15 crimes, natural anomalies and other mysteries that still have not been solved (18 photos)

Put on your hunting hats, Sherlocks - there is a case for you, and not just one, but 15 at once. Be it grisly murders, mysterious disappearances or paranormal phenomena, in all these cases the professionals were powerless, and the mystery is still alive. Maybe you have theories?





1. The Gardner Museum Robbery



In April 1990, unknown persons stole works of art worth a total of $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At 1:24 a.m., thieves wearing stolen police uniforms entered the museum under the pretext of responding to a call. They taped the guards to a bench in the basement, disabled the cameras and stole 13 paintings by cutting the canvases out of their frames. Although the thieves took some of the museum's best exhibits, they left the most valuable ones untouched. None of the stolen works of art have yet surfaced, and the culprits remain at large.





2. The disappearance of Alexis Patterson in Milwaukee



In 2002, 7-year-old Alexis disappeared on the way from school, although she lived just across the street - her stepfather took her to class in the morning, but she never returned home. Teachers say she was not in class and did not see her or her stepfather on school grounds that day, but several students testified that they saw Alexis on the school playground before and after school. Despite DNA tests and numerous interrogations, no one ever found out what happened to Alexis or where she disappeared to.

3. Crooked Forest in Poland



In the Polish city of Gryfino there is a very unusual forest - almost 400 trees have trunks that are twisted as if they are “bending the knee.” The trees are neatly lined up in rows and all “bow” in the same direction. The trees are believed to have been planted in the 1930s.

There are several theories as to why they look the way they do. Some believe that they were specially planted this way to make curved furniture, but with the outbreak of World War II, the idea had to be abandoned. Others think that at the very beginning of their lives the trees were buried under heavy snowdrifts. Some believe that this is the result of gravitational attraction in this area. And, of course, there are those who explain the appearance of the crooked forest by supernatural forces.

4. Okiku, “the ghost doll from Hokkaido”



A 2-year-old girl named Okiku received the doll as a gift from her older brother Eikichi. Okik really liked the doll - she constantly played with it and even named it after herself. Unfortunately, Okiku died of a cold a year later. Her heartbroken parents kept the doll in her memory, placing it in a place of honor at their altar. They prayed at the altar every day and one day they noticed that something was wrong with the doll. It turned out that her hair had grown back - initially the doll had a very short haircut.

How and why this happened remains a mystery, but the family believed that the spirit of their daughter resided in the doll. They kept the doll in the house until they left Hokkaido. Not wanting to disturb their daughter's spirit by moving, they offered the doll to the Mannenji Temple. Since then, the monks have taken care of Okiku and even cut her hair when her hair grows too long. The doll can still be seen in the temple.

5. The Disappearance of Tara Calico



In September 1988, 19-year-old Tara left her home in Belen, New Mexico and went on a daily 60-mile ride on her hot pink mountain bike. That morning was the last time Tara's family saw her. Several witnesses saw her driving along the highway; some noted that she was being followed by a Ford pickup truck with a trailer behind it. Neither she nor the pickup were ever found. However, nine months later, things took an unexpected turn.

In Port St. Joe, Florida—nearly 2,000 kilometers from where Tara disappeared—a woman noticed a white van parked next to her in a store parking lot. When she returned to the car with her groceries, the van was gone, but in its place lay a face-down Polaroid photo. In it, the woman saw two teenagers with their mouths taped shut and their hands tied behind their backs. The photo appears to have been taken in the back of that same van.

The photo was shown on the news, where Tara's parents saw it and identified her as the girl in the photo. The boy in the photo was also identified by his parents - he turned out to be Michael Henley, who had disappeared a year earlier on a camping trip with his father. Unfortunately, neither Tara nor Michael were ever found, and the identity of their abductors has not yet been established.

6The Kidnapping of Angela Hammond



In April 1991, 20-year-old Angela dropped her fiancé, Rob Shafer, at his home in Clinton, Missouri. Rob was going to babysit his little brother until his mom got home and then meet Angela downtown. Angela promised to call him before then. That's exactly what she did just an hour later, calling from a payphone in the city. While they were talking, Angela noticed a car circling the neighborhood around her—an old green Ford pickup with a sticker of a fish jumping out of the water on the rear windshield. Eventually the pickup stopped circling and parked right next to the phone booth.

Angela told her boyfriend that a man came out and used the pay phone next to her. He then returned to the truck and began searching for something with a flashlight. Rob thought maybe the other phone was broken, so Angela offered hers. The man refused, saying he would try again in a minute. Angela and Rob continued talking as usual when Rob suddenly heard his girlfriend scream.

