I love shows like Unsolved Mysteries, the old version and the new. Even though they can give me the willies, I love trying to solve crimes, and honestly, there’s just something fascinating about the darker side of human nature.
These 15 stories definitely fit the bill, so if you’re into that sort of thing, too, you need to take a look!
15. Who would run away during a storm?
Asha Degree. Girl leaves her house in the middle of the night during a storm and disappeared. The only problem is that she was terrified of thunder and lightning and had no motive for leaving because her home life was fine. Then her clothes and backpack were found a year later in an abandoned construction site.
14. Lost at sea stories are inherently creepy.
MV Joyita
Barnacle growth high above the usual waterline on the port side showed that Joyita had been listing heavily for some time.
There was some damage to the superstructure. Her flying bridge had been smashed away and the deckhouse had light damage and broken windows. A canvas awning had been rigged on top of the deckhouse behind the bridge.
Joyita carried a dinghy and three Carley life rafts, but all were missing. She did not carry enough lifejackets for everyone on board.
The starboard engine was found to be covered by mattresses, while the port engine’s clutch was still partially disassembled, showing that the vessel was still running on only one engine.
An auxiliary pump had been rigged in the engine room, mounted on a plank of wood slung between the main engines. However, it had not been connected.
The radio on board was tuned to the international distress channel, but when the equipment was inspected, a break was found in the cable between the set and the aerial. The cable had been painted over, obscuring the break. This would have limited the range of the radio to about 2 miles (3.2 km).
The electric clocks on board (wired into the vessel’s generator) had stopped at 10:25 and the switches for the cabin lighting and navigation lights were on, implying that whatever had occurred happened at night. The ships’ logbook, sextant, mechanical chronometer and other navigational equipment, as well as the firearms Miller kept in the boat,[7] were missing.
A doctor’s bag was found on deck, containing a stethoscope, a scalpel, and four lengths of blood-stained bandages.
13. I need to see this movie immediately.
Who was Perseus?
From 1943 to 1946, the Soviet Union had a high level spy in the Manhattan Project. Codenamed Perseus, this spy was a scientist at the White Sands missile testing site in NM, and the main research facilities in Los Alamos. Perseus saw pretty much the entire Project start to finish, giving the Russians everything they needed to get to work on their own bomb.
The fact that they were able to do so within 4 years of the end of WWII when their nations was still devastated is proof positive that Perseus helped a great deal.
And to top it all off, Perseus was never caught or positively identified.
12. Most people believe he was a Cold War spy.
The Tamám Shud case, also known as the Mystery of the Somerton Man, is an unsolved case of an unidentified man found dead at 6:30 am, 1 December 1948, on the Somerton Park beach, just south of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is named after the Persian phrase tamám shud, meaning “ended” or “finished,” which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man’s trousers.
The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám. Tamám was misspelt as Tamán in many early reports, and this error has often been repeated, leading to confusion about the name in the media.
11. The more you dig, the creepier it gets.
The 1987 Arkansas murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives.
And every single possible witness surrounding them. Like Keith McKaskle, who claimed to be on the tracks that night.
He talked to the special prosecutor about what he saw, then realized the prosecutor was dirty. After coming forth as a witness he began saying goodbye to his loved ones and planned his own funeral arrangements. Shortly after he was stabbed 113 times.
10. I don’t like the sound of that.
This is my favorite weird and barely known one:
Back in 2013 an unknown group assaulted a power substation in California. By all appearances it was pretty sophisticated: scouted firing positions, all casings wiped of prints, they targeted transformers so they’d take time to overheat before triggering any alarms, also knew exactly when the police would arrive.
No suspect or motive to this day, they also cut some fiber optic cables in a vault nearby. Conspiracy types think it was a dry run by Russia or possibly China to see how effective an attack like that might be.
9. Whoa I never knew about these.
At the start of lots of chapters of the Qur’an there are mysterious groups of letters.
No one knows what they mean. Although there are lots of theories.
8. So many cases that definitely weren’t suicides, y’all.
The “suicide” of Ellen Greenberg.
