As we've pointed out before, you can tell a lot about a people from their folklore. Even their ghost stories speak volumes about all of the underlying neuroses that create our nightmares.

But then there are some ghost stories that just leave you absolutely freaking baffled. We're talking about spooks like ...

Approximately 100 percent of the people reading this are about to get their Halloween costume idea for next year. You'll see.

Watch out, whatever-the-hell-costume-this-is!

The thing is, considering how consistently insane they are, Japanese ghost stories are about as formulaic as an episode of House. Typically, most of them read like this: Some traveler happens upon a mysterious stranger, mysterious stranger reveals that he's some sort of insanely deformed ghost and then the victim runs screaming, or the spirit disappears, or someone gets eaten by something.

"Something."

Which brings us to the story of the Shirime. In this tale, a samurai warrior is walking around Kyoto late one night when he is accosted by some naked pervert, seemingly the dumbest rapist in all of Japan.

Before the samurai can draw steel and carve this guy up, however, the perv bends over and ...

... wait for it ...

... reveals he has a huge eyeball peering out of his ass.

That's about where the story ends.

Yeah, Japanese folklore takes the "keep it simple, stupid" approach to spooky bullshit. They just ask you to imagine a samurai staring down at some guy mooning him with an eye up his ass, and make up your own ending.

Variations of the theme might replace the Shirime with a snake-necked woman, or a woman without a face, or a chick with a slit mouth, or that thing from Pan's Labyrinth. Basically, give somebody eyes where they wouldn't usually have eyes, and make them chase a samurai around, and you've got a Japanese ghost story.

If you thought Japan had a kinky and disturbing mythology, we'd like to introduce you to Malaysia. Specifically, the Hantu Tetek, whose name is most commonly translated as "breast ghost," but we're pretty sure that "titty specter," "booby phantom" and "gazongular apparition" are all just as acceptable.

Censored due to paranormal activity.

As you may have guessed, these female spirits have an impossibly humongous rack, and their entire shtick is to float around, smothering attractive and virile young men with their ectoplasmic unfunbags. And while you might think that doesn't sound like a bad way to go, put away those Ouija boards, gentlemen, because this one just gets weirder.

You can take them back out when it's time to ask Hitler for quiche recipes.

First of all, the jug spook is said to be a hideously obese old hag, and her triple-Z-cup namesakes are on her back.

It seems the Hantu Tetek has been appropriated in Malaysia as a kind of bogeyman story to keep children in line, as a version of the story has the ghost hunting down kids who stray too far or stay out too late, and wrapping them up in her titties so nobody will ever find them again.

OK, so there are worse ways to die.

Fair enough, but geez, isn't there some less-obscure threat that we can use as a deterrent in this situation? We mean, Occam's razor, people. Even in Malaysia, you're more likely to be attacked by grizzly bears than by marauding ghouls with weaponized bazongas.

Many American localities have their own individual roaming-monster stories to bring in the tourists and scare the crap out of them for profit. New Jersey, for example, has the Jersey Devil. Missouri, not wanting to be outdone, vomited out some bizarre story about a pig skeleton with bear claws that reads like a mash-up between Red Riding Hood and Pumpkinhead.

Way to steal shit from Missouri, Blizzard.

As the story goes, a powerful but more or less benevolent witch lived alone with a pet razorback hog named Raw Head. The hog was able to walk and talk like a man, because hey, magic. Up until now, it sounds like a Disney musical cartoon, but it only gets edgier and less family-friendly from here.

Sorry, kids.

One day, some asshole hunter decided that it was easier to shoot domesticated talking pigs than it was to go into the forest and bag some regular non magic ones, so he snuck into the witch's yard and kidnapped Raw Head, butchering him and making a day's income on the meat. At this point we'd like to stress that we can think of probably a hundred more profitable uses for a talking pig than carving it into regular pork chops, but hey, we're not from Missouri.

Sometimes the universe throws you a freebie.

The witch, infuriated by the death of her abomination against God, cast a spell over its bones so that they could walk and talk again, but rather than the cute little Disney piggy he once was, Raw Head returned as a bloody, skeletal engine of vengeance. He swore to get his own back against the hunter, but not before suiting up Batman-style with body parts from several other dead animals: the fangs of a panther, the claws of a bear and the bushy tail of a raccoon.

When he meets up with his own killer, most versions of the story include this cute but obviously plagiarized fairytale routine.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find pictures of a skeletal pig/panther/bear-coon?

