You know it's bad when Shane is scared.
While this show is mainly known for its comedic bantering between our resident Vitriolic Best Buds, there is a reason a lot of fans advise against watching this show at night...
Supernatural
- The Ohio State Penitentiary, not so much for its alleged paranormal activity, but for the fact that it was the epitome of the Hellhole Prison. The boys both find the conditions the prisoners were forced to live in to be much scarier than any ghosts, and most of the audience are inclined to agree. The abuse got so bad, one man lit himself on fire to be free of it.
- The voice recording of Anneliese Michel was terrifying.
- The flashlight turning on and off at command during the Sallie House episode, in response to Shane asking if the spirit didn't want them there. Ryan was so spooked that he ran out of the room.
- In the same episode, the drawing of "Sallie," which a lot of fans found creepier than the house itself.
- Ryan throwing a ball at Waverly Hills Hospital for the spirit of a young boy and the ball rolling under some graffiti of the word "Ryan" in a room all the way down the hallway. Though Shane lightens the mood with a joke (on the opposite wall is some graffiti which says, "I love pot", leading Shane to suggest that maybe this ghost "just loves to blaze it"), the fact that the ball rolled specifically into that room can be seen as quite an eerie coincidence.
- The footsteps that the duo heard in the Eastern State penitentiary. It's possible that they belonged to the maintenance worker who was in the building at the same time the Buzzfeed crew were there, but Ryan does mention he was told to stay away from them. If they don't belong to that worker, then they're by far the most compelling evidence this show has collected.
- While staying at the Dauphine Orleans Hotel, the boys hear footsteps coming from the room above them in the middle of the night. Shane, of course, stays calm and tries to sleep through it, by Ryan freaks out and investigates it the next morning. It turns out that the room above them was empty and other visitors also heard the footsteps.
- The Island of Dolls. If the hundreds of Creepy Dolls won't do it for you, the spiders everywhere probably will.
- Not only that, but the spiders only seemed to really become active once Ryan was scared off from attempting to give a tiny doll of his own to the original doll that Don Julian found with the drowned girl's body in the 50s. It's one of the few times on the show that we see Shane scared out of his mind, and more than willing to leave.
- “The Haunting of Hannah Williams” is chilling not just because it affected one of Ryan and Shane’s own co-workers (Hannah of the otherwise light and domestic “Mom in Progress” series), but it’s its own vat of horror: you buy a new house with your young family. Then a few weeks in you hear strange noises at night, the lights and security system malfunction mysteriously, and you and your six-year-old son encounter visions of a strange little girl. You bring in one of your friends in for the night just to confirm you’re not going crazy, and she reports having even touched this mysterious visage.
- On top of this earlier in the episode, the medium that Ryan and Shane brought along for the investigation reports feeling the presence of a father figure who had passed in the home and noting that he keeps hearing an unclear name that could be "Don" or "Ron" before settling on "Don" as a short name for "Donald". Hannah's reaction to this in the playback shows just how terrifying the situation had become for her. For the record, Matt is her husband.
Hannah: (On the verge of tears) Oh my god, that's Matt's dad!- To make matters worse, this episode features Ryan having an extended conversation with a spiritual entity that might be the aforementioned little girl. Unlike most episodes of Unsolved this is done through a device called an Ovilus which, unlike the Spirit Box, relies on gathered environmental data and not radio waves. Oh yeah, and as with many "child" spirits it's highly likely that the potential one in Hannah's house is a demon is disguise.
- The Mysterious Disappearance of Roanoke Colony gives a subtle one, yet it would chill many to the bone. At the 17:20 time mark, the camera is focused on Shane, with an out of focus mannequin in the background. Yet, in a few seconds the mannequin moves to turn its head at the camera! It's never talked about in the video, and neither one in the duo talks about it.
- Ryan sees a full body apparition in the Sorrel-Weed Mansion, which is briefly caught on camera
. Worth noting that this is is the only time Ryan has claimed to have seen a ghost on the show.- Not to mention the mysterious footsteps the boys hear coming from the floor above them. The same floor no one is allowed go up to because it's condemned and could fall apart at any minute.
- Even worse, after that incident, they hear the unmistakable sound of a dog barking. Even Shane looks freaked out by the whole thing, and they have no way to check due to the aforementioned condemnation.
- The loud "SHHH!" and the singing heard in Colchester Castle; the singing even clearly changes tone and inflection.
- The spirit box session at the St Augustine Light House. The ghost says "swap me"! Like it wants to take over Ryan's body and leave him there to be the ghost instead!
- The fact that Ryan actually has a fairly coherent conversation with the spirit box. It says "Eliza" (one of the young victims' names, though the voice appears to be male), says "chimney" and repeats "fell off a chimney", says "you hear me", and even says—as Ryan's leaving—"why are you leaving?" For a random assortment of white noise, radio snippets and static, that's a lot of coincidences.
