The events that occurred in the Ural Mountains at the beginning of February 1959, what would become known as the Dyatlov Pass incident, remain one of the 20th century’s most mysterious encounters—not least because we still don’t have a satisfactory or widely accepted explanation for why nine experienced hikers lost their lives in brutal ways.

Their tent was found in ruins, cut from the inside. Several of the hikers were discovered barefoot and almost naked near the original campsite around a month after their disappearance. What is interesting is that a trail of footprints—some barefoot—led from the tent and then simply stopped. The rest were discovered almost three months later, buried under snow in a ravine.

Just what happened to them? Why did they leave their tent, some barefoot, in the middle of the night in brutally cold temperatures, an act that would certainly guarantee their deaths? Here are ten theories as to just what happened.

10 It Was An Avalanche, Right?

The most obvious explanation would be that the group, for all their experience, were the unfortunate victims of a freak avalanche. Case solved, right? Well, not quite. First of all, the area has absolutely no history of avalanches, certainly none that would cause outright death.^[1] Secondly, even if this was a freak occurrence that just happened to hit on the night when hikers just happened to be on that part of the mountainside, there was simply no evidence of an avalanche when searchers eventually combed the area in search of the missing hikers.

Aside from there being no evidence of an avalanche, the injuries eventually discovered on the recovered bodies didn’t line up with such an incident. Although this explanation was very much promoted at one time—and even now, some people insist this is what happened—it simply does not add up. Furthermore, such insistence, against the obvious facts, could be argued to suggest a cover-up of sorts.

9 It Was A UFO

Okay, let’s get this one out of way. It was a UFO! That is certainly the theory of some researchers.^[2] And while there is no evidence to suggest they are correct, there are some interesting details to examine that might suggest involvement of a highly advanced craft from another world.

For example, where two of the hikers were discovered, next to the burned-out remains of a campfire, there was substantial damage to the trees that overlooked their makeshift base. The damage was around 4.6 meters (15 ft) high. Some researchers have theorized that this was the result of a UFO hovering just above the treetops.

Furthermore, some of the group who would be discovered months after they disappeared were found with pieces of skin, lips, and eyes apparently surgically removed. While some claim these “injuries” were merely the result of decomposition, others say the seemingly precise cuts suggest intelligent action.

8 The Yeti Claims

Perhaps one of the most interesting claims is that the group met their grisly end at the hands—or should that be claws—of a Yeti or Bigfoot-like creature that inhabits the remote regions of the Ural Mountains.^[3] The local Mansi tribe has legends of a Yeti-like creature called the Menk, and furthermore, it is said to roam the area of the incident.

There is a famous picture recovered from the belongings of the group on Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolle’s camera. On a shot known as “Frame 17,” there is a strange picture that seems to show a figure that bears a resemblance to a Bigfoot-type creature.

Some people believe that this “figure” was actually one of the hikers returning from a raised piece of land, probably looking to get their bearings. The fact that it was the last picture Thibeaux-Brignolle took, though, leads to some people perhaps reading more into what there actually is. Or perhaps it wasn’t a Bigfoot or one of the group? Perhaps, as our next entry looks at, it was something potentially more menacing.

7 Escaped Prisoners

Less talked-about is the claim that the hikers were the unfortunate victims of escaped prisoners from the gulags in the region.^[4] Many such prisoners, who very well may have been incarcerated since World War II and wouldn’t be at all up to speed with world events, would have been imprisoned in these facilities. To them, the conflict could very much have still been taking place unless they had other, inside knowledge.

Furthermore, being spotted by strangers could result in an attack from these desperate people—themselves potentially hardened from the war and untold time behind bars with no freedom whatsoever. They would, one would imagine, weigh up the options of attacking a (relatively) small group against the risk of being reported to the Soviet authorities, which would lead to many years back in the brutal gulags.

6 The Gulag Authorities Killed Them By Mistake

In addition to the potential threats from escaped gulag prisoners, the gulag authorities themselves were likely to shoot first and ask questions later, particularly in the region the hikers were.^[5] We should bear in mind that they were off-course and somewhere they had not planned to be.

Might the gulag authorities, perhaps conducting a standard patrol of the area or maybe looking for an escaped prisoner, have been a little eager for a potential apprehension and killed the hikers in error? Imagine the anger from the local population if this was to become known. Perhaps, then, a cover-up was decided upon? Note, however, that a potential hole in this theory and the one above is that the nearest gulag was reportedly about 100 kilometers (60 mi) from where the incident took place.

While there is no proof that gulag guards killed the hikers and covered it up, there is certainly enough murkiness around the incident for people to be suspicious. Also, it was the Cold War, a time when distrust, even among a country’s citizens, ran deep. In fact, the notion that the Cold War played a major part in this mysterious incident carries over into our next entry.

5 American Intelligence Involvement

There are some claims that the incident was a result of a CIA/KGB meeting involving the handing over of radioactive materials which ultimately resulted in the deaths of nine Soviet citizens.^[6] There is no real proof to these claims, and they rely heavily on the simple fact that the Cold War was in its heyday at the time. And, if there was any chance at all that the United States could have been placed in a negative light, the Soviets would have taken it.

However, there is reason to believe there could have been a type of “entrapment” scenario unfolding. For example, there were considerable indications of radiation, both in the area itself and on some of the dead hikers.

Rumors would surface that the incident was an attempt to plant radioactive materials on CIA agents “caught” behind Soviet lines. Somehow, the operation went wrong, and the hikers were killed. If this theory was true, then that would mean that at least one of the hikers was a KGB operative. And that is the subject of our next entry. What’s more, there is sufficient reason to believe that there really could have been a KGB presence in the Ural Mountains.

4 A KGB Plant?

There are several theories that the “hike” into the mountains was secretly, and against the majority of the hikers’ knowledge, a KGB operation.^[7] Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of these claims is the fact that the oldest member of the group, 37-year-old Semyon (aka Alexander) Zolotaryov (second from right above), was not only a last-minute addition but also reportedly had extensive military and combat training. Why, exactly, was he there?

Perhaps the tattoo on his body is worth paying more attention to by researchers into this most mysterious case? The tattoo read “DAERMMUAZUAYA.” According to those who have researched the word, there is no translation in any known language. Many assume it to be either a secret military tag or some kind of secret society moniker.

If there is any truth to Zolotaryov, or any of the Dyatlov crew, being KGB agents, what their mission might have been is still anyone’s guess.

3 Local Tribes

Some theories would persist that the deaths were the result of attacks from local tribes in the area, most notably the Mansi tribe.^[8] There is no real evidence of this; the Mansi were largely peaceful and uninterested in the outside world.

Furthermore, much like the details already mentioned when examining the apparent “escape” from their tent, there was no evidence in the surrounding snow—which was largely undisturbed—of such an approach by a tribe, who wouldn’t have been thinking at all of covering their tracks, certainly not after an attack. And for an attack to happen at night in the middle of an apparent blizzard is even more unlikely.

While they certainly make a convenient scapegoat, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Mansi, or any other tribe in the area, were responsible for these most sudden and strange deaths. It perhaps should be noted, tough, that the local tribes did refer to the mountain where the incident took place as the “Mountain of the Dead.”

2 The Gravity Fluctuation Theory

Perhaps one of the most bizarre theories, albeit one that is grounded in scientific thought, is the gravity fluctuation theory.^[9] What this theory essentially argues is that there was a sudden drop in gravity in a “corridor” that the hikers were unfortunately camped in. This is a little-known (and unproven) phenomenon, but it does, at least in theory, explain the eventual location of the campers’ bodies.

For example, it is argued that those who first rushed outside the camp were essentially placed into a non-gravitational situation where they died instantly—as if they were in a vacuum. The others were dragged from the tent, which would explain the “tears from the inside.” They were literally ripped from the tent due to the sudden and dramatic drop in gravity. It is argued that this unusual phenomenon occurs more than people realize but rarely results in such a drastic situation, as people aren’t usually caught in the event. Some researchers even claim that if the hikers had simply kept their tent shut, they would have survived the rare incident.

1 Secret Weapon Tests

This theory could explain the mysterious deaths, reports of strange lights, and the air of secrecy with which the Soviet authorities handled the incident.

Many rumors persisted in the area that the Soviets would regularly test secret weapons. Some have even claimed that “neutron weapons” were in use.^[10] The injuries of some of the campers—who had severe internal trauma but little external damage—would certainly suggest some sort of advanced and secretive technology.

Might it be possible that the Soviet military were testing weapons designed to “scare” the United States, for example, only to kill nine of its own citizens? Much like the gulag theories, this scenario would result in an instant and deep cover-up.

+ The One That Got Away

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the whole dire and terrible situation is that of Yuri Yudin.^[11] Only 24 hours into the ill-fated excursion, Yudin (pictured above being hugged) would come down with an illness, severe enough that he had to return to their set-off point. Knowing what we now know of the group’s situation, it was perhaps the most well-timed illness in the entirety of the 20th century.

Whatever the sickness was, it ultimately saved his life. Indeed, it perhaps makes one ponder the precariousness of our existence, where one circumstance seemingly as innocent and trivial as being too ill to participate can ultimately result in saving one’s life. Regardless, the decision would allow Yudin to live to old age, which he did, although he never had anything of significance to add to the investigations into the deaths of his colleagues.

At the end of World War II, the death marches, which claimed the lives of countless people, were considered among the worst atrocities. Some were simply done to kill prisoners or to keep them from being freed by the advancing Allies, while some were marched for later use as hostages. Survivors were witness to the cold-blooded murder of family, friends, adults, and children. They lived to tell of some of the darkest days of World War II.

10 David Friedmann

Before the Holocaust, David Friedmann was one of Berlin’s most important and prolific portrait artists. Although he and his family escaped to Prague in 1938, they were deported to Lodz’s Jewish Ghetto in 1941. Friedmann was ultimately sent to Gleiwitz I and was a part of the death march to Blechhammer. His family died at Auschwitz.

Friedmann and the other prisoners left on January 21, 1945, and marched the 100 kilometers (60 mi) to the next camp. Friedmann wrote of the execution of those too weak to walk and remembers that he was nearly one of those people. Friedmann gave credit to a doctor named Orenstein and two friends for saving his life and getting him to Blechhammer, where they were liberated days later by the Soviets.

After the war, Friedmann continued to paint and immortalized scenes from the concentration camps he was in as well as the death march.

9 Salvator Moshe

Salvator Moshe was born in Greece, where his family had settled generations before, fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. Moshe and the other Jewish residents of Salonika were deported to German concentration camps in 1943.

Moshe and his brother-in-law were a part of the 4,000-person death march from the Warsaw Ghetto to Dachau in 1944. The march went on for days. On the third day, they were told to stop alongside a river, where the escorting officers told them they could finally have a drink. As they went to the water, Moshe recalled, “[A] fellow next to me, he was drinking water, but I heard bullets. They shooting. Zzz, zzz, zzz. Coming.”

The officers shot their charges as they kneeled to drink, and when the survivors made it back to the road, he saw another officer shooting those who couldn’t continue. Moshe and his brother-in-law survived and were liberated by US troops outside Seeshaupt.

8 William Dyess

A US fighter pilot, William Dyess was one of the soldiers who survived the Bataan Death March. He escaped in 1943 and made his way back to the States.

Dyess published an account of the horrors he witnessed, starting with the first murder. He described an Air Force captain being searched by a Japanese private, who found a handful of yen. As soon as the private, who Dyess described as a giant, saw the yen, he stepped to the side and beheaded the captain.

Dyess also talked about the so-called “Oriental sun treatment,” where captives were forced to sit in the blazing sun for hours on end, with no protection or water. The marchers were followed by a “clean-up squad” of Japanese soldiers who killed those who fell behind.

Once at San Fernando, Dyess and the other survivors found themselves in conditions so dire that they couldn’t even bring themselves to protest.

7 Eva Gestl Burns

When Soviet forces approached Auschwitz and the surrounding labor camps, those being held there were forced to walk. Eva Gestl Burns was working at an ammunition factory when they were told to start walking, and she later recounted a courageous escape.

