Didn't want to know?! Fascinating and scary trivia & fun facts
Even though we think we don’t want to know scary stories, our curiosity tends to win and we end up watching or listening anyway, right? In this article, we’ve collected general-audience scary trivia and fun facts—the kind that gives you chills but you just can’t stop reading.
Some of it might make a few people regret seeing it a little, but there’s also plenty that’s good to know.
If you’re the type who wants to be informed—about the good and the bad—then follow your curiosity and check it out!
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Fun facts and trivia of surprise and fear (11–20)
A bear that has attacked a human once remembers the taste of human flesh.
When we think of bears, we picture them living deep in the mountains and rarely coming down near human settlements.
This trivia, which also serves as a warning about what can happen if such a bear encounters a person, touches on that scenario.
It’s especially troublesome when a bear comes down because there’s no food in the mountains; it’s said that a bear that attacks and eats a person will remember the taste of humans.
Once it recognizes humans as food, there’s a frightening possibility that it will attack more people to survive, leading to wider harm.
To prevent such situations, the content emphasizes the importance of precautions to avoid encountering bears in the first place and measures to avoid being attacked.
The kanji 患 means to pierce a person’s heart with a spear.
We learned about the origins of kanji back in elementary school, right? The most famous are pictographs, which were devised from the shapes of things—like “fish.” Then there are simple ideographs, which use lines and dots to represent concepts that are hard to depict visually, and compound ideographs, which combine two meanings.
There are also phono-semantic compounds that combine a meaning-bearing part with a sound-bearing part—like in 鳴. So, how about it—do you still remember all that? The character for “patient,” 患, is a phono-semantic compound made from the two characters 心 (heart) and 串 (skewer).
But if you picture a skewer stuck into a heart, it feels a bit scary, doesn’t it? From that, it came to carry the meaning of illness, which just shows how cleverly kanji are constructed.
Hippopotamuses are aggressive animals that can run at 30 kilometers per hour and have a biting force of up to one ton.
Hippos may give off a gentle impression, but they’re actually quite ferocious, and it’s said that as many as 3,000 people are attacked by hippos each year.
A hippo can run at about 30 kilometers per hour—roughly the speed of a moped—and its bite force reaches a ton.
It’s chilling to imagine being chased and bitten.
By the way, hippos are a formidable presence even to other wildlife; they’re said to prey on crocodiles.
Hopefully this gives you a sense of just how terrifying hippos can be.
The blocks in the Super Mario series were originally residents of the Mushroom Kingdom.
One of the most-played games in the world is Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.
series.
I’m sure you’ve played it once or twice—no, probably dozens of times.
The Mushroom Kingdom featured in Mario even has its own Wikipedia entry, detailing everything from its economy and military to diplomacy.
There’s a wealth of intricate lore too, like Donkey Kong once being Mario’s pet, or that the Kingdom’s blocks are made from its inhabitants—or are they? And by the way, the now-familiar name “Mario” was originally “Jumpman.” If you’re curious, look it up!
Spiders inject digestive fluids into their prey, dissolve it, and suck it up.
We often see large spider webs stretched out in the air, sometimes with prey already caught.
The prey ensnared in such a web is injected with digestive fluids, dissolved, and then consumed by the spider as if being sucked up.
This feeding method is called extraoral digestion, and while it makes sense as a way for spiders to eat prey even larger than themselves, the fact that the victim is dissolved from the inside is particularly horrifying.
Knowing this terrifying outcome, you can’t help but want to rescue the prey trapped by a spider.