Who’s ready for dinner?

Eating the flesh of another human may be one of the most taboo acts imaginable. But over the years, a surprising number of people have devoured their fellow man, not out of desperation, but inspired by a dark desire. The deeds of the 10 real-life cannibals revealed here are sure to turn your stomach. So pour yourself some nice, soothing Chianti, and settle in for these true tales of men with appalling appetites.

1. Jeffrey Dahmer

Undoubtedly the most notorious cannibalistic serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 young men between 1978 and 1991. Murder, though, was just the beginning of Dahmer’s sick and twisted M.O. He dismembered, cannibalized, and retained human remains, earning the nickname, “the Milwaukee Cannibal.” Sentenced to 16 life terms in prison, Dahmer was beaten to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.

Related: 10 Little-Known Facts About Jeffrey Dahmer

In November 2017, Oxygen launched its own investigation into the Jeffrey Dahmer case. Dahmer on Dahmer: A Serial Killer Speaks premiered Saturday, November 11. Click here for our article about the two-part true crime special.

2. Nikolai Dzhumagaliev

Kazahk serial killer Nikolai Dzhumagaliev confessed to the murder of 10 people, though authorities assume there were most likely more victims. He claimed he wanted to rid the world of prostitutes, and would attack women, drink their blood, then eat their remains. While drunk, he shot a coworker and was apprehended, only to escape from custody twice: The second time he was on the run for three years. He was eventually apprehended and committed to a mental institution. Doctors claimed he was cured in 2005. Just before Christmas 2015, he supposedly escaped the facility again. Officials refuse to confirm whether or not Dzhumagaliev is at the mental facility, or if he even arrived there in the first time. Keep your eyes peeled…

3. Armin Meiwes

Known as “The Master Butcher,” German Armin Meiwes is famous for the murder and cannibalism of a voluntary victim. Meiwes posted on a website called The Cannibal Cafe (for people with cannibalistic fetishes) that he was “looking for a well-built 18-to-30-year-old-male to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes answered the ad. The two men made a videotape of Meiwes severing and then eating Brandes’ penis, which both men ate; Meiwes then killed and ate Brandes. When a college student noticed the online ad, Meiwes was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. At a subsequent retrial, in which he stated that he still had a taste for flesh, he was sentenced to life in prison.

4. Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali

Police re-apprehended these Pakistani brothers when the head of a three-year-old boy was discovered in their shared home in 2014. Already convicted of several counts of cannibalism in 2011, the two brothers had since been released. While being questioned for the more recent crime, they claimed to have dug up and cannibalized the corpses of over 100 people, incorporating them into the homemade curry. In spite of their guilt, the men had been released from prison in May 2013, inciting–for obvious reasons–a public outcry.

5. Albert Fish

Albert Fish was an American serial killer, rapist, and cannibal, with a perverse taste for children. In 1928, he abducted 10-year-old Grace Budd in New York. Six years later, the Budd family received an anonymous letter riddled with spelling errors that detailed a man’s descent into madness and cannibalism. In the letter’s final paragraph, Fish graphically recounted abducting Grace Budd, killing her, and consuming her flesh. The authorities soon apprehended Fish, and he was executed by electric chair in 1936.

6. Issei Sagawa

At barely five-feet-tall, Sagawa said he chose his classmate, the five-foot-ten, 25-year-old Renée Hartevelt, as his victim for her beauty and health. He lured her to his apartment, shot her, and over the course of two days, cannibalized her body. When he tried to discard her remains in the Bois de Boulogne Lake in Paris, he was spotted and arrested. The French government extradited Sagawa to Japan, where he was committed to a mental institution. But, with the French case closed, he was able to check himself out, and, horrifyingly, has lived free since 1986. Sagawa has published several books and even worked briefly as a restaurant reviewer. In an interview with Vice magazine in 2009, he said that being forced to make a living as a known murderer and cannibal “was a terrible punishment.”

7. Rudy Eugene

Known as the “Causeway Cannibal,” Rudy Eugene brutally attacked homeless man Ronald Poppo underneath the MacArthur Causeway in Miami in 2012. Eugene, who was naked at the time, beat Poppo, then bit and chewed the flesh of his face, grossly disfiguring him and rendering him blind in both eyes. Police shot and killed Eugene after repeated warnings. A toxicology report showed that there was only marijuana in Eugene’s system, and his family was dumbfounded by his sudden and inexplicable behavior.

8. Luka Magnotta

In 2012, a gruesome video of a young man being repeatedly stabbed with an ice pick, dismembered, then cannibalized was uploaded to a website called Best Gore. The man in the video was subsequently identified as Lin Jun, a missing international student at Concordia University in Montreal. Days later, packages containing body parts (which, after investigation, turned out to be Lin’s) were delivered to the offices of the Conservative Party of Canada. Evidence led police to the apartment of Luke Magnotta, who by that time had fled to Paris, then Berlin. Magnotta was apprehended and sentenced to life in prison.

9. Jose Luis Calva

Police discovered Mexican murderer Jose Luis Calva eating a dish of human meat seasoned with lemon when they went to question him about the disappearance of his girlfriend in 2007. In his apartment, they also found the mutilated body of his girlfriend, human flesh in the refrigerator, a frying pan containing human flesh, and a cereal box filled with human bones. Calva had been working on an unfinished manuscript called “Cannibal Instincts” and there was a photo of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter taped to his wall. After being sentenced to 84 years in prison, Calva committed suicide in his cell.

10. Alfred Packer

American prospector Alfred Packer claimed that he cannibalized his already-dead fellow travellers to survive in the mountains of Colorado in the winter of 1874. However, inconsistencies in Packer’s story, regarding how, exactly, the men died, led him to be sentenced to 40 years in prison–eight years for each victim. He was released on parole in 1901, and died in 1907.