Trick-or-Treat
For most people, Halloween is a holiday where little kids put on costumes and go trick-or-treating around neighborhoods. It's also a day where adults get to play dress up and make fools of themselves. But what is Halloween without a scary story? And what is the nature of those spooky tales?
So I thought it would be interesting to look at the strange and the weird. Which unsolved mystery fascinates you the most? Without even getting into arguments over aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot, chupacabras, green children, the Loch Ness monster, or even who killed Jimmy Hoffa, there are some more down-to-earth mysteries that are just as chilling and unnerving. The list below consists of real cases and issues that have perplexed the public and multiple investigators, and in some ways are just as scary as anything Hollywood could dream up.
Continue below for more.
► The Death of Elisa Lam
In 2013, a maintenance worker discovered the nude body of a 21-year-old woman floating face up in one of the rooftop water tanks of Los Angeles' Cecil Hotel after guests had complained about weak water pressure. The woman was identified as Elisa Lam, a Canadian student. Her death was ruled accidental by the Los Angeles coroner, even though some strange circumstances surround the incident. Apparently authorities believe she suffered some sort of mental break, possibly bipolar disorder, somehow gained access to the locked roof without setting off an alarm, climbed inside the hotel's water tank and drowned.
However, police also found the surveillance video below, which are some of Lam's final moments. In the video, Lam displays extremely odd behavior, in which she seems to be hiding from something and making odd movements. This has led to all sorts of internet theories, including demonic possession, ghosts within the hotel, and given the Cecil Hotel has in the recent past been the residence of at least two serial killers, including Richard Ramirez (a.k.a. "The Night Stalker"), the possibility that she was murdered.
Keep this in mind while watching the video: No signs of drug or alcohol use were found in the autopsy of the body. Also of note, according to executive producer Ryan Murphy, the current season of American Horror Story was inspired by the video and the Cecil Hotel's history.
From William M. Welch at
USA Today:
She was staying at the hotel while on a holiday trip to California. Her body was found Feb. 19 in a water tank on the roof of the building. Authorities had searched the roof earlier during an investigation into her disappearance but did not open the four cisterns on the roof ... Authorities including police and the coroner have not stated how they believe Lam got into the tank. Law enforcement officials had been careful to say that the death could be accidental, despite widespread public suspicions of foul play.
► The Texas Killing Fields
In the past four decades, more than
459 deaths and 41 attempted homicides are believed to be linked to serial killers who are using the nation's highways to find and dispose of their victims
From the 1970s to the 1990s, more than 30 bodies were found along Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston. The victims are female, mostly in their teens and they were found in a
25-acre area near Texas City. Whether the murders were the work of mostly one killer or multiple killers using the area is unknown. However, at least one person has been convicted of murdering one of the victims.
In 1986, the body of 13-year-old Krystal Jean Baker was found under a bridge in the area. She had been beaten, raped and strangled to death. In 2010, Kevin Edison Smith was arrested on an unrelated charge in Louisiana, but a sample of his DNA was taken. It matched stains found on Baker's dress and underwear.
It should also be noted that just northeast of this area is a region that's been dubbed "The Dead Zone." Dozens of women have disappeared from an area around southeast Texas to north Louisiana between Houston and Shreveport.
► The Chicago Tylenol Murders
It began on September 29, 1982, when a 12-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, Illinois, complained of a sore throat and a runny nose. Mary Kellerman's parents gave her one extra-strength Tylenol capsule. She died hours later. That same day, Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, died of what seemed to have been a massive heart attack. Adam's brother Stanley and his wife Theresa gathered with other family members to mourn his death. At some point, Stanley and Theresa took Tylenol extra-strength capsules from the same bottle Adam had used, and both died shortly thereafter. Over the course of the next few days, three more seemingly healthy people died after taking Tylenol.
Investigators realized the Tylenol link and that set off a panic. Whoever the culprit (or culprits) were had removed Tylenol packages from stores, tainted the capsules with potassium cyanide and then returned them to the shelves at groceries and pharmacies. This led to Johnson & Johnson, the owner of the Tylenol brand, conducting one of the largest product recalls in history. And the incident is responsible for tamper-resistant packaging being the norm for not only medicines, but also on beverages and food products.
Seven people in the Chicago area were killed by Tylenol that had been poisoned with potassium cyanide.