The payphone was only seven blocks from his house, so the guy rushed to the car and rushed into town. On the road, a pickup truck rushed past him in the opposite direction. The guy's suspicions were confirmed when he heard someone shout "Robbie!" from the window. Rob turned around and chased the truck for as long as he could, but unfortunately, after a couple of kilometers, his transmission gave out. He watched helplessly as the pickup turned right, unable to stop it. Investigators got down to business, but in the end they just threw up their hands. There were no other leads or witnesses in the case, and all they had to work with was Rob's story.

Angela was never found, and in their search investigators found more questions than answers. The theories included an active serial killer - linking Angela's case to other missing persons in the area - and that she may have been kidnapped by mistake instead of the daughter of an informant in a drug case, also named Angela.

7. Planet X



According to NASA, researchers from the California Institute of Technology have hypothesized that there is an additional planet in our solar system - Planet X or Planet Nine. From what they know, researchers believe its mass could be 10 times that of Earth. Based on mathematical and computer modeling, they believe the planet also orbits our Sun, but takes 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete one full revolution. This means that it is located far beyond Pluto and the rest of our known solar system, and therefore we have no visual confirmation that the planet actually exists. However, its hypothetical existence could explain other unresolved mysteries of the cosmos, such as the unusual orbit of some objects in the Kuiper belt.

8. The disappearance of Branson Perry



In April 2001, 20-year-old Branson was at his home in Skidmore, Missouri, with a family friend. Branson's father was in the hospital, so they prepared the house for his return. Branson went to the shed next to the house to put back a couple of jumper cables and simply did not return. He left all his belongings, including his car.

One investigator on the case suspects Branson's disappearance is a drug-related kidnapping. In 2012, his stepfather purchased a cemetery plot for Branson. Although his name is on the tombstone, the grave remains empty.

9. Jane Doe from St. Louis



In 1983, two men's car broke down on the road, and they decided to look into the abandoned apartment building next door to find something that would help them fix the situation. Having made their way into the basement, they discovered a headless body. It was only when police examined the body more closely that they realized it belonged to a young girl.

It was not possible to catch the killer, largely due to the fact that the girl was never identified. Her head was never found, and despite the coverage of her case in all the newspapers, magazines and on the Oprah Winfrey Show, no one ever identified her. Investigators contacted all schools in the county looking for any black girls between the ages of 8 and 11 who had stopped going to school or were missing, but all were found. This, in turn, led them to believe that the girl was most likely not from St. Louis or the surrounding area.

10. The Disappearance of Jennifer Lynn Fay



In 1989, 16-year-old Jennifer's mother, Dottie, asked her daughter to babysit her younger children. Jennifer objected because she wanted to go out with friends. Jennifer eventually agreed, but as soon as her mom left, she called her cousin to watch the kids and snuck out of the house. Dottie called home later that evening to check on her and rushed home immediately when she heard her niece's voice instead of her daughter's. Unfortunately, Jennifer never returned home.

The police assumed that Jennifer had run away, so it took three years to investigate her disappearance. Initially, no searches or interrogations were carried out. The last person to see Jennifer was a drunk teenager who claimed that the girl was talking to someone in a brown pickup truck. Police determined that there were two pickup trucks matching the description in the area, and one of them disappeared around the same time as Jennifer. The friends who were with her that night remained silent during interrogations.

Dottie worked with private investigators to track down a woman in Corpus Christi, Texas, who appeared out of nowhere after Jennifer went missing. At the same time, the woman was surprisingly similar to Jennifer. But when Dottie came to talk to her in person, she realized that this was not her daughter. Since then the case has been frozen.

11. Murders in Hinterkaifeck



In 1922, six people were murdered at the Hinterkaifeck farm in Bavaria, Germany. Among the victims were the mother and father of the family, Kazilia and Andreas, their daughter Victoria, her two children, Kazilia and Josef, and the family's maid. Oddly enough, it was the first day of working as a maid in the house. The previous one had quit six months earlier, claiming the house was haunted. She claimed that she heard footsteps and voices that did not belong to any of the residents of the house. The family didn’t believe her at first, but then they themselves began to notice strange things around the house.

Little things first, like the sound of footsteps or missing keys. But over time, these “paranormal” phenomena increasingly took on a human form. A newspaper was found in the house that did not belong to any family member, and the door to the tool shed was scratched, as if someone had tried to pick the lock. There were footprints in the snow leading to the house, but not away from it. It seemed as if someone lived in the house with them.

