11 What was the English sweating sickness?

Between 1485 and 1551, England suffered five outbreaks of a disease so virulent that it could kill an otherwise healthy person in a matter of hours. Its favorite targets seemed to be wealthy adult males; children and elderly people were generally spared, while the aristocracy, members of professional classes, and the clergy seemed particularly vulnerable. The epidemics were short-lived but brutal, and in all but at most a handful of instances the disease did not spread beyond England.

Symptoms came on quickly; according to one account it came with “a sudden great sweating and stinking with redness of the face and of all the body” along with fever, headaches, and delirium. As many as half of those afflicted died within 18 hours. Anyone who made it through the first day would probably recover, but there was always a chance of reinfection.  

Whatever the disease was, it vanished as mysteriously as it appeared. The last outbreak was in 1551, and apart from some potential minor appearances in the following decades, we haven’t seen it since—though a similar affliction, known as the “Picardy sweat,” popped up in France a century and a half later, causing nearly 200 small outbreaks before it too disappeared in 1861.

Many theories have been floated over the centuries. It’s been suggested that the English sweating sickness could have been a strain of typhus or influenza, or even anthrax. A more likely answer emerged in 1993, when a similar outbreak occurred in the American Southwest. This disease was caused by a hantavirus, leading researchers to speculate that a hantavirus was also behind the English sweating sickness and the Picardy sweat. Since hantaviruses can be spread by rodents, this could explain why large households and academic institutions were hit so hard by the disease: Well-stocked kitchens and pantries would have attracted mice and rats, and household staff could have aerosolized the virus in their droppings while sweeping. This might be the best solution we get; according to a 2014 paper published in the journal Viruses, a conclusive answer will probably never come. 

12 What were the Nazca Lines for?

The Nazca (or Nasca) Lines are an array of geoglyphs carved into the coastal plain of southern Peru. Some are simply straight lines running in all directions, while others depict animals or people.

The lines were studied by researchers traveling on foot in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until commercial pilots began flying over the area in the 1930s that their full scope and elaborate design was revealed. According to UNESCO, the Nazca Lines are “unmatched in [their] extent, magnitude, quantity, size, diversity and ancient tradition to any similar work in the world.” They were built over the course of 1000 years, mostly by removing darker stones to reveal the lighter colored sand underneath. 

The question that still puzzles researchers is, why were the geoglyphs made? For decades, some archaeologists believed they served as giant astronomical calendars, possibly linked to constellations or other celestial bodies. Recent research suggests a more earthly purpose: It now appears that the Nazca Lines might have been connected to rituals meant to appeal to the gods for rain. It’s possible they marked processional routes used by pilgrims as they traveled to temples, or that rituals were performed at designated points along the lines themselves. 

13 What does the Voynich Manuscript say?

We don’t know when, where, or by whom the Voynich Manuscript was written, but there’s an even larger mystery to solve: We have absolutely no idea what it even says. The text—which is accompanied by astrological charts, illustrations of strange plants and naked, possibly pregnant women emerging from tubes and funnels or wading in green fluid, and other bizarre images—is composed in a writing system that doesn’t appear on any other document or object we’ve discovered so far. Some, including the late U.S. Army cryptographer William Friedman, believe Voynich was written in a synthetic language. Others think the manuscript uses a dead language such as proto-Romance, a precursor of vulgar Latin (though that claim was highly controversial), or that it could be written in some form of code or cipher. 

Whatever the case, the book is divided into six sections: one devoted to botanical studies; one that is apparently concerned with astrological and astronomical matters; one that contains elaborate (and super weird) biological drawings; a section containing what Yale University, the book’s keeper since 1969, identifies as “cosmological medallions”; a section dedicated to pharmaceutical sketches; and a text-only portion devoted to what appear to be recipes. 

Since bookseller Wilfrid Voynich found the manuscript in 1912, secreted in a bundle of medieval manuscripts he’d purchased from a Jesuit college, the book and its complicated history have been obsessively studied and analyzed. Carbon dating tells us the manuscript’s vellum was sourced in the early 15th century; pigments are consistent with that date as well, so that’s presumably when it was written. We know (or at least we think we know) it’s been owned by a Holy Roman emperor, an alchemist, a famed Bohemian doctor, and possibly Elizabethan occultist and court astrologer John Dee. If any of its previous custodians figured out how to read it, they kept it to themselves, but you’re welcome to give it a go if you’re feeling froggy. 

14 Who built Stonehenge?

Since the 17th century, the popular imagination has linked Stonehenge to the Druids, but the timeline doesn’t shake out—the earliest historical references to the Druids date to the 4th century BCE, while Stonehenge was most likely built sometime between 3000 and 2000 BCE. But if the Druids didn’t build it, who did?

There might not be one simple answer. Construction of Stonehenge is thought to have taken place in several phases over the course of about 1500 years. The first monument at Stonehenge simply consisted of a circular earthwork that enclosed dozens of pits and possibly some rocks. The iconic stone slabs were added a few hundred years later—around the same time the Egyptians were building the pyramids at Giza. It’s long been thought that Neolithic hunter-gatherers got the ball rolling, but new evidence suggests Stonehenge’s builders were the descendants of Mediterranean farmers who migrated to northwestern Europe 6000 years ago. 

