Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This unnerving account of the mysterious deaths of two sisters appeared in the “Patriot News,” March 24, 1968:

A soft sigh, a stare of horror, a piercing scream and death that as yet is unexplained…that was the fate of Beverly Stephens and her sister, Patricia, who died in almost identical circumstances five years apart. Neither girl uttered a word before she died. Neither gave any sign that anything was wrong before the seizure. The only sound either made was a scream. In both cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed.

Death came almost instantly. Neither girl had a medical history of serious ailments or emotional upsets. Exhaustive autopsies that included microorganisms tests revealed no clue to what killed either girl. Their death certificates read: "Sudden death, natural." Natural, perhaps, but inexplicable. 

Beverly Stephens died in August, 1963.  She had just stepped from a swimming pool in Porterville, Calif., when she sighed, looked about her with horror, uttered a single, high-pitched scream and collapsed. She was 17. Equally inexplicable was the death of Patricia Stephens Rush, who succumbed in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed ... then came the sigh, the look of fear, the scream and death.

She was 23. What haunts the girls' parents, Everett and Ruth Stephens, who live in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is the thought that whatever killed the sisters might be a hereditary disorder afflicting the female side of the family. The Stephenses have two other daughters, Barbara, 17, and Diana, 11, in addition to sons Larry and Robert. 

The same thought weighs heavily on Staff Sgt. Robert Rush, an Army combat engineer, who had been home from Vietnam just four days when his wife, Patricia, died, leaving him with two girls, Kristen, 1, and Kimberly, 6. 

The family made appointments with Los Angeles heart specialists for the surviving girls. The parents can shed little light on the deaths of the sisters, and neither does their personal background provide a clue. The family moved to California from St. Louis shortly after World War II. By 1954, Everett Stephens was working as a correctional officer for the state, first in Salinas, then in Porterville. He now works in San Luis Obispo at the California Men's Colony. 

The Stephenses were living in Porterville when Beverly, a high school senior, died. Although the autopsy showed nothing, her parents recall that a week before her fatal seizure, Beverly had survived a similar attack.  This occurred at a dance one warm August night. The girl uttered one short, piercing scream and collapsed. Two registered nurses, who happened to be at the dance, said she wasn't breathing when they began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She regained consciousness in a short time.

Doctors at the Porterville hospital could find nothing wrong with her. Suspecting that she was suffering from fatigue, they sent her home to bed. Beverly didn't remember a thing about what her mother still calls "the fainting spell." 

"She was perfectly normal the next day, and she went to a ball game that night," her mother recalled. "In fact, she went shopping with me the day after that." 

If Beverly had any premonition of death, she gave no sign to her family or friends. She went swimming with her younger brother, Robert, who was 13 at the time, a few days after the incident at the dance. It was Robert, now a high school senior, who described what happened to his sister at Porterville's Sunnyside Pool--the sigh, the terror-stricken look, the scream, and the frantic attempts to revive her. 

Dr. James Sargent, Tulare County autopsy surgeon, said he could find no marks on the body, no heart damage, no brain injury, nothing. Since the couple's other children seemed healthy enough, Beverly's strange death attracted little attention. There wasn't even a story about it in the local paper. All that changed recently when her sister died in almost identical circumstances. Patricia's death freshened coroner Sargent's memory of the original case: 

"Actually, you know as much about what caused the girl to die as we do," he said.  "I'm not satisfied with the explanations that were conjectured at the time. There simply was and is no theory on the subject that makes medical sense." 

One theory was that a sinus reflex had slowed the girl's heart action and ultimately killed her, but Sargent rejected that with the observation that such an explanation is a popular "medical dumping ground." 

Now the conjecture has started all over again. Like Beverly's brother, Patricia's husband, a 10-year army veteran, can't provide a clue even though he, too, was an eyewitness. Rush said he awoke about 6 a.m. to find his wife sitting upright, staring straight ahead and screaming.

He said he had the feeling that the scream was involuntary, that she was unconscious. Rush could detect no pulse. He called for an ambulance and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. Patricia was dead when she reached Valley Community Hospital 27 minutes later.

