67 Creepy And Mind-Boggling Things That Were Mysteries Until Humans Finally Cracked The Case

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have long been a mystery, since no archaeological evidence was ever found for any such garden in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar, who many associate with the gardens, was not known to have enacted any major works of engineering, which would have been necessary to water the gardens. Many have suspected that they may never have existed at all.

A popular modern theory is that the gardens weren't Babylonian, but actually Assyrian. The Assyrian king Sennacherib was well known for his waterworks and aqueducts, and his palace in Nineveh was documented to have lavish gardens.

It's believed that people mistakenly attributed the gardens to Babylon. The name Babylon means "Gate of the Gods", and was used to describe several cities in Mesopotamia. Nineveh's gates were named after different gods by Sennacherib, so it would likely have been referenced that way.

Archaeology at the site of Nineveh has been difficult in recent years because it's very close to Mosul, Iraq. The region had been occupied by ISIS, who intentionally damaged parts of the site.

Whether the city of Troy really existed or was just legend. It did. Some German guy who got rich in early industrialization used his wealth to search for it. Pretty much all the scholars of the time said it was a fools errand. Then he actually found it.

Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs. First discovered in 2007, its a radio pulse a few milliseconds long typically coming from extra galactic sources. In April of 2020 the CHIME radio telescope found the first one recorded in the milky-way. The source was a magnatar; a highly magnetic remnant of a large dead star. Magnatars are a special kind of neutron star because they have such an intensely strong magnetic field. If a magnatar was a moons distance away it would be able to rip your car keys out of your pocket.

What causes these FRBs is a magnatar quake. Magnatars are so dense that the surface is under a lot of strain to collapse in toward the core but the physical density of the neutron star is holding it back. A very slight shift in the crust of the magnatar releases a huge burst of x-rays/gamma-rays along with radio waves. And that is the Fast Radio Bursts we see.

The Andreen McDonald case. She and her husband Andre (yes, Andreen and Andre) originally were from Jamaica. They moved up to my town in Texas where Andre was air force and Andreen was a body building business owner. Andre was pretty jealous that Andreen was more successful and was constantly begging/demanding that she make him co-owner of her company. She always said no.

One day he had had it, and "did away with her". The gym that she frequented, every single morning, got concerned when she stopped showing up. She was very close with the ladies that she worked out with, and even gave them a key to her house. She told them that if she ever went missing, that her husband probably did it, and they knew he had an attitude.

So one day while Andre was out, the ladies went to check on Andreen. Her car was there, her wallet was there, but she wasn't. They found blood and hair in her bathroom.

That's when cops were called.

Cops showed up when Andre was home and asked about Andreen. He said she was in the hospital. They asked him, "if she's in the hospital, how come her wallets here?" He responded simply, "talk to my lawyer"

They got a warrant and were able to search the house further. Saw *more* leftover evidence in the bathroom, and evidence of clothes had been found burned in the fire pit in the backyard.

But no body.

So all they could do was charge him with a missing persons deal.

Andre was super snarky about it too. How he'd be proven innocent. How the cops would never catch on.

Little did he realize how loved Andreen was. And how much Texas ranchers hate corrupt and snarky m**derers. Crowds gathered daily and were given permission to sweep over rancher's land for any sign of Andreen's body.

Just as crowds started feeling defeated, and Andre started to see hope of being released, a rancher was scoping his field. He had heard coyotes out and went to see what could have entised them. Sure enough, he found human bones, later identified as Andreen.

So yeah, proper charges were able to be filed.

**Add on:**

So some ask why she stayed or why he felt jealous that she was more successful. Remember they're from Jamaica. The whole point of coming here was to better themselves, and bring pride to their families. So she was doing great, but because she was doing so good, his family was kind of looking down on him because his wife was better/more successful than him.

And then she stayed with him, mainly because she wanted to try and make sure their daughters life could be as normal as possible. (sucks that that kind of backfired for her, but now she's being taken care of by her aunt and grandma who both love and support her).

Mary Toft. I mean, really, what the heck.

