American Horror Nights

December 5, 1945: five Navy Avengers vanish after Lieutenant Taylor's compasses fail, a sixth rescue plane explodes mid-search, and no wreckage is ever found. The disappearance that named the Bermuda Triangle.

Transylvania's twisted-tree forest: the barren circular clearing where nothing grows, Emil Barnea's 1968 UFO photos, glowing orbs, dead electronics, lost time, and the shepherd who walked in with two hundred sheep and never came out.

Don Julian Santana Barrera's fifty-year vigil hanging thousands of rotting dolls in the Xochimilco canals to appease a drowned girl's spirit, until he drowned in the same spot in 2001 and visitors began reporting whispering dolls and moving eyes.

The uncaught 1968-69 Bay Area killer who turned murder into media theater: the Vallejo shootings, the Lake Berryessa hooded stabbing, the Paul Stine cab murder, the 408 and Z340 ciphers, and a suspect list that never closed.

Nine Soviet hikers found dead on Kholat Syakhl in 1959: a tent slashed from the inside, crushed skulls with no external wounds, a missing tongue, radiation on clothing, and an official verdict of a compelling natural force.

On the night before Thanksgiving 1971, a polite man in a dark suit hijacked a jet, took $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into a freezing storm over the Pacific Northwest — never to be seen again. The only unsolved skyjacking in American history.

In January 1947 Elizabeth Short's posed, bisected body was found in a Los Angeles vacant lot, and despite hundreds of suspects, her killer was never found.

In the autumn of 1888 five women were murdered in London's East End by a killer who wrote taunting letters to the press and was never caught.

A well-dressed man was found dead on an Adelaide beach in 1948 with no ID, a scrap reading Tamam Shud in his pocket, and a code in a poetry book that has never been cracked.

A violet gemstone looted from a Hindu temple in 1857 is said to have ruined every owner since, and now it sits in a London museum with a handwritten note begging no one to touch it.