We weren’t trying to build an archive. We were trying to stop losing places.
It started with a bedroom wall covered in the names of places that felt impossible to ignore. Roswell. Rendlesham. Tunguska. Places we’d read about, wondered about and promised ourselves we’d see one day.
One pin became another.
The fascination never really went away. It simply followed us from books and documentaries onto YouTube investigations, Reddit threads, social media rabbit holes and late-night searches for places we’d never heard of before.
Then we noticed the annoying part. We’d find somewhere incredible, watch the story, promise to remember it… and six months later we’d be searching through old videos and browser history trying to work out where the hell it was.
The stories were everywhere. The places weren’t.
So we started putting them on a map.
The problem was never finding strange stories. It was finding them again. The idea behind The Unknown Quest
Every pin is an invitation to look closer.
The Unknown Quest became more than a list of strange places. It’s a starting point: somewhere to discover a case, understand the story, follow the sources and — where it’s legal and respectful to do so — begin a quest of your own.
Chart the unknown.
Haunted buildings, UFO and UAP encounters, cryptid reports, forgotten ruins, strange landscapes and historical mysteries connected to real places around the world.
Follow the story.
A pin should be the beginning, not the end. Case files, historical context, eyewitness accounts, footage and research help turn a dot on a map into something worth investigating.
Continue the quest.
Visit responsibly. Investigate. Share what you experienced. Submit a place we’ve missed. The archive grows whenever somebody decides a story shouldn’t disappear.
We don’t need to tell you what to believe.
Some cases have a substantial historical record. Some rely on eyewitness testimony. Some survive as folklore passed between generations. Others remain frustratingly difficult to explain.
Those differences matter. The Unknown Quest isn’t here to flatten every story into either “proof” or “nonsense”. We’re interested in where the story came from, what was actually reported, what evidence exists and why people are still talking about it.
Sometimes we’ll find an answer. Sometimes we’ll find three competing answers. Sometimes we’ll simply have to say: we don’t know.
Record what happened before deciding what it means.
A good mystery survives sensible questions.
People, history, culture and private property come first.
Legend, testimony and documented record are not the same thing.
Strange stories don’t stop at borders.
The archive spans countries, cultures and centuries. Famous cases belong here, but so do local legends, overlooked locations and the stories that rarely make it beyond the people who live nearby.
Two people. Far too many open tabs.
The Unknown Quest isn’t a faceless database or an endless stream of automatically generated spooky stories. It’s an independent project built by two people who genuinely enjoy disappearing down rabbit holes, finding somewhere unusual and asking the question that started all of this: where is it?
Gemma
Co-founder of The Unknown Quest and one half of the team responsible for turning a collection of unexplained places into a growing global archive.
Chris
Co-founder of The Unknown Quest and the other half of the team behind the project, its explorations and the archive that keeps finding new places to investigate.
Somewhere is still missing.
That’s why The Unknown Quest was never meant to be a closed archive. Local knowledge matters. First-hand experiences matter. The obscure story your town has been telling for fifty years might be completely unknown to somebody on the other side of the world.
If we’ve missed somewhere, tell us. If you’ve been somewhere already on the map, add what you experienced. If you filmed something, documented something or found a source worth following, help keep the trail alive.
The answer isn’t always the best part.
Sometimes it’s the old newspaper clipping. The local story nobody wrote down. The road you almost drove past. The noise at 2am you still can’t explain. Or simply standing somewhere you’d only ever seen mentioned in a story.
We built The Unknown Quest because we wanted somewhere to keep those places. We opened it because we figured we probably weren’t the only ones.
Meet the team
Gemma
Co Founder, CEO
Chris
Co Founder