Some mysteries fade because people stop caring.
Others become alienated as they sit on the Internet.
Crazy video. Missing plane. To the child whom no one could name for 65 years. A password that reaches half a century. These are cases that are not kept neatly in the police archives. They delve into forums, Reddit threads, YouTube timelines, old message boards, and late-night searches that start with one question and end with ten more three hours later.
This is what makes internet rabbit holes so addictive. You don’t just read what happened. You watch thousands of strangers trying to figure things out that still don’t fit.
Some of the secrets below have not been officially revealed. Some are controversial. Some have partial answers, which only make the remaining gaps more disturbing. But they all have one thing in common: the internet never lets them go.
1. Elisa Lam and the elevator video
On January 31, 2013, a Canadian student named Elisa Lam disappeared while staying at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Three weeks later, guests began to complain about low water pressure and the strange taste of the tap water. Hotel staff found his body in one of the water tanks on the roof. His death was accidental drowning.
The case went global when police released elevator surveillance footage from the night she disappeared, showing her pressing several floor buttons, hiding in elevator corners and appearing to gesture to someone outside the frame.
The footage was timestamped, which the LAPD attributed to a technical issue. A 2021 Netflix documentary covered the case. The community at r/ElisaLam and r/UnresolvedMysteries has never completely moved away from footage.
2. Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board and disappeared 38 minutes after takeoff. Radar data showed the plane turned back, crossed Peninsular Malaysia and flew south over the Indian Ocean for hours after contact was lost.
Satellite data indicated it had gone down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, but an initial search yielded no results. Over the years, wreckage washed ashore on islands in the western Indian Ocean, confirming the general area.
Updated deep sea search Ocean Infinity In 2025, it covered 7,571 square kilometers of seabed and found nothing. On March 8, 2026, Malaysian authorities told the families that the search had yielded no results. The plane, the 239 people on board and the explanation of what happened are still missing.
3. Jon Benet Ramsey
Six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado on December 26, 1996.
Her father found her body hours after her parents called the police to report the kidnapping ransom. The note is one of the most scrutinized documents in the history of true crime: scribbled on paper from a notepad at home, the sum demanded almost exactly matches John Ramsey’s final bonus, and it’s an unusually long 2.5 pages.
A grand jury voted to indict both parents in 1999; the district attorney refused to sign it on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. Boulder police announced new DNA testing on dozens of items from the case in 2024 and 2025, using technology that didn’t exist at the time.
As of 2026, nearly thirty years after his death, no one has been charged.
4. Zodiac Killer
Between 1968 and 1969, the serial killer who operated in Northern California confirmed at least five murders, sent mocking letters to Bay Area newspapers and included passwords that he claimed contained his identity. He was never caught.
The 340-character code sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 remained unsolved for 51 years. A team of three amateur codebreakers led by a software developer in December 2020 David Oranchak cracked it using a special algorithm that worked on 650,000 variations of the ciphertext. The decrypted message reads: “I hope you have a lot of fun catching me.”
The identity of the constellation remains unknown. Its other ciphers have not been fully solved. The case has one of the most active research communities on the Internet, with new dubious theories regularly appearing in subreddits and dedicated forums.
5. DB Cooper
On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper bought a ticket for Northwest Eastern flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, handed over a note claiming to contain a bomb, demanded $200,000, refueled the plane, and then jumped off the back stairs in the night northwest. Never found.
In 1980, a bundle of ransom money was found on the banks of a tributary of the Columbia River. A partial refund explained something about where it was without explaining what happened to the person who took it.
The FBI conducted an active investigation for 45 years before it was discontinued in 2016. It remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in US commercial aviation history. r/dbcooper is continuing its investigation decades after the FBI dropped its official investigation.
6. Somerton Man
On December 1, 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide, Australia. Her clothing tags have been removed. His fingerprints did not match any records. He had no ID. In a hidden pocket of his trousers was a small folded piece of paper with the Persian words “Tamam Shud” written on it, torn from a rare edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
A copy of that book was later found nearby, containing a phone number and a handwritten code that has never been deciphered. In 2022, University of Adelaide Professor Derek Abbott, working with American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, proposed identifying the man as Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne.