"Land o' Goshen, what have you got those big eyes fer?" he snapped, thinking the kids were trying to scare him with some crazy mask.

"To see your grave," Raw Head rumbled very softly.

"Land o' Goshen, what have you got those big claws fer?" he snapped. "You look ridiculous."

"To dig your grave," Raw Head intoned softly, his voice a deep rumble that raised the hairs on the back of the hunter's neck.

"Land o' Goshen, what have you got that crazy tail fer?"

"To sweep your grave," Raw Head boomed.

We have no idea what "Land o' Goshen" means, but to cut a long story short, the skeleton hog eats the hunter and then steals his horse and clothes. Legend has it that old Raw Head, still just a pig skeleton with rotting animal bits, can still be seen riding through the Ozark Mountains every Halloween on his stolen horse and wearing presumably ill-fitting man-clothes.

Artist's representation.

We're not done yet with Malaysia. Their "toyol" is ... a mischievous fetus-ghost.

Gollum?

We'll stop and note here that, for some reason, all of Malaysia's horror legends seem to revolve around huge breasts, deadly vaginas and evil fetuses, but we're not in the position to explain exactly what that says about Malaysians, as we are not mental health professionals.

Anyway, the toyol is said to be the spirit of a deceased human fetus summoned by an evil wizard to enter people's homes and rob them of whatever its cute little fetus-sized hands can carry. Because enslaving the tortured soul of an abortion is clearly the easiest and most convenient way to steal a fucking wallet.

"This kid could be worth 50, 60 bucks."

Superstitious Malaysians are frightened of toyols, keeping their money and valuables near mirrors and needles (the spook's biggest weaknesses), but really, the whole story is kind of sad. Imagine your life ending before it has even begun, then finding that your afterlife mirrors the plot of Oliver Twist. Sure, their masters are big enough dicks already for sending ghosts into your house to steal your shit, but won't anybody think of the children?

Fortunately, there are many ways to protect your stuff from fetus-ghosts: In addition to avoiding the aforementioned needles and mirrors, it is said that they'll forget all about their master's orders for the chance to play with scattered marbles, sand, rocks or other things that pass for "toys" in poor Malaysian villages. Leave out some Legos or Pokemon cards and you would probably blow their little minds straight back to fetus-hell.

This is way cooler than marbles, sand and rocks.

A study of personality types once found that as a group, serial killers scored highest in "superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others." The other highest-scoring group for these undesirable traits? Politicians.

Again and again science has found that being in charge not only attracts terrifying douchebags, but creates them as well. And with that, here's the scariest article you'll read this month:

Try something for us. Write the word "ASS" on your forehead with a marker. If you refuse to do that, just picture yourself writing it, but really imagine you have the letters up there.

Hold that thought.

Science says there is a very logical reason that those in power don't actually give a damn about you: They are too busy thinking about themselves. There are several reasons for this, according to research.

First, researchers found that in leaderless situations, those with high opinions of themselves will take charge, for better or for worse. Well, that makes sense -- they think they're awesome, so of course they think they should be in charge. The problem, though, is that this same, often unwarranted, confidence also persuades the followers to follow them. And so they climb through the ranks by basically being the biggest loudmouth braggarts in the room.

"Kanye West" is a position of power, right?

The other problem is that the narcissistic types can manage to lead effectively -- for the short term. They're great at convincing everyone they have all the answers, but at the end of the day they can't take their eyes off their own self-interest long enough to focus on long-term goals such as "not losing all of our money." Actually being in power only makes it worse, which brings us back to the ASS on your forehead.

When you drew the imaginary letters, where did the letter "A" wind up? On your left, so that the word reads normally if you look in a mirror? That's how a lot of people would do it -- after all, that's the way you write things. Left to right.

Unless you're Asianese.

But that would be making the word backward for anyone else trying to read it. If you took the time to stop and consider that, and then carefully wrote the letters and word backward so it would be readable to a person facing you, that says a lot about your outlook toward other people.

They actually did that experiment in a study at Northwestern University. They randomly assigned a group of people to hold a position of power during the study, and assigned another group to a position where they'd have no power at all. Later, they gave everyone a simple task: Draw a capital letter "E" on their own foreheads. Same as we had you do with the word ASS.

The results were startling. People in the powerful group were almost three times as likely to carelessly draw the letter so that it was unreadable to anyone else. Those in the powerless group were the ones who stopped, thought about it and turned the letter around so that others could read it.

Not pictured: consideration for other people.

