Horrifying Animals You Should Avoid At All Costs

Here are some truly horrifying animals you should avoid at all costs!

June 12, 2024・

17 min read

From terrifying creatures that will make your skin crawl to monsters capable of tearing you limb from limb, here are some horrifying animals you should avoid at all costs!

The Deathstalker

Nobody wants to get stung by a scorpion; it hurts. But some pinchy boys will do a lot more than cause you a little pain. In the image below you can see the deadliest scorpion in the world, aptly named the deathstalker. In case it wasn’t obvious from that name, a sting from one can be deadly to the young, old, or weak...

But don’t get comfortable if that isn’t you! Stings can still cause a whole host of other nasty effects, including nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Imagine being attacked by a whole swarm of these beasties! Well, for the southern province of Aswan in Egypt, this was a horrifying reality!

In 2021, the region was bombarded with heavy rain, which forced hundreds of deathstalkers out of their dens to seek better shelter. Unfortunately, people were in the way! The army of deathstalkers descended on towns and cities, and a total of 503 people wound up stung by the venomous villains.

Thankfully, the local government was quick to react and they managed to apply antivenom to everybody. That could’ve been a whole load of blocked toilets, or filled graves.

Black Mamba

Snakes are some of the most feared fauna in the world. And it doesn’t help that they can pop up anywhere from your car to your toilet bowl! But one homeowner in Durban, South Africa, got the shock of their life when they found one of the most venomous snakes in the world curled up right inside their BBQ!

The black mamba is a snake so deadly that without swift medical attention, its bites almost always end in the victim’s demise. Black mambas are supremely nervous, meaning if you so much as step in the wrong place, it could be lights out. The speedy snakes can dart towards you at 10 miles an hour, and after lunging they’ll bite multiple times in a single attack. This is some serious overkill too, because just two drops of venom is enough to make a human pop their clogs!

Mosquitos

Everybody knows how irritating mosquitos are; they never seem to buzz off. However, surprisingly few people are aware of just how deadly these disgusting creatures can be.

Mozzies survive by drinking their victims’ blood using their long feeding tube, or proboscis. As they do so, they also inject a tiny amount of their saliva, which stops the blood from clotting and numbs the pain of the bite. The saliva also causes the itchy red spots we know so well.

The scary part isn’t the bite itself though, that comes from the insect’s ability to spread life threatening diseases. Whenever a skeeter drinks blood, say, from a rat, it also absorbs any disease-causing microorganisms that may be inside its blood stream. If that flying filth bag then feeds on a human, some of those microorganisms can pass to them.

Malaria is the most infamous of these ailments, responsible for over 600,000 casualties in 2022 alone. But that figure isn’t so hard to understand when you see how voracious these things can be. Reddit user Moniq2310 took her kids out swimming in a local river and got bit no less than 65 times! Thankfully, and perhaps astoundingly, it doesn’t seem like she caught anything nasty.

Exploding Whale

Most of us enjoy going to the beach to relax, swim and get a tan, but can you imagine stumbling upon the creature in the picture below? Despite what it looks like, it’s not a giant dinosaur.

This is a sperm whale carcass that washed up in Western Cape, South Africa back in 2018. Even though the creature is already dead, you should keep a safe distance from it. As a beached whale decomposes it produces gas and balloons in size, turning it into an alien looking mass! And all that gas inside the whale will continue to build up until eventually the pressure becomes too much for the giant fleshy beach ball and it finally explodes!

If you’re anywhere near it when it happens, the sheer force of the blast would do some serious damage, and never mind the smell. So, unless you fancy stinky whale flesh rocketing towards you at some unholy speed, stay well away!

Amazonian Giant Centipede

Millipedes are chill guys who chow down on dead plants. Except for the Amazonian giant centipede, that is. These nasty carnivores can grow up to a stomach churning 12 inches long and skulk through the rainforests of South America preying on everything from snakes to scorpions!

The creepy crawlies are venomous and aggressive when threatened, and trust me when I say a nip from one of these things smarts. Centipedes will latch onto your skin with a horrifying pair of pincer-like appendages and inject painful venom into the resulting wound.