The prisoners were clad in winter coats, and each coat was marked with a striped square. The women, many of whom were carrying scissors and thread, were able to remove the striped squares, cover the hole with a piece of plain material from somewhere else on the coat, and then replace the striped piece until they saw their chance for escape.

For Eva and a single companion, that chance came as they were being assembled into rows. When no one was paying attention, they ran, tore the striped fabric off their coats, and ultimately joined a group of German refugees heading to Sudentenland.

6 Stanislaw Jaskolski

In January 1945, prisoners at the Stutthof camp system were herded from their camps. Around 50,000 people were scattered. Around 5,000 were marched to Baltic Sea, ordered into the water, and shot. Others headed into Eastern Germany.

Stanislaw Jaskolski later described the march. He remembered freezing cold temperatures and the small bag of supplies they were handed. It included shirts, long johns, half a loaf of bread, and some margarine. They were given a scattering of blankets that were meant to be shared and were herded onto the road.

As they marched, Jaskolski thought of what they were leaving behind—the gallows, the gas chambers, and the crematorium. They were freezing, he remembered, but he also remembered thinking that they were, at that moment, doing pretty good.

5 Jack Aizenberg

Jack Aizenberg was one of 60 people (out of 600) who survived the 160-kilometer (100 mi) death march from Colditz Castle to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The 16-year-old boy was already starving, and he marched for a week with no food. Those alongside him were so hungry they were eating grass.

When they stopped to spend the night at a factory, Aizenberg found a single pea. He wanted to boil it over a fire they had started, and he was terrified that someone was going to try to steal it. He cut it into four pieces to make it last longer, and it was the only food he had for the entire march.

Aizenberg made it to Theresienstadt, and he knew he was dying—but he no longer cared. Soviet forces liberated the camp days later, and he would be taken to Britain as part of a resettlement program for the war’s orphans.

4 John Olson

Colonel John Olsen survived the Bataan Death March and the horror that came after it—Camp O’Donnell.

When survivors arrived at the camp, locals were granted permission to give them food. They were also given a welcome speech by a Japanese captain who made it clear that his only regret was that the code of honor to which he had to abide forbade him from killing the prisoners outright.

As personnel adjutant, Olson kept a meticulous record of what went on every day in the camp and would later use his notes to write a book. His journal records things like an increase in daily sugar rations (to 10 grams each) and the daily death toll. He also wrote about the burial detail and how men would volunteer for the task in order to make sure that their friends could at least have a proper burial.

3 Ingeborg Neumeyer

After World War I, around three million ethnic Germans were living in the area that became Czechoslovakia. By the time World War II rolled around, those Germans were no longer considered racially pure and became subject to the wrath of the Third Reich.

Ingeborg Neumeyer was 15 when she and her family were dragged from their apartment on May 31, 1945, and herded into the streets to join what would be known as the Brno death march. Later, she would recall seeing people shot for falling behind as well as her mother’s attempt to make sure her daughter at least had clothing. She was wearing three dresses when they started the march, but when she tried to discard two of the dresses, she was seen. She was beaten bloody, her clothes were taken, and her shoes were thrown away.

2 Marie Ranzenhoferova

Marie Ranzenhoferova was 24 years old when she walked from Brno to the Austrian border. She was offered the chance to stay by a would-be suitor who promised that if she and her baby went to live with him, she would be safe. She refused, and he would later force her at gunpoint to join the march.

Marie talked about families forced to leave homes they had been in for generations, dropping priceless family heirlooms as they walked, unable to carry them anymore. She remembered being supervised by guards from concentration camps, who were nowhere near as cruel as the men from the Zbrojovka arms factory. Those men were violent drunks, and she remembered one grabbing a baby from a woman’s arms and throwing it into a field because it would not stop crying.

When they reached the border, Marie left the march, and around 700 people followed her into the village of Perna. She stayed there for a while and eventually moved to Mikulov.

1 Keith Botterill

Keith Botterill (pictured above on the right) is one of only six people who survived the Sandakan death march. He and the other survivors only lived because they were able to escape their Japanese captors on the march from Sandakan Camp.

Botterill would later remember the camp itself as decent enough for the first 12 months they were there. As the war dragged on, the beatings and starvation got worse. As he and his companions planned for their escape, they were caught stealing rice in preparation. Botterill’s friend, Richie Murray, stepped forward and confessed to the theft. He was bayoneted.

After their escape, another companion, weakened by dysentery, slit his own throat to keep from slowing them down. The other survivors were Owen Campbell, Nelson Short (pictured left above), Bill Moxham, Bill Sticpewech (pictured center above), and James Richard Braithwaite. All Australian, they had been warned to escape by a sympathetic Japanese officer who knew about an upcoming slaughter.

Botterill died in 1997, just after the completion of a book about the remarkable story of the Sandakan Six.

+Further Reading

Here is a small selection of lists from the archives based around World War II.

10 Bizarre World War II Weapons That Were Actually Built
10 Little-Known Alternative Plans From World War II
10 Amazing Untold Stories From World War II
10 World War II Soldiers Who Pulled Off Amazing Feats

“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.” 

– Robert Anton Wilson 

Imagine going out on a routine excavation. Perhaps not even related to any academic study. It could just be surveying for a construction project. The dig starts, and instead of just finding the usual rocks and soil, the workers find a very specific form of the abyss: A glimpse into the inhumanity that man has shown to man throughout history. 

This will be another us writeup that spans the globe as it spans the ages. If there’s one thing that all humanity from all times and humanity can be counted on to do, it’s performing acts of horrifying cruelty. Sometimes the acts are committed out of the public eye, while others are officially sanctioned. As many years or even centuries as these atrocities were allowed to be forgotten, they have a surprising tendency to not stay forgotten forever. 

10. Somersham

It’s no surprise to long-time TopTenz readers that the Roman Legion were not benevolent overlords. The evidence indicates that the empire’s decline entered its early stages, and the legionaries doubled down on their harshness rather than trying to win their favor. According to Isabel Lisboa of the academic journal Archaeologica, in the Third Century AD executions doubled, and by the Fourth Century they had tripled. Glimpses of that appalling reality have been found in such areas as the village of Somersham in Cambridgeshire County.  

In 2001 Tarmac Trading began gravel excavation near the very unfortunately named Knobb’s Farm. They stumbled upon improvised cemeteries containing dozens of corpses divided roughly evenly between the genders, DNA tests revealing they were largely imported slaves. A full third of them had been decapitated before their burials. One, the remains of an old woman, was reported to have evidence of torture cut into her skeleton. Such cruelty has a way of taking the sting out of the decline and fall of this empire. 

9. 36 Craven Street

This discovery sounds like something that would be made up for the Assassin’s Creed video game series, yet it was hardly disputed from when it was first reported in 1997. During a renovation, the basement of this London address was found to contain the bodies of at least 15 people, six of which were children. Curiously, there were also the remains of sea turtles. Forensic analysis found that the bodies dated back to the 1770s, which immediately raised the profile of the discovery because that was the time when the address had been the home of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father who was then an envoy for the American colonies. Ironically, it had been during renovations to convert the building to a museum for Poor Richard himself that the potentially scandalous discovery was made. 

Fortunately for Franklin’s legacy, the historical record quickly exonerated him. To a point. It turned out the home had also been the residence of William Hewson, an anatomist with the Royal Society who was the son-in-law of the building’s owner. His noted, enlightened work came with some blemishes, in that he was deeply connected to the grave robberies that were so common for people in his profession that there were lobbying groups to legalize it (ultimately partially successful, as possessing a dead body was legal but damaging a grave or taking the effects the body was buried with were illegal). The current common consensus was that Franklin, a friend of Hewson’s before he left for home in 1776, was one of several who knew what was up but kept knowledge of those graves to himself.

8. Sand Creek

Even by the standards of US military abuses of Native American communities, the Sand Creek Massacre stood out for one fairly grim reason. On November 29, 1864, 700 US Cavalry soldiers attacked a community of about 1,000 local Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe members on an accusation that they had murdered a white family near Denver, Colorado. This was even though the community leaders were there at the government’s insistence and they had been peacefully cooperating up to that point. While the commander Colonel John Chivington would initially declare that they had won a glorious victory, Captain Silas Soule led an effort to correct the official story, reporting most of the 200 people who had been killed had been women and children, and that the attack had been unprovoked. Unusually, the government took the side of the Native American victims, though as reported by the National Park Service not a single cavalryman was so much as was charged with a crime. Ultimately, as it spurred many Native American attacks, the event was something of a My Lai Massacre of the American conquest of the West.  

By 1988, the location was designated for preservation, and yet the specific site had long been forgotten. It took a combined effort of the National Park Service, Colorado State, and Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes to use historical accounts and metal detectors. For all that, it still required the finding of a forgotten 1868 map drawn by Lieutenant Samuel Bonsail of the site and cross-referencing elk hide paintings from survivors to locate the area. As it happened, a Cheyenne spiritual leader had already consecrated the location in 1978 anyway, which many believe was more a fitting memorial for the atrocity. 

7. Crow Creek

Despite the previous entry, it is not our intention to patronizingly paint the Indigenous populations of pre-colonial America as any sort of utopia. There are few more vivid examples of how far they were from that postmodern conception than the findings at Crow Creek, South Dakota in the 1950s during an excavation for a dam project. Workers found the remains of 486 people who fell when a village was sacked circa 1350 AD, with the attackers showing no mercy based on age or gender. Indeed, many skulls had the characteristic damage from scalpings. 

The generally accepted belief for why the victims had been attacked so viciously was that the region was suffering from a drought. Such a shortage of rain was also the cause of mass migration as far away as among Pueblo tribes in the Southwestern states. Analysis of the eye sockets on the skulls showed that the victims were suffering from iron deficiency anemia. Considering recent drought patterns, whether climate change is anthropogenic or not, it’s a resonant event in a particularly unfortunate way.    

6. Potocani

As horrid as the events have been, at least for previous entries we’ve had likely explanations for why they happened. When Croatian construction workers working in Potocani village to construct a garage unearthed a mass grave in 2007, they stumbled upon evidence of a 6,200-year-old crime scene that only became more mysterious as it was investigated. The 41 victims ranged in age from their fifties to two years old. They were mostly killed through blows to the back of the head, many receiving multiple blows when the first could have been fatal, indicating that the executions were performed erratically. 

More curious was that the victims were not related, though they largely came from what’s now Türkiye. That raised the questions beyond why they were murdered. Why were they even together in the first place? Analysis of the bodies also indicated no injuries to their limbs or faces, strongly indicating they made no effort to defend themselves. So why did they allow themselves to be put to death en masse? Across the millenia, such answers are unlikely to be found. 

5. Tzompantli

The Tzompantli sound so much like propaganda from the conquistadors to justify their 1520s atrocities against the Aztecs that for decades historians suspected these supposed pyramids of human heads were made up. Unfortunately for past Central Americans, in 2015 the Institute of Anthropology found the remains of 119 of the reported seven in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Initially, it was assumed that the dead were captured enemy combatants offered up as sacrifices to maintain the existence of the universe, but as with so many other entries on this list, it turned out that women, the elderly, and children were not spared the obsidian daggers. 

In an extra grisly touch, some of the faces had been converted into masks. Some had obsidian blades, perhaps the same weapons that had been used to make offerings of them, were embedded in the nasal passages. The eyes were replaced with white stones, complete with smaller black discs on them to represent the pupils. Interestingly, while the Aztecs were savvy enough to use their enemies for their sacrifices, they also knew better to make larger demands of their more powerful subject states, reasoning that being able to offer a larger human tribute was a show of prosperity on the part of relatively large states and that making too large of demands on the smaller states would likely drive them to desperation. Such are the economics of systemic evisceration.  

4. Sandby Borg

We’ve seen more than our fair number of massacres so far, but the mass murders in the village fort of Sandby Borg (located on Öland island on the Eastern coast of Sweden, approximately 220 miles from Copenhagen) that took place circa 500 AD are unusually vivid. One day, attackers went door to door putting to death every man and many children. One elderly man was both thrown onto a fire and had sheep’s teeth shoved in his mouth. Infants were opened up. The bodies, in all cases, were left to rot where they fell, so that one man was found by archaeologists in the doorway to his home.   