- Ryan's breakdown when exploring the Old City Jail alone is both funny and utterly unnerving to watch.
- Of the multiple words they get off the Spirit Box in the Viper Room, one is repeated multiple times. "Help".
- Some of the animations of "Annabelle" are way creepier than they had any right to be. Special mention to the one illustrating what Lou saw when he experienced sleep paralysis: the doll crawling up his body, coming to strangle him. Brr...
- "The Hunt For La Llorona" is relatively light, but there is a creepy story the boys hear from one of the locals near La Llorona Park in New Mexico. A young woman recounts how when she was twelve and out with her cousin at night, they both saw the silhouette of a woman who seemed to be floating. She was already creeped out and confused, but when she heard the wailing, she instantly knew who she was looking at—and then found that her cousin, apparently having come to the same conclusion, had already booked it, leaving her by herself. She also describes being terrified, but trying not to cry for fear of attracting La Llorona's attention.
True Crime
- In general, some of the more grisly unsolved true crime cases most definitely fall under this.
- Also in general, the True Crime cases can be even more frightening than the Supernatural ones because unlike the latter, where there is some skepticism, cases falling under the former for sure happened. Not only that, but the people behind them aren't ghosts and demons. They're flesh-and-blood human beings, who don't need any scary magic tricks to cause terror.
- The sheer incompetence displayed by the police and other officials in some of the True Crime episodes is truly horrifying. Imagine something horrific happening to a loved one, and not knowing who's responsible... and then, due to laziness, stupidity, or corruption on the part of the people who are supposed to find out, realizing that you likely never will.
- The disappearance of the Sodder children, partially related to the above — it took the fire department seven hours to respond to a fire that was less than three miles away. Five of the children vanished without a trace, and we still don't know what happened, though it's now unanimously agreed that they didn't die in the fire. As the boys (and many commentators) pointed out, the whole thing just reeks of a kidnapping that the fire department helped cover up. The boys wring some comedy about how obvious the foul play isnote , but this just makes it even more terrifying, that there was so much blatant evidence, yet the perpetrators still pulled a Karma Houdini.
- The Louis Le Prince episode. Imagine spending your whole life creating something incredible, something that humanity has never seen before, something that is guaranteed to change the world. You finally get to a point where you're ready to debut your creation... and then you vanish without a trace, never to be heard from again. No one has any clue what happened to you, and you never get to see your invention debut... and your family can't make an ounce of money off of it either, meaning they won't be set for life, like they should've been. Oh, and the kicker? Most people still don't know you invented it. Even decades later, someone else gets all the credit.
- The Jack The Ripper episode is so unsettling that it contains a warning at the beginning about how the episode will go into graphic descriptions of violence against women.
- The Keddie Cabin episode just leaves you with the awful, awful sense that someone was helping protect a murderer. It gets much worse when you realize that, since this didn't happen that long ago, it's very possible that this person (if they exist) is still alive... and at least one resident of the town was keeping an eye on the boys while they were there. Brr.
- Really, while you can't really blame the people of Keddie for being suspicious of outsiders coming to town to gawk at the murder site, the fact that they were being watched adds more Paranoia Fuel to the fire, since there is no way that there wasn't a cover up of some kind that happened here - that "one resident" may have just been a concerned citizen, uncomfortable with the idea of these strangers filming at the site, or they may have been someone involved in the cover up itself.
- Ken McElroy. You're living in a small town at the complete mercy of a vicious thief, arsonist and rapist who somehow always manages to stay out of legal trouble (to the point of openly bragging about how he'd never go to jail) and the best solution the town police can come up with is... a neighborhood watch. Small wonder that when someone took justice into their own hands the entire town quietly covered for them.
- Which in and of itself is creepy when you think about it - a person could be so hated that someone could kill them in broad daylight in front of an entire street of witnesses and get away with it. It's even brought up that after getting shot no one bothered to call an ambulance for McElroy, leaving him to bleed to death in his car.
- The Creepy Murder in Room 1046—despite giving birth to Ricky Goldsworth—is profoundly unsettling. The way the victim just lies there in the dark, awake and waiting, giving short cryptic answers, is unnerving, and the low male voice that says "Come in. Turn on the lights"...
- The Suspicious Case of the Reykjavik Confessions, and how much Police Brutality was involved, including one suspect spending two years in solitary confinement.
- While the episode about The Monster with 21 Faces is relatively less scarier than entries on this page, the 1955 Morinaga Milk Arsenic Poisoning incident that was mentioned in the Theories section is parental worries at its finest, especially if you are a parent with infants. It's no wonder Shane and Ryan theorized that the survivors of the incident might have been those behind The Monster with 21 Faces.
Misc.
- Before the season five finale song of The Hot Daga, Believe Me Maizie, Shane put out several teasers on Soundcloud. One of them is ominous as hell, with muffled distorted voices giving it a dirge feel.
- Hell, even the music played over the endcard of each episode is rather eerie and unnerving.
