_Friday nights have become synonymous with one show.... DATELINE NBC! Scary, true life tales of murder and mystery. Literally thousands of people vanish every year under "suspicious" circumstance and their stories become town lore or an episode of Dateline or both. Some are far more haunting than any ghost story one could create. _

Redditor __archiearcher _inquired about what are some of the creepiest missing person's stories we've all heard about. (Because I already don't have enough nightmares.)_

IT'S ALL IN THE UPSIDE DOWN.

The disappearance of Fred Valentich, he was a pilot who set off from a Melbourne airport on a training exercise over Bass Strait, he never arrived at King Island.

What makes it creepy that he radioed in that there was a strange craft following him and the last piece of communication was a metallic scraping sound.

Experts said that he was disorientated and was flying upside down and seeing the lights from his own craft on the water but his Cessna he was flying could only fly upside down for a few seconds before stalling.

They have never found him or his craft.

The case of Jaycee Lee Dugard has always fascinated and mortified me. 11 year old girl kidnapped on her way to school in 1991. In 2009, she turns up alive. Turns out, married couple kidnapped her and kept her in a series of sheds in their backyard for 18 years as a slave. Thankfully, she was reunited with her parents and last known to be focusing on raising her kids and generally staying as private as possible with her life.

This might get buried but my grandfather has been looking for his sister since 1956. Just left one day before she turned 18 and never made contact again. At one point he went to ID a Jane Doe, doesn't speak much about that, but has continued to look since so more than likely wasn't her.

Got close a couple of times but records are a little hard to verify at this point.

My brother in law's uncle was driving to work and they found his truck with all his belongings,(except clothes) still running on the side of the road. No sign of him. Just gone.

Maybe not a missing person case, but one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard. Missing pregnant woman in my town. Can't find her anywhere. She put up an ad on Craigslist for other pregnant women to hangout with and to get advice from. Only one person responded and they became really great friends. They were friends for a couple months and one day she just goes missing for about a week.

Suddenly, someone sees a woman laying on the side of the road, guts pulled out and laid in a neat pile. So fresh there's still steam. Dental records prove it is the pregnant woman but there's no baby to be seen anywhere. Turns out the "friend" had cut out her baby and brought it to the hospital claiming to have had the baby in her car. What tipped them off was that instead of a placenta (like the woman thought) the woman had brought pregnant lady's ovaries instead.

Weird personal one for me. In my senior year of high school 3 teenage girls from my area disappeared. All of the cases were unrelated and happened within a month of each other. Two of them are resolved now. First girl left a party and never made it home( it was discovered later that she was drunk and had driven off the road and into a lake). Second was a mentally disabled girl who vanished from her home( I think the parents probably killed her, but no one has been arrested or charged, she's still just missing). Third was a girl who never came home one night( apparently she went to a trailer park to buy drugs, but the couple tied her up and kept her in a kennel for two months. They eventually got caught cause they invited a friend over. When he left he called the police, who rescued her). All these disappearances happened in the matter of weeks though and the local news was abuzz with theories. It was really disturbing at the time to have that stuff happening in my community.

Pedro Lopez is a serial killer, who, at least according to himself has killed more than 100 people. He spent some time in prison and at some point was freed, and his current whereabouts are unknown.

Yale med student Annie Le went missing shortly before her wedding. Just vanished. The strange thing was, surveillance showed her entering the lab where she worked but never leaving it. The police searched the building for days. Eventually they found her. A lab assistant had murdered her in the lab, cut her body into pieces and stuffed it into the gap between two walls.

For me, the creepiest is the disappearance of a Canadian boy named Michael Dunahee, then aged 4. He vanished from a school playground with his parents close by and there no witnesses.

A girl in my grade (when I was in grade 6) was reportedly missing after having an argument with her mom in the parking lot of a grocery store. Security cameras were checked and they found out the mother had lied about that. After several days we found out that the mom had strangled her with twine and threw her by a lake. Disturbing stuff. There were only about 30 people in my grade so it was a close knit community.

Ohhhhh... this girl who was working alone got dragged out of gas station (all seen on camera). The footage was so bad they couldn't figure out who it was so they put out a message in the paper with his coat description. Someone eventually says their janitor always wears that coat. They go to the guys house and search non stop over and over again. They find a single burned tooth in the backyard. It would have been inconclusive but the girl had gone to a dentist conference and got a just on the market filling that only like 2 people in the world had.... so they caught him.

