There are some people in history who did more than leave simple questions behind, they left behind entire mysteries and riddles that we just can’t seem to answer, even today.
A stranger at the gate
Kaspar Hauser was a man who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, confused and barely able to speak. He could somehow write his name, however, which really doesn’t make sense. The local people asked him where he came from, and his answer didn’t seem to make things any clearer.
He said he’d been kept alone in a small room for years, living on bread and water alone, nothing else. There were even rumors that he was a lost prince from Baden, Germany, because of course there were, although later DNA testing proved that false. So who was he?
The quiet man in 18E
Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, was a flight to remember, mostly because of who was on it. A passenger with the name Dan Cooper passed a note about a bomb and demanded that he get $200,000, along with four parachutes.Â
He got exactly what he asked for, the money, the parachutes, all of it. Cooper let the passengers off, and then jumped from the back of the plane while it was in flight, somewhere between Seattle and Reno. Some of the ransom cash was found in 1980, but nothing of Cooper himself.
A name made of symbols
The Zodiac Killer. He was a serial killer who put on a performance during his murders in a cold, almost strange way, thanks to the letters, symbols, and puzzles that he sent. Police said the Killer was definitively connected to at least five murders in Northern California in 1968 and 1969.
The Killer claimed he’d killed more, however, and talked about them in the coded messages he sent to newspapers. One of his ciphers was solved quickly, another took over 51 years to crack, the rest are still a mystery. We’ve got no idea who he was or even why he killed.
The letters kept arriving
In 1888, five women were murdered in Whitechapel, London, in brutal, completely sadistic ways. Nobody was ever convicted of the crimes, and nobody ever seemed to figure out who the murderer was. Then came the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, signed by ‘Jack the Ripper.’
The letter itself was probably a fake because, yes, some people are that sick, but the name itself stuck around, and so did the memories of the murders themselves. Whoever Jack was has been lost to time, and so has their real name.
Labels cut away
A man was walking with his daughters in Norway’s Isdalen valley on November 29, 1970, when they stumbled onto something terrifying, a dead body. That was only the start of the mystery. Turns out, all the labels had been removed from her clothes, and she’d used false identities.
Testing indicated that the Isdal Woman, as she came to be known, probably spent her childhood in southern Germany or northern Bavaria, maybe teen years near the Luxembourg-France border. That’s all we know, though, everything else is unknown.
No clear beginning
The Count of St. Germain was somehow everywhere, but also nowhere, because nobody ever knew who he really was. He moved through European courts with ease and spoke several languages like it was nothing, he really was a talented guy.Â
But everything else about him was a secret, like his parents, birthplace, even his real age was never determined. He could’ve been a nobleman hiding a family story, or he could’ve been a master manipulator, who knows, really?
A fortune with no face
The thing about Satoshi Nakamoto is that the answers are right there, online, thanks to a white paper from 2008 called ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.’ The paper helped create Bitcoin, and the idea of a blockchain database, so what’s the mystery here?Â
We’ve got a name, we’ve got the work, but we don’t know who wrote the paper, or even if it was a person. Maybe it was a group. There have been thousands of guesses, yes, and some people have claimed it, sure, yet Nakamoto’s identity has never been proven.
Roses before sunrise
The Poe Toaster does sound made up, but it really happened for years, and it’s all about Edgar Allan Poe. Someone kept showing up at the writer’s Baltimore grave before dawn on his birthday and leaving roses and a bottle of cognac, then disappearing. Poof, no identity.
The tradition started way back in 1949 and continued long enough that it became a mystery in itself, though there are some ideas about why they left roses. They represent Poe himself, his wife Virginia Eliza Poe, and his mother-in-law Maria Clemm. The cognac’s up in the air, though.
Pages no one could place
You might think the Voynich Manuscript would make sense if you just stared at it long enough, but no, people have tried doing that for a very long time, it hasn’t helped. The text has unknown writing and strange drawings that nobody can understand.Â
The writer’s completely unknown, too. The name came from the man who bought it in 1912, Wilfrid Voynich, who got it from a Jesuit college near Rome, but the book itself is much, much older. Radiocarbon testing says the parchment’s from the early 1400s, that’s the only fact, really.
A voice behind burned pages
There’s only one surviving manuscript of Beowulf that we have at the moment, it’s in the British Library. It’s the oldest surviving piece of English literature that we still have, so it’s kind of a big deal, but that’s not the mystery here.
We know two scribes wrote it down around the year 1000, and the story is older than that, probably. But who wrote it? No idea, really. We don’t even have the full version of it because the 1731 Ashburnham House fire damaged quite a few pages, because apparently, there wasn’t enough drama already.
The missing witness
What’s so annoying about the Babushka Lady is that she’s not some shadowy figure in the corner, she’s visible, she’s in photos. The Babushka Lady was present on that fateful day, November 22, 1963, while President Kennedy was shot.Â
She got her name because she was in a headscarf. But while everyone else ran from the action, she faced it head-on, and seemed to be holding a camera, too, and the photos she took would put conspiracies about JFK’s death to bed. But she was never found. Who was she?
Pure bravery
You might know about Tank Man, he’s an unidentified man who walked in front of a line of tanks near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It was part of many protests against the Chinese government. The tanks tried to go around him, should’ve been easy to do, but Tank Man continued.
There came a point when he actually climbed onto the main tank. But he’s never been identified. The image has stood the test of time, yet we’ve somehow never managed to find him.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
10 historical figures who took secrets to the grave
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.
