In 1948, a probate investigator named William V. Morrison was doing routine work in Texas when an elderly man named Joe Hines told him something impossible: Billy the Kid had never died in 1881….
In the summer of 1950, the governor of New Mexico sat in his office in Santa Fe, preparing for a visitor who had traveled more than seven hundred miles to see him. Thomas J. Mabry had announced the meeting publicly, and the press had gathered, sensing the oddity of what was about to take place. … Read more
On September 22, 1776, a 21-year-old schoolteacher named Nathan Hale was marched to a tree in New York City and fitted with a noose. He had volunteered to spy behind British lines with no…
On September 22, 1776, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher named Nathan Hale was led to a tree in New York City, a rope wrapped around his neck. He had volunteered for a mission to spy behind British lines. He had no training, no cover story, and no backup plan. He walked straight into enemy territory disguised as … Read more
On March 31, 1933, Congress passed a law to put a quarter of a million unemployed young men into the woods with axes—and no camps, no officers, and no plan existed yet. The deadline was July 1….
A wooded bluff in Illinois. A crew of young men in army-surplus work clothes, axes on their shoulders. And behind them, rising out of the ground, the stone walls and timber frame of a lodge they had cleared the land for themselves. On the 31st of March 1933, Congress passed the law that would let … Read more
In 1859, Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Hattie Bailey appeared in the household of the Witmore family, yet no bill of sale, no transfer document, and no record of purchase could explain…
The fire broke out on the night of December 10th, 1859, and by the time the Montgomery Fire Company arrived, the storage building on the Witmore estate was already lost. Neighbors came to help contain the blaze, and in the confusion of that emergency, several people later reported seeing Hattie Bailey attempting to flee the … Read more
On January 8, 1985, five climbers on Aconcagua spotted feathers between rocks at 5,300 meters. They assumed a dead condor. Instead, they found a small human skull, and beneath it, a boy wrapped in…
At 5,300 meters on Mount Aconcagua, a climber spotted something fluttering among the rocks. He assumed it was a dead condor and moved closer. It was not a bird. It was the small skull of a human being—a boy of about seven, wrapped in cloth, frozen in the mountain for five hundred years, offered as … Read more
In the summer of 1374, a town on the Rhine passed an ordinance banning pointed shoes, because the people filling its streets in rings, hands linked, d…
In the summer of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked out of her house on a narrow street in Strasbourg and began to dance. No music played. No one danced with her. She simply started in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street, and she did not stop. Her husband … Read more
On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer led roughly 210 men of the 7th Cavalry toward a massive Lakota and Cheyenne village along the Little Bighorn River, ignoring scouts who warned him the…
The two-day-old dead lay swollen and black under the June sun, and the men of General Alfred Terry’s column could smell them long before they saw them. Lieutenant James Bradley, one of the first scouts to reach the ridge above the Little Bighorn River, wrote afterward that it was like nothing he had ever encountered. … Read more
In March 1921, Martha Whitlock left her small log home near Newport, Tennessee, telling a neighbor she was walking to a church meeting. She carried a cloth purse and wore a gray wool coat. She…
The muffled scream came from somewhere deep in the trees, and Ruth Pendleton froze on the path. It was the evening of March 31st, 1921, and the moon had barely begun to rise, casting almost no light through the thick woods of East Tennessee. The sound was brief, cut off as suddenly as it had … Read more
In March 1945, a young German woman who had once led the League of German Girls in her town parachuted into enemy territory as part of a Nazi guerrilla unit called the Werewolves. Their mission,…
The shot came from inside the house, and for a moment the night went still. Ilse H. stood outside, waiting to lead the team out of Aachen, when the report of the pistol told her the deed was done. Then came the shouting, the scramble, the desperate flight through the dark streets toward the edge … Read more
In September 1932, a Catholic priest trained by the Vatican to investigate demonic possession arrived at a remote farm in Romania’s Apuseni Mountains to perform what he believed would be his…
In the autumn of 1932, a Catholic priest entered a farmhouse in the mountains of northern Romania to perform what he believed would be his forty-seventh exorcism. He emerged three nights later carrying a leather satchel of notes, a broken rosary, and the certainty that everything he had been taught about God, about evil, and … Read more