The medical world evolves almost daily. New vaccines and treatments are developed at an unbelievable rate, and millions have been successfully treated worldwide for all types of ailments. However, a medical mystery sometimes presents itself to doctors and completely baffles them.

10 The Woman Who Can Hear Her Eyes Move
Lancashire, England

Julie Redfern from Lancashire was playing the popular computer game Tetris eight years ago when she heard a funny squeaking sound. She couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, until she realized the sound occurred every time she moved her eyes from side to side. Julie was hearing the sound of her own eyeballs.

In the years that followed, Julie became aware that she could also hear her blood coursing through her veins. Her own chewing was so loud to her that she missed out on the conversation around the dinner table. Perhaps the worst of it all came when her condition became so bad that her eyes would literally shake in their sockets when her office phone rang.

Julie was diagnosed with SCDS (superior canal dehiscence syndrome). This is a very rare medical condition that causes the bones in the inner ear to lose density, resulting in very sensitive hearing.

Doctors only became aware of this medical condition during the ’90s. A pioneer surgery was performed on Julie. Her doctors successfully restored normal hearing to one of her ears, which has given her hope that the other ear can be cured as well.

9 The Boy Who Doesn’t Feel Hunger
Cedar Falls, Iowa

Twelve-year-old Landon Jones woke up one morning in 2013 without his usual appetite. He felt very faint and couldn’t stop coughing because thick phlegm blocked his chest. His parents rushed him to hospital where doctors discovered an infection in the boy’s left lung. They wasted no time in treating Landon and the infection was soon handled.

However, his appetite didn’t return when he got back home. Because of the lack of will to eat or drink anything, Landon rapidly lost weight. Before his family knew what hit them, Landon lost 16 kilograms (36 lb).

Doctors are at a loss as to what is causing Landon to lack hunger and thirst. In the year since Landon’s infection, his parents have taken him to medical experts in five different cities with no success. All they know is that Landon might well be the only person on the planet with this condition.

Landon now has to be reminded on a constant basis to eat and drink. Even his teachers have gotten into the habit of making sure he ingests food and water during school hours. Doctors are currently working to figure out whether Landon might have a dysfunctional hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that controls hunger and thirst. They are also looking into the medication that Landon is on that controls what doctors call absence seizures. The exact cause of Landon’s illness remains unclear at this stage.

8 The Girl Who Was Mysteriously Paralyzed
Tampa, Florida

About a month and a half before Christmas 2013, nine-year-old Marysue Grivna’s mother took her to hospital to get a flu shot. This year, the little girl will be celebrating Christmas confined to a wheelchair and unable to express herself as vocally as she could last year.

Just three days after receiving the flu shot, Marysue struggled to get up in the morning and was unable to speak. Terrified, her parents rushed her to hospital. They were shocked when doctors diagnosed their daughter with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. Known as ADEM, the disease begins when the immune system attacks myelin, which encases nerves in the brain and spinal cord. The white matter inside the brain and spine become extremely vulnerable without the myelin. Once this covering is broken through, paralysis and blindness can occur.

Doctors cannot confirm or deny the parents’ accusation that the flu shot Marysue received is the cause of her illness. Carla and Steven Grivna have done extensive research and refuse to believe the vaccine isn’t to blame. Medical experts confirmed that the exact cause of ADEM is unknown and that the results of several tests done on Marysue are all inconclusive when it comes to determining the manner in which the girl contracted the disease.

The future looks bleak for Marysue, even though doctors believe there is a slight chance her symptoms might be reversible. Her father has taken to carrying his daughter everywhere, unable to help her in any other way.

7 The Girls Who Cry Stones
Yemen

At the beginning of this year, Yemeni father Mohammad Saleh Al Jaharani was astonished when his eight-year-old daughter Saadia started crying tiny stones instead of tears.

Saadia is one of 12 children born to Mohammed from two wives. She is the only one of her siblings with this strange condition. No one has been able to give Saadia a diagnosis, nor can doctors find anything out of the ordinary with her eyes.

Another girl in the same region is the only other confirmed case of crying stones. Fifteen-year-old Saboura Hassan Al Fagiah experienced the same tiny stone tears. She also suffered from a distended abdomen and would become unconscious for hours at a time. Saboura was treated in Jordan and seems to have recovered.

The same is unfortunately not true for Saadia. All the doctors she has seen are unable to help her. The locals in her village whisper that the girl might be possessed or under a spell.

Her father confirmed during an interview that Saadia also cries normal tears at times and that the stones mostly appear during the late afternoon and at night. Luckily, she is in no pain even though up to 100 little stones sometimes appear in one day.

6 12 Girls With The Same Mysterious Symptoms
Le Roy, New York

In what many people would dismiss as an incident of mass hysteria, 12 girls from a high school in New York shared an experience that left medical doctors searching for an explanation.

After taking a nap one day in 2011, one of the students, Thera Sanchez, woke up with uncontrollable limbs and vocal tics. Something like this had never happened to her before, especially not the strange verbal outbursts that made her seem like she was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome.

Stranger than this was the fact that 11 other girls from Sanchez’s high school developed the same symptoms. A neurologist diagnosed all the girls with a conversion disorder. In other words, he believed the incident to be a case of mass hysteria. Others doctors believed that stress was the main factor causing these strange symptoms. Two mothers, including Thera’s mother, have challenged the doctors’ findings. Even though health officials made sure nothing at the school itself was making the girls sick, the two mothers were not given proof of the investigations conducted by these officials and are unsatisfied with their findings.

Thera was still twitching, stuttering, and suffering from uncontrollable verbal outbursts weeks later during a media interview. To date, no satisfactory explanation has been given for the incident.

5 The Girl Who Didn’t Age
Reisterstown, Maryland

By the time Brooke Greenberg passed away at the age of 20, she had never learned to speak and had to be pushed around in a stroller. Even though she was getting older, her body refused to age. At the time of her death, Brooke’s mental capacity was that of a toddler. She was still the size of a baby.

Scientists and doctors are still unable to come up with an explanation for Brooke’s medical condition. Brooke was a “miracle” baby since birth. She survived several stomach ulcers and a stroke. She also made it through a brain tumor that caused her to sleep for two weeks. When she finally woke up, the tumor was gone. Doctors were mystified.

The way Brooke’s body developed over the years was also very strange. At the age of 16, she still hadn’t lost her baby teeth, but her bones were thought to be the same as those of a 10-year-old (except in size, of course). Her hair and fingernails continued growing normally. She was able to recognize her siblings and express happiness.

A retired medical expert from the University Of Florida Medical School, Richard F. Walker, has made it his life’s mission to find out what causes this medical mystery known as Syndrome X. He is also studying similar cases including a young girl of eight who weighs only 5 kilograms (11 lb) and a 29-year-old whose body resembles that of a preadolescent boy.

4 The Woman Who Regained Her Sight
Auckland, New Zealand

New Zealand native Lisa Reid had no hope of ever regaining her sight after she lost it at age 11. Then, at the age of 24, she accidentally bumped her head and woke up the next morning with her sight restored.

As a child, Lisa was diagnosed with a tumor that pressed down so severely on her optic nerve that she lost her sight. Doctors could do nothing for Lisa, who learned to deal with her condition and got herself a guide dog.

Indirectly, Ami the guide dog helped Lisa regain her sight. One night in 2000, Lisa knelt down on the floor so she could kiss her beloved dog goodnight. She struck her head on a coffee table while attempting to reach Ami.

Nothing happened right away except perhaps a slight headache, but when Lisa woke the next morning, it was no longer dark. She could see as clearly as she could before she lost her sight. Fourteen years later, Lisa still has her sight.

3 The Boy Who Can’t Open His Mouth
Ottawa, Canada

Lockjaw is common in dogs, but a similar case in a newborn baby perplexed doctors at an Ottawa hospital earlier this year.

Little Wyatt couldn’t open his mouth to cry when he was born in June 2013, and he spent the first three months of his life in hospital while doctors tried to figure out how to help him. Unable to assist the little boy in unlocking his jaw, doctors finally sent him home and confirmed to the baby’s parents that there was no glaring reason for their son’s condition.

During the following months, Wyatt nearly lost his life on six occasions due to choking and the inability to gulp air through his closed mouth. His saliva builds up in his mouth and blocks his airway because he is unable to drool like most babies.

In a controversial move, medical experts have implemented the use of Botox to try and relax Wyatt’s jaw and this helped the little boy to open his mouth slightly. However, the problem still needs resolving as the dangers associated with this condition are likely to increase as he grows older.

This June, Wyatt had to eat his birthday dinner through a feeding tube directly into his stomach. His parents have also recently noticed that their baby doesn’t blink both his eyes at the same time. Ongoing tests are currently the only hope his parents have to find a solution.

2 The Woman With A New Accent
Ontario, Canada

A funny feeling of confusion and weakness prompted Rosemarie Dore to head to the nearest hospital back in 2006. She was suffering a stroke on the left side of her brain.

Before she was admitted to the hospital, everyone was used to Dore speaking in her native southern Ontario accent. Everyone was amazed when one day she suddenly started speaking with an eastern Canadian accent. As hard as she tried to speak normally, she couldn’t stop the accent from coming out. Doctors determined that on top of the stroke she suffered, Rosemarie Dore also had foreign accent syndrome, which most likely resulted from the brain trauma.

Further investigation into her condition revealed that Dore’s speech actually slowed down and started to change just before she had the stroke. Doctors believe that she still has the ability to speak in her normal accent, but the process of instructions from her brain to her mouth is not working the same way it used to and it therefore feels more natural to speak in the new accent.

Experts who have done extensive research on this medical condition noted that there were about 60 confirmed cases of foreign accent syndrome worldwide. One of the first was a woman from Norway who was injured by a bomb fragment that struck her on the head during the Second World War. Just after the injury, she suddenly started speaking with a German accent.

1 The Girl Who Feels No Pain
Big Lake, Minnesota

When she was very little, Gabby Gingras constantly stuck her fingers in her own eyes. One of her eyeballs eventually had to be removed. She also maimed three of her fingers by chewing on them.

Gabby suffers from an extremely rare medical condition that causes her to feel absolutely no pain. By the age of seven, she was required to wear a helmet and protective glasses to keep herself safe. In a documentary made when she was four, video footage shows the little girl banging her head into the sharp edges of a table without showing any signs of discomfort.

There is no cure for hereditary sensory autonomic neuropathy, the genetic disorder Gabby suffers from. In 2005, Gabby and her family were invited by Oprah to appear on her talk show. Here her parents spoke of the fear they experienced daily. They mentioned one incident when Gabby had broken her jaw and because she couldn’t feel it, no one noticed it for a month.

On top of all this, Gabby’s body doesn’t have the ability to regulate temperature the way a normal person’s body does. Gabby is now 14 and living a relatively normal life. Her parents are still keeping a close eye on her, and Gabby herself makes sure to stay within her limitations.

Estelle lives in JHB, South Africa. She hopes that someday answers will be found for all the medical mysteries out there.

The definition of ‘mysterious’ has changed drastically over the centuries. What may have been a baffling secret of nature in, say, the 13th century would be common knowledge by now, as our understanding of the world has got a lot better, thanks to steady advancements in science and technology. That’s not to say that mysteries don’t exist anymore. There’d always be something our current set of knowledge can’t explain. In fact, it’s essential to have things we’re yet to figure out to grow and progress as a society.

Some mysteries, however, aren’t just persistent, but seem to get even more confusing the more we look into them. From the mysteriously-diverse wildlife under Antarctica to how exactly the Sun works, here are ten unresolved mysteries that got even more baffling the last time we checked up on them.

See Also: Top 10 Mysteries And Crimes Solved By The Internet

8 We Still Don’t Entirely Get The Sun

If you think about it, the Sun must have been the most mysterious thing in the world for an early man. Here you are, barely making sense of the world around you full of various types of life, diverse landscapes and weird weather patterns. Absolutely nothing, however, compares to the giant ball of fire hanging in the sky that rises from one side of the horizon every day and sets into the other. Is it controlled by a higher entity? Will they switch it off some day? These are the questions our ancestors would have been faced with without anyone to answer them.