Again there were tests, the autopsy, the funeral. Her badly shaken father said: "They'll never find out what caused it." 

And Dr. John P. Blanchard, the Santa Barbara coroner, as baffled as Dr. Sargent had been, was forced to agree. "In all probability," he said, "the girl's father is right." 

Dr. Blanchard's autopsy report mentioned "pulmonary edema," a sudden accumulation of fluid in the lungs. "But in truth," the doctor said, "we just don't know what happened to her.  It's an unexplained natural death. I don't even have any theories." 

Dr. Blanchard has said he would continue his post mortem studies into Patricia's death and consult the pathologist who sought to find the cause of her sister’s death.  "Obviously, there is a medical reason for both deaths," he said, "but our science isn't sophisticated enough to find the answers."

Doctors at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, where a foundation grant is financing studies of inexplicable sudden death, may look into the cases of the Stephens sisters. Although their experiments have involved laboratory animals and not humans, a team led by Dr. Stewart Woll is convinced that panic can literally switch off a healthy heart and cause sudden death.

Wolf says that many drowning victims are often found without enough water in their lungs to have drowned them, and snake bite victims are known to have succumbed to an amount of venom that ordinarily would not have been fatal. 

"In such cases, the patient just dies of a turned-off heart as a result of panic," he said. Other members of the research team mentioned the possibility that Patricia might have had a particular vivid nightmare that produced death-dealing panic. But that explanation would not account for the death of her younger sister five years earlier at the swimming pool. The Stephenses have about reconciled themselves to the conviction that the deaths of their daughters will remain a mystery.

"Naturally, we're very concerned now about our older daughters, but we're not going to dwell on it. We can't let it ruin our lives," the father said.

I don’t know what happened to the other Stephens girls, but hopefully they were more fortunate than their sisters.  Still, their lives must have been very very uneasy.

The Pilot's Return

During the 1950s, Martin Caidin was the official historian for America’s Fifth Air Force during his stint in A-2 military intelligence.  In that capacity, he had full access to military combat files.  In his book “Ghosts of the Air,” he described a story he found in one of those files that was reported from air force operations in North Africa during WWII--a story that he admitted was “flatly impossible” but that was nevertheless “witnessed, and attested to, by several hundred officers and men of the U.S. Army, and Army Air Forces, who were there.”

Unfortunately, at the time he discovered this record, it was still classified, meaning he could take notes from the document, but not remove it from the vault.  In later visits to this vault, that particular file could not be found.  In other words, there is nothing to corroborate Caidin’s incredible yarn, leaving him to sigh, “Take it as it is, because that’s what you’re going to get.”

So, the caveat is duly noted.  However, it’s such a bloody good yarn, I decided to “take it.”

Our story begins with a day of standard combat operations in the Mediterranean Sea.  Among that day’s missions was a long-range patrol of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, which set off along the North African coast into airspace that was then controlled by the Germans.  The Lightnings encountered some of the enemy, and, inevitably, a fierce air battle ensued.  When the fighting was finally over, the Americans realized that one P-38 was not accounted for.  They were unable to make radio contact with the missing pilot.  A search found no trace of the plane in the water.  It was as if the P-38 and its pilot had simply vanished into air.  Finally, as the other Lightnings began to run low on fuel, the group was forced to return to their home base.  The one absent pilot was simply listed as “missing in action.”  They still held hope that he had just become separated from the others and would eventually return safely.

However, as the hours went on with no word from the missing fighter, everyone accepted that the worst had happened.  Just another casualty of war.  Then, the air-raid alert suddenly blasted through the base.  Radar had picked up an unknown aircraft heading toward the field.  Soon, a P-38 came into view, getting ready to land.

The defense system radioed the plane.  No answer.  Flares were sent up, as a signal for the pilot to give some response.  The plane took no notice of them.  When the P-38 was over the center of the airfield, it suddenly began shaking, and to the shock of all observers, the plane suddenly, inexplicably, began to disintegrate mid-air.

The men saw the pilot fall free from the wreck, and they frantically shouted to him to open his chute.  The parachute indeed opened, and the pilot fell gently to the ground.  As ambulances--and everyone else on the base--frantically drove to the site, it was noted that the man was not moving.

