73 Photos With Strange And Unexplained Histories

Montparnasse Station train accident.

The Montparnasse derailment occurred at 4 pm on 22 October 1895 when the Granville–Paris Express overran the buffer stop at its Gare Montparnasse terminus. With the train several minutes late and the driver trying to make up for lost time, it entered the station too fast and the train air brake failed. After running through the buffer stop, the train crossed the station concourse and crashed through the station wall before falling onto the Place de Rennes below, where it stood on its nose. A woman in the street below was k**led by falling masonry. The driver was fined 50 francs and one of the guards 25 francs.

colorcoma , www.reddit.com Report

This Carlos Diaz UFO photo.

Taken from the shoulder of a road on the side of a mountain in Mexico.

You can see the object, the trees/bushes between the object and the camera, the metal railing on the edge of the cliff, and the reflection off the hood of the car. Photo was taken from the left side of the car, over the hood, after Diaz stepped out of the driver side with his camera.

He described the object as being no more than 20m away, and making absolutely no sound as it rose out of the valley and then streaked away.

This picture is not taken through the windshield, and the light is not from the headlights. This photo was taken from over the hood of the car, diagonally over the close-left corner of the hood towards the front-right. The light coming off the guard-rail on the road is a result of the form of the light.

Coherent light, like a laser.

anon , chrisramsay52 Report

I like the photo which captured a person outside a cabin that went up on reddit about a year ago.

Maby not so much unexplained as creepy, from what I remember they did see footprints in the snow as I recall.

OP:

Up North at my cousins cabin and decide to take a panoramic photo. Look outside. There’s someone standing outside.

eastb01:

This might be easily explained. At least in Maine, people go and rob cabins in the winter, looking for medicine and other valuables. It’s easy because the cabins are deserted. So, this guy probably wanted to break in, but saw people and just decided to leave and look for some other cabin.
TL,DR, it’s a nonchalant burglar.

Learner-Vex , anon Report

I posted this in the last (non serious) thread. Now there are a few logical explanations of this but if you follow the story, it is pretty creepy.

The Warrens were performing a big investigation into Amityville. There were quite a few people in the house including the investigating team and reporters. At some point in the night one of the automatic cameras caught this image. There were no children in the house.

felbridge Report

I like the old UPS truck and sewing machine combo.

american_hoser:

Oh wow. I can actually explain this. Takes place at Princeton lawnparties (annual weekend long formal event) circa 2004. The UPS truck got stuck for about a week after trying to drive down a walking path that was too narrow, and ended up rolling down the hill towards the tennis courts. They’ve since built a new residential college (Whitman) in that area. I’m still not sure how they got the UPS truck out.
The sewing machine, I have to presume was for repairing a tux. And clearly the guy is drunk, because that’s how lawnparties work.

Ancillor Report

To date, no one positively knows who these children are or where the picture was taken.

One woman came forward saying the girl looks just like her daughter, Tara Calico, who now has been missing for over 30 years.

“Tara Leigh Calico (born February 28, 1969) is an American woman who disappeared near her home in Belen, New Mexico on September 20, 1988. She is widely believed to have been kidnapped. In July 1989, a Polaroid photo of an unidentified young woman and boy, both bound and gagged, was televised to the public after it was found in a convenience store parking lot. Family friends thought the woman resembled Calico and contacted her mother, who then met with investigators and examined the Polaroid. She believed it was her daughter after taking “time, growth and lack of makeup” into consideration, and noted that a scar on the woman’s leg was identical to one Calico had. Scotland Yard analyzed the photo and concluded that the woman was Calico, but a second analysis by the Los Alamos National Laboratory disagreed. An FBI analysis of the photo was inconclusive.”

m83tshirt Report

Jay Z in 1939.

Was one of Brooklyn’s finest in Harlem in 1939? This Sid Grossman photo of “Harlem Loiterers” from the Prints Collection at NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture has created quite a stir since being posted to the Center’s Facebook page the other day. Why? Because the man on the right looks a heck of a lot like Jay-Z. Cue Twilight Zone music, right? Schomburg’s Curator of Digital Collections Sylviane A. Diouf found the photo while researching an exhibition, and said, “I was immediately struck by the similarity to Jay-Z and actually laughed out loud … I still hope somebody will tell us who that young man really was.”

