Remember Unsolved Mysteries? (1987-2002)

So you want to talk about iconic intros? Unsolved Mysteries had one of the best. Get a double whammy going with the X-Files and everyone pees their pants. Going back to revisit the series, especially in Bed at Night, still caused the same anxieties I got as a child. It was definitely terrifying. These were real events that real people witnessed. This was not a fictional monster. Well, not all of them. A lot of these were real life things that could happen to us. Shows like this one, Rescue 911, and America's Most Wanted brought reality into our homes on a weekly basis. It started as a series of seven specials, with Raymond Burr, Carl Malden, and Robert Stack presenting. Only one could remain. Stack came out victorious among the other competitors. It was one of the greatest WrestleMania matches of all time. It wasn't, but it would be a lot cooler if it was. I swear this is not an intentional pun, because Matthew McConaughey is the star of one of the episodes. Well, that was that. Stack became the host, and the rest is childhood trauma history. But good trauma. Magical rocks, witchcraft, buried treasure. These were some of the highlights, and often less frightful episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. As I mentioned a second ago, as kids watching these episodes, we would take a lot of this at face value. There was no internet at the time for us to get a chance to debunk any of this. Not to mention that, as someone who grew up in the South, there was a lot of chit-chat among the ladies of the family who had heard from someone's cousin's stepfather's mailman baseball coach that they had heard of a similar experience. Well, you know, Teresa told me that her cousin Tammy heard from the cashier of the Piggly Wiggly. The customer came through ranting and raving that she had seen one of them unidentified objects land next to their barn. Two of their prized cows just mysteriously disappeared. I bet it was them aliens. Who the **** was gonna fact-check Teresa at the time? But maybe she was right. Tom Belong from Blink-182 helped the government find aliens, and the government officially opened a UFO investigation office, so maybe there's some weight in it after all. But the point being that the things you were skeptical about, the things that you held on to for 20 years, you just held on to them. You went to school the next day, and you talked to your friends about spontaneously combusting. Anytime you got a fever after that, you thought you were gonna ******* explode. Oh, and those title cards. Those just... The one for Unexplained Deaths is so *******... It's burned into my brain. Honestly, this subject could be anything, and it would still be horrifying. I could say, like, Snuggles the Bear or Sunshine, and it would still scare me. The daunting task of picking the creepiest episode segments was no easy feat. However, I've narrowed it down to a few that stuck with me over the years. The Tall Man's Ghost Special Halloween Edition. I'm gonna start with the one that everyone should be familiar with. It aired as part of a Halloween special featuring legends and haunted places. This one feels like a slightly more tame poltergeist. A family moves into a home in a small town in Wisconsin. One day, they bring home a bunk bed from a secondhand store. Yeah, just follow. After bringing the bed in, terrifying events begin to occur. First, it starts with the illness of the Tall Man children. The wife noted that the kids were never sick before, but it felt like they were just going to the doctor all the time now, and sometimes with all the kids being there. Next, their son Danny is sleeping next to a clock radio in his new bedroom, and as he's trying to sleep, the radio goes at full volume with the dial going back and forth. All the kids at some point have seen the same witch with red eyes who they see as burning. The dad of one night totally loses it and decides he's gonna challenge the ghost. Yes, he's full-on like screaming at the ghost in the house. After coming back from work one night, he starts hearing howling from the garage and the sound of a voice telling him to come here. He goes inside his house and comes back and there's the same noises. When he looks back at the garage, it's in flames. He freaks out then runs in the house to make sure that the garage isn't actually on fire. When he gets in the house, his lunchbox is yanked from his arms and thrown across the room. Later, he winds up spending the night in the same room as his daughters. The entity whispers as he lays on the floor that he's dead. One night, the wife asks a family friend and non-believer to come stay at the house. The friend is sleeping, then suddenly in the middle of the night lets out a scream. He was also visited by the ghost in the girl's room. At this point, the mother has had enough. She starts yelling at the friend to get the baby, that they're gonna get out of the house for good. As kids, this one generally made you wonder if something was going on in your house. You'd have to have an escort to your room at night, or ask your parents if you could sleep with them because you were convinced the same things were gonna happen in your house. If you had to pee in the middle of the night, you just try to hold it because if you got up, a witch was gonna eat you in the dark. The dad in the episode sitting at the table having a moment was a lot. Then, the friend looking up at the ceiling and just screaming his head off. You don't forget that. All the episodes in the special are some of the most popular, it seems, as fans of the series. It includes The General Wayne Inn, Tatum House, and The Queen Mary. Any of these would be worthy of your time. Also, I'm gonna issue a content warning. As some of you know, some of the episodes can be rather upsetting. I've chosen a couple that may not sit well with everyone. All right, that said, let's move on to the next one. Dial A for Abduction, Season 