The Gray Ones Gather by Piotr Jablonski

This photograph doesn’t look like much, but as the original uploader explains:

My grandmother used to live in a creepy old house in a gated community for seniors. The previous owner had died there. One morning, her husband, who always got up a few hours before her, woke her up in a panic. He led her into the living room, where the blanket that was usually across the back of the couch was sitting straight up, as if someone was sitting underneath it. The thing is, nothing was under it, and I mean nothing. There were no sticks holding it up, nothing hanging from the ceiling, no pillows, nothing.

My grandmother was too scared to go up to it at first, so she snapped this photo from afar. After a few days, she got the courage to touch it. She poked it, and the blanket immediately fell down, crumpled and flat, like a normal blanket with nothing in it. And that was it.

The Grimmer family consisted of Carole and John and their four children, Ricki, 7, Stephen, 5, Paul, 4, and Cheryl, 3. They had emigrated from Bristol to Australia in 1968. On the 12th of January, 1970, the Grimmer family - except for John, who was away on army duty - were enjoying a family day out at the beach at Fairy Meadow, in Illawarra, New South Wales, Australia.

At around 1:30PM the skies turned a deep shade of grey and the rain started pouring down. All of the Grimmer children ran to the shower block as Carole collected up their belongings, ready to return home. Moments later, Ricki returned to Carole to tell her that Cheryl was refusing to come out of the shower block. When Carole went to the shower blocks, she discovered that Cheryl was gone. A search of the area by concerned bystanders and the Grimmer family uncovered nothing. Since there was no phone at the surf club, Carole had to rush to a nearby house to call the police.

The main theory was that Cheryl had been abducted. Several witnesses came forward to saw they saw a young man holding Cheryl up to have a drink from a water fountain before bundling her into a towel and running off. Other witnesses said they saw her in a white car. Investigators chased up several leads including a blue Kombi seen at the scene and a ransom note saying the kidnapper would abduct another child if he wasn’t paid $10,000. Neither lead panned out. Gradually the case went cold and investigators said it was likely that Cheryl was dead

In 2017, there was a dramatic breakthrough in the country’s oldest unsolved homicide case when a 63-year-old suspect was arrested and accused of abducting and killing Cheryl. He cannot be named under local law because he was a minor at the time of the abduction but he is suspected of abducting and strangling Cheryl. The man was a person of interest during the initial investigation and reportedly made comments about Cheryl 18 months after her disappearance while living at a home for troubled boys.

On the 14th of December, 1931, 10-year-old Vera Page left her home in Notting Hill, London, to pick up two school swimming certificates that she had left behind in her aunt’s home. She arrived safe and well to her aunt’s house before picking up the documents and leaving to walk back home at around 5:45PM. However, Vera never made it home. That evening, her parents called the police to report their daughter missing. An investigation into the disappearance revealed that at some point after leaving her aunt’s home, Vera chatted with a school friend outside a chemist. This was the last time Vera was ever seen.

Two days later, a milkman found Vera’s body in shrubbery beside a house on Addison Road, approximately a mile from her home. No attempt had been made to conceal her body indicating that the killer had wanted her to be found. An autopsy concluded that Vera had been raped and manually strangled shortly after she was last seen by her friend. However, it was determined that she hadn’t been laying in the shrubbery for long: there had been a downpour the previous day yet Vera’s clothing was dry, particularly where her body was touching the ground. Moreover, numerous people had walked by the shrubbery beforehand yet saw no body. Vera’s neck also had a mark which had been caused by a string or something similar.

When Vera’s body was moved, a finger bandage with ammonia was found tucked in her elbow. It was theorised that this belonged to the killer and had come loose when he moved Vera to the spot she was found. Spots of candle wax and dust were discernible on her clothing as well. An examination of the wax concluded it was different than any candles in Vera’s home. This led investigators to believe the killer had kept Vera’s body in a coal shed with no electric light before transporting her to where she was found.

Vera was known to be a particularly shy little girl and her parents were adamant she wouldn’t have gone anywhere with a stranger. The investigation turned towards those who knew Vera and her family. A man named Percy Rush was subsequently arrested. Percy worked at Whiteley’s Laundry and often handled ammonia. Moreover, when he was arrested, he was wearing a bandage on a finger. Rush also knew Vera; he often ran into her family while visiting his mother who lived nearby. A search of his home uncovered candles which matched the wax on Vera’s clothing.

Rush denied any involvement in the murder but shortly after his arrest, a woman came forward and claimed she had seen him wheeling a wheelbarrow covered with a red tablecloth towards Addison Road. However, when she was asked to pick him out of a lineup, she was unable to. In his pocket, investigators found a pyjama string which could have caused the marks on her neck. In his home, investigators found finger bandages but the material did not match that found at the scene. However, when police placed the finger bandage at the scene over Rush’s finger, it fit perfectly.

L’oeuf (The Egg). 1885.