So is Jay-Z a time traveler? Is this someone else – anyone know who? What do you think?

Coral , nypl Report

The creepiest picture ive ever seen is this one.
“My friend took of his kid in his flat but theres a face in the curtain.”

0arussell Report

Black Knight Satellite

An unidentifiable satellite that was found orbiting earth in the early 1960’s. The object is in polar orbit which neither the Russians nor americans were capable of at the time.

Legend has it that in orbit around the Earth is a mysterious, dark object which dates back perhaps 13 000 years. Its origin and purpose are inscrutable, dubbed the “Black Knight” this elusive satellite has allegedly been beaming signals towards the Earth and inspected by NASA astronauts yet only a few on Earth officially know of its existence. The origin of the ominous name is part of the enigma; it is impossible to discover who first called it this or indeed why. Humans have only in the last 60 years had the technology to launch a man-made object into space so what is the logical explanation of tales of an alien intruder on our doorstep?

camxxcore Report

Thetulip ghost staircaseis kind of freaky. Anything that predates Photoshop with s**t like this freaks me out a bit.

blitzballer:

Taken in 1966 by the Reverend Ralph Hardy, who was visiting the Maritime Museum in Greenwhich, England on vacation.
However, the really interesting thing about the Tulip Staircase Ghost photograph is how scrutinized it was immediately after it was taken thanks to the Hardy family allowing the photo to be examined by experts in both the paranormal and photography fields.
After noticing the odd apparitions in their vacation photo after returning to Canada, the Hardy’s allowed The Ghost Club back in England to examine the photograph. Later the picture would be examined by the Kodak Film Company
Neither examination could prove the photo away as a fake and in fact the examinations provided this factual data on the photograph:
The photo did not seem to have suffered from photographic tricks or manipulations.
Each photo was accounted for in the roll. Neither the shot before nor after the ghost capture contains any image (both were of other architectural features of the Museum; one of a colonnade and one of a figurehead) that might have ‘bled’ over to the staircase shot.
The photograph was taken with a Zeiss Ikon Contina with Kodachrome 35mm color film. The picture was taken in natural daylight with no flash.

StickleyMan Report

The man at the canyon.

Supposedly the man at the edge had no idea anyone was there and didn’t see anyone.

swimmerboy29:

A kid probably realized he was in the photo and didn’t want to get in the way.

McGuineaRI:

When this was first posted a while back the guy said he and the person in the photo at the ledge were the only people around for miles. They drove to that spot and decided to take pictures. There’s nothing for miles and miles around. Neither of them saw anyone else there with them. Not when they were taking the pictures or afterwards. That’s what’s so inexplicable. Otherwise it’s just a picture of three people.

-R3DF0X Report

Picture from a hospital CCTV camera shows what appears to be a demon on-top of a dying patient.

anon Report

Has to be this one. We may never know what was going on when it was taken.

ReadsSmallTextWrong:

Clearly someone caught a leprechaun and had a completely ridiculous idea to stage a dog drinking competition so big that even the mayor would be there. There was also the swaggest lady of the age — you can see her pictured here with the hat that says “WIN” on the underside of the brim.
Edit: I’d like to elaborate. The man to the left of the pipe-smoking mayor wearing a similar hat is Jergen Offen, the believed asker of the wish. To the right of The Lady of Swag, Hashtag Kanye, we see Eartha Fire-Wind Dutchess of Marmahol, Catzlvania. She’s sporting the same hat that she wore to the Kentucky Derby in the year 1983.

Wargasismissing Report

The mysterious part of this picture is not what is in it, but what is not in it. What could possibly be in the kitchen that has these guys so mesmerized?

yaosio Report

I still cannot wrap my head around this picture. Is it normal for llamas to do that? or did this dog just walk in at the worst possible time?

Bcarey1233 Report

I remember seeing this picture one day.