What was morbid about the Sandby Borg massacre was that valuables such as silver brooches and spiral bead necklaces were left about the community, and there were no marks of injuries from self-defense or signs of significant damage to the walls. In short, all the evidence indicated that Sandby Borg was an immense inside job rather than a raid, which caught its inhabitants completely off-guard. It’s one thing to imagine a community falling to the blades of invaders, having time to grieve and no emotional connection to their attackers. What happened in Sandby Borg seems to have been an immense betrayal of trust, not a large Viking raid but more a massive and coordinated mob hit. It’s little wonder then that while archaeologists had to unearth the nature of the deaths, Sandby Borg went down in Swedish folklore as a cursed place.

3. Gough’s Cave

You knew before you clicked on this link that it was only a matter of time before the topic of cannibalism came up, didn’t you? But did you expect that the entry on the subject would take us not to a remote tropical island, but to Somerset, England? As reported in 2017 by the New York Times, remains were found in Gough’s Cave of Cheddar Gorge which showed that roughly 15,000 years ago, people were consuming each other. The presence of heaps of animal bones among the many gnawed human bones indicated that this was not done out of desperation, but out of ritual. That wasn’t even to mention that skull caps were being converted into bowls, something which would later be done by iconic Wisconsin grave-robbing murderer Ed Gein.       

The human bones were also mistreated in another, more cryptic manner. Patterns of etchings were carved into them, which looked like tally marks arranged in zigzags. The meaning of these markings is long lost to history, likely forever. The only aspect to lighten the grimness of the discovery was the fact that at least these bodies did not show signs of traumatic injury to the skeletons, leaving open the possibility that the consumed had at least been able to pass away from natural causes.  

2. The Forgotten Genocide

During a 1931 interview with Richard Breiting where he discussed his plans to commit genocide of undesirables, Adolf Hitler rhetorically asked “Who today remembers the Armenian Extermination?” While the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide has indeed been widely overlooked (with the White House only acknowledging it in April 2021) it turns out there was another recent genocide that Hitler could have referenced, and which would to a degree inspire the race experiments of the Holocaust. 

In 1999, mass graves were uncovered in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia (the nation located on the Northwestern border of South Africa). In 1904, the nation was one of Germany’s few African colonies, and an attempt at a massive land grab led to widespread rebellion by the Nama and Herero tribes. The German military sent 10,000 soldiers under orders to take no prisoners. By 1908 they would be estimated to have killed roughly 80% of Herero and 50% of Nama, of populations of 100,000 and 50,000 respectively. Survivors were placed in concentration camps and often sexually assaulted. Dr. Eugene Fischer would take the children of these rapes and perform experiments on them, concluding they were racially inferior, conclusions which would be widely cited to claim a scientific basis for the Final Solution. One of his subordinates was none other than Dr. Josef Mengele.    

Such was the degree of desperation of Namibia at the time (it had only achieved independence from South Africa in 1990) that even after the graves were uncovered, the government refused to formally acknowledge the genocide. It was only after Germany formally acknowledged the genocide that Namibian organizations acknowledged the atrocities. The government followed this up with $1.35 billion in reparations. Controversially, the funds were largely devoted to infrastructure projects such as energy development, and not to providing for the Nama and Herero descendants that had borne the brunt of the atrocity. 

1. Kamloops, Marieval, and More

In June 2021, the wider world was given insight into just what sort of ghastly but officially sanctioned crimes were largely overlooked in Canadian history. Beginning in 1863, a massive program of cultural erasure was begun by the Roman Catholic Church when Indigenous children were taken away from households and placed in 130 schools such as the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, and a similar facility in Kamloops, British Columbia. This practice continued until the astoundingly late year of 1998. Beginning in 2008, a commission confirmed a longstanding accusation: The death toll from the abductions was much higher than officials had been willing to admit. 

For example at Kamloops, 215 unmarked child graves were discovered. At Marieval, 751 child corpses had been discretely disposed of. The deaths were largely attributed to poor sanitary, heating, and nutritional conditions. Not to mention several failed attempts to escape rampant physical and sexual abuse. Even in January 2022, a search at the St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia reportedly yielded another 93 unmarked child graves. Who knows how many other covert deaths are still concealed at the more than 100 other schools? 

Dustin Koski also wrote about horrific events in the future in the supernatural comedy Return of the Living.

There is a saying that true evil hides in plain sight, and nothing could be truer in the notorious case of Ted Bundy. At face value, he was charming, handsome, intelligent, and charismatic.

Yet lurking under this superficial demeanor was a cold-blooded killer who stalked, raped, murdered, and dismembered his victims. Later, he returned to violate the corpses further. He confessed to killing 30 young women and girls in seven states between 1974 and 1978, but the true total number of his victims is unknown.

See Also: 10 Shocking Facts About The Last Days And Execution Of Ted Bundy

Following a renewed interest in these murders and the stories of those who knew him best, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer rereleased her memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, under the pseudonym Elizabeth “Liz” Kendall. This new edition included a contribution from her daughter, Molly, and never-before-seen photos.

These photos from their personal collection give us a chilling insight into the mind of a sadistic killer.

9 Ted On Vacation In Utah
1970

Four years before Ted Bundy began his known brutal killing spree, this vacation photo was taken in Ogden, Utah, in 1970. On either side of Ted are Liz and Molly. They brought Ted along to see their family home before they had moved to Seattle. A year earlier, Liz had been down on her luck as a newly divorced mother of one when she landed a receptionist job at the University of Washington.

Not long after her arrival in Seattle, she bumped into the “handsome” Ted in a bar and the pair began a relationship that was on and off for about seven years. Desperate for a father figure in Molly’s life and someone to help her feel less lonely, Liz tolerated a lot of behavior that she regrets now.

On reflection, Liz said:

This is kind of hard to even think about, but if you could put aside the fact that Ted Bundy was a terrible, murderous man, he was [also] a bad boyfriend. [ . . . ] Some of the things were just plain, flat-out codependence on my part. [ . . . ] I hope that women don’t do what I did, which was just settle for being treated not 100 percent truthfully.^[1]

8 Camping Trip In The Pacific Northwest
1970

Ted and Liz went on their first camping trip together in the Pacific Northwest where they both enjoyed the great outdoors. The Pacific Northwest, particularly Olympia and Seattle, would later become one of Ted’s preferred areas for claiming the lives of his victims.

In 1974, Ted abducted 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy and strangled her to death. One month later, he kidnapped and murdered 19-year-old Donna Gail Manson and never revealed where the body was buried. By September 1974, he had claimed the lives of six more young women.

Following the abduction of two victims at Lake Sammamish in King County in July 1974, police knew from witness accounts that they were on the lookout for a “handsome young man who called himself ‘Ted.’ ” They also learned that he had used an arm sling to lure women into helping him back to his now-notorious VW Beetle.^[2]

The photo of Ted happily jumping in the mountains could not have foretold what darkness lay ahead. This was his final year of freedom before he was locked behind bars for his horrendous crimes.

7 Ted Awakens From A Nap
1971

Photo credit: Abrams Press/Amazon Prime Video

Liz captioned this photo, “An unhappy Ted who just woke up from a nap.” The photo was taken in Green Lake, Seattle, years before Ted’s killing spree had peaked. Obviously, he could no longer keep his mood swings hidden.

Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Lewis interviewed Ted after his arrest and testified during his mental competency hearing. She revealed, “I believe he was suffering a bipolar mood disorder stemming from a manic-depressive illness.”^[3]

Later, these mood swings were on display for the public during subsequent trials. Ted jumped around the courtroom, flashed his smile at the television cameras, and waved to the public gallery. Moments later, he appeared agitated and uninterested in the case.

Ted’s trial for the Lake City murder of Kimberly Leach was moved to Orlando. Due to pretrial publicity, the court was unable to obtain an impartial jury. However, it was these outbursts and moments of frenzy that caused more damage to his character than any media coverage. Jurors were able to see for themselves just how volatile a man Ted really was.

6 Ted And Molly Driving A Boat
1971

At age three, Molly began to look up to Ted as a father figure and enjoyed days spent in his company. Now realizing who the monster behind the mask really was, Molly has recalled disturbing memories of her own, which she has detailed in the new edition of her mother’s memoir.

Molly recalls playing hide-and-seek with Ted when he was babysitting one evening. But she was left frightened after finding him naked. Frowning, Molly exclaimed, “You’re naked!” Ted replied, “I know, but that’s because I can turn invisible. But my clothes can’t, and I didn’t want you to see me!”

Molly added, “I tried to shove him out of the way, and comedically, Ted fell down to the shower mat where he sat cross-legged, covering his penis with his two hands.” When she recalled the memory in adulthood, she finally realized that Ted had had an erection at the time.

She also writes, “My next memory is of him leaving my room. I lay awake in fear for a very long time, watching the door. Hoping he would not come back. He did not.”^[4]

5 Ted Playing With Neighborhood Children
1972

Photo credit: Abrams Press/Amazon Prime Video

Enjoying the sunshine in the University District of Seattle, Ted can be seen playing with a young Molly and her friends in the neighborhood. Ted’s own childhood was a troubled one. He was brought up to believe that his mother was his sister and his grandparents were his parents.

Ted was born on November 24, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, Eleanor “Louise” Cowell, considered putting the baby up for adoption, but her father, Ted’s grandfather, insisted that the baby return to their family home in Philadelphia. For the next decade or so, Ted was raised with the belief that his mother was his sister.

In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule writes that Ted told her, “Maybe I just figured out that there couldn’t be 20 years’ difference in age between a brother and a sister, and Louise always took care of me. I just grew up knowing that she was really my mother.”^[5]

Later interviews revealed that Ted had discovered his own parentage when a cousin teased Ted about his birth certificate, which said that he had no known father. This was something that haunted Ted for the rest of his adult life.

4 Ted Taking A Nap
1974

Photo credit: Abrams Press/Amazon Prime Video

This photo was taken as Ted woke from a nap on Liz’s childhood bed during a Christmas break at her childhood home in Ogden, Utah. In 1974, the brutal murders that would later shock the world had begun. Liz said that she had noticed subtle changes in his personality that made her feel like she was “losing him.”

Kevin Sullivan, author of The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History, explained, “There were two Bundys. The only people who ever saw the diabolical Bundy were his victims.” Sullivan added, “This is what makes 1974 so extremely different. He is going to launch himself into full-time murder, and he was just going to keep doing it until he was captured or killed.”

In later interviews with investigators, Ted said that he was ruled by the “entity,” a demon that emerged whenever he was tense and told him to commit violence toward women. The serial killer confessed, “The tension would be too great, and the demands and expectations of this entity would reach a point where they just could not be controlled.”^[6]

3 Molly Playing With Ted’s Hair
1975

During a Nightline interview with Molly and her mother, Molly said, “I adored this man. We were like a family.”

They almost did become a real family when Liz became pregnant with Ted’s baby in 1972. However, Liz made the difficult decision to have an abortion. In the book The Phantom Prince, Liz wrote, “Both of us knew it would be impossible to have a baby now. He was going to start law school in the fall, and I needed to be able to work to put him through.”

She added, “It was awful. Ted took me home and put me to bed. He lay down beside me and talked about the day when I wouldn’t have to work and we would have lots of kids. He fixed me food, which I couldn’t eat, and did all he could to comfort me.”^[7]

Later, Ted did have a child of his own—a daughter named Rose (aka Rosa). He fathered Rose with his wife, Carole Ann Boone, while he was in prison. The whereabouts of Rose and her mother, Carole, are unknown as of this writing.

2 Ted And Liz In Utah
1975

Photo credit: Abrams Press/Amazon Prime Video

Liz was eventually encouraged by a close friend to speak to detectives about her suspicions surrounding Ted. She had discovered various suspicious items, including women’s clothes that did not belong to her and a pair of crutches. Later, after Ted’s arrest, Liz was interviewed again by Detective Robert D. Keppel. This time, her statements were taken more seriously.