The base’s medical team reached the pilot first.  As soon as they saw the body up-close, they could only stand there in stunned disbelief.  It was impossible enough to realize that the P-38 somehow approached the base with no fuel left in its tanks, but with both engines running.  But when it was found that the pilot had flown the plane and parachuted to the ground with a bullet hole in his forehead…

The man had been killed by German fire hours before.

A report had to be made about the incident, but it was marked “Secret,” hidden away in the most obscure file possible, and everyone involved did their best to persuade themselves that what they had just seen happen…did not happen.

What else could they do?  What else could you do?

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!  Our hosts for this Friday are Goldie and Brownie!

Because why not.

A plague outbreak from over 5,000 years ago.

A case of explosive revenge.

A medieval communication network.

How angry fishermen saved the American Revolution.

A remarkable amber pendant.

The liver-eating cannibal of the Old West.

Catherine Crowe's ghost hunt.

That time when humans nearly became extinct.

A dispute over camels in British India.

Disaster hits HMS Vanguard.

A newly-discovered Etruscan burial chamber.

The underwater ruins of a medieval city.

Restoring the Cotton Genesis.

Why we blow out birthday candles.

Warnings from dead aviators.

The life of Catherine of Egmont.

A look at 18th century painter William Williams.

That time when Elvis shot up a Cadillac.

Witches!  On broomsticks!  In 1982!

The mysterious death of a Renaissance muse.

Some ancient Egyptian inscriptions have really thrown archaeologists for a loop.

Wedding pranks that did not go well at all.

A new discovery regarding Sutton Hoo.

A strange medieval burial.

The oldest building in Spitalfields.

3I/Atlas is not only very weird, it's probably very very old.

The mysteries of Custer's Last Stand.

A Polish historical symbolism painter.

The mystery of how our planet got water.

A "Delilah" gets her revenge.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very eerie story from WWII.  In the meantime, let's welcome in Summer, medieval English style.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

On this blog, we’ve met mysterious Women in Black.  Not to mention the occasional Women in White.  So, who’s up for making the acquaintance of a Welsh Woman in Yellow?  The “Bradford Weekly Telegraph,” February 18, 1905:

A silent woman, shimmering in a bright yellow light, with gleaming eyes and up-lifted knife, is the latest ghostly form to be reported from South Wales. She has taken up her abode in a large building at Rhymney, now used as a Salvation Army barracks. The silent apparition, it is claimed, had been seen by many members of the corps, and, at the request of the Salvationists the local Wesleyan minister remained in the building through Friday night in order to investigate.

He was accompanied by two or three friends and a lady, the Salvationist Army lieutenant, and other Salvationists. The minister certainly did not see anything like what some of the others aver they saw, but he did see in the passage a body of very bright light moving to and fro. The party hoard many things during the night, such as the noisy walking and of a lady's dress rustling. 

“About half-past three," continued the minister, in describing his experiences, "my attention was called by one of the members of the Army to a face in the broken pane of the pantry window. I could not see the form of a face, but I saw something like a body of light.

“The lieutenant declared about that time that she saw apparition in the form of a woman dressed in yellow standing by my side, with a terrible look in its eyes and a knife in its band. I did not see  my undesirable companion. The Salvationist shouted out, ‘Oh, look at the knife!' and then fainted. 

“Coming to herself again, she appeared to follow the apparition with her eyes until they rested on the doorway, then she made a dash towards it, and was prevented by force from descending the cellar. 

“It occurs to me from what I saw,” adds the minister, that some enemy is using undue influence upon the Salvationists,such as hypnotism.  If it were not so, then it must be the hand of God revealing past events to the Salvationists, as well as to the world." 

In a conversation, the lieutenant informed the minister that she had been supernaturally informed that events had taken place in the house years ago, and that they would shortly be revealed to her and another lady Salvationist. The rev. gentleman has advised the Salvationists to close up the building for the present, and suggests that an exhaustive search should be made.

After a number of other sightings of the knife-wielding yellow lady, the Salvationists decided that they wished to gather someplace where life was less exciting, and cleared out of the barracks.  After that, as far as I know, the story disappeared from the newspapers.

