One of the few Unsolved Mysteries cases that I remember.
Lost Hawaiian Fishermen – What happened to the lost crew of the “Sarah Joe”?
They must be Bill Mauldin fans.
Re the “Sarah Joe”: What’s to wonder about, except the details. Many boats go missing in the ocean and larger lakes without a trace. It’s only when someone shows up having survived and drifted for months, or when traces are found that we hear about them again. And it’s only the surprising cases, like this one (2000 miles in a 17-foot flatboat?) that it becomes a mystery.
They got blown out to sea, drifted for some unknown time, and at least two of them reached the far island - after events we can only sketch in and wonder about.
I guess the creepy factor is at least one person survived to bury the dead guy in a shallow grave and place the spirit money on him, I would assume someone with a connection to asian culture. No clue why they were carrying it though.
I think the “book” object is being misdescribed, or incompletely described. It sounds like several kinds of things - disposable batteries, pocket hand warmers, etc. - that are composed of layers of paper and “foil.” If a plastic shell disintegrated, it would leave such a stack of paper and foil and little else after ten years.
It seems clear that at least two survivors reached the island, and one buried the other. It’s all very spooky and sad and mysterious, but it’s not really a mystery in any overall sense.
Eek, sorry about wrecking your weekend :). It’s funny how one person’s ‘fascinating’ is another person’s ‘nightmare fuel’. Me, I’m fine with weird and mysterious and strange; I find it fascinating. What makes something nightmarish for me is knowing that someone suffered horribly - physically and/or psychologically* - and there’s no real reason to think Somerton Man suffered, so I never thought of the case as nightmare fuel.
*If you’re like me, don’t ever read about Hinterkaifeck. Lots of fascinating mystery, but one detail that is pure headwrecker.
Oh, haha, no problem - this was a while ago, so not your fault at all!
I see where you’re coming from. The creepiest part for me was that, in trying to decipher the “code” (who knows if it’s really a code, but oh well), I had to try and get myself into the mindset of a man about to commit suicide. That was… Not pleasant.
Oh man. Can’t help myself. Googling now. Wish me luck. 
What’s the headwrecker?
The 7 year old, lying amongst her dead family, tearing her hair out in tufts, is pretty headwrecky.
I’d say it’s that the perpetrator stayed around for several days after the murders, taking care of the animals and so forth, and may have been in hiding at the farm for days beforehand.
If he saw footprints and heard some one moving about, he very well may have been.
Perhaps some one who needed to hide for a while and was discovered.
I’d guess the headwrecker is:
[spoiler] from Wiki:
The two-year-old Josef was rumoured to be the son of Viktoria and her father Andreas, who had an incestuous relationship. [/spoiler]
Yeah, it was the hair-tearing that did it for me. (I was going to spoiler it, given the no-nightmares subject of the thread, but since Baron Greenback’s already said it…) The fact that the killer might have been hiding on the farm for days beforehand is creepy as fuck, but doesn’t hit my AAAAIEEEE BACK BUTTON nerve.
There’s the unexplained, there’s the unexplainable, and then there’s the “Dear God, DON’T explain it!” The last may be the best.
I think the most explainable was the guy with socks stuck all over his clothes.
As for some of the rest, please pass the brain bleach.
It is as the boat was found 10 year later, but wasn’t there 4 years prior when a government survey was conducted on the island. So, where was the boat and body for 6 years.
It looks pretty conclusive that it is an Australian guy called Craig Wright (possibly working with another person at first).
There’s a disappearance which has always intrigued me, and which I feel doesn’t fall under the OP’s ban of “where the person concerned was almost certainly murdered” (abduction and subsequent killing, in the spies-and-spooks realm, is usually reckoned as a a possible – but fairly far-fetched – explanation).
The incident commonly known as “the man who walked round the horses”. It involves the disappearance in November 1809 of the British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst, at Perleberg in Germany. Bathurst was en route to Hamburg from Vienna, where he had been serving as the British envoy. While checking out a change of horses for his coach, at an inn in Perleberg, he happened to step out of the sight of his secretary and valet; and was not seen again, ever – not seen leaving the inn yard, or anything else.
A short story by H. Beam Piper, starting from this reported disappearance, postulates Bathurst’s having vanished into an alternative-history universe where the Napoleonic Wars, then raging in his own universe, never happened…
I’ve always loved the Bathurst one too, but unfortunately it looks like the mystery factor became exaggerated over the years. The whole ‘he just stepped around the horses and vanished’ thing comes from a later writer’s account. The contemporary stuff sounds more like he went out to the courtyard on his own to look at the carriage, and when other people followed, he wasn’t there. It’s not like he vanished in front of people’s eyes - his sister’s account says that ‘After waiting for him for nearly an hour, his attendants began to make enquiries for him.’ So no one was immediately worried or surprised that he wasn’t there.
Both the Wikipedia entry and a Fortean Times article (pdf warning) conclude that he was probably jumped and murdered, either for political reasons or for his stuff.
Thanks – but, ah, damn ! – I also find Fortean weirdness a lot more exciting and inspiring, than mundane spy-and-spook crap. I’d been taken with the Bathurst mystery, since reading about it in a book by the early-20th-century aficionado of the unexplained, Rupert Gould (as far as I know, no relation to the Baring-Gould of the FT article). It would seem that I, and H. Beam Piper, have been seduced by the weird and arcane’s being more intriguing than the mundane and probable…