Chills Number 4. “The CIA Loves LSD”: More commonly known
on the streets as “acid”, LSD is a psychedelic drug that causes colorful hallucinations and
intense thought patterns in its users. In the early 1950s, way before anybody knew
about the drug, the American government was busy conducting its own LSD research, and
they weren’t afraid to use the unwilling public as test subjects. The Central Intelligence Agency was put in
charge of a program called MK-ULTRA. Their goal was to see if they could use LSD
for various forms of mind control. More specifically, they were thinking of using
it as a truth serum , or to wipe clean an agent’s mind after they retire, or even
as a way to get people to obey commands. MK-ULTRA had one experiment in particular
called Operation Midnight Climax. For this operation, the CIA rented apartments
in San Francisco and New York and made them look like brothels . Then they paid prostitutes
$100 a night in return for luring clients back to the apartments and putting LSD into
their drinks. Sometimes they were told to smoke marijuana
instead. The entire time the CIA watched and recorded
the clients’ every move through a one-way mirror. This went on all the way until 1964 when the
last CIA outpost was quietly closed down. Another part of Operation Midnight Climax
focused on government infiltration. For this experiment, CIA agents would pose
as members of certain activist groups and drug them with LSD so they could study their
reactions. At one point, the CIA even hired professional
stage magicians to show secret service agents the best ways to slip LSD into someone’s
beverage without being detected. By the end of the operation, the United States
government had used taxpayer money to make thousands of people take psychedelic drugs
against their will. Number 3. “The Young Poisoner”: Graham Young was
a scrawny teenager living just outside of London in the 1960s who was very bitter about
life. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was
less than three months old. During this time, his grieving father sent
him to live with his aunt, a relative who he never bonded with. When his father finally remarried and took
Graham back home, the boy hated his new stepmother more than anyone he had ever hated before. This lack of affection would become what allows
Graham to later experiment on his entire family and countless others without feeling any pity
or remorse. Graham receives a chemistry kit and spends
most of his time alone studying his two favorite subjects: chemistry and Nazi history. No doubt Nazi experiments are what helps inspire
him to go on multiple poisoning sprees soon after. His first victim is his only childhood friend,
Christopher Williams. As they eat lunch together, Graham sneaks
poison into his friend’s sandwiches almost every day. It wasn’t long after before Christopher
began vomiting, having severe headaches, running a fever, and missing school all of the time
from feeling exhausted. Doctors thought that he was simply suffering
from a severe and prolonged case of the flu and didn’t think much more of it. One day, while Christopher is sick from school,
he and Graham go to the zoo together. Under the guise of friendship, Graham brings
with him some poisoned lemonade and lets Christopher have it. His friend survives, but continues to suffer. Graham is only 13 years old at this point. He enjoys poisoning Christopher as often as
he can get away with, but it just wasn’t often enough to satisfy his sick urges. He needed to go even further. He needed test subjects that he could constantly
monitor, so he puts poison into family meals. He only poisons certain sections of the meal
and saves the untainted pieces for himself. Graham is able to get ahold of the poison
he needs by charming local chemists. Using his expert knowledge to put them at
ease, he explains that he was a harmless young scientist himself and needs ingredients to
experiment with. Sometimes he would even convince them that
he was a college student so that they would sign the release forms, giving him access
to a steady supply of poison. The poison Graham was using was called antimony,
and it was used in the 60s to make batteries and other common products. It can be used in powder form to easily poison
someone. At first, it causes fever, vomiting, and other
symptoms resembling the flu. Over time, through repeated exposures, it
causes hair loss and kills the nerve endings. As they slowly suffer, Graham’s victims
often experience numbness that starts in the fingers and progresses into hot, shooting
pains throughout the body. As you can probably already tell, Graham has
a twisted, yet scientific mind. He keeps detailed logs the entire time as
his family becomes sicker and sicker around him. Each entry contains the dosage of the poison
and its effect. For example, if his mother starts to vomit,
he would write how many grams it took to cause that reaction. His family eventually realizes they are being
poisoned, but they did not suspect it was intentional. Instead they believe Graham had accidentally
contaminated some of their kitchen utensils by using them for his chemistry experiments,
and that was why they were all becoming so violently ill. Graham especially targets his stepmother,
Molly, who he had hated since childhood. Over the course of a year, he gives her small
doses to torture her stomach, and takes enormous pleasure in her suffering. In April 1962, Graham’s father discovers
his wife rolling around in pain in the garden. From the window, Graham watches the scene
unfold. His father looks up and the two lock eyes. He notices his son seems to have absolutely