4, Episode 16. It's April 4th, 1991. Angie drops her fiancé, Rob, off at his house. She tells him that she'll call him whenever she gets home. A little later, he gets a call from Angie who's at a payphone. She says some guy in a green truck has been following her around. They both can't say that they've seen the truck around town. Also to note, they live in a super small town. The guy in the truck pulls up beside the phone booth. She starts to tell Rob more about the truck and what the guy looks like. The guy gets out and tries to use the phone in the booth next to Angie's. They figure he must be lost. He quickly gets out and goes back to his truck to look around with a flashlight. Angie steps out of the booth and asks him if he needs to use the phone. He tells her no and that he'll try again in a minute. Rob asks Angie if he needs to come up there, but Angie brushes it off. They both decide to move on and talk for a few more minutes until Angie's blood-curdling scream comes through the receiver. Rob drops the phone and immediately bolts out of his house into the car. He takes off into town and when he gets there, he sees the truck in question. He hears his name being screamed by someone hanging out of the truck. Rob followed the truck for two miles until his transmission gave out as the truck was making a sharp right. This is the last time Rob sees or hears Angie. The police did an extensive search, but didn't come up with anything. No one claimed to see the truck or Angie. The thought that Angie saw Rob coming in his car to rescue her and then it never happens is crushing. The original episode doesn't mention that Angie was four months pregnant at the time, which makes your heart sink even more. Before the segment ends, Stacks says that Rob heard something the kidnapper said right after Angie screams, which was, I didn't need to use the phone anyway. The case, as far as I know, has still never been solved. Okay, so I may have told you all this before, but I was the kid who thought aliens were cool. You guys partake? And if I could talk to them, they would totally get me and be cool to all of humanity. Yeah, I was, well, me. I could talk a good game, but then I would see episodes like this one and rethink my position. So these four friends go out on a camping trip together. Totally harmless. One day, one of the brothers starts having these alarming nightmares that feel so familiar. He's sitting with his twin brother and his other two friends from art school. They're all naked and sitting next to one another. He starts to feel his fear, but it's paralyzing that he's wondering why no one is helping him. Then in a dream, he sees a tall, shadowy figure coming towards him. He keeps these nightmares a secret until his twin brother confesses that he's been having the same nightmare. The two brothers wondered if this had anything to do with some strange happenings that took place during their camping trip with the same friends to Maine alongside the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. During the trip, the friends spot this weird spherical light in the sky that seems to just disappear then reappear. The shape is particular and it's doing some weird stuff. One of the friends decides they should get in a canoe to further investigate. The same friend flashes SOS and Morse code out to the possible UFO. Boy, was he excited when they communicated back. Meanwhile, the other friend is like, yeah, my curiosity is satisfied. Yeah, get the hell out of there. The times of **** around and find out are upon you. When they get back to shore, they don't talk to each other. All they remember is being extremely tired and they all fall asleep. Skip back to the part about the nightmares. You may already know what's going on here. The guys have been abducted and have been studied by aliens aboard their craft. The same craft they were signaling to. When they play the tapes from their brothers being under hypnosis over the drawings, it gives you this rather uncomfortable feeling. They don't know what to do. I think they think I'm going to come after them. I can only imagine the kind of response this episode got when it originally aired. Even people today are still giving their own accounts of UFO sightings when this episode comes up. Near the end, the psychologist that assisted the four says, this is not a club that anyone wants to belong to. And I gotta agree. Dennis Depew, season three, episode 20. A couple out on their daily drive spot a guy in a van behind an abandoned schoolhouse carrying what appeared to be a bloodied white sheet. Dennis and Marilyn Depew seemed like the average middle-class couple raising kids. Little did everyone know that Dennis had become despondent, paranoid, and cruel. After realizing that she wanted her own happiness and that Dennis was not capable of change, Marilyn asked for a divorce. Dennis went along with this at first and granted her whatever she wished. Obviously, a manipulation tactic, but not seen by her. However, after the divorce, that's when the bad things started picking up again. Marilyn had granted Dennis access to the guest house to use as his office. This ended up being a bad move on her part as he used this to control her and the children. There were days that she would come home and he would be sitting in the living room quietly on the couch. She would have no idea how he got in because she had the locks changed several times. Dennis told people that he was depressed and that he was wanting to kill Marilyn. One day, when he comes up to pick up the children, who are still not willing to go anywhere with him alone, he starts an argument with one of the kids who resists going with him. Marilyn steps in and this causes a physical altercation between the two. Dennis winds up pushing Marilyn down the stairs and then commences to beating her nearly to death in front of their children. The oldest daughter rushed out of the house to call the police, but sadly it was