Of course, our understanding of the Sun has improved quite a bit from those times. Thanks to modern science, we now know that the heat of the Sun doesn’t come from fire, but rather complex nuclear fusion reactions in its core. That said, the Sun still holds many mysteries we may never know the answer to, as it’s impossible to actually go there and take readings.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t raise the bar for how close we can go and get better observations, which is exactly what the team behind the Parker Solar Probe believed. The probe has been the closest we have ever got to the Sun, though instead of answering questions, the mission raised entirely new ones.

Their observations suggest that things on the Sun are actually much, much more chaotic than we had previously thought. For one, the probe found that the Sun’s surface is regularly hit by sweeping magnetic waves so powerful that they temporarily reverse the local magnetic field. More importantly, they found that the waves and solar winds on the Sun travel at least twenty times faster than any standard model of the sun we have.

If we could account for that discrepancy and understand exactly what’s going on there, we’d be in a much better place to safeguard ourselves from harmful solar waves that could someday kill all electricity on Earth.^[1]

7 Life Under Antarctica Is Surprisingly Diverse

When we first started scientifically researching and documenting all the species on Earth, we were working under the assumption that life would be more diverse in the more hospitable regions of the world. We were working under the assumption that ‘hospitable’ means the same thing for all—or at least most organisms, though as we gradually found out, that’s not the case. Life is actually much more diverse and thriving in some of the most extreme regions of the world, and we still don’t understand how.

One of those regions is Antarctica, which also happens to be the only continent that’s not permanently inhabited. We’re not really talking about the surface, though, but the sea under the almost-perennially frozen cover of ice.

Mind you, it’s one of the most extreme places in the world, so much so that you need to spend an hour to dress up for a dive. Diver equipment here is about 200 pounds heavy, as you’d die within ten minutes if you attempt to dive with regular diving gear. It’s a fair assumption that it’s not conducive to any sort of life. As one photographer on a National Geographic expedition found out, though, that’s really not the case.

While we always knew that the waters underneath Antarctica hold their own secrets, no one thought of it as a vibrant ecosystem for plant and animal life. It was when the photographer made his way down to the floor that he realized the sheer diversity and number of organisms that call this hellhole home. From sea spiders to corals to sea stars, Antarctica’s deep sea is surprisingly teeming with life, though we don’t understand how. The photographer was so mesmerized by the prolific life on the ocean floor that he called it a ‘luxuriant garden’.

Again, this place is so hostile that he had to deal with nerve damage for seven months after the expedition.^[2]

6 Interstellar Space Is A LOT Weirder Than We Expected

It’s no breaking news that the universe beyond the tiny little planet we call home is a mysterious place. While we’re definitely closer to solving some of those mysteries than we were, say, a hundred years ago, that’s still not close enough. There are still many things we don’t understand about what all is out there, made worse by the fact that every time we have a new technology to get us closer to the answers, it actually ends up posing even more questions than before.

Take the Voyager 2, which – along with the Voyager 1 – is the only time we have been able to send a piece of our tech to interstellar space. One of its main aims was understanding what happens beyond the boundary of what we know as the heliosphere – the range of the Sun’s magnetic field that protects us from all kinds of radiation.

What we found there, however, doesn’t align with our calculations at all. For one, the magnetic field beyond the heliosphere is about two to three times stronger than we expected. That means that the interstellar particles exert an electromagnetic pressure of over ten time than we previously thought, which is pretty baffling for scientists who need those figures to be accurate to better understand the universe. They also found a lot of leakages in the space that marks the boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space.^[3]

5 Science Keeps Finding Alien-Like Ancient Creatures

All throughout history, the question of exactly where we came from has been on everyone’s mind. For some, it’s a philosophical question, but for the scientists, it’s a literal one. How did human life, and life in general, physically start on Earth is still largely a mystery, even if we have made tremendous strides in that field recently. We now know a lot about early life on Earth, thanks to better excavation and analysis techniques.

While we have answered many questions about the origins of life on Earth, research teams keep finding stuff that simply refutes everything we think we knew. As an example, consider the various alien-like species they have found – and still keep finding—in the Canadian Rockies, particularly from the Cambrian period. Many of the species couldn’t be classified according to any of our evolutionary models, making us rethink the whole thing every now and then.^[4]

4 We Don’t Know Anything About The Oldest Animals

While on the one hand we’re finding completely unknown species, we’re still no closer to finding the beginning of the tree of life Earth as we see it on the other. While it’s true that our ability to look into the past has vastly improved in the recent years – especially in the fields of archaeology and excavation—dial the proverbial knob of history too far back, and you’d start entering entire eras that are in the dark.

Moreover, we keep finding things that challenge our previously held models of our lineage. Research has found that the animals before the Cambrian period were entirely distinct from anything that came after, and we don’t understand how. The complex traits we see in animals today – no matter how immensely varied we all are – are actually a result of an event called the Cambrian Explosion, though the animals and plants that existed before are a complete mystery to us.^[5]

3 The Evolution Of Turtles Is (Still) A Mystery

Turtles occupy an interesting place on the family tree. It’s an animal that has successfully freed itself from the laborious-yet-crucial role of getting a house, simply by being born with one on its back. If you think that it’s not easy to trace its evolutionary roots, you’d be right. Scientists have never had much idea about where turtles really come from, though our basic understanding of them has certainly come a long way in recent times.

That understanding, though, was challenged by the recent discovery of a turtle-like animal some 220 million years ago. According to scientists, the animal that should have been at that place in the family tree of the turtle should have had a beak and a pair of two holes in its back, just like turtles. If we cross checked it with other fossils found around that time, we’d find that they don’t align with this discovery, either.^[6]

2Saturn Gets More Mysterious Every Time We Check Up On It

For all the discussion about colonizing outer space, we forget that unimaginably vast parts of the solar system – let alone the galaxy and beyond – are quite boring to begin with. While we’re sure it’d be fun to visit alien worlds at first, that excitement would wear off quite soon and we’d find that there’s not much to do in space.
Saturn, on the other hand, defies all norms of how boring space should be. Every time we make a visit to Saturn or one of its many moons, we find something completely different we don’t understand.

Take its rings, which keep getting more mysterious the more we try to understand them. We know that they’re made up of ice and rock and always have moving, outward ripples due to the gravity of Saturn’s 62 moons. As some recent findings suggest, though, they also have waves that move inward, which is confusing for the scientists. They don’t know what’s causing them, though it’d be clearer in future expeditions. There’s also the fact that its outer ring is much bigger than previously thought, as a recent study found.^[7]

1 Math Doesn’t Agree On The Rate Of Expansion Of The Universe

If you haven’t, we’d highly recommend reading the story of how we first discovered that the universe is expanding. While too long for the scope of this list, the discovery – for the first time in human history – proved that everything, everywhere is always in motion, which is sort of poetic, too. It still posed many more questions, like the rate of its expansion, whether it’d keep doing it indefinitely, and what does it mean for us.

As per recent research, though, we’re not just no closer to finding the answers, we also keep finding things that completely throw us off the path. If some recent observations are correct – and there’s no reason to believe they aren’t; they’re scientists after all – calculations of the rate of expansion of the universe keep turning different values depending on how we measure them. If you calculate it by studying the afterglow of the Big Bang, it’s a completely different value from calculating it from the cosmic microwave background.

It defies the fundamental rule of math and universe, that the correct answer to a problem would be the same regardless of the method you use to find it. According to some, it may need an entire new type of science to account for the discrepancy, as the true rate of expansion can only be one value if we go by our current rules of math and science.^[8]

2020 brings with it the start of not only a new year but a brand-new decade. There is a whisper of better things to come and a hint of hope. However, for some, it just means another year and possibly another decade stuck with an unsolved mystery that keeps them from finding closure.

See Also: 10 Truly Bizarre And Chilling Cases Of Mass Disappearances

Many have lost loved ones in inexplicable ways, while others wait for word on missing family members that never comes. On this list are 10 disappearances to be debated and mulled over. But all the while, we should not forget those left behind who are praying for their missing loved ones to return unharmed.

10 Boris Weisfeiler

Forty-three-year-old Boris Weisfeiler had just about had it with all the snow in Pennsylvania in December 1984. Craving sunshine, he booked a trip to Chile and was looking forward to hiking several trails in the Andes Mountains.

It is believed that Weisfeiler tried to cross a river at one point during a hike. The only sign that he was ever there was a backpack found on the riverbank. Weisfeiler never returned home and was never seen again. Authorities in Chile concluded that he had drowned while trying to cross the river, but his body was never recovered.^[1]

Fast-forward 16 years, and Boris Weisfeiler’s mysterious disappearance takes a sinister turn. Declassified US documents reveal that the Penn State University professor may have been murdered in Chile. The documents allege that a witness saw Weisfeiler being interrogated at an agricultural commune before being shot point-blank.

This revelation led to a new investigation. In 2012, eight men, including police and military officers, were charged with the kidnapping of Weisfeiler. However, the case was closed in 2016 and the men were all freed.

Boris Weisfeiler’s sister was devastated at this turn of events. To date, a body has not been recovered in Chile and Boris Weisfeiler’s ultimate fate remains a mystery.

9 Patricia Meehan

On April 20, 1989, 37-year-old Patricia Meehan was driving on the wrong side of the road on Montana Highway 200 when she crashed into another vehicle. The driver of the other car was Carol Heitz, an off-duty police dispatcher.

After Heitz exited her car, Meehan walked up to Heitz and stared silently at her. After a few seconds, Meehan turned around, climbed over a nearby fence, stared again at the scene, and then walked away. She was never heard from again.^[2]

After the incident, thousands of sightings of Meehan were reported: She was either hitching rides or having low-key meals at diners. These sightings all allegedly took place in the states of Montana and Washington. It was revealed that Meehan had suffered from depression and worked odd jobs at a ranch in Montana before her disappearance.

In conjunction with police efforts, Meehan’s family launched a personal search for Patricia. The family distributed 2,000 missing person flyers and made use of horses and a helicopter to search rough terrain. Despite this huge effort, Patricia Meehan remains missing.

8 Mayumi Arashi

Twenty-seven-year-old Mayumi Arashi left her home in Tokyo on September 2, 1994, after telling her sister, Yoko, that she was going out to meet a friend. When Mayumi failed to return by September 3, Yoko phoned that friend to find out where her sister was. The friend said that she hadn’t had plans to meet Mayumi the previous day.

Later the same day, a note was found in Yoko’s wardrobe. The note read: “I was going out with A but was betrayed. [ . . . ] I’m sorry.” A’s phone number was written at the bottom of the note.

Yoko dialed the number and spoke with “A.” He said that he had met with Mayumi the previous day. If Mayumi was dead, he hoped that the punishment would be prison. Yoko got hold of a private detective who tracked the movements of “A” for months. But the detective could only come back with the information that “A” had gone into the woods on March 9, 1995, carrying two drinks. A police investigation of the area turned up nothing.

Years went by with no news of Mayumi. Yoko and her father eventually did an TV interview about Mayumi’s disappearance. On a shelf behind the father was a piece of paper stuck to the wood that read: “Don’t believe what Yoko says.”^[3]

This sent viewers into a frenzy. But despite this weird turn of events, Mayumi Arashi remains missing. There are no new clues as to what may have happened to her.

7 Hannah Upp

It is not often that you hear of a person disappearing multiple times. However, this is exactly the case with Hannah Upp. She disappeared for the first time on August 28, 2008, after going for a jog on Riverside Drive near Hamilton Heights where she lived.

Nearly three weeks later, she was found floating in New York Harbor. She could not recall how she got to the harbor or what happened in the weeks she had been missing. While undergoing tests in a hospital, Upp was diagnosed with dissociative fugue, which is a rare form of amnesia. This disorder causes sufferers to forget their own identities and can last for years.