The Case of the Parlous Parlor

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.com

Early in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide.  This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:

The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser residence on Saturday, when the mother of the dead girl went in to speak to her.

Twigg and Miss Elosser were to have been married Sunday night. It is suspected that a jealous woman rival was the poisoner, carrying out her plot in a most crafty way.

The mystery begun with the discovery on Saturday afternoon of the pretty girl and her fiance sitting together, hand in hand, on a sofa in the parlor of their home—both dead.

So swift, so instantaneous had been the action of the poison upon them that they sat as if in life.

The girl's mother went into the room, wondering only at the very long silence that she had noted between the couple. She saw her daughter and the young man sitting in apparently the most natural fashion. They were holding hands and looking into each other's eyes.

Then the mother suddenly gasped and stepped back. There was something uncanny, she saw, in the intentness of the gaze the young man and woman had fixed upon each other. There was that which gave a silent, vague alarm in the fixedness of their pose. She spoke to them. They did not answer. She went over to them. She spoke again and received no reply.  Then she put a hand on her daughter's head and spoke again.

"Grace —Grace," she said. And there was still no reply, so she gently shook her daughter by the shoulder. The mother screamed then and ran from the room. The girl's head had lolled to a side and the other woman had seen that the girl's jaw was dropped and her eyes fixed in the piteous gaping of death.

Then when others came it was found that the man, too, was dead; that both had been suddenly and absolutely stricken. The deadliest of poisons had been the medium.

This was established by the autopsy of the coroner's physician, Dr. Thomas W. Koon. They had both taken cyanide of potassium. The man had more of the poison in his system than the girl.  In the holiday season there had been several boxes of candy in the house.  But the medical examination showed conclusively that neither Miss Elosser or her fiance had eaten candy.  He had, however, in his mouth a stick of chewing gum. He had taken scarcely more than two or three bites on it. It had not been masticated into a pulp. In Miss Elosser's mouth was no chewing gum.

The strange likelihood is being considered by the authorities that the stick of chewing gum contained the deadly cyanide. Also that the young man, with the gum in his mouth, had leaned forward to kiss his sweetheart and that the kiss communicated the poison to her lips--a kiss offered in love that was deadly—the kiss of whose tragic character the ardent bestower was in all ignorance.

This is the only evidence that the authorities have so far secured to aid them in the way of solving the amazing mystery.  It has been by no means proven that the chewing gum contained the deadly poison. But it seems to be the only possible source from which the young man and his sweetheart could have taken into their systems the deadly chemical. The candy that was in the Elosser home had been partaken of by all the members of the family without ill effect. Moreover, chemical analysis showed all this confectionery to be harmless.

The tips of the tongues of both Twigg and the girl who was to have been his bride were red and inflamed, quite as if they had been burned or bitten. Cyanide, of course, takes immediate action. The mere touching of a grain of it to the tip of the tongue will cause death instantly.

The newspapers did a great deal of speculating about the tragedy.  Twigg had initially courted the dead woman's sister May before transferring his affections to Grace.  A third sister admitted that May had been "terribly broken up" about losing Charles--so much so that she stopped speaking to Grace.  Could the "scorned woman" have taken this rejection so hard that she poisoned, not just her ex-flame, but her own sister?  The first doctor at the scene of the deaths testified that he also found May Elosser unconscious with "decided symptoms of cyanide poisoning."  It took him fifteen minutes of work to revive her.  Was this evidence that she had planned the deaths of all three members of this love triangle?

Or could Charles Twigg, for some as-yet-unknown reason, have poisoned himself and the woman he was about to marry? Or was it a double suicide?

The police finally decided that there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone.  At the inquest, May admitted that she had been jealous of her sister, but vehemently denied that she could even consider murdering her.  There was no evidence of her buying poison.  The coroner's jury returned a verdict that the couple had died from cyanide poisoning, but they could not say how it had been administered.  This ambiguous verdict meant that May Elosser--the only known person with any conceivable motive to kill the pair--was left with a grim cloud of suspicion over her head.  It was looking like she would have to live with it for the rest of her life.

