Whether it’s a spooky disappearance or a hidden identity, an event with hundreds of different explanations or none at all, there is an endless fascination with historical mysteries that remain unsolved years or even centuries later. We've rounded up the most enticing and surprising mysteries from history that may never be conclusively solved – from deserted cities to unbreakable codes.
Read on to dive into some of the most enigmatic episodes in world history...
Located on an island just off the eastern coast of present-day North Carolina in the United States, the Roanoke Colony was supposed to be the first permanent English settlement in the New World. It was founded in 1585, but within two years the first attempt at establishing a colony had been abandoned and the second was failing miserably.
Desperate, the governor John White travelled to England in 1587 to plead for supplies, and did not return until 1590. When he finally made it back to Roanoke he was shocked by what he found: nothing. No sign of the 117 colonists, including his daughter and granddaughter.
White found no bodies, no graves and no clear sign of what had happened. The only clues were the letters 'CRO' carved onto a tree and 'CROATOAN' on a fencepost. Had the colonists been attacked by a Native American raiding party or Spanish rivals, or had they left Roanoke? Had they tried to sail back to England (and been lost at sea) or move inland?
Croatoan Island was not far away, so the cryptic carvings may have been intended as a note to let White know the colonists were heading to live with the native Croatan tribe. Storms hindered search efforts and later search parties found nothing, so the colony became truly lost.
The merchant brigantine Mary Celeste left New York in early November 1872, bound for Genoa in Italy with more than 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol. On board were 10 people: the captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their infant daughter and a seven-strong crew. On 5 December another ship, the Dei Gratia, spotted it drifting in the Atlantic near the Azores with its sails partially set.
Closer inspection revealed that the Mary Celeste was completely abandoned. The cargo and crew’s belongings were untouched and there was plenty of food, but one lifeboat and all the people were missing. It had clearly been deserted in a hurry.
An official investigation couldn’t determine what befell the Mary Celeste, and the story caused quite a stir. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story inspired by the mystery, in which a vengeful former slave killed those on board.
This was pure fiction, and real-life theories have ranged from mutiny or piracy (despite no evidence of violence) to a waterspout (a tornado at sea). There was some water in the hold and one of the ship's pumps was disassembled, suggesting that Briggs may (incorrectly) have feared that his vessel was not seaworthy. Or he may have smelled gases leaking from the alcohol and worried that an explosion was imminent.
One of the most notorious serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper brutally killed at least five women and mutilated their bodies. The killings, from 31 August to 9 November 1888, spread fear and suspicion through the East End of Victorian London, and the police seemed powerless to stop 'the Whitechapel Murderer' or 'Leather Apron', as he was known in the press.
His more evocative moniker came from letters sent to the police, purportedly from the killer. The identity of Jack the Ripper has been a topic of fierce speculation since, with dozens of names put forward.
Suspects include Montague Druitt, a barrister who was found dead shortly after the last murder, the famous artist Walter Sickert and even one of Queen Victoria’s grandsons. Due to the barbarity of the killings, some suggest that Jack may have been a surgeon or butcher.
Or even a barber. In 2025, news stories emerged insisting the case was closed, as DNA evidence from a shawl belonging to one of the victims pointed at Aaron Kosminski as the culprit. The Polish barber had been a person of interest to the police at the time, but not everyone is convinced by the new findings, so the Ripperologists’ work continues.
There are a number of high-profile tombs that continue to escape detection, including the final resting places of Alexander the Great, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Perhaps no one, though, went to such extreme measures to rest in peace as Genghis Khan, the founder of the vast, continent-spanning Mongol Empire, who died in August 1227 while on campaign. His body was brought back to his homeland and that’s as much as is known – that his tomb is in Mongolia somewhere.
Love this? Follow us on Facebook for travel inspiration and more
Keeping to Mongol tradition, Genghis Khan’s burial site was unmarked – the complete opposite of pharaohs and their pyramids. Some stories claim that the soldiers of the funeral procession killed everyone they passed, the slaves who built the tomb and then themselves to keep the location a secret for all time.
It has also been claimed that a river was diverted to sink the tomb, or that 1,000 horses trampled the ground to remove any evidence. Today, the search centres on the Burkhan Khaldun mountain, but most Mongolians are happy for their honoured leader to be left alone.
Perhaps the most mysterious of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon appeared in many ancient Roman and Greek texts, but there's no definitive evidence they existed at all. If they were real, it would have been a work of extraordinary engineering to keep raised gardens alive in the deserts of what is now Iraq. The story goes that Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II created the gardens around 600 BC to cheer up his homesick wife, who missed the greenery of her homeland in modern-day Iran.
At best guess, the Hanging Gardens may have comprised a series of gardens set upon ascending terraces populated with exotic plants, which might have given the impression of a verdant mountain. These gardens might have been watered by a system of pumps and pipes connected to the Euphrates River.