Upp disappeared again for two days in September 2013 and then again on September 14, 2017, a week after Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean. She was working at a school in the Virgin Islands at the time.^[4]

On September 16, 2017, construction workers found her car at a beach. The vehicle contained clothes and her keys. The same day, Hurricane Maria was forming in the Atlantic and brought more devastation across the northeastern Caribbean.

Unfortunately, Hannah wasn’t found and remains missing to this day.

6 Patrick Warren And David Spencer

After celebrating a great Christmas Day with their families in 1996, best friends Patrick Warren, 11, and David Spencer, 13, spent Boxing Day lazing about in their homes in Chelmsley Wood. In the afternoon, they played with a group of children in Meriden Park. When the two boys finally returned home, they asked their parents if they could visit one of Patrick’s brothers that evening.

Patrick set off on the new bicycle he had received for Christmas, and David walked beside him. They made it as far as the local gas station where an attendant saw them head toward a shopping center.

The next day, another of Patrick’s brothers went looking for the boys when it was learned that they had never arrived at their destination the previous day. Much later, Patrick’s bicycle was found behind the gas station. The boys’ faces were plastered on milk cartons in an effort to find them.^[5]

It was only in 2003 that a suspect was arrested. However, the man was released without being charged. Child killer Brian Field was also a suspect because he had killed and raped a child in 1968 and imprisoned two teens in 1986.

In 2006, the area where Field used to dump waste was searched in the hopes that the remains of the boys would be found. The search was unsuccessful.

Patrick and David remain missing in early 2020. There is little hope that the case will ever be solved.

5 Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle

On March 26, 1993, 26-year-old native New Yorker Annie McCarrick went missing from Sandymount. She was last seen outside a post office in Enniskerry. Her parents arrived after being contacted by their daughter’s friends. The parents stayed in Ireland for six months while searching unsuccessfully for their daughter.

On July 25, 1993, 39-year-old Eva Brennan left her parents’ house in Rathgar but never made it back to her apartment. After two days of not hearing from his daughter, her father went to investigate. Inside Eva’s apartment, he found the jacket she’d been wearing the day she disappeared. Eva was never seen again.

On January 3, 1994, 22-year-old Imelda Keenan told her boyfriend that she was going to the post office. She left their apartment in Waterford City at 1:30 PM. The local doctor’s secretary was the last person to see Keenan as she crossed a road in town and seemingly vanished into thin air.

On November 9, 1995, 21-year-old Josephine Dollard was spotted using a pay phone in the Moone area of Kildare. After she ended the call, she was seen getting into a car with an unknown person. Dollard never made it back home.

On August 23, 1996, 25-year-old Fiona Pender vanished after leaving her apartment in Tullamore. On February 13, 1997, 17-year-old Ciara Breen disappeared from her home in Dundalk. On February 8, 1998, 19-year-old Fiona Sinnott went missing after leaving a pub in Broadway. On July 28, 1998, 18-year-old Deirdre Jacob went missing mere meters from her parents’ home.

None of these young women have ever been found.^[6]

The tie that binds them together? They all disappeared in what has come to be known as Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle within the boundaries of Leinster. Police decided that the missing women were most likely murdered and focused their investigation on convicted rapist Larry Murphy. He was charged with an unrelated rape and attempted murder case in 2000.

With Murphy in prison, the vanishings abruptly stopped, giving authorities even more reason to suspect him. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence and staunch denials on Murphy’s part mean that he was never charged for any of the disappearances. The fate of those who vanished remains unknown.

4 Lauren Spierer

On June 3, 2011, 20-year-old Indiana University student Lauren Spierer was enjoying an evening out at a bar with a bunch of friends. Her boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, hadn’t joined her. But he texted back and forth with her before eventually heading to bed.

Surveillance footage captured Spierer leaving the Bloomington bar just before 2:30 AM. She was accompanied by a friend named Cory Rossman. Several witnesses who had seen Spierer at the bar claimed that both she and Rossman were very intoxicated when they left.

Rossman and Spierer reached her apartment complex but left again shortly afterward. They walked through an alley just before 3:00 AM. They arrived at Rossman’s apartment, and his roommate, Michael Beth, escorted the young man to his room.

Spierer refused to stay and said that she wanted to return to her own home. She ended up at the apartment of Beth’s neighbor, Jay Rosenbaum. He claimed that Spierer left at 4:30 AM and that he saw her for the last time as she was heading south on College Avenue.

Boyfriend Jesse Wolff sent Spierer a text several hours later. But he received a reply from a bar employee indicating that Spierer had forgotten her phone at the establishment. Lauren Spierer was never seen again.^[7]

In 2015, 22-year-old Hannah Wilson was found murdered and dumped in a vacant lot 10 miles from the Bloomington campus after being reported missing. Daniel Messel was charged and convicted for the crime. Police investigated any possible links between the Spierer disappearance and the Wilson murder, but nothing came of their efforts. To date, no suspects have been named and no new clues have emerged.

3 Ben McDaniel

Thirty-year-old scuba diver Ben McDaniel was diving in the underwater cave at Vortex Springs on August 18, 2010. He tried to access a dangerous part of the cave by tampering with the gate that barred uncertified divers. Two employees of Vortex Springs were diving at the same time and noticed what McDaniel was doing. One of the men decided to let McDaniel into the cave to minimize the risk of him hurting himself or accidentally drowning by getting himself stuck inside the gate.

It took two days for the same employee to realize that McDaniel’s truck had never left his parking spot on the day he went diving. Fearing that McDaniel had drowned, the employee immediately called the police. Recovery divers searched every possible corner of the cave but came up empty-handed. A veteran diver came back with the news that Ben’s stature made it impossible for him to have become confined deeper in the cave.^[8]

McDaniel’s parents offered a $30,000 reward for any diver who would risk his own life to go even further into the depths of the cave to try to find their son. One diver may have taken up the challenge, though no one is sure. That diver was found dead in the cavern.

Conspiracy theories began flying. One claimed that McDaniel had faked his own death to escape personal troubles. Another maintained that someone had murdered McDaniel and hidden his body where it would be impossible to find. According to other theories, McDaniel had drowned and his body was covered with sand or he had committed suicide and squeezed himself into a tight space beforehand, making sure that no one could get him out.

Ben McDaniel remains missing, and the truth of his disappearance still evades his loved ones.

2 Anthonette Cayedito

On April 6, 1986, Penny Cayedito arrived at her apartment in Gallup, New Mexico, after a hard day’s work. Her three daughters were sound asleep, and the babysitter left as soon as Penny got there. Penny still had a few things to do around the house and only got to bed around 3:00 AM.

She had barely fallen asleep when a knock sounded at the door. Penny didn’t hear it. But her eldest daughter, Anthonette, did and went to answer the door. Penny’s two youngest daughters didn’t think anything of this and went right back to sleep. When the family awoke later that morning, nine-year-old Anthonette was gone.^[9]

Penny immediately called the police and reported her daughter missing. One of Anthonette’s sisters believed that their uncle may have been the one who had knocked on the door. But he was soon ruled out as a suspect due to a lack of evidence.

Neighbors reported seeing a brown van outside the Cayedito residence and a man walking toward the house. Police never found this van. A whole year had gone by without any leads when police received a phone call out of the blue from a young girl.

She told police that her name was Anthonette. She claimed to have been abducted and held in Albuquerque. In the background, a male voice could be heard asking, “Who said you could use the phone?” After that, the line went dead. Police were unable to trace the call.

A few years later, a waitress in Carson City, Nevada, contacted police after a teenager left a note under her plate that read, “Help me! Call police.” Despite this, the police never found Anthonette. Penny Cayedito died in 1999 without seeing her daughter again. The case remains open.

1 Mikelle Biggs

On January 2, 1999, nine-year-old Kimber Biggs and 11-year-old Mikelle Biggs were impatiently waiting outside their house in Mesa, Arizona, for an ice cream truck to arrive. Mikelle was riding her younger sister’s bike. Kimber was feeling very cold, so she told Mikelle that she was going inside. Kimber came back outside 90 seconds later and saw her bike lying in the road with the front wheel spinning. There was no sign of Mikelle.

Within 30 minutes, more than 1,000 people were walking the streets looking for Mikelle. But with no witnesses and no leads, the case quickly ran cold. The only people questioned were neighbors of the Biggses and Mikelle’s own father, who was quickly cleared of any suspicion.

Years passed without any sign of Mikelle. Then on March 14, 2018, a reporter phoned the police in Mesa. He told an officer that a man had handed in a dollar bill with writing on it that read: “My name is Mikel Biggs. Kidnapped from Mesa. I’m alive.”^[10]

Kimber Biggs was not convinced that the note was authentic because her sister’s name had been misspelled. This, too, was a dead end.

As of early 2020, Mikelle Biggs remains missing. Her sister now has her own son, and not a day goes by that she doesn’t hope and pray for Mikelle’s safe return.

The world is full of things that people don’t like. That could be other people, ideas, art, food, and even facts. If something exists, you better believe somebody hates it. If enough people get together to dislike something, an entire society can shun that thing and it becomes taboo. Throughout history, there have been a lot of taboos — cannibalism comes to mind — and mostly we can get behind these things. But every once in a while something pops up that’s a little harder to justify for its taboo status. 

10. Bananas Were Once Considered Immoral

There is a far greater than 0% chance that you or someone you know has picked up a banana in your presence and made a joke about the shape of it. It may be juvenile, it may be uncreative, but it’s also what are the oldest and most reliable jokes in the fruit world. 

While everybody understands the idea behind making a phallic banana joke, less well-known is that people took this stuff seriously once upon a time and bananas were actually considered pretty immoral.

You can thank colonialism for this one, as when Europeans first discovered bananas in the 1800s they devoted time to explaining how to disguise the shape of a banana to not offend anyone. As delicious as a banana is, no self-respecting British citizen wanted to be caught nibbling the tip of one, lest their reputation be sullied.

This was all very intentional, of course. It’s not like the modern world invented the idea of a penis joke by any means. Silent films of the ’20s used bananas as a very explicit metaphor, and polite society clearly knew the implications of the nefarious fruit for years. 

9. Green Hats are Taboo in China

Some taboos are very much a cultural thing, and the meaning behind them really doesn’t extend well beyond borders. For instance, look at a green hat. On St Patrick’s Day, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a bar anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that isn’t full of people in green hats drunkenly embracing Irish heritage whether or not they have it. Head East and things will change significantly.

In China, you never want to wear a green hat. Wearing a green hat means you are being cheated on according to Chinese superstition. You’d think that if no one ever wore a green hat, then fidelity would be the standard for all of society, but that’s not exactly how this superstition works.

In Chinese, a man whose wife cheats on him is called “dai lu mao.” If you translate the traditional Chinese you get the word “cuckold” which makes sense but then there’s the literal translation of the Chinese characters which is “wearing a green hat.” The idea is so taboo that if you’re caught committing a traffic violation, police may make you wear a green hat in public to shame you so that you don’t do it again. 

There’s apparently a link between this and the Yuan dynasty when it was said that the relatives of prostitutes were forced to wear green hats. Whatever the potential validity or history of the idea, that’s why green hats are not in fashion today. 

8. Men’s Shorts Were Once Considered Offensive in America

Have you ever seen a man wearing shorts in the summer and they were just too short for your liking and you thought “No, this doesn’t seem right?” You are not alone. Once upon a time, men wearing shorts in America was an altogether taboo act.

Even in the modern era, shorts are not welcome everywhere. There are stories about boys at school and even adult men in workplaces being sent home to change because they wore shorts.

Shorts on men were considered improper and immodest. The town of Honesdale Pennsylvania banned wearing shorts in 1938 by pointing out that the town is not a bathing beach.  Even as late as 1959, a town in New York banned shorts for anyone over the age of 16. Shorts were strictly meant for children who apparently didn’t know any better, and could look foolish in the eyes of adults. If you were caught wearing shorts, you could get up to 25 days in jail. 

