Midnight Terror

In 1986, the Snedeker family moved into a rented house in Southington, Connecticut, close to the hospital treating their eldest son — only to discover the house had once been a funeral home, and their boys' bedroom had been the embalming room. Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren declared it a genuine haunting, and the case became one of America's most famous, retold in the book In a Dark Place and the film A Haunting in Connecticut.

In 1661, magistrate John Mompesson confiscated a vagrant drummer's drum in the Wiltshire village of Tedworth — and the drummer cursed him for it. From the following March, a phantom drumming beat through the house every night, witnessed by neighbours, clergymen, and the Reverend Joseph Glanvill, who published the case as proof of spirits. The drumming lasted two years, then stopped as suddenly as it began.

In a sealed basement in the Norfolk village of Scole, four ordinary people held séances in total darkness before scientists from the Society for Psychical Research. Lights moved on their own, objects appeared from nowhere, and sealed rolls of film came back with pictures on them. The investigators could find no fraud — and could not prove it was real.

In 1284, the town of Hamelin was freed from its rats by a mysterious piper in a coat of many colours — then the town refused to pay. On the 26th of June, the piper returned, and this time his music called the children. One hundred and thirty boys and girls followed him out of the town gate, and none was ever seen again.

In the summer of 1976, two girls saw a tall winged figure with glowing red eyes hovering above a Cornish church tower. The Owlman of Mawnan has never hurt anyone. He only watches.

He spoke every language, charmed every court, and never seemed to age. The Count of St. Germain died in 1784, yet the sightings never stopped. Spy, fraud, or the man who found a way to live forever?

Two men dressed as police talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and left with thirteen masterpieces worth half a billion dollars. Thirty years later, the gold frames still hang empty.

On June 6, 1992, three women vanished from a house in Springfield, Missouri. No struggle, no blood, no note. Just a smashed porch light and an answering machine message someone erased.

For fifty years, farmers, police officers, and soldiers have reported a huge black cat on Bodmin Moor, and livestock found with throats cut clean. Britain has no wild big cats. So what is out there in the mist?

Half monkey, half fish, sewn together and grinning in a glass case: P.T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid drew thousands. People did not pay to see a mermaid. They paid to argue about one.

In 1869, workmen digging a well in Cardiff, New York, unearthed a ten-foot petrified giant. Crowds paid to see proof of the giants of scripture. It was the most magnificent lie America ever bought.

A young woman begged to be buried in the house she loved, and when her sisters broke the promise, the house began to scream. For four hundred years, the skull of Burton Agnes has stayed put.

Every teenager in 1950s America knew the rule: never park on Lovers' Lane. The radio would warn of an escaped killer with a hook for a hand, and then came the scratching on the car door.

Two hundred and forty pages in an alphabet no one has ever identified, plants that do not exist, and star charts that match no sky. The Voynich Manuscript has defied every codebreaker for a century.

An explosion, a tremor, and a glowing egg-shaped object on a Welsh mountainside: a nurse drove toward the Berwyn incident expecting a plane crash. What she found made it Britain's other Roswell.

A Florida widow is found reduced to ten pounds of ash in a barely damaged room, one slippered foot unburned. The Cinder Woman case became the flagship of spontaneous human combustion — and science's answer almost works.

West Virginia, 1966: a salesman is stopped on a night highway by a grinning man whose voice arrives inside his head. His name was Indrid Cold, he said — and he only wanted to ask a few questions.

In 1943 four boys found a woman's skull grinning out of a hollow tree in Hagley Wood — the remains of someone no missing-person list could name. Then the words began appearing on walls across the Midlands: 'Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?' Forensic artists have since given her back her face. Eighty years on, she still has no name.

Palermo's Capuchin Catacombs hold eight thousand of the dressed dead — and one two-year-old who has looked peacefully asleep for over a century. Visitors swear Rosalia Lombardo opens her eyes.

Australia Day, 1966: three children took the bus to Glenelg beach with a few coins and a whole summer day ahead of them. By afternoon they had vanished from a crowded shore, last seen happy in the company of a tall blond stranger who paid for their lunch with a one-pound note. In nearly sixty years, not one trace of them has ever been found.

The keeper's wife ran off with the ferry captain, and Ernie never left his lighthouse in the sea. For fifty years, Coast Guard crews at New London Ledge logged a colleague who wasn't there.

He walks the upper circle of Drury Lane in broad daylight, in a grey coat and tricorn hat, and actors pray for him to attend: a sighting means a hit. The skeleton in the wall says he has every reason to stay.

November 1938: a slasher stalks foggy Halifax. Scotland Yard arrives — and discovers the wounds were self-inflicted, the victims were lying, and the monster was the panic itself.

For two years a blade-wielding fiend terrorised the women of Georgian London — or did he? The London Monster, the monster-proof petticoats, and the flower-maker who may have been innocent.

London, 1804: a village arms itself to shoot a ghost, and a young officer fires at a figure in white — a bricklayer in plaster-dusted work clothes. The Hammersmith Ghost's only victim was the man killed hunting it.

On a lonely Dartmoor road in the 1920s, drivers swore that huge hairy hands seized their steering and wrenched them toward the ditch. One motorcyclist died. The reports never entirely stopped.

When sisters Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock were killed on a Hexham road in 1957, their father swore they would be born to the family again. A year later twin girls arrived — carrying the same birthmarks, the same memories, and the same terror of cars. The Pollock twins became the most famous case for reincarnation ever recorded.

Third floor, third stall: knock three times and ask for Hanako-san. The story of Japan's most famous school ghost, and the child who may have died in the one room that should have been safe.

She fell on the tracks in the snowy north and died in two pieces. Now she drags herself through Japan's stations on her elbows — teke, teke — and if she catches you, she will make you just like her.

A message in a bottle seems to solve the Deering — until its finder confesses he forged it. Mutiny, pirates, and Bolsheviks: a century of theories, and no crew ever found.

January 1921: the schooner Carroll A. Deering is found aground off Cape Hatteras, sails set, dinner half-cooked, and all eleven men gone. America's greatest sea mystery begins.

The entity talked, threatened the child, and then stopped as suddenly as it came. The family has refused to be found ever since — and the South Shields case file remains open in every way that matters.

South Shields, 2006: a toddler's letter board starts spelling threats, and a young father's back opens with scratches no hand made. Britain's most violent modern poltergeist case begins.

An RAF officer kept one print in a drawer for three decades. In 2022 the Calvine photograph finally surfaced — and the two men who took it have never been found.

August 1990: two hotel workers photograph a vast diamond-shaped craft over Calvine, Scotland — then the Ministry of Defence makes the finest UFO picture ever taken disappear for 32 years.

Sixty years later, the cousins finally confess: the fairies were cardboard cutouts held up by hatpins. But one of them swore to her death that the fifth photograph was real.

Two Yorkshire cousins borrow a camera in 1917 and return with photographs of fairies. When the pictures reach Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes stakes his reputation on them.

In March 1918 the USS Cyclops steamed out of Barbados with 306 souls and ten thousand tons of manganese ore — and simply never arrived. No distress call, no wreckage, no bodies: the largest non-combat loss of life in US naval history, and a silence the sea has kept for more than a century.

In a Barbados churchyard stands a vault the dead would not rest in. Each time the Chase vault was opened for a new burial, the heavy lead coffins inside had been flung about like toys — until the governor himself sealed the slab, pressed his ring into the cement, and laid sand to catch any intruder. Nothing human ever crossed it.

Mirage, plague ship, or curse? The science of the Fata Morgana, the real ships refused entry at every port, and how Wagner and Hollywood made the Dutchman immortal.