Here are 10 most disorienting stories of mysterious deaths and disappearances in history.
10. Bettie Page
Bettie Page, who was ridiculously famous for being a pinup girl in her prime, was an American model. She came into fame in the 1950s for her pinup photos. She was dubbed the "Queen of Pinups" and almost every teenager had her picture on the walls of their bedrooms. At the peak of her career, she mysteriously disappeared into the dark. She lived as a recluse and became a devoted Christian eventually working as a secretary for Rev. Billy Graham. While attending Bible School, Page began hearing voices. Her mental health deteriorated and she was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized for 10 years. She was later found at age 85 and died shortly after in December, 2008.
9. Agatha Cristie
Agatha Cristie was an English mystery novelist in the early 1900s. Cristie left Surrey town in her car in December, 1926. Not too long after, her car was found tottering over a cliff not far from her home. Cristie was not in the car nor was she anywhere near the scene of the accidents. She just vanished into thin air without a trace or explanation. As a famous novelist, over 1000 police and volunteers and even airplanes searched for her but she could not be found. Thankfully, she was 11 days later in a hotel room at Harrogate hale and hearty. Her reappearance posed even more questions and less solutions as Cristie claimed to have remembered nothing from the incident. She refused to speak about why she disappeared abruptly and why she did so in a way that suggested that she might have been killed.
MV Joyita was a merchant vessel from which 25 passenger and crew mysteriously disappeared in 1955. This vessel was commissioned by the US Navy as a patrol boat during WW II, serving in the South Pacific. It was found drifting in the South Pacific without anyone aboard. The ship was also in very poor condition which included oxidized pipes and a radio, although functional, only had a range of about 2 miles, which was likely due to faulty wiring. A puzzling fact was that the hull of the Joyita was sound and her design made her unsinkable. It is a mystery why the passenger and crew did not wait on board till help came.
7. Brian Shaffer
27 year old second-year medical student at Ohio State University disappeared into thin air on the night of March 31, 2006. It was spring break and he decided to celebrate with his two friends. The trio went into a bar called the "Ugly Tuna Saloona". After some time and some drinks, Shaffer's friends noticed that he was missing. He went into bar and never came out. In fact, after that night, Brian Shaffer was never seen or heard from again. His family members were in shock and insisted that Shaffer's life was good and clean and that after school, he had planned to propose to his girlfriend who was also a medical student. Till today, Shaffer's case is still a thing of mystery.
Louis le Prince was widely known for being a French Artist and the inventor of an early motion picture camera, possibly being the first person to shoot a moving picture using a single lens camera and a strip of paper film. on September 16, 1890, le Prince disappeared never to be seen again. He had promised that he would rejoin his friends in Paris for a return journey to England but he did not arrive at the appointed time and he was never seen or heard of by his family or friends ever again.
An American merchant brigantine, the Mary Celeste, was also discovered adrift and completely deserted in the Atlantic Ocean, off the shores of the Azores Islands, on December 5, 1872. It was found in near-perfect condition with only three and half feet of water that was in the ship's bottom, under a partial sail and with her lifeboat missing. The fate of the passengers and crew aboard the Mary Celeste remains one of the most baffling in the history of the sea.
4. The Sarah Joe
On the afternoon of February 11, 1979, five friends (Benjamin Kalama, Scott Moorman, Peter Hanchett, Patrick Woesner and Ralph Malaiakini) boarded a Boston Whaler named Sarah Joe. They were semi-experienced sailors and the 17 foot long vessel was not equipped for any major sea voyages. The vessel left the coast of Hawaii and would not be seen for a decade. When the vessel was eventually found on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1988, all but one of the sailors had vanished into thin air. The skeletal remains of one of them who would later be proven to be Scott Moorman was found in the makeshift cairn of the Whaler. This, and the strange ritualistic discovery on this shallow grave raised many questions. Is the ritual a covering for something more sinister? What caused the death of Moorman? Where were the other four sailors? Where was the vessel before it was found and why did no one see it? Forty years later and no one knows the answers to any of these questions.
George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine were two of some British explorers and mountaineers who went on the second expedition with the goal of achieving the first ascent of Mount Everest, which stands at a magnificent 29, 106 feet. After two summit attempts, Edward Norton set a world altitude record of 28, 126 feet. On the third attempt, Mallory and Irvine disappeared in 1924. Mallory's body was eventually found in 1999 at 26, 106 feet. Neither Irvine nor a camera was found. The long standing unanswered question is whether or not the pair made it to the summit before their speculated deaths.
D.B. Cooper or Dan Cooper were the names given to an unidentified man who hijacked a plane by the media. In the afternoon of Wednesday, November 24, 1971, Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 and extorted $ 200, 000 (equivalent to $ 1, 240, 000 in 2018) in ransom and parachuted to an uncertain fate. Despite the extensive search for him by federal investigators, this hijacker has not being identified till today. It remains the only unsolved case of hijacking in aviation history.
Amelia Earhart was a female aviation pioneer and an author who was seen at her time as the future of aviation for females. Her most popular feats in aviation gained her numerous awards, one of them being her successfully flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean. On July 2, 1937, during an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Central Pacific Ocean, near Howard Island and they were never found again. In 1939, she was declared deceased in absentia.
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