Everyone loves a good mystery. With Fox recently airing a 6-episode-long 10th season of its hit television show The X-Files, we took to AskReddit to learn about some real-life, unsolved stories that are guaranteed to give you the willies.
#1. The Insatiable Tarrare
“A French man who could not stop eating. He was said to have an incredibly large mouth with stained teeth, and supposedly had a visible vapor rising off of his body. His parents kicked him out as a teenager because he was literally eating them out of house and home. He ate any and everything, including live animals, stones, silverware, anything he could get his hands on. The French military even tried employing him as a courier to smuggle documents by eating them. No doctor was able to find a cause or a cure to his appetite. He was eventually kicked out of the military hospital where they were studying him, after falling under suspicion of eating a 14 month old child that went missing from the same hospital. A reasonable suspicion, since they caught him trying to eat dead bodies in the morgue on several occasions.”
#2. The Oakville Blobs
“Gelatinous blobs fell from the sky in Oakville, WA in the early 90’s that made people sick and killed some animals. After testing it was shown to contain human white blood cells.”
#3. Hallucinations At Sea
“So, this has been scientifically explained, but it’s intensely creepy. Coming from a family of sailors, both my father and grandfather had similar experiences. My father described an incident where he saw floating coffins covering the entire sea. My grandfather described an incident where a swarm of crows were following the boat, and people riding on motorcycles besides the boat.”
#4. The Death of Gloria Ramirez
“A woman was brought into the ER suffering from late stage cervical cancer. Her body had an oily sheen to it, her breath smelled like fruity garlic, her blood samples smelled like ammonia and had floating particles in it. Most of the people who worked on her got sick themselves.”
#5. The Monkey Man
“In May 2001, reports began to circulate in the Indian capital New Delhi of a strange monkey-like creature that was appearing at night and attacking people. Eyewitness accounts were often inconsistent, but tended to describe the creature as about four feet (120 cm) tall, covered in thick black hair, with a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons on its chest; others, however, described the Monkey-man as having a more vulpine snout, and being up to eight feet tall, and muscular; it would leap from building to building like a parkour enthusiast. Still others have described it as a bandaged figure or as a helmeted thing. Theories on the nature of the Monkey Man ranged from an Avatar of the Hindu god Hanuman, to an Indian version of Bigfoot. Many people reported being scratched, and two (by some reports, three) people even died when they leapt from the tops of buildings or fell down stairwells in a panic caused by what they thought was the attacker. At one point, exasperated police even issued artist’s impression drawings in an attempt to catch the creature. The entire incident has been described as an example of mass hysteria.”
#6. The Hoia Baciu Forest In Romania
“Visitors to the forest often report intense feelings of anxiety and the feeling of being constantly watched. Moreover, the local vegetation is somehow bizarre in appearance, like something out of a make-believe story with strangely shaped trees, and unexplained charring on tree stumps and branches. The forest was named after a shepherd that disappeared in the area with a flock of two hundred sheep. Most people who live near the forest are afraid to enter it due to the stories and legends that have been handed down. They believe that those who visit the site will never return back home. Many of the locals who have been brave enough to venture into the forest complained of physical harm, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, migraines, burns, scratches, anxiety, and other unusual sensations.”
#7. Skinwalker Ranch
“A ranch in Northeast Utah where in the 90s the owners reported weird phenomena like giant wolf-like creatures attacking their cattle and taking multiple rifle shots without flinching, then apparently vanishing into thin air, floating orbs of light, bigfoot-like creatures, cattle mutilations, etc. A team of scientists from the National Institute for Discovery Science (including Colm Kelleher, who wrote a book about the occurrences) camped out on the ranch and reportedly witnessed much of the same, including what appeared to be windows opening into other worlds and a creature climbing through; poltergeist-like, ‘trickster’ activity, such as a surveillance camera being pulled down and gaffer tape being meticulously unwrapped from the cables, all while an adjacent camera picked up absolutely nothing. The ranch is on land infamous among the local native tribe as being haunted by ‘skinwalkers,’ supposedly powerful shape shifting sorcerers, and has a long history of weird happenings going back decades at least. The team of scientists, though they all experienced a lot of weird shit, were never able to gather any robust data to report back to NIDS. They got the feeling whatever they were observing knew it was being observed and did not want to be discovered. The book by Kelleher is Hunt for the Skinwalkers: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah. It’s a damned fascinating read.”
#8. The Taured Mystery
“A man shows up at an airport in Tokyo and his passport says that he’s from a country called Taured. When asked to point to Taured on a map, he points to Andorra but is confused because he had never heard of Andorra before. The company that he claims to work for has no idea who he is even though he had copious amounts of documentation to prove it. He was held in a hotel room guarded by two policemen while the police investigated the case. He disappeared from his room even though they were several stories up with no balcony.”
#9. The Mary Celeste
“An American merchant brigantine that was found adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores Islands, Portugal, on December 4, 1872, by the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia. She was in a disheveled but seaworthy condition, under partial sail, with no one on board, and her lifeboat missing. The last log entry was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7, and on discovery was still amply provisioned. Her cargo of denatured alcohol was intact, and the captain’s and crew’s personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board—the captain and his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and the crew of seven—were ever seen or heard from again.”
#10. Mel’s Hole
“A guy has a hole on his property that he claims is bottomless and has the power to restore dead animals to life. Hole is tested by some people who ‘verify’ the claims, then government gets involved to shut everything down. It is probably a hoax, but has all the elements of a good X-Files story, including government cover-up.”
#11. The Taman Shud Case
“A man washed up on Australia shores who is completely, and to this day, unidentified. Cause of death unknown, and he was carrying a booklet with him that had a crypted message that to this day is still without meaning. A suitcase believed to be his was also discovered, with odd objects inside that seem to make no sense to this man’s apparent possession of them, some of the items being: Red felt slippers, a stenciling brush for marking ship cargo, and a pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, along with makeshift weapons.”
#12. The Hinterkaifeck Murders
“A few days prior to the crime, farmer Andreas Gruber told neighbors about discovering footprints in the snow leading from the edge of the forest to the farm, but none leading back. He also spoke about hearing footsteps in the attic and finding an unfamiliar newspaper on the farm. Furthermore, the house keys went missing several days before the murders. None of this was reported to the police prior to the attack. Six months earlier, the previous maid had left the farm, claiming that it was haunted; the new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived on the farm on the day of the attack and was killed hours later. Exactly what happened on that Friday evening cannot be said for certain. It is believed that the older couple, as well as their daughter Viktoria, and her daughter, Cäzilia, were all lured into the barn one by one, where they were killed. The perpetrator(s) then went into the house where they killed two‑year‑old Josef, who was sleeping in his cot in his mother’s bedroom, as well as the maid, Maria Baumgartner, in her bedchamber.”
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