7. The Scottish are Said to Have a Historical Aversion to Pork

If you’re not from the UK, you may not have a very clear idea of Scottish cuisine. Everyone knows haggis, but what else? While you can Google the topic and learn about what the good folks of the Highlands might enjoy eating, you may notice a lack of pork on the menu. That’s not to say there’s no pork in Scotland, but you’ll find it’s not nearly as widespread as other meats. This is thanks to a historical aversion to pork with some hard to pin down roots in Scottish culture.

Scots not eating pork has a pretty long history. In 1920 it was proposed that this anti-pork stance goes all the way back to pre-Roman times. While the rest of Europe was happy to enjoy pork chops, Scots tried to stay away from it. Books from the 1800s referenced it and James VI of Scotland was known to hate pork as far back as his reign in the 1500s.

Some of this taboo seems to be rooted in superstition. With pigs not being native to Scotland, and the animal being so rare, there are accounts of people seeing them for the first time and thinking that they were demons. Others believed pigs caused diseases like cancer and leprosy. 

While many other theories have been presented as to why pigs and the Scottish don’t seem to get along, the easiest conclusion to draw is that no one knows why pork is not traditionally something eaten in Scotland.

6. The First Man to Use an Umbrella in England was Shamed

New technology often comes with resistance. Sometimes you’re mocked for using something new and everyone gets on board and agrees. Things like the Segway scooter, for instance. Those never became cool, and we’re all the better for it. But what about something a little simpler like the umbrella?

The first man to use an umbrella in England was Jonas Hanway and people made fun of him mercilessly. It wasn’t that no one knew what an umbrella was it was just that they all thought umbrellas were garbage. Only a truly effeminate man would ever walk around with an umbrella, a symbol of everything wrong and weak in the world. They really hated umbrellas back then.

Umbrellas were considered tools of Frenchmen, and no one wanted to be mistaken for a Frenchman in England. Basically, it was something womanly and pathetic according to the standards of the day. History proved the desire not to get soaking wet as something more important.

5. Many Early Cultures Had a Taboo Against Naming Bears Directly

Are you afraid of bears? Maybe in a general sense, you’re not because you don’t ever run across bears in your day-to-day life, but if you did run into a bear it’s entirely reasonable that you would be afraid of it, right? They’re typically apex predators where they live, and toe to toe against a human, a bear is going to win every time. They’re so frightening, in fact, that the name of a bear is taboo.

Now you may be thinking that the name of a bear isn’t taboo because it’s right there, bear. It looks like the word bear was actually devised to come up with a way to refer to the animal without using its real name like it was a big furry Voldemort.

The English “bear,” the Dutch “beer,” the German “baer,” the Swedish “bjorn” and a lot of other words for bear can all be traced to the same proto-Indo-European origin – “*bher” or brown. The name means “brown one” and it was what people called bears rather than calling them by their true name, another proto-Indo-European word *rkto. These words are spelled with an asterisk in front of them to indicate linguists are sort of just guessing.

It’s been hypothesized that in many of the early cultures where bears were common, the taboo against calling them by name came about because they were so terrifying, it was best to only talk about them in a roundabout way, like calling them the brown one, instead of naming them directly. 

4. Many Marines Consider Apricots Taboo

The Marines are known for being some of the toughest soldiers in the armed forces. But that doesn’t mean they’re above falling prey to superstition. For instance, Marines and apricots don’t get along. The taboo against them dates back to World War II.

Like all soldiers, Marines are issued rations when in the field. Included in those rations were apricots. They’re lightweight, don’t take up a lot of room, and offer some quick nutrients. Now here’s where things get a little sketchy. If a tank ever broke down, there would be apricots on board. That’s kind of obvious if they’re part of your rations, but soldiers are a superstitious bunch at the best of times. The more tanks broke down over time, for whatever reason, the more people noticed there were apricots on board. Eventually, they started blaming apricots for the tanks breaking down.

Later, in Vietnam, this morphed into something even worse. If someone ate apricots, it was believed it was going to attract enemy artillery fire. Many retired Marines swore off apricots for the rest of their lives.

3. Kissing In Public Was and Sometimes Still Is Taboo

If you’re not a fan of PDA then take heart, a lot of history agrees with you. Kissing in public has been a taboo at many times and in many places and, in fact, still is in some places. 

Historically, public kissing was often done only between men, as in a subject kissing the hand of his Lord or even a platonic kiss in greeting like you might still see in parts of Europe. Unmarried women were usually not invited to the kissing parties and even if you were married your only public kiss might be the one on your wedding day.

In countries like China and Japan, public kissing was long considered a taboo practice and is only becoming accepted more recently. Countries like India and Thailand still typically shy away from any public affection.

2. Christmas Was Once Taboo in New England

For at least a decade now, every year at Christmas, the media will focus on the so-called War on Christmas. This is all very ironic since, once upon a time, Christmas was unwelcome in certain parts of America. Especially in New England.

In the 1600s, Puritan settlers in New England enacted laws banning Christmas and punishing those who might celebrate it. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, anyone who celebrated between 1659 and 1681 was fined. Their beef? It focused too heavily on pagan traditions.

The taboo on Christmas remained in various places throughout New England all the way until 1870 when it was declared a federal holiday, thus making it hard to get away from or be punished for on the local level. 

1. The “Euphemism Treadmill” Refers to the Habit of Coming Up with New Polite Terms for “Taboo” Words

Language taboos are some of the most common taboos we have in the modern world. Some words are so taboo we won’t even say them when discussing them, and if you don’t know what we mean by that, well, use your imagination. 

Other words are cycled out of the common vernacular as people decide they are no longer suitable for use. For instance, the word elderly is considered offensive now when 10 years ago no one would bat an eye over it. A term like “older adult” is considered less offensive.

The term “euphemism treadmill” was devised to explain this habit we have of declaring a word taboo, replacing it until that new word is taboo, and then coming up with yet another term. “Cripple” becomes “handicapped” becomes “disabled” becomes “person with a disability.” All words start as the polite new term until the emotional charge behind it or the way people use it becomes intolerable and a new term is needed.

For a long time, if you wanted to get around the world you were going to have to go by water at some point. And the thing about water is that everything is literally smooth sailing on the surface. When things go wrong, however, then you sink. In general, sinking sucks. It’s cold, you can’t breathe, pressure can crush you and all kinds of stuff will eat you. Please avoid sinking at all costs. 

Historically, not everyone or everything has avoided sinking and sometimes the stories of what happened are a lot weirder than you’d think. 

10. The USS Bowfin Is the Only Submarine That Ever Sank a Bus

Submarines, on both sides, sank thousands of ships during WWII. They have proven to be some of the most valuable naval assets a country can have. They are so good at what they do that the USS Bowfin managed to sink a bus. Think about that for a second.

A bus, to clarify, is not an aquatic vehicle. Nevertheless, back in 1944, after a refit at Pearl Harbor the Bowfin set out to sea. It made its way after a Japanese convoy to some islands close to Okinawa. There were three vessels moored in the harbor alongside a pier with a crane and some supplies and such.

Seizing an opportunity, the Bowfin fired three torpedoes, then made a quick position change and fired off three more. The result was the destruction of several Japanese vessels but also the pier. That meant, in addition to sinking enemy ships, the Bowfin managed to take out the crane and a bus that had been parked on the pier as well. It is the only recorded case of a submarine taking out public transportation. 

9. L Ron Hubbard Claimed to Have Sunk Two Mystery Submarines During WWII 

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard really loved the sea. There’s a whole aquatic division of Scientology that’s a gong show of a story for another time, but Hubbard himself was also a naval man and served at sea in the military. Or, at least, he had some colorful stories about it.

Back in 1943, Hubbard was serving in WWII. According to him, he was an absolute MCU-level hero like Captain America. According to the Navy, not so much. He claimed to have sunk two Japanese vessels in May of that year, just off the Oregon coast. The problem was that the Navy could find no evidence of the vessels, though it seems he had his crew open fire on a log at one point. Hubbard later claimed it was a coverup because the military didn’t want anyone to know the Japanese got so close to the shore.

Hubbard would later lose his command after accidentally sailing into Mexican waters and firing guns at an island for no reason. 

8. North Korea Claimed to Sink a US Vessel That Was Already Decommissioned

Lots of things can be hard to unravel in the fog of war and some fine details have likely been lost to history all over the world in every conflict in recorded history. Sometimes it’s less being unsure of who fired first or what kicked off which battle where and more someone just lying. But if you are going to lie, you want to try to do it believably. North Korea has not mastered this.

North Korea claimed that, back in 1950, they sank the USS Baltimore. She was a heavy cruiser and it would be significant to any military’s history to have taken that ship out. However, official records state that the Baltimore was decommissioned in 1947.

7. The US Military Sank a Radioactive Aircraft Carrier Near San Francisco 

When a boat is sunk on purpose by the military or a company that owns it, it’s called scuttling. There’s nothing wrong with it and sometimes it’s even used to make artificial reefs for fish and cool places to go scuba diving. It’s an effective form of recycling. But you’d hope that, if someone does scuttle a ship, they let people know it’s happening. Especially if the ship is radioactive.

The USS Independence was an aircraft carrier that was involved in nuclear bomb tests. As a result, the ship ended up absorbing more than its fair share of radiation. They used it as a target ship at Bikini Atoll. 

They brought the vessel back to San Francisco in the late 1940s to study nuclear decontamination and then, in 1951, they took it 30 miles offshore and scuttled it. Experts stated the ocean is a good buffer against radiation and the contamination is minimal so the fear of it getting into fish you might eat is also minimal. Which doesn’t mean non-existent, of course. Just minimal. 

6. Titanic’s Sister Ship Sank a U-Boat

RMS Olympic was launched in 1910 and it was the largest ship in the world at the time. It was the first of three revolutionary ocean liners, the third of which was far better known – the Titanic. But before the Titanic stole her thunder, the Olympic was a big deal. She was actually one of the vessels that responded to the Titanic’s distress call when it sank.

Because WWI broke up, no one was taking massive cruise liners across the sea and the Olympic was tweaked with a gray paint job, covered portholes, and other adjustments to make it less noticeable to enemy vessels. She became the HMT Olympic and served as a troopship. The paint job was changed to dazzle camouflage, and she was outfitted with guns.

In 1918, the Olympic crew spotted a German U-boat in the English Channel and countered its torpedoes by full-on ramming the enemy ship, sinking it.

5. There Are Over a Half Dozen Nuclear Subs Sunk at Sea

Nuclear submarines have been around since 1955. With that much history, you can safely assume not all of them are in service anymore, but you may not want to know what happens to all of them since the story is not a comforting one. Not every nuclear sub made it safely back to harbor to be decommissioned in a safe and friendly manner. 

There are at least 8 nuclear submarines which have been lost at sea. That means nuclear reactors and weapons sunk to the icy depths and maybe no one knows where anymore. The general consensus is that this isn’t so bad, since the reactors are shielded and could keep them safe for centuries, by which time most of the fuel will have died, anyway. Fun!

Russia has planned to retrieve some of their lost vessels: K-159, which sank in 1963, and K-27, which was scuttled in 1982 despite being mildly radioactive. So far nothing has happened on that front. 

4. Garfield Phones From a Sunken Shipping Container Have Washed Ashore for Decades

The sea returns all kinds of things to the land over time. Some things can be lost at sea for years before it washes up somewhere. For about 40 years, Garfield phones have been washing up on shore in Brittany and it’s also thanks to a sunken ship with the most impressive cargo of all time. 

In 2019, after being plagued by the phones for years, a shipping container full of them that sank in the ’80s was finally identified. The container had been swept into a cave that could be accessed at low tide, like a strange pirate treasure. 

3. An Overflowing Toilet Sank a U-Boat

U-boats were terrifying during the war and sank as many as 3,000 Allied vessels. That’s obviously a lot of lives lost and damage caused so anything that could take out a U-boat was welcome. And, in one case, it was a toilet that did one in.

U-1206 was in the war towards the end of combat and was one of the most advanced vessels in the fleet. For whatever reason, German engineers decided that removing the septic system to save space was a good idea. Instead, the subs just shot waste into the sea. The problem was that it only worked near the surface. 

