Throughout history, unfathomable events have occurred that defy logical explanation. Despite years of investigation, officials are left with no evidence and no answers.

Unsolved mysteries aren’t just the strange stories we see in The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, or investigative docuseries; they are real people’s lives. Behind each case are loved ones, friends, and acquaintances who have vanished without a trace. Families, trapped in a true crime podcast that never ends, often spend years waiting for answers that may never come. As perplexing as these cases are, they are also deeply tragic. 

Not all unsolved mysteries involve loss or disaster; some are centered on historical events or questions of health. These incidents can be so bewildering that piecing together an explanation seems impossible (though we speculate), making their unsolved nature all the more unsettling. 

From disappearing flights to cryptic manuscripts and living statues, let’s explore seven baffling unsolved mysteries that experts still can’t explain.  

1. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370
2. Young Walter Collins
3. The Abandoned Mary Celeste
4. The Pollock Sisters
5. The Voynich Manuscript
6. Dyatlov Pass Hikers
7. Encephalitis Lethargica

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370

On March 8, 2014, an aircraft carrying 239 passengers, headed for China, took off from Malaysia. There was nothing special about this flight to distinguish it from any other, except for the events that occurred after the plane took flight. 

Less than an hour after takeoff, the aircraft veered off its course, and its transponder was turned off. Nearly eight hours later, it was tracked over the Indian Ocean before vanishing into thin air. Gone, without a trace. 

Despite years of investigations (and the largest multinational search in aviation history), the plane and its passengers were never found. Only three pieces of debris matching MH370 have been recovered over the last 12 years, but the whereabouts of the plane, and its passengers and crew, remain a mystery. 

Many suppose a meteor struck the plane and it evaporated. Others believe it was pilot-induced suicide, given the captain had flown a similar path on his home flight simulator a month prior. 

Young Walter Collins

The case of young Walter Collins was so confounding that it caught the attention of Hollywood great Clint Eastwood, who decided to make it into a movie, Changeling, in 2008… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

In 1928, Christine Collins, a single mother, called law enforcement to report that her 9-year-old son, Walter, was missing. Five months later, police arrived at the doorstep of their Los Angeles residence with a child they suspected to be Walter. Christine confirmed, with complete certainty, that the boy was not her son, but police did not believe her. They accused her of being a bad mother to the extent of having her admitted into a mental institution. 

As for the real Walter Collins, he was never found. Law enforcement suspected his life was taken by Gordon Stewart Northcott, a child murderer who was executed in 1930, but the evidence was inconclusive. Nearly 100 years later, no one knows what happened to Walter, and why the Los Angeles Police Department was so persistent about Christine taking in a child that was not her own. 

The Abandoned Mary Celeste

The ocean itself is mysterious and mind-bending, so there was bound to be an unsolved case about a “ghost ship” on this list.  

November 1872. A British American ship called the Mary Celeste took off from New York, with her sights set on Genoa, Italy. The ship was filled with practical provisions and lavish supplies, including a piano and a sewing machine. On the ship was Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their 2-year-old child, and seven crew members. Briggs kept a written log of Mary Celeste’s days at sea, with the last entry reporting nothing out of the ordinary. 

On December 4, less than two months after the ship set sail, authorities found her at sea, totally abandoned. Even stranger, nothing on the ship was out of place. Everything was accounted for, except those who attempted to make the journey to Italy.  

Some hypothesize pirates or a sea monster were the culprit, but those seem unlikely since nothing on the ship was stolen and everything remained intact. Decades later, scientists proposed the theory that alcohol stored on the ship triggered a reaction that released fumes, which frightened the crew and led them to abandon the vessel, though not successfully, because they were never heard from again. The unfortunate truth is that this happened so long ago that we’ll likely never know what occurred that day aboard the Mary Celeste. 

The Pollock Sisters

Some unsolved mysteries are of a spiritual nature, like that of the Pollock sisters. 

Two sisters, Joanna, 11, and Jacqueline, 6, died in a car accident in 1957. In 1958, after a year of grieving, their mother gave birth to twin girls, Gillian and Jennifer. Everything was normal until the twins learned how to walk and talk. 

To the complete and utter bewilderment of their parents, Gillian and Jennifer began to ask for specific toys that Joanna and Jacqueline used to play with. They were able to recognize the school their deceased siblings attended, despite having no prior knowledge of its existence. As if this wasn’t eerie enough already, the twins were also abnormally frightened by passing cars, fearing one would strike any vehicle they were riding in. 

As the girls got older, these incidents ceased, and they continued to live entirely normal lives. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who studied reincarnation, learned about this story and, after conducting his own investigation, chose to feature the Pollock sisters in his book on 14 cases of reincarnation that he believed to be real.

The Voynich Manuscript

Taking a brief intermission from tragic accidents and missing persons cases, we arrive at the Voynich Manuscript, which is just as enigmatic. 

Imagine finding a manuscript in your personal library with untraceable origins. No author, no publication date. No details except the text, which was written in a language no one had ever seen or studied before. Alchemist Georg Baresch discovered the manuscript (sometime between 1585 and 1692) among his possessions and attempted to determine its origins without success. 

It passed through the hands of various owners for centuries before reaching Voynich, a Polish book dealer, in 1912. The manuscript, presumably a medical text, was 250 pages long and was carbon-dated back to the 1400s. The author remains unknown, despite Voynich’s assumption that it was alchemist Albertus Magnus or scientist Roger Bacon. 

Over 600 years have passed since the unnamed author scribed the manuscript, and we are still unaware of its intended context. 

Dyatlov Pass Hikers

Like the ocean, the mountains are cloaked in obscurity. 

Nine hikers set off for Dyatlov Pass in Russia in February 1959. They pitched a tent, shared a meal together, and drifted off to sleep, but not for long.  

25 days later, when none of them returned home, authorities went to search for their bodies, only to arrive at a gruesome scene. The tent was abandoned and ripped open. Footprints (some barefoot, some in socks, some with only one shoe) led investigators to a different part of the woods, where they found the first two bodies wearing very little clothing. Authorities considered the possibility of hypothermia until they found the remaining seven bodies. One body was burned, one showed signs of blunt force, and another was missing a tongue. Their clothing was analyzed and showed signs of radioactivity.

Over the years, people have come up with a range of conspiracies, including alien activity, a Yeti, and possibly a drug overdose. A documentary filmmaker inferred the incident involved “infrasound,” which is when “the wind interacts with the topography to create a barely audible hum that can induce intense nausea, panic, dread, chills, nervousness, raised heart rate and breathing difficulties,” according to Reader’s Digest. 

The cause of the nine hikers’ deaths remains undetermined.

Encephalitis Lethargica

The next curious case involves over half a million people and over a century of analysis. 

Encephalitis lethargica, otherwise known as the “sleeping sickness,” infected over half a million people from 1917 to 1928, first appearing in Europe. Falling ill with this condition meant having control over your mind, but being unable to move your body. Victims were literally frozen in time like a living statue, while fully aware of their surroundings. 

The sickness spread to India and North America two years after the first case was discovered, with a third of its victims passing away. Those who did not lose their lives remained physically incapable of movement for days, weeks, and in severe cases, years. Some could move their eyes and speak briefly, while others stayed seemingly paralyzed. 

After reemerging in Europe in the 1950s, encephalitis lethargica appeared once more in China in 2010, resulting in a child being hospitalized for five weeks.

The exact cause of this condition remains a mystery, though brain inflammation is suspected. Researchers who studied patients with similar symptoms in 2004 believe that the cause of the illness is likely still present (whatever that may be). 

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