My would-be aunt was abducted and presumably murdered when she was a young girl, 7yo. The primary suspect was Ted Bundy, who lived down the street and was 14 at the time. My grandmother wrote to him while he was on death row and he wrote back denying responsibility. My mom and the deceased shared a bedroom and were very close in age. There's a book about it. Very creepy in general but especially to me considering it could have easily been my mom and I never would have existed.

The woman in the article below is my deceased grandmother.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/obituaries/beverly-ann-burr-mother-of-abducted-tacoma-girl-dies/

The Brandon Lawson case

Around 2am he was in a field in Texas and called 911. In the call its hard to hear what he says but he sounds distressed and panicked. He cuts off and that was the last he was heard of. His brother said he called him after but he has yet to be found

It sounds like said he ran into something and mentions he was chased in the woods. Somewhere else someone edited the audio and it sounds like gunshots in the background of the call. Allegedly at 1:03 you can barely hear a faint "help me"

The 911 Call

British South American Airlines flight CS-59 flying from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile went missing in 1947. The last message "S-T-E-N-D-E-C" was sent via morse code. The pilots were experienced World War 2 bomber pilots and the passengers was a varying group from around the globe and many walks of life, including business executives, a British diplomatic courier, and various people from around the globe. The extensive aerial and land search of the route showed no signs of wreckage, a crash site, or anything. For decades many lines of theories were floated, Nazis, Argentine espionage, hijacking, and even aliens abduction.

Then in 1998, hikers found aircraft wreckage at the base of a glacier on Mount Tupungato. The air crew navigate using methods to calculate distance traveled by the air speed and time, which is a crude but accurate method of navigation. To get above weather and the Andes mountains they climbed to the pressurized aircraft's ceiling. BUT, in 1947 the existence of the jet streams was barely known and certainly not mapped and part of the weather reports the pilots would have reviewed prior to takeoff. The Plane entered and flew against the jet stream, throwing off navigation with the cloud cover of the time and caused them to begin their slow decent too soon and into mountain glacier and causing a avalanche to immediately after hiding the crash site. It took 50 years for the part of the glacier that held the crash site to flow down and begin melt enough to drop the remains of the aircraft, passengers, and crew.

My town got hit by two huge storms early this year. Tornados/strong winds. A two year old child was the only person reported missing after the storm. What makes it so weird is the parents nor any family were able to provide a single picture of the child, no body has been found, and the birth certificate shows the kid should've actually been 3, not 2 like the parents claimed. There's 3 theories-1. The child never existed and the "parents" were just trying to capitalize on a tragic event with false documents , 2. The child actually died long before the storm and it was used as a convenient excuse or 3. The child was swept away by the storm and the parents are just that shitty to never have taken a photo of their son.

The case of Johnny Gosch in Des Moines. Watch "Who Took Johnny?" on Netflix. He was a paperboy who disappeared during his route. Weirdest part is his mom admitted that he came to visit her once, years after he disappeared.

The Schulze Family from Drage in Lower Saxony. Husband Marco (41 at the time), his wife Sylvia (43 at the time), and their daughter Miriam (12 at the time), went missing from their home in Drage on the 22nd july 2015, nowhere to be found. Marcos body was found a week later in the Elbe (a river), he had a concrete block attached to his legs with a rope. Sylvia and Miriam though remain unfound to this day. Their house was just emptied of all their personal belongings and everything, it will be sold, the money will be put in a secure bank account until they find out who will inherit it. Sylvia can't be pronounced dead yet, earliest in 8 years from now on, 10 years after her disappearance. Miriam on the other hand can't be pronounced dead until she is 25, that is the law here in Germany. Many people believe that either the dad killed his wife, daughter, then himself. Others believe mother and daughter are alive. Who knows though, we will may never know.

A local one for me, but the case of Dakota James. TLDR a Pittsburgh college student named Dakota James goes missing. Police say he fell in the river, city residents disagree. A bunch of guys went missing around that time, and they all had the same gay dating app on their phone.

Three lighthouse keepers went missing from a tiny island off Scotland. No one knows what happened but when people came to the island they saw that two of the three raincoats were missing, a meal was left half eaten, and a chair was knocked over on the ground. When they checked the diary of one of the lighthouse keepers, it talked about a violent storm and how they other two lighthouse keepers were acting weird. What's creepy is that there never was a storm in that region even though the diary said there was. All three lighthouse keepers were never found.

Source

H/T : REDDIT