Every case file in this archive ends the same way. After the dates, the names, the excavation reports and the letters nobody read for a century, there is a single word at the bottom of the page. Documented. Disputed. Debunked. Unresolved. Or, for the stories told on purpose, Invented.
One word is a blunt instrument for a ghost, a lost machine or a stone too heavy to move. But it forces a question every mystery deserves and few ever get asked: when you go back to the very first record, what is actually there?
We have now asked that question 505 times. This is what the stamps say when you count them.
The Count | October 2026
| Verdict | Case files | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Debunked | 220 | 44% |
| Unresolved | 124 | 25% |
| Invented | 70 | 14% |
| Documented | 53 | 10% |
| Disputed | 38 | 8% |
| Total | 505 | 100% |
The headline number is the one people expect. Close to half of the famous claims we traced did not survive contact with their own sources.
The number underneath it is the one people don’t. Put the Documented, Disputed and Unresolved files together and you get 215. For almost every mystery that fell apart, another one held up, split the experts, or ran the record dry before anyone could close it. A quarter of everything we checked is still open. The strange did not go away. It just moved.
What the Five Stamps Mean
Documented. The core claim holds up against the primary record. It happened, broadly as told, and the sources can be checked.
Disputed. Serious evidence points in more than one direction, and credible researchers still disagree.
Debunked. The claim does not survive the record. The error, misreading or fabrication is named, and how it spread becomes the case.
Unresolved. The record runs out before the answer does. What is known is laid out, and the gap is left open.
Invented. A story told on purpose, a work of fiction or a modern myth with no record behind it. These files are kept apart from the others, so a legend is never mistaken for a lead.
A stamp judges the core claim, not the whole story. A haunting can be debunked while the people who lived through it are entirely real. A machine can be documented while its purpose is still argued over. The stamp is the answer to one question, and the file is everything around it.
Documented | When the Strange Part Is True
These are the files where the record turned out to be stranger than the rumour, or at least as strange.
In 536 the sun went dim across the Northern Hemisphere and stayed that way for more than a year. The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that it shone like the moon. For centuries that sounded like exaggeration, until ice from an Alpine glacier gave up volcanic glass from an eruption in Iceland early that year. The year without a sun is no longer a mystery about whether it happened. It is a record of what happened next.
The Antikythera mechanism came up from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 as a corroded lump nobody looked at for months. It is a geared calculator of the heavens, built more than two thousand years ago, and its full workings were only modelled in 2021.
Some Documented files are about the investigators. S. G. Soal, a president of the Society for Psychical Research, produced some of the most celebrated telepathy results of the twentieth century. In 1978 a researcher using computer analysis showed his data had been altered. The fraud is the documented part, and it was exposed from inside the society he led.
Others are about power. In 1909 two Theosophists picked out a teenage boy on a beach in India and announced he would be the next world teacher. Annie Besant built an international order around him. In 1929 the boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, grown up, dissolved it himself. And in 1971 a group of burglars took files from an FBI office in Pennsylvania and mailed them to newspapers, exposing COINTELPRO, a secret programme that had been running for fifteen years.
Even the oldest ghost story in your bathroom has a documented file. Stare into a mirror in a dim room for ten minutes and, in one 2010 study, two thirds of people watched their own face distort. The faces are real. What they are made of is the case.
Disputed | Where Serious People Still Disagree
The smallest stamp, and in some ways the most honest. A Disputed file is one where the evidence is real on more than one side and nobody has earned the last word.
The Enfield poltergeist began in a council house in north London in 1977. Decades later Janet Hodgson, the girl at the centre of it, said that about two percent of it was faked. Two percent is a confession. It is also a claim about the other ninety-eight.
Eusapia Palladino was caught cheating more than once, at Cambridge in 1895 and in New York in 1910. In between, three hardened investigators sat with her in Naples in 1908 and came away convinced that not everything they saw was a trick. When Rupert Sheldrake published his theory of morphic resonance in 1981, the editor of Nature asked whether the book should be burned. The argument has never really stopped.
Egypt supplies two more. The Osiris Shaft under the Giza causeway descends three levels to a chamber surrounded by water, and its age is still argued over. In 2025 a team announced that satellite radar had found deep wells beneath Khafre’s pyramid. Egyptologists, led by Zahi Hawass, rejected it. No one has yet dug to find out.
Debunked | Where the Story Becomes the Case
The largest stamp, and the most misunderstood. Debunked does not mean dull. It means the interesting question has changed, from whether something happened to how so many people came to believe it did.