She revealed:

About the crimes . . . he told me that he was sick and that he was consumed by something that he didn’t understand. And that he just couldn’t contain it. He said that he tried, he said that it took so much of his time, that’s why he wasn’t doing well in law school and couldn’t seem to get his act together because he spent so much time trying to maintain a normal life. And he just couldn’t do it, he said that he was preoccupied with this force.

Liz added, “He . . . started by saying that he was sick, that ‘I don’t have a split personality.’ And he said, ‘I don’t have blackouts, I remember everything I’ve done.’ “^[8]

1 Ted Drinking On The Courthouse Steps
1980

On January 15, 1978, Ted broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. He brutally murdered students Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. Three other young women were attacked that night but miraculously survived. Then came his final act of evil—the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. This was the undoing of the serial killer, and these murders landed him in the electric chair.

During the four-day hearing, US District Judge G. Kendall Sharp refused to allow the defense team to claim that Ted was incompetent during his initial trial. They tried to argue that Ted was provided alcohol smuggled in by his partner, Carole Ann Boone, and that he was heavily under the influence of Valium and other pills. Disagreeing, Sharp stated, “[Ted] is the most competent serial killer in the country at this time.”^[9]

On January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison.

About The Author: Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines. Founder of Crime Viral community since 2015.

Famous landmarks and other locations around the world draw millions of tourists every year. Even now after lockdown, many of these places can still be toured virtually, cementing their overwhelming popularity.

Every so often, however, a landmark also becomes infamous as the location where someone was spotted or encountered for the very last time before they seemingly disappeared into thin air.

10 Truly Bizarre And Chilling Cases Of Mass Disappearances

10 George Penca Jr.
Last Seen: Upper Yosemite Falls Trail

On a beautiful June day in 2011, 30-year-old George Penca Jr. went hiking with around 20 members of his 80-strong church group. They decided to hike the Upper Yosemite Falls trail. But when they trekked back down, George was no longer with the group.

Assuming that he’d hiked back to the Yosemite Valley floor, his friends only reported George missing at 9:00 PM when it became apparent that he was nowhere to be found. At the time of his disappearance, George was dressed casually in sweatpants, a T-shirt, and running shoes. He was carrying a bag containing minimal food and water.

A full-scale search and rescue operation got underway first thing the next morning. Approximately 105 people, several helicopters, and six search and rescue dogs scoured the area for about a week without finding any clues or trace of Penca.^[1]

In 2020, there is still no information as to what may have happened to Penca. His remains, clothing, and bag have never been located.

9 Carla Valpeoz
Last Seen: Machu Picchu

In December 2018, 35-year-old Carla Valpeoz, who is legally blind, traveled from her home in Detroit to Peru to attend a wedding. While there, she tried to tour Machu Picchu. But she was denied entry due to her low vision.

A tour group offered to help her explore the site. Carla and members of the group stayed together the whole day and then went dancing at a club. They returned to the Pariwana Hostel, where they were all staying, at around 4:00 AM on December 12.

Later, Carla texted a new friend from the tour group that she was going to explore the city that morning. Then she disappeared.

According to her brother, Carlos Valpeoz Jr., a female member of the tour group said that she had awakened around 9:30 AM and noticed that Carla and all her belongings were gone. Around this time, security officers and a receptionist had seen Carla getting into a taxi.

The taxi driver was located, and he told police that he had dropped Carla off at a Cusco bus terminal as she wanted to further explore the city. The last information that Carla’s family and friends received is that a man working at the entrance to Machu Picchu saw Carla there and she looked well.^[2]

Shortly after Carla’s disappearance, her father and brother started traveling Peru looking for her. To date, no evidence about Carla’s fate has been found.

In 2019, police investigating her disappearance expressed doubt that Carla ever made it to Machu Picchu on December 12, 2018, despite the park employee claiming that he saw her on that day.

It is believed that the case is still open. However, there is some speculation that she was victimized by criminals but has now been found and quietly returned to her parents.

8 Tinashe Chitambo
Last Seen: Victoria Falls Rain Forest

In March 2012, 25-year-old Tinashe Chitambo visited Victoria Falls with his sister. The duo decided to have lunch at Shearwater Restaurant. Afterward, Tinashe told his sister that he was going back to the falls for another tour.

Shortly after Tinashe left, a tourist approached a security ranger and said that he had spotted a man loitering around the falls. A team was sent out to investigate but didn’t find the man, who was later suspected to have been Tinashe.^[3]

He never returned to the restaurant where his sister was waiting for him. A police spokesperson explained that they couldn’t eliminate explanations such as suicide and Tinashe’s “[possession] by evil spirits.”

The suicide ruling has yet to be confirmed as Tinashe’s body was never found.

7 Gavin Cusi Octaviano
Last Seen: Golden Gate Bridge

On November 21, 2018, 22-year-old Gavin Octaviano traveled to San Francisco to spend Thanksgiving Day with his family and celebrate his birthday. On November 23, Gavin took a family member’s car and drove to the Golden Gate Bridge. He parked the vehicle in the northern parking lot at 5:20 PM.^[4]

Just over four hours later, a motorist almost hit Gavin, who was walking near the Golden Gate Bridge tunnel. According to the driver, Gavin seemed to be under the influence.

Gavin was never seen again.

On November 28, after seeing Gavin’s photograph on a missing person’s poster, the motorist contacted the young man’s family to tell them about the encounter. Devastated family members spent several days searching on and around the bridge to find clues as to what may have happened to Gavin. He is still missing in 2020.

6 Mujuet Bales
Last Seen: Central Park

In April 1994, Joseph Bales took his two-month-old baby girl, Mujuet, to Central Park and promptly fell asleep on a park bench for a few minutes while the baby lay beside him. His wife and other daughter, four-year-old Priscilla, were exploring the west side of the park.

When Joseph awoke, Mujuet was gone. Her carrier stood around 305 meters (1,000 ft) away from the bench. For some reason, Joseph and his wife, Helena, who were French-Canadian tourists, didn’t report Mujuet’s disappearance for 20 hours. Until then, they returned to their Manhattan hotel and waited. Later, the couple told police that they had delayed for so long because neither of them spoke English.^[5]

As the police investigated the suspicious story, they learned that the couple had crossed into the US from Canada with only one child, Priscilla. When confronted with this information, Joseph and Helena decided to come clean.

Ten days earlier, Mujuet had been found dead in her crib in Canada. Due to earlier allegations of child abuse about a foster child at their home, Joseph and Helena wanted to avoid any further allegations of abuse. So they threw the baby’s body in a nearby woods in Quebec and traveled to the US to pretend that the child had disappeared in Central Park.

Mujuet’s body was recovered, but the cause of death was unclear according to newspaper accounts at the time.

Top 10 Extremely Unsettling Disappearances

5 Tylee Ryan And J.J. Vallow
Last Seen: Yellowstone National Park (Ryan) And Kennedy Elementary School (Vallow)

In what has turned out to be an incredibly confusing and tragic missing persons case, siblings Tylee Ryan and J.J. Vallow disappeared without a trace in September 2019.^[6]

Seventeen-year-old Tylee was seen for the last time with her family at Yellowstone National Park on September 8, 2019. Seven-year-old J.J. was last seen at Kennedy Elementary School on September 23, 2019. Despite all this, their mother, Lori Vallow, got married on November 5, 2019, to Chad Daybell (whose late wife had died in October 2019).

When Idaho police tried to conduct a welfare check on J.J. on November 26, Lori told them that J.J. was with other family members in Arizona. That story unraveled fast as the police investigated. By the time officers returned on November 27, Lori’s home in Idaho had been abandoned. Days later, Lori and Chad quietly slipped away to Hawaii where they lived in a rental townhome.

The investigations into the disappearances of Tylee and J.J. were made public on December 20, 2019. Lori missed a court-ordered deadline to produce the children on January 30, 2020. On February 10, it was reported that police had found Tylee’s cell phone with Lori’s belongings in Hawaii.

On February 20, Lori Vallow was arrested by Kauai police and ultimately charged with multiple counts related to these disappearances. Shortly before her arrest, it became known that Lori and her husband were convinced that Tylee and J.J. were possessed and had become zombies as a result.

On June 9, 2020, police discovered the remains of Tylee and J.J. in the backyard of Chad Daybell’s home in Salem, Idaho. J.J.’s body was wrapped in plastic and duct tape. Tylee’s body had been dismembered and set on fire.

Daybell is also facing charges in connection with the deaths of these two children.

4 Karl-Erivan Haub
Last Seen: Klein Matterhorn, Swiss Alps

In April 2018, German billionaire Karl-Erivan Haub went skiing on the Klein Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. An experienced skier, Haub was by himself at the time of his disappearance. He was training for an upcoming race. When he didn’t return from the glacier-shrouded peak, he was reported missing.^[7]

A full-scale search operation was launched but to no avail. Over two years later, what happened to Haub is still unclear as no trace of him has ever been found.

The last sighting of the billionaire was at the mountain station of the gondola lift. There is no active search at this point. According to the general consensus, Haub probably fell into a crevasse. So it is unlikely that his body will be recovered.

The full truth behind his disappearance remains to be discovered.

3 Floyd Roberts III
Last Seen: The Grand Canyon

On June 17, 2016, Floyd Roberts III, 52, set off to the western part of the Grand Canyon with his friend Ned Bryant and Ned’s daughter Madeleine. After splitting from Ned and his daughter and using a different route to climb a hill, Floyd became one of the many missing hikers at the Grand Canyon.

Floyd and Ned had been friends since childhood and had gone on regular hikes together for over 20 years. The hiking party had planned a nine-day trip, which started with them camping by a river.

When they reached the fateful hill on the first day, Ned and Madeleine opted to climb over it. But Floyd decided to go around it. They arranged to meet at a point on the other side of the hill.^[8]

As Ned and Madeleine waited for Floyd, they became anxious when he didn’t turn up. They camped for the night and then walked to an area where they had cell phone reception. There, they reported Floyd missing on June 18 at 3:00 PM. The initial search lasted for six days but was scaled back on June 24.

Searchers found no clues or evidence that Floyd had somehow fallen, and there was no trace of him or his backpack. The case went cold very quickly but remains open.

2 Ben Trommels
Last Seen: Niagara Falls, Ontario

Twenty-four-year-old Ben Trommels lived alone in an apartment in the north end of Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 2016. The young man was troubled and had been struggling with mental health issues for at least three years at that point.

On February 11, 2016, Ben went grocery shopping with his mother. While they were talking, Ben said something that would haunt his mother for years to come.

As they were walking in the store, Ben said, “I’m tired of it all.” This occurred after conversations in which Ben had declared that he wanted to jump down the falls and never be found as he felt that he was a burden to his mother.^[9]

In the early hours of February 12, 2016, Ben Trommels left his Niagara Falls apartment and vanished into the night. His mother, Monique Smith, only realized four days later that her son was missing. Volunteers searched the falls, but no sign of Ben was found.

More than four years later, Monique is none the wiser when it comes to Ben’s fate. However, she believes that he made good on his promise to take his own life.

1 Prabhdeep Srawn
Last Seen: Kosciuszko National Park

Bushwalker Prabhdeep “Prabh” Srawn, 25, rented a van in Sydney on May 13, 2013, and signed an agreement that obligated him to return the vehicle in Melbourne two days later. Security footage showed him entering a convenience store near Jindabyne later that day.

Prabh drove to and parked near the Charlotte Pass Ski Resort staff quarters on May 14, 2013. He was seen heading toward the Main Range Trail carrying some food and a cell phone.^[10]

The day started out bright and sunny. However, around noon, the temperature dropped significantly and snow started falling hard and fast. Other bushwalkers reported that the trail was difficult to see in spots because of the deep snow.

The first sign that Prabh was likely in trouble on the trail came when a caretaker at the resort noticed that the rental van was still parked in the same spot on May 18, 2013. A search and rescue operation lasted about two weeks. Then Prabh’s family launched extensive private searches in a desperate attempt to find him.

