(soft music)
- Recently on my channel, I made a video
diving into various unsolved mysteries from Reddit.
While the number of unanswered mysteries
will always outnumber solved cases,
there are exceptions to this.
Rarely, there are the few unsolved mysteries
that bring enough people together online to find an answer,
from finding missing persons,
to debunking decades-old urban legends,
to possibly even saving lives.
These are some of the most noteworthy cases
that were able to be solved with the help of Reddit.
Before we get into the video,
I'd like to take a second to thank today's video sponsor:
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Now let's get into the mysteries.
Reddit and the man from Taured.
While his real name might not be familiar to you,
you've probably heard of him as the man from Taured.
It's a longstanding urban legend,
one that predates Reddit by more than a half century.
When a man entered Japan in 1959,
he was arrested regarding a passport that seemed fraudulent.
When asked where the country of Taured,
stamped on his passport, was situated,
the man pointed somewhere between modern France and Spain
and seemed confused when told about the actual region
that already existed there.
Over the next few decades,
the myth making about what happened next would snowball.
Confounding details of the case
continued to bolster the idea that the man
might have been from a dimension not of our own.
After questioning him,
Japanese authorities decided to detain the man
in a hotel room to decide what to do with him next.
Somehow, he vanished,
despite the room being incredibly well-guarded.
By all accounts, the man was never seen again.
So what really happened,
and how did Reddit help solve the mystery?
For starters, it can't be overstated
that this story has seen plenty of different variations,
but almost all of them seem to trace back
to an apparent real-world incident in the 1950s.
Interestingly, almost all of the versions
of the urban legend suggest the man landed
specifically at Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
One place where you won't find any evidence
is in the official records from the airport itself,
where no such incident has ever been recorded.
For many, this would be the end of a story,
but a collection of posts on Reddit,
summarized in an excellent writeup
by a user in r/unsolvedmysteries
seemed to have cracked the entirety
of what was happening here.
They found the case of a man named John Zegrus,
a man who arrived in Tokyo
suggesting that he was a naturalized Ethiopian citizen
and that his passport was issued at Tamanrasset,
the capital of Taured.
It sounded so romantic, it simply had to exist.
And that was Mr. Zegrus's ace,
as he went across the globe,
sporting a passport for a country
you'll never find on a map.
Through some more work by Redditors
trying to piece together the full picture,
it was found that Mr. Zegrus's case
was cited in the British House of Commons in the '60s,
on the issue of border control.
He was being detained in Japan
on charges of illegal entry and fraud,
and seemed to have a deeper history of con-artistry.
So the mystery then becomes
about him being held in a hotel room and vanishing.
But like many other finer details of this urban legend,
it seems that these were made up as time went on.
The reality was much more mundane,
with the real Mr. Zegrus being sentenced
to one year in prison in Japan.
That leaves one lingering mystery.
Where was he really from?
What was Mr. Zegrus's actual nationality?
While Zegrus would give a wild testimony
about being from the US and moving to the UK,
eventually becoming a spy
sometime after the Second World War,
it was likely that these claims were as fraudulent
as his invented current citizenship.
While questions about where the man was really from
still linger, Redditors at least conclusively proved
that a place called Taured,
situated in another dimension, was never the answer.
Is the FBI after us?
Next up, we have a strange tale
involving a user and the FBI.
It was 2010 when a Reddit user posted a single thread,
titled "Does This Mean the FBI Is After Us?"
He attached pictures of a small black device
which he claimed was found
when he and his friend took the car into the mechanic.
The original thread was terribly short
and sparse with details,
but the mysterious device garnered attention.
Dozens of Redditors came in to help identify the device.
Rising among the flurry of comments on the thread
was the insight of a user named Jean Mark P,
identifying it as a Guardian ST820.
He stressed that the exact make
was restricted to the army and law enforcement,
seemingly confirming that the OP
was being tracked by authorities.
The original poster was in his 20s at the time
and suggested that this wouldn't be the first time
the FBI had interacted with him or his friend,
his friend's father being a recently passed
religious leader.
As attention on the threat heightened,
some were quick to warn OP
that removing the device could lead to consequences.
OP mentioned that they were planning to sell the device
on Craigslist, but before he could,
the FBI knocked on his door.
When a Wired article covering the story reached out to him,
the OP confirmed that the FBI had come to his residence
and demanded the expensive device back.
Redditors were shocked to learn
that not only was this type of surveillance perfectly legal,
but it was apparently more common than one might assume.
As for the original poster,
it seems that the FBI had decided to leave him be
after the incident became something
of a viral embarrassment.
The Strongsville Doe.
While hiking down the buddy banks of the Rocky River
in Strongsville, Ohio, three young boys were horrified
when they found the skeleton remains
of a person sticking out of a hole.
After telling their parents,
who went on to notify the police,
the skeleton was found to be in a state
that implied foul play.
None of their limbs nor jaw were found
but this can often be explained by foraging animals.
What couldn't be chopped up the nature
was a hole found in what was determined
to be a woman's skull,
a hole that led the coroner to confirm
the skeleton was likely a murder victim
killed with a .25 caliber bullet.
Despite the coverage the gruesome 1975 discovery got,
the case went cold for decades,
and neither the woman who became known
as the Strongsville Doe,
nor a potential killer, were identified.
It was only in 2015 when a break in the case finally came.
Christina Scates, a student,
was working on a genealogy research project
when she stumbled upon an unknown female's white bones
in a cemetery index.
