Harold Frederick Shipman was born into a working-class family on the 14th January 1946 and despite being one of four children, he grew into a shy, awkward loner. 

As the favourite child of his domineering mother, Shipman was devastated when his mother died from terminal lung cancer on the 21st June 1963, when he was just a teenager studying for his A Levels. 

Having devoted his life to her care, Shipman became fascinated by the effects of morphine and how it alleviated his mother’s pain when administered by doctors.

Though her passing was tragic, it inspired him to pursue a career in medicine and seven years later, he graduated from medical school, taking his first job at Pontefract General Infirmary, Yorkshire.

Alyoshenka representing unidentified mummified remains of biological origin, found in 1996 near the southern outskirts of Kyshtym in the village of Kaolinovy, Chelyabinsk region of Russia.

A strange “creature” was discovered in May 1996 in the village of Kaolinovoe near Kyshtym by a pensioner Tamara Vasilyevna Prosvirina, suffering from mental illness. A lonely pensioner received a “telepathic order”: get up and immediately go to the cemetery.

However, the pensioner was often at the cemetery because of a mental illness, gathered flowers there and even brought photos of the dead taken from the monuments to the house.

War brings with it horror. The battlefields of World War I were no exception and the trenches here may as well have been meat grinders as they swallowed countless souls in an orgy of blood and death. However, the ever present threat of death from the enemy was not always the only horror that lied in wait within the labyrinthine trenches of the war. 

From the fog of blood, brutality and violence of the Word War I trenches comes the bizarre story of a mysterious and deadly creature that was said to prowl the danger-ridden no man’s land during fierce fighting during the Battle of Mons.

The Battle of Mons was so named for the small Belgian village of Mons, which was to become the scene of vicious fighting between British and German forces. In 1914, German troops had occupied Mons and the British, in what was their first foray into battle during World War I, valiantly marched in to try and liberate it. 

During the spring and summer of 1974, police in the Pacific Northwest were in a panic. Women at colleges across Washington and Oregon were disappearing at an alarming rate, and law enforcement had few leads as to who was behind it.

In just six months, six women had been abducted. Panic in the area reached fever pitch when Janice Ann Ott and Denise Marie Naslund disappeared in broad daylight from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park.

But the boldest of the abductions also yielded the first real break in the case. On the day Ott and Naslund vanished, several other women remembered being approached by a man who had tried and failed to lure them to his car.

Born prematurely in August of 1962 with a birth defect that rendered him unable to bend his wrists completely, Tsutomu Miyazaki spent most of his early childhood alone as the victim of bullying for his deformity.

Miyazaki kept to himself and rarely participated in social events or made many friends. He often hid his hands in photographs out of embarrassment. He did seem to delight in drawing, however, and comics while alone at home.

Though he wasn’t a social student, he was a successful one and he ranked in the top 10 of his class. He moved from elementary school to high school in Nakano, Tokyo, and remained a star student with the hopes of becoming a teacher.

Zigmund Jan Adamski was a Polish immigrant who in 1960 had moved to the quaint, small town of Tingley, near Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. A coal miner by trade, he had a rather simple life, and there was actually not that much that was particularly remarkable about him. 

He and his wife, Leokadia, were well-liked enough by their neighbors but other than the wife’s multiple sclerosis they were for the most part unassuming, that is until June 6, 1980, when Adamski would carve out a place for himself in the annals of strange unexplained disappearances and deaths. 

That day was the eve of his goddaughter’s wedding, and the family was full of good cheer, looking forward to the festivities the following day. It was in good spirits that at around 3:30 PM, Adamski went off to do some shopping for the next day’s lunch.

When she was three years old, Madeleine McCann vanished into thin air. The little British girl disappeared from her family’s hotel room in Portugal in 2007. The confounding incident has since become “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history.”

There were no signs of forced entry or any rational explanation as to how it happened. Over the following weeks, theories ranged from an abduction by a stranger to Madeleine’s own parents covering up her accidental death. A child sex-trafficking ring also entered the discussion.

Four months after her disappearance, the Portuguese police classified her parents Kate and Gerry McCann as formal suspects. However, that designation was later lifted due to lack of evidence. The incident soon became international in scope, with authorities and publishers from around the world entering the fray and offering opinions.

The Hammersmith Ghost murder case of 1804 set a legal precedent in the UK regarding self-defence: whether someone could be held liable for their actions even if they were the consequence of a mistaken belief.

Near the end of 1803, a number of people claimed to have seen and even been attacked by a ghost in the Hammersmith area of London, a ghost believed by locals to be the spirit of a suicide victim. On 3 January 1804, a member of one of the armed patrols set up in the wake of the reports shot and killed a bricklayer, Thomas Millwood, mistaking the white clothes of Millwood's trade for a ghostly apparition. The culprit, a 29-year-old excise officer named Francis Smith, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, commuted to one year's hard labour.

The issues surrounding the case were not settled for 180 years, until a Court of Appeal decision in 1984.

Ambrose Joseph Small was born in 1866 in Bradford, Canada West, to Daniel and Ellen Small. By 1880, Small’s family had moved to Toronto, where Daniel became the manager of the Grand Hotel. 

Next door to the hotel was the Grand Opera House, a prestigious establishment that presented the best shows coming out of New York. About 1884, young Small began working at the opera house as an usher and bartender. He was also involved in an illegal bookmaking operation taking bets on horse races.

In 1889, after a quarrel with Grand Opera House manager Oliver B. Sheppard, Small went to work for the Toronto Opera House, a venue for vaudeville and popular melodrama on the touring circuits controlled from New York and Montreal.

On August 28, 1984, 18-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl went missing. Her mother Rosemarie hastily filed a missing-persons report, frantic over the whereabouts of her daughter. For weeks there was no word from Elisabeth, and her parents were left to assume the worst. Then out of nowhere, a letter arrived from Elisabeth, claiming she had grown tired of her family life and run away.

Her father Josef told policeman who came to the house that he had no idea where she would go, but that she likely joined a religious cult, something she had talked previously about doing.

But the truth was that Josef Fritzl knew exactly where his daughter was: she was about 20 feet below where the police officer was standing.