After failing to figure the toilet out on their first voyage, the captain called in an engineer who turned the wrong valve and began to flood the sub with seawater and poop. Why was there a valve that let that happen? Who knows?

The mix of poop and seawater flooded the battery room, which was conveniently located under the bathroom. The batteries began to release poisonous gas as a result. 

Flooding and filling with gas, the sub had to surface, and it needed to do so quickly. They fired torpedoes to increase buoyancy and then surfaced right in front of allies who attacked. Most of the crew was taken prisoner and U-1206 sank.

2. The Eastland Sinking Killed More People Than the Titanic

Some nautical disasters can be chalked up to bad luck, but not all of them. The Eastland Disaster was a tragedy and the blame for the death toll falls on extremely poor planning. Unlike the Titanic, the Eastland didn’t head out onto the open sea; it was on Lake Michigan. And when it sank, nearly 850 people died. 

The Eastland was a passenger liner, taking 2,573 passengers from Chicago out across the lake to a park for a day trip and picnic. The boat, one of five carrying employees of Western Electric Company, was already known to be unsteady and had nearly capsized more than once in the past. 

On the day of the fatal voyage, it was listing, in port, before all the passengers were even on board. Rather than cancel the trip, the crew simply tried to use ballast to balance the boat. They fixed it, then it started listing the other way. 

At 7:25 a.m. it was listing 25 degrees to port and was taking on water. At 7:30 it headed out anyway and then rolled to its side. Because there were so many people on board, even though it happened right at the port with people watching, hundreds were crushed under the boat and couldn’t be saved. 844 people in total died.

No one was ever held accountable for the deaths and the cause was speculated to be indirectly related to the Titanic. The boat was outfitted with new lifeboats after the sinking of the Titanic, which didn’t have enough for its passengers. The Eastland’s lifeboats are believed to have made the boat top-heavy, which caused the instability. 

1. The Whaling Ship Essex Was Sunk By a Sperm Whale

The whaling ship Essex sank on November 20, 1820, and may qualify as the most dramatic sinking in history next to the Titanic, at least in terms of the overall impact it has had on culture. This seems hard to understand at first since everyone knows the Titanic and, probably, very few people know the Essex. But it’s less that the Essex sank that it’s famous, and more why it sank.

The Essex was rammed by a sperm whale. It was out on a two-and-a-half-year whaling voyage when it encountered a pod. Smaller boats were sent out to harpoon the whales and one was hit.

At the same time, one whale broke away from the pod and it was a big one. Reports said it was 85 feet, much larger than the average 65 feet for adult sperm whales.  It headed straight for the Essex and smashed into the hull. The size and speed were too much, even for a 238-ton whaling vessel. The hull buckled, and the boat sank. 

If the story sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because this was the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

A staggering 600,000 people go missing every year in the US. And while the vast majority of them turn up again within the same year, far too many do not. That doesn’t necessarily mean those people are never seen again, but with each passing year, the likelihood decreases. Which is what makes it so remarkable when a person who, by all accounts, should never have been seen again makes a reappearance. And while that, in and of itself, is remarkable, sometimes the way it happens is far more bizarre than you could imagine. Let’s look at ten of the most incredible times the missing reappeared. 

10. One of John Wayne Gacy’s Supposed Victims Turned Up Alive 34 Years Later

John Wayne Gacy was one of America’s most infamous serial killers. He murdered at least 33 young men and boys and likely more back in the 1970s. As you can imagine, that led to a lot of ruined and devastated families. And though he was finally caught, the fact that the number of his victims was never accurately pinned down meant that anyone else in the right age range who went missing at that time in that area could have just as easily fallen prey to him. There was no way to tell, and the remains of several unidentified victims were found.

In 1977, 19-year-old Harold Wayne Lovell left his Chicago home one day and was never seen again. His family believe he had fallen victim to Gacy once his crimes came to light. There were unidentified remains of eight victims related to Gacy’s crimes. Lovell’s family was assisting law enforcement to see if they could match DNA with some of the victims and finally determine Harold’s fate. Instead, they discovered that he’d been arrested on marijuana charges in Florida a few years earlier.

For 34 years, Harold had been living his life and had just never informed his family. He left home willingly and never looked back. His reason? He said he “never felt wanted” there, so he went somewhere else. He did, however, reconnect with his siblings after they discovered he was still alive. 

9. Woman Missing for 11 Years Was Next Door

When someone goes missing, a good way to start a search is to establish a sort of perimeter. If the person was last seen in one spot, you can guess that they could have traveled maybe ten miles away, and now you have a circle with a ten mile radius in which to search. As time passes, you can expand outward. 

None of this happened when an 18-year-old woman named Sajitha left her parent’s house in Kerala, India. They say police searched high and low for her but apparently not close. She had gone across the street. 

Turns out Sajitha was in love with her neighbor Rahman. Being of different religions, they feared their relationship wouldn’t be accepted, so she secretly lived with him for 11 years without anyone, even his parents, who lived in the same house, knowing. They were only discovered when they moved to a new town and didn’t tell anyone, so Rahman was considered a missing person and tracked down as well.  

8. A Tortoise Was Found in a House After 30 Years

Okay, so this one isn’t a missing person so much as a missing pet, but it’s pretty dramatic nonetheless. Manuela the tortoise went missing in 1982. The Brazilian family was unable to find the creature and assumed the worst as one does. And then, in a baffling twist, the tortoise showed up again in the house’s attic. And sure, that’s amazing, but it was 2013 when they found it again. 

Manuela had vanished when the house was being renovated, so there was a lot of clutter. The grandfather was a bit of a hoarder and had jammed the house with old junk. That’s what kept the tortoise hidden. The family suspects she was surviving on termites.

7. Lawrence Joseph Bader Vanished for 8 Years, Then Was Found with a New Name

Soap operas are infamous for stories of amnesiacs and you’ll see it on film every now and again, too. Someone gets in an accident, forgets who they are, starts a whole new life. Does that ever really happen? Lawrence Joseph Bader claims it did. 

Bader had gone fishing on Lake Erie in 1957, despite being warned by the man renting the boat and the Coast Guard that a storm was coming. His boat was found, but he was not. He left behind a wife and four kids.  But in 1965, his niece ran into him at a sporting goods convention halfway across the country in Chicago. 

Bader had become Fritz Johnson. He had become a radio personality and then a local TV star known for his big personality. His backstory? A former Navy man, discharged for having a bad back. 

Fingerprints confirmed Johnson was Bader, but he claimed to have no memory of that life. Lawyers would later argue a tumor, which had cost him his eye, was responsible. He died a year later when his cancer returned.

6. Teruo Nakamura Fought WWII for 30 Extra Years

Here’s a question you may never have pondered before. If you were fighting a war in a remote location and the war ended, how would you know? Presumably you’d get the call on a phone or radio, right? What if you didn’t have those things? That’s sort of what happened to Teruo Nakamura. 

Nakamura had been stationed on an Indonesian island in 1944. He was presumed dead after a battle, but he had escaped to the jungle with some other soldiers. They’d been told to keep on fighting. So he did. 

Leaflets dropped on the island in 1945 that the war was over were dismissed as propaganda. Years went by, and Nakamura and his few fellow soldiers stayed hidden. They watched aircraft evolve and assumed it was the results of an arm race. 

By 1956 he was alone, growing sweet potatoes and harvesting bananas. In 1974, he was spotted by some locals who reported him to Indonesian authorities. They began making arrangements to send him home and also give him 30 years of back pay, which amounted to $227.59.

5. Singer Shelagh McDonald Disappeared for 30 Years After an Acid Trip

Scottish folk singer Shelagh McDonald disappeared in 1971, just when her music career was really taking off. Thirty-four years later some of her music was re-released and so she decided to turn up and explain her disappearance.

Turns out McDonald had gotten super high on LSD. How high? Disappear for over 30 years high. Apparently she tripped out for a solid 18 months at her parents’ house. She had no contact info for friends, so she didn’t contact them. But she did meet a man and fall in love. They lived in a tent together for 6 years at one point and were quite happy. 

4. Lucy Ann Johnson Disappeared for 52 Years 

Try to imagine being a kid and one day your mom just never comes home.The police even dig up your yard looking for her body, but nothing turned up. Then, 52 years later, you get a call from a woman who saw your mom’s picture in a missing person ad and says that’s her mom, too.

This is the story of Lucy Ann Johnson. Linda Evans was seven when her mother went missing from Surrey, British Columbia. She turned up in the Yukon with a whole new family. Her husband, Evans’ father, had been abusive and a cheater and so one day she walked out. She tried to take the kids, but he refused and so she left, never to come back. The man himself didn’t report his wife missing for about four years.

3. A 5-Year-Old Boy From India Used Google Earth to Find Home Decades Later

The story of Saroo Brierley is hard to believe but has been well documented and as amazing as it is nightmarish, especially if you’re a parent. When Saroo was five, he was taking a train with his nine-year-old brother. The boys lived with their siblings and mother in a small town in India. Their father had left them and Saroo’s older brother Guddu was trying to help his mother by scavenging and stealing what he could. One day, he brought Saroo with him.

The plan was to look for lost change on a train. But the brothers got separated, and Saroo fell asleep on the train. When he awoke, he was alone with no idea where he was. At five, and from rural India, he also didn’t know the name of his town, or his family surname. 

He ended up in Calcutta, unable to find anyone who spoke the same language as him. Eventually, he ended up in a juvenile center where he was adopted by the Brierleys, a kind couple from Australia.

In 2009, Saroo had grown into a happy and popular teen. He was still curious about his past, and Google Earth was able to provide answers. Though he didn’t know place names, he recognized landmarks and used them to hunt down his hometown. He even made use of that old math question about a train leaving a station traveling at a certain speed for a certain number of hours to narrow his search area, since that’s exactly what happened to him. His search took years.

Having been gone for about 25 years, Saroo finally found his hometown of Khandwa and returned in 2012. There, he reunited with his mother, sister and one of his brothers and learned Guddu had died shortly after his disappearance.  

2. Carlina White Was Missing for 23 Years

It was the summer of 1987 when Carlina White disappeared. At 19 days old, someone took her from the hospital where she’d been born and it would be a stunning 23 years before she was heard from again. 

Carlina’s mother got a message in 2010 from a woman named Nejdra Nance that came with baby pictures. They were pictures of Nance herself. She had been on a missing person’s website and seen pictures of Carlina, the 19-day-old baby. She noticed they looked a lot like her own baby pictures. 

Police DNA tested both Nance and Carlina White’s parents and confirmed that Nance was, in fact, Carlina. 

She had been abducted by a woman named Anne Pettway. Carlina said she was always a little suspicious since she looked nothing like Pettway and the woman was unable to provide a birth certificate a few years earlier when she needed one. Later, she confessed to not being her birth mother but insisted her real parents abandoned her. 

Despite being a kidnapper, White admitted of her fake mother that, although strict, she was a good mother. Her friends, she said, always thought she was cool.

Her suspicions prompted her to look into missing person’s cases, which is how she ended up discovering her own disappearance. She was reunited with her birth parents in 2011.

1. Julian Hernandez Found Out He Was Kidnapped When He Tried to Go to College

Solving your own missing person’s case is not unprecedented, as we’ve seen, but having no idea anyone was looking for you and stumbling upon it as a result of doing routine paperwork may be. That’s how things worked out for 18-year-old Julian Hernandez.

Hernandez was applying to go to college and ran into a strange problem when trying to fill out his application. He found out his social security number was wrong. As in, it didn’t belong to him. So he got the help of a school guidance counselor and together they discovered Hernandez’s picture on a database of missing children. He’d disappeared 13 years earlier when he was just five-years-old. 

Because it was his father that had taken him, Hernandez had no idea that anything was wrong. He was told his mother had abandoned him, which was not the case. And despite how it sounds, Hernandez was a vocal supporter of his father during the ensuing trial, saying his father had been a good dad and made sure he got good grades, noting that punishing him for taking him from his mother was essentially doing the same thing to him all over again. He was given four years in prison.

