Probably a bit of a shorter one here, but I'm only looking to evoke a certain mood for the spooky month this time. For my nostalgic memories of the 90's, Unsolved Mysteries fits the bill nicely. I could just end this post here, having already linked the theme song that scared the piss out of my entire generation... but instead I actually went to watch some of the show. Lucky for me, a whole shitload of it is online and I went with two episodes from the second season. Here's where the approach got tricky, though. Unsolved Mysteries is, in a lot of ways, a true crime show. It also deals with aspects of the unexplained and paranormal, as well as some sweeter tales which we'll get to in a moment... but true crime is awkward. It's one thing for me to sit here and chronicle a review of some slasher movie where imaginary people played by actors get killed by someone. It's quite another for me to write out a real crime case where a real human being's life ended. 31 Screams has always been about exploring the fantastical, and just covering an actual fucking murder is a line I don't really want to cross. Lucky for me, the two I watched only had one actual unsolved murder mystery case between them. What's in between? Before we get to the spooky, here's the surprisingly heartfelt.
At this point I'm convinced that stories about hope and healing are haunting me; the first episode I loaded up, after a quick real crime update, told the story of a Vietnam vet named Jim looking for the nurse who helped him after he was wounded during the war. It's an unexpectedly sweet story, and one with the happy ending of the nurse and the patient meeting up again after 20-odd years. Now I'm skipping past more paranormal stuff, but I then loaded up a second episode from the second season. It began with the story of a Vietnam vet named Jim looking for the nurse who helped him after he was wounded during the war. I want you all to know that I lay there, downstairs, seriously wondering for a few moments if that Berenstein Bears/Mandela Effect bullshit had just happened to me, and I'd shifted between parallel universes in between episodes. It all ended up being a huge coincidence, though. At least, I think so. Still, for a show I decided to watch because it had a spooky theme song and dealt with like aliens and ghosts and shit sometimes, it was surprisingly poignant. It's like all those stories I get inspired by, your Sailor Moons and your Doctor Whos and your Zombie Lands and whatnot, but it's real. A real tangible connection between real people, shared for the world in the hopes that they can reconnect and heal the last scars of their wounds in Vietnam. The second vet even says as much, once he gets to meet his caring nurse from yesteryear. It's really quite lovely and I liked it.
And now for the SPOOKY SHIT! The two spooky cases I encountered were of the Roswell UFO crash of 1947, and the cryptid Ogopogo from British Columbia. Ogopogo is basically just Canada's Loch Ness Monster, for those not in the know. The Roswell case is presented in wild detail, and it's definitely a jumping off point that makes me want to read more into it. I mean, I have enough of a rational mind to know that it's probably all grasping at straws, but Unsolved Mysteries makes it feel real, especially when it gets into the details of leaked Army documents sent to UFO hunters. Which could just be people fucking around with UFO hunters, mind, but then you have a living eyewitness who supposedly handled the alien spaceship metal after his dad brought it home. There's always a rational way out of it all, of course, but when you've got that spooky mood and that spooky theme music it can be hard to forget that. That goes double for Ogopogo, a lake monster which actually has a bunch of blurry footage of it shot in the late 60's and the 80's. Unsolved Mysteries shows about four different bits of footage of Ogopogo, and in half of them you can't see shit. The ones from 1989 show something but it could easily be a big beaver or an otter. It makes me wonder if anyone with like, an actual HD camera in our day and age has captured Ogopogo footage. That's that for Unsolved Mysteries, I guess. It's definitely a spooky goddamned show, even if it has moments of true crime and sweetness peppered within.
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