History has left us with quite a few people who have managed to be involved in some major events, yet we know very little about who these people were, even to this day.
Etta Place
Etta Place traveled with two of the most famous outlaws in the American West, but she left a surprisingly thin trail behind her. She was photographed with the Sundance Kid and traveled with him and Butch Cassidy to South America. She also appeared in Pinkerton detective files.
But we know almost nothing about her. Even her original name has been lost to time, and so has the majority of her early life. A few historians believe she might’ve been a woman named Ann Bassett, but still, we really don’t know.
B. Traven
You’d think that someone who managed to sell millions of books would be pretty well-known. But no. B. Traven wrote the best-selling book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and he lived in Mexico. That’s almost all we know about him.
His personal story kept changing, depending on which sources you follow. He lived his life, at least for a short time, as Ret Marut in Germany until 1923. Marut was a German actor and anarchist. Everything else is a mystery, and we have no idea who he was, where he came from, or even when he was born.
Monsieur Chouchani
Monsieur Chouchani was a man who taught major Jewish thinkers, including Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas, after World War II. He apparently surprised students with how much he knew. But as it turns out, his own history was a complete mystery, and we know very little about him.
Some historians believe he was born in Eastern Europe, others claim he was from North Africa. There have been many attempts to find out his identity, with names like Hillel Perlman and Mordechai Rosenbaum being some suggestions. What we do know is that he died in Uruguay in 1968 and was buried with a gravestone that reads, ‘His birth and his life are sealed in enigma.’
The Phantom Killer of Texarkana
Texarkana was a scary place to be in 1946. Someone kept attacking people around the Texas-Arkansas border at night, and police had no idea who it was. The killer murdered at least five people, and there were several people who survived attacks connected with the case.
One of them described a man with a face hidden beneath a light-colored covering with eye holes. The police tried their hardest by questioning suspects and following plenty of leads, yet they never found the killer. The FBI still treats it as an unsolved cold case.
The Cleveland Torso Murderer
Police in Cleveland, Ohio, had a hard time in the 1930s, as they kept finding body parts around Kingsbury Run. Yes, real human body parts. The case only got stranger as they discovered more remains because several victims couldn’t even be identified.
Eliot Ness was one of the leading figures trying to find the murderer, and investigators focused heavily on a man known as ‘Dr. X.’ They never found any evidence tying him to the murders, though. The killings eventually stopped and, to this day, we don’t know who the killer was or their motivation.
The Villisca Axe Murderer
The morning of June 10, 1912, began with an awful discovery in tiny Villisca, Iowa. Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two girls staying overnight had all been brutally murdered inside the Moore home. An axe was later found at the scene and believed to be the murder weapon.
The police actually had quite a lengthy list of suspects, and one of them, a traveling minister named George Kelly, confessed to it. He faced trial, but he was ultimately acquitted and sent to a mental hospital. Historians have no idea who the murderer was or what they wanted.
Fulcanelli
Fulcanelli. It’s a name attached to two strange books and a very long debate over who exactly wrote them. What we do know is that these two texts appeared in France in 1926 and 1930, dealing with things like alchemy and old buildings. They included information about symbols and secret meanings tucked into architecture, too.
French alchemist Eugène Canseliet said he was Fulcanelli’s student, and artist Jean-Julien Champagne was also connected with the books. But we don’t know who the real Fulcanelli was. It could’ve been Champagne, it could’ve been another French scientist. It might’ve even been a group of writers. We just don’t know.
Tank Man
All we know about Tank Man is that he was carrying two shopping bags and facing down a line of tanks. He’s the man photographed near Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, during public protests in China. He stepped in front of the tanks and moved when they moved.
He blocked them, too, and at one point, he even climbed onto the lead tank. Yet we don’t know who this man actually was, although there have been claims that it was someone called Wang Weilin. That’s never been proven, though. He became one of the most iconic examples of non-violent protest in modern history, but his identity has been lost to time.
Peter Bergmann
The little that we know about Peter Bergmann is the fact that he wasn’t Peter Bergmann. He was an older man who checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland, in June 2009 under that name. Bergmann spent several days moving around town.
He was found dead at Rosses Point on June 16. That was when the mystery started, as investigators discovered that the address he’d provided was false, and the labels had been removed from his clothes. CCTV footage showed he’d left with a bag and returned without it. There have been multiple appeals, but still, nobody knows who he was.
‘Bella’ of the Wych Elm
Four boys went looking for birds’ nests around Hagley Wood in England in April 1943. What they found was something horrifying. They discovered a human skull inside a hollow wych elm, a kind of tree, and police later recovered most of a woman’s skeleton.
They also found a shoe and a wedding ring, but couldn’t identify her. Graffiti suddenly started appearing around the town that read, ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?’ Nobody knows where the name Bella came from, and nobody seems to know the woman’s identity, either. We don’t even know how she ended up in the tree.
Robert C. Christian
Robert C. Christian was a man who walked into Elbert County, Georgia, in 1979 and asked for a giant granite monument to be built. But it turns out that ‘Robert C. Christian’ wasn’t his real name, and he even admitted as such. He claimed to represent a private group.
Christian arranged the money and helped to get the ball rolling on the construction of the Georgia Guidestones. The monument went up the following year and had messages carved in several languages. The Guidestones stood there until 2022, when a vandal destroyed them. Who Christian was remains a complete mystery.
Agent 355
Agent 355 has a weird backstory. For starters, that wasn’t even the secret agent’s personal number at all, as the term just meant ‘lady’ back then. She was an unknown female spy during the American Revolution who actually became one of the country’s first-ever spies.
She supposedly worked with the American Patriots and gave General George Washington vital information that helped him make some pretty important decisions. But we don’t know who she was. There are even some historians who think she was entirely made up. She was just that mysterious.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
15 strange events that really happened in history
History gets a lot weirder when you look at some of the stories which, although they sound fake, are 100% real.
