Unsolved cases, contested legends, and declassified history — told the way they were told.
On Yushan in Taiwan, the keeper of Paiyun Lodge opened the door on a freezing night to three young men in bamboo hats and yellow raincoats. He turned to fetch the register, and when he came back they were gone and the door was still locked. Only later did he learn that the three hikers booked in for that night had died in the snow below the Great Cliff.
Read more →Paderborn, Germany, on a hot Tuesday night during the 2006 World Cup. Frauke Liebs, a 21-year-old student nurse, set off on foot from a pub and never reached home. For the next week she called from her own phone again and again, promising again and again to be home that day, never able to say where she was. On the last call she was asked three times where she was, and three times she answered "Mama". In October a hunter found her in a forest. Twenty years on, no one knows where she spent that week, or who was with her.
Read more →In the lagoon of Venice, Italy, there is an island where no one has lived for more than fifty years, and where, Venetians say, a wicked man wakes up after he dies. Legend says its hospital doctor survived a fall from the bell tower, only to be smothered by a mist rising from the ground. Since then, some who went out there fled to the jetty at midnight shouting about ghosts, some heard a little girl crying on a snowy night, and some found at dawn that a side table in the chapel had changed places.
Read more →In Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan, on a hot Sunday night in July 1995, the summer festival in the park across the road had just ended when three women were shot at close range in the upstairs office of the Nanpei supermarket after closing. Five bullets were fired, one of them into the door of the safe, yet not a yen of the more than five million inside was taken. Neighbours mistook the shots for festival drums, and the man who had come to collect one of the women waited at the foot of the stairs for a long time, but none of the three ever came down. Thirty-one years later, whoever climbed those stairs has never been found.
Read more →In Taipei, Taiwan, a fourteen-storey block at the corner of Xinsheng North Road and Jinzhou Street was once a hotel where nineteen people died in a fire in 1984. The people who live there say the lift sometimes takes you to the basement and opens onto a closed white door, and that a young policeman who came to see a flat was met at the lift by a woman who asked whether he had come to see the flat.
Read more →Daegu, South Korea, on a Thursday morning in May 1999. Six-year-old Kim Tae-wan left his mother's hair salon for a lesson and walked into the alley by his home. Within ten minutes a scream came from the far end of it. He later said someone had poured hot water on him. It was sulphuric acid. Over the next forty-nine days, blind, he kept describing that alley, two utility poles and a voice that called his name. No one has ever been able to prove who was in that alley.
Read more →In Robertson County, northern Tennessee, United States, a family on a farm beside the Red River lived with an invisible voice for four years, starting in 1817. First came knocking in the night, gnawing on the bedposts and quilts torn off sleepers. Then the voice began to talk, and promised to torment the father for as long as he lived. In December 1820 he fell into a sleep no one could wake him from, and a small vial nobody recognized turned up in the cupboard. The voice said, "I put it there."
Read more →In Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan, late on the night of 30 December 2000, someone climbed through the bathroom window of a small house beside a park, and none of the four people inside got out. After the killings he did not leave. He drank barley tea from their fridge, squeezed ice cream out of the cups with his bare hand, went online on the family computer, then took off his bloodied top, put his head on their cushion and slept in their living room. He left fingerprints, blood and two handkerchiefs behind. A hundred days later, a stone Jizo facing the house appeared across the river. Twenty-five years on, no one knows who he is.
Read more →In Ping Shan, in Hong Kong's New Territories, a narrow path lined with graves leads to a primary school that closed in 1998. People say its locked gate opens by itself, that a woman's voice speaks in the girls' toilet, and that in September 2011 twelve teenagers lit incense on the path, turned back, and the girl who said she had seen a woman in red at the graves later gripped her own throat with both hands at the station.
Read more →In Daegu, South Korea, on a public holiday morning in March 1991, five boys carrying empty containers walked up Waryongsan, the low hill behind their neighbourhood, to collect salamander eggs, and never came down. More than three hundred thousand searchers looked for them for eleven and a half years, across the whole country, and no one found them. One afternoon in September 2002, a man phoned a newspaper, said where they were, how many and how they lay, and hung up. The next day they were found exactly there, clothes over their faces, one shirt knotted behind the back.
Read more →In Japan, in the spring of 1979, a woman in a white surgical mask stood on the roads children walked home along and asked each of them one question. Say yes and she lowers the mask and asks again. Say no and she does not wait for a second question. That season whole school districts walked home in groups and the boys went with stones in their pockets.
Read more →South of Mexico City, Mexico, deep in the canals of Xochimilco, there is an island where thousands of dolls hang from the trees, some without heads, some nothing but heads. A man who grew vegetables there found a girl in the water in front of his island, and for fifty years he hung the dolls one by one, until one morning in 2001 he told his nephew the mermaids were coming for him.
Read more →In Taoyuan, Taiwan, on the morning of 21 November 1996, nine people were found piled inside the guardhouse by the gate of the county magistrate's official residence, tape over their eyes and mouths, and only one of them still had a pulse. People came and went through the house all morning, and not one of them noticed the two strangers inside the guardhouse, or knows what happened behind that door in those two hours. Thirty years on, nobody knows who the killers were or why they wanted these nine people dead. After the residence was left empty, the neighbours heard its telephone ringing at night, and someone counted eight dead cats beside the guardhouse.