You can look forward to swelling, bleeding and a whole lot of itching and burning! And in rare cases, tissue death, a disgusting condition where your flesh literally rots away. Millipedes and centipedes definitely aren't the same thing, don’t get these two confused!

Bears

For people who aren’t in the know, bears are cute fuzzballs that you just wanna hug! The reality however is very different, something which one vacationer in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, found out the hard way:

Bears are terrifying. They’re huge, powerful, and almost unstoppable. Reddit user donutshopsss shared the story of his encounter with this menacing creature. He and three friends had decided to go camping in a secluded area near some woods in Yellowstone and had just set up for the night. But they had no idea they were near an elk carcass.

That is, until a whole group of grizzly bears turned up to share the food. Resisting the urge to panic, donut and his pals quickly packed up and made a hasty exit. However, as they were retreating, something downright horrifying happened. A grizzly came charging out of the woods straight at them. Now it was panic time. Luckily, one of the group had brought bear spray and fired a hefty dose at the rampaging animal, which made it turn on its heels.

But the ordeal was far from over. One of the campers had cut themselves while packing up the supplies and the scent of the wound was attracting all the bears in the vicinity! The group spent an exhausting 8 hours fleeing the relentless beasts in the darkness while trying to find their way to safety.

At one point, they made a fire from the books they’d brought with them and set light to dry sticks with it, throwing them at any bear that got too close. Incredibly, this worked long enough to see them through to the next morning and against all odds, everybody survived.

So, if you ever intend on camping out in bear territory, first of all, make sure you bring bear spray! Failing that, there are a couple of other things you can try if a bear attacks you. If it’s a brown or grizzly bear, play dead. The bear won’t perceive you as a threat and may leave you alone. If it’s a black bear though, this won’t work. Instead, you’ll have to either run or fight, and neither is a great option. The best advice? Stay out of bear territory, full stop.

Tarantula Hawk

Three words: Tarantula hawk wasp. If it sounds like something from your deepest nightmares, there’s good reason! It’s part of the spider wasp family, wasps so badass that they kill tarantulas. Well, after paralyzing them with a venomous sting and laying an egg in them of course! After the egg hatches, the larva emerges and eats the poor stunned spider alive.

And the creepy critters are super common too, living everywhere from the US to Australia. So, you never know when you might stumble across one. Australian reddit user space_monster came home from work one day to a skin crawling sight: a tarantula hawk wasp dragging off a colossal huntsman spider! What a homely welcome!

Thankfully, the hellish wasps aren’t interested in making you their dinner and will sooner flee than attack, so space_monster was okay. However, if one feels threatened, you could well find yourself at the business end of a stinger. And a sting from the tarantula hawk is agony. In fact, it’s so intense that the only advice experts give is to lie down and scream.

The pain only lasts a few minutes, but you can guarantee it’ll be the most agonizing few minutes of your life. Most people are so consumed by it that they lose control of their bodies, making them more likely to accidentally hurt themselves further. That’s all bad enough; just be glad you don’t have eight legs!

Saltwater Crocodile

The saltwater crocodile is the largest living reptile, and arguably the deadliest croc in the world. They can reach 20 feet in length and weigh a colossal 3,330lbs that’s almost as long as a London bus and three times heavier than a grizzly bear!

These reptilian monsters are highly aggressive and so territorial that they’ll snack on humans if any are unlucky enough to wander nearby. And unlucky they’d certainly be because saltwater crocs have the strongest bite of any animal!

Bite force is measured by PSI, or pressure per square inch. Salties have an astounding crunch power of 3,700 PSI! That’s 3,700 pounds of sheer force colliding with every inch of the bite area. For reference, lions bite with 1,000 PSI, and humans between 150 and 200 PSI. Simply put, these titans can crush bones with ease. And there are plenty of times they’ve demonstrated this.

Back in the Second World War, after the battle of Ramree Island in 1945, 1,000 Japanese soldiers were forced to retreat through thick mangrove swamps. Only 20 made it out alive, and for decades it was believed that hordes of saltwater crocodiles had slaughtered them!

