As a correlation to this cool thread:
started by Bayard, I do want to read about all the wild stuff that goes on, unsolved, that will freak me out. You can skip over classics like the Lindbergh baby and Jack the Ripper, but surely folks have some good, creepy stories of things we’ve never heard about. So, keep me up tonight, people!
Read the book Stranger Than Science. It’s full of creepy mysteries. When I first read it as a kid, it freaked me right out. Mysteries right under our noses! People disappearing in broad daylight! Meat falling from the sky! Mysterious happenings! Ghosts! Premonitions! All with dates and locations! Documented and verifiable!
Here’s one from the book that stuck with me all these years:
Where’d they go?
I used to have that book! Man, I loved reading about all the odd stuff he wrote about. I wish I could remember more of them. There was one about a farmer, who was coming in from a field to greet some friends coming down the lane in their buggy. The farmer’s family had come out to greet them too, when suddenly, the farmer disappeared! Everyone saw that he was there one moment and gone the next. He never returned, though the kids thought they heard him a time or two.
And then there was one about a psychic horse who could find lost people. The owners had set up a system of blocks with letters on them and the horse could spell out clues as to where to find folks. The one in this particular story, I believe the author, a columnist named Frank Edwards, had a hand in. It involved a little boy who had wandered away from home and the parents had contacted him to see if he could help find their son.
Frank called the owners and found that the horse was in retirement from the people finding biz, but Frank was able to convince the owners to let the horse try this one last time. So he went out to where they lived and the owners set up the letter blocks. The horse got right on it and essentially said to go to a certain spot in the woods and you’ll find the boy’s shoe near a log. The child will be nearby. And by gosh, he was! And unharmed, at that.
Of course, I don’t believe in that kind of stuff. Didn’t way back then either, really, but the author was so compelling (and, being in my teens, a little more gullible or open-minded or what have you) but I just loved reading that book anyway. I have an Amazon gift card that has been languishing in my wallet for, lo, these several years. Perhaps I should make use of it and relive some fond but weird memories.
The missing Beaumont children in Australia
and the missing Sodder children in the US
Breaks your heart to think of what may have happened all those beautiful kids and the agony of their parents.
I actually have three (!) copies. I remembered a specific story, and wanted to reread it. So I got a copy, and that story wasn’t there. So I bought two more, different editions, wondering perhaps if that story was only in one printing. Still haven’t found it.
It was about a giant purple gelatinous blob that showed up (mysteriously!) in some town. It was a form of blob no one had encountered before. Disappointingly, it did not attack the town, but sat there (mysteriously) where it was found, until the rain washed it away. No none was ever able to determine what it was, or where it came from.
I swear the chapter was titled (unmysteriously) “Police and the Purple Blob”, but there is no chapter by that name. Maybe I read it in a similar book.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a good’n.
As is the Lead Masks Case.
and Philadelphia’s Boy in the Box.
It looks as though the story may be in Strange World rather than Stranger than Science.
According to mysteriousuniverse.org, the chapter was called Police and the Purple Glob.
WOW! I’ve hunted for that for years! It was a different Frank Edwards book. Is there nothing the SD can’t do?
(Glob, blob, eh whatever. At least it was purple…)
We discussed the Sodder case here at some length within the last year or so. I lean towards it being a case of the details being misunderstood and misstated. While the house burned quickly and may not have reached crematory temps, it collapsed into the basement, producing a giant pit of coals that could have easily burned five bodies to ash in the 24(?) hours before it was dug out. Bones would have been reduced to gray rubble hard to distinguish from other sources.
It’s all in taking the claim that the house burned too quickly and too cool-ly to incinerate five smallish bodies. Reading between the lines of that claim establishes the truth.
There are always “mysterious figures” about in recollection, likely imaginary or utterly unattached to the tragedy.
That’s a really interesting theory, Amateur Barbarian. I’m going to look for the thread you mention and read it.
I remember buying this at a school book fair when I was… 12?
Fascinating stories. But then my Spock-fu kicked in, and I could only assume it was mostly B.S.
I remember a vague story about a guy who went out to meet an “evil witch” or something that walked along a certain path. The guy vanished, but his camera remained with an eerie pic…sorry I can’t recall more details.
A case like that happened in Dallas, TX sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s but the blob wasn’t ‘giant’. Maybe a couple of feet across. It was on the news for several days. Finally, the woman who owned the property brewed up some nicotine in water (it’s used for mites or something like them) poured it over the blob and that was the end of that.
I’m so sorry for just now getting back to this thread! Somehow I’d clicked unsubscribe and then my ailing memory got the best of me. Again, mea culpa.
These all are great though. The Elisa Lam one really gets me and I’ve had similar books like the ones mentioned. Now to add my own new (to me) unsolved mystery…
The Bloody Benders. A murderous clan from the 1870s. Seems they’d lure travelers to their makeshift hotel, sit them at a place of honor (??) for supper, then whack 'em and drop 'em down a hidden trapdoor. All for just the purpose of robbing them. Then they’d be killed and buried on their property.
No one suspected a thing until some prominent doctor from somewhere else came up missing. They were questioned, just like everyone, and their answers aroused no suspicion. But later the homestead was found completely abandoned and, after some further investigation, bodies discovered. The official count was much smaller, but an overall estimate was made of 20.
Pretty frightening for, in one case, a hall of just forty cents.
I know the OP said “No Jack-the-Ripper,” but the JTR case is part of a larger Fall of terror when Whitechapel in London (and other nearby districts) experienced an upswing in murders, and gruesome murders, and there seem to have been at least two serial killers at loose, possibly three.
The five victims attributed to JTR may not all have been his, and it’s remotely possible that the person who killed two of the canonical JTR victims killed a couple of other women not considered JTR victims.
Also, at the same time, there was someone murdering women, and dismembering them, and dumping body parts in the Thames, and occasionally other places. At first the police attributed some of these to JTR, but it’s pretty obvious that the MO is completely different. The most common nickname for this killer is “The Thames Torso Killer.” A number of headless and legless, sometimes also armless, torsos floated up out of the Thames around this time.
Before the police had enough bodies to recognize the signatures of different killers, there was just a growing file called “Whitechapel murders.”