Mysteries at Bedtime

The disappearance of Brandon Lawson is one of the most haunting missing-persons cases of the modern age, and it is captured, in part, on a chilling 911 call. In August 2013, the 26-year-old father ran out of petrol on a dark rural road in Texas. He phoned his brother for help, then called 911, breathless and terrified, saying men were chasing him and that he'd run out into a field. He begged the o...

The Ilkley Moor alien case is one of Britain's most famous UFO photographs. In December 1987, a retired police officer photographed a small green figure on a Yorkshire moor, then found his compass reversed and an hour of time missing. Experts examined the photo and could not prove it a fake. We lay out the evidence, the sceptics' case, and why, nearly 40 years on, no one can explain it. Settle in,...

The disappearance of Steven Koecher in December 2009 is one of the most quietly baffling vanishings of the modern age, and more than sixteen years later, not a single trace of him has ever been found. Steven Koecher was a devout and much-loved 30-year-old journalist from Utah who, in the days before he disappeared, made a series of long and secret road trips that he explained to no one. On a sunny...

The disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon in April 2014 is one of the most haunting and hotly debated mysteries of the modern age, and more than a decade later, no one agrees on what really happened. The two young Dutch women, best friends near the end of the trip of a lifetime, set out on a popular jungle trail near Boquete, Panama, on a bright afternoon. They photographed themselves sm...

The mystery of Kaspar Hauser has haunted Europe for nearly 200 years, and it began on a spring afternoon in 1828 when a bewildered teenage boy appeared in the streets of Nuremberg, barely able to speak. He carried two letters and a single strange request: he wanted to be a cavalryman, like his father. He could not use a candle without burning himself. He recoiled from meat and drank only water. An...

The Zodiac Killer ciphers are among the most famous unsolved codes in the world, and after more than fifty years, two of them have still never been cracked. Between 1969 and 1970, the unidentified serial killer who called himself the Zodiac sent four coded messages to San Francisco newspapers, each a block of strange symbols mixing letters, numbers, and astrological signs. He promised that his cod...

The Solway Firth Spaceman is one of the most famous unexplained photographs in British history, and after more than sixty years, people are still arguing about what it shows. On the afternoon of the 23rd of May 1964, a Carlisle firefighter named Jim Templeton took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway Firth in Cumberland, England. It was a...

Shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday the 15th of November 1966, in the small Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the county of Mason, two young married couples in a black 1957 Chevrolet drove out along State Route 62 to see what there was to see at the abandoned munitions plant seven miles north of town. The plant had been decommissioned since the end of the Second Wor...

At approximately 11 o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 11th of October 1973, two men walked into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in the small Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told the sheriff on duty that a few hours earlier, on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, they had been abducted by aliens. The older of the two men was Charles Hickson. He was 42 years old. He was a...

On the evening of Monday the 15th of August 1977, in a field outside the small town of Delaware, Ohio, a radio telescope the size of three football fields was listening to the sky. There were no astronomers present. The telescope could not be steered. It sat on the ground, pointed straight up, and let the rotation of the Earth do its work for it. As the planet turned, patches of the night sky drif...

At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a loca...

On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to...

On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would re...

A young father in Vermont was changing his eighteen-month-old son's nappy when the little boy looked up at him and said something that no toddler should be able to say. Daddy, when I was your age, I used to change your nappies. His father searched his face for a smile. There was none. The little boy looked back at him with the calm certainty of a child stating a fact. And the strange thing was, hi...

High on a hillside above the River Esk in Cumbria stands one of the oldest occupied houses in England. Muncaster Castle has been home to the Pennington family for over 800 years. A king once sheltered here after losing his throne. A cruel jester named Tom Fool once stalked its grounds. A young carpenter was beheaded in its stables. A housemaid was murdered on the road outside its main gate. And in...

Hello legends, Jack here, host of Mysteries at Bedtime . I'm currently travelling to the US because my other show, One Minute Remaining , was lucky enough to be nominated for an award. I’ll be back very soon, but while I’m away, I’m diving into the vault to bring you some fascinating and mysterious stories from Crime at Bedtime . These are stories focused on people who have vanished under mysterio...

Hello legends, Jack here, host of Mysteries at Bedtime . I'm currently travelling to the US because my other show, One Minute Remaining , was lucky enough to be nominated for an award. I’ll be back very soon, but while I’m away, I’m diving into the vault to bring you some fascinating and mysterious stories from Crime at Bedtime . These are stories focused on people who have vanished under mysterio...

On a quiet April night in 1991, 20-year-old Angela Hammond made a routine call to her fiancé from a payphone in the small town of Clinton, Missouri. She was four months pregnant, cheerful, and had just dropped a friend home. But what happened next would spark one of the most haunting and baffling missing persons cases in American history. While on the phone, Angie suddenly became alarmed by a stra...

In June 2025, a 19 year old woman in Lyon, France, was placed into a medically induced coma. For the next three weeks, she lay still in a hospital bed, kept alive by machines while her body healed. But inside her mind, something extraordinary was happening. Clélia Verdier was falling in love. She was getting married. She was giving birth to triplets she named Mila, Maïlée, and Miles. She was buryi...

On the afternoon of Saturday 3 May 2014, neighbours in the exclusive gated community of Reynolds Great Waters at Lake Oconee, Georgia, gathered for a Kentucky Derby watch party. Two of the invited guests never arrived. Three days later, a neighbour found 88 year old Russell Dermond's decapitated body in the garage of his million dollar lakefront home. His head was missing. His 87 year old wife Shi...

Michele Diane "Shelly" Miscavige was once one of the most powerful women in the Church of Scientology—the wife of its leader, David Miscavige, and a commanding figure within the organisation's elite Sea Org division. But in August 2005, Shelly vanished from public view following a reported confrontation with her husband. For years, no one outside Scientology's inner circle saw or heard from her. H...

January 12, 1981. A dog wandered into the woods north of Houston and returned home carrying a decomposed human arm. Search parties found two bodies. A young man, bound and beaten to death. A young woman, strangled and posed in prayer. For 40 years, they remained unidentified. Buried in anonymous graves. Forgotten. Until genetic genealogy finally gave them their names: Harold Dean Clouse Junior, 21...

February 27, 2026. Albuquerque, New Mexico. Retired Air Force Major General William McCasland left his home between 11:10am and 12:04pm. He took his wallet, hiking boots, a .38-calibre revolver, and a red backpack. He left behind his phone, glasses, and wearable devices. Seventeen days later, despite helicopters, drones, search dogs, and 700 homes canvassed, there was no trace of him. But McCaslan...

On a warm June evening in 1768, a 69-year-old paralysed man named Owen Parfitt sat outside his sister's cottage in Shepton Mallet, England, dressed in his nightshirt and propped up on his folded greatcoat. Just a dozen yards away, farm workers laboured in full view of the porch. Around 7 PM, Owen's elderly sister Mary and a young neighbour, Susannah Snook, went inside to fetch him before an approa...

In 2016, a 13-year-old genius named Max Loughan went viral with an extraordinary claim: CERN destroyed our universe. Not with an explosion—but by shifting us all into a parallel reality. When scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider smashed particles together in 2012 and discovered the Higgs boson, Max believed the sheer energy tore a hole in spacetime, sliding humanity into a neighbouring unive...