Mysteries and Histories

In the shadowy woods around Vermont’s Glastenbury Mountain, Paula Jean Welden is only one of several people who walked into the trees and never properly came back. In just five years, an experienced hunter vanished from a hunting party, a war veteran disappeared from a moving bus, an eight‑year‑old boy slipped away from his mother’s parked truck, and a hiker stepped off a trail to change her wet clothes, only to be found months later where searchers swore they’d already looked, feeding the legend of a forest that doesn’t just lose people, but erases them.

In April 1981, inside a shabby rental at Cabin 28 in the tiny mountain town of Keddie, California, someone turned a cramped living room into a slaughterhouse. Sue Sharp, her teenage son John, and his friend Dana were beaten, bound, and stabbed, while 12‑year‑old Tina vanished into the night, later found as a skull in the woods miles away, leaving behind surviving children who slept through the carnage and a crime scene so chaotic, mishandled, and haunting that the “Keddie Cabin murders” still feel less like a solved case and more like something evil that walked in, did its worst, and walked back out into the dark.

In a monarchy obsessed with heirs, weddings, and “traditional values,” some of Britain’s most powerful rulers were living far queerer lives than their portraits ever admitted. Behind the careful marriages and staged public affection, kings whispered with male favourites in locked chambers, queens poured their longing into letters for the women who never left their side, and courtiers learned to speak about desire in code
or not at all. Their secrets shaped alliances, sparked scandals, and sometimes even helped topple governments, yet history kept sanding down the edges, pretending these loves were just “friendship” so the myth of a perfectly straight crown could survive.

On a foggy New Year’s Eve in 1959, 16‑year‑old Mary Flanagan waved goodbye to her family in West Ham, supposedly heading to a work party at the Tate & Lyle sugar factory and then vanished into the London night.
No body, no confirmed sightings, and even her original police files lost to time have left her disappearance frozen in place as Britain’s longest‑running missing person case, an open question that has haunted her siblings and the Metropolitan Police for more than six decades.

Across centuries, crowds have convulsed, nuns have meowed like cats, factory workers have fallen “sick” from phantom June bugs, men have panicked that their bodies were literally shrinking away, and entire towns have watched mysterious tics spread like a virus. Doctors now call it mass psychogenic illness, terror and stress so contagious that they leave real bite marks, real vomit, real screams, and sometimes whole communities convinced that something impossible is hunting them.