This group picture of some soldiers was taken in 1919 so no Photoshop has been used here. The photographer didn’t see that shadowed face when the picture was taken. First later some of the soldiers saw the picture and recognized the face as a fellow soldier named Freddy Jackson, who died in an accident caused by an airplane propeller two days earlier. If it’s real I actually feel sorry for that poor guy.. He still thought he was alive and wanted to be part of the group photo.

Haunted Britain:

This photograph, taken in 1919, is of the men and women of Goddard’s Squadron, the RAF Squadron who served at HMS Daedalus in WWI, which was actually a land-based seaplane airfield, and has since been renamed RNAS Lee-on-Solent. At first, the photo seems fairly typical for the time, however upon closer inspection it appears there is an extra figure who was not accounted for at the time.
If you look across the very top row, the face of a man can clearly be seen standing behind the right shoulder of the airman fourth from the left. This face has been identified by a number of people as Freddy Jackson. Freddy was an aircraft repair mechanic in Goddard’s Squadron who had recently been k**led in a propellor accident before this photo was taken. His death certificate can be seen in photo 3.
The photograph has attracted substantial attention since its release. The phantom face does not appear to match any other faces in the immediate area of the photo, which reduces the chance of it being a double exposure caused by one of the subjects moving. Also, to fake a photograph of this nature would have required advanced techniques for the time, not to mention a military unit hoaxing a ghost photograph of a recently deceased comrade would have likely been in particularly bad taste, especially following WWI.
The photograph of Freddy Jackson and his Squadron remains a mystery to this day, and has left many skeptics scratching their heads. Squadron Leader Sir Victor Goddard, the man who took the photograph itself is adamant, likely many others, that he inadvertently captured the ghost of Freddy. What do you think?

Superbacon_hero , Haunted Britain Report

THE NORWEGIAN SKY ANOMALY. This phenomen was first observed in Norway in 1997 and contisues to this day.

Hundreds of calls flooded the Norwegian Meteorological Institute as residents wanted to know what they were seeing. UFO enthusiasts immediately began speculating whether the aerial light display could be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence proposing among other things that it could be a wormhole opening up, or somehow was linked to the recent high-energy experiments undertaken at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland

FieldOfTurnips Report

As the Cooper’s move into their new home in Texas, they take a photograph of the family sitting together, but as the photo is taken, a body falls from the ceiling. The OP said he wasn’t sure if it was real, but he thought it was real creepy.

imgur Report

The Piri Reis Map

Fascinating artefact which could change the way we look at the history of the human race.

olit123 Report

Did we ever find out what the baltic sea anomaly was?

edit: IT’S NOT THE F*****G MILLENNIUM FALCON.

Thereminz Report

The white UPS delivery truck comes to my mind. I don’t know why. It just feels… weird.

Come_To_r_Polandball:

Criminal organizations are known to clone delivery vehicles in smuggling operations. This looks like a really half-assed attempt.

bleedthrough Report

Hooded figures in the background of a wedding.

Seems really freaky to me.

jayrund Report

The Loretto Chapel Staircase is somewhat unexplained. The story goes that the nun’s needed a staircase and prayed to St. Joseph, patron saint of Carpenter’s, when a mysterious man came and offered to help construct a staircase over the next couple months, but he disappeared without receiving pay or thanks and could not be found. Within the staircase there is not any support or nails to be found and the staircase makes two perfect 360 degree turns.

Mooninites7 Report

The Voynich Manuscriptis pretty cool.
15th century text in an unknown language, yet to be deciphered.

fragglestickcar Report

Somebody found this on google street view.I don’t know anything else about it. Maybe somebody has suggestions on what it could be about? A specific group of people?

DwarfCuddler Report

Martian spherules (also known as hematite spherules or blueberries) are small spherules (roughly spherical pebbles) that are rich in an iron oxide and are found in exceedingly large numbers at Meridiani Planum, a vast Martian plain.

Jabberminor Report

The Naga fireballs is a phenomenon with unconfirmed source said to be often seen in Thailand’s Mekong river in which glowing balls are alleged to naturally rise from the water high into the air.