Whoever Stonehenge’s builders were, their accomplishments were astonishing. We’re still trying to figure out how Stonehenge was constructed; some of the stones came from nearby quarries, but others were sourced from a Welsh site 200 miles away. We have no idea how people who didn’t even have wheels were able to transport the stones and hoist them into place.

15 Who killed the Black Dahlia?

History is full of unsolved murders, from the disappearance and presumed assassinations of King Edward V and Prince Richard, Duke of York, in 1483 to the Zodiac killings that terrorized the Bay Area in the 1960s. But none has captivated American popular culture quite like the horrific murder of Elizabeth Short, the young woman who will forever be known by the sensational nickname given to her by the press: the Black Dahlia.

Short’s body was discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The brutality that had been visited upon her, both pre- and post-mortem, is still shocking: Her face had been grotesquely disfigured, her body cut in half, and some of her organs removed, among other acts of torture and mutilation. No one was ever arrested for Short’s murder, and the case eventually went cold. Recent theories have blamed everyone from Orson Welles to Bugsy Siegel. 

The Los Angeles Police Department investigated dozens of suspects, including George Hodel, a surgeon whose social circles included surrealist photographer Man Ray and The Maltese Falcon director John Huston. Upon learning his father had been investigated for the murder, George’s son, Steve, decided to clear his dad’s name after his dad’s death in 1999, only to become convinced that George was indeed Short’s killer. Steve published his findings in a well-received and fairly convincing 2003 book, but later lost some credibility when he also accused his father of being the Zodiac Killer.

In 2018, British author Piu Eatwell also claimed to have identified Short’s killer. In her book Black Dahlia, Red Rose, Eatwell maintains that the culprit wasn’t one murderer but a group of conspirators that included a bellhop and former mortician’s assistant named Leslie Dillon (who had been one of the LAPD’s favorite suspects decades ago), nightclub owner Mark Hansen, and a man named Jeff Connors. Eatwell thinks the police were involved in a cover-up due to their connections with at least one of those men, though she allows that the case will probably never be definitively solved. 

SOURCE: MENTAL FLOSS

From Mentalfloss.com:

6 What happened to Roald Amundsen?

Exploration is a dangerous business. All 129 men who comprised the polar exploration venture known as the Franklin Expedition died in the years after the mission’s 1845 launch. The case of Amelia Earhart, the pilot who vanished with her navigator Fred Noonan while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, continues to make front page news despite little progress being made. We still don’t know what happened to British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazonian jungle in 1925 while searching for the legendary lost city of Z, or Henry Hudson, who was placed in a small boat and cast adrift in waters off northeastern Canada following a mutiny in 1611.

The disappearance of legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen is a little different. Amundsen had certainly been at the forefront of polar exploration—he was the first to sail the Northwest Passage and, a few years later, he beat England’s Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole by several weeks. But Amundsen didn’t die while charting new territory; he vanished on a rescue mission while trying to come to the aid of Italian pilot and aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile, whose airship had crashed while exploring the Arctic in 1928. Amundsen’s own plane is thought to have gone down somewhere around Bear Island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Fishermen found something strange in the area in 1933, but the object fell back into the sea before it could be recovered; a high-tech 2009 search came up empty. Amundsen’s fate remains a mystery, but according to Norway’s Roald Amundsen’s House, three objects that were recovered soon after Amundsen’s disappearance might suggest a crash south of Bear Island.

7 Who was D.B. Cooper?

No survey of historical mysteries would be complete without the tale of the man known as D.B. Cooper, the only person to have hijacked a commercial plane in the United States and gotten away with it (or at least evaded capture). Plenty of notorious criminals have managed to remain unidentified for decades or longer—we still don’t know the identities of Jack the Ripper, the Axeman of New Orleans, or the Zodiac Killer, to name a few—but Cooper belongs to a very different category. Other than showing a flight attendant a device he claimed was a bomb, his crime was nonviolent, and it was stunning in its boldness.

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, Cooper boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. A little after 3 p.m., he handed a flight attendant a note, flashed his supposed bomb, and made his demand: He was to be given $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, saying, “No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” The plane landed in Seattle, traded its passengers and most of the flight attendants for Cooper’s ransom, and took off again.

As the plane flew over an area somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Cooper jumped into the cold, rainy night, buffeted by 200-mph winds, with nothing but the business suit (and possibly a trench coat) he was wearing, two parachutes, and $200,000 (a little more than $1.5 million in today’s currency). The ensuing manhunt, officially known as NORJAK, for “Northwest Hijacking,” lasted 45 years and yielded 800 suspects but no arrests. Cooper has become a folk hero to many, inspiring songs, movies, TV shows, podcasts, books, and even an annual gathering of enthusiasts known as “CooperCon.”