It was a local physician, a Dr. Littlefield, who finally provided a resolution to the case.  He had closely examined the parlor where Twigg and Elosser died.  He noted that there was a small crack in the glass of a gas stove in the room.  He also saw that when all the doors and windows were closed--as they had been when couple died—the parlor had very little air circulation.  He theorized that the couple had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he decided to try an experiment.  He placed a cat in the parlor, made sure all the doors and windows were shut, and left the animal there overnight.

By the time he returned the next morning, the cat was dead.  An autopsy found that an accumulation of leaking gas had killed it.  A second cat was left in the room overnight.  This cat also died.  Littlefield pointed out that certain foods create hydrocyanic acid in the stomach, meaning that the traces of "poison" found in Twigg and Elosser's system could have come from natural causes.  The couple's bodies were exhumed, and the subsequent autopsy established that they had indeed died from carbon monoxide, the result of the flue of the parlor stove being choked with an over-accumulation of soot.  He felt that he had proved their deaths were simply a catastrophic accident.

Many townspeople, still stubbornly convinced of May Elosser's guilt, refused to accept that the tragedy could have such a prosaic explanation.  However, in 1913, two women living in the Elosser home were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in that same parlor.  Fortunately, they were found in time to revive them.  Examination showed that they too had allowed the flue to become choked with soot.

It looked like Littlefield had been vindicated--no one had been murdered, after all.

Except those poor cats, of course.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Oh, God, the Strange Company staffers are bar-hopping again.

A case of avenged honor.

The most famous dog of the Middle Ages.

The legend of King Arthur in Greenland.

A Welsh village that became a casualty of WWII.

The rise and fall of masquerade balls.

In which science proves that stolen french fries taste better.

Two newly-discovered sermons by St. Augustine.

Ireland's "famine roads."

London's execution broadsides.

The social life of ancient Roman...latrines.

That time when Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay were roomies.

The enigma of Vermeer.

A ditch full of ancient headless human skeletons have been discovered, and archaeologists haven't a clue.

A lost WWI battalion.

A tale of a 19th century deathbed.

How America's 150th birthday party went sideways.

The mystery of the origins of language.

The folklore of "corpse roads."

Celebrating the 100th birthday of Route 66.

The Mob's arrival in Hollywood.

The stories behind two coffins.

HMS Dolphin captures a slave ship.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a murder case...that wasn't.  In the meantime, here's one of those pop songs where the original version is less well known than the covers.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

It’s time for some Mystery Blood!  The “Sacramento Bee,” August 16, 1870:

At the Juapa, at the residence of Mr. John Baldwin, one of those phenomena occurred for which it is so difficult to account. On the 15th instant, a shower of blood fell at the dwelling of Mr. B., spattering the doorstep and the surrounding grounds. There had been only an instant before a perfect calm, without a cloud in the horizon, when suddenly a whirlwind arose, scattering everything in all directions, and leaving as the result, large clots of blood in the immediate vicinity of the house. The question arises, where did this blood come from. The circumstances are altogether different from that which occurred a few months ago at Los Nietos, where it was finally agreed that it was made by vultures who had been preying upon dead carcasses upon the plains, and from the ratification of the air, in passing over that place, gave up their gorged repast.

The First Mrs. Bennett

William Bell Scott, Woman Startled by the Ghost of a Girl by a Mirror

Second marriages can be awkward, especially when the ex-spouse has issues with their former partner entering into a new union.  If said ex-spouse happens to be dead, you know your domestic life has well and truly entered Strange Company territory.

In her 1974 book “Haunted East Anglia,” Joan Forman described an unsettling episode in the life of an acquaintance of hers to whom she gave the pseudonym “Mrs. June Bennett.”  At the time our story opens, June had recently married a widower, after which the couple settled into the Wroxam home Mr. Bennett had shared with his first wife.  The late Mrs. Bennett had greatly loved the home and had been very possessive of it--as it happened, she had even died there.  June knew of all this, but felt no superstitious unease at becoming the house’s new mistress.

However, as soon as June took up residence, she noticed odd things going on around her.  She would hear phantom footsteps walking up and down the stairs, and she began noticing strange odors in some of the rooms.  The smells were like nothing she had ever noticed before--she could only describe them to Forman as “like incense, and yet unlike.”

