Your Everyday Heroes highlights ordinary people who have overcome their individual hardships to lead exceptional lives. Our real-life heroes inspire viewers by beating the odds, giving back to their communities, and creating change through social activism.
Quadruple amputee Brett Eastburn and terminally ill filmmaker Vick Lee motivate by rising above their circumstances, blind mechanic Brett Hickey and disabled graphic artist Umar Mughal uplift through their self-determination, and inspirational mural artist Damon Lamar Reed provokes by remembering the missing.
Your Everyday Heroes scours the world for underrecognized individuals with extraordinary stories, and our sister site, Your Everyday Entertainment, takes the same initiative to uncover mind boggling mysteries, answer burning behind-the-scenes questions, and unearth undiscovered destinations.
Take a look at some of our trending topics:
The Unsolved Mystery of the Circleville Letters
From 1976 to 1994 residents of Circleville, Ohio were terrorized by an anonymous letter writer who revealed the deepest darkest secrets of local residents to the people they were hiding them from.
The first known letter was sent to bus driver Mary Gillispie in 1976, informing her that the secret scribbler knew about her extramarital affair with the local school district’s superintendent and threatening to expose it to the public. Her husband Ron received a letter soon after, and Mary denied the accusations.
Ron believed his wife, but the letters came frequently and were increasingly menacing in nature. On the one-year anniversary of the first notes arrival, he received another message that enraged him enough grab his gun and go hunting for the person who was stalking his wife.
Ron was discovered dead that night, local police claimed he was drunk driving and wrapped his truck around a tree. His family disputed the findings, as he was not known to over imbibe and inexplicably, the gun had been fired that night.
Years later, Mary discovered that the writer had exposed the affair to the public by placing signs advertising her torrid secret on a fence post along her bus route. When she ripped the sign off, Mary noticed that it was wired to the trigger of a gun. The crude booby trap failed to fire the weapon, but had she pulled the sign off more violently, it would have blown her head off.
KEEP READING to find out who was arrested for Mary Gillispie’s attempted murder.
The Five Best Superhero Video Games of All Time
Superhero videogames notoriously serve as marketing props for the release of big budget blockbusters based on legendary caped crusaders, and tend to be more of a merchandising opportunity than an enjoyable gaming experience. 2004’s Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation 2 is one of the rare exceptions to this terrible trend.
It’s predecessor, adapted from Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst’s 2002 Hollywood hit Spider-Man, offered little more than nostalgic charm, but game maker Activision got the sequel right by adopting a sprawling open-world formula borrowed from Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto.
Spider-Man 2’s user-friendly web swinging element was a hit with superhero obsessed gamers, who were content to swing through New York City for hours on end. They enjoyed exploring so much, that completing the main mission nearly took the back seat to the free-roaming side quests sprinkled throughout the city.
Spider-Man 2 is our fifth favorite superhero game, click HERE to find out the top four.
Three Secret Codes No One Can Crack
Ciphers are by design, meant to be solved, but some messages are so enigmatic, that even the world’s best cryptographers are unable to crack them.
One famously unsolvable mystery revolves around the murder of an Australian man who was found dead on the shore of Somerton Park Beach in Adelaide. He suspiciously washed up on the beach one day without any documentation, or signs of assault on his body.
The only clue to discovering the man’s identity was a tightly rolled piece of paper in his pant pocket that contained the Persian phrase tamám shud, which translates to “it is finished.” Local police determined the paper was torn out of poetry book The Rubáiyát, which had been discovered in the park with that exact page missing.
While the message seems straight forward, the book contained a handwritten code and the phone number of a local nurse named Jessica Thompson, who denied knowing the man and refused to cooperate with the investigation. She died in 2012, and afterwards, her daughter Katie revealed that Jessica knew the identity of the unknown man, but took the secret to her grave.
Law enforcement authorities believe that cracking code in The Rubáiyát is the key to discovering the man’s killer.
Click HERE to learn about the 15th century codex that scholars have dubbed “the most mysterious book in the world.”
Five Real-Life Treasure Hunts That Can Make You Rich
Blockbuster movies Uncharted and Indiana Jones make treasure hunts out to be fantastical adventures that are too out of this world to be anything less than fictional, but real-life people have hidden vast fortunes throughout history and many of them have gone undiscovered.
The Oak Island Money Pit is a location that is believed to contain enormous wealth, but treasure hunters have failed to excavate it for centuries. The pit was discovered in 1795 by teenager Daniel McGinnis while he was exploring the small island off Nova Scotia, Canada.
McGinnis and his friends dug down and found man-made platforms every ten feet they descended down the hole. Word got out about the pit and others began digging, by 1804 a group of explorers from the Onslow Company made it 90 feet down and discovered a cipher that read: “40 feet below, 2 million pounds are buried.”
The company did not make it to the additional depth because they were thwarted by sophisticated booby traps that flooded the hole with sea water. Over the next two centuries, many have attempted to reach the 130-foot end goal, but could not bypass the water. Six people have lost their lives attempting to reach the bottom.
Keep READING to find out four more known hidden treasures.