Except, are we looking in the wrong place? It has been theorised that the Hanging Gardens were real, but not in Babylon (pictured). Instead, might they have been created by the Assyrian king Sennacherib around a century later for his palace at Nineveh, several hundred miles to the north on the Tigris River?
A hummingbird, a monkey, a whale, a condor, a dog and a spider: these are just some of the mighty geoglyphs etched into the landscape of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Along with this menagerie of animals, the world-famous Nazca Lines include humans, plants and vast geometric shapes.
Most are around 2,000 years old, although some may be much older, and were made by the Nazca people by removing reddish surface stones to reveal the lighter soil underneath. Since this extremely arid area gets next to no rain or wind, the formations have been protected from the ravages of erosion.
There are hundreds of individual Nazca Line drawings, and new ones are still being found. But they can't easily be seen from ground level and their scale and ingenuity is best appreciated from above. As such, it was only with the advent of commercial flight in the 1930s that the Nazca Lines gained widespread attention.
This makes their original purpose tricky to determine. Early theories wondered if they served some astronomical purpose, but current thought suggests that they were used in rituals, perhaps to bring water to crops. After all, they were meant to be seen by the gods up in the heavens.
Shortly after 7am on 30 June 1908, there was an earth-shaking explosion in central Siberia, Russia, with an estimated force 1,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It flattened 500,000 acres, charred millions of trees and caused severe rumblings in the nearest town 40 miles (64km) away. The explosion brightened the night skies and its effects were picked up on seismographs as far away as Britain. Since no one knew what caused the blast, it was given the rather innocuous name, 'the Tunguska event'.
The inaccessibility of the region combined with years of political chaos in Russia meant that no investigation was carried out until the late-1920s. Even after all that time, little was growing in the area. Yet researchers did not find an impact crater, so it is now thought that the blast must have happened several miles above the ground.
There have been a number of theories put forward, though some of them sound like science fiction, such as a collision of matter and antimatter or the passage of a primordial black hole. Currently, the leading hypothesis is that the Tunguska event was caused by a huge celestial object, such as an asteroid, exploding in the atmosphere.
Around AD 500, the city of Teotihuacán, some 30 miles (48km) north of Mexico City, was one of the great metropolises of the world. It housed as many as 200,000 people, and boasted sophisticated urban planning, irrigation systems and monumental architecture. The Pyramid of the Sun (pictured), at 216 feet (66m) high with a base of 720 by 760 feet (230m by 220m), is one of the largest pyramids in Mesoamerica.
By the 700s, however, Teotihuacán was abandoned. What happened to the civilisation that built it – and who exactly they were in the first place – remains unknown.
We don’t even know the original name of the city. It was the Aztecs, who showed up much later, that named it Teotihuacán, meaning 'the place where gods were created' in Nahuatl. Soil erosion, deforestation and drought might have forced people away, since they could no longer grow enough food to sustain the city's vast numbers.
Others theorise that the city may have been attacked by rivals, since it was relatively unfortified. It’s also possible that there was a revolt from within. Evidence of a large fire suggests that something violent took place, which may have made Teotihuacán unliveable.
It is well-known that the first people to climb the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, were the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and the Nepali-Indian Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. They reached the summit and enshrined their names in the history books on 29 May 1953.
But one question has bugged the mountaineering community ever since: what if they weren’t the first? Nearly three decades earlier, in 1924, the British pair George Mallory and Andrew Irvine (pictured) attempted an ascent, but disappeared a few hundred metres from the top.
In 1999, the frozen body of Mallory was discovered on the mountain. It appeared that he had suffered a fall that may have killed him quickly or left him badly injured. But the photo of his wife, which he had pledged to leave at the summit, was not on the body.
This was hardly conclusive evidence, and it would be another 25 years before there was any sign of Irvine. In 2024, his foot, still inside its boot, was found. The missing piece of the puzzle, however, is the camera that they were carrying: if found, and the film developed, it might well show the two men on the summit.
There is so much that is not known about the Voynich Manuscript. The enigmatic codex’s 240 vellum pages are filled with an unknown script that has yet to be deciphered, alongside surreal illustrations of unidentifiable flowers, mythical creatures, floating castles and more.
What the naked women bathing in green liquid are meant to mean is anyone’s guess. We don’t know who created the codex (probably in the early 15th century), or why they wrote a book that no one could read. The name Voynich comes from a Polish-Lithuanian rare book seller called Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912.
If the illustrations of the Voynich Manuscript offer any clues, then it seems to be scientific in nature. It might discuss the medical properties of plants, astrology and astronomy, or it might be linked to alchemy. Or the whole thing could be a hoax, perpetrated by Voynich himself.
All attempts to read the text have failed; we’re not even sure if it’s a long-dead language, a secret code or gibberish. Even World War II codebreakers were stumped. Yale University, which currently holds the codex, has put the whole thing online in the hopes that someone, someday, will crack it.
