When someone with your credentials (and SDMB street cred) suggests we don’t investigate something in that genre, I’m inclined to follow your advice. Thoroughly.
See also
(Great site overall too.)
and
“Authorities said, ‘better left unsolved’”.
– Spinal Tap, on one of their drummer explosions
Well of course I did. Another purely evil one. And I learned some new words while reading about him.
Pure evil.
This reminds me of the Manson family’s creepy-crawling. They would break into occupied homes at night and crawl around, move furniture, etc so the residents would know some one had been there, but without disturbing the sleeping residents. IIRC they did this to the Biancas some time before they murdered them. Creepy as hell on several levels & a reminder that going downstairs to check on that noise is not always a good idea.
The creepy part of the Turpin case is that this happened right under our noses. Like the women imprisoned in basements, backyards, etc. in the middle of suburbia. Creepy to realize how easily this could happen next door.
Euronymous, a guy from the Norwegian black metal scene was pretty creepy.
The YouTube channel that video is on has lots of crime stories and many of them are of the creepy variety.
I think Cecil had a column on ghost transmitters, and the most plausible explanation is espionage. Which would explain why no one claims them.
Eta: ninja’d.
This was creepy for me. It really had me stunned for a few moments before I figured it out.
I do not believe in ghosts or apparitions or anything but for a few moments thought I had seen something from out of the world.
What I saw - I opened the back door from inside our house and saw something bright zip through our backyard. Looked to be going 50mph or so. It was bright and sort of star shaped, but it only lasted a second, so didn’t get that good of a look.
I was stunned for a few seconds, and then thought there must be an explanation.
I puzzled it out. That door has glass in it. When it swung open, what I saw was a reflection on the glass from a light inside the house. It moved fast because the door was being opened.
It fully looked like it was outside. Zipping across our yard.
Yeah I was aware of that, I think for me there is a certain amount cognitive dissonance with all these creepy cases. The logical part of my brain is well aware there is almost certainly a completely mundane non-creepy explanation for all these things. But there is still a part of my brain that is completely creeped out by them nonetheless.
Though the logical part of my brain is also saying WTF in the year 2022 are spies still using radio transmitters like it was 1940? Isn’t that super dangerous given advances in electronic warfare and countermeasures in the last 80 years? (though I guess attempts to move with times have not gone well so maybe its safer that way?)
It kind of makes you want to hack one and get it to broadcast Never Gonna Give You Up. But given that it might instigate a nuclear war, it’s probably not a good idea.
You completely missed the point of these transmitters. The spies aren’t transmitting anything.
The authorities back home broadcast to the whole entire world the message “123 956 346 345 826”. Even if everybody in the world had a radio receiver tuned to the right frequency at the right time, they would have no idea what the message meant. Except for one person.
The spy who knew to listen on frequency X at time Y would hear the same “123 956 346 345 826” as everybody else. But they’d look those numbers up in the code book that only they have. And see that it means “Kill the Slobovian Ambassador and escape via the southern border.”
There’s no way to detect somebody receiving a radio message. And the radio required is a completely ordinary one that any citizen might own, not some snazzy modern spy radio.
So it’s the safest way to send messages to spies in the field. Certainly safer than the internet that’s fully traceable from end to end. Or with weirdo secret radios the spy might be caught carrying.
As the person who first mentioned the Lead masks case in this thread, I’m going to dial back my opinion of how creepy the story is.
Part of what made it seem creepy is the fact that the coroner couldn’t determine the cause(s) of death. In combination with the interest in alien life, it sounded at first like something “not of this world” was afoot.
But according to wiki, it appears that the coroners were unable to test for poisons because they were swamped at the time. And when they were able to get to it, decomposition made accurate tests impossible.
Never attribute to aliens that which can be chalked up to budget constraints.
I know I’m late to the thread, but I’m going to bump it anyway. I don’t know what it says about me, but I’ve read about almost all of these stories. One I didn’t see is the Tara Calico disappearance, along with the creepy found photo. You have to scroll down a bit to see the photo if you want to.
I see they mention they served a search warrant last year, but there are no new details.
Another one that’s creepy just in the sense of how odd and inexplicable it is; “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”.
In 1983 or 1984, a public radio station in West Germany broadcast a rock song by an unknown band, which a young listener recorded on cassette. 20 years later, he digitized his collection of cassette recordings and several years later posted them online to try and identify some songs he didn’t know the names of. To date, this one particular song has never been identified. People have hunted down 40-year-old playlists from this radio station in an attempt to identify it and come up empty. The audio artifacts on the recording strongly indicate that it comes from that station in that year and wasn’t something created as a hoax later on.
To this date, nobody has determined who wrote or recorded the song, or what its name is or even exactly what the lyrics are, and nobody has put forth a credible claim that they are the creator/s. There are likely some 60-year-old grandpas in Germany today who have no idea that the demo they recorded with their buddies 40 years ago has been listened to by millions of people who have no idea who they are.
Currently, there’s the case of the Dallas anesthesiologist charged with poisoning patients’ IV bags, supposedly as revenge for his being the subject of a hospital investigation over improper care. Link contains creepy surveillance video.
And it’s not the first time he’s attracted the attention of authorities.
“In 2016, he was convicted in Collin County of using a pellet gun to shoot and injure the dog of a neighbor in retaliation for her helping his partner escape domestic violence, (medical) board documents state. In that case, the board fined him $2,000 and gave him a public reprimand.”
Yes, they were very firm with him. 
That photo is pretty disturbing on its own. But it reminded me of another disappearance that I read on some “creepy stories” website, the details of which I of course cannot remember. Except for the fact that someone noticed a white van parked at a convenience store in, Iowa, I think; and when it drove off, found a Polaroid of a young girl and boy, also bound and with black duct tape across their mouths. But it wasn’t the same girl or boy as in the Calico photo.
No wonder they can’t figure it out. Except for the slightly weird voice, it sounds like a thousand other pop songs. 
I like the “adverse patient outcomes” line. I guess you could call death an adverse outcome.
I think that is the Calico photo. From wiki:
On June 15, 1989, a Polaroid photo of an unidentified young woman and a boy, both gagged with black duct tape and seemingly bound, was discovered in the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida The woman who found the photo said that it was in a parking space where a white windowless Toyota cargo van had been parked when she arrived at the store. She said that the van was being driven by a man with a mustache who appeared to be in his 30s. Police set up roadblocks to intercept the vehicle, but the man has never been identified.
I don’t know what to call the case of Austin Harrouff who killed two people and was eating the face of one of them when finally stopped by the combined efforts of multiple policemen, a taser, and a police dog. Initially believed to be under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs his toxicology came back clean. After 6 years a bench trial has recently begun with Harrouff who is using an insanity defense. I don’t doubt that he was mentally ill and legally insane at the time but the story is horrific. He killed two people he randomly encountered, and seriously injured a third person who tried to assist them. Multiple policemen using a taser could not pull him off the still living man whose face he was eating and at one point he became briefly lucid and said to the police “Just kill me!”. Although diagnosed with schizophrenia he could be walking the streets some day.
No, I remember the other photo quite clearly. The young woman in that one was younger than the one in the Calico photo. I’ll try to find the link.