From Dr. Howard Markel at
PBS Newshour:
In 1983, the U.S. Congress passed what was called “the Tylenol bill,” making it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products. In 1989, the FDA established federal guidelines for manufacturers to make all such products tamper-proof.
However, to this day, the person (or persons) responsible for these murders has never been conclusively identified.
James William Lewis was convicted and spent over a decade in prison for extortion in relation to the crime. Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million in exchange for a stop to the poisonings. But whether he was really connected to the crime or just a copycat/scumbag attempting to use the situation for his advantage is open to debate. According to
reports, documents indicate Department of Justice investigators believed Lewis was responsible for the deaths, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him with the murders.
► UVB-76
UVB-76 (a.k.a. "The Buzzer") is a shortwave radio station that broadcasts a repeating buzzing tone at the frequency 4625 kHz. And it has been broadcasting that tone consistently at high power, at a rate of 25 tones per minute, for more than 30 years.
The transmission has been traced to Russia, and on very rare occasions a voice interrupts the tone and announces a series of numbers and names, and then the broadcast returns to the repeating tone.
- At 2100 UTC on December 24, 1997: "Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4."
- At 0418 UTC on December 9, 2002: "UVB-76, UVB-76. 62 691 IZAFET 36 93 82 70"
- At 0757 UTC on February 21, 2006: "UVB-76, UVB-76. 75-59-75-59. 39-52-53-58. 5-5-2-5. Konstantin-1-9-0-9-0-8-9-8-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka. Konstantin 8-4. 9-7-5-5-9-Tatiana. Anna Larisa Uliyana-9-4-1-4-3-4-8."
- At 1335 UTC on August 23, 2010: "UVB-76, UVB-76. 93 882 NAIMINA 74 14 35 74"
- At 1648 UTC on September 7, 2013: "Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. 04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T. T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y."
This has led to many theories as to what might be the purpose behind this? These theories include scientific explanations (i.e., measuring changes in the ionosphere) to it being a test signal to keep the channel occupied and operators at receiving stations alert. There are also two other Russian stations that follow a similar format, nicknamed "
The Pip" and "
The Squeaky Wheel."
The dominant theory is that UVB-76 is part of a network of numbers stations which broadcast coded messages to intelligence operatives at specific times to relay orders for specific events. On March 18, 2014, less than 24 hours after Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, this was heard: "T-E-R-R-A-K-O-T-A. Mikhail Dimitri Zhenya Boris. Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. 81 26 T-E-R-R-A-K-O-T-A."
► Wow! Signal
On August 15, 1977, Jerry Ehman detected a strong narrowband signal,
30 times more powerful than the average radiation from deep space, while working at the
Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University. Ehman wrote "Wow!" on the data printout of the signal. The Wow! signal has been the source of much speculation as to whether it's extraterrestrial in source and possible proof of alien intelligence. If the signal originated in space, the
most likely source, given the data, is a globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius, near the
Chi Sagittarii star group. In 2012, the Arecibo Observatory
broadcast a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the same direction.
However, all attempts to detect the signal or others like it from the same direction since 1977 have failed. And there are other alternative theories as to the signal's origin, including it being an Earth based signal that was reflected by space debris and some form of scintillation of a weaker signal.
► Did D.B. Cooper Escape To Safety?
On November 24th, 1971, a middle-aged man carrying an attache case and identifying himself as "Dan Cooper" approached the Northwest flight counter at the Portland International Airport. He bought a one way ticket to Seattle, Washington. Once in flight, Cooper passed a note to a flight attendant, who at first thought he was making a pass at her, that announced he had a bomb. Cooper then demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills and parachutes. According to at least some of the first-hand accounts of flight attendants, Cooper was calm, collected and polite throughout the entire hijacking.
After the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, the FBI met his demands and the Boeing 727 was refueled, Cooper released all the passengers and gave the pilot a heading towards Mexico City, which he wanted to be flown at the minimum airspeed possible without stalling the 727. Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, in the middle of a storm, Cooper had the aft airstairs lowered and jumped out of the back of the plane at 10,000 ft. with a bag of money. He has never been heard from since.
