There's a reason most horror stories involve physical mayhem: The idea of something messing with our body is disturbing enough to have a genre all its own . Still, all the Re-Animators and Human Centipedes out there are nothing. The greatest horror writer is nature itself, and it has made certain that reality offers us far more interesting body-mangling ailments than a thousand inventive dark wizard curses.

5 You Can Grow Hair Out Of Your Eyeballs

Digital Vision/DigitalVision/Getty Images

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We apologize in advance for the image we're about to show you. Please make sure that there are no sharp or spoon-like objects nearby you that could use to, say, spontaneously gouge at anything eyeball-shaped in your face as you recoil in horror.

Ready? Good. Behold:

NEJM.org/TUOMS via Daily Mail

OK, that's it. No more eyes for anybody.

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Holy tap-dancing shit on a stick! It's one thing to have a growth bigger than your pupil hanging around on your eyeball, but it's something else to see it sprouting hair. How is that even possible, and how hasn't that poor person burned the entire world in retaliation?

NEJM via Examiner

"I will as soon as I can get this damn lash out of my eye!"

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That ... fucking ... thing is a limbal dermoid. They are congenital tumors that form on the limbus part of the cornea. They can cause vision deficiencies such as astigmatism and amblyopia, but they're benign in the sense that they're not cancerous. On the other hand, they're very very malignant in the "your eyeball may grow a mullet" department.

Limbal dermoids are rare, but they're out there -- it's estimated that the average eye doctor encounters one or two cases during their career. The particular horror above was removed from the eye of a 19-year-old dude. The tumor was present from birth and slowly grew with its host -- from a cute baby tumor to the awkward, pimpled tumor-teen that stole its first kiss under the bleachers and awkwardly started experimenting with facial hair like its peers.