Modern medicine has advanced so dramatically in the last century that it’s hard to believe that so much is still unexplained. But doctors are often faced with medical mysteries, those phenomena that currently lack a confirmed cause or full explanation.

Although we can’t list every medical mystery here, these 10 examples are a great way to illustrate how medicine continues to grow and transform over time. They also show how much new research is always needed.

10 Medical Student Syndrome

Nearly everyone has had those fleeting thoughts that they’re experiencing a symptom from a severe, undiagnosed disease. Throughout medical school, future doctors learn about thousands of diseases with various signs and symptoms that they are expected to recognize in their own patients one day. An interesting phenomenon that seems to occur in some of these people is known as “medical student syndrome.”

This occurs when medical students believe they are experiencing the symptoms of a disease that they are studying. As opposed to illness anxiety disorder, these delusions are transient.^[1]

It is unknown exactly why this occurs. But researchers believe that medical students create a mental schema as they learn about a disease and some students begin to recognize normal bodily sensations as part of this disease schema.

One study found that up to 78.8 percent of randomly sampled medical students suffer from a form of medical student syndrome. For some, this illness anxiety can be debilitating and lead to unnecessary medical bills. Despite widespread knowledge of this syndrome, it continues to propagate and affect hundreds of students each year.

9 Chemo Brain

Many cancer survivors use the term “chemo brain” to describe the thinking and memory problems that occur after chemotherapy treatment. Symptoms can vary from person to person—from difficulty concentrating to memory problems or difficulty multitasking. This is an extremely frustrating phenomenon for those who are undergoing chemotherapy.

For years, many doctors did not believe in this phenomenon. As it became more common, however, physicians began to recognize that this was a real and debilitating experience. Currently, there is no consensus on what is causing chemo brain, but it is believed to be due to more than just chemotherapy treatment. Researchers are trying to find the source of the cognitive difficulties but have been unsuccessful so far.^[2]

8 Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome

First described in 1900, Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome (KTS) is an extremely rare disease. Affecting blood vessels, bones, and soft tissues, this condition results in three characteristic features: a red birthmark known as a port-wine stain, abnormal bone and soft tissue overgrowth, and venous malformations. The increased size of bone and soft tissue can result in oversized limbs, usually in the lower body and legs. The venous malformations can result in large blood clots.

Famous cases of KTS include Billy Corgan, the lead singer for The Smashing Pumpkins, and Matthias Schlitte, a professional arm wrestler. Notably, Matthias is known for his Popeye-like right forearm that allows him to be an extremely successful arm wrestler. His condition causes the bone in his right forearm to be 33 percent larger than the one in his other forearm. Currently, there is no cure for the condition and physicians have little explanation as to the cause of the disease.^[3]

7 Rip Van Winkle Syndrome

The disease sounds like the work of a fairy tale, but Rip Van Winkle syndrome is far from fantasy. Also known as Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS), this disease has only a few reported cases and its physiological cause has not been confirmed.

At age 13, Stephen Maier became a victim of KLS following an upper respiratory infection. Out of nowhere, his parents were unable to wake him up. When they finally did, he was completely incoherent.

After many tests, all of which were negative, Stephen was left with no answers. Even tests on brain activity showed no abnormalities. Maier would go through sleeping spells of up to 22 hours a day for 10 to 20 consecutive days. As mysteriously as the disease appeared, it gradually faded away in his twenties.^[4]

In another case of KLS, a 17-year-old female from Pennsylvania experienced a sleeping episode that lasted 64 days—from Thanksgiving to January. She was reported to have slept 22–24 hours a day. When she did awaken to eat and use the bathroom, she was in a sleepwalking state.

In addition to this sleepiness, sufferers can experience increased appetite, hallucinations, anhedonia, childlike behavior, and hypersexuality. Between these episodes, however, the patients are completely asymptomatic.

Although it may seem appealing to some to get so much sleep, patients end up missing out on large parts of their lives. A few theories about the origin of this disease range from a virus to autoimmunity, but its cause is still largely unknown.

6 Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome

First described in 2004 by J.H. Allen and colleagues, this odd disorder presents with intractable nausea, vomiting, and GI distress. With further study, the researchers found that all these patients shared a common background of long-term cannabis use.

Although little is known about the cause of this phenomenon, two theories have been put forth. The first holds that the toxic buildup of cannabinoids may be the cause. The second has to do with the functionality of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. During these episodes, some patients have reported temporary symptom relief from a hot shower or bath or psychiatric medications. The only known cure is stopping the use of cannabis. Improvement can be seen within one to three months.

These vomiting episodes tend to last for one to two days. What is extremely odd about this disorder is that marijuana is known for its anti-vomiting effect. This paradox is especially problematic for people who use marijuana to treat nausea and vomiting and then end up feeling more nauseated. It is unclear as to why some chronic users develop this disorder while others do not.^[5]

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is extremely complex, and researchers are still searching for explanations. As the use of marijuana increases, it is an area that will require much more research.

5 Abscopal Effect

Michael Postow and his colleagues put forth a paper describing a patient whose metastatic melanoma tumors began shrinking after the person received the drug ipilimumab and radiotherapy. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, this report got a lot of attention in the medical community.

The abscopal effect refers to the bizarre phenomenon where metastatic tumors throughout the body shrink in response to localized treatment of a tumor. For many years, there was no explanation for this interesting reaction. In 2004, it was first hypothesized that the immune system may play a role in this systemic shrinking. While researchers are continuing to investigate the cause of what is happening, a firm explanation has yet to be established.^[6]

4 The Lazarus Phenomenon

An 11-month-old girl in the intensive care unit at the University of Rochester Medical Center had been pronounced dead after aggressive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), seven doses of epinephrine, two bags of fluid, and four shocks to her chest. After two minutes of asystole, the official time of death was called out at 1:58 PM.

The girl’s family was devastated and asked for her breathing tube to be removed so that they could have some time with their daughter. Fifteen minutes after she was pronounced dead, the tube was removed. Suddenly, the girl began to breathe spontaneously. Her heart began beating again, her color came back, and her gag reflex reappeared. The physicians had never seen anything like this.^[7]

The Lazarus phenomenon is a rare occurrence in which patients experience a delayed return of spontaneous circulation after CPR has been stopped. This bizarre syndrome was initially described in 1982. It was named “Lazarus” after the man who was resurrected by Christ four days after his death.

The explanation for this miraculous ability to come back to life has continued to evade physicians and researchers alike. Some believe that there may be more than one mechanism at work, such as the delayed action of drugs or high potassium.

3 Smoking Aversion From Hepatitis

Thousands of people try various methods to quit smoking every year. While many researchers are learning more about the causes behind nicotine addiction, much less is known about the roots of smoking aversion. However, one interesting trigger has been discovered for immediate smoking aversion—the development of hepatitis A.^[8]

There are various presentations when a person is infected with hepatitis A, depending upon its stage. The first phase (aka the viral replication phase) is largely asymptomatic in most patients. Moving into the prodromal or second phase, patients can experience anorexia, nausea, vomiting, muscle aches, fatigue, itching, and an aversion to smoking. The disease then begins to affect the liver and GI system before resolving.

Although aversion to smoking is a documented effect of acute hepatitis A, little is known about its cause. More research is definitely warranted in this area as the discovery of the cause of the aversion may be extremely helpful to millions of smokers throughout the world.

2 Meat Allergy From Ticks

Last year, the researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were stumped by the increasing number of US cases of anaphylaxis to a molecule found in red meat. Alpha gal is a sugar molecule that is naturally found in beef, pork, lamb, and other red meats.

As researchers delved deeper into the histories of patients with this allergy, they found that most were located in the Southeast and certain parts of New York, New Jersey, and New England. Even more interestingly, all the patients had a history of bites from the lone star tick.

This allergy was particularly hard to diagnose because it presented 3–6 hours after ingestion, unlike common anaphylaxis that presents within 5–30 minutes. The symptoms of this odd anaphylaxis ranged from hives to GI distress to itching and swelling. However, there was no throat swelling. Common allergy tests do not routinely scan for antibodies against alpha gal, so these patients are commonly misdiagnosed.

Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills initially discovered the alpha gal connection.^[9] Some of his patients with a history of lone star tick bites experienced anaphylaxis from the cancer drug cetuximab, which contains alpha gal. Although the source of the allergy has been discovered, the reason that lone star tick bites are associated with alpha-gal allergies remains a mystery.

1 Cellular Memory

Cellular memory is a controversial hypothesis that the body itself is capable of storing memories rather than only the brain. As there is mostly anecdotal evidence to support this theory, many consider it to be pseudoscientific.

Many have linked phantom pain to cellular memory for past trauma to a joint or limb. Cellular memory has also come into play in certain stories of organ transplant patients who develop the traits of their donors.

Researchers at the University of Hawaii evaluated whether organ transplant recipients experienced personality changes following their transplants and if any of these changes paralleled the history of their donors. In a study of 10 patients, each one showed 2–5 changes after the completion of a heart transplant that paralleled his or her donor’s history. These changes in preference occurred in areas such as food, art, recreation, career, and even sex.^[10]

One case involved Claire Sylvia, who received a heart from an 18-year-old male who died in a motorcycle crash. When she awoke from the surgery, she had a strong craving for beer and chicken nuggets, which was out of the ordinary for her. Additionally, she continued to have recurring dreams about someone named Tim L. After searching obituaries, she found that her heart had come from a man named Tim and later discovered that he loved all the foods that she had begun craving.

In a study done by Tufts University, researchers trained a worm and then removed its head and brain, which shrank it to 1/279th of its original size. The worm was then regrown in the lab and still showed signs of its previous training.

The research on cellular memory has a long way to go before this phenomenon is proven to be real. Nevertheless, we still don’t have any explanations for these odd parallels in numerous transplant stories.

Shelby Hoebee is a third-year medical student. While she doesn’t have much free time anymore, she still enjoys writing top 10 lists when inspiration strikes.

While modern medicine is borderline miraculous, there are a number of downright scary disorders that we’ve yet to find a cure for. Unlike other incurable diseases, such as the common cold, these conditions aren’t exactly easy to live with — many of them can even result in individuals being ostracized.

10. Berardinelli-Seip Congenital Lipodystrophy

Occurring in every one out of about 10 million births, Berardinelli-Seip congenital lipodystrophy (BSCL) is a condition marked by a severe lack of fat tissue in the body, with fats being stored in unlikely places around the body such as the liver and muscles. Because of these odd symptoms, patients with BSCL have a rather distinctive look and appear very muscular, almost superhero-like. They also tend to have prominent facial bones and enlarged genitalia.

In one of the two known types of BSCL, medical researchers have also found a mild to moderate intellectual disability — but that’s far from being the patients’ biggest concern. The highly unusual handling and depositing of fat leads to serious problems, such as high levels of fats circulating in the bloodstream and insulin resistance, while the accumulation of fats in the liver or heart can lead to severe damage of both organs and even sudden death. Apart from drugs normally used for patients with hyperglycemia, BSCL patients have to maintain a strict diet in order to keep their fat and carbohydrate intake to a minimum, while also avoiding total proteins and trans fats.

9. Leukodystrophies, or Benjamin Button Syndrome

A somewhat similar condition was depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and the subsequent movie adaptation, but the actual disease is quite a bit different, albeit just as scary. Because of an improper growth of myelin (the brain’s white matter) people suffering from leukodystrophies will experience a gradual decline in development, essentially going from a normal adult to having the thought process of a toddler.

Affecting about one in a few thousand individuals, most cases of leukodystrophies are genetic in nature and also share a number of common features with the less rare multiple sclerosis, which is also caused by the loss of white matter from the brain. The more disturbing types of leukodystrophies are not inherited but may arise spontaneously, even after the individual in question has been living a normal and healthy life into adulthood. Around forty rare genetic disorders comprise leukodystrophies, all of them having mostly similar symptoms. Treatment is usually limited to symptom management.

