Hi, friends. I'm Crystal, and I write the That Got Dark newsletter, BuzzFeed's weekly roundup of all things creepy, macabre, and horrible AF. And if you looooove this kind of content, you should subscribe!!!!!
Here's what the newsletter is covering this week:
Warning: Graphic content ahead, including stories of murder.
1.
Earlier this month, I stumbled across a video that looked like it had been ripped straight from a horror movie. Following severe flooding in southern China, up to 900 snakes escaped from a breeding farm after rising floodwaters destroyed their enclosures.
The farm reportedly housed several species, including cobras, and, unsurprisingly, footage of the snakes slithering through muddy water went viral.
Local officials urged residents to stay away from any snakes they encountered while emergency crews worked to recapture them and stocked nearby hospitals with additional antivenom. As surreal as the videos are, the escape happened in the middle of a devastating flood that forced thousands of people from their homes, turning an already dangerous natural disaster into something that felt straight out of a horror movie.
2.
Earlier this month, a murder arrest in Japan made headlines for an allegation so disturbing I had to read it twice. Police say a former nurse contaminated a hospitalized patient's IV drip with feces, causing a bacterial infection that ultimately led to his death.
The victim, 75-year-old Eiji Aita, was hospitalized in Chiba Prefecture and died on Jan. 31, 2026, one day after investigators say the IV was tampered with.
According to investigators, another nurse discovered Aita in distress during an early morning round after his condition suddenly deteriorated. When staff removed his IV, they noticed a brown foreign substance inside the tubing, which was preserved and later tested. Investigators say intestinal bacteria found in the tube matched bacteria in Aita's bloodstream, indicating he died from sepsis that led to multiple organ failure.
Investigators say a fellow nurse saw the suspect entering the patient's room several times shortly before his condition suddenly worsened. Police also allege she searched on her phone whether injecting feces could kill someone before the patient's death. The former nurse has denied the allegations, and authorities are continuing to investigate the case.
3.
Cindy Song was just 21 years old when she vanished after attending a Halloween party near Penn State University in the early morning hours of Nov. 1, 2001.
Dressed as a bunny and last seen walking toward her apartment in State College, Pennsylvania, Cindy appeared to make it home safely — some of her personal items were found in her apartment — but she was never seen again. There were no obvious signs of a struggle, and she seemed to disappear without a trace.
Over the years, investigators have pursued numerous leads, including a possible connection to convicted murderer Hugo Selenski after a jailhouse informant claimed Cindy had been taken to one of his properties. Authorities searched the property multiple times but found no evidence linking Selenski to Cindy's disappearance, and he has never been charged in connection with the case.
Cindy's disappearance has generated thousands of tips over the past two decades, but investigators have never identified a suspect or determined exactly what happened after she left the Halloween party. More than 20 years later, the case remains one of Pennsylvania's most enduring mysteries.
4.
On July 23, 1982, actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le, 7, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, 6, were killed while filming a Vietnam War scene for Twilight Zone: The Movie near Santa Clarita, California.
In the segment, Morrow's character was supposed to rescue two Vietnamese children from the chaos of war. But during filming, pyrotechnic explosions caused a low-flying helicopter to lose control and crash into the actors below, violently killing all three. (And if you’re REALLY into the macabre, you can see the footage here, though, FAIR WARNING, it's...a lot.)
The tragedy shocked Hollywood and led to criminal charges against director John Landis, the film's unit production manager, the special effects coordinator, and the helicopter pilot, though all four were ultimately acquitted of manslaughter.
The accident also prompted sweeping changes to on-set safety rules involving helicopters, explosives, and child actors.
The film itself was also changed after the accident. The original Vietnam War ending was abandoned, and Morrow's character was instead shown returning to Nazi-occupied France and sent to a concentration camp. More than four decades later, the tragedy remains one of the deadliest accidents in Hollywood history and a turning point for on-set safety.
Nicknamed the "Genesee River Killer," Shawcross murdered at least 13 people, including 11 women in the Rochester, New York, area between 1988 and 1990 after previously being convicted of manslaughter in 1972 for the killing of two children. He typically targeted vulnerable women, many of them sex workers, strangling them before abandoning their bodies in secluded wooded areas and near the Genesee River.
After several bodies were discovered, investigators launched one of the largest homicide investigations in Rochester's history. The breakthrough came when police placed known prostitution areas under surveillance and observed Shawcross picking up a woman. Officers followed him until they had enough evidence to arrest him, and he later confessed to multiple murders.
He was sentenced to 250 years to life in prison because New York did not have an active death penalty at the time of his conviction. He died of cardiac arrest at Albany Medical Center in 2008 after being transferred from Sullivan Correctional Facility.
His last meal: Because he died of a medical emergency rather than by execution, Shawcross did not receive a traditional last meal, and what he last ate was never made public.
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