Can you imagine how horrendous that must’ve been? Admittedly, it’s now believed the crocs were responsible for far less of the fallen soldiers than first thought, but it's still not recommendable to traipse through any mangrove swamps.

At least humans weren’t about in the Cretaceous period, nearly 100 million years ago. Because crocs sure were, and as massive as the saltwater croc is today, its ancient ancestors were even bigger. Monsters such as Deinosuchus were believed to have reached a gargantuan 39 feet, or half the length of a tennis court! Just imagine if those things were still around today. They used to eat dinosaurs, so we wouldn’t stand a chance!

Camel Spiders

Camel spiders are hellish creatures that can leap 6 feet in the air, issue a bloodcurdling scream while running at 25 miles an hour, and will numb the flesh of their victims before eating them alive! Or at least, that’s what US soldiers stationed in Iraq in the early 2000s told people.

According to them, the camel spider got its name from its habit of attacking camels, eating their stomachs, and laying its eggs inside them. The soldiers even claimed that many of them had woken up to find they were covered in the things, and that they’d been stealthily eating them in the night!

You’ll be relieved to know these claims are actually all baseless. The soldiers that relayed them were just spinning a long yarn for the people back home. So, what’re these horrid things really like? For starters, they’re only about 5 inches long, not the horrifying length they seem to be in the viral pic below. The soldiers were just holding two attached to each other!

And they aren’t actually spiders at all. They fall into the broader arachnid family alongside other hellish monsters like the tailless whip scorpion, strange beasts that are essentially harmless, even if they look utterly dread inducing at the time of shedding their exoskeleton. The hard outer shell can’t grow with the scorpion itself, so the creature has to discard it several times throughout its life.

While neither of these arachnids are lethal though, camel spiders can deliver a painful bite if they feel the need to defend themselves. So, don’t poke them. Camel spiders will chase down humans, but not to take a bite out of them. They sometimes follow people to stay inside the cool shadow they cast over the desert. While they’re unlikely to cause you any lasting harm then, they’re still totally horrific and very much deserving of being left well alone!

Giant Spitting Cobras

Most people hate snakes, especially big ones that’re capable of shooting venom at you. So, giant spitting cobras are pretty much the worst nightmare. At nearly 9 feet long, they’re the largest species of venom-spitting cobra on earth.

Science folk believe the huge danger noodles evolved their alarming ability to defend themselves from our early ancestors a few million years ago. So, in a way it’s all our fault! The snakes shoot their shots directly at the eyes of their enemies, savagely burning them and causing blindness if left untreated.

They can fire from many feet away, but that doesn’t stop them going in close for a juicy bite either. And if it does decide to bite its venom into your system, it’ll rapidly cause the tissue around the bite to die, leading to disfigurement and potentially much worse.

Despite this, snake charmers around the world absolutely love to use cobras in their routines. Enough accidents occur with non-spitting cobras, imagine how much worse things could get if they used one of these guys!

One such charmer met his untimely demise back in 2018 after being bitten by a spitting cobra he was trying to capture in Malaysia. The venom took just four days to take full hold, and once it had, there was tragically no more that could be done.

Komodo Dragons

Rinca Island in Indonesia is famed for being chock full of huge Komodo dragons, usually though, they stay outside the buildings. Back in 2009, a tour guide named Maen entered his office on the island and took a seat at his desk. When he glanced down however, a cold sweat ran down his brow. Curled beside his legs was a colossal Komodo!

These beasts are the largest lizards in the world, able to reach a seriously intimidating 10 feet in length! They’re strong, vicious, and very venomous. As well as being incredibly painful, a single bite from a dragon can paralyse you and cause rapid, debilitating blood loss. From there, they’d simply wait for you to collapse before chowing down. Truly unsettling.

Komodos are also capable of swallowing large animals like deer whole. If something looks a little big for them, they won’t bother chewing it up into smaller chunks. They’re far more likely to spend 20 minutes forcing the paralyzed animal down their throat by slamming it against a tree.