It’s likely Cooper didn’t survive the jump, which was so dangerous that an experienced parachutist would probably never have attempted it in the first place. In 1980, some of the ransom money was found near the Columbia River, leading some to suspect Cooper had perhaps parachuted into the water and died, but a 2020 study that examined diatom species on the recovered bills found they were exposed to water around May-June rather than November. Though the FBI officially dropped the case in 2016, amateur sleuths are still trying to crack the mystery. One theory even claims Cooper was a transgender woman named Barbara Dayton, who died in 2002 at the age of 76.

8 What happened to the lightkeepers of Flannan Isle?

There’s an entire category of historical mysteries devoted to vanishings—people who just seemed to disappear into thin air, leaving no physical clues about what might have happened to them. Jimmy Hoffa is probably the textbook example; nearly 50 years after he disappeared from the parking lot of a Detroit restaurant, his body still hasn’t been found. But 75 years before Hoffa met his fate, Scotland was investigating its own unexplained vanishing—three of them, in fact.

In December 1900, a steamship was passing by the Flannan Isles when its crew noticed the lighthouse had gone dark. Then, on December 26, a relief lighthouse keeper found the Flannan Isle structure abandoned. A search turned up no trace of the men, but there were signs that a violent storm had torn across the island: Supplies were strewn across the ground well above sea level, iron railings were twisted, and an enormous boulder had been dislodged. 

The subsequent investigation assumed the men had been caught in the storm and swept out to sea, but troubling details remained. For instance, if the men had ventured into the storm to secure equipment as had been assumed, why did one of them leave his raingear behind? A theory suggested by shepherds who grazed their sheep on the island connected the men’s deaths to a powerful marine spout that would sporadically shoot dangerous volumes of compressed seawater into the air. Perhaps one man stayed behind while the other two went out into a storm to secure equipment, saw from the lighthouse that conditions were right for the water to erupt, and rushed out to warn the others, only for all three to be swept out to sea in the storm. Others discount the compressed water explanation, but broadly agree that two of the men were outside doing something and for some reason the third man had to run outside in a hurry. A few years later, the poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson invented stories of an overturned chair and partially eaten food, helping to create an enduring mystery.

9 Was King Arthur real?

The story of King Arthur is one of the most influential and widely studied literary cycles in Western culture, but there’s one big thing we don’t know about it: Did Arthur really exist?

There’s a vague reference to a legendary hero named Arthur in the Welsh poem Y Gododdin dated to around the 6th or 7th century, but it’s not that simple. The story survives in a couple different versions written centuries later, and only one of them mentions Arthur. Whether the Arthur reference is a 7th century original, a 13th century addition, or something in between is a contested area of scholarship.

The first explicit accounts date back to the 9th century Historia Brittonum, which documented 12 battles supposedly fought against the Saxons by a British military commander identified as Arthur. His feats were impressive, to say the least—in the 12th battle, he supposedly killed over 900 enemy soldiers all by himself.

Cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth built on Arthur’s legend in the 12th century with his History of the Kings of Britain, and subsequent Arthurian poems and romances added now-familiar elements such as the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail. It wasn’t until the 15th century that Thomas Malory came along and gave us what many now think of as the definitive story of King Arthur, Le Morte d’Arthur. 

When we ask whether Arthur really existed, it’s important to decide which version of him we’re asking about. If it’s the one that began with Geoffrey—a glorious king who once ruled most of Europe—the answer is probably no. If such a ruler had existed, odds are slim he would have been omitted from the historical record. But the Historia Brittonum’s earlier account of a great military leader called Arthur might have some basis in fact. The author probably got some of the details wrong—it would have been logistically impossible for one man to have fought in all 12 of the battles—but it’s not impossible that at some point in the dim and distant past there was a real military leader who rallied the fractured tribes of early medieval Britain against their Saxon invaders.

10 What happened to the Roanoke colony?

( Pat’s Note: I do a deeper dive into this particular mystery later in the month.)

England’s plan to colonize North America did not get off to a smooth start. By the time artist-turned-explorer John White and about 115 colonists arrived on Roanoke Island off the coast of modern-day North Carolina in 1587, the settlement already had a reputation. It had been abandoned once in 1586, and a garrison of 15 men who were later deposited there, tasked with holding the land on England’s behalf, also disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a single skeleton to greet the next batch of colonists, who weren’t even supposed to be staying there. (The plan had been to proceed up to the Chesapeake Bay after stopping at Roanoke Island, but the conventional story is that the captain refused to go further.) There’s no reason to have expected White’s colony—which settled in an area where their recent predecessors had had trouble securing food, encountered formidable weather, and were quickly burning through any good will the Native American populations had shown them—would have fared any better.

The colonists arrived too late in the year to grow their own food, and White returned to England for more supplies. The first Anglo-Spanish War delayed his return, and when he finally got back in 1590, everyone was gone. But White didn’t seem puzzled by their disappearance. Someone had carved the word CROATOAN, the name of both a nearby island and the friendly Native American group who inhabited it, into a palisade post (or maybe a tree). White had instructed that if the colonists found themselves in distress, they should carve a type of cross alongside the location, but there was no cross—so he interpreted as a “certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan.” But a storm stopped him from sailing there to look for them, and he was never able to raise the money to finance another expedition to the New World. 

