Unanswered questions are the worst, and it’s even more terrible when they continue to be unanswered because the people with the answers took them to their graves.
The name behind it
A masked prisoner, and a royal secret. The story of the Man in the Iron Mask has all the makings of a good film. The prisoner was an unknown man who was kept in French prisons from 1669 to 1703, although the thing is, people did know who he was.
They gave him a fake name, and all the signs point to King Louis XIV knowing who the man was, but he didn’t tell anyone about the man’s identity, not even on his deathbed. Historians have debated the man’s identity ever since.Â
A margin with room left
Math. It’s something that a lot of us find difficult, but mathematician Pierre de Fermat absolutely loved it, and he even claimed to have a ‘truly remarkable proof’ for one of his theorems. But he claimed the margin was too small to write the proof down. So helpful.
It wasn’t until his son published the note after his father’s death that mathematicians got to work on solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, and it was in the 1990s that Andrew Wiles finally proved it. They never found Fermat’s proof, though, and it has been lost to time.
Half a case
Anybody who loves mystery books should probably avoid reading Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood because, really, there’s no solution. Dickens never finished it. He originally released it in monthly parts, but died in 1870 before writing the ending.
The setup, the suspects, the weird details, they were all there, but all the questions about the story went unanswered. What was John Jasper going to do? Was Edwin really dead? Nobody knows, and nobody will ever know, since Dickens died with the answer. How annoying.
The missing why
Everyone knows why Lee Harvey Oswald was famous, it’s no secret, but the mystery here is about his actions. We don’t actually know why he killed JFK. Investigators have come up with some reasons, sure, so have conspiracy theorists, but the real reason’s a mystery.
We might’ve been able to find out, but then Jack Ruby shot Oswald dead two days after Kennedy was killed. With his death, some of the answers to one of the most famous assassinations in the world were gone.Â
The count that moved
Serial killer H. H. Holmes was someone with a shifty story right up until he died. We know he killed a lot of people in his Murder Castle, yet the exact number of people who died at his hands is a mystery. One minute, he said it was 27, the next, he said it was 100.
Some of those 27 were alive when he said he’d murdered them, so clearly he was lying. He killed at least nine people, that number was confirmed, but we’ve got no idea about the rest. Could be a little more, could be a lot more. The answers ended with Holmes’s hanging in 1896.
A crown with question marks
A fake royal sounds like something from a bad movie, but that’s exactly what happened with False Dmitry I. He tricked people into believing he was the rightful tsar of Russia, Dmitry of Uglich, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who had supposedly died years before.
He managed to take the throne for less than a year before he was killed in 1606. The mystery here is who exactly he was. Was he a runaway monk as some people claimed, or was he a Polish peasant? Nobody’s been able to figure it out because he kept his secret when he died.
Numbers behind stone walls
Elizabeth Báthory was another serial killer with a secret number of victims. The noblewoman was accused of killing numerous young women at Čachtice Castle, Slovakia, during the 1600s. After she was caught, Báthory was imprisoned in the castle until she died in 1614 in her sleep.
The true scale of her murders has never been determined. Some say she murdered 80 girls and women, some say it was as many as 600, apparently because she wanted to bathe in their blood. Why? So she could stay looking young. We’ve got no idea how many she really killed.
A language left on paper
James Hampton worked as a janitor in Washington, D.C. Starting in 1950, he began creating a religious piece of art called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, using bits and pieces that he found. He even wrote notes about it.
Except, the notes were in a language nobody could understand. It’s clear that there’s shape and rhythm to the words, yet we can’t figure out what they mean, and we probably never will. He kept the entire thing a secret from everyone. His own loved ones didn’t find the art until he died.
A final language gap
Albert Einstein’s last secret actually came when he was on his deathbed. He was in Princeton Hospital in April 1955 after suffering a major aneurysm and refusing surgery. He knew he was at the end of his life, so he spoke his final words, in German, to the nurse.
But she didn’t speak German, not a word, annoyingly. All we know is that he said two sentences, and that’s all, no note or idea of what one of the smartest men in human history had to say.
A summer with no ending
Edward V and his brother Richard were two young boys, aged 12 and 9, who were put in the Tower of London in 1483. It was their uncle, Richard III, who put them there while they were waiting for Edward V to be crowned, until Parliament suddenly said they were illegitimate.
They weren’t going to be crowned. That’s where the mystery began, because after that moment, they completely disappeared, never to be found again. Richard III died in 1485 and never revealed what happened to the princes. Seriously, where did they go?
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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