That's right: Even meaningless, arbitrary power, assigned purely for the experiment, was enough to make the subjects less likely to stop for a few seconds and consider the perspectives of others. Now imagine what an actual position of power would do.

Oh, we're just getting started here.

It's estimated that the average person lies up to six times a day -- it's even considered an important developmental milestone in babies, which presumably means that nobody will accept you as a person until you figure out how to make shit up to keep yourself out of trouble. So you can imagine how much politicians and CEOs have to bullshit us on a minute-to-minute basis to get their reputations. Well, there's a scientific reason they are the way they are.

Warning: Exposure to truth may cause anaphylaxis.

You'd think this would be obvious -- that liars tend to get into positions of power because they're so good at lying (and science says you're right), but there's a much weirder factor at play.

Researchers at Columbia Business School used a similar setup to the "E" experiment above, where they did a role-play that divided subjects into leaders and subordinates. Leaders were even given a fancy, large office; the underlings got a small, windowless room. All of them were then tempted to lie (they found a $100 bill and were put in a situation where they'd have to lie about it to the people running the experiment if they wanted to keep it).

We'd probably just have grabbed the $100 and bolted for the parking lot.

After a nice round of vigorous lying, both groups of subjects were tested for stress hormone levels. Researchers also studied a video-tape of the subjects lying their asses off. The result, in their words:

"Low-power individuals showed the expected emotional, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral signs of deception; in contrast, powerful people demonstrated no evidence of lying across emotion, cognition, physiology, or behavior."

Once more, that's after a couple of hours of completely fake power. These people were chosen at random, but when they were stuffed into a fancy room that made them feel like big-shots, their feelings of guilt about lying melted away.

And that made them better liars; it's those unpleasant feelings of guilt and stress that cause the physical cues that let people know we're lying. Add a feeling of power to the mix and the opposite happens. In fact, instead of negative emotions, the study found that a powerful person actually experiences a positive internal response. These people feel joyful relaxation as a result of lying their fucking faces off.

It's almost as if the feeling of being in power made them think the normal rules of morality didn't apply to them. Which leads us to ...

Ted Haggard. And also this next point.

This one goes a long way toward explaining the almost endemic hypocrisy of politicians and business leaders we see in the news every day. It explains why so many vehemently anti-gay politicians and religious leaders are creepy sexual deviants. It explains why banks are currently refusing to lend to anyone while giving their employees huge bonuses with bailout money. And it explains why the Senate voted itself a pay raise on the same day it refused to increase the minimum wage.

"Why? Because fuck them, that's why."

Once again, this is something that can be tested in experiments, and once more the correlation goes the opposite way you'd expect.

A Dutch researcher mixed things up this time, using five different experiments to try to instill a sense of power in people using different methods, presumably to make sure it wasn't anything particular to a specific kind of role-playing that got the results.

They tried 3.5, GURPS and Shadowrun.

In one experiment, he took random subjects and had them role-play in a fictional government, so that some would have positions of power (aka prime minister) while others would be peons, like in the previous experiment. But other groups would, for instance, be asked to vividly describe a time when they held a position of power, in an effort to get them into the same mood they experienced when they were in that role. No one involved knew what the experiment was trying to uncover.

Later the subjects were given a questionnaire with gray-area moral questions (such as, is it OK to exceed the speed limit if you're late for an appointment). After just that brief period of feeling powerful, the role-playing prime ministers were more ready than the peons to say they would bend the rules if they needed to. But when asked other hypothetical questions that tested whether they thought it was OK for other people to skirt the rules, the prime ministers were harder on the rule-benders than the peons.

Nobody gives peons a break.

No matter how the researcher went about instilling the feelings of power, the results were the same: Within minutes, a feeling of power flips a switch in the brain that says, "The rules now do not apply to me. BRING ME A WHORE."

A WHORE, I SAY!

But even stranger, the people induced to feel powerless went the opposite way -- they actually were more self-critical than they'd normally be. Think about what that says about society: The people who are already powerless, as a result feel like they're less worthy to be in power and thus stay powerless.

Remember being bored out of your skull because your parents dragged you to some stupid museum when you were a kid? Well, it could have been worse. Much worse.

Because there are apparently museums out there capable of inflicting the kind of trauma a person never recovers from.

Location: Guanajuato, Mexico

The El Museo is the museum of HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT!

Why... does that exist anywhere?