Employees and a skier in the Little Austria area reported that they heard what sounded like a human voice calling out on May 22, 2013. A helicopter search was commenced in the area, but nothing was found.

Even after the snow melted, there was still no sign of Prabh. After spending over $200,000 on private searches, Prabh’s family was forced to call off their efforts in October 2013.

Prabh was declared dead in June 2015 despite no trace of him having ever been found. His family still hopes for a miracle.

10 Baffling Disappearances That Remain Unsolved

[WARNING: This list contains disturbing recordings.] In 2017, a pilot flying over Western Australia noticed an SOS made of rocks in a remote location. Realizing that somebody could be stranded in this hostile environment, the pilot reported it to police, who launched an investigation.

The mysterious SOS was later revealed to have been created four years earlier, when a couple became stranded on their yacht in Swift Bay. They survived on meagre rations before being rescued by a passing yacht days later.

Despite this SOS signal not aiding their survival, it was certainly a smart way to increase their chances of rescue, however not all SOS stories have such a positive and logical conclusion, so here are 10 Chilling SOS Calls That Have Never Been Explained.

Top 10 Absurd Emergency Calls

10 Kenji Iwamura

In July 1989, two hikers from Tokyo visited the Daisetsuzan National Park in Hokkaido where they planned to hike to Mount Asahidake. During their trek, the men became stranded and when they didn’t return home as scheduled on July 24th, a search was launched. An SOS sign made from birch tree logs was spotted from a helicopter and the lost hikers were eventually rescued. During their recuperation, the hikers were commended by the rescue pilots for building the SOS signal they had spotted. This clearly baffled the men who denied any knowledge of the signal, so the rescue mission was relaunched the next morning because of fears that more people were stranded on the mountain.

After another search of the area, a backpack was found containing a tape recorder and the driving license of 25 year old Kenji Iwamura. On the tape recorder was the recording above.

Five years earlier, Kenji had decided to hike a similar route but when he failed to check out of his hotel two days later, the owner called the police and a search party was launched. It was called off after 30 days as no trace of Kenji was found.

After reinvigorating the search following the discovery of the backpack, rescue teams found human bones not far from the SOS signal which they eventually announced to be Kenji’s. Investigators couldn’t determine the cause of death from his remains so the investigation was closed. Some reports suggest that the police originally identified the body as that of a woman with type O blood before re-analyzing it and concluding that it was a male with type A blood, which matched Kenji.

Many people still question the police explanation of Kenji’s final moments. How did Kenji move the gigantic birch logs used to construct the SOS signal? The trees were also apparently felled with an axe, although no large bladed object was ever found nearby.

9 Anthonette Cayedito

Anthonette Cayedito was living with her mother and two sisters in Gallup, New Mexico when, at 3am on the 5th of April 1986, she went to investigate a knock at the door. As soon as the door opened, Anthonette was snatched by two men and bundled into a van which sped off into the night. Anthonette’s Mother didn’t notice her daughter was missing until the next morning, at which point she contacted police.

With little for the police to go on, the trail quickly turned cold until almost a year later, when Gallup PD received a chilling phone call from a young girl which you can hear above….

The call was too short to be traced but Anthonette’s mother, Penny, confirmed that it was her daughter’s voice. Despite this brief call raising the family’s hope that Anthonette was still alive, nothing was heard from her for nearly five years until 1991, when there was an unconfirmed report from a Waitress in Carson City, who noticed a teenage girl matching Anthonette’s description dining with an unkempt looking couple. After they left, she found an SOS scrawled on a napkin under the girl’s plate that simply said… ‘ Help me!’ and ‘Call Police’.

That was the last anyone ever saw of Anthonette and Penny died in 1999, never knowing the truth about her daughter’s fate.

8 Henry Mccabe

On September 6th, 2015, Henry Mccabe’s wife and kids left Minnesota to visit family, leaving him alone. Henry decided to enjoy his free time with two friends and they spent the night in a local nightclub. By 2am Henry was clearly in no fit state to drive, so his friends decided to drop him off at home. On the way, Henry insisted on being driven to a gas station to get food before walking home. Reluctantly his friends agreed, unaware that it would be the last time anyone saw Henry alive.

At 2.28am, Henry’s wife received a voicemail from his phone. Only part of the message has ever been released to the public but you can hear that clip above.

Obviously disturbed by this, Henry’s wife called the police. The investigation revealed that after calling his wife, Henry also called his brother, who claimed he could hear sobbing down the line before the call cut out. Later that night, Henry’s phone pinged once more from a cell tower 4 miles away and that is the last record we have of him.

Nearly two months later, Henry’s body was discovered in a lake not far from the cell tower where his phone last pinged. There were no signs of injury on his body so his death was recorded as either suicide or accidental drowning. He had recently been given a poor performance evaluation at work and his rent cheque had bounced, leading people to believe he chose to end his own life, however none of these details explain the chilling noises you can hear in the SOS call he made that night.

7 Brandon Lawson

At 11.30pm on August 8, 2013, Brandon Lawson called his father and announced that he was on his way to visit him in Crowley, a 3 hour drive from his home in San Angelo, Texas. At 12.30am, Brandon called his brother Kyle and told him he had run out of gas on Route 277. Following this call, Brandon also called 911 asking for help, above is a recording of that call.

Kyle arrived at 1.18am and was greeted by an officer who was attending the scene because of other 911 calls made by passing motorists regarding Brandon’s abandoned car. Kyle didn’t mention anything to the deputy as Brandon had outstanding warrants. Unfortunately both Kyle and the officer were unaware that Brandon had already called 911 asking for police, so whatever predicament he found himself in clearly outweighed his fear of being arrested.

Many theories suggest that Brandon had relapsed and was high on drugs, or he decided to disappear and start a new life but the case is still open and unsolved and his family remain convinced that he was the victim of foul play.

6 Joanne Pederson

On February 19th 1983, Joanne Pederson was visiting a mall in Chilliwack BC, with her sister and cousin. On the way back home, the sisters had an argument which led to the two older girls running into the house and locking the door behind them, leaving 10 year old Joanne outside in the cold, dark night.

After failing to convince her sister to open the door, Joanne made her way to a payphone and at 8pm she called her parents and asked to be picked up. Her father answered and said they would leave immediately before handing the phone to his wife so she could comfort the distressed girl. However when Joanne’s mother took the phone, she heard a gruff, irritated male voice who told her if they were not there in 30 minutes he would call the police, then the call ended.

Joanne’s concerned parents raced to the payphone, but when they arrived Joanne was nowhere to be seen. Witnesses claim to have seen Joanne at the payphone with a caucasian man in his 30s, wearing a dark jacket. Another witness claimed to see Joanne and the strange man in a cream coloured car with a green roof, however that’s as far as the trail goes and 35 years later no trace of Joanne has ever been found.

5 Brandon Swanson

Brandon Swanson was a 19 year old student at Minnesota West Community College when on May 13th 2008 at around 2am, he crashed his car into a ditch on the way home from a party. Apparently unhurt, he called his parents so that they could come and get him. His parents agreed and stayed in contact with him over the phone while they drove to pick him up.

Despite being unsure of his exact location, Brandon decided that he must be near the town of Lind as he could see lights in the distance. He told his Dad over the phone that he would walk there and meet him in the car park of a local bar. Brandon stayed in contact with his Dad on the phone for 47 minutes until eventually he uttered his last words ‘Oh shit!’ before the call disconnected.

After hearing this and not managing to find their son despite searching desperately, Brandon’s parents contacted the Lind police to declare him missing. Cell phone tower data was examined and it was found that Brandon had been calling from a town called Taunton, almost 25 miles away from Lind. A search was launched in the area and soon his Chevy was found north of State Highway 68. After a 30 day search of the area, Brandon and his phone could not be located and his fate remains a mystery to this day.

4 Ruth Price

Details are few and far between when it comes to this recording but it is reported that in 1988, Ruth Price was an elderly lady living alone in the U.S. when she called 911 to report a prowler outside her property. Not long after Ruth explains that she is home alone, she lets rip with a blood curdling scream while muffled thumps can be heard over the receiver. The operator sits in stunned silence as Ruth screams for help at the top of her lungs before the call ends abruptly. You can hear the recording above.

Many who trained as 911 operators in the 90s claimed to have heard this recording during training. They were informed by their instructors that the recording was real and that Ruth was battered to death in her home. Apparently it was a very effective way of demonstrating correct emergency operator procedure, as the operator heard everything but still had no address that she could send emergency responders to.

3 Japanese City’s Mystery Emergency Calls

In the Akita prefecture of Japan, emergency calls from landlines have recently been proving such a mystery that local firefighter chiefs submitted a letter of enquiry to the local phone company to begin an investigation. In 2020, emergency responders were called out 9 times to properties where residents were unaware that their landline phone had dialled the emergency services.

The calls didn’t contain an audible language, but were described as robot-like noises by those that heard them. Due to them being considered ‘mute emergency calls’ firefighters were dispatched to the locations where the calls originated from, only to find bemused residents with no idea why the fire service was interrupting their dinner. Over half of these calls were made when residents were not even home!

2 SS Ourang Medan

The Ourang Medan SOS is one of the most famous mayday calls in maritime history, yet the details of this case are heavily disputed. Even a date cannot be agreed on for this event, with most people agreeing it happened some time between late 1947 and early 1948. What makes this story interesting is that the SOS was received by two American ships who both separately understood the communication to say..

‘All officers including the Captain are dead. Lying in chartroom and the bridge. Possibly whole crew dead. I die.’

Upon hearing this ominous message, the Silver Star was immediately dispatched in the direction of the stricken vessel and several hours later the Ourang Medan was spotted with no signs of life on board. Once all efforts to make contact were exhausted, the crew of the SIlver Star boarded and were faced with a grisly scene. The corpses of the Dutch crew littered the decks, their faces contorted in agony and/or horror but with no signs of any injuries. The radio operator who sent the message was still at his station, as were the engineers who appeared to have died where they were working. Crewman who boarded the Ourang Medan reported an eerie chill on the ship despite the warm climate of the Malacca Strait where it was found.

Eventually the crew of the Silver Star tethered the Ourang Medan ready to tow it to safety, at which point it promptly burst into flames from the lower decks, before exploding and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, dragging any chance of discovering what happened to the crew down with it.

1 1990 Washington State Bigfoot calls

Our final entry contains two phone calls to Washington State emergency operators that were recorded some time in 1990. Both recordings are edited but they both clearly come from the same confused and distressed gentleman in his home. He is obviously at a loss to explain what is happening but he is also clearly a sober and logical person. He does his best to describe what he is witnessing in human terms, however it is clear he doesn’t really understand what he is seeing.

When we think of the East side of the Cold War, many of us likely imagine KGB officers and discreet agents working out of Moscow. However, while often overlooked by comparison, the Stasi of East Germany (officially the State Security Service of the German Democratic Republic) was without a doubt one of the most brutal secret police agencies in recent history.

From imprisoning political opponents and closely watching every citizen of East Germany to sending “sleeper” agents to live secret lives in various places in the West, the Stasi remains an organization of deep interest to those who study such repressive groups.

Here are 10 things we learned about the Stasi’s activities after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. These revelations show just how brutal and harsh an organization it really was. The Stasi was certainly on a par with equivalent agencies working out of Moscow.

10 Unconventional Methods For Successfully Fighting Crime

10 They Were Part Of One Of The Most Repressive Regimes In History

Without a doubt, the Stasi was a repressive secret police agency. They monitored each of their nation’s citizens closely and constantly. They also took decisive action against anyone who went against the accepted ideology. This even necessitated men keeping their hair a certain length. In some cases, people had to wear government-approved clothing.^[1]

What’s more, the Stasi was far from discreet about its actions. They often made it crystal clear that they were watching every citizen, especially the ones who had proven themselves to be “enemies” of the communist state.

The Stasi often used wiretaps and steamed open personal mail. In some cases, they drilled holes into the rooms of their citizens to spy directly on them.

Even more chilling for those living under the East German regime, it is thought that the Stasi had around 200,000 informants on their books. Each was willing—or forced—to keep close tabs on his neighbors and even his family.