Hard archeological evidence for White’s proclamation “of their safe being at Croatoan” is still lacking. Most researchers think the settlers were either killed by Native Americans who’d turned hostile to European colonizers or, more likely, were absorbed into friendlier Native populations.  

According to archeologist Charles Ewen, the idea that there’s anything particularly strange about the colony’s disappearance might be a relatively modern development. “It’s no big mystery until you start to get a historical type of writing in the 1800s,” he told The New York Times in 2020, pointing out that failed colonization attempts were hardly out of the ordinary (though Ewen himself is skeptical of the Croatoan explanation for a lack of actual evidence). Science writer Andrew Lawler, author of The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, told Salon that “the ‘Lost Colony’ is a product of the 19th century”—a time, he says, when “the idea of the colonists assimilating with the Native Americans was a taboo.”

SOURCE: MENTAL FLOSS

I love a good mystery, don’t you?  I found this article on Mental Floss and wanted to share!

From Mentalfloss.com:

1 Where is Cleopatra’s tomb?

Finding the burial place of Cleopatra VII, who is usually considered the last monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great—and therefore the last pharaoh of Egypt—would undoubtedly be one of the crowning archaeological achievements in modern history. The problem is, no one knows where to look.  Conventional wisdom places Cleopatra’s tomb beside her palace in an area of ancient Alexandria that is now submerged beneath the Mediterranean Sea. If this is the case, the tomb is likely lost forever. 

But a few researchers have set their sights on Taposiris Magna, the location of a temple dedicated to Osiris, the Egyptian ruler of the realm of the dead, near Alexandria’s western outskirts. Since Cleopatra wanted to associate herself and her Roman lover, Mark Antony, with Osiris and his sister-wife, Isis, some believe it stands to reason that the two could be interred there. Excavations at Taposiris Magna were still underway in 2023, and have so far yielded 16 burial chambers, mummies with golden tongues, funeral masks, coins engraved with the legendary queen’s face, and a tunnel more than 4000 feet long—but no signs of Cleopatra.

If you’re especially captivated by the legend of Cleopatra’s tomb, you’re welcome to help look for it: The Taposiris Magna excavation has been turned into a hands-on tourist experience that starts at about $21,000 per person. 

2 What happened on the Mary Celeste?

If you’ve heard of the Mary Celeste, you can thank Arthur Conan Doyle. The unexplained abandonment of the ship in 1872—and the still-unknown fate of the 10 people aboard—might have been forgotten if not for Conan Doyle publishing a sensational short story about the fictional Marie Celeste in 1884 that captured the popular imagination and turned the American merchant ship into one of the most enduring maritime mysteries of all time.

In terms of solving the mystery of the Mary Celeste and the fate of its captain, his wife and 2-year-old daughter, and its seven-man crew, Doyle’s highly fictionalized account, involving a missing African artifact and a murderous mutiny led by a man who had been born into enslavement in America, was unhelpful. But the official inquiry conducted years earlier had also failed to come up with any reason for the crew to have abandoned a seaworthy vessel. There was three and half feet of water in the hold and a pump had been dismantled, and the ship’s lifeboat was gone. But the ship was safe and operable when it was found drifting near the Azores islands, and the crew who found it had no trouble sailing it 800 miles to Gibraltar to file a salvage claim. 

In 2006, a chemistry professor at University College London proposed a solution: A “pressure-wave type of explosion” caused by the ship’s cargo—around 1700 barrels of industrial alcohol—and some unknown spark had caused little damage but frightened the crew into abandoning the vessel. But other researchers have discounted the theory. While the mystery around the Mary Celeste remains unsolved, it continues to serve as inspiration for storytellers: Season 4 of True Detective was partially inspired by the abandoned ship as well as the Dyatlov Pass incident, another historical head scratcher. 

3 What caused the Great Unconformity?

In 1869, American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell was working in the Grand Canyon when he noticed something strange: What should have been thousands of feet of rock were just hundreds, and as tools and techniques improved, it became clear that in parts of the Grand Canyon over a billion years’ worth of rock was missing. Since the missing time immediately precedes the Cambrian explosion—the period when evolution seems to have kicked into high gear and life on Earth suddenly and rapidly diversified—scientists would very much like to know more about it. 

Rock strata are full of gaps, or “unconformities,” but a billion years is a big one, even in terms of geologic time. As geologist Kalin McDannell explained to science mag Eos, it’s the difference between a book that’s missing a few pages and one that’s had entire chapters torn out. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a local phenomenon—since Powell noticed the anomaly in the Grand Canyon, it’s been spotted in other parts of the world as well. The gap is twice as large in some places, representing more than 40 percent of the planet’s history that just isn’t there.

So where did it go? Two main theories have emerged in recent years. The first maintains that the missing rock was scoured away by glaciers a few hundred million years ago, during what’s known as the Snowball Earth period. The other theory is a little more dramatic: The culprit might be Rodinia, a supercontinent that predates Pangaea and potentially sliced away huge swathes of what would become our geologic record as pieces of the enormous land mass broke away, slid around the planet, and smashed back together. It’s also possible that the Great Unconformity isn’t one gap, but many smaller ones caused by a series of distinct geologic events.

