True Mystery

Encounters brings you forty of the most compelling cases of unidentified aerial phenomena ever documented. Experience these remarkable incidents as they unfolded through the eyes of military personnel, commercial pilots, law enforcement officers, and everyday citizens who found themselves face to face with the unexplainable.

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of Black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Built in 1847 on the banks of the Ohio River, the Bellaire House is reputed to be one of the most haunted houses in America. Since the early 20th century it has earned a reputation as a hotbed of paranormal activity, with reports of apparitions, curses, psychic assaults, and violence.

In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm". Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace.

After a perfectly decent local woman is killed during a robbery, the Witherspoon household receives a surprising visit from a stranger named Blimpey Groggins. He claims his best buddy was convicted of the crime. He also claims the peaceable chap didn't even know how to fire a gun. And considering he's to be hanged in three weeks, Blimpey's desperate to find the real killer. With the trail cold, the crime allegedly solved, and the evidence mucked up, Mrs. Jeffries and her belowstairs cohorts have their work cut out for them if they want to save an innocent man from the gallows.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

Kelsey Byden always believed that her mother was dead. But now, after all this time, she has discovered the truth: Naomi Chadwick is still alive - after spending years in prison for the murder of her lover. Now, at Naomi’s Virginia horse farm, Kelsey is trying to sort out a lifetime of deception - and her feelings about her mother. The bonds of love can be fragile...as Kelsey learned from her recently ended marriage.

Emma and I did everything together – including getting kidnapped. As teenagers, we were both taken but only I survived. I promised myself that I would tell my story, and Emma’s story, when the time was right. Now here we are. I’m on the cusp of launching my true crime novel which is predicted to be a huge bestseller.

The audiobook Warden Force: Grim Witness and Other True Game Warden Adventures is a collection of short stories, the true adventures of some of the toughest, most dedicated, and courageous protectors of wildlife in the world and the wildlife-destroying outlaws they pursue.

Jim True has returned from an out-of-body experience to find he has been brutally murdered and his body mutilated. No one can see him, no one can hear him, no one, except his killer, knows he still exists. Freed from his body, True embarks on a quest to find his killer and discover why and how he has managed to survive. As he closes in on his murderer, True discovers that even the very people he loved and trusted have betrayed him. He meets his killer, a strange and sinister figure who can also leave his body at will.

I didn't believe in time travel or teleportation until it happened to me. I'm Bruce Gernon, and I flew through the heart of the Bermuda Triangle before I'd even heard the term. Skeptics have dismissed the Triangle as a nonmystery, but they weren't in my airplane when the fog surrounded my craft and I leapt ahead 100 miles. I documented what happened and memorized every detail of that flight. Now, I'm ready to explain that there is no Bermuda Triangle!

It started on a summer afternoon in 1795 when a young man named Daniel McGinnis found what appeared to be an old site on an island off the Acadian coast, a coastline fabled for the skullduggery of pirates. Ever since that summer day, the possibility of what might be hidden in the depths of a small island off the south coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, has made it the site of the world's longest, most expensive, and most perplexing treasure hunt. Author D'Arcy O'Connor recounts the fascinating stories and amazing discoveries of past and current treasure seekers who have sought Oak Island's fabled treasure for over 200 years.

Fiona and Violet Seng were just children when their family’s Cessna crash-landed in the Washington wilderness, claiming the lives of their parents. For twelve harrowing weeks, the girls fended for themselves before being rescued. Twenty-five years later, they’re still trying to move on from the trauma. Fiona repurposes it into controversial works of art. Violet has battled addiction and failed relationships to finally progress toward normalcy as a writer. The estranged sisters never speak about what they call their Alone Time in the wild.

A self-proclaimed skeptic, the food writer dismissed rumors of a mischievous resident poltergeist named Lucy when he moved in, but he quickly found himself at a loss to explain the disembodied footsteps and mysterious odors that seemed to plague the old house. Soon, he was talking to neighbors and fellow homeowners, and it seemed that everyone had stories of strange events and supernatural occurrences in their own dwellings. As a result, David set out to document and research these reports...

In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning.

Erich von Daniken has exhaustively researched and analyzed the great world religions, their myths and belief structures, in an effort to find an answer to a question that has fascinated humans for millennia: who, or what, were the Gods described in ancient stories? His extraordinary conclusion? The Gods were not metaphysical beings born of humanity's overactive imagination, but extraterrestrials who left traces of their presence everywhere on Earth.

Kevin, Meg's cyber-savvy nephew who lives in the basement, comes to her with a problem. He's become involved as the techie for a true-crime podcast, one that focuses on Virginia cold cases and unsolved crimes. And he thinks their podcast has hit a nerve with someone...one of the podcast team has had a brush with death that Kevin thinks was an attempted murder, not an accident. Kevin rather sheepishly asks for Meg's help in checking out the people involved in a couple of the cases.

Bound by blood but divided by troubles as old as Cain and Abel, Moses Reed and Aaron Fox were first introduced in Kellerman’s bestselling Bones. They are sons of the same strong-willed mother, and their respective fathers were cops, partners, and friends. Their turbulent family history has set them at odds, despite their shared calling. Moses—part Boy Scout, part bulldog, man of few words—is a no-frills LAPD detective.

What if the British Museum isn't a house of learning, but a vast sinkhole of still-bubbling historic injustice? What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits? When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a landslide as staff old and new brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable supernatural encounters.

A collection of 11 award-winning short stories concerning the true adventures of California fish and game wardens and the wildlife-destroying outlaws they pursue. These stories illustrate the wide variety of wildlife-related problems wardens face in California, which has a greater diversity of wildlife and wildlife habitat than any other state and is second only to Alaska in its vast expanses of wilderness.