Disappearances
People who walked into a silence and were never found.
Files on record
Mysteries
9 Historical Mysteries: What We Know and What Remains Unexplained
Nine cases the past keeps returning to — a lost colony, a crewless ship, an unreadable manuscript — set out as what happened, the leading explanation, and what remains unknown.
Disappearances
What Happened to the Sodder Children?
A house burned to its foundations on Christmas morning 1945 and five children were said to have died inside it. No remains attributable to them were ever recovered.
Mysteries
The Bermuda Triangle: The Sea That Swallows Ships
A stretch of the western Atlantic has been blamed for vanishing ships and aircraft for nearly a century. The sea gives nothing back easily, and the legend has grown in the silence.
Disappearances
Three Lighthouse Keepers Vanished Into the North Atlantic
A lighthouse on an uninhabited rock twenty miles into the Atlantic went dark in the middle of December 1900. When a relief boat finally reached it eleven days later, the station was in order, the lamp was ready to light, and all three keepers were gone. The official investigation blamed the sea. Almost everything else attached to the case since then was invented.
Disappearances
The Bennington Triangle: Five People Vanished Around One Vermont Mountain
In five years, five people went into the woods around one southern Vermont mountain and did not come back. Four were never found. The one who was found left no explanation.
Mysteries
The Mary Celeste: A Ship Sailing With No One Aboard
On a December morning in 1872, the crew of the Dei Gratia boarded an American brigantine drifting under partial sail in the Atlantic. The ship was sound, her cargo largely intact, six months of food and water in her stores — and every one of the ten people aboard was gone. No one ever saw them again.
Mysteries
Dyatlov Pass: What Happened to the Nine Hikers?
Nine experienced hikers left their tent on a frozen Ural slope without boots or winter clothing. Their bodies were found between the camp and a cedar forest, some with devastating internal injuries. Decades of retelling turned the tragedy into a supernatural puzzle. The original record is stranger, more coherent and less certain.
Disappearances
The Roanoke Colony: 117 People Vanished and Left One Word
When John White returned to Roanoke after three years, every colonist was gone. The houses had been dismantled, the boats had vanished, and CROATOAN had been carved into a palisade post. It looked less like a sudden disappearance than a message — but storms prevented White from following it.
Disappearances
The Princes in the Tower: Two Boys Who Vanished in 1483
In the spring of 1483, a twelve-year-old boy became King Edward V of England. By the end of that summer he and his nine-year-old brother Richard had disappeared inside the Tower of London, their uncle had taken the crown as Richard III, and no one has been able to say — with proof — what happened to them since.
Disappearances
D.B. Cooper: The Man Who Hijacked a Plane, Took $200,000, and Stepped Into the Dark
On the afternoon before Thanksgiving in 1971, a quiet man in a business suit bought a one-way ticket under the name Dan Cooper, sat down in seat 18C of a Boeing 727, and ordered a bourbon and soda. By eight o'clock that night he had $200,000 in cash strapped to his body and was standing at the bottom of the plane's rear stairs, in a rainstorm, somewhere over southwestern Washington. Then he jumped. Neither he nor most of the money has ever been found. It remains the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.
Disappearances
The Yuba County Five: Five Men Drove Into the Mountains. One Was Never Found
On a Friday night in February 1978, five young men from Yuba City drove to Chico to watch a college basketball game. They never came home. Their car turned up days later, abandoned on a snowy mountain road some seventy miles from where they should have been. When the snow melted in June, four of them were found dead. One had survived for weeks inside a stocked Forest Service trailer without opening the food around him. The fifth man, Gary Mathias, has never been found.