9 The Stasi Files Conspiracy

At this point, it is probably worth examining how we gained knowledge about the Stasi. This is largely due to their secret files.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, high-ranking Stasi agents issued orders to destroy the mountain of paperwork at their headquarters. These files contained multiple things previously withheld from the public arena—including the names of informants, details of secret trials, and the Stasi’s dealings with the West.^[2]

The paper shredding occurred almost immediately. Although around 45 million pages were shredded, activists managed to storm the headquarters before all the files were destroyed. They discovered 600 million pieces of paper in over 15,000 bags. Many of the documents had been torn by hand to destroy as much as possible.

Initially, there was discussion of what to do with the files. However, two years after Germany reunified, it was decided that a special task force would be set up. Their job was to piece together the files, page by page, in order to make the revelations public. For as much as we now know of the Stasi’s activities, it is likely that a considerable amount was lost and will likely remain secret.

8 The Arrests Of Political Opponents

The Stasi especially kept close tabs on political opponents of the East German government. Although many people were arrested and imprisoned, most were interrogated and confined at Hohenschonhausen prison. As we might imagine, conditions were far from luxurious.

Decades later, one former political prisoner recounted how he had been locked in a “small cell” with small windows. These windows “only told you whether it was light or dark outside.” He regularly underwent brutal interrogations designed to mentally weaken him. Like all such prisoners, he was also forced to wear an “ill-fitting blue tracksuit” to further demoralize him.^[3]

All this was designed to mentally exhaust the political prisoners so that they would sign confessions. Most often, they were unaware of the charges of which they were accused and only found out on the day of their sentencing.

7 The Plan To ‘Rebrand’ The Stasi

As the 1980s wore on, it became clearer that the communist experiment was failing. In response, the East German authorities began to look at ways to “rebrand” the Ministry for State Security. They opted to become the Office for National Security.

In reality, this was a last attempt to hand the power of a unified Germany to the Stasi under another name. Legislation was even passed to allow this at roughly the same time that Stasi agents were destroying the files of their activities.^[4]

However, there was a huge public outcry at the potential move. Combined with the discovery of the destroyed files, this led to the move being blocked. Soon after, the Stasi was broken up.

It is an intriguing thought as to what might have happened if the attempted rebranding had succeeded. Perhaps we only need to look at the decades that have followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. To some, Russia is still a nation being led by the same dictatorship that ruled during the Cold War.

6 They Helped To Train Castro’s Cuban Communists

Although we might expect a kinship between two communist nations such as East Germany and Cuba, it still came as a shock when records revealed a much deeper relationship. It came to light that there was a more intricate connection between the Stasi and its Cuban equivalent, the Ministry of the Interior (MININT).

The discovery was made by a Cuban exile and one-time prisoner of the Stasi. He found that the Stasi had trained Cuban security officers to act with their population in the same way that the East German authorities did. This Cuban exile stated that MININT’s activities were “almost a copy” of the Stasi’s own brutal methods.^[5]

Much of this export of ideas took place during the 1970s and ’80s. It involved activities such as using LSD with interrogations, bugging the hotel rooms of tourists, and other security and spying methods. The Stasi also exported hardware and computers to make keeping tabs on Cuban citizens easier.

10 Real Honeypot Operations That Played Out Like Spy Thrillers

5 They Had ‘Sleeper’ Agents In The West For Years

We now know of Cold War activities on both sides of the divide. Perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to discover that the Stasi had “sleeper” agents planted in various places in the West. For all intents and purposes, these agents led normal Western lives and shared in the respective ideology.^[6]

They reported all the activities occurring in the West. In some cases, they even influenced these events. Many worked their way up to important positions in government or industry.

Perhaps the best example is the case of Gunter Guillaume. He managed to become the secretary of Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor.

Guillaume regularly reported to Stasi headquarters about Brandt’s activities. Guillaume also told of other goings-on inside the West German government. When he was discovered to be a Stasi agent, it led to Brandt’s public downfall.

4 The Disinformation About HIV/AIDS

Today, it is well established that disinformation is purposely released to the general public. This is often done by certain governments to influence public thinking.

Much the same was true with the Stasi when they had power. Perhaps one of the most outrageous claims came during the initial outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s.^[7]

The mission—known as Operation INFEKTION—even involved the KGB. Aided by the Stasi, the KGB was the chief driver behind the propaganda. According to the main notion of this fake news, HIV/AIDS was created by the United States government as a biological weapon to target certain parts of the population. The creation supposedly took place at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

Although the claims were completely untrue, many millions of people—both in the East and the West—took them as fact. What’s more, these conspiracies persist in some circles today.

3 They Planned To Assist The Communists In North Vietnam

In 1972, when direct US involvement was nearing its end in the Vietnam War, it was revealed that the Stasi had been looking at ways to actively assist the North Vietnamese communists against the United States. Most of this support was to be intelligence training for the North Vietnamese troops. In reality, contact had been taking place between North Vietnam and East Germany since the late 1950s.^[8]

The plans were never fully realized. However, the Stasi managed to import intelligence procedures similar to the North Vietnamese mindset. In reality, the Vietnam War was a wider conflict of ideologies. Other communist nations also offered discreet support to the North Vietnamese communist regime.

2 The Sandoz Chemical Spill Conspiracy

Without a doubt, one of the most intriguing revelations about the Stasi’s activities are the claims of their involvement in the Sandoz chemical spill of 1986. Supposedly, this was an attempt to take the world’s attention away from the recent Chernobyl disaster. The claims surfaced shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall during a German television documentary.^[9]

It was stated that the Stasi was behind several “chemical accidents” along the River Rhine. A fire at the Sandoz factory got the most attention. The cause of the fire has still not been established.

The warehouse contained over 1,300 tons of agrochemical products when it ignited. The fire was the cause of huge environmental damage in the months that followed.

There is still debate as to whether the claims are accurate. The television program makers stated that their source was a former CIA agent.

1 They Made Active Attempts To Turn Western Nations Against Each Other

We have already mentioned how the Stasi was involved in disinformation missions regarding the HIV/AIDS outbreak. However, the organization was also active in attempts to turn Western nations against one another.

This was particularly true with the United States. Among Stasi agents, the relevant unit was known as Division X. Its only purpose was to provide information for smear campaigns. This could be photographs, state secrets, and even recordings of conversations.

Perhaps the best example occurred in 1975. Stasi agents secretly recorded talks between Helmut Kohl and Kurt Biedenkopf, two high-ranking West German politicians. The Stasi “leaked” the recording to the media while claiming that it had been made by US agents. It looked like the United States was secretly spying on allied nations.

Remarkably, West German citizens believed that the recording had been made by US intelligence. In part, this was due to increasing distrust of the United States throughout Europe at the time. It is arguably one of the most successful Stasi propaganda missions.^[10]

10 US Government Employees Who Defected To The Eastern Bloc

About The Author: Marcus Lowth—writer at Me Time For The Mind—https://www.metimeforthemind.com/
Me Time For The Mind on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/MeTimeForTheMind/

Most sudden calamities – murders, car crashes, natural disasters – don’t offer a chance to say goodbye. But in a terrifying twist of fate, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 offered exactly that for thousands trapped in towers and stranded on hijacked airliners.

As the situation deteriorated, many victims realized that their chance of survival was approaching zero. So after desperately searching for exits, many spent their final moments speaking or leaving messages for loved ones. Their last words are mortifying and heartbreakingly human.

10 NYC Horrors That Were As Traumatic As 9/11

10 Madeline Sweeney: “We are flying way too low.”

Madeline Sweeney was an American Airlines flight attendant for over a decade. On September 11, 2001, she covering for a sick colleague on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Before takeoff, she called her husband from the plane. She was sad about being unable to take her daughter, who had recently started kindergarten, to school that morning.

At about 8:15am, American Airlines 11 became the flight plane hijacked that day, by a team of terrorists led by ringleader Mohamed Atta. “We have some planes”, Atta accidentally broadcast, mistakenly thinking he was using the internal address system. “Just be quiet and we’ll be OK. We are returning to the airport.”

Sweeney and her colleague, Betty Ong, took turns calling airline security teams on the ground. Sweeney’s ability to calmly identity the hijackers’ seat numbers became some of the day’s first leads for investigators. At 8:46am, she was on the phone with manager Michael Woodward when the plane made its final run, southward over Manhattan toward the North Tower.

“I see water. I see buildings. I see buildings! We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God we are flying way too low. Oh my God!”

“Seconds later,” Woodward said, “there was a very, very loud static on the other end.”^[1]

9 Jim Gartenberg: “Take It Easy.”

September 11th was supposed to be Jim Gartenberg’s last day working at the World Trade Center. His employer, commercial real estate firm Julien J. Studley Inc., had transferred him to its Midtown Manhattan offices. In fact Gartenberg, 35, was cleaning out his desk on the 86th Floor of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into it at 8:46am.

The plane struck floors 93-99 – several stories about Gartenberg’s office. However, the impact left piles of debris that, per a phone call Gartenberg made to Midtown office colleague Margaret Luberda, blocked his exit. Soon, fire compounded the problem. “There’s a fire,” he said to his pregnant wife, Jill. “I love you, tell Nicole” – the couple’s two-year-old daughter – “I don’t know if I’m going to be OK.”

Remarkably, Gartenberg’s next call was to ABC News, who carried the conversation live on air. Calmly explaining where he was, what happened and who he was with, his composure during the two-minute conversation was heroic. In fact, Gartenberg doesn’t discernibly panic even after learning that, unbeknownst to him, not one but two plane crashes had occurred – one in each building.

Instead, Gartenberg sought to comfort the thousands of family members with unaccounted-for loved ones. “I want to tell anybody who has a family member in the building that the situation is under control. Please… take it easy.”

This wasn’t ignorance or denial. Next, Gartenberg called his Midtown colleague again: “Margaret, I didn’t want to tell them how bad it was,” he replied. “I didn’t want to worry the other families.” Gartenberg perished.^[2]

8 Rob Sibarium: “I thought we were going into the ocean.”

For many near the impact zones, location meant everything. Despite being three floors above Jim Gartenberg, MetLife Insurance employee Rob Sibarium survived that day – but only through the actions of two noteworthy 9/11 heroes.

Sibarium and about a dozen colleagues were on MetLife’s 89th floor offices when the first plane struck the North Tower just a few stories above. “The building bent so far, I thought we were going into the ocean,” he remembers. With fires breaking out around them, Sibarium and his coworkers retreated to a law firm down the hall.

Soon, the situation there also become untenable as the corridor filled with smoke and flames. “The floor was actually melting,” Sibarium said. The exits were blocked. They were doomed.

And then, suddenly, they were delivered.

“We were pounding on those doors,” said Nathan Goldwasser, a colleague of Sibarium, “and almost like a miracle, we heard a voice on the other side yelling, “Get away from the door!’ The next thing, there’s a crowbar coming through the wall.”

Their savior was either Port Authority architect Frank de Martini or his colleague, Pablo Ortiz. The duo is credited with saving more than 75 lives in the North Tower that day. Both perished when the building collapsed – continuing to save others throughout the ordeal despite having ample time to escape themselves. Their story is told in a riveting documentary, ”Heroes of the 88th Floor”.^[3]

7 Sean Rooney: Fatal Decision

For family members of those in the South Tower – the second one hit – calls had potential to be double-edged swords. Beverly Eckert received multiple calls that morning from her husband, Sean Rooney, a vice president with Aon Corporation. They first spoke around 8:50am, following the impact on the opposite tower. He reported that an accident had happened in the neighboring building, and assured Beverly he was safe.

Aon had over 400,000 square feet of office space in the South Tower, spread out over several floors. On the 100th, Jennifer Fahey urged colleagues to leave immediately. “You had people wanting to grab purses or not believing what they saw,” she recalled. “One gentleman was going back to get some files, and I was yelling at him, `Please, it’s not important!’” That man later called his wife from an upper-floor conference room. He died.

