Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This absolutely, positively, 100-percent not fake news story appeared in the “Philadelphia Inquirer” on November 8, 1904:

SITKA, Alaska, Nov 1st, 1904. Enclosed with this letter is a sketch by Mr. Ssirk of the queer "thing" found encased in an iceberg on Lake Tinsel. 

Last night a party of Esquimaux runners, highly excited, dashed into Sitka, and reported that the mysterious creature had come to life, that Mr. Ssirk was ill from the strain, and that many of his servants had fled. Business in Sitka is temporarily suspended. Many persons are already on the dog-trail to the interior, and a party of one hundred and fifty men left here this morning on skies for the Ssirk estate. 

My Esquimaux informants state that for nearly an hour after its release the creature lay like a mummy. Then, as night tell, the eyelids quivered, and rhuem was seen to issue from them. All the while Mr. Ssirk was engaged in massaging the "thing's” wrists and heart. With the coming dusk animation stirred its body. The lip trembled, the fingers shook nervously.

Suddenly, as the moon rose, the tongue protruded and articulation was heard. Mr. Ssirk fell over in a faint, and all his servants, save three, fled.

The remaining servants tenderly put their master, who for two days had neglected to take food, upon a dog-sled and bore him, with the strange acquisition, to his home. Recovering, Mr. Ssirk saw again the weird being and found it wholly alive and seated on a chair like any human creature, dispatching with gluttonous haste all the visible eatables on the servants' table, its first food for possibly 4000 years.

 

My Esquimaux messengers added that when daylight came the creature acted as one dead, and remained so until nightfall, when it emerged from its coma, and, bearing itself like a high-caste human, uttered strange speech and made overt attempts to convey its thoughts.

My next letter will be written from personal observation, as it is no longer possible to endure conjecture.  I leave for the Ssirk estate tonight and will advise you of developments.

Imagine being a Philadelphian reading this baby with your morning coffee.

And before you ask, I couldn't find any follow-ups to this story. What a surprise.