To say this is a museum full of mummies doesn't even come close to conveying the unspeakable horror of this place. How about this: In ancient Rome, and college fraternities, there is a brutal and humiliating tradition known as running the gauntlet, during which you strip naked and run through a valley of horrors. Guanajuato's El Museo De Las Momias ("Museum of the Mummies") is just like that, except that it's the spectators who are naked. And dead.

You know one of those hands will reach out and grab you.

The Mummies of Guanajuato are naturally preserved bodies from a cholera outbreak that hit Guanajuato way back in 1833. Since this is basically just a huge open grave with floodlights, its legality and moral status continues to be the subject of much discussion everywhere except in Mexico.

Most of the mummies on display were corpses whose families could not afford to pay a grave tax levied on their families once they died. If you failed to pay the taxes, you guessed it...

You went up on display.

Hey, have we mentioned the babies?

"Come play with us..."

"...forever..."

"...and ever..."

Oh, and while we're on the subject of nightmarish carnivals of the rotting dead...

Location: Palermo, Sicily

Welcome to Catacombe dei Cappuccini: the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. Described as a "human library," the Catacombs serve as an invaluable historic record on everything from clothing trends to fear tolerance.

In 1599, the monks who lived here discovered a great new method for embalming the dead, and as the situation warranted, they went to work embalming each other. Then wealthy locals wanted to be interred in the Capuchin Catacombs as a status thing.

Despite being as old as Galileo and bombed to hell during World War II, some of the inhabitants of the Capuchin Catacombs still look pretty fresh...

...And all of them dressed in the finest clothes, eagerly awaiting the Resurrection.

Seriously, what the fuck...

"BUY POSTCARDS!"

Location: St. Joseph, Missouri

The Glore Psychiatric Museum, formally known as Missouri's State Lunatic Asylum No. 2, is like the Event Horizon of art galleries.

They call this one "Schizophrenia."

The museum takes its name from one George Glore, who in the 60s, put his patients/inmates at the St. Joseph State Hospital to work building full-size replicas of some of the most horrific psychiatric practices from the last few centuries--which makes about as much sense as making the inmates at Guantanamo Bay build Big Macs until they love America.

Apparently, building creepy shit like this is a damn good way to get sane.

The result is a weird and terrifying excursion through the minds of a hundred lunatics, displaying patient art which ranges from sophisticated...

Albeit psychopathic.

To South Park...

Stan?

But the, uh, highlight of the museum has to be this magnificent mosaic, which was constructed entirely from the stomach contents of a woman suffering from compulsive swallowing.

That horror is 100 percent stomach contents.

It is actually hard to picture anyone going crazy over anything in Missouri, but now that we have seen what their hospitals look like, it is probably best to avoid the state. After all, the woman who swallowed those 1,446 objects died in surgery. So who the fuck made the mosaic?

Location: New Carrollton, Maryland

We're all adults here, hopefully. Menstruation isn't any more disgusting than the other bodily functions we don't discuss in polite company. So what's wrong with having a museum dedicated to the subject?

How about the fact that it's in some random dude's basement in lower Maryland.

This guy!

While there genuinely is a long history to menstruation's imprint on culture, from its symbolic record to its inclusion in Cervantes' Don Quixote , the Museum of Menstruation & Women's Health is really just the story of one man with a dream: Harry Finley.

Since 1995, this humble, middle-aged American has devoted his life to making his private collection of feminine hygiene products and mutilated mannequins available to the public. His work has received accolades from Johns Hopkins University and The New York Times--at least according to his website--and Harry's reputation has since blossomed from local neighborhood character to a character from a Thomas Harris novel.

Among the museum's collections are a dress made out of tampons...

...well kept archives...

...whatever the hell these are...

...and finally, the intimacy of knowing that you and Harry are the only people in the house. For real. Since 1999, all visits to the museum/Harry's basement have had to be done by appointment and in private.

We imagine so that no one can hear you scream.

It's a running theme here at Cracked that a lot of what we think we know about history has been filtered through many centuries of utter bullshit. Our image of the past is largely made up of Hollywood inventions, propaganda and uneducated guesses.

So you will probably be surprised to find that...

The Perception:

We get so busy being amazed by the Pyramids, with their massive, meticulously layered sandy golden bricks, that we forget that what we're seeing are the broken-down remnants. If you could see them new, you'd barely recognize them. They were much more awesome back then.

The Reality:

What we think of today as the Pyramids are really just the exposed layers of the structural base. The original pyramids lit up like the Times Square of ancient Egypt. Egyptians were all about having the maximum amount of glittery goodness, especially when it came to death.

Pharaohs liked tacky shit? We would have never guessed.

