Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the macabre. He wrote horror stories, mysteries, poems, fiction and non-fiction. He was a master of suspense and the father of the modern detective stories.
He had the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie copying his format to create their own stories and is considered one of the most influential writers in history.
However, his own untimely demise would prove to be the biggest mystery of all with detectives and fans from around the globe trying to discover what really happened to the master of mystery.
And now his legion of fans can find out.
Part of Albert Jack’s Mysterious World Series

The Prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima (and the mad Catholics)
On 13 July 1917, three children were startled to find a mysterious figure approaching them as they tended their flock of sheep in pastureland near Fatima in Portugal. Lucia dos Santos and her two cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto reported seeing what they described as a ‘pretty lady from Heaven’.
Lucia said the lady was ‘brighter than the sun, shedding rays of light clearer and stronger than a crystal glass filled with the most sparkling water and pierced by the burning rays of the sun’. Just the sort of description you’d expect from an illiterate ten-year-old shepherd girl.
Lucia also claimed the lady had also entrusted her with three important secrets, which she did not reveal until many years later.
Instead of being cuffed around the ear, the three scally-wags were firmly believed and the devout soon identified the mysterious visitor as the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.
Word of the vision rapidly spread, and thousands began making the pilgrimage to the Cova da Iria (the area of pastureland near Fatima in which the children had grazed their sheep) hoping to see the Mother of Jesus for themselves.
Listen on…..

From the bestselling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, Ten Minute Mysteries and many more….
The Spine-Chilling Tale of the Chase Vault
What terrifying secret is sealed within an old family tomb in Oistins, Barbados?
From the seventeenth century onwards, the nobles of England who had been awarded land on the island began importing thousands of African slaves to work the newly formed tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations.
Over the next century, Barbados dominated the world’s sugar industry and the plantation owners became powerful and successful figures throughout the British Empire.
It was one of these landowners, the Honourable Thomas Waldron, who in 1724 built an elegant family burial vault in the cemetery of the parish church in the town of Oistins. It was intended for his married daughter and her family.
Seven feet wide and twelve feet deep, and made out of carved coral, the vault was large enough to accommodate the entire Waldron family. The first person to be buried in it was Richard Elliot, the husband of Elizabeth Waldron. He was also the last of the family to be interred there.
Nobody has since been able to explain why Elizabeth failed to join her husband in his final resting place, and nor why the next occupant, Mrs Thomasina Goddard, was a non-family member (unless she was a descendent of the Elliots or the Waldrons by marriage), but what is known is that when the tomb was opened on 31 July 1807 to bury Mrs Goddard, it was found to be empty.
Part of Albert Jack’s Mysterious World Series

From the bestselling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel and Ten Minute Mysteries.
The famous bandleader vanished without trace en route to entertain Allied troops in 1944. It had now been revealed that the results of the investigation into his disappearance were covered up.
This is what really happened to him and what the U.S Government don’t want you to know.
Part of Albert Jack’s Mysterious World Series

From the best-selling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, They Laughed at Galileo, Mysterious World, New World Order and many more…..
Try to See It from My Angle: The Bermuda Triangle
What is it about this infamous stretch of ocean (and sky) that causes ships and planes to vanish without a trace?
At ten past two in the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the naval air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The commander of Flight 19, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, had been assigned a routine two-hour training flight of fifteen men on a course that would take them out to sea sixty-six miles due east of the airbase, to the Hen and Chicken Shoals.
There the squadron would carry out practice bombing runs, then fly due north for seventy miles before turning for a second time and heading back to base, 120 miles away.
Their plotted flight plan formed a simple triangle, straightforward to execute, and Lieutenant Taylor and his four trainee pilots headed out into the clear blue sky over a calm Sargasso Sea.
Even though everything seemed set fair, some of the crew were showing signs of anxiety. This was not unusual during a training flight over open water.
Less usual was the fact that one of the fifteen crewmen had failed to show up for duty, claiming he had had a premonition that something strange would happen on that day and that he was too scared to fly.
Listen on…..

From the Author of the Internationally Bestselling Books – Red Herrings & White Elephants, What Caesar did for My Salad, Shaggy Dogs, Pop Goes the Weasel, They Laughed at Galileo:
We all love a good mystery don’t we? And by all, I mean each and every one of us are, or will be, captivated at one time or another by a decent, real-life, scary mystery; either one of the world’s most famous or something on a much smaller scale. But, writing a book on just one of these would have been relatively easy.
The challenge came from researching many of them and then condensing them down in a way that I know you, my reader, will enjoy them. And that is in short, sharp informative sections that can be read on the train, bus, queue or whilst you are waiting to pick the kids up from school.
Therefore, inevitably, some information will be missing, for which I apologise in advance. But the missing detail isn’t critical to the basic story; the core details of the mystery in question should all be in there. And this brings me to an important point. Given that I am a fan of the unknown and unexplained, I have not set out to be a mystery buster in this series.
I just wanted to tell the story, reveal some little-known detail and offer a rational explanation wherever I could. I wanted to provoke a bit of thought and conversation wherever I could, but leave you to decide the answer for yourselves; does the story remain a mystery, in your view, or have you managed to piece together a theory of your own that you can share with friends.
Here then are six of the world’s most famous mysteries of the sea.
Contents
1. The Mary Celeste
2. The Bermuda Triangle
3. The Eilean Mor Lighthouse
4. Buster Crabb
5. Unidentified Submerged Objects (USO)
6. The Flying Dutchman

From the best selling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, Ten Minute Mysteries and many more…
Who Really Makes Crop Circles?
Strange formations in fields of wheat and other crops have been appearing since the 1970s. Are they made by aliens parking their spaceships, or is the explanation rather more down to earth?
Of all the subjects I’ve explored for this series, the one I was most looking forward to finding more about was crop circles. For years I had been hoping there would be an extraordinary paranormal explanation for crop-circle appearances or, better still, that we were being visited by aliens from other worlds.
Then, when it became clear that most of the circles were in fact hoaxes, I relished the thought that I would finally have the chance to dismiss all the crop-circle fanatics I have heard on the radio over the years talking with great passion about the temporary parking of invisible spacecraft in a field, leaving behind an imprint in the flattened wheat when they zoom back into outer space.
The only extra bit of evidence offered for this startling conclusion appearing to be that witnesses claim flocks of birds veer around crop-circle sites as if avoiding or circumnavigating something the rest of us cannot see.
I was looking forward to poking fun at the gaping holes left in the arguments of these so-called experts when expounding their elaborate theories on the six o’clock news.
Indeed, I wish I had phoned in once, just once, and asked that sanctimonious old fellow on the BBC, who appeared to be contradicting himself every five minutes, a couple of simple questions: how, then, do you explain the crop circles that have appeared directly underneath power lines – how could a spaceship have landed there?
Listen here…..