9 Crazy Mysteries Solved On The Internet

In 1995, 21-year-old student Michael Hager picked up a 19-year old-hitchhiker traveling from a Grateful Dead concert. The two were making their way to their respective destinations, Hager to his mother's house in South Carolina, when something caused the Volkswagen transporting the men to crash into a tree. Both died.

As Hager didn't know the boy who was riding with him, his family didn't either. When they came to identify Hager's remains, none could identify the hitchhiker and nobody came out to report him missing. Since his real identity was unknown, he was given the name Grateful Doe because of the Grateful Dead concert.

There were reconstructions made of Greateful Doe's face and a number of small, distinctive tattoos that people could work to identify. However for many years there was no luck until Australian reddit user Layla Betts started posting about Grateful Doe online, leading to the creation of the subreddit r/GratefulDoe (which now looks at various Jane/John Doe cases).

Someone saw the posts and claimed that the reconstructions looked like his former roommate, James Callahan. With Callahan's photos beginning to circulate online, his mother came forward and revealed that her son had in fact gone missing 20 years earlier. The police were later able to confirm that Grateful Doe was in fact James Callahan.