And since the Pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs, they made sure they were the biggest, most sparkly things of all. The original outside consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece. Don't take our word for it; you can still see bits of that decorative layer on some of them:

That outer crunchy candy shell was then polished until it was on the verge of blinding from all the light it would reflect from the sun or moon. It was said that they could be seen from miles away, even during the night.

Of course that wasn't enough, so the capstone was then plated in gold or electrum. Had the technology existed, we're sure the pharaohs would have stuck 24-inch chrome rims on them, too.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

What we're looking at today are the equivalent of sports cars that have been long forgotten in some junkyard.

Weather and time have been beating down the pyramids for four and a half thousand years. Well, partly it was time, but mostly it was assholes. Those shiny layers of white and gold? They were stripped off and used in the construction of Medieval Cairo, and there are cracks and holes where 19th century treasure hunters tried to get in with pickaxes and in one unfortunate case, dynamite.

Oh don't worry about it looters, those were only the greatest architectural accomplishments of the Ancient World. We're sure what you needed the stuff for was way more important.

The Perception:

Sure, the T-Rex may be the go-to killer dinosaur, but everyone who's anyone knows that Velociraptors were the real baddest asses of prehistoric times. Cracked Paleontologists theorize that if it wasn't for a giant boulder shot from outer space wiping them all out, Velociraptors would be ruling the planet today, only keeping humans around for food and sport.

"We'll give you a two minute head start."

These deadly beasts of yore looked like miniaturized Tyrannosaurs, but sleeker, quicker and more dangerous. The dinosaur Kobe to the T-Rex's Shaq, if you will. Anyone who's seen Jurassic Park has a pretty good idea of what Raptors looked like. Well... except for one minor detail.

"We hope it's not something that makes us look totally lame!"

The Reality:

They had feathers. Not just a few here and there either. But a full on, honest to goodness coat of teeth-to-tail FEATHERS.

Source.

Now, it would be awesome if this meant they could fly, but obviously if they could do that, you'd already damned well know about it. No, it turns out Velociraptors were just big fluffy looking lizards, who most likely used the feathers to show off to other raptors, or in mating rituals. Apparently Raptor ladies were impressed if you looked like the bastard offspring of a komodo dragon and Big Bird.

Velociraptors: Preening douchebags of the thunder lizard kingdom.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

We actually didn't know about this until 1998, when a bone proving the extent of quill knobs on Velociraptors was discovered, and many a childhood ruined.

Here's to hoping they do a Star Wars-style special edition for Jurassic Park, with updated, more accurate CGI dinosaurs. That should be goddamned hilarious.

The Perception:

Quick, what do you picture in your head when we say, "Ancient Greece"? If you're like most people you either picture lots of dudes standing around in togas, or white marble statues with no pupils in their eyes:

"Colorful clothes are for gangbangers and homosexuals."

Those ornate statues made of pure white marble, depicting the austere beauty and power of epic gods and heroes, have made quite an impression on history. Renaissance sculptors carved their own marble statues based on the belief that that's how the ever wise Greeks did things.

The Reality:

Ancient Greece looked more like someone crashed their LGBT pride parade into a Mardi Gras Festival.

Recent studies using the awesome powers of lasers and shit (no, seriously!) have found that once completing the iconic marble statues and buildings we know today, the Greeks covered them head to toe in bright primary colors. Greek sculptors worked together with painters to come up with psychedelic patterns and colors to make their statues and buildings pop.

So in the midst of all that theorizing and philosophizing, the Greeks were also really focused on making sure their day to day life looked like the album cover of Magical Mystery Tour. Oh, and you know the iconic Parthenon? Based on the way buildings were painted back then, it was most likely an eye-searing mash of bright yellow, red and blue.

Why We Picture it Wrong:

As years passed, like with the Pyramids, the primitive paint used on the statues chipped and wore off, so when they were rediscovered by later civilizations, they appeared in their all white form. And frankly people just liked the idea of the all white marble look.

Even so, archaeologists knew that the statues used to be painted, since there were ancient records showing people painting the damned things. However, people simply preferred to display the plain white statues, since they looked more like something made by the founders of Western civilization should look like, in the minds of many scholars. Pure, clean, capturing the shape and essence of scientific accuracy and artistic beauty--whereas the painted versions kinda looked like something you might have made during middle school art class.

The world is full of some pretty awful diseases, including but not limited to viruses that leave you with your limbs rotting off (CAUTION! Pictures!) or pooping yourself to death in hours.