The Ouija board was patented in 1891 and sold as a parlour game. The force that moves the planchette had been named forty years earlier, by a physiologist called William Carpenter. It is the hands of the people touching it. That is not the end of the story. It is the reason the story works at all.
John Titor arrived on internet forums in 2000, a soldier from 2036 sent back for an old IBM computer. He described a civil war in the United States that would begin within a few years. It never came. The Mothman sightings at Point Pleasant are real history, reported to police within hours in 1966. The idea that the creature foretold the collapse of the Silver Bridge thirteen months later is not. Investigators traced the collapse to a crack in a single steel link.
Some debunks turn the method on its own inventors. Harry Price made his name exposing fake mediums, then made Borley Rectory the most haunted house in England. Eight years after his death, three researchers, two of them his own colleagues, took his evidence apart.
And some debunks make the truth more impressive than the legend. The Nazca lines did not need visitors from the sky. They needed a desert culture that could lay out a hummingbird the length of a football pitch without ever seeing it from above. The first nine years of the Knights Templar were not spent digging for treasure under the Temple Mount. They were spent poor, ignored and waiting, until a church council at Troyes in 1129 gave them a rule, and the beginning of one of the most powerful institutions in medieval Europe.
Unresolved | Where the Record Runs Out
A quarter of the archive, and the reason it exists. An Unresolved file is not a shrug. It is a careful account of exactly how far the evidence goes, and the precise place where it stops.
A clay jar from outside Baghdad, sealed with bitumen around a copper cylinder and an iron rod, can make electricity. Replicas prove it. Whether anyone two thousand years ago meant it to is the open question at the heart of the Baghdad battery. At Baalbek three Roman stones of around eight hundred tonnes each sit in a temple wall, and how they were moved into place is still genuinely debated. The Phaistos Disc, pulled from a Cretan palace in 1908, carries a spiral of stamped signs that no one has read.
The human cases are stranger still. In 1759 Emanuel Swedenborg, at a dinner in Gothenburg, described a fire burning in Stockholm, hundreds of kilometres away, as it happened. Immanuel Kant took the trouble to investigate the story. In 1977 four young people in a Massachusetts town reported the same small, pale figure with an oversized head. It was never seen again, and it became the Dover Demon. Daniel Dunglas Home performed for scientists and royalty and was never caught. And in St. Louis in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down at a Ouija board and began writing, for more than twenty years, in the voice of Patience Worth, a woman who said she had died centuries earlier.
None of these files is closed. All of them are more precise than the legends told about them.
Invented | Stories Told on Purpose
Seventy files carry the Invented stamp, and they are here on purpose too. Modern myth is part of the record of what people believe, but it should never be filed beside the evidence.
H. P. Lovecraft insisted his gods were inventions, and occultists built real magical systems around them anyway. In 1967 a minister published a book about Valiant Thor, a Venusian who supposedly lived inside the Pentagon for three years. And there is the Bartholomew expedition, an album of photographs from inside the Earth, said to have been found in a Kentucky cave, with no finder, no archive and no photographs anyone can produce.
What the Count Tells Us
Three things stand out.
Most mysteries break at the source, not at the end. When a famous claim fails, it rarely fails on some fine point of physics. It fails on the first document. A translation that was never checked, a press release that outran its paper, a confession nobody quoted, a date copied wrong and then copied again. The single most useful thing anyone can do with a mystery is find the earliest version of it.
Debunked is where the best stories often live. A hoax that fooled a nation, an investigator who fooled himself, a myth that grew from a crack in a steel bar. How a false thing spreads tells you more about people than most true things do.
The open files are real. One case in four still ends at an edge. That is not a failure of the method. It is what an honest method produces. An archive that closed every case would be telling you something false.
How the Stamps Are Given
Each file starts with the claim as it is usually told, then works backwards: to the earliest newspaper report, the excavation record, the original letter, the paper the headline was written from. The verdict judges the core claim against that record and nothing else. It is not a judgement of the people involved, the tradition the story belongs to, or anyone who believes it.
A stamp can change. When new evidence arrives, the file is reopened, and the verdict follows the record wherever it goes.
The count above covers 505 of the archive’s 587 files. The other 82 carry no stamp yet. Most of them explain a tradition, a text or a piece of science rather than test a single claim, so there is nothing for a stamp to judge. A smaller group are older files waiting for a full rewrite before they get one. This count was taken on 16 October 2026.
You are welcome to cite these numbers. A link back to this page is all we ask, so readers can follow every stamp to the file behind it.
Every one of these 505 stamps is a door. Pick a word, open the file, and check the record for yourself. That was always the point.