Essentially, you really wouldn’t want one underneath your desk. Therefore, what happened to Maen? Horrified, he pulled his legs back from the beast, but one of them caught on something and the dragon lunged, chomping down on it! The tour guide screamed for help and managed to kick the giant lizard off him as his colleagues arrived. But the smell of his blood had attracted a horde of other nearby komodos!

His co-workers frantically rushed him out the building and raced across the island, dodging and running from the frenzied Komodo dragons as they went. Miraculously they made it to the dock and leapt onto a boat without any further injuries. Then, they took Maen to a nearby hospital where he got the treatment he needed. It still took around 6 months for him to fully recover from his harrowing ordeal though.

Northern Giant Hornets

Everyone’s tired of hearing about 2020’s COVID-19 outbreak now but there was another big news story that year that still gives us all the shivers. The discovery of northern giant hornets, once known as “murder hornets,” in Washington, US.

The huge bugs are thought to have come to the states by ship, and they’re supremely dangerous. Compared to honeybees, the hornets can deliver a devastating 28 times more venom in a single sting! So, if you get stung by a whole swarm of these guys, well, you can wave “bye-bye” to tomorrow.

Understandably, Americans were pretty darn panicked then to find out the vicious vespids were on home ground. American actress Rose McGowan got stung in 2021 and suffered from immense pain, numbness, a rapid heartrate, and even fuzzy vision! Thankfully, she was fine in the end.

It’s actually very rare for a sting to cause anything other than temporary symptoms unless you’re allergic. What’s more, multiple nests had been found and destroyed by the end of 2021, and there were no new sightings in Washington across the whole of 2022. So, the US might just have dodged a bullet there. If you do wind up coming across one of the insidious insects though, keep well away!

Tapeworms

Of all the horrible beasts that we’ve discussed so far, there’s at least one small solace you can take is that they don’t squirm around inside your body! Unlike tapeworms. Tapeworms are horrid little things that can be contracted by eating undercooked meats.

If a cow eats grass with tapeworm eggs on it, they’ll hatch in its intestines as larvae, before moving through the bloodstream to the muscles. There they form hardy cysts. These cysts are killed by cooking the infected meat thoroughly, but if you eat infected beef without cooking it properly, you’ll get infected.

After being ingested, the cyst will develop into a fully-fledged tapeworm and live inside your intestine, feeding on nutrients that should be going to your body. That’s beyond disturbing. It could be much more upsetting though.

In the UK back in 2012, a man was admitted to hospital after suffering from 4 years of headaches. On top of a painful cranium, he’d also been experiencing strange smells, memory flashbacks and even seizures! So, what was wrong with him? Doctors found out a rare, ribbon shaped tapeworm had made its way into his brain.

It’s believed that whilst on a trip to China the man probably ingested some infected meat, but rather than stay in his gut, the worm had somehow furrowed all the way to his brain! Understandably, this caused some rather wild symptoms. The invasive house guest was eventually removed, but the man apparently still suffers residual problems. Let that be a lesson to always cook your food people!

Funnel Web Spiders

Australia is home to some of the most venomous, aggressive spiders of them all: Australian funnel webs. These guys will attack anything that gets too close. And the huge fangs on one particular species, the Sydney funnel web, are so strong that they can pierce leather, meaning yes, they can nip right through your shoes!

So what happens if you do get bitten through your sick kicks? The venom can cause extreme symptoms just minutes after entering the blood stream, when you'll experience vomiting, spasms, confusion, heart palpitations and even brain swelling! Without swift treatment, Sydney funnel web bites can even be lethal.

Australian native Ian Beard had a spine-chilling encounter with one of the spooky spiders in 2020. His drain needed to be cleaned out, so he took a small shovel and stuck his arm down it to dig up whatever was clogging it. Bit of a ballsy move, but apparently he’d done it hundreds of times before. That day however was different.

Suddenly, he felt a sharp shooting pain on his finger and yanked his arm out to be greeted by a horrifying sight. You guessed it, there was a funnel web spider on it! His wife immediately called an ambulance which rushed Ian to hospital within 20 minutes. It’s a good job too, although his condition was swiftly deteriorating, the antivenom was administered on time to save Ian’s life.

I hope you were amazed at these horrifying animals you should avoid at all costs! Thanks for reading.