Here’s a tale I just came across this morning, which was apparently featured on Unsolved Mysteries back in the day. In 1988, two teenage boys were struck by an early morning freight train in Arkansas. Though their bodies were badly damaged by the impact, it was soon discovered that they had been murdered beforehand and then placed on the tracks in an apparent attempt to destroy the evidence of the crime.
In the coming years, six people who claimed to have been witnesses to the boys’ final hours were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances. Their testimonies indicate that local police and county officials (including a prosecutor who was assigned to the case) were involved in a drug smuggling operation and killed the boys when they accidentally stumbled upon them searching for a drop site. Noone has ever been convicted of their killing, but the prosecutor and two cops who are suspected of having been the actual killers have been found guilty of other drug-related crimes. Federal files into the investigation are heavily redacted, and it’s been alleged that Bill Clinton personally protected a state medical examiner who either through corruption or incompetence tried to whitewash the boys’ deaths as a marijuana-induced death by misadventure.
For me, it is the case of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon. Was there another person there or not? Reports imply that as soon as you walk down the other side of the mountain it is easy to get lost but their family walked the same path and you can go quite a while and just turn around on the path and head back. Was Lisanne injured and who was controlling her phone? What happened to photo 702? Why the series of pictures taken at the end?
As for a personal story, we were traveling back in Central Oregon at night and no gas stations were open as we were on pissant US26. Remember you can’t pump you own gas there. We were finally on fumes and we pulled into a country store gas station and decided to wait there a few hours until they open. I hiked to the top of a small hill 100 yards away and there was nothing around. After 15 minutes this Oregon DOT gas truck pulls over to us and asked what was going on. He explained that he was driving the gas truck to a DOT work area a few miles away because it’s his job to fill up the big vehicles on site. He said he wasn’t allowed to do this but he gave us enough gas to get to an all-night truck stop / gas station at the border. But there’s the thing, as we drove to the Idaho border, there was no indicator anywhere of any road work being done. We all agree that we were in a Stephen King novel on that one.
I doubted whether to post this, because it’s just something horrible that you’d rather not know, along the lines of the chimp attack and other gruesome, real-life stories. I’ve decided to post it, though, in view of some of the accounts upthread with similar content. There is nothing mysterious or intriguing about this, only the horror it provokes, so do not unspoiler it unless you don’t mind exposure to a disturbing mental image that’ll stay with you far longer than you’d like.
Last warning: You really don’t want to read this.
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It happened in Hiroshima or Nagasaki immediately after one of the atomic bombs had been dropped. A survivor recounted that some members of his family had gathered at their home when “something black” came down the street, on all fours like a dog, entered the home and collapsed. The family stood around it, wondering what it was, and someone eventually recognized their grandmother.
They could have been working on a different road than the highway? They could have been working on a section of railroad track a few miles away from the highway?
Figuring out real-life creepy things like this is fun. Back in the 90s, I moved into a condo apartment that had a balcony. A couple of times, when sitting on the balcony, I heard what I was sure was someone talking in my apartment, which was creepy, because I lived alone. I wondered if someone was opening my apartment door, or something.
I eventually figured out it was weird acoustics. There was one spot on the sidewalk across the street where, when conditions were just right, sounds would reflect off the back of the balcony, so they sounded like they were coming from inside the apartment. Being five floors up I’d never thought of this, until I noticed the people talking on the sidewalk at the same time I heard the voices from behind me. With a bit of deliberate observation, I eventually confirmed that this was what was happening.
Every few years I read the Wikipedia article on the Somerton Man end to end, just to creep myself out. I hadn’t heard that someone made a plausible identification this year, so thanks for the news! The evidence does seem to be very persuasive. I wonder what’s taking the police so long to decide whether the case can now be closed.
Anyway, my go-to creep-out story will now be that of the Donner Party. My stomach turns whenever I read about how they were forced to boil down their own oxhide shelters just to have something to eat.
It was so dark that I’m sure we would have noticed the activity. And here’s the thing, it didn’t take us long to get going and as soon as we crested that hill I talked about, traveling the same direction as him, he was gone. Like Ghost Gasguy
I wouldn’t be so sure. There was a similar case where someone killed and ate the stranger sitting next to him on a Greyhound bus. The killer was found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric facility, but was released six years later after showing improvement.
There’s no reason it can’t be both. Racism and stupidity may have helped get them into the situation, but once they were in it, things turned pretty horrific. And I’m not just talking about the trials of surviving in the wilderness, but the inhumanity with which some of the people treated each other.
When I didn’t see a separate thread devoted to BTK, I found this instead and decided to bump it.
In short, there’s some very compelling evidence that he was responsible for the murders of two young women, one in Missouri and the other in Oklahoma. These were during times that he was traveling as part of his job as a security alarm installer (!) and a census employee. TL : DR/W: His daughter, who had not seen him since his 2005 arrest, visited him earlier this year and said “He’s rotting from the inside.” Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
Since this thread’s been bumped, I read through it again, and read the BBC story about the Somerton Man. Cool that he’s finally been identified, but I wouldn’t say that the case is solved; there’s still no explanation of how he died or why the labels of his clothes were removed, or how he came to be on that beach.
Altough I understand your point here, as a general practical matter this is absolutely false. Radio receivers also “transmit” a weak signal from their IF or intermediate frequency transformers unless they were extremely well shielded. This principle was used by various authorities amongst the belligerents during WWII, that was the reason for the trucks with a large antenna apparatus combing the streets. They could triangulate the listeners location with a reasonable accuracy. Listening to the Beeb wasn’t allowed, you see. It was tedious work, but merely listening to certain broadcasts was risky if they were looking for it. I don’t effective it was, but it probably gave one pause considering the penalties.
I suspect a similar procedure was used whilst Britons had to pay an onerous TV tax, they could sniff out those bloody tax scofflaws.
Of course you’re correct that any radio receiver emits a smidgen of energy while doing it’s thing. But it’s not like a modern country could deploy a generic receiver detecor system over their entire territory and detect everyone everywhere who’s tuned in to frequency 123.456.
I read the whole wiki on this to get up to speed, and I just cant help but think a lot of it was just showing the bad elements of these people’s characters. Maybe because many of them came from more privileged backgrounds they just didn’t handle hardship all that well. A lot of them just seemed like nasty pieces of work.
Not that that’s all there is to it. I can’t expect anyone who had to feed their dead husband to their children to act with much grace. Sounds like many of them lost their minds. Maybe we would all be as beastly.
But I doubt it. History is full of stories of communities coming together to survive hardship. These people didn’t appear to have any sense of community.
The escalator at the Rosslyn Metro Station (part of Arlington, VA, i.e. the DC Metro system) is effectively a whispering gallery in places. On several occasions, I’d be riding up it when it was not too crowded, and hear someone speaking directly next to me. I’d look around, and the only people in the escalator tunnel were on the opposite side, going down, and chatting with each other. If I hadn’t realized what was going on, it would have been very, very creepy.
And remember that the Donner Party’s cannibalism didn’t include eating just those who had already died, but also their Native American guides were deliberately killed to be eaten.