The Bennetts employed a cleaning woman, who had also worked for the first Mrs. B.  She too heard the mysterious footsteps and smelled the strange odors.  However, what really frightened her was that she began hearing an invisible figure calling her name.  It was the voice of the first Mrs. Bennett.  The woman was so unnerved by this that she visited the grave of her late employer and begged to be left alone.  Unfortunately, this had no effect.  Oddly, Mr. Bennett heard and saw nothing unusual.

As unpleasant as all this was, June did not start to become seriously alarmed until she had been living in the house for about a year.  The Bennetts had just arrived back home from a holiday, when June heard both doorbells ring simultaneously.  By this point, she was not particularly surprised to find no one at either door.  A few nights later, June woke up to feel some substance clinging to her face.  She tried brushing it off, to no avail.  She told Forman “It was unlike material, but resembled cobwebs, and was certainly sticky.”  June got up to get something to drink, and by the time she went back to bed, the strange sensation had gone.

The most frightening incident of all came a short time later.  June was putting on makeup in front of the mirror on her dressing table.  Then, the mirror began to mist over.  When she tried to wipe it clean, she saw a reflection of a woman…that was not her.  It was the face of a stranger.  When she later described the woman to her husband, he said it must have been the face of his first wife.  June never used that mirror again.  Soon after this incident, she persuaded her husband to sell the home, and they moved to Norwich.  The home’s new owners reported no unusual occurrences, which seems logical.  The late Mrs. Bennett had no reason to feel jealous of them.

Even after moving away, June was not completely free of her predecessor.  One room in the new house contained furniture that had belonged to the first Mrs. Bennett.  The new cleaner who worked for June told her that this room often smelled strangely:  “Not quite like baking bread, but very near it.”

Pro tip:  If you plan to marry a widow/widower, always clear things with the ghost of the previous spouse first.  It could prevent a lot of uncomfortable situations.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where the Strange Company staff is off on an early summer road trip!

Daniel Webster prosecutes an "extraordinary case."

Is there a planet hidden behind Neptune?

A woman's unsolved disappearance.

A medieval domestic violence case.

"London characters" of the early 20th century.

Exploring some fairy caves.

The actor and the crisis apparition.

A bride returns from the grave.

The earliest known domesticated dogs.

Percy Fawcett and the "lost city of Z."

The landscapes of John Constable.

Why we toss coins in fountains.

The busboy who witnessed RFK's assassination.

Bees are mighty darn smart.

A very ancient whale graveyard.

The efforts to reconcile Britain and the American colonies.

A mysterious castle in Wyoming.

Some facts about the Black Death.

The "strangers burial ground."

Ancient humans may have used fire a lot earlier than we thought.

Instructions for medieval monks.

The "Wizard of Oz" curse.

A "most hateful decision" during WWII.

The many alter egos of Benjamin Franklin.

A "coal cracker" makes good.

A Galileo forgery.

A betting tip from the past.

A terrifying UFO in Costa Rica.

Some medieval warrior women.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a dead wife stirring up trouble.  In the meantime, here's Merle.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This tale of strange goings-on in a seemingly unremarkable apartment was told in the “Western Mail,” March 10, 1927:

An extraordinary story of queer happenings in an unoccupied Fulham (England) flat was told recently by a foreman and two workmen who have been decorating it (declares the "London Daily News").

One of the men mentioned to the foreman some days ago that when working in the flat he received a severe blow on the head, seemingly from nowhere. On the foreman's going to investigate he, too, so he says, heard mysterious thuds, saw a cup wobble along the floor, matches vanish, candles appear from nowhere, and so on.

The climax came when one of the workmen also vanished, and was found lying unconscious on the floor of another room.

The three men all tell the same story, but unfortunately no one else has been inconvenienced in the same way in the flat. Tenants in the neighbouring flats have heard nothing.

Most unfortunately, I was unable to find out any more about this intriguing bit of weirdness.

