On December 11, 2015, this unidentified man was filmed by CCTV leaving the Manchester Piccadilly railway station in England.
A day later, his body was discovered near the "Indian's Head" rock feature overlooking a remote reservoir in Saddleworth Moor.
The man had no identification, and other than his train tickets, he was carrying nothing besides an empty vial of Strychnine.
It was believed that he swallowed the poison to commit suicide and likely had some tie to the location where he was found.
When reports of the mysterious man’s death were made public, many speculated that he was involved in a 1949 plane crash...
...in which a British European Airways Douglas DC-3 impacted Indian’s Head in a fog, killing 24 and leaving 8 survivors.
That potential lead, however, turned up no clues, and other attempts to link him to missing persons and suspected spies failed.
The case went cold for a year until police focused on Urdu writing found on the vial and a metal plate in the man’s leg.
Both items likely came from Pakistan, and the investigation turned to combing through flights that had arrived from the country.
By comparing passport photos to the deceased man, police were finally able to identify him as David Lytton in early 2017.
Lytton, formerly known as David Lautenberg, was a 67-year-old man from London who had been retired in Pakistan for 10 years.
Despite his identification, the reasons for which Lytton traveled to Saddleworth Moor to end his life remain a mystery...
Early on August 31, 2004, employees at a Richmond Hill, Georgia, Burger King found an unconscious man behind the dumpster.
He was naked and sunburned and depressions in his skull appeared to indicate that he had suffered severe blunt force trauma.
The man possessed no photo identity documents, and police recorded his name at the hospital as “Burger King Doe.”
When he finally woke up two weeks later, he had no memory of his past, other than that he believed his first name was “Benjaman.”
Further adding to the mystery, the man had been suffering from advanced cataracts that rendered him partially blind...
...and following surgery to restore his eyesight, he realized that he was nearly 20 years older than he previously thought.
Listed as the only missing person the FBI knew where to find, Benjaman took the surname Kyle and referred to himself as BK.
Despite appearing on TV, featuring in a documentary, and taking part in a Reddit AMA, he remained unidentified for a decade.
It wouldn’t be until 2015 that a genetic detective would discover that BK’s real name was William Burgess Powell...
...a man born in Indiana who disappeared from his family in 1976 after abandoning his car and leaving all of his belongings behind.
A paper-trail of odd jobs traced Powell to Boulder and Denver, Colorado, but records of his existence dry up after 1983.
It is still not known what Powell was doing in the years before he was found or how he later ended up behind the Burger King...
On December 24, 2010, the body of Lori Erica Ruff was found in her car parked in the driveway of the Ruff family’s Texas home.
She had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and left behind a note for her husband and a sealed letter for her daughter.
The Ruff family had always had reservations about Lori, who behaved erratically and refused to speak about her history.
That her suicide note contained only "ramblings from a clearly disturbed person" did little to assuage their doubts.
After her funeral, the Ruffs found a box hidden in her closet that suggested “Lori” had been living under a stolen identity...
...basing her life on the birth certificate of a 2-year-old girl killed in a Washington state house fire in 1988.
It is believed that Lori moved to Idaho and used the document to legally change her name and start her mysterious new life.
Scribblings in the box included "North Hollywood police", "402 months", and "Ben Perkins," but offered no clue to her past.
Lori’s story generated intense public speculation that she was running away from a crime or had escaped a religious cult.
Her true origins remained a mystery until 2016, when she was identified using forensic DNA genealogy as Kimberly McLean.
McLean ran away from home in 1986 when she was 18 to escape a turbulent family, but it is unclear why she needed a new identity.
Where she was and what she was doing between her disappearance and arrival in Texas in 1988 remain almost entirely unknown...
On April 27, 1964, one-day-old Paul Fronczak was stolen from his parents and snuck out of a Chicago hospital by an unknown woman.
His whereabouts were a mystery until the shock discovery of a toddler of a similar appearance a year later in New Jersey.
Although the identity of the abandoned child could not be established scientifically, the Fronczaks were convinced he was Paul.
The FBI returned the child to the family, and he was raised as their own until he failed to resemble the Fronczaks as he grew.
It eventually became apparent to the Fronczaks that “Paul” was an entirely different and unidentified child...
...a suspicion that was eventually confirmed by DNA testing in 2012, opening a second and entirely new mystery.
It took several years for Paul to finally be identified as Jack, a child who had vanished along with his twin sister Jill.
Jack’s biological parents had since died, leaving them unable to shed any light on his early history or why he was abandoned.
Even stranger, it is still not known why Jack was left alone in his stroller while no trace of Jill was ever found.
As for the real Paul Fronczak, his FBI case has since been reopened and he is once again a missing person...
On April 18, 1943, four local boys in Hagley Wood, England discovered an unusual wych elm tree with a hollow trunk...
...and after climbing the tree to peer down into the void, they spotted what appeared to be a human skull with hair.
The boys reported the gruesome find to police, who uncovered a complete skeleton stuffed inside of the tree.
It was determined that the victim was female, and not far away were also the remains of a hand and a gold wedding ring.
Investigators believed she died from suffocation and had been dead for at least 18 months, but were unable to identify her.
With WWII raging, the number of missing people reported to police was overwhelming, and no one came the claim the body.
A year later, this unsettling graffiti appeared on the Hagley Obelisk near to the tree where the woman was discovered...
...asking the eerie question, “Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?” despite the victim never being publicly called that name.
The location of her body is presently unknown and the autopsy from the investigation has long since vanished...
...making the identity of the mysterious woman a subject of intense intrigue amid rumor of witchcraft and ritual sacrifice.
The real story of her death, however, may be even more fascinating and tied to a secret Nazi spy mission during WWII...
...after declassified British intelligence linked a German singer and movie actress, Clara Bauerle, to a captured Nazi agent.
The agent’s file contained a photo of Beurle, who allegedly parachuted into England under the codename Clarabella.
It is now thought that she may have been captured, killed, and hidden in a cover-up to prevent a local wartime panic...