5 Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries
Fascinating cases of mysterious disappearances, hijackings, ghost ships, and others.
These are only a few of the cases that caught my attention. Most of them have documentaries, podcasts, and a lot of resources that cover these cases in detail, which I definitely recommend checking out.
D.B. Cooper
On November 24, 1971, a man in his mid-40s, wearing a suit bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, Washington.
Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed the stewardess a note in which he stated that he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills.
After the flight landed in Seattle, Cooper released the 36 passengers in exchange for the parachutes and money. He kept a few of the crew members in order to fly to Mexico City.
Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Cooper jumped out of the back of the plane with a parachute, taking the money with him. He wasn’t seen since.
The FBI NORJAK (Northwest Hijacking) investigation looked at 800 suspects in the first five years.
At first, they believed that he could have served in the military as a paratrooper, however, he failed to notice that his reserve parachute was sewn shut for training.
A prime suspect was Richard Floyd McCoy, who was arrested for a similar hijacking less than five months after Cooper’s flight. But he was later ruled out because he didn’t match the descriptions of the flight attendants.
Another theory is that he didn’t survive as he would have landed in a heavily wooded area at night.
In 1980, a boy found a rotting package containing $5,800 in twenty-dollar bills along the Columbia River. The serial numbers of the money matched those of the ransom. But nothing more was discovered.
In 2016, the FBI officially closed the investigation.
Mary Celeste
The ghost ship set sail from New York to Genoa, Italy in November 1872. The ship was manned by Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, Sarah, their two-year-old daughter, Sophia, and eight crewmembers.
Supplies were supposed to last six months, however, less than a month later on December 5, the ghost ship was found abandoned by a passing British ship, Dei Gratia.
The ship was undamaged and the supplies were untouched. But a lifeboat was missing.
Some of the theories include pirate attack, mutiny, giant octopus or sea monster attack, and an explosion caused by fumes from the 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol in the ship’s hold.
In the 2007 documentary, The True Story of Mary Celeste another possible explanation was suggested. A faulty chronometer clogged onboard pump and rough seas could have resulted in Briggs abandoning the ship on a lifeboat.
Vatican mystery
For nearly 40 years, Emanuela Orlandi has been missing. She was 15 when she vanished on 22 June 1983.
She was on her way home from her flute lesson in Rome. She was late to class because she received a job offer from a representative of Avon Cosmetics.
At the end of the lesson, Emanuela spoke about the offer with one of her friends, who later left her with another girl at a bus stop.
Allegedly, she was last seen getting into a large, dark-colored BMW.
Recently, in 2019, the Orlandi family received an anonymous tip-off suggesting that Emanuela’s remains could be found in the Vatican’s Teutonic Cemetery.
However, the tombs did not contain any human remains, let alone the 15-year-old girl’s.
The tombs belonged to two 19th-century princesses, Princess Sophie von Hohenlohe and Princess Charlotte Federica of Mecklenburg, who were supposedly buried there in 1836 and 1840. However, they were completely empty.
Furthermore, two ossuaries were uncovered during the investigation and thousands of bones were discovered, enough to fill 24 bags.
Throughout the years, her disappearance was connected to an Italian criminal organization and one of its bosses Enrico De Pedis, a plot to kill John Paul II, and the Vatican bank money-laundering scandal.
Isdal Woman
A woman’s burned body was found in Ice Valley in 1970. There was a bottle of St. Hallvard Liqueur, jewelry, and clothes with labels ripped out placed around her.
The autopsy revealed that the woman burned alive and the cause of her death was a combination of this and the ingestion of a large number of sleeping pills.
Some argue that this might have been a complex suicide, while others believe that this was murder.
A few days later, two suitcases were found in Bergen Train Station’s lost luggage department. They were packed with wigs, timetables, maps, and cosmetics. However, all the labels were once again destroyed.
There was a coded note found in one of the suitcases, which provided a list of places where the woman had stayed. The police believed that the woman was involved in some sort of espionage. She used a variety of aliases and fake passports.
In 2016, the Isdal Woman’s case was reopened, however, her identity and what happened to her remains a mystery to this day.
Agatha Christie Disappearance
One of the greatest English crime novelists, Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926 from the 3rd of December to the 14th.
For some time before her disappearance, Agatha and her husband Archie fought due to his affair with a 25-year-old assistant, Nancy Neale. Archie’s request for divorce and Agatha’s mother’s death of bronchitis prior to this led to a very turbulent atmosphere in their family.
On the evening of the 3rd of December, Agatha and Archie fought. He left to spend the weekend with friends and his mistress, while Agatha left her daughter with the maid and also left the house a few hours later.
Her car was found the next morning, partly submerged in the bushes after an apparent car accident.
Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks put pressure on the investigation, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the help of a clairvoyant to find the writer using one of her gloves.
Ten days later, she was found at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate. She used the name of Theresa Neale to disguise herself.
He husband declared that she was suffering from amnesia and a concussion.
There were a few theories, varying from a possible nervous breakdown to a publicity stunt in order to attract more attention to her novels since she was little-known before her disappearance.
To this day, her disappearance remains a mystery. Even in her autobiography, she didn’t mention the 11 days that she was gone.
Although some of these cases remain unsolved, a few of these are still being investigated, with more and more discoveries being made throughout the years.
