Terrifying Unsolved Mysteries of World War One: Vanishing Ships, Lost Treasures, and Haunting Secrets That Continue to Baffle America and the World

There are moments in American history when the world seems to pause, when everything changes in the space of a single shot, a single moment, a single decision that cannot be unmade. But there are other moments—quieter moments, darker moments—that the world has chosen to forget. These are the mysteries of the First World War, the stories that were buried beneath the thunder of artillery and the fog of battle, hidden away in archives and forgotten testimonies.

They say that if you listen carefully to the old soldiers’ stories, if you sit with the descendants of those who lived through that terrible time, you can hear echoes of questions that were never answered. Questions about duty and deception, about who fired the first shots, about ships that vanished and men who disappeared, about the thin line between heroism and horror.

These are the legends of the forgotten war.

Part Two: The First Shot

The question sounds simple: Who fired the first shot for the British Empire in World War I?

But in America, where we love the definitiveness of beginnings and endings, this question has never received a satisfying answer. History points to July 29, 1914, when a round was fired from the Austro-Hungarian warship Bodrog along the Danube River—but that was Austria-Hungary firing on Serbia, not Britain firing on anyone. The British declaration of war came later, on August 4, 1914, and what followed was a chaos of firings and claimings, each nation insisting that they had the right to call themselves first.

On August 22, 1914, a cavalry drummer named Sergeant E. Thomas pulled the trigger on four German horsemen somewhere in Belgium. The round tore through the air, the first British bullet to cross into German-held territory. No one was injured, but history would record this moment as significant—the first shot fired by Britain on European soil.

But wait.

Just ten days earlier, in a place called Togaland in West Africa, a native soldier named Alhaji Grunchi serving in the British Army had opened fire on a German unit guarding a wireless transmission station. It wasn’t Europe, but in essence, it was still a shot fired in the name of the British Crown. Did that count? Who gets to decide which shot truly came first?

And then there was August 5, 1914—just one day after Britain declared war. A coastal artillery unit at Port Phillip, south of Melbourne, was ordered to fire a warning shot at a German freighter named SS Faltz, which was attempting to leave the harbor. The shot caused no damage, but it forced the ship to turn back, making it the first enemy vessel captured in the world during that war.

So in the end, nobody knows. And perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps the real mystery isn’t who fired the first shot, but why we need so desperately to know. Perhaps it’s because in that first shot lives the seed of everything that followed—all the violence, all the loss, all the questions that would never be answered.

Part Three: The Red Baron’s Death

Manfred von Richthofen—the Red Baron—was a legend even before he died. He was the man who had shot down as many as eighty enemy aircraft, the ace of aces, the warrior who seemed invincible. His plane was painted crimson, a daring challenge to the enemy: Come and find me if you can.

On April 21, 1918, at the height of his powers, the Red Baron led his squadron into the skies above France. He was hunting, searching for enemy prey. And he found it in the form of a young Canadian pilot named Wilfried May—a boy with no combat experience, a lieutenant who had never fought a real battle.

The chase was on. The Red Baron, confident in his superiority, pursued the young Canadian deeper and deeper into territory that should have been familiar. But something changed. Somewhere in that pursuit, the Red Baron made a mistake. He flew too deep, too far, into an area where Canadian and British aircraft filled the sky and Australian infantry forces waited on the ground below.

A single bullet found him. It came from somewhere—from the sky, from the earth, from a direction that no one could definitively identify. The bullet tore into his chest, shattering his heart and lungs. And yet, mortally wounded, he managed to keep control of his aircraft. He guided it down to a field near the village of Sallly-le-Sec. By the time Australian troops reached him, he had taken his final breath.

For more than a century, people have argued about who fired that fatal shot. Canadian Squadron leader Captain Arthur Roy Brown was officially credited in military records. But Brown himself, despite receiving formal recognition, later admitted he wasn’t sure he had struck the Red Baron. Australian Sergeant Cedric Popkin came forward, pointing out that his firing position best matched the angle of the wound. But no conclusive evidence has ever been found.

Some say it was Arthur Brown. Some say it was Cedric Popkin. Some say it was a random bullet from a soldier whose name was never recorded, whose identity was never known. The Red Baron died, that much is certain. But the truth about who killed him remains buried in the fog of that April afternoon, in a sky over France where so many shots were fired that no one could ever say for certain which one mattered.