F.B.I. wanted poster of D. B. Cooper
A 1996
story from the
Seattle Times claimed that somewhere deep inside the J. Edgar Hoover building, the FBI had a case file on Cooper that was then more than
60 volumes thick. And the case is still ongoing. In all of those volumes, they still don't know what Cooper's real name is, or whether he survived the jump. In 1980, $5,800 of the $200,000 ransom was
discovered. The decaying $20 bills were found on a Columbia River beach in Vancouver, Washington. What happened to the rest of the money is anyone's guess.
And the incident remains the only unsolved aviation hijacking case in American history.
► The Max Headroom Incident
On November 22, 1987, someone successfully hijacked the signal for both WGN-TV and WTTW in Chicago over the course of three hours. The first intrusion occurred during WGN's evening news broadcast. While showing highlights for a Bears game, WGN's signal went to black for 15 seconds and when it returned there was a person wearing a Max Headroom mask with sunglasses in front of a moving metal background. There was no audio, and the intrusion was stopped when WGN's engineers switched the frequency of their link with the John Hancock Center.
A second hack occurred later in the evening when WTTW's broadcast of a Doctor Who episode was interrupted. This time the intrusion lasted about 90 seconds, included audio, complaints about Chuck Swirsky being a "frickin' liberal," and spanking with a flyswatter.
From Chris Knittel at
Vice's Motherboard:
In the case of the Max Headroom intrusion, the theory goes like this: the hacker managed to overpower the microwaves of the STL, which sat vulnerable to attack on a frequency that wouldn't have been hard to find, as they were being sent to the receivers atop the John Hancock Building and Sears Tower.
The intruders would have simply had to switch on their transmission equipment at a high enough location, probably a high-rise apartment or a roof, at a place between the two studios and their downtown transmitters, somewhere on the North or Northwest Sides of Chicago. From there, they could blast the skyscraper receivers with high-power microwave frequencies, and by overriding the studios' signals, they could trick the transmitters into sending out their own signal. "I think the bad guy got close to the receiving end and just transmitted a signal that was received with a stronger strength than the more distant, intended signal," said Marcus ... In the age of digital transmissions and encryption, signal intrusions have become harder to perpetrate, but they still happen. In 2007, a Disney Channel show being broadcast to a town in New Jersey was interrupted with scenes from an adult film; last year, someone inserted hardcore gay porn into a morning news show in Hamilton, Ontario, and a technician in Tuscon was charged with doing something similar to Comcast's 2009 broadcast of the Super Bowl in that city. Last February, a hacker managed to hijack the emergency alert systems of four separate TV stations with warnings of a zombie invasion; he was quickly found and arrested.
The Max Headroom incident has been called one of the strangest hacks in TV history. Federal investigators have never identified the culprits, and the incident remains a mystery.
► The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich manuscript is a book for which no one knows what the hell it means. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. But pages from the book have been carbon-dated to the early 15th century.
Cryptographers, mathematicians, linguists, people who get paid to find and decipher patterns, have all been left unable to decipher a single word
The text appears to be a real language. But if it is, it's a language that no one understands. All attempts to decipher a single word of it have failed. Based on the illustrations, the manuscript seems to be concerned with medicinal recipes and biological science. On the other hand, there is a school of thought that thinks the book is a giant 15th century hoax, and it was written in gibberish purposely.
► Hinterkaifeck
Have you ever been alone at home, and in middle of the night/early morning someone knocks on your door? At first, you wonder whether you should go see who it is and what they want, or just ignore it. But then, if you're neurotic like me, you wonder whether maybe whoever it is might be looking for a house where someone doesn't answer. And then if you get to the door and no one is there, the gears in the brains imagination start spinning even faster still.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood details the circumstances around the murder of the Clutter family in 1959. Herbert Clutter, a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children were senselessly killed in the middle of the night after a botched robbery attempt by Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith. The terror of In Cold Blood combines the unsettling feeling of an unknown being on the other side of the door with the inexplicable randomness of a crime done for no real reason at all. And what makes In Cold Blood even more disturbing is that it's not fiction. The events actually happened.
Thirty-seven years earlier, a similar case happened in Germany. The only difference is that to this day no one knows why the Gruber family was butchered at their farm or who did it. On March 31, 1922, Andreas Gruber, his wife Cäzilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, her two children (ages 7 and 2), and their maid Maria Baumgartner were killed with a mattock, which is a tool similar to a pickaxe. Baumgartner had just started her job as the family's maid and it's suspected that she was killed hours after arriving at the farm. On April 4, 1922, neighbors began to wonder about why they had not seen any of the Grubers for some time. When the farm was searched, four of the victims, Andreas, his wife, his daughter Viktoria, and the elder granddaughter were found in the barn, stacked in hay. The maid and the youngest grandchild were found dead in their beds.