8. RPI Deficiency, the World’s Rarest Disease

With a single patient suffering from it in all known history, RPI deficiency may well be the rarest disease in the world, although it shares a number of similarities with the aforementioned leukodystrophies. Caused by a low production of the Ribose 5 Phosphate Isomerase (RPI) enzyme, which is pretty much in charge of your body’s metabolism, the disorder consists of a number of mutations and a range of symptoms that aren’t found together in any other disease.

The only known patient to have it was born in 1984 and over the years developed psychomotor retardation, epilepsy, optic atrophy and extensive abnormalities of his brain’s white matter. Despite extensive investigations and research over the years, physicians are yet to either find a cure or even give a prognosis, especially since no other patient is known to exist on the planet.

7. Lesch–Nyhan Syndrome, or Self-Cannibalism

Affecting one in over 300,000 individuals, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome (LNS) is a rare disorder which is also caused by a deficiency of a metabolism enzyme, but with a different and horrifying symptom. Apart from delayed overall growth, nervous system impairment, testicular atrophy, kidney damage and sometimes acute inflammatory arthritis, most LNS patients tend to injure themselves via biting. Without outside help some of them can go as far as literally biting themselves to death, which is why most LNS patients are kept in restraints for most of their short lives. There are even some cases in which their front teeth are extracted in order to keep them from biting themselves.

Despite this atrocious symptom, LNS usually kills via kidney failure, and patients have a two decade prognosis at best. The treatment is either symptomatic or experimental, with no full-on cure existing at the moment. The only good news about the disease is the fact that women are mostly devoid of symptoms and are just carriers.

6. Moebius Syndrome

The rare Moebius syndrome is characterized by complete facial paralysis. It seems that only up to 20 individuals in 20 million births suffer from this congenital neurological disorder, and those who do may also exhibit limb abnormalities (such as missing fingers) and corneal erosion because of their limited ability to blink.

Since facial expressions and smiles are an important part of social interaction, Moebius syndrome patients are erroneously stereotyped as being mentally impaired because of their motionless face and frequent drooling. Most cases don’t appear to be genetic and usually happen after traumatic pregnancies or after the use of certain drugs by the mother, such as cocaine or abortion inducing substances. While therapy can improve motor skills and coordination over the years, and eye drops can battle the implications of impaired blinking, the only so-called cure for the lack of facial expressions is via smile reconstruction surgery.

5. Prosopagnosia, or Face Blindess

Prosopagnosic people are probably the most misunderstood people on this list, and that’s because their condition is hard to grasp from the outside. In short, people with prosopagnosia find it difficult or downright impossible to remember faces, even their own. Some go as far as making funny faces when standing in front of a mirror in a crowded restroom just so they can see which ones they are. They’re not technically face blind, as they can detect faces as clearly as any other human, but their brains can’t memorize what they see.

While you would think the biggest problem with this condition would be following a movie plot, the sadder truth is the fact that most prosopagnosics are ostracized by people who are offended that they aren’t recognized. Since there’s no long-lasting therapy that can work with this disorder, most patients learn to cope with prosopagnosia by using audio and other visual clues to recognize friends, family and co-workers.

4. Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progresiva, or Stone Man Syndrome

Yet another cruel genetic disease, fybrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is an odd condition in which most or even all of a person’s muscle tissue, tendons and ligaments become ossified over time. The only moving body parts that don’t turn into bone are the cardiac muscle, the diaphragm, the tongue, the extra-ocular muscles and smooth muscle tissue, essentially transforming the person into a living statue.

Since the extra bones appearing on the body of a FOP patient are formed across joints it can severely restrict movement down to the inability to fully open their mouths, thus causing difficulty in speaking and eating. If that doesn’t sound bad enough, any physical trauma — including attempts to surgically remove the extra bone — are bound to trigger muscle swelling in the area, which in turn may cause more bone growth. While rather gruesome in both appearance and consequences, FOP is very rare, with the condition occurring in about one in two million newborns and only a few hundred cases having been confirmed by modern medicine.

3. Harlequin-type Ichthyosis

Harlequin-type ichthyosis is a genetic disorder that affects just the skin of the patient, albeit in a unique and macabre way. Babies born with this condition have very hard and thick skin that forms large, diamond-shaped plates separated by deep fissures. The shape of the eyes, nose, mouth and ears are also distinctive.

While extremely rare, harlequin-type ichthyosis has been known since at least the mid-18^th century, when a case was described in the diary of a cleric from South Carolina. Until just a few years ago the condition was almost always fatal, since the characteristics of the patients’ skin makes them highly susceptible to infections and dehydration, and also make it hard to regulate body temperature or breathe properly. With recent medical improvements the number of survivors of this severe disorder is steadily increasing, but there’s still no absolute cure for it.

2. Visual Release Hallucinations, or Charles Bonnet Syndrome

Although it appears in people who are otherwise mentally healthy, Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) can probably make someone feel like they’re crazy or constantly drugged. In short, patients with CBS can experience rather vivid and complex visual hallucinations, despite the fact that all of them suffer from partial or severe visual impairment due to old age or certain diseases such as diabetes or glaucoma. Obviously, seeing things that couldn’t possibly be there, such as mythological creatures or cartoon characters, does little to improve the mental condition of sufferers, especially since most fear they may have a brain-related disease such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

Even though there’s a rather high rate of non-reporting of this disorder, it appears that it has a high prevalence among older adults that have started experiencing significant blindness, with certain studies reporting anywhere between 10 and 40 percent of nearly blind and old patients suffer from CBS. Fortunately, unlike the other conditions on this list, CBS symptoms will simply disappear on their own after one or two years at most, or once the brain has started to adjust to the patient’s loss of vision.

1. Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome

Cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS) is a medical condition that’s bound to completely disrupt the normal life of any otherwise health individual, as its symptoms mainly consist of intense and recurring attacks of nausea and vomiting for no apparent reason. Corroborated with headaches and abdominal pain, the life-disrupting episodes can take hours or even several days, with the sufferers sometimes requiring medical treatment in the ER.

Because of the severe and cyclic nature of nausea and vomiting attacks, CVS patients have a much higher chance of developing a number of other medical complications, such as dehydration, inflammation of the esophagus, tooth decay and even a life-threatening tear of the esophagus. While there’s no known remedy for CVS, there are a number of treatments which may stop or prevent a vomiting attack, or relieve associated symptoms. Currently, it’s known that about three in 100,000 births are diagnosed with the condition, and it seems that even Charles Darwin may have suffered from it.

They say that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. If you’re not a human, then that means only one thing is guaranteed. And even though we all have to die sometime, we sure don’t all get to go out the same way.

The animal kingdom can be brutal and death can come from predators, lack of habitat, lack of resources, and dozens of other reasons. But some species have unique and bizarre hazards that only they face. Let’s take a look at ten of the most unusual.

10. The Suicide Palm Flowers to Death

With a name like “suicide palm,” it’s clear that this particular plant has an unusual story. It grows in Madagascar and was only discovered back in 2006. Though it has the less grim name of Tahina, the morbid “suicide plan” name came from the tree’s remarkably unusual life cycle. 

For decades, the tree will grow up to a height of as much as 18 meters or nearly 60 feet. Then it blossoms for the first and only time. Nectar-filled blossoms cover the tree numbering in the millions. These will eventually turn into fruit. Producing the flowers and fruit takes every resource the tree has, and it is unable to survive the process. The tree dies and the fruit will litter the ground around their dead progenitor. 

The fruit can obviously give rise to a new generation of trees if the seeds take root and are able to grow, but if something didn’t work out, then the plant would simply die out in that location thanks to its all-or-nothing reproduction plan.

9. Australian Jewel Beetles Loved Beer Bottles to Death

Insects get a lot of credit for their seemingly remarkable abilities to organize and perform tasks but, realistically, that’s mostly reserved for bees and ants. The rest of the insect kingdom is generally overlooked, and maybe that’s for good reason, at least when it comes to something like the Australian jewel beetle. These poor little creatures have one claim to fame and it’s not a complex hive organization or their industrious nature. It’s that they’ll kill themselves trying to mate with beer bottles.

Researchers discovered the habit of the Australian beetles by accident some years ago. In the field, two scientists were studying something else altogether but happened to notice these beetles giving their best effort with discarded beer bottles. 

Numerous beetles and numerous bottles indicated it wasn’t just a fluke. These bugs were trying to get busy and there was no mistake. In scientific terms, they were able to observe that the beetles were definitely attempting to mate.They even set up new bottles and observed that they attracted more males for would latch on and had to be forcefully removed to get them to stop. One even continued even as ants bit its genitals.

The researchers noted that the female beetles were almost exactly the same shade of brown as the specific brand of bottles that the beetles had chosen. And, just like bottles, the females had a dimpled carapace. So the males were simply confused. But they were so committed that they would continue even unto death in the sun or plucked off and eaten by predators. 

The story does have a happy ending, however. After the scientists released their findings, the company that made the seductive bottles changed the design to remove the confusing dimples. The beetles then lost interest. 

8. The Longhorn Cowfish Poisons Itself

If you’re into saltwater aquariums, you may already know about the longhorn cowfish. They’re popular among exotic fish enthusiasts because of their bright yellow color and their extremely unusual appearance. But keeping them in an aquarium presents a unique danger in the form of their natural self-defense abilities.

Most animals have some way to defend themselves, and the cowfish pulls this off by way of an ostracitoxin it can release. So it’s a poisonous fish. But again, that’s not so unusual. Lots of creatures are toxic or venomous in some way. The problem with the longhorn cowfish is that it’s not immune to its own toxins. So if the fish gets too excited or feels threatened, the toxin will fill the aquarium and not just kill all the other fish, it will kill itself as well. 

The toxin can be removed from a tank with activated carbon, but if you need to do that, it’s likely everything will have died already. 

7. Babirusa Tusks Can Pierce Their Own Skulls

A babirusa looks like a wild boar that someone tried to draw from memory after seeing it only once in passing. Sometimes called deer pigs, they’re native to parts of Indonesia. The most notable feature of a male babirusa is their remarkably long, curving tusks. Unlike a boar, they have two sets of two, not just one. While they have the expected set you’d expect to see protruding from their lower jaw, they also have an upward curving pair of canine tusks on their upper jaw as well. These tusks do not extend up outside of their mouths, instead they actually pierce through the animal’s snout flesh. As far as we know, they’re the only animal in the world with teeth that grow vertically like this.

It’s this pair of tusks that can become a lethal complication for the animal. As they grow, they curve inward, extending up and over its eyes. 

The babirusa must find a way to wear those tusks down, either against trees or rocks. If it doesn’t, the tusks can curve around and pierce through the skull, killing it. 

6. Army Ant Mills

Ants can live in colonies that house anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 members. While these colonies can be huge, they work because the members all work together. But sometimes they work together too well. Or too poorly, as the case may be. When individual members lack autonomy, one ant can follow another ant towards certain doom. This is what’s at the heart of an ant mill, the phenomenon which occurs in army ant colonies now and then.

Army ants have some unique features that separate them from other species. One is that they don’t have permanent nests like many other ant species, so they’re always on the hunt for new food sources.. Another is that they are blind. And that works for them because they use their other senses to forage for food. 

When things work as planned, the head ant will lead the others by leaving a pheromone trail. The other ants follow the smell towards their goal. But if something goes wrong, and the lead ant doubles back, for instance, the other ants will follow that trail and the lead ant may also get caught following its own trail. This leads to the ants walking in circles, following trails that go nowhere. And because they’re not designed to do anything different, the ants will continue in these spirals until all of them die of exhaustion. 

5. Demodex Mites Eat Until They Die

Right now, on your face, is an entire ecosystem you never see. Microscopic demodex mites are very likely living it up in your hair follicles and pores, feasting on your secretions and oils. It’s believed skin conditions like rosacea are caused by too many of these little critters taking up residence in your flesh. The method of how and why this happens is truly bizarre and more than a little offputting.

The older you are, the more likely you are to have the mites, and they seem to be shared through direct contact. They like oily skin best and are most likely to be found on your face. And while they might live a happy life on your face eating cells around hair follicles and sebum you secrete, they can’t actually get rid of anything they eat because they don’t come equipped with an anus. 