South Australian police have described the find as cautiously optimistic, but have not officially confirmed it. The cause of death has not been determined.
7. Dyatlov Pass incident
In January 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers skied north of the Ural Mountains and never returned. Search teams found their tents cut from the inside in February.
The hikers had fled the freezing temperatures in their pajamas. Their bodies were recovered intermittently over the following weeks, some with catastrophic internal injuries but no external wounds and one missing its tongue.
Soviet investigators concluded that the deaths were caused by an “unknown compelling force” and closed the case. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the case was partially declassified and created one of the most active mystery communities on the Internet. Russian authorities have officially attributed the deaths to an avalanche in 2021, but the finding has been challenged by researchers who note that the intact snow in the tent is inconsistent with that explanation. r/dyatlovpass is still running.
8. Crimes of Delphi
On February 13, 2017, two teenage girls named Abby Williams and Libby German went on a hike near Delphi, Indiana and never came home. Their bodies were found the next day.
Before Libby disappeared, she captured images and audio recordings of the man police believe killed them. Police released a grainy clip of a figure walking on a trail bridge and audio of a man saying “down the hill.” The case went cold for five years until Richard Allen, a local pharmacist, was arrested in 2022. He was convicted on all four counts in November 2024 and sentenced to 130 years in prison. His lawyers immediately appealed, arguing that his confession was coerced into solitary confinement and that exculpatory evidence was withheld from the jury.
The online community organized around this case is one of the most active in true crime and follows the appeal in real time.
9. Gilgo Beach murders
In December 2010, the remains of multiple women were discovered along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach on Long Island. When investigators finished searching the area, they found the remains of ten or eleven people, most of them women who advertised online escort services.
The pattern suggested a single, organized killer. The case went cold for more than a decade, and the Long Island Serial Killer became one of the most hotly debated cases on true crime forums in the 2010s.
In July 2023, New York City architect Rex Heuermann was arrested and charged with three counts of murder. The charges were extended to 2024 as prosecutors collected new DNA evidence: a fourth in January, two more in June and a seventh in December, bringing the total to seven indicted murders spanning 1993-2011.
On April 8, 2026, Heuermann pleaded guilty to all seven murders. At the same hearing, he admitted to an eighth murder – that of Karen Vergata – for which he was not formally charged as part of a plea deal.
Several of the other victims found in the area have not been identified, and whether Heuermann is responsible for all of the deaths along Ocean Parkway — or just some of them — has not been determined. These questions and the cold case speculation that preceded the arrest are what society is still building around the case.
10. The Boy in the Box
In February 1957, a child’s body was found in a cardboard box in a wooded area northeast of Philadelphia. The boy was between four and six years old, had been beaten and showed signs of malnutrition. No one has reported him missing. Police distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers and interviewed thousands of people in the region. Nothing authenticated.
For 65 years, he was known only as America’s Unknown Child, and the case established one of the longest-running cold case communities in true crime. In 2022, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office announced that genealogical DNA analysis identified the boy as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born in 1953. His family ties have been traced through DNA, but investigators have not publicly named any living relatives or explained how he came to be in the field. His killer has never been identified. The murder remains open.
Final thoughts
Maybe that’s the real charm of these rabbit holes.
It’s not just the secret itself. Buried beneath old footage, eyewitness accounts, archived forum posts, Reddit comments, court documents and half-forgotten local memorabilia is the feeling that there might be a detail that everyone else is missing.
Of course, most people who carry these conditions will not resolve them. The late-night theme probably won’t find the missing plane or name the killer until decades later.
But unsolved mysteries do a strange thing to the mind. They keep us looking for examples. They make us question the official answers. They remind us how much life can be changed by one missing piece of information.
And maybe that’s why people keep coming back to them.
Not because everything has a neat ending waiting at the bottom of the page, but because the unanswered parts remain alive. They leave room for doubt, sadness, obsession, hope, and that anxious little thought that keeps every rabbit hole open:
If someone, somewhere, still knows something?