Up on the 105th floor, Rooney hadn’t heard Fahey’s plea, and unfortunately also chose to remain. At 9:30am – 27 minutes after the second plane crashed 20 stories below him – he called Beverly again. Her heart soared as the phone rang, an indication Sean had gotten out safely. He hadn’t.

“I knew right away that Sean was never coming home,” she told reporters.

“After long minutes of talking, he whispered ‘I love you’ over and over. Then I suddenly heard this loud explosion.” It was 9:59am, and the tower was collapsing.

“I called his name in the phone over and over,” said Beverly. “Then I just sat there huddled on the floor holding the phone to my heart.”^[4]

6 Brad Fetchet: “I saw a guy fall… all the way down.”

Many of the victims lost in the South Tower align with Sean Rooney’s relatively calm demeanor. While in hindsight their decision to remain on the upper floors of a skyscraper whose twin was profusely smoking and smoldering seems terribly misguided, at the time many didn’t realize the explosion in the neighboring tower was a plane crash – or, if they did, thought it was an accident.

In between crashes, there were just 17 disorienting minutes for those on the South Tower’s upper floors to descend to safety. Their deaths, then, were both tragically avoidable yet entirely understandable.

Still, the case of Brad Fetchet sticks out. Fetchet, 24, worked for financial firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods on the 89th floor of the South Tower. Shortly after the plane struck the North Tower, he called his parents. The message he left (about 17:30 into the video) was shockingly even-keeled for what he’d just witnessed.

“I’m obviously alive and well over here… pretty scary experience though. I saw a guy fall out of probably the 91st story, all the way down.”

Frustratingly, Fetchet had no intention of leaving his office. The message concludes: “You’re welcome to give a call. I think we’ll be here all day. Love you.”

10 Disturbing Raw Videos From 9/11

5 South Tower Intercom: “Please remain at your desks.”

Why did folks like Rooney and Fetchet remain? Well, partly because they were instructed to.

Audio of the South Tower’s intercom system from 9/11 is difficult to find but, as dramatized in “Inside the Towers” (about 8:50 into this video), workers in the unaffected tower were told to stay put immediately following the North Tower explosion – even while many who called NYC’s emergency response number were told to evacuate.

Worse, many South Tower workers who began their descent were told to return to their offices on the upper floors. Incredibly, these instructions were given by authority figures who often knew less about what had just happened than those they were ordering back upstairs – many of whom had seen the gaping, burning hole in the adjacent tower from their windows.

There’s no satisfying explanation for why panicked workers – some who’d gotten as far downstairs as the LOBBY – were told to return to their offices. The idea that the identical twin of a building rocked by a major explosion (and which had been bombed just eight years earlier) was the safest place to be is insane. The only viable explanation is that authorities, realizing the massive undertaking of evacuating the North Tower, didn’t want the plaza clogged with unnecessary evacuees from the South Tower.^[5]

4 Christopher Hanley: “Please hurry.”

For those trapped in the towers, the two most repeated words to emergency response workers may have been “please hurry.” Many of the day’s audio recordings showcase a terrible truth: Assessing the deteriorating conditions and sheer height of the building, many of those trapped displayed doubt that firefighters could reach them in time, if at all. On the other end of the line, emergency responders were left placating without making promises that were simply impossible to keep.

The emergency call made by Christopher Hanley, who was attending a conference at Windows in the World restaurant on the North Tower’s 106th floor, exemplifies this mix of urgency and reality. Just minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the floors directly beneath him, conditions on the top floor were steadily worsening.

“I can see the smoke coming up from outside the windows,” Hanley says, to which the emergency operator replies with a simple “All right, we’re on the way.”

“Okay, please hurry,” Hanley pleads.

After instructing Hanley to open a window if he must – a stupid suggestion not only because fire thrives on oxygen, but because the 106th floor of a building isn’t going to have openable windows – the operator provides the understatement of the century: “It’s going to be a while because there’s a fire going on downstairs.”

“Alright,” Hanley says, “please hurry.”

Hanley died that day, as did every single person above the impact zone in the North Tower. Their fates were sealed the instant the plane hit, destroying all stairwells to safety.

3 Melissa Doi: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Melissa Doi, 32, was a manager at IQ Financial Systems on the 83rd floor of the South Tower, the second impacted. The plane sliced through swaths of floors 77-85. With Doi’s offices so near the strike zone, it didn’t take long for the situation to deteriorate into desperation.

She called in the emergency (the number, ironically, is 9-1-1) at 9:17am, just 14 minutes after the plane slammed into her building. “The floor is completely engulfed and we can’t breathe,” she says, hyperventilating, “and it’s very, very, very hot.”

Doi’s call further showcases the futility of the dispatchers, who were left to placate the panicked and make dubious-at-best promises of help en route. But in addition to being unconvincing, Doi’s dispatcher makes a mistake that can only be described as detached and dumb. After Doi states several times that she can’t see around her, the dispatcher stupidly says “but there’s no smoke, right?”

“OF COURSE THERE’S SMOKE!” Doi shouts. Then, a few seconds later, “I don’t see any air anymore!”

Then, the question anyone in Doi’s situation would ask: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” The dispatcher’s response was a heartbreaking hedge. “No, no, no, no…,” she denies, followed quickly by a thoroughly unassuring “ma’am, say your prayers.” Doi lost her life that day.

2 Ceecee Lyles: “I’m so sorry, baby.”

United Airlines Flight 93 was the only hijacked plane that didn’t hit its target. The largest reason for that was a 45-minute delay at the airport prior to takeoff, which gave passengers time to learn of the attacks and surmise, correctly, that their only chance of surviving was retaking control of the aircraft. Though the plane crashed, their efforts prevented a fourth high-profile impact – likely the US Capitol Building or White House.

As news of the other three crashes trickled in, Flight 93’s passengers and flight attendants frantically phoned loved ones. Along with panic, these calls are often fraught with stunned bewilderment and morbid abandonment guilt.

The voice message flight attendant Ceecee Lyles left for her husband showcases this macabre mélange. It begins matter-of-factly, even calmly: “Hi baby. You have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. I’m calling from the plane.”

Her voice begins cracking as she cuts to the chase, asking that her children be told she loves them before apologizing to her husband for what she suspects is his pending widowerhood: “I’m so sorry baby.”

Finally, the horrible – and perhaps purposefully buried – lede. “There’s three guys, they’ve hijacked the plane … I heard that there’s planes that have been flown into the World Trade Center.” “I HOPE…” – she stresses this word – “…to see your face again, baby. I love you.”^[6]

1 Tom McGinnis: “You don’t understand. There are people jumping.”

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, the area’s cell phone bandwidth and land lines became overwhelmed with calls. As a result, some people trapped on the upper floors had extreme difficulty getting through to a worried loved one.

Trapped on the North Tower’s 92nd floor, Carr Futures stock trader Tom McGinnis was unable to reach his wife Iliana until 10:18am – more than 90 minutes after the first plane struck directly above him. By then, McGinnis and a handful of colleagues had retreated to an office surrounded by flames. McGinnis also may have known that, about 20 minutes earlier, the South Tower had completely collapsed.

Dismayed at learning her husband was still in the burning building, Iliana recalls the conversation: “Are you O.K., yes or no?” she demanded.

“We’re on the 92nd floor in a room we can’t get out of,” Tom said. “I love you. Take care of Caitlin [the couple’s daughter].”

Understandably, Iliana wasn’t ready to concede defeat. “Don’t lose your cool,” she urged. “You guys are so tough, you’re resourceful. You’ll get out of there.”

“You don’t understand,” Tom said, discouraging his wife’s false hope. “There are people jumping from the floors above us.”

The gravity of the situation sunk in for Iliana. All she could muster was “Don’t hang up.”

His last words before the line disconnected: “I got to get down on the floor” The tower collapsed just minutes later, at 10:28am.^[7]

Top 10 Incredible Tales From 9/11

The American Civil War was exceptional in its brutality and the loss of American lives. It took place in the violent sweet spot in history after the American adoption of guerrilla warfare, rifled weapons, and repeating weapons, and before the proliferation of modern hygienic and medical standards, as well as the invention of antibiotics. This meant that the conflict was poised to deliver maximum casualties with relatively minimal recovery.

This proved true, and more Americans died in the conflict than any other war in the nation’s history. Tales of the suffering it caused are notorious, as are the tales of the paranormal legacy that suffering left behind. All in all, it makes the Civil War an eerie topic, and many stories from the conflict, whether real or paranormal, are chilling. Here are ten of those Civil War stories sure to unnerve you.

10 The Taste of Brains

It was common for literate soldiers to write diaries during their deployment, whether as personal journals or meant as letters to loved ones. Henry Fitzgerald Charles kept one, and it chronicles his service to the Union as part of the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry. He was involved in many conflicts over his three stints in the war. Certainly, he saw his share of the war’s horrors. One stands out.

He writes about one day when he and another soldier entered the woods after a battle had ended there, looking for salvage. They rested and, “All at once I heard a gun crack and at the same time my mouth was filled with another man’s brains. There was a sharpshooter in the distant woods somewhere… I reckon he waited till he had us both in line and was going to kill two birds with one stone, but my friend’s head was too hard—it reflected the bullet. If I swallowed any of it, it certainly came up along with everything else I had in my stomach.” A bullet meant for both men was stopped by his friend’s skull, and Charles had a taste of his friend’s brains.

9 The Devil’s Den, Gettysburg

The Devil’s Den is a rocky hill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was named for its twisting passages that seem to cut through its many large boulders, thought to be made by a giant serpent. See: the biblical Devil. The small hill is home to an impressive amount of ghost stories and purported sightings. For one, the whole hill seems to become a dead zone for electronics at random intervals. Visitors have claimed to see uniformed Union soldiers walking through it, even one with a bloody chest wound who asks passers-by for help.

If ghosts are real, then Devil’s Den would be a natural haunt. The hill was a battleground on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the single bloodiest battle in the entire Civil War, which again is the single bloodiest conflict in American history.

8 Angel’s Glow

This story concludes in a very wholesome way, but imagining how soldiers in the war experienced it, it must have been frightening. There are multiple reports from the war that soldiers’ injuries would sometimes begin mysteriously glowing blue, most famously those at the Battle of Shiloh. Further, those that did glow seemed more likely to survive. The otherworldly light came to known as Angel’s Glow.

The glow was written off as superstition for a century and a half until a 17-year-old whose mother studied bioluminescent bacteria learned of Angel’s Glow and put two and two together. He and a friend conducted some experiments and were able to unravel the whole mystery. It turns out the heavenly light of the angels was caused by the bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens. Though to soldiers at the time who knew nothing of microbiology, this must have been an unearthly experience.

7 Green Eyes

A monster story that comes from Civil War soldiers themselves is that of Ol’ Green Eyes. It is a supernatural creature that haunts the site of the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee and Georgia. The creature itself varies between tellings. It is sometimes a giant white ghoul, sometimes a green-skinned swamp creature with fangs, and sometimes a headless soldier searching for the lost head. The one thing that every version shares are bright, glowing green eyes. (Yes, even the headless soldier, somehow). It’s no surprise the area is haunted. Over 34,000 soldiers died on that spot within just three days.

6 The Dream of John C. Calhoun

John Calhoun was an American politician, most famous for serving as Vice President to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He was called the ‘cast-iron man’ for his unwavering, absolute support of Southern customs and beliefs, including slavery and white supremacy. One night a few years before the war, Calhoun was preparing a plan for the South to leave the Union when he was visited in a dream.

He said, “The sight struck me like a thunderclap. It was the face of a dead man whom extraordinary events had called back to life. The features were those of George Washington and he was dressed in his General’s uniform.” Washington then placed a black spot on Calhoun’s right hand which, said Washington, “is the mark by which Benedict Arnold is known in the next world.” Washington warned Calhoun that dissolving the Union would be traitorous, and would haunt him throughout his eternal afterlife.

5 St. Peter’s Ghost

St. Peter’s Church in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia was used as a hospital during the Civil War. Its staff cared for soldiers from both sides, and both armies were careful to avoid attacking it with artillery or otherwise harming it. It is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young soldier who died in its doorway.