too late. Dennis tells his kids that everything's okay and that he's taking Marilyn to the hospital, but he never does. It is said that this true crime story inspired Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers. The couple I spoke of in the beginning, they go back to the schoolhouse to make sure they saw what they saw. After doing this, Dennis follows them in his van. Fortunately for them, this was more of a scare tactic, it seems, because as soon as they turned off a random road, Dennis stops following them. It took a year to find Dennis, but luckily he was found the day after this episode aired. He was living in Dallas under a new name, Hank Queen, with his new girlfriend. I will never forget the guy's face or the story itself, especially when Stack read the last few sentences of the letter that DePue had written and sent out to several of their friends. It said, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a lie for a lie, a life for a life. To which Stack counters with, At the time, Dennis DePue had no idea just how prophetic those words would be. Spontaneous Human Combustion, Season 9, Episode 14 So, I had to present this one last. I'm sure many of you remember this, images like a woman suddenly catching fire in her kitchen, or a sunken burned impression in a bed probably start flooding your brain. This one starts with an account from a wife who starts to catch fire in her kitchen. We see her back smoking and her husband comes immediately over to take her shirt off revealing no fire or burns underneath. The kitchen is filled with smoke, but there's no evidence of where it came from or that a fire even started. Next, we hear the story of a son who goes to visit his dad at home after many failed attempts at trying to reach him. When he gets inside the house, there's smoke in the air, and when he enters his father's room, he appears to see a silhouette in the bed with smoke and ash coming off of it. The TV across from the bed was also melted. Bizarre, right? How the heck does this happen? There are two explanations for the experts. One, electrical current flows naturally produced in the body. All that electrical current builds up and there you go. Two, there's no real scientific evidence that this has ever happened and it can be easily solved by the factors surrounding the death. Both the gentleman in the episode happen to be smokers. I will say that the guy from the Skeptic Inquirer magazine probably has the best line of the entire segment. So the mystery mongers ought to shut up and get a life. Totally made me snort. They're so serious. It's impressive. Regardless, the thought of this happening along with the photograph shown in the episode make it one that stays burned in your brain forever. I'm more than sure you guys will have some of your own. Just make sure they aren't episodes of Beyond Belief. I love you, Jonathan Frakes. There are many, many places to watch episodes. I don't recommend doing it in bed at night though. Honestly, that's what makes the series so solid is that it doesn't matter what time of the day it is, it's still gonna scare the boogans out of you. There is no escape. You can get the series on DVD or it's more easily accessible on Pluto if you're cool with random episodes. FilmRise has them, but Tubi is the better way to go unless you want to be bombarded by the same eight ads for Liberty Mutual Insurance that feel like they go on for an eternity and then you only get two minutes of the actual show pre-streaming things. Now, there is a FilmRise True Crime channel on YouTube. Less ads, but still ads because YouTube. So how did it end? Where is it now? To the surprise of absolutely no one, the series came back in 2020. It's got some pretty good episodes, but it doesn't have that same edge that the original did, which I think was to be expected. There's also a strong lack of Stack, who was a tremendous presence. You can't really fill those shoes. Maybe Keith Morrison could. So not having a host isn't a huge bother. There's also a podcast hosted by Steve French, not to be confused with the mountain lion of the same name. Really, the show bounced from NBC to CBS to Lifetime during its original run. It was brought back in 2008 after the contract with Lifetime had finally run out. Dennis Farina took over hosting duties for the next couple of years, though the show itself was criticized for repurposing episodes from the first series and making them shorter. I also feel compelled as a vinyl collector to tell you that TerraVision got creator John Cosgrove to make a deal so they could release the soundtrack. I wanted to buy this, but still cannot bring myself to do it. The fact that Ryan Grayface sat through all of those DAT tapes just utterly amazes me. The man needs some kind of award for his bravery and sheer badassery. I would have been crying a minute into it. I know we already mentioned the music, but it plays such an integral role in the series. You can't put the Benny Hill theme over that and expect it to work out then, can you? I like to think that one day I'll have the courage to finally buy it, but then it will take another five years before I can bring myself to listen to it. They still have copies of Volume 1 and 2, which are beautifully pressed, so please go grab yourself a copy. Unsolved Mysteries will always be a core memory for us. It sparked our imaginations with Mothman, Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, aliens, and all the weirdness in between. Like America's Most Wanted, it also helped catch criminals and reunite people with their long-lost family members. Sure, I want to die a little inside every time I hear the music, but it immediately triggers memories for me. Not just around the show, but childhood memories built around it. It's still a solid show, and the fact that it came back is a testament to that. No, you don't have to miss the show too much, but giving it some extra love never hurt either. Stay spooky, my friends.