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Unsolved disappearances & mysteries
People who walked out of a bar, a dorm, a farmhouse or a burning building and were never found, plus the strange deaths and signals no one has ever explained. Many of these families are still waiting. Where a case is still open, the story names the agency to contact. Somebody, somewhere, knows something.
The Sodder Children
For nearly forty years, if you drove Route 16 outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, you passed a billboard with five children’s faces on it.
Read case No. 051 · 9 minThe Lost Colony of Roanoke
On August 18, 1590, a man named John White came ashore on Roanoke Island looking for his family. He had been gone three years.
Read case No. 052 · 8 minBrandon Swanson
The last thing anyone ever heard Brandon Swanson say was two words, shouted into a cell phone in the dark. He had been talking to his father for forty-seven minutes.
Read case No. 053 · 8 minD.B. Cooper
He bought his ticket with cash. It was the afternoon before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, at Portland International Airport in Oregon.
Read case No. 054 · 9 minMaura Murray
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Route 112 runs east from the Vermont border through dense woods and scattered farmhouses, rising and curving along the Wild Ammonoosuc River.
Read case No. 055 · 7 minThe Springfield Three
It was graduation night. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall walked across the stage at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, and received…
Read case No. 056 · 5 minAsha Degree
In the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2000, during a cold winter storm, a truck driver on a two-lane highway outside Shelby, North Carolina, saw something strange in his headlights.
Read case No. 057 · 5 minBrian Shaffer
The security cameras caught him walking in. At 1:15 a.m. on Saturday, April 1, 2006, a camera at the entrance to a bar called the Ugly Tuna Saloona, on the second floor of a new shopping…
Read case No. 058 · 4 minThe Yuba County Five
On the night of Friday, February 24, 1978, five young men from Yuba City, California, drove about fifty miles north to Chico to watch a college basketball game.
Read case No. 059 · 5 minDorothy Arnold
On a bright, cold afternoon in December 1910, a young woman in a blue serge suit, a black velvet hat trimmed with flowers, and a fox-fur scarf walked out of her family’s townhouse on East…
Read case No. 060 · 4 minJudge Joseph Force Crater
For decades after 1930, if someone in America didn’t show up when they were supposed to, people would joke: “Judge Crater, call your office.”
Read case No. 061 · 5 minTara Calico
On June 15, 1989, a woman walking through the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, a small town on the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle, noticed something lying on the…
Read case No. 062 · 4 minThe Bennington Triangle
In the southwestern corner of Vermont, east of the town of Bennington, the Green Mountains rise in a dense, dark, rolling wilderness of spruce, birch and maple.
Read case No. 063 · 5 minFlight 19
At 2:10 in the afternoon on December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida on a routine training mission.
Read case No. 064 · 5 minAmelia Earhart
At 8:43 on the morning of July 2, 1937, the radio room of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored off a speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, picked up a woman’s voice.
Read case No. 065 · 5 minJimmy Hoffa
At about 2:30 on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 30, 1975, a short, stocky man in a dark blue shirt and dark pants stood in the parking lot of a restaurant in the Detroit suburbs, waiting.
Read case No. 066 · 5 minElisa Lam
Elisa Lam’s death became one of the most discussed cases of the internet age. A short, grainy security video of her final hours was watched by millions of people.
Read case No. 067 · 5 minDennis Martin
It was supposed to be a Father’s Day tradition. Every year, the men of the Martin family of Knoxville, Tennessee, went camping together in the Great Smoky Mountains for Father’s Day weekend.
Read case No. 068 · 4 minZebb Quinn
Two days after Zebb Quinn disappeared, his car turned up in a restaurant parking lot near a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.
Read case No. 069 · 4 minKenny Veach
In the fall of 2014, a man from Las Vegas posted a short video on YouTube of himself hiking through the desert mountains north of the city.
Read case No. 070 · 4 minJoshua Maddux
In the summer of 2015, a crew of contractors was hired to tear down an old cabin in the mountain town of Woodland Park, Colorado.
Read case No. 071 · 4 minGlen and Bessie Hyde
In the autumn of 1928, two newlyweds set out to do something no woman had ever done. Glen and Bessie Hyde had been married for only a few months.
Read case No. 072 · 5 minEverett Ruess
In February 1935, a search party riding through the remote canyon country of southern Utah came upon two burros grazing in a small, makeshift corral in a side canyon called Davis Gulch.
Read case No. 073 · 5 minJean Spangler
On the evening of Friday, October 7, 1949, a young actress and dancer named Jean Spangler kissed her five-year-old daughter goodbye, told her sister-in-law she was going to see her…
Read case No. 074 · 5 minConnie Converse
In August 1974, a fifty-year-old woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, packed her belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, said goodbye to almost no one, and drove away.
