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50 free Creepy trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
47 free creepy trivia questions with answers. This creepy trivia quiz is built from things that are true, which is what makes them creepy. Nature supplies the parasites: the fungus that steers ants onto leaves before sprouting from their heads, the louse that becomes a fish's tongue, the worm that marches crickets into rivers, and the wasp larva that eats a tarantula alive. History supplies the rest: the dancing plague of Strasbourg, the six million dead under Paris, a chandelier of human bones, a pope's corpse on trial, mummies ground into medicine, and radium dial painters licking their brushes. Then come the mysteries and the mind: the Mary Celeste and the Flannan Isles keepers, the Wow! signal, the Bloop, the Voynich manuscript, the Somerton Man, sleep paralysis and the Old Hag, and the delusion that you are already dead. It works for Halloween parties, campfires and anyone who likes their facts unsettling. Nothing here is gore for its own sake, and there is no true crime; the site has separate quizzes for horror films and serial killers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and reference sources, and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
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Q 01What did Frau Troffea begin doing uncontrollably in Strasbourg in July 1518, starting an outbreak?
Dancing
Between 50 and 400 people joined in over the following weeks; the leading theory today is stress-induced mass hysteria, though ergot poisoning has also been blamed.
Q 02The Catacombs of Paris hold the remains of roughly how many people?
6 million
The bones were moved by night from overflowing cemeteries into old limestone mines from 1788; Robespierre and Danton are somewhere down there.
Q 03The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic is famous for a chandelier made of what?
Human bones
Woodcarver František Rint arranged the bones of 40,000 to 70,000 people in 1870 and signed his name on the wall, in bone.
Q 04What message greets visitors to Rome's Capuchin Crypt, decorated with friars' bones?
What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be
New friars were dug up after about 30 years so their bones could join the decor; Mark Twain wrote about the place.
Q 05Tollund Man, a 2,400-year-old Danish bog body found in 1950, was so well preserved that his finders assumed what?
He was a recent murder victim
He still had a plaited noose around his neck; his last meal was barley porridge eaten 12 to 24 hours before he was hanged.
Q 06Bog acids preserve a body's skin and organs but do what to its bones?
Dissolve them
The acid has a pH like vinegar and pickles the flesh, while eating away the calcium phosphate of the skeleton.
Q 07Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Alps in 1991 after some 5,300 years, died how?
Shot with an arrow
The arrowhead is still lodged in his left shoulder; he also carried 61 tattoos and was lactose intolerant.
Q 08In 1976 a TV crew found the embalmed body of outlaw Elmer McCurdy, killed in 1911, being used as what?
A funhouse mannequin
The Six Million Dollar Man crew were filming at a Long Beach amusement park when an arm came off; he was finally buried in Oklahoma in 1977.
Q 09The Cadaver Synod of 897 was the trial of a pope who had been dead for nine months. What was the verdict?
Guilty, and thrown in the Tiber
Pope Stephen VI had Formosus's corpse dressed in vestments and propped on a throne; three fingers were cut off before the body went in the river.
Q 10For centuries European apothecaries sold 'mummia', a medicine made from what?
Ground-up Egyptian mummies
The word originally meant bitumen; a mistranslation set off the trade, and artists used the same stuff as the pigment 'mummy brown'.
Q 11The Radium Girls dial painters were poisoned partly because supervisors told them to shape their brushes how?
Pointing the tips with their lips
The 1928 settlement gave each of five New Jersey plaintiffs $10,000; radium dial paint was not banned until the 1960s.
Q 12Scheele's Green, a fashionable 19th-century wallpaper and dress pigment, was made with what?
Arsenic
Journals reported children wasting away in bright green rooms; a Greenock taste for green blancmange left locals wary of green sweets for generations.
Q 13Post-mortem photography, common in the Victorian era, often posed the dead in what way?
As if peacefully sleeping
Q 21About how old was the oldest Greenland shark, the longest-lived vertebrate known, estimated to be?
392 years
It does not reach maturity until about 150, and most have a parasite dangling from each eye that leaves them nearly blind.
Q 22When threatened, a hagfish defends itself by producing huge quantities of what?
Slime
The slime swells to 10,000 times its size in under half a second and clogs a predator's gills; the hagfish then ties itself in a knot to wipe itself clean.
Q 23In some deep-sea anglerfish, what happens to the tiny male when he finds a female?
He fuses to her body and shares her blood
For many infants it was the only photograph the family would ever have; photographers sometimes tinted the cheeks pink.
Q 14How many people are documented as having been saved by a 19th-century 'safety coffin'?
None
Decomposition gases set off false alarms; the claim that 'saved by the bell' comes from these coffins is a myth.
Q 15In which US state was the world's first 'body farm' set up in 1981?
Tennessee
Anthropologist William Bass founded it in Knoxville; the US now has eight, and the biggest is a 26-acre ranch in Texas.
Q 16Do fingernails and hair keep growing after death?
No, the shrinking skin only makes them look longer
Dehydration tightens the skin, exposing more nail and hair; it is one of the most persistent myths about corpses.
Q 17The 'zombie-ant fungus' Ophiocordyceps makes an infected ant do what before it dies?
Clamp its jaws onto a leaf vein
The fungus then grows a stalk out of the ant's head and rains spores on the trail below; the whole process takes 4 to 10 days.
Q 18Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills and becomes its replacement what?
Tongue
It is the only parasite known to functionally replace a host's organ; the fish carries on using it like a prosthetic.
Q 19Horsehair worms grow inside crickets and grasshoppers, then drive their host to do what?
Walk into water and drown
The worm, up to two metres long in extreme cases, then wriggles out to breed in the water; some can even escape from a predator that eats the host.
Q 20The tarantula hawk wasp lays its egg on a paralysed tarantula. What does the larva do?
Eats the living spider, saving vital organs for last
The wasp's own sting rates near the top of the Schmidt pain index: 'unrelenting pain that shuts down one's ability to do anything except scream'.
Their unusual immune systems make the fusion possible; the female fishes with a glowing lure grown from a dorsal spine.
Q 24The titan arum, or corpse flower, smells of rotting flesh to attract which pollinators?
Carrion beetles and flies
It blooms only every three to seven years for about a day and a half, and heats itself to human body temperature to spread the stink.
Q 25The 'immortal jellyfish' Turritopsis dohrnii cheats death by doing what?
Reverting from adult back to its polyp stage
It is the only animal known to reverse its life cycle, though individuals still get eaten; ships' ballast water has spread it around the world.
Q 26'Zombie worms' of the genus Osedax feed on what at the bottom of the ocean?
Whale bones
A single whale fall can feed a deep-sea community for decades; a 40-tonne carcass carries as much carbon as centuries of normal seafloor deposits.
Q 27The 'brain-eating amoeba' Naegleria fowleri infects people through which route?
Up the nose while swimming
Swallowing it is harmless; once it reaches the brain the fatality rate is above 97 percent, but the US sees only a few cases a year.
Q 28Guinea worm disease has no drug cure. How is the metre-long worm removed?
Wound around a stick over weeks
Cases have fallen from 3.5 million a year in the 1980s to about ten, and it may become only the second human disease ever eradicated.
Q 29The surgery called osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis restores sight by implanting a lens set in what?
The patient's own tooth
The tooth is first grown into the patient's cheek for months to build a blood supply; Benedetto Strampelli pioneered it in the 1960s.
Q 30People with Cotard's syndrome hold what delusion?
That they are dead or do not exist
Jules Cotard described it in 1880 as 'the delusion of negation'; it is sometimes called walking corpse syndrome.