27 stab wounds in different areas of the body.
7. I am never going to be okay until we know what happened to the Sodder children.
There are a few that bug me.
The Sodder children; their house burned down in the middle of the night. Several of the kids were presumed dead, but their bodies were never found in the debris and it never burned hot enough to cremate them. It started to look extremely suspicious and the parents until their deaths believed that they had been taken for some reason. Many years down the line they did receive a photo and cryptic note from someone claiming to be their son but it was never authenticated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodder_children_disappearance
The boy in the box. A deceased little boy, found beaten, recently shaved of his hair and abandoned in the box for a bassinet that he was way too old for. The photos and reconstructions of him released to the public in the desperate hope of identifying him are haunting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia))
The Saint Louis Jane Doe, a little girl found in an abandoned house, decapitated and bound at the hands. They have no dental records or facial reconstruction to go from. The case has led nowhere, she’s just nameless, lost to time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Jane_Doe
Tri-state Crematory. A devastating case of a man called back from his college football career to take over his father’s business when the father fell ill. Over time people started noticing… bodies… and body parts. On the grounds. Just hanging around. When someone finally took the reports seriously they found that he’d been piling bodies up randomly all over the property, often when it would’ve been much easier to cremate them instead of hauling them around to where they were dumped. The guy gave families canisters of cement dust instead of ashes. The mystery on this one is… why. The guy never gave up the answer to what happened there and will only insist that there are no answers. His lawyer theorized he had mercury poisoning from cremating amalgam fillings, but that doesn’t really explain why you would dump a body instead of cremating it when the latter takes less effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory_scandal
The West Memphis Three case. All of the Satanic Panic mess obscured so much that will probably go unanswered now. A bloody man covered in mud stumbled into a Bojangles the night those little boys went missing. Cops barely investigated that incident and lost the blood evidence they did collect regarding it. WHAT was going on with John Mark Byers and Terry Hobbs, two dads of two of those kids, both turning up with evidence and acting at different points like they may have been involved?
6. Yes I would also like to know what happened.
What happened to Brian Shaffer
This happened in my home town. This med student went to a bar with friends and then fully disappeared off the face of the earth.
The podcast True Crime Garage has an incredible series on this case. The hosts are both from Columbus and around Brian’s age. They talk through the whole case in depth and they also have a few guests that they talk with as well.
5. That last part though…
Flight 19 of December 5, 1945.
Five bomber craft on a routine training run became lost while heading back and eventually disappeared entirely. Audio has them saying that they thought they had ended up over the Florida Keys, but wind could not have allowed that.
Even more interesting is the fact the rescue craft dispatched to locate them also disappeared.
4. This continues to bother so many of us.
The guys motive for shooting up all those people in Vegas.
3. Oh yeah this one is definitely up there.
The Hinterkaifeck Murders … super creepy and the fact that there was evidence the murderers were in the house watching the family for awhile before killing them just totally freaks me out
2. What could have happened?!
The U.S.S. Cyclops. A coal ship. Disappeared with 306 men. The largest U.S. Navy loss of life that didn’t involve combat.
1. It seems like we should be able to figure this out?
What on Earth happened to the Tromp family.
So it’s this Australian family who owned a Berry farm. Somehow Mr and Mrs Tromp and their three grown kids developed the belief that they weren’t safe and they needed to flee their farm without cell phones or anything traceable (credit cards, etc). It sounds like the oldest son wasn’t sold on whatever it was that led them to flee. He brought his phone, but eventually it got tossed from the car. He ended up bailing first and taking a train home. From there the rest of the family slowly separated and suffered various degrees of emotional breaks.
The two girls stole a car. Somehow they got separated and one made it home, but the other was found on the floor in the backseat of some guys car in a catatonic state. (he spotted her after he started down the road). Eventually the parents were found wandering around aimlessly. Fortunately they were all ok physically but wtf happened? Was someone actually after them? Were they delusional? As far as I know the family hasn’t released any updates.
I have such a need to know more, y’all!
Do you have a favorite unsolved case? If it’s not on this list I want to hear about it in the comments!
