The Bloody Mary mirror legend did not begin neatly with a murdered witch or vengeful Tudor queen, but grew from older traditions of staring into darkened mirrors to glimpse the future. Somewhere along the way, courtship divination became a bathroom dare — and the face in the glass became something considerably less friendly.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a quiet passenger calling himself Dan Cooper bought an $18.52 airline ticket, demanded $200,000 and parachuted from a Boeing 727 into the darkness. The D. B. Cooper hijacking became America’s perfect unsolved crime because investigators found pieces of the story but never the man at its centre.

London After Midnight disappeared decades after audiences first saw Lon Chaney’s grotesque Man in the Beaver Hat, leaving photographs, scripts and memories where a film ought to be. Its strange afterlife explains why this lost film has become more famous in absence than many silent horrors that actually survived.