True Mystery

This mesmerizing, surreal account of the bizarre adventures of Terence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and a small band of their friends, is a wild ride of exotic experience and scientific inquiry. Exploring the Amazon Basin in search of mythical shamanic hallucinogens, they encounter a host of unusual characters - including a mushroom, a flying saucer, pirate Mantids from outer space, an appearance by James and Nora Joyce in the guise of poultry, and translinguistic matter - and discover the missing link in the development of human consciousness and language.

The morning after a ferocious storm, the body of a vulnerable teenage girl is found in the woods. The police are under pressure to find the killer and solve the tragedy but with thin evidence and no witnesses, the case is falling apart. Desperate to find this vicious murderer, they hunt high and low and eventually find their man: an outsider with no alibi. When the suspect confesses to the crime, it’s an open and shut case. But two women suspect foul play and dedicate their lives to working out what really happened, at all costs.

From New York Times best-selling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road. In 2011, Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched 'a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them'. He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Inside a beautiful house in Philadelphia's ritzy Main Line section lay the body of a young mother - dead of an apparent drowning in her bathtub. With no sign of a break-in, no history of marital problems, and the naïve belief that these things sometimes just happen, Stefanie Rabinowitz's family prepared to bury the 29-year-old wife and mother. But at the 11th hour, because Stefanie was so young, and because there were no witnesses to her death, an autopsy was ordered. And what it revealed was unthinkable: Stefanie had been murdered.

What makes people want to solve a mystery? Listen to these seven stories and you might decide there are some things that can never be explained. Find out how one woman checked into a Parisian hotel - and then disappeared; why Flight 19 never returned, with no sign of wreckage or survivors; and if the ghosts of Borley rectory can ever rest in peace. With gripping accounts and dramatic fact files, uncover some mysterious events from real life and decide what you think really happened.

Celebrating her 45th birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her 45th birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

The first edition of Greentown helped reopen one of America's most shameful unsolved murder cases, the savage slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in an exclusive enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, the night before Halloween 1975. Soon after Martha's body was discovered, attention focused on members of the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Ethel Skakel and Robert Kennedy had married in Greenwich, and the two families were close.

Rookie cop Carrie Santero has always been fascinated by serial killers. As a teenager, she wrote a letter to Charles Manson in prison - and received a chilling reply. Then she came face to face with a child murderer in her small Pennsylvania town, an encounter that haunts her to this day. Now, as a detective in training, she finally has her chance to make a difference; to hunt down a psychopathic sadist who embodies the very nature of evil itself.

The Williams family gave into an odd, overwhelming desire to purchase and move into a Victorian home they had come upon by chance...but shortly after moving in, strange things began to happen. It became abundantly clear that the Williams' new home was haunted.

In 1978, 56-year-old Leoma Patterson left a bar in Clinton, Tennessee, and was never seen again. Six months later, a female skeleton was found on a wooded lakeshore in a neighboring county. The bones were consistent with those of the missing woman, and one of Patterson's daughters recognized a ring found at the death scene as her mother's. The bones were buried, and six years later, a relative of Patterson's - one of the men she was last seen alive with - confessed to killing her. Case closed.

The dead do not rest till they get what they want. You have arrived in the hills. In here, you are surrounded by dense, menacing forests, enveloped in a deadly silence... You never know what lurks here in the cold, dark night. Do not walk alone after sunset in the hills. A beautiful woman in white haunts the Lonely pathways, looking to enchant and ensnare men... All the people who died in accidents here... They say you hear their screams at night. And the deserted lodges sitting amidst lush greenery and calm streams...

In 2019, veteran journalist Mark Seal began investigating the suspicious death of music mogul Peter Ikin. Just 32 days before he was found dead in his Paris hotel room, Ikin had married a handsome, debonair Frenchman named Alexandre, who would claim to be entitled to his late husband’s fortune. As Seal dug into the case, he had no idea that tracing the incredible life of Alexandre Despallieres would take him from Paris to London to Beverly Hills, and unspool a web of intricate plots and deceptions.

Beware...this book is cursed! These strange but true stories of the world's most infamous items will appeal to true believers as well as history buffs, horror fans, and anyone who loves a good spine-tingling tale.

Nine wholesome university students mountaineering in the Urals go missing, and are later uncovered from the snows of a bleak forest's edge in the Siberian Taiga, in a series of grisly discoveries. Why were the climbers wearing no boots? Why were stout branches of the forest pines singed to a height of 30 feet? What were the mysterious markings in the bark of nearby trees? What was so-called "overwhelming force" that was capable of breaking eight ribs in a single blow without bruises?

In the summer of 1967, 19-year-old Brenda Joyce Holland disappeared. She was a mountain girl who had come to Manteo to work in the outdoor drama The Lost Colony. Her body was found five days later, floating in the sound. This riveting narrative, built on unique access to the state investigative file and multiple interviews with insiders, searches for the truth of her unsolved murder. This island odyssey of discovery includes seances, a suicide, and a supposed shallow grave. Journalist John Railey cuts through the myths and mistakes to finally arrive at the long-hidden truth.

Maybe you know someone who swears by the reliability of psychics or who is in regular contact with angels. Or perhaps you're trying to find a nice way of dissuading someone from wasting money on a homeopathy cure. How do you find a gently persuasive way of steering people away from unfounded beliefs, bogus cures, conspiracy theories, and the like? Longtime skeptic Guy P. Harrison shows you how in this down-to-earth, entertaining exploration of commonly held extraordinary claims.

Nestled deep in Litchfield Hills, Connecticut, a 1790 farmhouse sits near the epicenter of a paranormal commotion. The family that resides there regularly encounters its own ancestors and strangers - human and nonhuman - who seemingly occupy the same physical space in our world while remaining in their own parallel worlds. When famous ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated, they dubbed it "Ghost Central".

The definitive investigation into the greatest aviation mystery in history, with a startling hypothesis about who took the plane, where they took it, and how. On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared. A year later, still no trace of the plane - or the 239 people onboard - has been found. But why? In The Plane That Wasn't There, science journalist and CNN aviation analyst Jeff Wise sweeps aside the conspiracy theories and misconceptions and lays out, with clear concision, just what we know about the plane's fate - and what we don't.

A fictional true crime podcast starring BAFTA Award winner Sheridan Smith (Mrs Biggs, Cilla) and Golden Globe winner Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey), THE MARGATE MURDERS follows the hunt for an elusive serial killer who murders once every decade, and then changes his identity. In a story full of shocking twists and turns, a journalist, a survivor, a witness, a detective and a forensic psychologist are all interviewed for their perspective on the what went right, and what went horribly wrong, in the hunt for a killer. But everyone has their own agenda, and maybe even something to hide…

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.