Disappearances are freaky all by themselves.
When cops and investigators can't solve the cases, though, the disappearances get even
scarier.
These unsolved mysteries will haunt you like you can't imagine.
Don't watch alone.
Maura Murray
The disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004 is long, complicated, and baffling.
It's been covered in length by E! News as well as in a six-part Oxygen documentary series
and an ongoing podcast called Missing Maura Murray, which has over 100 episodes as of
September 2018.
The short version is this.
21-year-old nursing student Maura Murray emailed her professors at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst that she would be missing class due to a death in her family.
This was a lie.
She emailed her boyfriend, packed a bag, took $280 out of an ATM, spent $40 of that at a
liquor store and started driving.
Between 7 and 7:30 p.m., Murray skidded off the road into a snowbank where she got stuck,
140 miles north of Amherst.
A school bus driver stopped to ask if she needed help.
She said no, but he called 911 anyway.
The police arrived 10 minutes later, and in that 10-minute window, Maura Murray vanished
from the face of the Earth.
The police found her textbooks in the car, together with a spilled bottle of wine and
a printout of MapQuest directions to Burlington, Vermont.
But there was no wallet, no keys, and no cell phone.
Oh, and strangest of all: no footprints in the snow anywhere around the car.
Tara Calico
As detailed by Crimefeed, 19-year-old Tara Calico went out for a bike ride in Belen,
New Mexico, the morning of September 20th, 1988, and planned to meet her boyfriend for
a tennis date.
When her mother didn't hear from her by the afternoon, she went looking for her daughter
and started to worry when she found the tape Tara had been listening to in a ditch by the
side of the highway.
Things got worse when police found bits of Tara's Walkman and bike 20 miles from her
home.
The next summer, however, across the country in Port St. Joe, Florida, a woman found a
Polaroid picture on the ground.
In the picture were a teenage girl and a young boy tied up with tape over their mouths on
top of a mattress in what appeared to be the back of a van.
Tara's mother was convinced that this girl was Tara, due to the resemblance and the presence
of a scar on the leg of the girl in the picture similar to one Tara also had.
As KRQE News related, there has never been a conclusive link between Tara and the picture,
nor has the boy ever been identified.
"She would've been somebody who contributed to society.
She was a good person."
Brian Shaffer
As Cleveland's Fox 8 News reports, there were cameras all over Columbus, Ohio's Ugly Tuna
Saloona on April 1, 2006, but that still hasn't helped anyone discover the whereabouts of
27-year-old Brian Shaffer since he disappeared that day.
In fact, the cameras show him going into the bar but never show him going out.
The recordings account for every other person in the bar, both entering and exiting.
Shaffer is seen going in at 1:15 a.m., but he never comes out any of the exits.
Searches through the bar and nearby turned up nothing.
After his disappearance, his girlfriend would call his cell phone every night, and every
night it would go straight to voicemail.
One night about six months after his disappearance, however, it rang, pinging a cell tower just
outside Columbus.
This slim hope has been enough to keep his family and friends going, more than a decade
later.
"Pretty much since day one I really thought of him as the love of my life."
Asha Degree
On the night before Valentine's Day in 2000, sometime after 2:30 a.m., 9-year-old Asha
Degree got dressed and grabbed a backpack filled with clothes and other items.
According to ABC News, she then left the house, never to be seen by her family again.
She was seen, however, by a number of motorists who spotted a girl fitting Asha's description
walking down the highway at about 4 a.m. in pouring rain.
When one driver tried to check on the girl, she ran off into the woods.
That was the last time anyone saw Asha.
A search of the woods near where she was seen running revealed a shed that held candy wrappers,
pencils, markers, and a Mickey Mouse hair bow that Degree's parents identified as Asha's.
One of the spookiest details came a year later when Asha's backpack was found buried, wrapped
in garbage bags, 26 miles away.
Her family hasn't given up hope, however, and the investigation was even ramped up in
September 2017.