no emotion. At the hospital, doctors could not understand
Molly’s symptoms. She says she wants to go home and cook dinner. Hours later, she is dead. Graham could stop there, but his compulsions
do not let him. He tortures his grief-stricken family even
further with more poison, keeping detailed logs of his human “experiments” all the
while. His father and sister both would eventually
have permanent liver damage from his cruelty. Graham begins to especially focus on his father’s
misery. There is no reason for him to do this other
than a morbid fascination with death. From all records, his father had never especially
wronged him, but he decided to poison him more than the others. While his father is at the hospital one day
for flu-like symptoms, doctors began to suspect it to be a poisoning. As the doctors wonder out loud what poison
it could have been, Graham begins to lecture them. His expertise on the subject frightened everybody,
including his father, and also made them suspicious. One day, as Graham is busy making his family’s
lives miserable, his chemistry teacher finds the poison he uses in the boy’s desk during
class. He calls Graham’s family doctor, who calls
a psychiatrist, who goes with the police to interview Graham. They act like they are simply interested with
his impressive knowledge of chemistry and give no indication that he is a suspect in
a murder case. Graham shows off his knowledge of poisonous
chemicals, and police are convinced enough to arrest him. At age 14, he is sentenced to 15 years at
Broadmoore psychiatric facility. During his stay, he uses soap and anything
else he can find to poison those around him. He even extracts cyanide from a laurel bush
to kill one inmate. Even after confessing his murder to the staff,
they do not believe him and list it as a suicide. Being a clever young man, he is eventually
able to convince the staff that he is rehabilitated and is released very early at the age of 23. As a free citizen, Graham decides to continue
experimenting on people with poisons. Thallium is his new chemical element of choice. This is a heavy metal that was used in the
photography industry back then to manufacture camera lenses. Before that, it was a type of rat poison. Thallium is odorless, colorless, tasteless,
and easily dissolves in water – the perfect poison. Using a glowing reference from Broadmoore,
Graham finds a job at one of the only two factories in the entire country that stocks
the poison he needs. Shortly after starting work, at least 10 of
his peers begin to suddenly suffer from a mystery illness. The ones closest to him seem to get the sickest. Bob Egle seems to be his favorite target. The poor associate has stomach pains and numbness
throughout his body and hallucinates for two months. When he goes to the hospital, doctors can’t
figure it out. He described his ailments to Graham the entire
time, who pretends to be his friend while dutifully taking notes in his journal. When Bob dies, Graham convinces his widow
to cremate the body to hide all of the evidence. Fred Biggs becomes the next coworker to be
targeted the most. He dies the same way shortly after. At this point, there have been two deaths
and all of the workers are quite alarmed. A doctor investigates the workplace and concludes
that it was a flu virus that claimed their lives. But when Graham begins asking the doctor too
many questions, he arouses suspicion from his coworkers. He actually mentions the possibility of thallium
poisoning. His coworkers contact the police, and criminal
investigators start looking into his past. When they find out about his history of poisoning,
they raid his house for evidence. There, among Nazi paraphernalia , is the poison,
and the scientific journal. Just like before with his family, it lists
all of Graham’s coworkers, their dosages, and the effects. For these crimes, Graham was sentenced to
life in prison. During the proceedings he never apologized
and said that he felt only emptiness. If anything, however, he desperately wanted
to be remembered. A note that he passed to a courtroom journalist
asked to make him famous for his crimes. He died in 1990 at the age of 42. Many believe that he poisoned himself for
one last hurrah . Number 2. “The Scientific Sadist”: To the outside
world, Bob Berdella was a strange fellow who owned a store full of oddities called Bob’s
Bizarre Bazaar . Customers thought he was full of himself and smelled weird. He thought he was an excellent person for
bringing culture into the dull area of Kansas City. His private life, however, was much more twisted
and horrifying than any of the merchandise he sold. One day, Berdella picks up a male drug addict
and promises to give him prescription drugs at his house. When they get there, he ties the victim, who
remains nameless for privacy’s sake, to his bed. There, he tortures him endlessly. Berdella starts by shocking the man’s genitals
with wire cables while he snapping away pictures to pleasure himself to later. He does not stop until the victim pretends
to pass out. Berdella puts a burlap sack over his head
and walks out the room. He comes back, viciously beats him about the
head with an iron bar, and leaves again. When Berdella comes back a third time, he
injects a needle full of Drain-O into his throat. Berdella does this to try and dissolve the
vocal chords so his victims could no longer scream. Next, he takes Q-tips soaked in bleach and
dabs his victim’s eyes. The victim recalls later how the burning pain
was unbearable and his eyes swelled shut. Each time Berdella left the room, it was probably
to make another entry in his journal of human torture experiments. This was not his first victim. Berdella had a lot of experience. He enjoyed torturing young men to death and