Read more →On the south shore of Long Island, New York, there is a Dutch Colonial house whose two quarter-round attic windows look out at the street like a pair of eyes. One night in 1974 the six people inside died face down in their beds. Thirteen months later a new family moved in, stayed twenty-eight days and left with nothing, and every night the husband woke at a quarter past three.
Read more →In Taipei, Taiwan, a tunnel less than five hundred metres long runs from a funeral parlour into a hill that used to be all graves. Drivers say a woman flags them down at the mouth at night and asks for the far side; when they turn round, the back seat is empty. One taxi driver said he put his foot down to eighty and the car did not move.
Read more →In Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China, in January 1996, a nineteen-year-old student walked out of the university gate in a red coat and was never seen again. On the morning the snow stopped, a street cleaner in the city centre picked up a bag of neatly sliced cooked meat and washed three fingers out of it. Over the following days bags of body parts turned up at five or six places across the city, the head and organs boiled, more than two thousand pieces. Almost every police officer in Nanjing was put on the case. Thirty years on, no one has been caught, and she has no grave.
Read more →In the mountains of Aomori, Japan, there is a village that was wiped off the map. A sign on the road says anyone who goes past it cannot be guaranteed their life, a skull-shaped stone sits under a torii gate, and four young people who drove up to find it came back to their car to find it had turned itself around.
Read more →In Gwangalli, Busan, South Korea, a couple married for six months rode the lift home one night in May 2016, and none of the building's twenty-one security cameras ever recorded them leaving. The groceries were still on the table, the dog was still in the flat, the car was still in the car park, and their phones kept sending messages for days. The last signals came on the same day, one in Busan, one in Seoul. Police traced a woman living in Norway. A Norwegian court said the evidence was not enough.
Read more →In Linhai, Zhejiang Province, China, a twelve-kilometre gorge called Longwang Eighteen Pools is what the village uses to frighten its children. In February 2020 a woman walked into it alone. Three hundred villagers, police, drones and dogs searched for sixteen days and found no footprint. On the seventeenth morning she walked out by herself and said some people had taken her climbing. When she gave their names, her family could not speak.
Read more →At the foot of a hill in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, a psychiatric hospital stood empty for twenty-two years. The people who went in say there was a door on the second floor, and that three knocks came from the other side of it, where nobody was. When they came out, the old woman next door raised her torch and asked only one thing. You saw it, didn't you?
Read more →In the northern Urals of the Soviet Union there is a mountain the Mansi call the dead mountain. In February 1959 nine people pitched a tent on its eastern slope and were never seen alive again. The tent was found cut open from the inside, and a line of footprints in socks led away from it into the dark.
Read more →Thirty-nine stone buildings and more than two hundred rooms. Four fifths have lost their roofs, four fifths have no door panels, and since 2007 nobody has lived on this ravine floor at all.
Read more →A seven-storey hospital has stood empty for thirty years on Tainan's busiest corner. Its window frames were stripped out long ago, leaving every room open to the air, and thirty years on, police followed a smell to the lift on the ground floor.
Read more →Her train went past station after station without stopping, and outside the window there was not a single light anywhere. She asked for help just after eleven at night. Four and a half hours later she wrote one last line, and nobody has heard from her since.
Read more →Misaki Ogura, 7, vanished from a campsite in Doshi, Yamanashi, in 2019. After 1,700 searchers found no trace, evidence surfaced on the same mountain two years and seven months later.
Read more →On an August night in 1977, in a council house in Enfield, north London, a chest of drawers slid forty-six centimetres across a bedroom floor with nobody touching it. Eighteen months later, more than thirty people had seen or heard something, and an old man's voice was speaking out of a twelve-year-old girl.
Read more →In September 2006, police broke into a silent house in Hualien, Taiwan, and found five children in the bathroom. On the living-room desk, an ashtray held down thousand-dollar bills covered in SOS messages. The parents had vanished — and stayed vanished for nine years.
Read more →In February 2013, guests at a downtown Los Angeles hotel complained that the taps ran black for a moment and the water tasted strange. On the roof, inside one of four tanks, a maintenance worker found Elisa Lam — the young woman the whole internet had just watched in an elevator.
Read more →Before midnight, the steps at the end of the bridge number twelve. Count them again after twelve o'clock and there is one more. On a small footbridge beside the men's dormitories at Tunghai University in Taiwan, a long-haired student may stop you to ask what time it is.
Read more →One high-school spring break, he rode his motorbike out to his grandparents' farmhouse in the hills. The garden hedge stood two metres tall. Above it, a white hat was moving. Then came the sound.
Read more →In 1986 a household of eight moved into a white duplex on Meriden Avenue in Southington, Connecticut. The house was large and the rent was low. It was the basement that told them what the building used to be.
Read more →On 1 March 1998 a family filmed their walk up a hill in Taichung. Watching it back, they found a child in red at the end of the line — and nobody who was there that day could remember her.
Read more →A body on an Adelaide beach in 1948 left behind a scrap of paper reading "Tamám Shud", a line of letters nobody has cracked, and seventy years of theory. This is the case sorted into two piles — what the file supports, and what people have merely said.
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