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.
I recently came across a doll so deeply unsettling that I genuinely thought it had to be fake, like some AI-generated Victorian ghost child designed to haunt TikTok. But, turns out, she was very real.
In 1965, Hasbro released a doll called Little Miss No Name, and her entire concept was basically emotional manipulation. Instead of selling glamour or fantasy, the company decided to market sadness. She was intentionally designed to look like a neglected, impoverished child. She wore what looked like a tiny burlap sack for a dress. She had oversized, watery eyes with a molded tear pooling beneath them. Her short, uneven hair made her look like she’d either been through something traumatic…or was about to cause it.
So, what was the point of this doll? Apparently, the folks at Hasbro thought kids would feel so sorry for her that they’d want to “adopt” her and give her a loving home. In fact, you can see an eerie commercial for Little Miss No Name here.
Unsurprisingly, Little Miss No Name was a commercial disaster. She lasted less than a year before quietly disappearing from stores. Parents were confused. Kids were uncomfortable. And somewhere in a boardroom, someone had to admit that maybe manufacturing a guilt-based toy wasn’t the winning strategy they’d hoped for. Ironically, though, today she’s become a collector’s item — partly because of how strange she is.
2.
In July 1980, the body of a young woman was found in a high school parking lot in Ventura County. She had been stabbed to death and was about four months pregnant. There was no identification on her. No purse. No driver’s license. No name for investigators to use when calling out to the press. No family was immediately searching in a way that connected her to the case. For 46 years, she was only known as “Jane Doe.”
Detectives pursued leads over the decades, but without knowing who she was, everything stalled. Her pregnancy added another layer of tragedy — two lives lost, neither one able to be properly mourned. Meanwhile, her killer had already been identified…
DNA evidence eventually linked her murder to a man, Wilson Chouest, who was convicted of another killing in the 1980s and is now serving a life sentence. Authorities knew who had taken her life — but they still didn’t know who she was. That missing piece lingered for decades.
Then, this February, everything changed. Using investigative genetic genealogy — the same technique that helped identify the Golden State Killer — forensic genealogists reexamined preserved DNA evidence. They uploaded her profile into public genealogy databases and began building family trees from distant relatives who had voluntarily submitted their DNA. Cousins. Second cousins. Fragments of connection.
Piece by piece, they worked backward through generations, narrowing branches, confirming records, cross-referencing birth certificates, until finally, they arrived at her name: Maricela Rocha Parga. She was 22 years old. Finally, “Jane Doe” had a name, and a decades-old cold case is being resolved.
3.
This person’s bone-chilling experience in “creepy” US town Denton, North Carolina.
“I somehow found myself dating someone from here. I’m half Mexican, and when she took me to her town, it was very weird. She took me to the local BBQ restaurant, and she later told me the person who said ‘hi’ in the form of, ‘I’m sorry y’all lost the Civil War,’ was the wife of the local KKK’s grand dragon. Everyone in the town stared at me and gave me that, ‘I’ll smile because you’re with a local, but don’t come back’ vibe. Driving around I saw nooses in people’s yards. It was so weird and bizarre!”
North Carolina has a documented history of white supremacist violence and Ku Klux Klan activity, particularly during and after Reconstruction in the late 1800s. The Klan and similar groups used intimidation and violence to suppress Black political participation. One major episode was the 1898 Wilmington coup, when white supremacists overthrew a legally elected biracial government — one of the only successful coups in US history — killing Black citizens and driving many from the city. In the 20th century, the Klan resurfaced in the state during the 1920s and again during the Civil Rights era, when it engaged in harassment and violence.
This week’s Wikipedia spiral led me to Dead Hands Dig Deep, a 2016 documentary about Edwin Borsheim, the former frontman of the shock-rock band Kettle Cadaver. By the time filming began, Borsheim had retreated to a remote stretch of desert in California, living alone in a makeshift compound ringed with barbed wire, guard dogs, and an arsenal of weapons.
Once known for extreme stage performances that blurred into self-harm and animal cruelty, he now seemed to exist in a self-constructed exile, cut off from nearly everyone. The filmmaker, Jai Love, spent months trying to reach him — there was no phone number, no email, no reliable way in — before finally securing permission to document his life. But once production began, the atmosphere shifted quickly. Paranoia, hostility, and unpredictability seeped into the footage, turning what might have been a standard music documentary into something far more volatile and unnerving.
During filming, Borsheim’s volatility became impossible to ignore. He began sending the crew disturbing photographs — graphic, unsettling images that felt less like provocation and more like warning shots. As financial pressure mounted and his remote property faced seizure over unpaid taxes, his rhetoric escalated. He spoke openly about a plan to murder the filmmakers and anyone involved in taking his land before killing himself, framing it as a final act of control. What had started as a documentary about a fringe musician hardened into something far more precarious, with the crew navigating a man whose performance instincts seemed indistinguishable from genuine instability.
The film was ultimately completed, and Borsheim even attended a screening…an almost surreal coda to the ordeal.
5.
The shocking and (still) unsolved murder of The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls).
In the early hours of March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace (better known as The Notorious B.I.G.), who was just 24 years old and at the height of his career, was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. He had just left a Vibe magazine and Bad Boy Records afterparty at the Petersen Automotive Museum when a dark sedan pulled up alongside his SUV at a red light and opened fire.
Despite the presence of security, police, and numerous witnesses in the area, no one was ever arrested. The case quickly became tangled in jurisdictional issues, allegations of police corruption, and the toxic climate surrounding the East Coast–West Coast rap rivalry.
Biggie’s death came only six months after Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas, cementing one of the most volatile and mythologized chapters in hip-hop history. The two murders — so close in timing, so symbolically intertwined — transformed a musical rivalry into something far darker.
Nearly three decades later, Wallace’s killing remains officially unsolved, fueling investigations, wrongful death lawsuits against the LAPD, and endless speculation about gang involvement, retaliation, and institutional cover-ups.
6.
Finally, the story of Kenneth Dewayne Williams, a violent criminal who became one of Arkansas’s most notorious serial killers following a series of murders and a Hollywood-style prison break.
Originally sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 killing of a college cheerleader, Dominique Hurd, Williams managed to escape just weeks later by hiding inside a 500-gallon barrel of kitchen scraps on a garbage truck. During his short time on the run, he murdered a former prison warden and caused a high-speed car crash that killed a delivery driver.
After being recaptured and sentenced to death, he was eventually executed via lethal injection in April 2017. It was an event that drew national attention because of his body’s violent physical reactions during the procedure, leading to claims that it was “botched.”
His last meal: Two pieces of fried chicken with a side of sweet rice, BBQ pinto beans, a slice of bread, a peanut butter cookie, and a cinnamon roll.