documenting their reactions in a notebook. In this journal, he made up his own code of
vulgar acronyms that reference everything he did to them, and even what positions he
abused them in. This is so that he could read over them later
and relive the torture in his head again and again without missing any details. The torture acts involved everything from
grocery store produce to electricity. He even once tried to rip a man’s eye out
just to see what it felt like. In total, 47 people were reported missing
from 1984 to 1988, and Berdella seems responsible for most of them. Over the next few days, Berdella tends to
his victim’s injuries. The poor man drifts in an out of consciousness
for days, drugged up on animal tranquilizers, blinded and barely able to speak. The entire time Berdella keeps the television
up so loud that it is impossible to tell if he is still in the room or not. The man has to sit and listen in constant
fear of his torturer returning. After four days of being tied to a bed, the
victim convinces Berdella to tie the ropes differently. Berdella listens, and later his victim is
able to manipulate the knots just enough to have a limited degree of reach. On the fifth day, he is able to grab a nearby
pack of matches and uses them to burn the ropes off. By now, his eyes have healed enough to be
able to see again and he looks down from the window. Berdella has vicious guard dogs in his backyard
below, so the victim opens the window and begins to slowly creep along the ledge. The ledge breaks, but fortunately he falls
into an area where the dogs aren’t able to get him. Completely naked, the only person to escape
Berdella’s lair alive heads straight to authorities, who quickly arrest him. After his arrest, the county hires a real
estate agent to evaluate how much his home is worth. The real estate agent describes seeing gigantic
guard dogs in cages in the backyard, and also seeing unsettling paintings of people screaming
throughout the home. Worst of all was the kitchen. It was very plain and had two large stainless
steel tables in the center to dismember bodies on. One of the tables even had a sink with a gigantic
industrial garbage disposal that no person would ever ordinarily have a use for. Bob Berdella died of a heart attack in prison
in 1992. Number 1. “Japan’s Human Experiments”: During
World War 2, Japan figured they could win by using the types of biological weapons that
had been banned from wartime use. Unit 731 was the name for a bioweapon research
unit that ignored all of the rules. When Japan invaded a portion of China in the
1930s, Unit 731 sets up research posts for some of the most horrible human experiments
to ever be recorded. In the beginning, Unit 731 claims to exist
to help the public combat disease, but really they are conducting atrocities on prisoners
of war. For example, 40 Japanese medical doctors are
led to a jail one day. Here they find two prisoners with their hands
tied behind their backs. The prisoners are shot in the stomach twice. After that, the doctors are divided into teams
and ordered to remove the bullets without giving the prisoners any painkillers or anesthesia. While this happens, other doctors are practicing
battlefield amputations while others still are cutting into their windpipes for another
surgical maneuver. The human experiments are literally ripped
apart while alive. Other experiments tested the effects of frostbite
to see if there was a way to reverse it once it settled in. To achieve this, human test subjects are placed
outside in freezing weather with their arms and legs exposed. Guards would march by and throw freezing water
on their limbs to quicken the process until they became black with frostbite. Then they were put in pools of water at different
temperatures to see if they could regain feeling and control of their extremities . Many died
from illness, froze to death, or could not withstand the shock of losing a limb. Ceramic bombs, cluster bombs, and bombs with
plague-infected fleas were all tested as well. For this, human experiment victims were tied
to stakes at fixed positions to measure the effectiveness of the bombs at different blast
radiuses . Those who did not die right away suffered in agony, hung up on a post to scream
and plead until their injuries turned fatal. Other experiments dealt with the effects of
pressure. Humans were placed in a pressure chamber and
the pressure was slowly turned up until their eyes exploded from their skulls. Prisoners aside, local populations were not
safe from Unit 731 either. Researchers had an airplane to spray anthrax,
plague, cholera, and other contaminants over villages and towns. After the community slowly and painfully died,
Unit 731 researchers would examine the dead bodies and take notes to see which weapons
were the most lethal. Between 300 and 580 thousand people have are
thought to have died this way. As the end of World War 2 came to a close,
Unit 731 became more and more desperate in their experiments. They had one operation in particular, codenamed
Cherry Blossoms at Night, which planned to use plague-infested pilots to spread disease
across America. These planes were planned to dive bomb the
coast of California, but the event never happened. When the war finally came to an end, Unit
731 attempted to dynamite all the evidence of their wrongdoings, but plenty of gruesome
information was still discovered. The prisoners, however, were massacred using
poisonous gas and machinegun fire. Those who were still standing were thrown
into the river to drown. Nobody was left alive to be rescued.
