Top 10 Creepiest Mysteries You've Never Heard Of

Good luck sleeping after this. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the Top 10 Insane Mysteries You Probably Didn’t Know About.

For this list, we’ll be looking at the strangest and downright creepiest mysteries throughout history that may have gone unnoticed in the public eye. From unsolved murders, to disappearances, to indecipherable texts – this list has them all. None of these enigmas have been conclusively solved to this day, leading many people to turn to the supernatural for explanation. So get ready for some goosebumps!

This mystery is so abnormal that 80 years later it became the basis for Clint Eastwood's film “Changeling”. In 1928, nine-year-old Walter Collins went missing. Five months later, the police return a boy to his mother, Christine Collins – except she claims that this boy is not her son. After suggesting she give it a whirl anyway, the police grow tired of mother Collins' complaints and commit her to a psychiatric ward, while ridiculing her and her parenting skills. Until, that is, the boy admitted he had been lying. Christine Collins searched for her son for the rest of her life, but never found him, which is tragic, but the police’s odd behavior makes this strange case even stranger.

Starting sometime in 2016, diplomatic personnel in Cuba began to experience a weird range of health problems such as memory loss, hearing loss, and nausea. Follow up studies found that there was evidence of brain injuries. However, when questioned, the victims said that they heard a strange noise like a grating sound or marbles rolling on the floor, although others nearby did not hear this. Quasi unusual... but when recordings of the sound were captured, the closest thing researchers could find were Jamaican field crickets, which are harmless. No cause has been found, and theories range from microwave weapons to pesticides.

Picture it. 1942, off the coast of California. Two US Navy pilots command the Navy's L-8 blimp in search for Japanese submarines in waters not so far from San Francisco. They radio flight control about an oil slick on the water... and are never heard from again. A few hours later that very same L-8 blimp crashes into a cliff... with no one on board. Everything in or about the craft was working normally, the throttles were idea, and – more eerily – the parachutes and lifeboat were still on board. To this day no one knows what happened, and the personnel involved were never found.

In 1947, American vessels picked up an S.O.S call from a Dutch vessel, the SS Ourang Medan. The message was a chilling one: “S.O.S from Ourang Medan. We Float….Probably whole of crew dead. I die.” Finding the ship also meant finding corpses with gaping eyes and mouths. Soon after, while under tow, the ship caught fire and exploded. Stranger still, there are apparently no registration records for the ship, while the Coast Guard didn't report the story until the mid '50s. Theories tend to focus on government cover ups due to possible chemical weapons aboard. This story even served as the basis for the 2019 video game “The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Man of Medan.”

In 1587 John White led a group of British colonists to Roanoke Island – of the coast of what is now North Carolina – to settle it. Requiring supplies, White returned to Britain, but when he came back to Roanoke in 1590 he found his people were gone. Rather than a carved X to indicate they had been taken by force, he found the word “Croatoan” etched into the fencing. Did this mean they'd left for the Croatoan Island, or had they joined the Croatan people, a group of First Nations allied with the English? No one knows, and experts today are even using modern DNA tests to search for possible descendants and solve this mystery once and for all.

On the morning of June 30, 1908, a large explosion blasted the area near the Tunguska river in Russia, flattening some 80 million trees over some 800 square miles of forest. The mystery is just what exactly caused the explosion. It’s classified as the largest impact event ever recorded, but no impact crater was ever found; instead, researchers found 5 miles of scorched trees directly in the center that were somehow still standing. While scientists have debated on what caused such a massive explosion, some suggest it to be a meteor after a team from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine analyzed rock samples of meteoric origin from the site in 2013.

Brazil’s Guanabara Bay (gwawnna-BAWR-rah) contains a lot of trash, but the trash that people can’t explain is the 200 or so Roman ceramic jars found submerged in an underwater field – an underwater field the size of three tennis courts. According to experts, these jars trace back to the third century. However, European explorers didn’t even reach Brazil until 1500, and the Romans themselves had little to no incentive to travel that far out. Thus, it’s a complete mystery why their artifacts would be found here. Meanwhile, Brazil closed off the area in 1983, so it’s unlikely an answer will ever be found.

If you haven’t heard of this one, strap in. The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious 250-page book written in a completely unknown language and containing odd, other-wordly sketches. Its origin is unable to be fully traced, so no one knows who created it let alone why, but carbon dating puts it in the early 15th century. So far no one has been able to decode the script it's written in, despite being worked on by professional codebreakers from both World War I and II. What strange message lies inside this uncrackable book?

In 1987, two television stations in Chicago were hijacked in perhaps the most surreal act of video piracy ever recorded. Both instances featured an unidentified man dressed as obscure TV personality Max Headroom dancing to distorted audio. The second video, significantly longer, saw the man rambling incoherently in a distorted voice and being swatted on the behind by an offscreen accomplice. The segments lasted no more than a couple of minutes, but have gone down as among the most notorious incidents in television history. No one has ever identified who pulled it off, or even why. We can only hope someone comes forward after all this time to put an end to this mystery.

I do think that at least some of these will one day be solved, but it’s so frustrating that we have to wait! And like, it’s one thing for these mysteries that happened decades or centuries ago, but what about the Havana thing - that was only a few years ago!! Anyway, there’s one more insane mystery you probably didn’t know about, so let’s check out a few HMs and then we’ll learn more about it

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Why Have Dozens of Dogs Leapt Off This Bridge to their Deaths?
The Overtoun Bridge, Scotland (over-TEUN/TUNE)

Who Killed This Man & Left a Coded Message?
The Tamam Shud Case (tuh-MAWN SHOULD)

Were These Rocks Naturally Formed or an Ancient Civilization?
Bimini Road, Bahamas

Who Put These Mysterious Tiles Across the U.S & What Do They Mean?
The Toynbee Tiles

Why Did Half a Million People Become Living Statues?
The Encephalitis Lethargica Outbreak (1917-28)

One of the strangest mysteries of all time. Nine Russian hikers went trekking in the mountains and never came back. Their bodies were discovered in a variety of strange yet terrible states. Their tent had been ripped open from the inside, implying that they fled suddenly. Stranger even still, they had traces of radiation on their clothes. No one actually knows what could have caused such an incident, and their deaths remains a complete mystery. But, if you want to know more about what happened on the Dyatlov Pass, then head on over to Unveiled and check out our deep-dive video.