Treehouse

from Michael J. Wilson, author of Tesla and Edison Argue and Tesla Talks to Time:

1. The Taman Shud Case (1948)

At 6:30 a.m. on December 1st 1948 a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. The body was reclining as if sleeping, an unlit cigarette behind his ear. The man had been seen alive in the location starting at 7 p.m.the night before. He was wearing nice clothing and despite the heat a sweater and jacket.

No cause of death was found. All the labels were removed from his clothing. He had no wallet. A suitcase was found also with the labels removed at the Adelaide train station. The suitcase is linked through an orange thread used to fix a hole in the pants the dead man was wearing.

In a pocket of the man’s pants a scrap of paper was found with the words “taman shud” on it. This Persian phrase translates to “finished” and is the final line of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The scrap was ripped from an edition of the book that was later discovered by an unrelated man in the back seat of his unlocked car. In the book were a series of codes that have not been translated to this day and a phone number for a nurse who lived within a mile of the beach. She claimed to not know the dead man but many believe she had an affair with him while he was a patient of hers. It was proven that she had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to another former patient. Neither the woman nor the other man would cooperate with police in the investigation.

2. Dayatlov Pass Incident (1959)

On February 9th 1959 nine skiers died while camping on the eastern side of Kholat Syakhl in the Ural mountains. The pass was named Dayatlov Pass after the deaths. The leader of the group was named Igor Dayatlov.

No one survived and there were no witnesses. The campsite was discovered on February 26th. The tent was shredded from within and all of the victims’ belongings were inside it. 1.5 km away two bodies were found in their underwear sitting under a tree. Between the tree and the campsite three more bodies were found. On May 4th the remaining four skiers were found in a ravine under snow. These bodies all had severe internal injuries despite the ravine being only 13 feet deep. One was missing parts of her face.

The clothing of the skiers showed elevated radiation levels. There are reports from people at the funerals that the bodies were oddly discolored. The campsite is near a missile test site.

3. Betsy Aardsma (1969)

On November 28th 1969 4:55 p.m. two men walked past the desk at Pattee Library on the campus of Pennsylvania State University. On their way out they told the librarian that someone should go help a woman in the stacks who fell over. They then left. Several people came to the woman’s aid; they attempted to revive her but she died upon arrival at the health center on campus.

The woman was Betsy Aardsma. The autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed one time, right through the heart. Her red dress hid the small amount of blood that came from the wound. The two men who alerted the staff of her collapse were never identified.

4. Isdal Woman (1970)

A group of friends was hiking on a trail on Mount Ulriken in Norway on November 24th 1970. They passed a woman who seemed to be terrified of two men following her. She seemed to mouth words at the group of friends, but said nothing. She walked away fast.

On November 29th 1970 at 1:15 a man and his two daughters discovered a naked, partially burned body of a woman on the same trail. Nearby were a bottle of sleeping pills and several cans of petrol.

The original hiker and friends were able to identify the body as the same woman. The man who came forward claims that a police officer told him to leave it, that the woman had been “dispatched.”

Police were able to trace the woman to two suitcases at a Bergen train station. All of the labels were missing from her clothing and her fingerprints had been sanded away.

The woman had used up to 9 fake identities in her travels across Europe. People in the hotel she had been staying at said she paid in cash and was seen talking to a mysterious man.

5. Ricky McCormick (1999)

In a cornfield in St. Charles County, Missouri, a motorist found the body of Ricky McCormick on June 30, 1999. The body was already in a state of decomposition. No one had declared him missing and he was last seen 5 days earlier at a local hospital.

The cornfield Ricky was found in was 15 miles from his home. He did not own a car. He had no known enemies. He was never married, but had 4 children. He had chronic heart and lung problems. Ricky had also been convicted of statutory rape.

In 2011, 12 years after the death, the FBI reclassified the case as a murder and released information of strange codes found on the body. None of them have been deciphered.

In 2012 Ricky’s family came forward and said that Ricky barely knew how to write, let alone create the complicated codes the FBI say they found. The family also revealed that at the time of the death they were allowed to see the contents of his person. The notes were never revealed to them until the FBI released them in 2011.