Top 10 Most Mysterious People in History

Top 10 Most Mysterious People in History

Welcome to WatchMojoUK, and today we’re looking at the most mysterious people to have lived or appeared in the UK.

#10: Lord Lucan

On the 7th of November 1974, the nanny of the aristocratic Lucan family, Sandra Rivett, was murdered in their home. All eyes fell on Lord Lucan, who’d immediately fled; he wrote a few letters attesting to his innocence before disappearing. His car was found abandoned in Newhaven, East Sussex. Despite Lucan being the prime suspect, with his face and description appearing in media around the world, he never resurfaced. He was eventually declared dead in 1999, despite countless alleged sightings of him everywhere from New Zealand to Colombia, with his eldest son inheriting the title in 2016. Nobody knows where he ended up, despite police searching over a dozen country houses in case his upper-class friends were harbouring him.

#9: William Shakespeare

Though he’s Britain’s greatest-ever writer, there’s still so much we don’t know about the Bard. Enduring mysteries and speculations have surrounded him for centuries, and you may be surprised to learn we actually don’t know for definite what he looked like; the famous portrait of him from the early seventeenth century is only LIKELY to be him. We know he was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, and of course, we have his plays and poems – or do we? There are even debates around that, too, with some people suggesting that contemporary playwright Christopher Marlowe – who’s mysterious in his own right, plagued with rumours that he was a spy – was responsible for Shakespeare’s work, among some other authors.

#8: Anne Bonny & Mary Read

It’s often suggested that Anne Bonny was Irish, not British, but the truth is that we just don’t know. We have no idea about any part of her life, including where she was born or if “Anne Bonny” was her real name – which seems doubtful – until she emerged in the Bahamas during the Golden Age of Piracy. The same is true of Mary Read, though it’s at least known that she was probably born in England because we have birth records showing many Mary Reads were born there at the time. What we DO know is that Mary Read died in Jamaica in 1721 after she and Bonny were sentenced to hang. While there are records of Read’s death, there are none for Bonny.

#7: The Princes in the Tower

Richard III himself was a historical mystery until, in 2012, his remains were finally discovered underneath a carpark. But no such closure has emerged for Edward V and the Duke of York who, aged twelve and nine respectively, disappeared in 1483. It was long rumoured that Richard III, upon deposing the young King Edward V, killed the boys to protect his claim to the throne after locking them up in the Tower of London. We know that they WERE locked in the Tower of London and were never seen again, but when or how they died is unclear. In the 1670s, two skeletons were found in the Tower and buried at Westminster Abbey, but medical investigations have been inconclusive about proving who they are.

#6: Spring-heeled Jack

Was he a man, or was he a ghost? We’ll never know, but someone or someTHING terrorised London in the late 1830s. He was described as being devil-like in his appearance, able to breathe fire and, crucially, leap over buildings in his gentlemanly attire. In 1838, there were at least two widely publicised attacks on young women, Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, who said they’d been menaced by a man in a frightening costume. There were genuine suspects for the attacks, and in at least one case someone was convicted. It’s been claimed in the years since that Spring-heeled Jack was anything from a group of aristocratic pranksters to a genuine ghost, who haunted Victorian England for decades.

#5: The Cladh Hallan Mummies

Peat bog mummies are more common in Ireland, but have been found in Britain, too, including these ones unearthed on an Outer Hebridian island in Scotland. Archaeologists don’t know why, but evidence suggests that the four skeletons were put into a peat bog to preserve them on purpose, rather than just finding their way into peat like other bog mummies, and were then removed and displayed or used by the local people for unknown purposes. They were eventually buried again. They were over three thousand years old, and had already been dead for centuries by the time they were reinterred. Disturbingly, some of the skeletons were composites of multiple people’s remains.

#4: Helen Duncan

When do you think the last conviction under the Witchcraft Act happened in Britain? Sometime in the eighteenth century, maybe? Well, you’d be wrong: it was actually a Scottish spirit medium named Helen Duncan, convicted in 1944. The 1735 Witchcraft Act was actually responsible for ENDING witch trials by making it a crime to claim that you or somebody else had supernatural powers. The reason for Duncan’s arrest? She produced information at a 1941 séance about the sinking of HMS Barham, which HAD been sunk, but this was kept hidden from the public for months. The authorities thought Duncan was revealing state secrets, but what we don’t know is who her source of classified information really was.

#3: Wych Elm Bella

Another wartime mystery, the remains of a woman were found inside a tree – a wych elm – in Worcestershire in 1943 by a group of young boys playing in the woods. The body was removed and it was determined that she’d died somewhat recently, in the last eighteen months, and been placed in the tree by her presumed killer. No missing women were ever conclusively identified with the body, despite her unique teeth. The following year, graffiti appeared in the local area asking “Who put Bella down the wych elm?”. Even with the name “Bella”, we still don’t know who she was – nor do we know who killed her or who started the graffiti, which still appears around Hagley to this day.

#2: Aleister Crowley

He’s a well-known figure in certain circles, an influential writer and occultist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But as well as being a successful novelist, Crowley also founded a religion and declared himself its prophet. Rumours widely circulated about him, including that he was a Satanist who advocated human sacrifice and “sex magic”. Only the sex magic part is true, though Crowley enjoyed the strange rumours about him and the attention they brought, so he didn’t dispute being a Satanist. At one point someone even claimed Crowley had forced them to drink a cat’s blood. But maybe the strangest rumours of all are the unsubstantiated claims that he was a spy working for the secret services during World War I.

#1: Jack the Ripper

Was he one person, or many? Did he perpetrate all eleven Whitechapel Murders, or just the so-called “canonical five”? Was he also responsible for the Cleveland Torso Murder? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. The enduring mystery, and the police’s inability to catch him, has turned the Ripper into a mythical figure, stalking the streets of Whitechapel looking for victims. We don’t even know how many of the letters written to the police are genuine, with tabloid journalist Fred Best allegedly confessing to having written some to keep the case in the news. To this day, armchair detectives visit the East End to try and solve the case Abberline couldn’t.

Let us know in the comments which enigmatic, famous faces we forgot to include.