The crime scene in the barn
No discernible motive has ever been established for the murders. However, the circumstances surrounding the murders are as strange as the murders themselves.
- Andreas Gruber was alleged to have been having an incestuous relationship with his daughter, Viktoria. And it was unknown who the father was of Viktoria's youngest child, with some rumors claiming it was the product of incest.
- While all members of the family were killed with a mattock, Viktoria's body showed signs of strangulation.
- A few days prior to the crime, Andreas is alleged to have told neighbors about discovering footprints in the snow leading from the edge of the forest to the farm, and of hearing noises around his home.
- The previous maid before Baumgartner quit the job and claimed the Gruber house was haunted.
- Whomever was responsible may have stayed at the farm for a bit of time after committing the murders. The cattle and livestock were well fed when the bodies were found.
► The Dyatlov Pass Incident
Ten skiers, consisting of eight men and two women, decided to trek through the Ural mountains in early 1959. A little over a week into their journey nine of them were dead. The last time they were seen alive was when one of the group, Yuri Yudin, decided to turn back because of illness. Their trek is believed to have ended on February 2 in a pass on the east shoulder of the mountain Kholat Syakhl.
A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on February 26, 1959
It's speculated the elements caused the group to make camp in the pass. What happened next is anyone's guess, but Soviet investigators of the time claimed "a compelling unknown force" had caused the deaths. The group's tent had been cut open from the inside and the skiers had fled without protective clothing in -30 degree Celsius temperatures. Footprints around the tent indicated the people who left it had done so in their socks or barefoot, and the skiers had moved down a snowy slope toward a thick forest. When the bodies were eventually recovered, they showed no signs of struggle or defensive wounds, and yet two of the skiers had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue.
Over the years, speculation about what happened has ranged from the scientific (e.g., the weather conditions created a Kármán vortex street and produced infrasound waves that caused the skiers to panic), to the more paranormal suggestions of aliens or other weirdness, and the tinfoil since at least some reports surrounding the incident claim there was radioactive contamination among the bodies, leading to suggestions the skiers were exposed to some Soviet experiment.
The most logical explanation seems to be that an avalanche may have happened in the area. It would explain why the skiers clawed their way out of the tent, if it had been covered in snow. Exposed to the elements, hypothermia would set in, and one of the symptoms of hypothermia is
paradoxical undressing. As hypothermia becomes worse, people become disoriented and combative. They also feel like they're overheating, causing them to disrobe. Add all of those things up, and you would have a bunch of people pulling off their clothes and acting in dumb, aggressive ways before dying of exposure. If the skiers injuries didn't occur during those final moments, the missing tongue and bodily injuries may have been the result of scavenging animals picking over their bodies in the time in-between their deaths and anyone finding the camp site.
Of course, all of the above is just conjecture. No one really knows what happened for sure, and no one ever will.
► The Black Dahlia
On the morning of January 15, 1947, the bisected body of a young woman was found in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress, had been cut in half at the waist and drained of blood, with her body mutilated in gruesome ways. Short's mouth had been cut from ear to ear (i.e., a Glasgow smile), but her hair and the halves of her body had been carefully washed and positioned.
The story became a sensation in the media, which dubbed Short "The Black Dahlia."
The case remains unsolved even though there has been a legion of possible suspects suggested in the near 7 decades since the murder.
From Jennifer Latson at TIME:
One promising admission came a few weeks after the murder, from an Army corporal who said he had been drinking with Short in San Francisco a few days before her body was discovered — then blacked out, with no memory of his activity until he came to again in a cab outside New York’s Penn Station. (Short, an aspiring movie star, had a fondness for servicemen, according to The Black Dahlia, the James Ellroy novel based on her murder.)
Asked if he thought he had committed the murder, the corporal said yes, and became a prime suspect until evidence emerged that he had actually been on his military base the day of Short’s death.