Eventually seeing similarities,
she requested the police file on the Strongsville Doe.
She decided to share her findings
with like-minded people on Reddit.
The case got even more traction
with the file itself spreading to other forums
like websleuths.com,
and getting the attention of Carl Koppelman,
a forensic artist.
Things continued to move along
as Koppelman worked on a portrait
of the few remaining pictures
of the unknown white female bones.
The work of Scates and Koppelman
eventually led to the Strongsville Doe
getting a dedicated nameless entry,
one that would lead it
to the case's most crucial development.
The similarities between the Strongsville Doe
and another unresolved a missing person's case
proved too great to ignore.
With the compilation of evidence gathered online,
the police went forward with DNA testing.
After so many years,
the Strongsville Doe was finally identified
as Linda Pagano, a woman who had gone missing
after an argument with her stepfather.
I tried to find further explanations
on the ruling of the homicide online.
The leading theory is that Pagano was murdered,
and the most likely suspect was her own stepfather.
Because he passed in 1990,
developments on finding her killer
seem to have come to a standstill for the time being.
At the very least, the work of Scates and those online
had given the Strongsville Doe her name back.
Mysterious Post-It notes.
It's a little hard to corroborate this one,
but it's a story seemingly straight from a mystery novel,
with a plot twist just too good not to include.
On the subreddit r/legaladvice,
the OP asked for advice on how to proceed
after bizarre happenings in their apartment.
Over the course of a few weeks, in four separate incidents,
it seemed like somebody was entering their apartment
and leaving cryptic Post-It notes.
They provided further details,
explaining that the Post-It notes
seemed to be written with a pen found inside the apartment.
The notes themselves were also highly specific,
and the OP was getting uncomfortable.
One found near their desk told them to save their documents
in a handwriting that wasn't their own.
Another incident saw the poster finding a Post-It note
on their door and the doors of nearby apartments.
The OP's theory was immediately
that the landlord was entering their apartment
without notifying them,
which is illegal in most of the United States.
Some users suggested putting up a security camera
to collect evidence, while others remarked it
as seemingly being a made-up story.
A few helpful users gave OP further advice
on the legal avenues they had to pursue.
And then, among the many responses,
and alternative theory was raised.
One specific user stood out,
claiming that the OP sounded sincere,
and there were alternative theories
to who was leaving the Post-It notes.
One suggestion was that the OP was potentially suffering
from an undiagnosed mental illness
and disassociating late at night.
Noticing that the OP complained of headaches
in their original post, the comment also suggested
they check their carbon monoxide detector just to be safe.
Although it sounded farfetched,
OP figured it was worth a try.
The next time they updated the thread,
the mystery seemed to be solved
in the most unlikely of ways.
OP had tested their apartment
and found dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in the air.
Their own detector proved defective with further testing
Reddit seemed to have provided
more than just legal advice this time.
Instead, it may just have saved the original poster's life.
Number five: Grateful Doe.
On the afternoon of June 26th, 1995,
two men were killed when the driver crashed into a tree
on Route 58 in Virginia.
The driver was soon identified,
and it seemed that the passenger was likely a hitchhiker.
The driver's family did not recognize the passenger,
and nobody came forward to claim him as missing.
Severe injuries to the man's face
also barred police from releasing photographs to the public
to help identify him.
One of the few significant clues
the police had to go off of
was the objects found on his person.
Of these, the most significant
were two tickets to a Grateful Dead concert.
They first tried to trace back the tickets,
but because they were scalped,
there was no official documentation
involved in the purchase,
and the reseller could not remember the man
when questioned by the police.
The unidentified men became known as the Grateful Doe,
and for two decades, the case went cold.
In 2015, Layla Betz, a Redditor,
was spending a fair bit of her time web surfing.
She fell down the rabbit hole
of the unidentified a Grateful Doe
and helped start a subreddit dedicated to the case.
This subreddit eventually circulated
composite sketches of the victim,
which led to a man messaging her
and suggesting that the victim resembled
one of his previous roommates
when he was studying in Illinois,
a man named Jason Callahan.
This information reached
a still missing Jason Callahan's family,
who were shown composites of the Grateful Doe.
Callahan's half-sister had little doubt it was a match,
consenting to further DNA testing
to match the two individuals.
A year of waiting ensued,
and then, more than two decades after the crash,
the results showed it was almost certain
that the Grateful Does was Callahan.
in a WBUR article, Layla Betz said the following:
"It wasn't that this case had been solved after 20 years.
It was that Jason Callahan was finally going to go home.
His family had a resolution."
And that is all of our solved Reddit mysteries for today.
While the term "we did at Reddit"
has become a laughing stock on most of the internet,
it's important to weigh the good and the bad
and show that the platform has had success
in the online investigation niche.
Many of these cases succeed
not only because of a wide reach
or a level-headed approach to the research,
but almost always because of a combination of the two.
I tried to present a diversity of different cases
Reddit has had a hand in resolving.
As I mentioned, finding closed cases
was miles more challenging than finding unresolved ones,
but I'd love to hear from you
if there are any others you'd like to see covered
in a future video.
And let me know your favorite of the bunch down below.
Thank you so much for making it to the end of the video.
If you enjoyed, I'd really appreciate it
if you would consider subscribing to the channel
or dropping a link or comment down below,
as it really helps me out.
Thanks again for watching, and have a good night.