How cannibalism, torture, rape, and murder came to inspire the folklore known the world over today.Alexander Zick/Wikimedia CommonsHansel and Gretel enter the woods. Legends have always played an important role in the human experience. Some serve to remind us of our history. Some help to teach us proper morals. Then, of course, there are also legends that just help to send a tingle down our spines. The very best legends, the ones that get passed down across the centuries, do all three.

Rafael Pérez, The Dirty Cop Who Who Stole $800,000 Worth Of Cocaine And Inspired ‘Training Day’ Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPérez’s attitude and actions served as inspiration for Denzel Washington’s character in ‘Training Day’ In 1995, Rafael Pérez quickly earned a reputation for being an aggressive officer who kept his ear to the ground as a member of LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang task force. He was a young officer and felt a rush of adrenaline when he went undercover, buying drugs from street dealers only to put them behind bars later on.

Whether it's ghosts, UFOs, or monsters, these creepy real-life stories represent the scariest tales from the annals of human history.While horror movies can surely leave us terrified, it’s the true scary stories from history that really burrow into our brains and stay there. From true crime to the paranormal to the just plain eerie, the real-life creepy stories are the ones that provide a lasting fright that fictional ones cannot.

Judy Garland’s Studio-Enforced Diet Of Cigarettes And Amphetamines Watching Dorothy dance in The Wizard of Oz you’d never guess the kind of hardship that Judy Garland, the actress who played Dorothy, was put through by the studio’s executives. Wikimedia CommonsEven Judy Garland couldn’t escape Hollywood scandal. Garland was only 13 years old when she auditioned for the film producer and co-founder of MGM, Louis B. Mayer. It seemed like a lucky break, but for Garland, it turned into a nightmare.

As an author, Karen Blixen was considered several times for the Nobel Prize in literature.Portrait of Danish writer Karen Blixen. Karen Blixen was born into wealth. The daughter of Wilhelm Dinesen, an army officer, and Ingeborg Westenholz, who came from a family of wealthy bourgeois merchants, she had a relatively comfortable and relaxed home life. However, that changed when she was ten years old. Her father had a child outside of wedlock with his maid and then committed suicide.