Loch Ness: From a Famous Photograph to Sonar and DNA
About 5 min readA 1934 photograph made Loch Ness famous. Sonar, cameras, and DNA have searched the loch since. What have they found?
Unsolved
The Lost Dutchman Mine: Gold, Death, and the Superstition Mountains
About 4 min readJacob Waltz died in Phoenix in 1891, leaving a trunk of rich gold ore and a set of deathbed directions centred on Weaver’s Needle. Generations of searchers have followed them into the Superstition Mountains — dozens never came back, and no mine has ever been found. Was Waltz guarding a real mine, or only the gold he took from somewhere else?
The Lost City of Atlantis: Plato’s Story and the Search for a Sunken World
About 4 min readPlato described a great island empire that sank beneath the waves — and in 2,400 years, no one has found a trace of it beyond his two dialogues. Santorini, the Sahara, the Azores and Antarctica have all been proposed; every candidate has failed. Why does a story with a single source still launch expeditions?
The Honey Island Swamp Monster: Louisiana’s Seven-Foot Swamp Ape
About 4 min readIn 1963, a retired air traffic controller named Harlan Ford reported a seven-foot, grey-haired creature with yellow eyes in the Honey Island Swamp — and plaster casts of footprints no known animal could have made. Sixty years on, the swamp still keeps its secret.
Moundsville Penitentiary: The Haunted Prison on the Hill
About 5 min readFor 119 years, the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville was one of the most violent prisons in America — 94 executions, 36 murders, and cells five feet by seven. It closed in 1995. The ghost hunters arrived almost immediately.
The Trans-en-Provence Case
About 4 min readOn 8 January 1981 a farmer in southern France watched a lead-coloured saucer land in his field — and the ground it left behind was scorched, compressed and chemically changed. Forty years later, no explanation has held.
Manipogo: The Serpent of Lake Manitoba
About 4 min readLake Manitoba has its own lake monster — a serpentine creature, four to fifteen metres long, reported since 1909 and named Manipogo in 1960. Seventeen witnesses once claimed to see three of them swimming together. The only photograph ever taken is still argued over.
Bachelors Grove Cemetery: The Madonna, the Phantom House, and Chicago’s Most Haunted Acre
About 4 min readHidden in the woods southwest of Chicago, a one-acre cemetery closed to burials in 1965 has produced more than a hundred reported encounters — a translucent woman photographed in 1991, a farmhouse that appears and vanishes, and a pond said to hide mob victims.
Bessie, the Lake Erie Monster: Two Centuries of Serpents in the Inland Sea
About 4 min readFor more than two hundred years, sailors and fishermen on Lake Erie have reported a long, dark, serpentine creature, thirty to forty feet long, sliding through the water off Sandusky Bay. No body, photograph, or DNA sample has ever confirmed it — and the reports have never stopped.
Bobby Mackey’s Music World: The Haunted Honky-Tonk of Wilder, Kentucky
About 5 min readFor nearly half a century, Bobby Mackey’s Music World offered country music upstairs and ghost stories downstairs — a basement well, a murdered woman, and a sign at the door warning that the place was haunted. In December 2024, the building was demolished.