The young man was wounded and asked nurses at the church to see him. Labeling his wounds as low priority, they saw to other, seemingly more grievous injuries first. The soldier laid in front of the church, waiting. Finally, his time came, and nurses began carrying him inside. Just as he passed through the entranceway, his wound overcame him and he died. Allegedly, just moments before passing, he whispered, “I’m saved.”

4 Champ Ferguson

For the vast majority of Southern men who supported the Confederate effort and wanted to help, the choice was clear: enlist and aid them as a soldier. Champ Ferguson chose a different path. Ferguson chose not to join the Confederacy in any official way and instead gathered a unit of like-minded friends and neighbors under his, and only his, command. Acting on Ferguson’s orders, the unit spent the war carrying out guerrilla attacks on whomever they pleased.

They routinely attacked and killed civilians who Ferguson believed supported the Union. They were known to be indiscriminate, attacking the wounded, the elderly, and sleeping targets. Unconfirmed (though believable) reports state that Ferguson sometimes mutilated the bodies of his victims after death, decapitating them or otherwise mutilating them. After the war, he was caught and tried, when he admitted to killing over 100 men himself. He was hanged for war crimes.

3 Andersonville Prison

Champ Ferguson’s execution for war crimes made him one of only two men in the Civil War to be put to death for this crime. The other was Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the infamous Andersonville Prison, known as Camp Sumter. Andersonville was a Confederate prison camp in which over 13,000 Union troops died due to starvation, dehydration, and disease.

Conditions at the prison were atrocious and inhumane, and some photographs of survivors look indistinguishable from those of Nazi concentration camps. Dysentery, scurvy, and typhoid fever ravaged the crowded Union POWs, killing an estimated 100 per day. Prisoners would later recount their experience as being constant cruelty and suffering, with many earnestly believing the prison was Hell.

2 Washington Again

One of the most famous triumphant stories from the Civil War is that of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Infantry Regiment. The regiment made a dramatic charge down Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, likely preventing a total Union loss. Instead of Chamberlain, however, many soldiers in the regiment claim to have seen the ghost of George Washington in full Revolutionary War regalia giving the order to charge.

When asked about the alleged specter later in his life, Chamberlain reportedly said, “I have no doubt that it had a tremendous psychological effect in inspiring the men. Doubtless, it was a superstition, but who among us can say that such a thing was impossible? We have not yet sounded or explored the immortal life that lies out beyond the Bar. I only know the effect, but I dare not explain or deny the cause.”

1 The Tragedy of Sullivan Ballou

Major Sullivan Ballou fought for the Union Army who became famous after a letter he wrote to his wife Sarah was featured in Ken Burns’s documentary “The Civil War.” The letter, read aloud in the documentary, changed how many people thought about soldiers of that era. Whereas before, many thought the average soldier was simple and had a basic literacy, Ballou’s letter proved they could be eloquent, deep, contemplative, and even poetic. One section reads, “The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us.”

Heartfelt and beautiful, the letter became iconic. In sharp contrast, however, Ballou’s life after its writing was brutal and profane. He died one week later at the First Battle of Bull Run. A cannonball ripped off much of his right leg, and he eventually succumbed to the wound. Unconfirmed reports state that Confederate soldiers discovered his burial site. He was then exhumed, decapitated, and his desecrated body cruelly hung on display.

The human mind likes to make sense of things. We look for patterns and order in everything, even if it’s not really there. Few things spark our interest in finding meaning more than when we stumble upon a coincidence. Many people believe they have to mean something. And whether or not these amazing coincidences are indicative of something supernatural or just bad luck doesn’t really matter, they’re all still pretty creepy.

10. The Baby Catcher

About 4,000 children per year under 10 are injured by falling from windows. That seems like a lot, all things considered. And it may be at the root of explaining the curious coincidence that befell Joseph Figlock back in 1938. According to reports, Figlock was a street sweeper in Detroit. He was walking down the street one day when a baby fell from somewhere above him in the building he was passing. The child landed on Figlock and injured both of them, but they both survived as a result.

A year later, Figlock was cleaning out an alley and a two-year-old fell from a fourth story window, once again landing on Figlock. The results were the same as before, with Figlock cushioning the falls enough that the child survived. 

You may see this story retold with embellished details, such as the same baby landing on Figlock exactly one year later, and he caught it both times. The original reports didn’t include those details at all and, in fact, point out that one baby was a girl and the other was a boy.

9. Booth’s Brother Saved Lincoln’s Son

People love to share eerie coincidences about Abraham Lincoln, whether or not they’re always true. But there are some quirky facts about the president’s life that do make you want to scratch your head, including the very odd coincidence about his son’s near-death experience. 

Everyone knows that Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Less well known is how Edwin Booth, brother of John, saved the life of Robert Todd Lincoln. Like his brother, Edwin was an actor as well. Unlike his brother, he was actually a big fan of Lincoln and the Union.

It was during the Civil War when Edwin and Robert met by chance in New Jersey. Neither knew the other personally, of course, and Robert was on a break from college while Edwin was traveling to see a friend. 

Robert was knocked off a train platform and fell down next to the train, which had started moving. Trapped, Robert suddenly felt someone grab him and yank him back up. He recognized Edwin Booth as being an actor, though Booth didn’t know who Lincoln was. It was only a year or two later when John Wilkes Booth assassinated the president.

8 . The Life and Death of George Story

George Story became famous from birth thanks to Life magazine. On November 23, 1936, the first issue of Life hit the stands. Inside that first issue, the very first photo was of a doctor delivering a baby. The caption read “Life begins” which was a clever bit of wordplay for the magazine title. The baby was George Story.

Throughout the years, Life would check in on George and run that photo again. The man himself grew up to be a journalist for some years. Life magazine stopped publishing in the year 2000. For their farewell issue, they were going to include one final photo of George with the caption “A Life ends.” Two days before the photographers showed up to take the final photos, Story passed away from congestive heart failure. 

7. The Nebraska Church Explosion

Choir practice at the West Side Baptist Church was scheduled to begin at 7:20 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1, 1950. It always started at that time, so this was by no means an unusual event. What was unusual was that, at 7:25, the church exploded. It’s been suggested that, after the furnace was lit in preparation for the choir’s arrival, a gas leak may have caused the blast. It was powerful enough to blow the windows out of nearby buildings and even knock the local radio station off the air. And not a single person was hurt because no one was there.

Every single member of the choir was late that night. Every single one was late for a different reason. Reverend Klempel, who lit the furnace, went home after to have dinner but ran late when his daughter’s dress got dirty and his wife was ironing a clean one.

The church pianist fell asleep at home after her own dinner and woke up at 7:15. A highschool student was stuck on a geometry problem with her homework. Two other members couldn’t get their cars started. One man was stuck writing a letter, and another was helping her mother. In total, 15 different people were late for 15 different reasons, such that no one was in the church when it eventually blew. 

6. The Deaths of Bruce and Brandon Lee

Bruce Lee died in 1973 while filming his fifth movie, Game of Death. His death was caused by a cerebral edema in his brain and was all but unpredictable. He left behind a wife and two children. One of those children, Brandon Lee, famously followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming an actor. As most of us know, Brandon Lee tragically died as well on the set of his film The Crow 20 years later in 1993. 

The Crow was Brandon’s fifth film. His death was caused by a prop gun that was improperly prepared for use. The dummy rounds were made from altered live rounds and one of the dummy bullets was still in the chamber when the blank was fired, causing it to fire like a normal gun. 

In what turned out to be a bizarre coincidence, a scenario that almost exactly mirrored this turn of events happens on screen in Game of Death. In the film, Bruce Lee is playing an actor. On the set of the movie he’s starring in, the prop guy explains to the cast and crew how to properly fire the prop gun. He explains that the gun is loaded with blanks but that they must only aim upwards because there’s a wad of paper that could come out and injure someone. If the actor on the set of The Crow had followed those instructions, Lee would have survived.

In his movie, Bruce Lee’s character is then shot by the prop gun, though the character shooting intentionally swapped out the dummy round for a real bullet. The similarity between what happened on screen and what his son endured 20 years later was eerily prophetic. 

5. The Death of Stephen Hawking

Ask the average person to name the greatest physicists of all time and they’ll likely only come up with a handful of names. Let’s be honest, science isn’t super glamorous and fame isn’t typically one of the perks, anyway. But that doesn’t mean some of them don’t achieve it. People like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are at the top of the list. And while their scientific minds likely wouldn’t give much credence to weird coincidences, the rest of us can still do it.

Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, and passed away on March 14, 2018. He was born on the 300th anniversary of famed astronomer Galileo Galilei’s death. He died on the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth. And it was also Pi Day, the day to commemorate the mathematical constant of Pi, which is often abbreviated down to 3.14, or March 14.

As you can imagine, social media made no end of clever quips about the timing of Hawking’s death, but even if it had no greater meaning related to relativity and time, it was still a hell of a coincidence. 

4 The Tierney Men

A lot of sons follow in the footsteps of their fathers. That’s usually a good thing. Not so for the Tierney family, however, who endured generational tragedy at the Hoover Dam.

By the time the Hoover Dam was finished, 96 fatalities had been recorded. One of those deaths occurred on December 20, 1921. John Gregory Tierney was caught in a flood and drowned in the Colorado River. Tierney left behind a family, which included his young son Patrick.

Fourteen years after his father died. Patrick Tierney was a young man and had taken up work at the site of his father’s death. It was December 20, the anniversary of his father’s death, when Patrick slipped from an intake tower. His death would be the final one associated with the building of the dam. 

3. My Way Killings

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” spent 75 weeks as a Top 40 hit, and another 49 weeks in the top 75. The song was arguably Sinatra’s biggest and most memorable hit ever and is still popular to this day. Maybe even too popular, at least in the Philippines. Bad things happen to people who sing it there. 

Between the years 2002 and 2012, upwards of a dozen people were killed in connection to “My Way.” In the Philippines, karaoke is both very popular and very serious. Serious enough that at least one of those 12 people was killed for singing the song out of tune. It was reported at that time that the song had already been taken off of numerous play lists because violence kept breaking out when people sang it poorly.

Another victim was stabbed in 2018 when a fight broke out before the song even started. In another incident, a four-year-old was singing the song, adults started arguing, and one man attacked with a meat cleaver. The only common theme is the choice of song, it seems, making it quite a deadly coincidence with little reason for the deadly acts beyond the arrogant lyrics, making people angry. 

2. The Taxi Brothers

Many stories of amazing coincidences are too good to be true. Do some digging and they fall apart. But one popular tale of two brothers killed a year apart by the same taxi driver carrying the same passenger may actually be the real deal. 

The incident supposedly took place in Bermuda in 1975, so records are a bit hard to come by. But internet sleuths wanting to get to the bottom of the story have dug around to find the clues. A story from the Telegraph in 1975 does present the incident as fact. Both brothers were 17 at the time of their death, both riding the same scooter on the same road, one year apart. Other reports mention the name of the taxi driver and even the sections of road on which the boys were hit. 

Though verifiable details are hard to come by, a 1974 newsletter from a Bermuda worker’s union does offer a small message of sympathy after the death of a 17-year-old with the same name from the original story, which gives the whole thing a lot of credence. 

1. Umberto and Umberto

In The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain created a tale of two identical men who swap places. One royalty, the other a poor commoner. Sounds fantastical and implausible, which makes the story of King Umberto of Italy and Umberto the restaurateur so unbelievable. 

According to the story, the King went to a restaurant to have a meal. The owner wanted to meet the king, and the men were stunned to notice they looked exactly alike. They shared the same name and the same birthday. Both married women named Margherita on the same day. 

The day after their meeting, King Umberto was assassinated. He was shot four times. The two men were scheduled to meet again that day, but it never panned out. Umberto, the restaurant owner, had died that morning after also being shot. 

If the story is true, it’s quite the coincidence indeed. The two men very well could have been twin brothers without knowing it. But the death of a random restaurant owner in the year 1900 did not cause many waves, especially on the same day the king was assassinated, so details of his life, if he even existed, have been lost.