From the Vault - Into the Darkness

On the seventeenth of December 1967, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt walked into the surf at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was never seen again. Despite one of the largest search operations in the nation's history, no body and no trace were ever found. Was it an accidental drowning, as a coroner would eventually rule, or something stranger: a suicide, a shark, or the extraordinary claim that Holt was a secret agent who faked his own death and slipped away aboard a waiting submarine? This is the enduring mystery of the most powerful man in the country, who went for a swim one summer Sunday and simply vanished. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the disappearance of Harold Holt. VOT ONE MINUTE REMAINING SIGNAL AWARDS

Titu Singh was barely more than a toddler when he began insisting he was not who his family thought he was. He was not a little boy, he said, but a grown man named Suresh Verma, a shopkeeper from the city of Agra, with a wife, two children, and a radio shop, who had been shot dead in his own car. His family dismissed it as a child’s fantasy, until they travelled to Agra and found the shop, the widow, and the murdered man, all exactly as the boy had described. Then there were the two birthmarks on Titu’s head, which matched the entry and exit wounds recorded in the dead man’s autopsy. Investigated by serious researchers and filmed by the BBC, it remains one of the most carefully documented and most debated cases of its kind in the world. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story, and weigh it honestly: how could a small boy know the intimate details of a murder he could not possibly have witnessed? Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the boy who named his own killer. VOT ONE MINUTE REMAINING SIGNAL AWARDS

The Hexham Heads are one of the strangest and most enduring mysteries in British folklore. In 1971, two young brothers dug up two small carved stone heads in the garden of their home in Hexham, Northumberland, and, according to those who were there, unleashed something. Objects moved on their own. A neighbour reported a werewolf walking down the stairs in the dead of night. And when a respected Celtic scholar took the heads home to study them, she woke to find a half-wolf, half-human figure in her bedroom, an account she stood by, on national television, for the rest of her life. Then a local man claimed he had made the heads himself, out of concrete, as toys. And in the end, the heads themselves simply vanished, and have never been seen again. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story: the haunting, the werewolf, the scholar, the sceptic, and the objects that disappeared off the face of the earth. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the heads that vanished. VOT ONE MINUTE REMAINING SIGNAL AWARDS

The disappearance of Brandon Lawson is one of the most haunting missing-persons cases of the modern age, and it is captured, in part, on a chilling 911 call. In August 2013, the 26-year-old father ran out of petrol on a dark rural road in Texas. He phoned his brother for help, then called 911, breathless and terrified, saying men were chasing him and that he'd run out into a field. He begged the operator to hurry. Then the line went dead. When his brother reached the abandoned truck minutes later, Brandon was gone. He was so afraid of whatever was out there that he called the police despite having a warrant out for his arrest. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story: the frantic phone calls, the search that found nothing, the remains discovered nine years later in already-searched ground, and the question no one can answer, what was he running from? Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the voice in the field. VOT ONE MINUTE REMAINING SIGNAL AWARDS

The Ilkley Moor alien case is one of Britain's most famous UFO photographs. In December 1987, a retired police officer photographed a small green figure on a Yorkshire moor, then found his compass reversed and an hour of time missing. Experts examined the photo and could not prove it a fake. We lay out the evidence, the sceptics' case, and why, nearly 40 years on, no one can explain it. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the figure by the quarry. VOT ONE MINUTE REMAINING SIGNAL AWARDS