#UNSOLVED PIRATE MYSTERIES TV#

Inevitably the phone would ring, and I would race to answer it, eager to hear another human voice. The curtains seemed to move, the shadows flickered on the walls, and I would have goosebumps on every square inch of skin. Robert Stack would look straight at me while he described a young girl, home alone, who never made it to Saturday morning. One of my favorite hobbies was to frighten myself to death by leaving off the lights and tuning in when my roommate was not home. By the time I was in college, Unsolved Mysteries had moved to Friday nights.

Watching it by yourself is an entirely different prospect. Watching Unsolved Mysteries with a group of people is one thing. And our sense of justice had been restored, our faith in law and order renewed. And then a mug shot would appear, or if we were lucky an actual video of a suspect in handcuffs being led from some seedy motel room in the middle of nowhere. We would all sit up straighter, ready to hear what mystery had been solved. Often, at the end of a segment, there would be a blast of music and the word ‘Update’ would scroll up the screen.

#UNSOLVED PIRATE MYSTERIES TV#

This was the best time to take a bathroom/snack break and then race back to the TV set just as I heard the theme song start to play. My tastes were much less misty-eyed and more cloak and dagger. I found them overly sentimental and usually featured older folks who had time on their hands to cry and reminisce. The Lost Loves stories were my least favorite. They would hold their breath expectantly, and I held my breath right along with them. Who doesn’t like the idea of chests of pirate gold or barrels of outlaw bounty being found in the desert by a group of wannabe cowboys who were lucky enough to find a cross-shaped pile of rocks behind the one tree for hundreds of miles around? Of course, they rarely actually dug up anything of value, but they sure seemed to have fun trying. Stack would ask the audience to be on the lookout. Robert Stack would describe a bank robber or kidnapper who was last seen in New York City or Chicago and had so far evaded capture for months or even years. The Wanted Fugitive part was always exciting. I am a born skeptic, so I mentally refuted all the eyewitnesses who claimed their toaster was possessed by a dead Civil War general or their attic was infested with other-worldly squatters from five centuries ago. The Supernatural segment featured stories about UFOs and ghosts that made me roll my eyes. And then I would reward myself with the realization that I was safe and at home where I belonged.

People last seen climbing in a truck or walking down a lonely highway made me shiver with the possibility that anyone could just vanish at any given time. The segments where family members described how their loved one “just disappeared one night” were my favorite. The opening music was like a siren song, and we all came from various rooms in the house for another dose of whodunit.Įach episode was usually broken down into several parts: an Unsolved Murder, the Supernatural, Wanted Fugitives, Hidden Treasure, and Lost Loves were the typical stories. Wednesday nights, after church, we gathered around the TV. For an entire generation of television/mystery junkies, his voice became synonymous with murder and spooky encounters. Do you remember that show? There was never a more perfect host than Mr.

The original one, with Robert Stack, not the reboot that was nowhere as good as the real one. We have 3-D printing and fiber optics, micro-artificial intelligence and quantum graphics (I have absolutely no idea what those last two things even are).īut, by far, the most thrilling innovation in my life is the fact that our Smart TV has an entire channel running every episode of the classic Unsolved Mysteries show from the 80s and 90s. We can program everything in our homes from a thousand miles away with a tap of an icon on our cell phones. Technology has opened the universe … we have robotic surgery and driverless vehicles, digital money and quantum computing.

Unsolved pirate mysteries