Everyone loves to solve a good mystery. We examine the clues, try to figure out motivations, if necessary, and put the pieces together to determine a logical answer to what happened. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we can’t unlock the solutions to the world’s most perplexing puzzles.
Who was Jack the Ripper? Is Maddie McCann dead or alive? What really happened to Flight MH370?
We may never know. It is just as unlikely that we’ll solve the mysteries of what happened to the Beaumont children or who The Boy in the Box was. On this list are 10 more mysteries for which we will probably never find the answers.
10 The Gurning Man
In the 1970s, several women in Glasgow, Scotland, reported a strange and terrifying phenomenon. A man who appeared to be in his fifties had started harassing them in a weird way.
One woman reported seeing the man sitting at the end of her bed when she woke up around midnight one evening. The man, later dubbed the “Gurning Man,” grinned at her while rubbing his hands up and down his chest. Yelling for her husband to wake up, the woman was astonished to find the man had disappeared without a trace.
Two teen girls also had a run-in with the Gurning Man one night as they were walking home. They both reported seeing an extremely skinny, bald man dressed in what looked like a leotard standing underneath a streetlight. As the girls passed him, he gave them a weird grin but didn’t speak. When they looked back, he was gone.[1]
Seventeen complaints were filed between 1976 and 1979, six of which stated that the Gurning Man was inside the complainant’s home. Most of the reports also stated that the man seemed to be extremely agitated. To this day, no one knows who he was or why he behaved so strangely.
9 Diane Schuler Accident
In July 2009, a horrific car accident that claimed the lives of eight people in New York led to more questions than answers in its aftermath. Thirty-six-year-old Diane Schuler drove down the wrong side of the Taconic State Parkway, crashing into an SUV. Schuler, her daughter, and her three nieces died in the crash along with three passengers in the SUV.
A bottle of vodka recovered from Schuler’s car and reports that she had bought orange juice that morning seemed to solidify that it was a clear case of driving under the influence that had gone terribly wrong. Autopsy reports confirmed that her blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit, and there was evidence of marijuana use shortly before the accident.
However, Schuler’s sister-in-law had spoken to her an hour and a half before the accident happened and she did not think for one minute that Schuler was drunk or high. Diane Schuler’s husband, Daniel, made conflicting statements about his wife’s drinking, which led to speculation that she may have been an alcoholic but her family had covered it up.
Theories began making the rounds that Diane may have caused the crash on purpose as a way of getting back at her husband because their relationship wasn’t all it had seemed to be. This theory gained traction with reports that Diane’s behavior was perfectly normal while driving. The Schuler family members even filed lawsuits against one another after the accident.[2]
While it is clear that Diane Schuler was under the influence of debilitating substances, it remains unknown why she chose to ingest such an incredible amount of alcohol and drugs in such a short time and then get behind the wheel of a car with so many of her own family members alongside her.
8 Saturday Mthiyane
In 1987, residents of Sundumbili, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, discovered a young boy about five years old living in the wild. He had a broken leg and displayed animallike behavior.
Those who found him took the boy to the nearest police station. From there, he was taken to a school for disabled children where he was given the name Saturday Mthiyane: Saturday because that’s the day on which they discovered him, and Mthiyane because this was the last name of the principal of the school.
He displayed violent tendencies toward the other children in the school, hitting them and refusing to play with them. He used windows to get in and out of the building and stole raw red meat from the fridge.[3]
Experts believed that the boy may have been raised by monkeys in the wild, conjuring up an image of a scene from The Jungle Book. The boy also dug holes in the ground, had a penchant for bananas, and loved tossing food into his mouth. Ten years after he was found, Saturday only had one friend at the school, still didn’t speak, and hadn’t been sick once.
While it is obvious that Saturday was abandoned or perhaps got lost, his mother was never found. His reason for being raised by animals in the wild remains a mystery. In 2007, Saturday died in a fire, his story forever unresolved.
7 Harassment Of Bill And Dorothy Wacker
Bill and Dorothy Wacker were an average, quiet couple who lived in Ohio for most of their married life. For unknown reasons, they became the target of a violent harasser. Their torment started in 1984 and lasted until 1993.
In January 1985, after their house had been broken into and cleaned out for the third time in less than a year, Bill involved the police for the first time. That same year, Dorothy was attacked in their home while recovering from heart surgery.
She allowed a man inside to use the telephone. He said goodbye after using the phone but never left. Instead, he sneaked up behind an unsuspecting Dorothy and hit her over the head. While she was unconscious, he tied her up and gagged her, leaving her on the kitchen floor.[4]
Luckily, she escaped largely unscathed. However, the harasser took several items from the house, including a revolver, watch, radio scanner, and camera. The unknown assailant returned the items to the house over the following months.
The harasser began prank calling the couple, banging on their walls late at night, and leaving notes on their porch and walls. Police were dumbfounded. In 1993, the criminal struck again. He attacked Dorothy, leaving her with lacerations on her skull. The Wackers tried staking out their own house, hoping to catch the person tormenting them. But it was to no avail.