Will Kirsten Dunst Team Up with Dwayne Johnson for Jumanji 4?
Beloved kids classic Jumanji, which starred late, great comedian Robin Williams, was rebooted more than two decades later with Hollywood heavyweights Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart.
The 1995 fantasy adventure found orphaned Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter Shepherd turn their new hometown upside down when they discover and play Jumanji, which released traumatized jungle-man Alan Parrish, who had been trapped in the supernatural board game since 1969, and a host of exotically deadly jungle creatures.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle updated the original board game concept to a cursed video game, which turns a group of detention bound teenagers into adult avatars played by Johnson and Hart, who must complete a quest to get out of the game.
Prior to the film’s release, Dunst indicated that she would have been open to making an appearance. “That’d be fun, I would definitely do something in that if they wanted me to,” she said in 2017. “I honestly didn’t even know they were making a Jumanji movie. I’m offended I haven’t been reached out to be in it!”
Dunst wasn’t asked to star in the reboot, or sequel 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level, though an end credits scene indicated that she had a shot at making an appearance in 2024’s Jumanji 4.
READ MORE to find out how the Jumanji franchise could bring Kirsten Dunst back into the game.
Kurt Warner: Will His Children Play in the NFL?
Legendary quarterback Kurt Warner is widely considered the greatest undrafted player in the NFL history, after leading the St. Louis Rams to the Super Bowl during his first season as a starter.
Warner went on to play for 12 more seasons and took two of his teams to the big game a total of three times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2017 and still holds NFL passing records to this day.
Warner’s NFL Cinderella story was so unbelievably unlikely, that his life inspired the 2021 film American Underdog, starring Shazam! hero Zachary Levi and True Blood lead Anna Paquin star as Kurt and Brenda Warner.
The film chronicles the early years of Warner’s 25-year marriage to Brenda, while he struggled to rise from an undrafted a grocery store stock boy to an arena ring upstart and onto his eventual NFL superstardom.
More than a decade after his retirement and seven children later, many are wondering if his two college football playing sons will follow their father’s footsteps into the National Football League.
Click HERE to find out if Kade and EJ Warner have what it takes to make it in the NFL.
The Cicada 3301 Mystery: Now 10 Years Old and Still Unsolved
The Cicada 3301 puzzle first captivated the internet’s collective imagination in January 2012, when an image with a hidden message was shared to 4chan’s “Science & Math” board. The image contained a message from the mysterious poster that read:
Hello,
We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test.
There is a message hidden in this image.
Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck.
3301
Swedish computer programmer Joel Eriksson discovered a cipher in the image’s code, and once decrypted, it was revealed to be a URL that led to another puzzle. The pattern repeated itself and the successive puzzles became increasingly difficult, even leading dedicated internet sleuths into the real world to scan QR codes hidden in various locations around the world.
In 2014, the puzzles led to a file that contained a 58-page book written entirely in code, titled Liber Primus. According to Cicada, “Liber Primus is the way. Its words are the map, their meaning is the road, and their numbers are the direction. Seek and you will be found.”
However, eight years later, only two of the book’s pages have been decoded, despite entire online communities committing to solving the mystery. Cicada, who has been theorized to a group of programmers, or even the CIA, has not released any new puzzles since.
One man, who said he solved all of the 2012 puzzles, claims to have been contacted by Cicada themselves. KEEP READING to find out what they told him.
Four of the Most Secret Places on Earth
Most Americans are aware of top-secret Area 51 and tightly sealed federal gold reserve Fort Knox, but Club 33 is a mystery to all but it’s 147 members. Surprisingly, the ultra-exclusive organization has nothing to do with aliens or national secrets.
Club 33 is located in the happiest place on Earth: Anaheim California’s Disneyland. The member’s only association is a mysterious fine-dining restraint that caters to an extremely limited number of billionaires, celebrities, and politicians.
The luxurious club is the only place in the entire theme park that allows guests to imbibe alcohol, and membership is so restricted that the restaurant has a 14-year long wait list. Once a member is admitted, they must pony up a $33,000 initiation and an annual fee of $15,000.
FIND OUT what other secret places made the list.
The Five Worst Marvel Movies
Marvel has been dominating Hollywood since launching the Studio’s Cinematic Universe with 2008 Robert Downey Jr. starrer Iron Man. The superhero studio has Hulk smashed box office records with 27 films, including The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the beloved Black Panther.
For as many hits as Marvel has churned out, there have been some clear misses that include the ill-fated 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four. It seems impossible that the Michael B. Jordan movie could possibly perform worse than 2005’s version, which only received a 28% freshness rating on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, but somehow the update only managed to score an abysmal 9% on the Tomatometer.
Critics called the film “a woefully misguided attempt to translate a classic comic series without the humor, joy, or colorful thrills that made it great.”
The filmmakers also managed to butcher Dr. Doom, arguably one of Marvel’s greatest villains, by bestowing him with superpowers and muddling the character’s motivations. Even after several reshoots, the film was unable to be salvaged, and is rife with continuity errors that eager fans picked out like Easter eggs.
Find out which other Marvel flicks made the most hated list HERE.
