12 Photos With Horrifying Backstories

“A photo speaks a thousand words” is true only some of the time. Photos don’t give everything away because they are a single moment captured, not the moment before or after. Behind a photo is a story with thousands of more words. In these photographs, a story much more gruesome and disturbing is waiting to be told, but not everyone has the stomach to tell them or even to hear them. Some people take pictures to save memories, but some memories are better lost.

* These photos can be very disturbing and upsetting.

1. Victorian Family Photo

While this looks like a regular family portrait, there is something quite off. The parents are slightly  blurry, caused by movement while trying to stay still. Yet their daughter is in sharp focus. It was normal for families in the 1800s to take pictures with their loved ones after they had passed away, and this daughter had passed away earlier that day.

2. John Lennon

The man on the right getting John Lennon’s signature is Mark David Chapman, the man who — only hours after this photo was taken — shot and killed Lennon.

3. James Bulger

The toddler in this photo is James Bulger, and the older boy leading him is one of the boys who would later torture and kill James. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables kidnapped and tortured James before murdering him and leaving his body on some railroad tracks 2.5 miles away from the shopping center he was abducted from. The boys became the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history, though they were both released by the age of 18. 

4. Chris McCandless

Chris McCandless took this photo of himself in the Alaskan wilderness. His body was later found in a camper after he starved to death.