Maslo59 Report

Brown Lady of Raynham HallBrown Lady of Raynham Hall claimed photograph of the ghost, Captain Hubert C. Provand. First published in Countrylife magazine, 1936Wiki Link

Zanoxa Report

Loch Ness Monster. She’s real, real I tell you!

“The Loch Ness Monster, known affectionately as Nessie, is a mythical creature in Scottish folklore that is said to inhabit Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands.”

Garrilland Report

Probably the famous “backpack girl” image that was featured on many cyber parked websites from 2005 to around 2012. Whenever you would misspell an address, or check who owned that URL you wanted, there she was, smiling at your anger, tears, and rage. Who is she? Where is she? Why is she so famous? Nobody knows!

anon Report

The Eye of the Saharahas been NASA’s APOD twice, although I can’t link to it due to government shutdown. It’s not an unexplained picture as much as it is a picture of an unexplained thing. It is a completely unique, apparently geologic formation in Africa that geologists can’t explain or recreate. It is slightly oblong but appears nearly perfectly circular and is absolutely massive, almost 50 km in diameter.
While geologists don’t know what to do with it conspiracy theorists come in, many claiming it is the lost city of Atlantis.
Wikipedia article.
Atlantis article

As_river Report

This strange looking bolder was photographed a few years ago on the surface of mars… Quite odd.

“The Mars monolith is a rectangular object, possibly a boulder, discovered on the surface of Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles (300 km) away. The HiRISE camera that was used to photograph the monolith has a resolution of approximately 1 foot or 30 centimeters per pixel.”

Rcam92 Report

Not really unexplained, but every summer, for two weeks, the most powerful political movers and shakers in the world come to northern california to worship a big owl idol at the Bohemian Grove.

“The Bohemian Grove, that I attend from time to time—the Easterners and the others come there—but it is the most faggy g*****n thing you could ever imagine, that San Francisco crowd that goes in there; it’s just terrible! I mean I won’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”—President Richard M. Nixon.

anon Report

Phoenix lights.

wickedsmaht:

I have seen this a few times since I moved here 3 years ago. Freaks me the f**k out ever time.

anon Report

Some people may say I’m lying and may downvote me. But this is a true story. My dad back in the 70’s had a friend who was the singer in the cover rock band they were in and friends with him ever since. My dad’s friend ended up living a pretty interesting life.

He became a photographer for MTV way back in the 80’s. At the time, and he showed me this picture when I was 15 or 16, so this was 2003/2004. He owned a cigar shop and on the mantle of the fireplace had framed pictures of him singing and jamming with Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin. He had a picture of him and Ozzy posing backstage back when Ozzy had blonde hair and in the picture Ozzy had an entire apple in his mouth.

He even had a picture of him selling cigars to Bill Clinton when Clinton was President and posed in a picture with him holding the box of cigars.

Anyway, my dad told me his friend went to Gettysburg and brought his camera with him. He went to a cemetery to take pictures. And when he developed them, one picture he took of some tombstones in the cemetery there had a transparent woman wearing old Civil War era style clothes and was on her knees praying in front of a grave.

He never really told anybody about this picture and he wouldn’t have showed me that picture if my dad never told him to show me that picture of the ghost. He had to go up in the attic of this little house he turned into a cigar shop and was there for like 5 minutes trying to find it like he just carelessly left it somewhere.

He showed me the picture and I was telling him it’s got to be fake. But he assured me it wasn’t. But even told me he’s an atheist and even after taking the photo himself and developing it himself he was still skeptical of what came out.

If anybody is interested I can ask my dad if maybe he can somehow get a copy or a scanned copy of it on the computer. But, I don’t know if he would give that photo out. He told me the reason he never went public with it is because he didn’t want people to think he was a con artist or crazy to believe in that type of stuff since he was an atheist.

nujurzy87 Report

The Phoenix Lights were a series of widely sighted unidentified flying objects, seen by 1000s of people, observed in the skies over Arizona, Nevada in the United States, and Sonora, Mexico on Thursday, March 13, 1997.There were allegedly two distinct events involved in the incident: a triangular formation of lights seen to pass over the state, and a series of stationary lights seen in the Phoenix area. The United States Air Force identified the second group of lights as flares dropped by A-10 Warthog aircraft that were on training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in southwest Arizona. The lights were reported to have reappeared in 2007 and 2008, but these events were quickly attributed to (respectively) military flares dropped by fighter aircraft at Luke Air Force Base and flares attached to helium balloons released by a civilian

imgur Report

Someone in our family took this photo using a disposable camera and pointing it into a completely dark closet.
We really can’t figure out where the face came from, but it’s incredibly spooky.

