Want to write a mystery based on history? Check out my blog for posts about the unsolved past, with writing prompts!

Roopkund Lake Skeletons: unexplained remains of at least 300 people found at an isolated lake in the Indian Himalayas, from 800 and 1800 CE

The Beast of Gevaudan: History’s most well-documented werewolf, France, 1764

The Mystery of the Moving Coffins: tales of supposed unexplained movement of heavy coffins in burial vaults, most well-known in Barbados, 1808-19

The Female Stranger: unidentified decedent, Virginia (US), 1816

Spring-Heeled Jack: well-documented apparition or cryptid, England 1837-1904

The ghost ships Mary Celeste (1872) and Carroll A. Deering (1920)

Lizzie Borden: unsolved double murder, Massachusetts (US), 1892

The Flannan Isles Vanishing: disappearance of three lighthouse keepers, Scotland, 1900

Disappearance of Everett Ruess: missing person in the Utah (US) desert, 1934

Planes lost in the Bermuda Triangle: Flight 19 (1945) and The Star Tiger and Star Ariel, (1948-49)

Dyatlov Pass: mysterious deaths of 9 hikers, Ural Mountains, 1959

A werewolf prompt:

Escapist fiction. It’s possible the Beast of Gevaudan was not a wolf or dog, but another large creature, like a hyena or lion. Local zoos would have been private, so who knows what people were keeping? Obviously, once the killing started, the owner would have taken down the lost pet posters, so nobody owned up to owning the beast. People were not expecting to see anything other than local creatures in the woods, and they might not have had much familiarity with lions anyway, so it would probably make sense for them to call it a “wolf.” As for plots, there’s room for a sweeping historical novel starting in the place where the wild beast was captured, on the ship sending it to France, in the private zoo, and then out into the woods to become the Beast. Or what if it was not one lion that escaped, but a breeding pair? How would the locals cope with a growing population of big cats in the woods?

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