Whatever the cause, the Great Unconformity is a case of one mystery that might hold the key to another. Some researchers believe that when the missing rock was deposited into Earth’s oceans, it altered the chemistry of the water and seeded it with vast amounts of minerals and nutrients. This could have given early lifeforms the resources they needed to evolve helpful things like shells and skeletons, setting the stage for the Cambrian explosion.  

4 What’s up with the Salish Sea feet?

If you type the phrase Salish Sea into Google’s search field, the autocomplete feature assumes you’re going to ask it about all those feet. The phenomenon seems to have started in 2007, when a 12-year-old girl found a running shoe containing a human foot on a British Columbia beach. Since then, more than 20 disembodied feet, most of them secured in sneakers, have washed ashore on the Salish Sea’s U.S. and Canadian coastlines. The embarrassment of extremities has prompted sinister theories ranging from the somewhat plausible (a serial killer is clearly at work) to the fantastic (it’s obviously aliens). Science, however, has requested that we all calm down a little and consider the facts. 

For starters, authorities have ruled out foul play, determining that several of the feet belonged to people who died accidentally or by suicide. Roughly 8.7 million people live along these shores, and there’s a grim correlation between seaside population density and the number of corpses that end up in the water. But if it’s a natural phenomenon, why is it just feet? Why did it start happening so recently? And why just the shores around the Salish Sea? 

Science can help us here, too. The bodies of drowning victims—a category that would include most of the people who die in the waters of the Salish Sea—tend to sink, where their soft tissue is consumed by bottom-dwelling animals such as crabs and lobsters. Since soft tissue is much of what’s holding our feet on, they can easily become detached. If they’re tucked inside running shoes or hiking boots that are made of lightweight, buoyant materials—technology that began to develop rapidly around the time the feet started washing ashore—they’re likely to bob up to the surface, where the Salish Sea’s distinctive combination of geography, wind conditions, and currents conspire to deposit them on beaches rather than carry them out to the open ocean. For all intents and purposes, we can probably mark this one “solved.”

5 How—and why—were the Olmec Heads made?

Long before the Maya (at least the Classical Period of Maya) and Aztecs built sophisticated civilizations in what is now Central America and Mexico, the area was home to the Olmecs, a society that flourished around 3200 to 2400 years ago. As the first great civilization of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs are sometimes considered a “mother culture” that influenced many of the peoples who would come in their wake. They cultivated an extensive trade network and possessed impressive engineering skills, but we know them best for the spectacular art they left behind, including approximately 17 colossal stone heads that have been discovered to date. 

The mystery of the heads is two-fold. First, their size—some are nearly 10 feet tall, and they weigh about 8 tons on average—would have presented enormous logistical challenges. Each head is carved from a single volcanic basalt boulder, and each of those boulders had to be moved more than 50 miles from where it was sourced. How did they do it? And second, why did they go to all that trouble?

Given the resources and labor required to transport and create them and the fact that they appear to depict distinct individuals, most archaeologists think the heads are portraits of powerful Olmec rulers (though some have suggested they could represent ballgame players who were maybe not that good). As for how they were moved such long distances, several theories have been suggested, ranging from wooden rollers to enormous rafts to temporary causeways built specifically for their transport. Answering these questions would fill in some important blanks in our knowledge of human history, but so far researchers can only make educated guesses. 

SOURCE: MENTAL FLOSS

In Bull Valley, there exists one of the strangest homes in Illinois. It is located in rural McHenry County, Illinois, near Woodstock. The house I am talking about is the George Stickney House (also referred to as the Stickney Mansion).

You will notice right away something odd about this house: there are no sharp corners. The design of the home is Italianate. It is a beautiful home. Since 1979, it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Stickney was the first in the township when he arrived there in 1835. Stickney was a very prosperous farmer, and he acquired enough money to build the home of his dreams. The home was built in 1856.

Aside from being a farmer, Stickney was a Spiritualist. He performed séances that were attended by many, including the most elite in the area. This influenced the design of the home. As a Spiritualist, Stickney believes that spirits hid in the corners. So problem solved: he got rid of the corners.

According to Haunted Places.org

Because of George Stickney’s belief in spiritualism, he designed his house with no 90-degree angles inside so that no spirits would be caught in the corners. The Stickneys had 10 children, but only 3 lived to adulthood, and they are said to have regularly conducted seances on the 2nd floor to speak to their children. Currently the building houses the local police department, and many spooky events occur here. Tenants after the Stickneys, and later, police officers, have noted apparitions, moving objects, electrical phenomena, doors opening by themselves, and more. The Holcombville Cemetery where the Stickney children are buried lies nearby, and they are said to haunt the entire neighborhood along with the spirit of a passenger killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191.

(The Stickney House is now the Bull Valley Police Headquarters and Richard Vance is a Village Administrator and Police Officer.)