With no way to remove waste, the mites just get bigger and bigger as they eat until they finally die and their filthy corpses are left in your flesh..

4. Dolphins Sometimes Commit Suicide

Dolphins are considered some of the smartest animals in the world, second only to humans and more intelligent than primates. They are capable of solving problems and abstract thought and, it seems, a lot of emotional turmoil. So much so that dolphins can even take their own lives.

Knowing that a dolphin can think about the world in almost the same way as a human, it changes how something like a dolphin show at an aquarium works. Imagine if someone was forcing you to swim and do tricks for a crowd every day. Or perform on camera, as was the case with Kathy, one of the dolphins that played Flipper on the TV series.

Trainer Richard O’Barry said he was in the tank the day Kathy killed herself. He claimed she sank to the bottom and stopped breathing. Dolphins must consciously control their own breathing, so if one were so inclined to simply suffocate, it could probably do so easily enough. 

In the 1960s, NASA was trying to train a dolphin named Peter to speak English. In a bizarre twist, Peter fell in love with his trainer Margate Howe Lovatt with who, he trained six days a week. You may have heard the unusual details of that story when they made the news a few years back as the media was rather taken with the specific detail of how physical that relationship between human and dolphin got.

That aside, the experiments ended abruptly and Lovatt was fired. Peter was moved to a new tank and left alone. He voluntarily stopped breathing as well, sinking to the bottom and dying, just as Kathy had. 

3. Shrews Need to Eat Their Own Body Weight Every Day

A shrew is often used as a pejorative term for someone who is a nag. Realistically, it should be a term for someone who eats like a fiend. A shrew’s metabolism is hard to imagine. Their hearts can beat 800 to 1,000 times per minute. One species even breaks 1,500 times per minute.

They can move 12 times per second and if they don’t eat their body weight every day, they die. A short-tailed shrew needs to eat three times its weight. If they even go a few hours without eating, it could be fatal.

2. Female Ferrets Must Mate or Die

Like shrews, ferrets are beholden to a biological imperative that can be deadly. Female ferrets go into estrus, or heat, like many other mammals. But the difference with ferrets is that if they don’t mate, they won’t survive the process.

Pet ferrets need to be spayed or neutered. First and foremost, it reduces their somewhat objectionable odor. But it also saves the lives of the females because those that don’t mate will die from aplastic anemia. This is due to imbalanced hormone levels caused by the ferret going into heat but not successfully mating. The hormones affect blood production and the fatal anemia soon follows. 

1. The Australian Antechinus Mates Until it Dies

Going from a creature that will die if it doesn’t mate to one that will die because it mated, we have the Australian antechinus. These little mouse-like marsupials experience either the greatest or worst ending of any life, depending on your perspective and/or sense of humor.

Every year, males of the species are obliterated as they attempt to continue their genetic line. For upwards of 14 hours at a time for several weeks on end, they mate with females or fight off other males. This continues until they die. 

The testosterone that floods their little bodies interferes with various stress hormone levels. This, in turn, completely destroys their immune systems and eventually they collapse and die as a result. 

As bizarre as this sounds from an evolutionary standpoint, it actually helps the species out. With the male population destroyed, the pregnant females have less competition for food and are able to eat and provide for their young.

Death is rarely the sort of thing that inspires wonder or delight. Typically, it’s an event that brings about sorrow and introspection. But every so often, a death occurs that’s just perplexing and weird. And when it comes to royalty, they seem to be subject to these unusual and inauspicious deaths more than the general population. 

10. Charles VIII Hit His Head on the Door Frame

If ever there was proof that royals are just like us, it’s in the tale of King Charles VIII and his most unfortunate demise. Charles VIII was the king of France in the late 1400s. At 28 years of age, he was still young and powerful and seemed likely to reign for years to come. 

On April 7, 1498, Charles and his wife were on their way to watch a tennis match. On the way through the chateau at which they were staying, Charles stumbled on a rotten floorboard. According to the court chronicler, they were rushing through what was described as a “nasty” corner of the house where everyone apparently peed on the floor, which is what caused the wood to rot. The king tripped and hit his head on the lintel over the door.

The King was fine for a time and even watched his tennis match, but then collapsed later on and died about nine hours after the initial injury.

9. King Alexander of Greece Was Bit by a Monkey

By now, everyone should know that having a pet monkey is a one way ticket to pain. They’re just not meant to be pets. But back in 1920, no one was around to tell that to King Alexander of Greece. He had to find out the hard way. 

Alexander had been king of Greece for three years. The First World War had only recently ended and there was some serious turmoil in the world at large, so it’s no surprise that the King liked to go for walks with his dogs sometimes.  That’s what he did on October 2.

Someone on the royal staff had a pet monkey, specifically a Barbary macaque. They’re known to be aggressive sometimes, especially if they’ve grown accustomed to humans feeding them. The monkey attacked the King’s dog, so the King did what any dog owner would do when their dog was in danger. He tried to save it. 

A second monkey attacked when the King got involved, biting the man several times. Two of the bites became severely infected. Doctors even considered amputating his leg, but word is the doctors were afraid to do anything that would make it worse. So they effectively did nothing. Twenty-three days after the attack, the King died from the massive infection that had spread through his body.

8. King Henry Ate Too Many Eels

Outside of Japan, eel has never really caught on as a popular food item. Not that no one eats it, it’s just nowhere near as popular as salmon, for instance. That said, it has enjoyed a long culinary history that dates back hundreds of years. For instance, King Henry I of England was a huge fan of eels. So much so that he was warned by doctors he needed to scale back his love of them. 

For whatever reason, Henry’s love of eels was more of a love hate thing. He loved them, but they made him sick. Still, he kept eating. It was said that eating the eels, lamprey to be specific, produced a “deadly chill” in his body and a “sudden and extreme convulsion.”

The final time the sickness overtook him, he suffered a fever and soon passed away. To this day, lamprey, which don’t have bones and apparently are a bit like beef when cooked, can be deadly. They have a bad habit of absorbing mercury in their bodies. 

7. King Bela of Hungary’s Throne Collapsed

In modern parlance, if someone were to say a certain monarch’s throne fell or collapsed, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a metaphor. It sounds like what someone might say when a monarchy fails. But as Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a fallen throne is really a fallen throne. 

King Bela I of Hungary ruled the nation from 1060 until 1063. The man’s reign had been tumultuous, and he’d even fought a victorious war against the Holy Roman Emperor. He was in the midst of preparing for a new war against those who were supporting another’s claim to the throne when the completely inexplicable occurred. 

Bela had been seated on his throne, as in the literal chair which was made of wood, when it collapsed. He was injured so badly when the chair crumbled around him; he died as a result.

6. Prince Sado Was Locked in a Box for 8 Days

Prince Sado of Korea was born in 1735. He was heir to the throne of King Yeongjo, but the King was a violent and angry man. The Prince’s upbringing was one of fear and intimidation and also sickness. He suffered some unnamed maladies during childhood, and as he grew older, his behavior became unusual. After a bout with the measles in his teens, it’s said that he began to suffer hallucinations.

Sado became obsessed with the weather and even believed his clothing affected it. His father became more and more enraged by him and his behavior.  He, in turn, would vent his frustrations on the servants by beating or killing them. There were multiple bodies being removed from the palace every day.When he turned on his younger sister, the king had had enough.

Sado was forced into a rice box, a heavy wooden chest. It was early July, and he was left in the box for eight days, where he died. Some have speculated the prince had syphilis, which led to dementia, but we’ll likely never know for sure. 

5. Duke Jing of Jin Drowned in the Toilet

John Donne once wrote “death, be not proud” and he was referring to the promise of something beyond death. The poem contends that death should not be proud of its accomplishments because, when we wake eternally, death itself will die. That’s a lovely sentiment, of course, but if you believe death capable of taking pride in its work, then you have to believe it got some pride out of the inglorious death of Duke Jing of Jin. The man drowned in a toilet by accident. 

The Duke, sometimes referred to as a Marquis, is said to have had a terrible dream one day. He called for a witch to interpret the dream and she said that he would die before tasting the wheat of the new year. 

When the new wheat came, the duke summoned the witch and had her killed for being wrong. So the story goes, he was about to eat it when his stomach started giving him troubles, so he headed out to what was essentially an outhouse privy. His servants waited a long time for him to come back, but he did not. When they finally went to find him, they found that he had fallen into the cesspool and died. 

4. King John of Bohemia Inexplicably Died in Battle

If a king dies on the field of battle, does that qualify as unusual? In almost every single circumstance, you’d likely have to say no. Leading soldiers to battle seems like a very kingly thing to do. And it was the sort of thing that King John of Bohemia wanted to do as well. 

Crowned king in 1311, he fought in many wars over the years. This included battles against Russian, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania and Austria. He also fought with the French against England. It was at the Battle of Crécy when King John died, felled by a volley of English arrows. A fitting end for a king in most stories, but there was one detail which sets King John’s fate apart.

The Battle of Crécy took place in 1346. King John lost his sight in 1336. The king was blind when he went to battle. His horse had to be tied to two other horses because the man had no idea where he was going. He and the two knights leading him were all killed charging the English.

3. The Prince of Wu Was Killed by a Chess Board

Gaming is serious business for a lot of people. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since it’s been this way for thousands of years. In fact, sometime around 175 BC, a game of chess became life and death for a Chinese crown prince and a future emperor. 

The son of the King of Wu and the son of Emperor Wen were spending some time together in the Han capital. They were both young men and, word has it, drinking was one of the past times in which they engaged when they were together. 

As drinking buddies, the two young men were known to have fun together, playing a variety of games. The two men took up a game of chess, though some sources dispute the exact nature of the game. Regardless of what it was, the men didn’t agree on the rules and got into an argument. The argument got heated and the future emperor took things too far. He grabbed the game board and bashed the crown prince over the head. 

The heavy wooden board must have been formidable as the assault crushed the crown prince’s skull with enough force to end his life. 

2. The Earl of Orkney Was Killed By a Tooth 

Ironic deaths are hard to come by sometimes, but few have achieved the level of dramatic irony that befell Sigurd Eysteinsson, known as Sigurd the Mighty, the first Earl of Orkney. As part of his reign, Sigurd had been conquering various parts of Scotland when he ran into trouble in Moray sometime around the year 1200. 

A man known as Maelbrigte Tusk, on account of his unusually large teeth, was proving to be trouble for Sigurd. In order to settle their differences, the men agreed to hash it out with violence. Each man would bring 40 men and whoever lived was the winner. Sigurd showed up with 80 men.

As expected, Sigurd won. He took Maelbrigte’s head as a prize and rode off with it. Some time during the journey, the gnarly tooth of Maelbrigte pierced Sigurd’s flesh. The resulting infection ended up costing him his life. 

1. King Charles of Navarre Died a Brandy-Soaked Fiery Death

Most people seem to want to die at home in bed if they were to have a choice. Not that most of us do. But the idea makes sense. If given the option, few people would ever choose a painful death. And it’s likely no one would ever choose what happened to King Charles of Navarre.

During his reign in the mid-1300s, Charles was a treacherous and cruel king. He was known to make duplicitous deals and doublecross allies when it suited him. He also was not above slaughtering peasants to quell uprisings and maintain his control. 

In 1387, Charles fell ill with a mystery ailment. Medicine being what it was at the time, doctors didn’t have a very practical solution to his problems. So they prescribed that he be wrapped in brandy-soaked sheets from head to toe. Moreover, he was sewn into the cloth so that he could absorb all the curative properties of the brandy. 

After he was all sewn up, there was a length of excess thread hanging off the fabric. The maid who sewed him in couldn’t find any scissors so she decided to use a candle to burn the thread off. It set the alcohol-soaked sheets ablaze, torching the king trapped within. 

Some say it was an errant coal from the fire that sparked the sheet and not the maid. A Bishop who attended the King even said his death was just a peaceful one. But the burning story has been the one that stuck throughout history.