TL;DR: (NSFW) Woman starts giving birth to copious amounts of rabbit parts. Woman taken to London and studied under intense supervision, turns out she was shoving the pieces up there days before for the publicity.

The Sailing Stones of Death Valley.

**TL;DR:** Rocks would magically move up to 1,500 feet in the desert. Turns out it gets cold & freezes the ground overnight & the rocks would get pushed by the ice sheets that melted under the wind.

The story of the Toynbee tiles always fascinated me, in the 1980s all these tiles started to appear in major cities across the US, mostly around Philadelphia. They were laid in the ground, in the middle of the streets and no-one knew how they appeared there. They had strange messages - “Toynbee idea in Kubrick’s 2001 resurrect dead on planet Jupiter”

There’s an amazing documentary about this guy who noticed the tiles and went on a quest to figure out how they were appearing and who was creating them. The tiles are actually IN the asphalt, which is not an easy feat. In the doc Justin Duer finds the guy and figures out how he does it- with a car that has no passenger seat and a hole in the bottom. It’s a beautifully heartbreaking story and I highly recommend watching it!

The Case of Adrienne Shelly - screenwriter for Waitress. Husband came home to find her hanging in the shower - ruled s*****e.

He insists she was happy and would never [take her own life] promoting another view of crime scene where they found a shoe print that matched a construction worker in the building.

Sure enough the construction worker went to rob her and thought he [unalived] her so staged a s*****e when the hanging ended up being the actual thing that [ended] her.

The French guy who claimed to be a missing boy in the 90s, he even lived with the crazy mother.

Nicholas Barclay, aged 13 at the time he went missing, was last seen playing basketball with his friends in his home town of San Antonio, Texas, on 13 June 1994. Barclay never made it home and has not been seen or heard from since. In 1997, Bourdin took Barclay's identity and was flown to the United States. Although Bourdin had brown eyes and a French accent, he convinced the family he was their blue-eyed son, saying he had escaped from a child [abuse] ring and the ring had altered his eye color. Bourdin lived with the family for almost five months until 6 March 1998.

The craziest part is they recently found out the brother was the m******r and mu*****d Barclay with permission of his mother, and the only reason the French guy got away with it is because the family didn't want to reveal that they knew who [unalived] Barclay.

So, in the early 2000s, someone posted new wave music that had been initially recorded off a German radio station on cassette around 1985. It contained about a minute of a song that became known as "Stay, the Second Time Around”, that no one seemed to be able to find any more information about. This became a pretty famous "earworm" internet mystery, until 2013 when folks on Reddit discovered the actual song and artist. It turned out it was a song by Swedish artist Johan Lindell titled "Up On The Roof" that never became any kind of hit, and up until that time, had never been re-released after the original analog release.

Roman concrete that resisted sea water, and the missing Roanoke colony.

The lost recipe for the concrete turned out to be something we misinterpreted, and the Roanoke colony was abandoned because the settlers decided to live and mix with the natives. DNA tracing was able to connect this.

Another science mystery: Back in the 1800s, evolution theorists had predicted the age of the Earth to be several milliard years, since this would have been necessary for the current life forms to have evolved. But Kelvin, the number one superstar of physics at the time, had used thermodynamics to calculate the age of the Earth based on the temperature of its insides, and he said it was quite a bit younger. This was a mystery for many years, and was considered one of the major flaws of then-current evolution theory.

It was not until the early 1900s they found the answer: Radioactivity! Decays of uranium and other radioactive elements are heating up the Earth, so the cooling takes longer than expected. The biologists were right all along!

But when the scientists who made the discovery were about to present their findings, who's sitting at the back of the lecture room? It's Kelvin! Now an old man, he's still alive and has come to watch their presentation. They were terrified at the idea of having to stand in front of the Lord of Physics himself and basically explain why he was wrong. But to their great relief, he immediately fell asleep.

I think about this when I myself fall asleep in physics class. It happens to the best of us.

All the Bigfoot tracks turned out to be some guy who made special shoes and just left them everywhere to [mess] with people.

Catching criminals like Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Lots of people talk about how horrific and disgusting their crimes were and they forget that these monsters were caught. Granted, oftentimes not due to ace detective work by three letter agencies, but by regular people catching them on something mundane.

