In ten unbelievable tales we can find out who these people were, before they vanished- without a trace.
Do kids still go through an Unsolved Mysteries of the Unknown phase? Even if it no longer directly involves Unsolved Mysteries or Mysteries of the Unknown?
My childhood local library conveniently gathered everything paranormal, psychic powers, UFO, Big Foot, mysterious disappearances and so on under the “Occult” section, which during the peak Satanic-Panic years was basically an invitation to middle schoolers to scare themselves silly.
I picked up this book at a small charity thrift store in upstate New York, which seems to get a steady supply of some of the most obscure YA and Middle Reader series of the 1980s and 90s. One of the names in the list of “cases” profiled caught my eye and I thought I might have found a relic of the peak of the “you-are-totally-going-to-get-kidnapped-and-murdered” era, which it is not quite.
Still, that non-descript cover is strangely menacing, right? I think I figured out it is because it reminds me of the cover of Alive.
Some Highlights: The book actually retells the stories of 10 historical unsolved missing persons cases, ranging from the most famous to the too-obscure-for-Wikipedia, dating from 1854 to 1982. Continue reading