Dejanigma Report

It’s going to be hard to prove this isn’t fake, but I guess you’ll either take me at my word, or…not.

So a few years ago I was attending a Halloween party back in my hometown of Boston, that was being thrown by a few of my girlfriend’s grad school friends.

I get to talking with a small group of them about things that creep us out, and one of them mentions his “girlfriend’s family’s ghost”, and how creepy it is.

I’m a skeptical person, and I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s Halloween and I want a cool story, so I press him for more details. He says his girlfriend’s family claims that there’s a ghost that lives in their house, and that it’s a “friendly ghost” – whatever that means. He is also skeptical from what I remember, but claims to have a picture. He says it’s a family photo and the ghost of the lady is in the background. He tries to dig it up on his Blackberry, but comes up short. Bummer.

A few days later, though – I get an email from my girlfriend from her friend.

I still have the picture, and even though I don’t believe in that stuff it still freaks me the f**k out.

I haven’t looked at it in a while – it creeps me out too much. Gah I hate it.

themisanthrope Report

In February 2012, a picture was released to the news media of a likely unknown victim of Dean Corll. The color Polaroid image had been found in the personal possessions of one of his accomplices

dopebojangles Report

Devil’s Kettle Falls is pretty cool

It’s ‘unexplained’ insofar as not knowing the precise mechanism of how it works, but everyone’s pretty sure it drains into the great lakes.

GrandTyromancer Report

Guy on Tumblr found [some…thing] standing on a balcony on Google Street view. Later got blurred out.

BeyonceIsBetter Report

We have a local one around here called the ‘Joplin/Hornet Spooklight’ Basically it’s a road you can park on and there is a light off in the distance where there shouldn’t be one. It has beenseen for a long time. There is a lot of stuff about it online.
I made a cheesy ghost documentary a long time ago with a segment about it and filmed it myself,starts at 8:35my footage is near the end, and is sped up, but you can clearly see the light. not sure why I sped it up so much haha.

anon Report

I went to a high school that’s extremely old and infamous for being haunted. There’s a photograph of the senior class from years ago where a ghostly girl appears, with long black hair and a white dress. No one from that graduating class remembers her, or her being in the picture.

anon Report

Jim Templeton was in a marsh taking photos of his young daughter and after getting them developed there appeared to have been a Spaceman in full astronaut gear standing behind her. Except there wasn’t anyone else around while they were there. Even Kodak verified that it was not tampered with. Freaks me the f**k out.

imgur Report

A group of four kids posing for a picture, however, there appears to be a mysterious thumb next to the kid in black on the right, that does not seem to align with anyone’s body. The OP of this photo says he has no idea where the thumb could have come from.

imgur Report

A photo published in the Los Angeles Times on February 26, 1942 has been cited by modern day conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists as evidence of an extra-terrestrial visitation. They assert that the photo clearly shows searchlights focused on an alien spaceship; however, the photo was heavily modified by photo retouching prior to publication, a routine practice in graphic arts of the time intended to improve contrast in black and white photos.[11] Los Angeles Times writer Larry Harnish noted that the retouched photo along with faked newspaper headlines were presented as true historical material in trailers for the film Battle: Los Angeles. Harnish commented, “if the publicity campaign wanted to establish UFO research as nothing but lies and fakery, it couldn’t have done a better job.”

imgur Report

Unusual lights have been reported here since 1940s or earlier. Especially high activity of Hessdalen lights took place from December 1981 until the summer of 1984 when lights were observed 15–20 times per week. The frequency of the lights caused a gathering of numerous tourists staying there overnight to see the phenomenon.[1] Since then, the activity has decreased and now the lights are observed some 10–20 times per year.