Then there was the woman who became convinced — in 1991, after therapy chipped away at 40-year-old repressed memories — that her late father was the murderer. Police dug up the yard of her childhood home, where she believed they’d find his weapons or the remains of other victims. They did find a rusty knife, farm tools, and costume jewelry — but no evidence to tie him to the Black Dahlia case or any other murders.
The state of Short's body, and the manner in which she was cut in half, has led suspicion to people with medical training. And some reports
claim that of the LAPD's possible suspects, about a third of them are medical doctors.
► The Lost Colony at Roanoke
Established in the late 16th century in what is today's Dare County, North Carolina, the Roanoke Colony was an attempt at a permanent English settlement in North America. The expedition was organized by Sir Walter Raleigh through a charter granted him by Queen Elizabeth I. During the initial exploration, the settlers encountered harsh conditions and angered the native populations by sacking and burning a village.
At the end of 1587, there were a little more than a hundred colonists living in Roanoke. The governor of the colony, John White, returned to England to plead for help and more supplies. Because of the Anglo-Spanish War, no relief would be sent to the colony for 3 years. When White returned to the colony, there was no one to be found. All of the homes and fortifications had been dismantled, and the only clue as to why was the word "Croatoan" carved into a post. White took it to mean the colonists may have moved to Croatoan Island (a.k.a. Hatteras Island). However, the ultimate fate of the colonists and the meaning of the Croatoan carving are to this day unknown.
Croatoan
There are many theories as to what happened. Among them:
- Given they were at war at the time, the Spanish found the colony and killed the settlers. The "Croatoan" carving was an attempt by the Spanish to pin the blame on local tribes.
- The colonists were slaughtered and the colony ransacked for supplies by the native populations in the area.
- The colonists abandoned Roanoke and integrated into the native populations in the area.
From Jake Slocum at
Cracked:
It's almost as if, we don't know, a certain group of settlers realized their colony sucked, and went and found some natives nearby who seemed to know how to live off the land. And that they then left their shitty colony forever to go live happily ever after on Croatan Island, and to have impressive amounts of sex with the natives.
► The Zodiac Killer
Between December 1968 and October 1969, the Zodiac Killer is confirmed to have murdered seven people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is suspected in the murder of at least three others. The victims were both men and women, and both guns and knives used as murder weapons.
The killer named himself "Zodiac" and claimed to have killed as many as 37 people in a series of letters sent to the
Vallejo Times Herald, the
San Francisco Chronicle, and the
San Francisco Examiner, which taunted both the police and public. Inserted as part of the letters were a series of four cryptograms (or ciphers), which the Zodiac killer claimed would reveal his true identity. Only one of these ciphers has been solved to at least some degree. Whether the other three actually contain a message or are pure gibberish is a mystery that will probably never be solved.
The text of the only cryptogram that has been deciphered
In most of the murders and attacks confirmed by San Francisco P.D. to have been perpetrated by the Zodiac Killer, the victims were couples in public places. The first murders thought to have been committed in the series were against Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20, 1968. Both were teenagers who were shot while parked at a "lover's lane" spot. The attack against Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard on September 27, 1969 happened as they were picknicking. The description Shepard gave authorities of the killer before lapsing into a coma and dying is of someone dressed like a supervillain.
The description of the Zodiac Killer given by victim Cecelia Shepard before she died
The mystery of it all is almost as disturbing as the nature of the Zodiac murders, and has led to various theories over the years. For example, it was once suggested that Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the
Unabomber) and the Zodiac Killer might be one and the same. Although, the theory doesn't make a lot of sense. Both the Unabomber and the Zodiac Killer murdered people and wrote letters intended for the press. But that's where the similarities stop. Both had different methods of killing (e.g., bombs versus guns/knives), and the letters from each have different tones. Kaczynski wrote his manifestos like a doctoral thesis, and the Zodiac Killer intentionally misspells words and mocks the readers.
The person thought to be the most likely suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen. Circumstantial evidence points to his possible guilt (e.g., he owned the same type of typewriter used for the letters sent to the press, the first murders occurred near where he lived and worked, the "Zodiac" moniker may have been a reference to the type of watch he wore, etc.). However, testing in 2002 of DNA samples found on the envelope and the stamp of one of the Zodiac letters did not match Allen. But whether one should assume the sample taken from the letter would be from the Zodiac Killer in the first place is another conundrum in finding the murderer's identity.