Bundy was caught after he was stopped by local police for speeding and the officer found him in a stolen vehicle. Gacy was caught after he was spotted on surveillance footage. Dahmer was found out after he solicited a potential victim who then flagged down local police officers. Hell, even Robert Pickton was caught by Canadian police after his property was raided for the suspected possession of illegal firearms.

The Pioneer gravity anomaly.

Space probe wasn't accelerating away from Earth the way we'd predicted, but it didn't get noticed until the probe got way the hell out there.

Next space probe gets launched, gets way out there, same thing happens. WTH? How does acceleration not work right? Does gravity just change really far away?

Turns out the heat from the radioactive death generator was all coming off the same side of the space probe, and the extra particle radiation gave a "thermal recoil force" resulting in an extra acceleration of -- no kidding -- about 0.000000000874 m/s2.

Over enough distance, it all counts.

The tomb of Jesus' previously unknown brother turned out to be a hoax to try to sell the tomb of a nobody for a lot of money.

Atlantis isn’t real. The story is an allegory in Plato’s works that fit right within Greek sensibilities and interests, incorporating things the Greeks would’ve known about intimately and with interest, like authors are want to do. He also just made stuff up that was never there.

There ARE lost cities and structures in the ocean, but they are not Atlantis. There is this weird notion that ancient people were stupid, and this leads to a kind of literal interpretation and broad, reductive generalizing of their beliefs that are clearly, provably false, but exist nonetheless. Ancient people knew what metaphors and other artistic techniques are, and it actively harms progress to be reductive about the past and dishonest in the present.

The McStay family disappearance and m**ders. In February of 2010, the McStay’s, a family of 4 (Mom Summer, Dad Joseph, and sons Gianni and Joseph jr) seemingly vanished from their home- abruptly. A carton of eggs was left open on the counter and the family dogs were still outside in the backyard. The scene was eerie, and complicated because the home the McStays lived in was in the process of being renovated- so a “neat and orderly” home wasn’t the norm at this stage. It appeared there was missing furniture and the usual mess that comes with construction (some freshly painted or redone surfaces mixed with older versions).

From the outside- it appeared the family just took off. Neighbor had surveillance that captured what appeared to be the bottom of the family SUV leaving the driveway. Since they were living in California, the boarder to Mexico wasn’t far and authorities found footage of what appeared to be the McStay’s walking into Mexico with their two little boys in tow. The family SUV was found abandoned in a mall parking lot near the Mexico boarder.

3 years passed before the bodies of the McStay’s were found buried in shallow graves in the California desert. The bodies appeared to be in advanced decomposition and there were signs of blunt force trauma. A sledgehammer was also found buried with one of the bodies.

Chase Merritt, a business partner to Joseph McStay, was arrested and charged with their murders on 11/5/2014. His trial was delayed for years until 2019. He was sentenced to death. Motive- Chase had a gambling a*******n and had been and continued embezzling money from the business. His DNA was found in the McStay’s abandoned vehicle. He bludgeoned this beautiful family to death for money.

Why socks tend to "vanish."

A study showed that, because of their material and shape (a flattened "tube") they can hold a very large static electrical charge for their weight (most often acquired from tumble drying).

This charge makes them stick to all sorts of objects --and people's clothing-- where they can be transported to different places unnoticed. And because they are "boomerang"-shaped, with one heavy end, they soon work themselves free via pendulum motion. Then, again because of their flatness and weighted-at-one-end shape, they can easily slip into the cracks between objects when they drop.

Also: Cats and dogs love their weird combination of cleaned stink, and often steal these fallen socks.

The Kensington rock. Found by an american farmer in like late 1800s?? Maybe? Covered in old Norse runes, which were claimed to be from around the year 1000, which would ”prove” that there were white settlers in America long before Colombus, thereby justifying a lot of the white supremacist claims of the 20th century.

Later PROVED to have been forged by a swedish settler, just for fun, some hundred years prior. And people are still making documentaries on it, claiming it to be some wild unrevealed truth of america’s colonization.