From thegeorgestickneyhousemariahruiz.blogspot.com:

The story on the house is that George and Sylvia Stickney had ten children, but only 3 survived to adulthood. George and Sylvia were Mediums, which means they could talk to the dead. They would hold seances to communicate to their children who passed away. They also allowed others to come into their house so that they also can talk to their loved ones. George and Sylvia wanted to build a house that would be easier to communicate with their children. The Stickney’s believed that 90-degree angles were bad for spirits because the spirits would get stuck in the corner and house the evil spirits. When building their mansion, they wanted everything to be rounded so that the spirits can move freely, even the ceiling is rounded. Rumor has it that a 90-degree angle in the house is were George Stickney died. Richard confirmed that wasn’t true.  The house was searched and documented and there was no 90-degree angles found at the time of George’s death. He also confirmed that George’s death was never documented, so no one knows how he died. 

I asked Richard Vance what type of experiences he had in the house. He told me some stories about what happened to him and other officers. He said the spirits like to move things around on his desk. They have made his stapler vibrate vigorously, they stood all of his pencils on their erasers and things have flown off of shelves. He even told me that he has seen a lot of different spirits and talked to them as well. The spirits like to move around chairs. There are specifically two chairs that are upstairs that move often. They like to move them close together or stack them on tables. Richard told me he has talked to spirits threw a voice box.  He didn’t get into details with what was said but he has communicated with them. Richard described how it feels when a spirit touches you. He said, “There body feels like a spiderweb meshed into human figure, a cold, electric shock when they touch you.” Richard says that the spirits touch him all the time. They touch him on his face, hands, and arms. One time he had his gun on his side and a spirit poked him underneath his gun. Throughout the interview, Richard Vance kept reminding me that the house isn’t bad. The Stickney’s were good people, they just wanted to talk to their dead children.

Sylvia Stickney is the most active spirit in the house. Everyone that works there has seen her and say she is very beautiful. Sylvia Stickney wears a white gown and she loves children.  Richard informed me about an experience a little boy had while visiting the Stickney house. The boy was very scared to go inside because of what he had heard about it. When asked if he was still scared later on, he replied, “No, the nice women told me that I shouldn’t be scared, so I’m not scared anymore!” When they asked the little boy to describe what the women looked like, he pointed to the picture of Sylvia Stickney.  

Richard Vance told me about the most active places and times of the house. The Stickney family is the most active spirits in the house besides the Indians. Richard believes that the Indians were on the property before the Stickney family built there home. He said that the spirits are more active from 5pm to 8pm and on the weekends. Richard said that the Stickney house still celebrates Mayday, which is the most active day out of the year. Mayday is a celebration on May 1st, which was a very big holiday in the 1800’s where everyone would celebrate with dancing and singing outside. The Stickney’s held tons of parties on Mayday. Whenever it rains, the house is more active as well. Richard confirmed what I read online that the second floor of the house and the staircase is the most active.

(You can read about Maria’s experience when she visited the second floor at the link posted above.)

SOURCES: ATLAS OBSCURA

                  HAUNTED PLACES.ORG

                  thegeorgestickneyhousemariahruiz.blogspot.com

In the early morning hours of December 26, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey awoke to find their six-year-old daughter JonBenét Ramsey missing from her bed at their home in Boulder, Colorado. Patsy and John had woken up early to prepare for a trip, when Patsy discovered a ransom note on the stairs demanding $118,000 for their daughter’s safe return.

Despite the note’s warning not to involve police, Patsy immediately called them, as well as friends and family in order to aid in the search for JonBenét Ramsey. Police arrived at 5:55 AM and found no signs of forced entry, but did not search the basement, where her body would eventually be found.

Before JonBenét’s body was even found, there were many investigative mistakes made. Only JonBenét’s room was cornered off, so friends and family roamed the rest of the house, picking up things and potentially destroying evidence. The Boulder Police Department also shared evidence they found with the Ramseys and delayed conducting their informal interviews with the parents. At 1:00 PM the detectives instructed Mr. Ramsey and a family friend to go around the house to see if anything was amiss. The first place they looked was the basement, where they found JonBenét’s body. John Ramsey immediately picked up his daughter’s body and brought her upstairs, which unfortunately destroyed potential evidence by disturbing the crime scene.

During the autopsy it was discovered that JonBenét Ramsey had died from asphyxiation due to strangulation, in addition to a skull fracture. Her mouth had been covered in duct tape and her wrists and neck were wrapped with a white cord. Her torso had been covered in a white blanket. There was no conclusive evidence of rape as no semen was found on the body and her vagina appeared to have been wiped clean, although a sexual assault had occurred. The makeshift garret was made using a length of cord and part of a paintbrush from the basement. The coroner also found what was believed to be pineapple in JonBenét’s stomach. Her parents do not remember giving her any the night before she died, but there was a bowl of pineapple in the kitchen which had her nine-year-old brother Burke’s fingerprints on it, however this meant little since time cannot be attributed to fingerprints. The Ramseys maintained Burke was in his room all night asleep, and there was never any physical evidence to reflect otherwise.

