists on 9/11. A passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, Beamer was forced to think quickly. He first tried calling AT&T, but both of his calls were terminated upon connection. Beamer then attempted to call his wife, but that call was also terminated. Finally, he contacted Airfone operators and was able to connect with a supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. While on the line, he pleaded with Jefferson to tell his pregnant wife and two sons that he loved them, but he also outlined a heroic plan to fight back against the hijackers alongside his fellow passengers and the flight crew. And that’s exactly what he did.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#7
The majestic Maine Coon cat
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#8
I knew I recognized that outfit!
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#9
A Rottweiler with Vitiligo
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#10
By the time she was 17, Judy Garland was already reliant on “pep pills,” a.k.a. amphetamines, and was being hounded by studio executives regarding her weight and looks. One executive called her a fat hunchback and encouraged her to smoke in order to suppress her appetite.
Garland’s grueling work schedule — coupled with a strict diet of black coffee, chicken soup, and cigarettes imposed upon her by her Hollywood bosses — set the stage for her lifetime of body dysmorphia and substance abuse. The star attempted suicide at least 20 times in her life until her fatal overdose at 47.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#11
In October 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, began a 4,000-mile sailing trip from Tahiti to San Diego. Three weeks into the journey, they were hit by a category 4 hurricane that capsized their ship and knocked Ashcraft unconscious.
Some 27 hours later, she awoke to find that her fiance was gone and she was stranded alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With only a sextant and watch, Ashcraft journeyed for 41 days until she found the coast of Hawaii.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#12
This is a Hammerhead Bat, also known as the “Winged Moose” Wow!
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#13
By the age of 12, Drew Barrymore was already a self-described “party girl” — thanks to her mom who took her to nightclubs in Los Angeles and New York. By the time she turned 14, she had spent a year in rehab, been emancipated from her parents, and lived in her own apartment.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#14
A giant eagle that was caught on camera in Alert Bay, BC.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#15
This is Simo Häyhä, the deadliest sniper in world history with over 500 confirmed kills in less than 100 days. He used no scope on his rifle and once held off over 4,000 Soviets with only 31 other Finns.
Over the course of the Winter War, which lasted roughly 100 days, Häyhä killed between 500 and 542 Russian soldiers, all with his antiquated rifle. While his comrades were using state-of-the-art telescopic lenses to zoom in on their targets, Häyhä was fighting with an iron sight, which he felt gave him a more precise target.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#16
Harry Haft was just a teenager when he was sent to Auschwitz. Once he arrived, the Nazi guards found out that he had some boxing experience — so they ordered him to fight his fellow prisoners in harrowing boxing matches where the loser would be executed. Forced to literally fight for his life, Haft never lost a single match, even though he would have known many of his opponents because the Nazis regularly sent people from the same town to the same concentration camps. From 1943 to 1945, he was forced to fight at least 76 people, none of whom he ever saw alive again.
Only in April 1945 did Haft manage to escape during a death march away from the camp — by killing a Nazi soldier and stealing his uniform. Haft then spent weeks running from village to village. Trained to fight to the death, he even killed an elderly couple who offered him shelter after he suspected they’d discovered that he wasn’t really a Nazi. By the time he made it to Allied-controlled Germany, he weighed only 110 pounds and spent the next two years recovering in a refugee camp. But by 1947, he decided to fight again and immigrated to America to become a professional boxer — where he took on some of the biggest names in the sport.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#17
Accused of murdering two white girls in 1944 without a shred of physical evidence, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. became the youngest person in U.S. history ever executed in the electric chair
When he was put to death, he was so small that the state electrician struggled to adjust an electrode to his right leg. Stinney even needed to sit on a phone book for the electrocution to work properly. He then survived the first round of 2,400 volts, which caused his oversized mask to slip off and expose his tears. It took two more jolts before he was dead with the room reeking of burning flesh.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#18
Former NFL star Pat Tillman was hailed as a hero in 2004 after he was “killed by the Taliban.” But it was a lie — he’d been killed by friendly fire. And while the shooting has since been described as accidental, some believe it was intentionally planned by the U.S. Army.
Not only was Tillman shot three times in the head, but he was also shot at close range and it was later determined that the Army had lied about his unit being ambushed by the enemy. Eerily, all of Tillman’s personal items had been burned — including his uniform and private journals. On top of that, rumors had surfaced that he was about to go public about his opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror with a televised meeting with Noam Chomsky. But this meeting would never happen.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#19
Only a few will remember him
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#20
Near the end of his life, Bob Marley was told by a doctor that he had “more cancer in him than I’ve seen with a live human being,” and that he only had a few months to live, so “he might as well go back out on the road and die there.”
Three years earlier, the reggae icon had been diagnosed with melanoma under his toenail in 1977. Doctors removed the nail and the nail bed, but Marley refused to have the toe itself amputated to stop the spread of the disease, insisting that it violated his Rastafarian religious beliefs. By 1980, the cancer had spread throughout his body, infecting his liver, lungs, and even his brain. Marley played his last show on September 30, 1980, in Pittsburgh, performing Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” during the soundcheck to the bemusement of his roadies, who didn’t know anything was wrong. He died eight months later at the age of 36.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#21
“4 days ago, a group of friends and I went to Murree together. We were having a walk through the Murree Hills at 2 or 3am and this happened. All of us were together. One friend asked to take a group photo of us, and took it with flash because there was low to zero lighting. When i went through my pictures later on, I was shocked to see a person standing right behind one of my friends. He had a pale white face and if you close in on his legs you can see it look as if it is not of human. None of us knew the person 3rd from the left.”
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#22
When Joe Pichler was just six years old, he made his acting breakthrough with a commercial for a Seattle department store. Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, where he landed a part in 1999’s “Varsity Blues” before earning a leading role in two installments of the “Beethoven” franchise.
Pichler then moved back to his hometown of Bremerton, Washington to attend high school and had plans to return to Hollywood after he had his braces removed — but he never got the chance. In the early morning hours of January 5, 2006, Pichler mysteriously vanished, and police have been unable to solve his disappearance to this day.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating
#23
Between 2000 and 2003, biologist Amie Huguenard spent three summers in Alaska with her boyfriend Timothy Treadwell studying and filming grizzly bears. Treadwell, who was better known as the “Grizzly Man,” had met Huguenard during a book tour in 1996 and the pair had instantly bonded over their love of animals. But then, in October 2003, the couple was brutally mauled and eaten by a half-ton bear that attacked them at their camp. And the audio of their horrifying final moments was captured on tape.
Image credits: The Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating