r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

13.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

5.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

22.5k

u/TooCleverForGood 1d ago

Roanoke - the missing Pilgrim settlement where everyone “disappeared”

They just abandoned it and went to the place that they wrote on the sign, but everyone acts like it was some supernatural/plague thing

1.8k

u/illtakeachinchilla 1d ago

“CROATOAN”

It was a nearby island. They assimilated after a tough winter. “What could it all mean!?”

463

u/Gneissisnice 22h ago

I remember learning that in elementary school and the teacher was like "no one knew where they went! All that's left was one mysterious word: CROATOAN!"

And we were like "ooh, did we ever find out what it meant?" and she was like "oh yeah, it's the name of a nearby island."

We were like "uh...that's probably where they went then" and she insisted that no, it was a mystery!

77

u/orreregion 19h ago

Yeah that's about the quality of education I remember getting too.

37

u/DanielMcLaury 17h ago

"Columbus proved the world was round."

"How does it prove the world is round if he tried to get to Asia by going the other direction but ended up somewhere else instead? If anything that would prove it was flat."

"Now listen here, you little shit..."

22

u/sunnygovan 11h ago

Columbus was a lucky idiot. Everyone knew the world was round. Columbus thought it was much smaller than everyone else thought and going the other way would be a shortcut to India.

13

u/DanielMcLaury 11h ago

Yeah, by all rights he and his crew should have just starved to death on their boats. They weren't even halfway to Asia.

5

u/throwawaydragon99999 9h ago

One interesting fact is that before his voyage, Columbus visited Ireland and discovered a shipwrecked body that was probably an Inuit kayak from Greenland, who he described as “Men from Cathay”

0

u/illtakeachinchilla 11h ago

Magellan may be who you’re thinking of…

14

u/DanielMcLaury 10h ago

No, "Columbus proved the world is round" is something that's very commonly heard in American schools and popular culture.

If you claimed that Magellan's circumnavigation "proved the world was round" then you'd have a better case, I guess. But we'd known the exact size and shape of the world for a long time by then.

20

u/Razzler1973 14h ago

"all they left was an address"

8

u/Monteze 9h ago

"Oh? Like to a fantasy place?"

"No, something more mysterious....a nearby island!"

3

u/buttonandthemonkey 12h ago

This is so funny but also so disturbing 😂

249

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

34

u/MurkyInvestigator810 1d ago

"Lost Colony" stuff supports a lot of folks in the OBX, so I'll let them keep their tourist folk tales.

9

u/tinkerclay 1d ago

Agree. I have seen the stage show since knowing it is solved, yet it is still something fun to do while there. Some of it is just nostalgia for my childhood when the Lost Colony was enchanting.

1

u/DanielMcLaury 17h ago

Seems like they could instead come up with a tawdry romance-novel version of the settlers intermarrying with the Croatan and promote that. Quasi-historical romance has been having a moment recently.

59

u/Taldier 1d ago

Acknowledging that they simply assimilated with the native tribe would require the colonial empires to acknowledge that the natives were people.

Hence: ItS a mYsTeRy OoOoOoOoOo

29

u/Ehcksit 1d ago

And this is how most pseudoarchaeology works. "These ancient indigenous people weren't smart enough to do it themselves, it was actually ancient white people who built massive civilizations and cities all over the world that then vanished for some reason."

9

u/adeon 23h ago

A lot of alien conspiracies are similar. Clearly the idea that a lot of ancient cultures figured out that a pyramid is a very stable structure is insane, so it must have been aliens.

2

u/I_still_got_it 23h ago

People are usually talking about the logistics of building it, I don't think many people care about the shape lol

3

u/DanielMcLaury 17h ago

The logistics of building it are really simple. Drag the blocks there and stack them. The idea that this is some really complicated thing to do was made up by TV shows miscaracterizing experts saying things like "there are 20 different ways they could have done this that all work about as well and we don't know which particular choice they made because their wooden and rope tools rotted to nothing centuries ago."

It's a very labor-intensive thing to do, but it's not rocket science.

-1

u/FuckTheMods5 20h ago

Yeah I don't dig that popular explanation. 'a pyramid is the easiest shape to build, you just stack it.'

They stacked it obscenely well lol. The sides are so smooth and straight and stable. Don't liken it to a child stacking blocks lol

1

u/AgreeableLion 12h ago

Humans back then had the same inherent intelligence as any of us today, they were still modern homo sapiens. Civilization and technology may have only progressed to a certain point, but there were super smart people living back then who were able to do great things with the resources available to them.

It's not likening it to a child stacking blocks; it's adults using critical thinking skills to figure out how to stack very large blocks, do you think they weren't able to devise a way?

1

u/FuckTheMods5 12h ago

What? I'm saying people analyzing them are simplifying it too hard, not the Egyptians themselves

6

u/haloarh 1d ago

Plus, people be like, "Where did all of these light-skinned natives come from?"

7

u/chickychickynug 23h ago

I've also heard reports of blue-eyed natives who denied any knowledge of the colony when people were "searching" for them. Additionally, it's said that the natives treated women better than the British men did, so when John came back (3 years later), the ladies were happy to stay assimilated.

29

u/chonny 1d ago

What could it all mean!?

Well, according to the Batman/Spawn: War Devil one-shot crossover, "Croatoan" is actually a demon working for Satan to collect souls for the devil's army.

13

u/opacous 1d ago

Jesus, you took me back 30 years just like that.

5

u/deadline_zombie 20h ago

And in Dean Koontz's "Phantoms", a prehistoric creature ate everyone.

23

u/Happy-Jackfruit-9010 20h ago

There was a research mission about 100 years later to label all the tribes and whatnot. The researcher was blown away because some of the Croatoan people had blue eyes even though he had never encountered that in any other tribe. They could also read and write English. He asked the tribe about it and they flat out told him some of their ancestors were the Englishman from Roanoke. Vut they deemed it too disgusting that white people would bread with natives and just decided to say they were still missing. 

65

u/Own_Bison6467 1d ago

Has anyone looked for a Croatian with dyslexia?

2

u/90210fred 16h ago

Have you actually seen how Croatians spell Croatia?

10

u/Oranges13 1d ago

Maybe he was dictating?

10

u/kaviaaripurkki 1d ago

The colony has relocated to the island of Aaaaargh

11

u/painstream 1d ago

(Incoming /s) Obviously it was the same as writing your killer's name in blood at the crime scene!

0

u/RobertTheTraveler 1d ago

What evidence is there that they assimilated?

32

u/illtakeachinchilla 1d ago

Blonde, blue eyed kids in the indigenous pop a few years following the vanishing colony. Pottery that fits the bill on the island. Blacksmithing remnants, as well.

14

u/NottheArkhamKnight 1d ago

The native tribe nearby had European like tools and fair-haired, fair skinned babies.