Part Four: The Zabrina

In October 1917, as the war dragged on and autumn swept across the English Channel, a small vessel named Zabrina set sail from Falmouth, Cornwall. Its destination was Cherbourg—a short voyage, just thirty hours across relatively calm waters, carrying a load of coal and a nameless group of sailors.

But the Zabrina never reached port. Two days later, French forces discovered it aground at Roselle Point, south of Cherbourg. And it was empty.

Not damaged. Not attacked by any visible force. Not in distress. Simply empty. The hull showed no signs of damage. The lifeboat was still in its place, secured in its davits. In the galley, the cooking fire continued to smolder, as if the crew had just stepped away. On the dining table, dinner was neatly set for five people. But not a soul was anywhere to be found.

The mystery of the Zabrina became one of those stories that older sailors would tell on quiet nights, each version adding details that couldn’t be verified but sounded right. Some claimed an unexpected storm had swept the crew overboard while they were trying to secure the cargo. But there was no visible damage to suggest such a storm. Others whispered about German submarines, about U-boats lurking in the Channel, about the intensifying war at sea and how Allied vessels had reported submarine encounters in the very area where Zabrina had vanished.

But there was another theory, one that was rarely mentioned except in hushed voices. According to records uncovered after the war, the Zabrina wasn’t carrying five men on that voyage. It was carrying twenty-three. A strange number for a ship of its size. This detail raised dark suspicions that the Zabrina was more than just a merchant vessel. Perhaps it was a Q-ship—a British decoy vessel designed to lure German submarines to the surface where they could be ambushed and sunk.

If that were true, the Zabrina might have been exposed. The crew might have never had a chance to escape. They might have been taken by the very submarine they were meant to catch. Or perhaps they had been betrayed by their own side—sacrificed as part of some larger strategy that would never be publicly acknowledged.

The truth about the Zabrina died with its crew. No bodies were ever found. No wreckage was ever recovered. The vessel itself was salvaged and returned to service. It was as if the disappearance had been deliberately erased, written out of the official record, transformed into the kind of story that was told only in bars by old men whom no one quite believed.

Part Five: Bela Kiss—The Tinsmith’s Secret

In a small village called Czinkota near Budapest, there lived a quiet man named Bela Kiss. He was a tinsmith, well-known in the area, polite in his manner, unremarkable in every way that mattered. When the war came in 1914, Kiss enlisted like thousands of other men. He locked his house and departed without raising suspicion.

But by 1916, rumors began to circulate that Kiss had been killed on the battlefield. His landlord, assuming the property was abandoned, decided to clean it out in preparation to lease it to someone else. And it was there, within those walls, that a horrific secret began to surface.

The landlord found seven large metal drums, sealed tightly like fuel containers. But when one of them was opened, the stench that rose wasn’t of gasoline or oil. It was the unmistakable scent of death. Inside was the strangled body of a woman, preserved in industrial alcohol. Her face was frozen in an expression of terror.

When the Budapest police arrived and searched the entire house, they discovered a total of twenty-four bodies, all stored inside similar barrels. Every single one was a woman. Every one had been strangled. Every one had been preserved in alcohol, kept like specimens in some mad laboratory.

Bela Kiss was still alive.

By the time authorities uncovered his identity, Kiss was recovering at a military hospital after being wounded at the front. But before the police could reach him, he had switched his identification with that of a dead soldier and vanished into the night. He simply walked away from the hospital, disappeared into the chaos and confusion of wartime, and was never officially apprehended.

In the years that followed, reports of his sightings emerged from all across the world. From Hungary to France. From Austria to Romania. And, perhaps most chilling of all, from America—reports that a man matching Kiss’s description was working as a janitor in an office building in New York City. When American police arrived to investigate, he had already disappeared again.

Kiss is believed to have died sometime in the 1930s, but no one knows for certain. No one knows how many women he killed after his escape. No one knows if he continued his work in other countries under assumed names. And perhaps the most terrifying possibility of all is that he may have died peacefully somewhere, hidden among the very world he had filled with unspeakable horror.