What could be worse than getting diagnosed with one of those? How about having a doctor stand over your death bed, shrug his shoulders and say, "I dunno, magic?" After all, nothing is scarier than the unknown, and science can't explain the first thing about some pretty horrific diseases, and even less about how to stop them.

Firmly in the category of "things somehow made more terrifying by a ridiculous name," the Dancing Plague was an actual disease that killed people. In 1518, in Strasbourg, France, Frau Troffea started dancing in the street. After six days, others began to join in; after a week there were 34. By the end of the month there were 400, though at that point most of the people started dropping dead of exhaustion, starvation and strokes. From dancing.

Deadlier than a crocodile with rabies and a machine gun.

Now, you may be thinking that "tackling and forcibly stopping" the people who were literally dancing themselves to death may be a sound idea for preventing the afflicted from dying. But of course, at at time when there was no such thing as Hazmat suits, that would have taken an enormous set of balls. Instead, Strasbourg officials had the brilliant idea of getting everyone to dance more--they herded the afflicted indoors, built them a stage and paid minstrels to crank out more jams, which eventually resulted in most of them dying. Clearly this was the pinnacle of 16th century medicine.

"Well, they're not dancing anymore, are they?"

The Mystery:

The whole thing just kind of ended and, despite almost five intervening centuries, modern medicine has no explanation for why 400 French people suddenly danced themselves to death. Many theories have been offered, such as ergotism (poisoning by a certain type of fungus) and mass psychogenic illness, but they have some issues.

MPI is the first runner-up for the most plausible explanation, but it would have required 400 people to all develop the exact same "mass hysteria" of dancing at a staggered pace over a month, which is pretty unlikely. In the case of ergot poisoning, one of the common side effects is loss of muscular control, which makes complex movements (like dancing) impossible.

Then again, the only alternative seems to be demonic possession or witchcraft, so maybe we'll just go with the fungus thing and pretend it never happened.

Not everything terrible in the natural world kills you. Sometimes it just pounds your crotch into pixie dust with a meat tenderizer (figuratively).

Nature is a lot like Vinnie Jones.

Stiff person syndrome is one of those cases. People afflicted with it experience increasingly progressive rigidity, so it's kind of like a muscle cramp that never, ever goes away. As the disease progresses, the victim's muscles become more and more stiff until they are completely paralyzed--the muscles becoming so constricted that they are frozen. In severe cases, the condition results in difficulty breathing, problems swallowing, muscle ruptures and fucking broken bones .

The Mystery:

We have no idea why this syndrome develops in some people. It might have something to do with having diabetes; it could be an autoimmune disease; and it could be the result of a mutated gene, which would be the dumbest mutant power ever conceived.

"You can just take that shit right the fuck outside."

This brings up the very real possibility that you could have it right now and not even know it. There is no way to predict that it will happen to someone, or how long it will take to cripple them once it starts. There are some treatment options, most of which involve lots of injections that relieve part of the stiffness. The bottom line, though, is your ass is wheelchair-bound regardless of what you do.

While bleeding to death inside your body is pretty terrifying, the sweating sickness will kill you mere hours after you start showing symptoms, and it has come and gone six times already in Europe.

Reportedly it begins with "a sense of apprehension," followed by violent cold shivers, headaches, severe neck, shoulder and limb pain, and oddly, giddiness. After the "cold stage," which can last anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, there comes the "sweating stage," where the victim starts pouring out sweat like Ruben Studdard trapped in a Stuckey's with no air conditioning.

Because he's fat.

While the sweat stage isn't always immediately fatal, it typically leads to more sweating stages that will eventually kill you. It first appeared in 1485 in England, and killed thousands of people within a single year, most likely because by the time anyone realized they had it, the entire village was already infected.

The Mystery:

We have no freaking idea what it is. People sweat, then die. Quickly. Is it a virus? Bacteria? Something toxic everyone in the area was drinking or eating or breathing? Who knows?

All we have is speculation. Some think it might be a version of the Hanta virus, which is a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola and Lujo, but there's no proof. This is like telling someone that there is a werewolf somewhere in their room before shutting off the lights and letting them guess.

"Hotter. Hotter! You found him!"

What we know is that it's contagious. We mentioned already that it has come and gone six times already--these weren't individual cases scattered over centuries, but six individual epidemics. And as we know from Ebola and Lujo, when you don't know what causes it, it's only a matter of time before some poor bastard farts on a transatlantic flight and once more unleashes cold, sweaty hell on the modern world.