In May 2012 Korean police showed reporters a 51-second video of a funeral in China and said Jo Hee-pal (often spelled Cho Hee-pal), the man behind Korea's biggest Ponzi scheme, had died there the previous December.

His pitch: investors bought massage chairs and medical machines on paper, the company rented them to bathhouses, and the rent came back as a fixed monthly payout. Prosecutors later counted about 70,000 investors. Most of the money was cycled back to earlier investors; the unrecovered loss was put at about 840 billion won.

On 30 October 2008, in a Daegu hotel coffee shop, he handed 900 million won in cashier's cheques to a senior police officer, who was later jailed for 10 years. A few weeks later, in December 2008, he left Korea by sea from the west coast.

In China he got an ID card, a driver's licence and a passport under another name: Jo Yeong-bok, ethnic Korean.

The story police were given: a night of drinking in a hotel basement karaoke, chest pain, and death in an ambulance at 00:15 on 19 December 2011. The 2012 reports placed it in Qingdao or Yantai; prosecutors in 2016 placed it in Weihai. The hospital's death certificate had no Chinese police seal. Prosecutors said that seal is only used when a homicide is suspected.

TV crews then found golf caddies who said they had seen him after his reported death, and a Qingdao course record dated after it. None of those sightings was ever verified. In 2016 prosecutors closed the case: a lock of hair kept since 2011 was matched to him by the National Forensic Service.

Both sides are still there. Prosecutors say the hair and the witnesses settle it. His victims point out that nobody outside his circle ever saw a body; he was cremated in China.

Full case file, with every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/jo-hee-pal-korea-ponzi-declared-dead/

Around the start of 1921 an ascetic covered in ash sat on the Buckland Bund, Dacca's riverfront, for about four months. Crowds began whispering a name: Ramendra Narayan Roy, the second Kumar (prince) of Bhawal, the second-largest estate in East Bengal.

The problem: the Kumar had been reported dead in Darjeeling twelve years earlier.

He went up to Darjeeling in April 1909 with his wife, her brother, the family doctor and about twenty servants. They stayed at a house called "Step Aside". He fell ill on 6 May. A telegram home said he was seriously ill, and the next morning word came that he had died.

Both sides agreed he was taken for dead on 8 May 1909. They did not agree on the hour. His wife's side said shortly before midnight, with the cremation the next morning. His side said around dusk, and that a storm broke and the funeral party sheltered from the rain, leaving him before the pyre was lit. A Darjeeling meteorologist later gave evidence.

He accepted that a cremation took place on the morning of 9 May. He said the body that was burned was not his. Both claims were argued in court.

In April 1921 he was brought to the family seat at Jaidebpur on an elephant. Questioned, he named his old wet nurse, and the crowd took it as proof. On 4 May, pressed by his sister, he said who he was.

His wife never accepted him. She called him an impostor.

The trial ran 608 days of hearings with 1,584 witnesses. Judge Pannalal Basu typed the judgment himself and slept with the typewriter key under his pillow. On 24 August 1936 he ruled the ascetic was the Kumar. The Calcutta High Court upheld it 2-1 in 1940, and the Privy Council in London affirmed it on 30 July 1946.

Within days of that final ruling, he died. The courts ruled on civil evidence; it was never a scientific proof, and historians still debate who he really was.

Would you recognise a family member who came back like that, after twelve years?

Full case file with the court rulings and every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/bhawal-sannyasi-case-prince-cremated-returned/

In 1915 the Antarctic ice trapped Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, in the Weddell Sea. As the pressure built, eight emperor penguins came up to the ship. Their cries "sounded like a dirge for the ship", Shackleton wrote.

Ordered onto the ice, each man could keep 2 lb of gear. Shackleton kept one page of the Bible, from Job: "Out of whose womb came the ice?" The photographer, Frank Hurley, went back into the flooded wreck for his glass-plate negatives.

She sank in November 1915. The 28 men camped on drifting floes for months, until their floe split right under the boats. In April 1916 they rowed to Elephant Island, their first solid ground in 497 days.

No ship would look for them there. So six men set out in the James Caird, a 20-foot boat, across about 800 miles of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia.

Three of them crossed the island's mountains on foot to a whaling station. "It seemed to me often that we were four, not three," Shackleton later wrote.

The 22 left behind lived under two upturned boats. Every day Frank Wild told them: "Get your things ready, boys, the Boss may come to-day."

On 30 August 1916 someone outside shouted "Ship O!" They first heard it as "Lunch O!" All 28 men of the Endurance came home.

In 2022 the wreck was found, 3,008 metres down, with her name still on the stern.

Would you have climbed into the boat, or stayed on the beach and waited?

Full case file with every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/shackleton-endurance-all-28-men-survived/