Part Six: The USS Cyclops

It was a behemoth stretching over 500 feet in length. The USS Cyclops was a coal transport ship by classification, but with superior design and heavy armament, it resembled more a mobile fortress than a mere cargo vessel. In February 1918, it departed from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, loaded with hundreds of tons of manganese ore. A total of 309 people were aboard—crew, passengers, soldiers, and civilians.

The intended destination was Baltimore. But the captain made an unscheduled stop in Barbados, citing engine trouble. A few days later, the Cyclops departed Barbados, heading out into the Atlantic, and then vanished. Completely. Utterly. Without a trace.

The United States Navy conducted an unprecedented search effort. Ships crisscrossed the Atlantic. Aircraft scanned the waters. Intelligence reports were filed. But it yielded nothing. Not a single plank of wood. Not a single body. Not a single piece of evidence that could explain what had happened to the USS Cyclops.

Questions arose. Was the ship overloaded beyond its safe carrying capacity? Did the engines fail and explode under the strain of the heavy cargo? Did a sudden storm swallow the vessel whole? Some whispered about the Bermuda Triangle, that infamous stretch of ocean said to have devoured countless ships and planes. Others speculated that German spies had targeted the Cyclops and sunk it in a covert operation never disclosed to the public.

And some ventured further still into the unknown, speaking of extraterrestrials or deep sea creatures not yet understood by man. Whatever the cause, the conclusion remained the same: 309 souls set sail aboard the largest naval vessel in America’s fleet at the time, and not a single one of them ever returned.

The mystery of the USS Cyclops was officially declared unsolved. Reports were filed. Conclusions were drawn. But the fundamental question remained unanswered. What happened to that ship? Where did it go? What force could erase a vessel that large, that modern, that seemingly invincible?

Part Seven: John Parr

His name was John Parr. He was just fourteen years old when he walked into a recruitment office in 1912. Thin, undersized, and boyish, he lied about his age, insisting he was eighteen, old enough to wear the khaki uniform of the British Empire.

Two years later, John Parr became one of the first soldiers deployed to the Belgian front, to the forests and fields around Mons where the British Army would open its campaign of the First World War. He brought with him nothing but a rifle, a military bicycle, and the naive belief that this was how a boy became a man.

On August 21, 1914, during a reconnaissance mission, he pedaled north of Mons to scout for signs of approaching German forces. He never returned.

Some said John was ambushed by a German unit. Others claimed he was shot while retreating. But no official records mentioned any skirmish in that area at that time. And there was no confirmation from the German side of any engagement either.

Some researchers later suggested a more tragic possibility: that John Parr may have died under friendly fire, misidentified as the enemy in the confusion of those early days of war. In the chaos and panic, a single moment of mistaken identity was all it took to make John Parr the first British soldier to fall in the Great War.

He was buried without ceremony in a simple grave overgrown with grass near Mons. And in one of history’s cruelest ironies, directly across from John’s grave lies the final resting place of George Edwin Ellison, the last British soldier to die before the war ended in 1918.

John’s mother wrote letters—many of them—pleading with the army for a clearer explanation. But she never received a satisfying answer. And for the rest of her life, she lived with only one certainty: her son had died for a reason no one was willing to tell her.

Epilogue: The Forgotten War

These are the mysteries that emerged from the First World War. Not the great battles that are remembered in history books. Not the famous generals whose names live forever. But the smaller mysteries, the personal mysteries, the questions that were never answered.

Who fired the first shot for the British Empire? No one can say for certain. Who killed the Red Baron? The answer remains disputed after more than a century. What happened to the crew of the Zabrina? Their fate was swallowed by the sea and wartime secrecy. Where is Bela Kiss? He disappeared into history, leaving behind only horror and uncertainty. Where did the USS Cyclops go? The Atlantic keeps its secrets. And how did young John Parr really die? Only those who were there can know, and they took their secrets to their graves.

These are the stories that older Americans still tell, the legends that have been passed down through generations of families whose ancestors lived through that terrible time. They are stories of mystery and loss, of questions that were never answered and wounds that never fully healed.

The Great War ended in 1918, and a new century began. But the mysteries remained. And they remain still, waiting in the darkness, waiting to be