Read case No. 075 · 5 minMary Shotwell Little
At about eight o’clock on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 1965, a young woman finished dinner with a co-worker at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in Lenox Square, the gleaming new shopping…
Read case No. 076 · 5 minRey Rivera
On a spring evening in 2006, a man in Baltimore took a phone call at home, hurried out of the house, and drove away. Eight days later, his body was found in an empty room of one of the…
Read case No. 077 · 5 min657 Boulevard
In June 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus closed on the house of their dreams. It was a big, gracious, six-bedroom Dutch Colonial built in 1905, on a tree-lined street called Boulevard in…
Read case No. 078 · 4 minThe Carroll A. Deering
On the morning of January 31, 1921, a Coast Guard lookout at the Cape Hatteras station on North Carolina’s Outer Banks spotted a large sailing ship stuck fast on the Diamond Shoals.
Read case No. 079 · 5 minNorthwest Orient Flight 2501
Shortly after midnight on June 24, 1950, a Northwest Orient Airlines plane flying west over Lake Michigan radioed a routine request to air traffic controllers.
Read case No. 080 · 4 minMary Reeser
On the morning of July 2, 1951, a telegram boy knocked on the door of a small apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. The building’s landlady, Pansy Carpenter, was with him, trying to…
Read case No. 081 · 4 minThe Phoenix Lights
On the evening of Thursday, March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up at the sky and saw something they couldn’t explain.
Read case No. 082 · 4 minThe Kecksburg Incident
At about a quarter to five on the afternoon of December 9, 1965, people across a huge swath of North America looked up and saw a fireball streak across the sky.
Read case No. 083 · 4 minTrenny Gibson
On Friday, October 8, 1976, a school bus carrying a horticulture class from Bearden High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, pulled into the parking lot near Clingmans Dome, the highest point…
Read case No. 084 · 3 minThelma Pauline Melton
On the afternoon of Friday, September 25, 1981, three women set out from a campground for an easy walk in the woods. They were friends — Thelma Pauline Melton, who was fifty-eight, and two…
Read case No. 085 · 3 minDeOrr Kunz Jr.
Timber Creek Campground is a small, remote campsite in the mountains of east-central Idaho, at the end of a long dirt road, surrounded by sagebrush hills, aspen groves and pine forest.
Read case No. 086 · 4 minJennifer Kesse
Somewhere in the hours between the night of Monday, January 23, 2006, and the morning of Tuesday, January 24, Jennifer Kesse vanished from her new condominium in Orlando, Florida.
Read case No. 087 · 4 minLeah Roberts
In March 2000, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Durham, North Carolina, packed up her white 1993 Jeep Cherokee, put her cat in the passenger seat, and set off across the country.
Read case No. 088 · 4 minThe Boy in the Box
On a cold day in February 1957, a young man was checking muskrat traps in a weedy, overgrown lot along Susquehanna Road, in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, when he noticed a…
Read case No. 089 · 4 minBobby Dunbar
This is a story about a boy who disappeared, and a boy who was found. For ninety years, everyone believed they were the same boy.
Read case No. 090 · 4 minAmbrose Bierce
In the autumn of 1913, one of the most famous writers in America set out on a journey he seemed to suspect he would never come back from.
Read case No. 091 · 5 minThe Chicago Tylenol Murders
On the morning of September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up feeling sick in her family’s home in Elk Grove Village, a suburb northwest of Chicago.
Read case No. 092 · 4 minThe Black Dahlia
On the morning of January 15, 1947, a young mother named Betty Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter along a quiet street in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles…
Read case No. 093 · 5 minThe Zodiac Killer
On the evening of December 20, 1968, two teenagers on their first date drove out to a lonely spot on Lake Herman Road, just outside the city of Vallejo, California, about thirty miles…
Read case No. 094 · 5 minThe Lady of the Dunes
On a hot summer afternoon in July 1974, a thirteen-year-old girl walking her dog in the sand dunes near Race Point Beach, at the very tip of Cape Cod, found a woman lying on a green beach…
Read case No. 095 · 3 minMorgan Nick
On the evening of Friday, June 9, 1995, a six-year-old girl named Morgan Nick went with her mother to a Little League baseball game in Alma, a small town in western Arkansas, near the…
Read case No. 096 · 3 minThe Max Headroom Broadcast Intrusion
At 9:14 on the evening of Sunday, November 22, 1987, viewers in Chicago who were watching the sports report on WGN-TV’s nine o’clock news saw the screen suddenly go black.
Read case No. 097 · 4 minJim Sullivan
In 1969, a young singer-songwriter from Southern California released an album called U.F.O. The cover showed him leaning against a wall in a hotel, with a strange expression on his face.
Read case No. 098 · 4 minJason Jolkowski
At about 10:45 on the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2001, a neighbor in Omaha, Nebraska, looked out and saw nineteen-year-old Jason Jolkowski in front of his family’s house, helping his…
Read case No. 099 · 4 minThe Taos Hum
Since the early 1990s, people in and around Taos, New Mexico, have reported a low, droning hum that most of their neighbors can’t hear at all. Scientists studied it. No one found the source.
Read case No. 100 · 4 minNothing in the files matches that. Try another name or town.
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