There are two popular theories in the Ramsey case; the family theory and the intruder theory. The initial investigation focused heavily on the Ramsey family for many reasons. The police felt that the ransom note was staged as it was unusually long, written using a pen and paper from the Ramsey’s house, and demanded almost the exact amount of money that John had received as a bonus earlier that year. Additionally, the Ramseys were reluctant to cooperate with police, though they later said this was because they feared the police would not conduct a full investigation and target at them as easy suspects. However all three members of the immediate family were questioned by investigators and submitting handwriting samples to compare to the ransom letter. Both John and Burke were cleared of any suspicion of writing the note. Although much was made that Patsy could not be conclusively cleared by her handwriting sample, this analysis was not further supported by any other evidence.

Despite a larger pool of suspects, the media immediately focused on JonBenét’s parents, and they spent years under the harsh limelight of the public eye. In 1999, a Colorado grand jury voted to indict the Ramseys on child endangerment and obstruction of a murder investigation, however the prosecutor felt that the evidence did not meet the beyond a reasonable doubt standard and declined to prosecute. JonBenét’s parents were never officially named as suspects in the murder.

Alternatively, the intruder theory had lots of physical evidence to support it. There was a boot print found next to JonBenét’s body which did not belong to anyone in the family. There was also a broken window in the basement which was believed to be the most likely point of entry for an intruder. Additionally, there was DNA from drops of blood from an unknown male found on her underwear. The floors in the Ramsey’s home were heavily carpeted, making it plausible for an intruder to have carried JonBenét downstairs without waking the family.

One of the most famous suspects was John Karr. He was arrested in 2006 when he confessed to killing JonBenét by accident, after he had drugged and sexually assaulted her. Karr was eventually dismissed as a suspect after it was revealed that no drugs had been found in JonBenét’s system, police could not confirm he was in Boulder at the time, and his DNA did not match the profile generated from the samples found.

Much of the recent investigation in the case revolves around the DNA profiles developed from the sample found in her underwear and the touch DNA later developed from her long johns. The profile from her underwear was entered into CODIS (the national DNA database) in 2003, but no matches have been identified.

In 2006, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy took over the case. She agreed with the federal prosecutor that the intruder theory was more plausible than the Ramseys killing their daughter. Under Lacy’s lead, investigators developed a DNA profile from touch DNA (DNA left behind by skin cells) on her long johns. In 2008 Lacy released a statement detailing the DNA evidence and fully exonerating the Ramsey family, saying in part:

“The Boulder District Attorney’s Office does not consider any member of the Ramsey family, including John, Patsy, or Burke Ramsey, as suspects in this case. We make this announcement now because we have recently obtained this new scientific evidence that adds significantly to the exculpatory value of the previous scientific evidence. We do so with full appreciation for the other evidence in this case.

Local, national, and even international publicity has focused on the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Many members of the public came to believe that one or more of the Ramseys, including her mother or her father or even her brother, were responsible for this brutal homicide. Those suspicions were not based on evidence that had been tested in court; rather, they were based on evidence reported by the media.”

In 2010 the case was officially reopened with renewed focus on the DNA samples. Further testing has been conducted on the samples and experts now believe that the sample is actually from two individuals rather than one. In 2016 it was announced that the DNA would be sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to be tested using more modern methods and authorities hope to develop an even stronger DNA profile of the killer.

In 2016, CBS aired The Case of JonBenét Ramsey which implied her then nine-year-old brother Burke was the killer despite the fact he was cleared by the DNA evidence that proved the existence of an intruder. Burke filed a $750 million-dollar lawsuit against CBS for defamation. The case was settled in 2019, and while the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, his lawyer stated the case was “amicably resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.”

The JonBenét Ramsey case is still open and remains unsolved.

SOURCE: CRIME MUSEUM

During the reign of King Louis XIV, a mysterious man was locked away in the notorious Bastille and other French prisons: the Man in the Iron Mask. Held captive from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 18th century, the enigmatic prisoner still conjures up images of political intrigue, deadly betrayal, and historical enigmas.

His unforgiving mask and threadbare cell were perhaps even more infamous than the man himself. But his anonymous face obviously led to questions about his identity later on. Was he a nobleman, a prince, a political rival, or just a valet in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Who was the Man in the Iron Mask, and why was he in prison?

The Man Behind the Mask

While we may never know the true identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, we can make a few guesses based on what we do know.

Before taking up residence at the dreaded Bastille, he was held in a small prison off the coast of Cannes called Sainte-Marguerite. It was first constructed in 1617, but it didn’t become a state prison until 1685. One of the most infamous prisoners was the Man in the Iron Mask, who was said to be held there sometime during the 1680s.

Under the watch of former musketeer Bénigne de Saint-Mars, the Man in the Iron Mask also spent time locked up in the Pignerol and Exilles fortresses.

In 1698, a Bastille official recorded that Saint-Mars finally arrived at the infamous prison with a mysterious inmate who was “always masked and whose name is never pronounced.”

Secrecy was the name of the game for the Man in the Iron Mask. Interestingly, the “iron” detail may have even been part of the legend added later, as some have claimed that the mask was actually made of velvet.

But regardless of the mask’s material, Saint-Mars refused to say a word to anyone about what his inmate did to end up in the slammer.

