Everybody loves The X-Files, but even almost 10 years of weekly weirdness was not enough to cover all of the truly bizarre things that can happen. From bizarre illnesses and mysterious disappearances to alien hot spots and inexplicable fires that have ravaged entire towns, there are a lot of true creepy mysteries out there. Some of these real-life X-files go beyond completely terrifying.
What makes a man mysteriously pass and decompose as if he'd been deceased for weeks in only a matter of days? Where do entire boats and planes go when they disappear? What can make five children disappear almost without a trace and then taunt their parents for decades? No one has ever been able to figure most of these bizarre real-life mysteries out, but we all know it would be awesome to watch Mulder and Scully take a crack at them. Take a look at these cases that might even be too weird for The X-Files.
The Mass Disappearance Of Children From National Parks
Over the past 100 years, more than 1,100 people have disappeared without a trace from national parks across the US. Many of these disappearances have been those of children. This is especially wild considering that these children have vanished on federal land, which is known for being closely watched by law enforcement.
You would think that such a high number of disappearances would have left angry loved ones behind looking for answers and led to some sort of public outcry, but instead, the issue is not widely known. This is, perhaps, because getting accurate statistics is incredibly difficult, meaning that it is impossible to know exactly how many children have vanished.
Amazingly, the Department of the Interior just started tracking these disappearances in 2013.
In the 1700s in France, a man named Tarrare walked the streets eating literally anything in his path. At the age of 17, he weighed only 100 pounds and could eat a quarter of an entire cow in a day. He could also wrap the skin of his stomach around his entire body. After being kicked out of his house for his appearance, he traveled as part of a freak show, consuming anything put in front of him. Tarrare would eat anything from garbage to flint to even live animals.
Tarrare enlisted in the army and was quickly sent to a hospital after almost starving on a diet meant for a normal man. There, he became the test subject of curious doctors, who fed him everything from live snakes and eels to meals meant for 15 people. Tarrare, however, was kicked out of the hospital after getting caught trying to eat cadavers. During his stay, a 14-month-old baby mysteriously disappeared from the infirmary, and it's believed he ate it.
Around 1947-1948, a bizarre radio message was received by a number of ships traveling through the Straits of Malacca near Sumatra and Malaysia. The message was delivered in Morse code and partially indecipherable. According to those who received the transcript, it said. "All Officers, including the Captain, are dead. Lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead. … I die."
Two American ships came to the Dutch ship's rescue and found the distress calls horrifyingly accurate. The ship was littered with the cadavers of the crew, all in states of complete terror. Even the crew's pet dog was found deceased, its teeth bared mid-snarl. While there was no sign of physical harm on any of the crew, they all appeared to be rotting rapidly. Suddenly, the Ourang Medan caught fire and blew up, sinking into the sea.
In 1954, an unusual man tried to go through customs at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. He claimed that he was from Taured, a country between France and Spain that simply does not exist. He had a passport from the country with stamps that corresponded to all of his business trips as well as a wallet full of corresponding currencies and documentation. After officials showed him a map depicting Andorra to be the country between France and Spain, he became angry and claimed that Taured had existed for thousands of years.
The man was put up in a hotel overnight and his documents locked away while the authorities attempted to sort everything out. They found out that the company he said he was meeting with had never heard of him and the bank listed in his checkbook did not exist. Things got even weirder when the man disappeared from a guarded hotel room without a trace overnight. All of his documentation, which had been held overnight by airport security, also vanished.
The Mysterious Disappearance Of The Sodder Children
A tragic fire in the Sodder family home in 1945 led to one of the strangest disappearances in American history. Five children, from the ages of 5-14, vanished from their home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, and were never seen again. The father did everything to save his children from the smoldering upper floor, but found his ladder missing, his trucks suddenly not working, and no one in the entire town could get a hold of the operator to call the fire department.
Even stranger, no remains of the five children were ever found on the property. And in fact, there were sightings of them for years, though the sightings never culminated in anything concrete. Police and private investigations turned up nothing, only for Jennie Sodder to be sent a picture of a young man over 20 years after the fire. The picture was labeled Louis Sodder, and he had the same features as her missing son Louis. The envelope was postmarked Kentucky but had no return address. The private investigator the Sodders sent to Kentucky was never seen again. Both parents passed without ever finding out what had happened to their children.
Lake Lanier is a human-made lake in Georgia with a terrifying past. In order to create it, the US government flooded over 50,000 acres of land, forcing entire towns of people to relocate. This lake not only has a series of perfectly intact ghost towns along the bottom but a reputation for attracting strangeness ever since its creation in the 1950s. This lake is famous for boating mishaps, drownings, and even nearby drivers suddenly losing control and plunging their cars into it.
In 2011 alone, there were over a dozen mysterious deaths on the lake. It is famous for strange and often unsolved disappearances. One of the most recent disappearances is that of a man named Kelly Nash who woke up one day with flu-like symptoms, told his girlfriend he was sick, and went back to sleep. When she woke up, he had disappeared, leaving behind his keys and wallet, only for his decomposed body to appear in Lake Lanier a month later.