In 1483, King Edward IV of England died. But instead of the crown passing to his 12-year-old son, proclaimed as Edward V, it was the young boy’s uncle who soon assumed the throne as Richard III – first as lord protector and then as king. Edward V and his younger brother were confined to the Tower of London and, that summer, vanished.
Rumours quickly spread that the so-called 'princes in the Tower' had been murdered by their uncle. This certainly helped Richard’s enemies paint him as a villain, including Henry Tudor, who would seize the throne two years later.
The Tudors successfully tarnished Richard’s reputation for generations to come, and the matter seemed closed when, in 1674, the skeletons of two children were discovered in a wooden chest underneath a staircase in the Tower. But it has never been conclusively proven that these bones belonged to the princes, and there remains a possibility that they were smuggled to safety.
And if they were killed, there are other suspects. Even Henry Tudor, or perhaps even his mother, had reason to send an assassin, as Edward V would be a clear threat to his own claim to the throne. Most historians are comfortable blaming Richard, but the mystery endures.
On 24 November 1971, a man in his mid-40s, giving his name as Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. After take-off, he handed an attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded $200,000 (about $1.5 million today) and four parachutes.
The hijacker allowed the plane to land and let the passengers and some of the crew off while his ransom was handed over, before ordering the pilot to take off again and head for Mexico. On the way, however, he jumped from the plane using one of the parachutes – and was never seen again.
There was a huge manhunt for DB Cooper, as he was misnamed in the press, and the FBI investigation, dubbed NORJACK (Northwest Hijacking), went through 800 suspects in the next five years. Nothing came of it. The only significant lead was DNA from Cooper's tie and the discovery of some of the ransom money (pictured).
Cooper may have perished during the jump – the weather conditions were hazardous – but that hasn’t stopped the speculation. Just a few months later a man named Richard McCoy Jr carried out an eerily similar hijacking, except that it failed and he was arrested. He was long ago dismissed as a suspect, but his children remain convinced that he was the real DB Cooper.
The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Amelia Earhart was one of the most famous aviators in the world. As well as that 1932 feat, she broke numerous altitude, speed and distance records; went on speaking tours and wrote books; and co-founded an organisation, the Ninety-Nines, to get women into flying.
Today, however, she is best known for her disappearance while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. In 1937 at the age of 39, she set off from California with her navigator, Fred Noonan. A month later, she had travelled 22,000 miles (35,000km) and reached Lae in New Guinea.
During the next leg to the tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, Earhart got into trouble despite being in intermittent contact with a US Coast Guard ship, the Itasca. Her last message, when running out of fuel and desperately trying to find land, was, "We are running north and south." A colossal search-and-rescue operation was immediately launched, but it failed to find any sign of Earhart, Noonan or the plane.
She was officially declared dead in January 1939. It seems likely that she crashed into the sea, but it has been suggested that she did make it to land, perhaps Nikumaroro Island in modern-day Kiribati. A more outlandish theory claims that she was captured by the Japanese.
The 1883 novel Treasure Island, by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, was responsible for popularising many of our prevailing images of piracy, including peg-legged buccaneers with parrots on their shoulders, the dreaded black spot and the notion of burying treasure on remote tropical islands. The Caribbean was not actually full of pirates drawing up maps where 'X' marked the spot. But there is a real legend that's kept treasure-hunters busy: the treasure of French pirate Olivier Levasseur, better known as 'La Buse' ('The Buzzard').
The story goes that as the Buzzard was being taken to the gallows in 1730, he threw his necklace onto the ground yelling, "My treasure to he who can understand!" Inside the necklace was a 17-line cryptogram (pictured) consisting of obscure symbols. If decoded, it would reveal the location of Levasseur’s hoard, which some claim to be worth vast sums.
The British Museum has verified that the parchment dates from the 18th century, but that doesn't mean the treasure is real. Was the whole thing a later invention? The hunt goes on, focussed on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.
With its earliest works dating back 5,000 years, the Neolithic monument of Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in England, is a wonder of ancient engineering. The great sarsen stones that form the inner horseshoe and outer ring weigh around 25 tonnes each. The smaller bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, some 180 miles (290km) away.
How they were transported and then raised into position with such precision remains a matter of debate. The 12th-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth thought he had the answer when he wrote that the stones were moved by the wizard Merlin.
The other mystery surrounding the world-famous monument is what it was used for. Why was such effort put into building it? It was clearly a place of huge importance, perhaps a centre for the Britons living in the area where they could meet, trade or, most likely, perform rituals and ceremonies. Bones and cremations found at the site suggest that Stonehenge was a burial place, while the fact that the sun aligns with the monolithic Heel Stone on the summer and winter solstices has fuelled the belief that it must hold astronomical significance.
Read on to discover the world weather events that changed the course of history