“You have only to watch over the security of all your prisoners, without ever explaining to anyone what it is that your prisoner of long standing did,” wrote a minister named Barbezieux to Saint-Mars in November 1697, according to The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations.

In any case, Saint-Mars achieved his goal. The true identity of the man, and the crimes for which he was punished, will probably never be known. But of course, that didn’t stop people from guessing.

The Prisoner’s Days in The Bastille

The storming of the Bastille — the prison that housed political dissidents of the powerful — is celebrated today on Bastille Day on July 14 in France. But before the Bastille became a symbol of the country’s freedom from hierarchical oppression, it was a hulking symbol of royal power.

The Man in the Iron Mask spent his final years here in this Parisian stronghold, watched over by Saint-Mars. However, the jailer was no great protector of his captive. Recent documents from 2015 suggest that the former musketeer diverted most of the funds for supporting the prisoner’s cell to his own pockets.

Allegedly, the Bastille cell only contained a mat for sleeping — so it could not have been a pleasant stay.

Even after his death in 1703, the very memory of the Man in the Iron Mask was subject to erasure. His clothes were promptly burned at dawn, and his cell was scraped and whitewashed to hide any trace of his identity that he may have left behind.

The French bureaucratic system worked very hard to ensure no one ever knew the real story behind the Man in the Iron Mask. But it didn’t take long for theories to emerge.

Theories About the Man In The Iron Mask

So, who was the Man in the Iron Mask? The guesses have numbered in the hundreds over the centuries, from the plausible to the far-fetched.

Historians point to two men as the most often suspected identities behind the iron mask: Ercole Matthiole and Eustache Dauger. The former was an Italian count who had betrayed Louis XIV politically in the 1670s.

His last name was so similar to an alias that was often used for the Man in the Iron Mask — “Marchioly.” On top of that, Louis XIV’s descendants Louis XV and Louis XVI had both claimed that the famous prisoner was an Italian nobleman. No wonder Matthiole was in the hot seat.

However, Matthiole died in 1694, which was years before the Man in the Iron Mask passed away. So that’s why many experts agree that Dauger is a more likely candidate.

As for Dauger, he was reportedly a valet arrested for unclear reasons in 1669. While some say the valet was somehow implicated in a political scandal, others say he wasn’t a valet at all. He’s also been painted as a debauched nobleman or even a failed assassin.

But regardless of his former occupation, Dauger had been imprisoned in several fortresses — and he was once transported between prisons in a covered chair so that passersby would not see his face. And when he was first arrested, orders were given to jailers to “threaten him with death if he speaks one word except about his actual needs.”

Enlightenment thinker Voltaire put forth a different theory — that the prisoner may have been a brother of Louis XIV. Voltaire also specified that the mask was made of iron, describing it as such: “The chin of the mask was made of steel springs, allowing the prisoner to eat without removing it.”

Meanwhile, the Dutch people, who fighting the French during the Nine Years’ War, hoped to sow discord by spreading the rumor that the Man in the Iron Mask was the true father of the king. This rumor took root because Louis XIV was born very late into his parents’ marriage.

For some people, that was enough to convince them that his mother may have taken a lover to provide France with an heir.

This had the double effect of besmirching the king’s mother while also painting her son as a bastard, and by extension, an illegitimate ruler.

Yet another rumor suggested that it wasn’t Louis XIV’s father behind the Iron Mask, but instead his illegitimate son Louis de Bourbon.

While these theories would certainly explain why the king wouldn’t want the identity of the prisoner released, there’s never been any clear-cut evidence to prove that these ideas were true.

The Eternal Mystery

Although the iron (or velvet) mask was meant to condemn the prisoner with lifelong anonymity in his jail cell, it also gave him notoriety that still persists to this day. More than 300 years later, we still want to know the true story of the Man in the Iron Mask.

The question has inspired writers, actors, and other creatives to produce artwork illustrating their theories — to varying degrees of success.

During the 19th century, the French author Alexandre Dumas tackled the question in his historical novels. Dumas theorized that the prisoner was King Louis XIV’s twin brother Philippe, imprisoned to simplify the throne’s inheritance and keep Louis XIV in power.

Even though Dumas’ story was just based on one theory, it would eventually inspire more modern depictions of the Man in the Iron Mask — including a 1998 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

In the film version, Louis XIV is portrayed as a villain interested only in money and bedding women while his country starves. In the movie, the royal is also completely responsible for the unique punishment of the mask.

The torturous device is doled out for the sin his brother commits — the sin of sharing his face.

Meanwhile, the TV series Versailles, which follows the early days of the magnificent French palace, portrays Louis XIV’s brother as being obsessed with the Man in the Iron Mask.

Actor Alexander Vlahos, who plays the King’s brother Philippe, commented, “When the writer came up to me and said that that was my storyline for the year, I thought: ‘How are we going to realize this?’ because obviously it’s so steeped in mythology, no one really knows who that person was, and why he was there.”

Vlahos hits the nail on the head. We’ll probably never know the answer to one of the most burning questions in modern history: Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? All we can do is guess.

SOURCE: ALLTHATSINTERESTING