Bill and Dorothy are both deceased now, and the person who made their lives hell was never caught.
6 Etienne Bottineau And Nauscopy
In the late 1700s, Etienne Bottineau came up with the concept of nauscopy (seeing beyond the horizon). He stated that he was able to see beyond the horizon because ships left a mark or “indentation” on the atmosphere.
He worked on his talent from where he lived on Mauritius until he could predict multiple ships heading to the island while they were still beyond the horizon. He never failed in his predictions, successfully doing so for the arrival of 575 ships that docked at the island between 1778 and 1782.
All his predictions were recorded, and Bottineau was offered a large amount of money to reveal his secret. But he refused to tell anyone exactly how he was able to “see” the ships before they appeared on the horizon.
When France rejected his idea to become a teacher of nauscopy in their country, Bottineau returned to Mauritius and predicted the appearance of ships until his death. His secret went with him to the grave.[5]
5 Sylvia L. Ossa And DC-3
In 1976, a cargo ship named Sylvia L. Ossa departed from Brazil en route to Philadelphia. The ship and its crew of 37 disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle with only a lifeboat and burned life preserver recovered. The fate of the ship remains a mystery.
Similarly, in 1948, the pilot of a DC-3 en route from Puerto Rico to Miami reported landing gear problems shortly before takeoff. The pilot also stated that the airplane batteries were discharged, but he refused to delay the trip for these issues.
All went well with the flight until the plane was 80 kilometers (50 mi) from Miami. Then it simply disappeared and was never recovered. The 27 people aboard were never found, either.[6]
4 Kyron Horman Disappearance
On June 4, 2010, seven-year-old Kyron Horman arrived at Skyline Elementary School with his stepmother, Terri Moulton Horman. At a quarter to nine, Terri left the school after seeing Kyron off near his classroom. One of the students later reported seeing Kyron at the south entrance to the school.
When Kyron didn’t appear in his homeroom class, his teacher reported him absent. When Terri went to wait for the school bus at half past three in the afternoon, she discovered that Kyron wasn’t on the bus and had not been at school the entire day.
Kyron was reported missing, and a search party was formed the same day. However, the boy is still missing. Suspicion fell on Terri Horman, but she publicly denied being involved in Kyron’s disappearance in 2016. She was never named an official suspect by the authorities despite failing two polygraph tests.
Kyron’s fate remains to be discovered.[7]
3 Sarah L. Winchester House
After her husband died in 1881, Sarah Winchester lived alone in their eight-room farmhouse in San Jose. Which was perfectly normal. What wasn’t normal, however, is that the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester insisted on continuous construction that eventually saw the modest house converted to a massive mansion with 160 rooms. The strangest part about the building was the multiple doors and stairwells that led to dead ends.
There are several theories about this incessant construction. One says that Sarah wanted to relive happy moments spent with her husband when they oversaw the construction of their former home in Connecticut. Another theory has it that Sarah couldn’t bear to let go of her workers and made up this plan to keep them employed and paid.
However, a creepy theory states that Sarah Winchester consulted a medium to try to contact her late husband. The medium told her that she had to pay penance for all the souls of people killed by Winchester rifles. To do this, Sarah had to build enough rooms for all of these lost souls.[8]
Sarah Winchester died in 1922, and her reasons for the extra rooms went to the grave with her. A movie about her and the Winchester mansion is due to be released in cinemas in 2018.
2 Asha Degree Disappearance
In the early hours of February 14, 2000, nine-year-old Asha Degree packed her school bag and left her home. She started walking along the North Carolina Highway. It was storming, but Asha kept walking until a passing motorist turned around and drove back her way. Then Asha ran into the woods.
Her parents discovered that she was missing later that morning, and the police were called. It took more than a year for her bag to be discovered along Highway 18. The site in the woods where Asha disappeared now sports a billboard asking for information about her disappearance.
It remains unclear whether Asha Degree ran away from home or was abducted. In 2016, the FBI received a tip about a girl who looked like Asha and may have gotten into a distinctive vehicle on North Carolina Highway 18 back in 2000. However, her whereabouts are still a mystery.[9]
1 Keith Bennett’s Remains
Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered five children and buried four of their victims on Saddleworth Moor. Hindley died in 2002, and Brady died in 2017 after refusing to reveal where one of the victims, Keith Bennett, was buried.
It has been thought for a long time that Keith’s remains are also on Saddleworth Moor, but extensive searches have revealed nothing so far. In 2003 and 2009, special searches were launched but nothing came of them. Ian Brady staunchly refused to help with any information during both of these searches. Keith Bennett’s mother died in 2012 without being able to give her son a proper burial and farewell.[10]
Also in 2012, Jackie Powell, an advocate for Ian Brady, claimed to have received a letter from the killer to pass on to Bennett’s mother in the event of Brady’s death. Powell was interrogated by police, but no letter was ever found.
Estelle lives in Gauteng, South Africa.