After the murders, things took a very strange turn. The killer continued to live in their house for a week. He fed the cattle, cooked and ate food in the kitchen, and lit the fireplace. At the same time, the killer did not take any things or money out of the house. To this day, his identity has never been established.

12. Big glitter puzzle



In December 2018, the New York Times published an article about glitter (large and crumbly decorative glitter), saying that the industry is extremely mysterious. In the article, author Katie Weaver asked Glitterex, one of the largest glitter companies, to give her a tour of their factory. During the tour, Katie was not allowed to see or even listen to how the glitter was made, or even be in the same wing of the building in which it was made. As a result, the excursion raised more questions than answers.

During the interview, Katie asked Lauren Dyer, a Glitterex manager who served as her factory tour guide, about which industry purchased the most glitter from the company. It would seem that this should have been followed by a direct answer, such as nail polish or paint manufacturers, but Lauren dodged the answer, saying: "No, I absolutely know I can't [tell you]." When Katie asked if she knew what industry she was talking about, Lauren replied, “God, yes. And you’ll never guess... they don’t want anyone to know it’s glitter.” Katie continued to put pressure on the employee, and in the end she only found out that a person would never have guessed that it was glitter just by looking at this item, but you can see it.

Since the publication of the article, this mystery has taken the Internet by storm, and social media users, from TikTok to Twitter and Reddit, are still scratching their heads trying to figure out who needs all this glitter and why. Among the most popular versions are the production of spaceships, car paint or even food.

13. The girl who never grew old



Unfortunately, Brooke Greenberg only lived to be 20 years old, but her body stopped developing at the age of 5. Her parents suspected that something was wrong, but their fears were confirmed when her younger sister began to surpass her developmentally. Doctors called her condition “syndrome X” because virtually nothing is known about it. Scientists examined Brooke's DNA but found no abnormalities in any of the genes associated with aging. There were no such cases in her family, and her brothers and sisters showed no traces of the syndrome. There have been several other cases of Syndrome X around the world, but there are still many more questions surrounding it than answers.

14. Franklin Expedition



In May 1845, the Franklin Expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, set sail from the port of Kent, England. The 128-man expedition consisted of two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, with the goal of sailing the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic and reaching the Pacific Ocean. The journey had been difficult and had claimed the lives and ships of many travelers before, but these two ships were much better prepared. For some time the journey went according to plan. In July of that year, several European whalers saw the ship in Baffin Bay. None of them knew that this was the last time the ship's passengers were seen alive.

Two years later, people became worried, and search parties were sent for the expedition. They found an abandoned camp on Beachy Island and next to it the graves of three expedition members. In 1859 - after Parliament abandoned the search - Franklin's wife organized the search on her own. On King William Island, a team of searchers discovered a cairn with two messages inside - one good and one bad. The good one was dated May 1847 and reported that the expedition was going well and that the search party found that they had "overwintered" on Beechey Island. The second, dated just two weeks after the first message, stated that 24 members of the expedition had died, including Franklin. The message said that the rest of the crew was heading south. Another body was found there.

Only in 2014 new information about the expedition appeared: one of the ships, the Erebus, was found. It was located in Queen Maud Bay and sank at a depth of about 10 meters. Two years later, the Terror was found south of King William Island. The most puzzling thing about this story is the fact that the ships ended up 100 kilometers from where they were supposed to be.

It is still unknown what exactly caused such a sudden change between the first and second messages, or why none of the 128 travelers were ever heard from again. According to Inuit oral history, the ships were stuck in the ice and the people slowly died. Modern research shows that many died from diseases such as scurvy, while others resorted to cannibalism to survive.



15. Robbery at the Carlton Hotel



According to the Guinness Book of Records, it was the largest robbery in history. In August 1994, three men broke into the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France, just before it was about to close, ransacked the hotel's jewelry store to the accompaniment of deafening machine gun fire, and made off with an estimated $43 million in jewelry. After the thieves fled the scene, employees and witnesses to the robbery, to their great shock, did not find a single bullet hole. The thieves fired blanks.

However, the story does not end there. Despite the fact that the robbery was included in the Guinness Book of Records a couple of years later and was covered by major reputable media outlets such as CNN and BBC, until this point there were no articles or photographs from the scene about the robbery. Neither Guinness nor the owners of Carlton can find evidence that it happened. Whether there actually was a robbery at all remains a mystery.