The Hessdalen light most often is a bright, white or yellow light of unknown origin standing or floating above the ground level. Sometimes the light can be seen for more than one hour. There are several other types of unexplained lights observed in the Hessdalen valley

imgur Report

People believe that this photograph, taken in 1941 at the re-opening of the South Forks Bridge in Gold Bridge, Canada, is depicting a man in seemingly modern dress and style, with a camera that is advanced well beyond its time. The circle on the left illustrates a man with a camera typical to the time-period

imgur Report

In 2000, two photographs said to be of the Skunk Ape were taken by an anonymous woman and mailed to the Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff’s Department. The photographs were accompanied by a letter from the woman in which she claims to have photographed an ape in her backyard.[3] The woman wrote that on three different nights an ape had entered her backyard to take apples left on her back porch. She was convinced the ape was an escaped orangutan. The pictures have become known to Bigfoot enthusiasts as the “skunk ape photos.”

imgur Report

This painting is called “The Madonna with Saint Giovannino”. It was painted in the 15th century by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) and hangs as part of the Loeser collection in the Palazzo Vecchio. Above Mary’s right shoulder is a disk shaped object. Below is a blow up of this section and a man and his dog can clearly be seen looking up at the object.

imgur Report

The Falcon Lake Incident is a reported unidentified flying object (UFO) encounter near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, Canada claimed to have occurred on May 20, 1967 by Stefan Michalak. He had had taken a short vacation in Whiteshell Provincial Park to prospect veins of quartz near Falcon Lake when he spotted two cigar-shaped objects descending, one of which landed near him. Michelak says he saw a door open and heard voices from inside the object, after which he tried to make contact in English and other languages but got no response. He claims to have burned his hand while attempting to examine “colourful glass” found around the object and seen a grid-like exhaust vent that expelled gas that burned his clothing.

imgur Report

This one has always fascinated me. The story goes that the couple were on their honeymoon. Husband was taking pictures of the wife in her ‘sexy times’ outfits. The TV was turned off when the picture was taken. They supposedly didn’t notice the image on the TV screen until some time after they had left the hotel (Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, AR). I can’t speak to the photo’s authenticity, but if it IS genuine, as they claim, it’s weird.

Ted_Denslow Report

Well, there’s this… I really want to know what’s happened here.

CZtheDude Report

Wow, I found it hard to believe no one has mentioned ball lightning yet

anon Report

It’s the most unexplainable to me, because I witnessed it.
I took this in my mother’s old home during a visit a few years ago. Through my phone’s viewfinder it looked like a green ghost fire that dropped from the window. Panicked hands produced a shaky picture.

ihatehesesbar Report

In these two photographs of the gaping hole the plane crashed into the South Tower of of the WTC on 9/11, you can see a woman standing on the edge of the hole waving. Her name is Edna Clinton, and the mystery many people say of these photos is that she actually was a survivor. People inquire how she was able to survive everything that happened at that location, then go on to make it out of the building.

imgur Report

Dyatlov pass incident. Cooked people, tents torn open, no animal involved. Pictures of the incident in article and there is a good documentary too. The wikipedia page doesn’t give too much insight so I just included one from the daily mail. I am at work and unable to find a great link…but still one of my favorite mysteries worth the read.

Edit: There were internal injuries and one women was missing her tongue and eyes. Everyone had internal injuries and no external…radiation was present.

Edit 2: The documentary I watched said that their insides were basically cooked. I’m terribly sorry wikipedia doesn’t say they were…but if you give me 10 mins I can change that.

strictlytacos Report

Sailing Stones

Much photographed, nothing spooky, but still no plausible explanation.

anon Report

I can’t believe no one has mentioned Our lady of light. This is one of the most famous Marian apparitions, and one of the few to be seen by lots of people at once, with lots of photographs.

Eclipse-caste_Pony Report

Allegedly this was found very small on an old nasa photo from the moon

ZCC0NONA Report

The Marfa Lights, mysterious glowing orbs that appear in the desert outside the West Texas town of Marfa, have mystified people for generations.

dustin999 Report