The Bizarre Murder of Pauline Amsel

"Indian Citizen," November 12. 1914, via Newspapers.com

A frightening and inexplicable tragedy hit the normally peaceful town of Durant, Oklahoma in 1914.  According to Jake and Celia Amsel, a well-to-do, respectable couple, at about one-thirty a.m. on the night of November 11, they were awakened by screams emanating from their home’s outdoor sleeping porch.  They were horrified to recognize the voice as that of their only child, fourteen year old Pauline.  Jake Amsel leaped out of bed, only to be confronted with an intruder.  The man took out a pistol and fired it into the floor, while pleading with Amsel to let him go.  After his gun jammed, the stranger pulled out a small knife, and began to stab at the father.  The two men struggled for several minutes before the stranger broke away and escaped.

While this fight was going on, Pauline walked into the bedroom and announced that she was sick.  While the mother called for help, the girl walked into her own room, and fell onto the floor.

As it happened, Pauline had good reason to be ill.  The entire right side of her throat had been deeply slashed.  She died half an hour later.

What followed was the usual depressing pattern seen in all hopelessly perplexing murders:  Searches were made for the killer, rewards were offered, private detectives hired, the usual suspects hauled in for questioning and quickly released, with no one left any closer to obtaining justice for the victim.  It probably did not help the inquiry that Pauline was buried before an autopsy could be performed.  (Her family was Jewish, compelling them to bury her before sundown.)

Pauline was buried in Corsicana, Texas, where her mother had family ties, and soon afterwards, her parents left Durant for good.

It is rare that such a violent murder provides so little information, or even speculation, to work with.  No valuables in the house appeared touched, so robbery was ruled out as a motive.  It was as if a phantom had picked a house at random, attacked the first person he saw, and disappeared into a permanent fog.  No one could guess who would have wished to harm the girl.

Well, no one guessed in public, at least.  In private, it was evidently a very different matter.  As is always the case with mysterious crimes, the local rumor mill went into overdrive.  Residents of Durant had little difficulty solving Pauline’s murder.  Chillingly, the top suspects were the only witnesses to the crime, the dead girl’s parents.  Melody Amsel-Arieli, an indirect descendant of Pauline's, began to research the case during the 1980s.  She contacted many locals who still had memories of the shocking crime.  According to some, Pauline had fallen in love with a certain boy, and this youthful romance horrified her parents.  The suggestion is that this family conflict somehow inspired her murder.

One hesitates to take such a theory seriously—if it is false, such claims are a cruel disservice to a couple who had surely suffered enough.  However, there is no getting away from it that the story they gave is decidedly odd.  First of all, why would Pauline be outdoors, in the middle of a frigid Oklahoma winter night?  If her throat was slashed so deeply that—according to some accounts—she was nearly decapitated, how could she walk upstairs, announce that she was “sick,” and then go off to her own room to die?  Didn’t the parents notice she was covered in blood?  And if this intruder had a gun, as well as a knife, why didn’t he use the more efficient weapon on the girl?  And why did it take thirty minutes for help to be summoned?  And would a man who had just fatally wounded a girl and was waving around a gun, ask her father to just let him go?  Why, after attacking Pauline, did the intruder go upstairs and do this pointless and ineffectual wrestling with her father, rather than immediately flee?

According to a doctor who examined Pauline’s corpse, her injuries were made with a razor.  So, this intruder came equipped with a gun, a knife, and a razor?  How could it be that blood was found on the sleeping porch and Pauline’s bedroom, but nowhere in between, assuming that she had actually summoned the superhuman strength to walk upstairs with a fatally slashed throat?

I give the Ansels the benefit of the doubt and assume they were incapable of murdering their own daughter.  But there is no question that what we are told about Pauline’s death is disturbingly illogical…which is undoubtedly why it haunts the town of Durant to this day.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

I'm sure our host this week needs no further introduction.  The caption says it all.

A medieval anti-war satire.

Mysterious meat shower?  Or vulture vomit?

The paranormal side of the Cold War.

Ernest Hemingway, boxing, and, uh, salad dressing.

The man who blew up a nuclear power station.

Mystery in a medieval tomb.

More proof that scientists have way too much spare time on their hands.  (Note to self:  When any scientist offers me bread, check the recipe very very carefully.)

An "impossible" sword from the Bronze Age.

A bizarre medical scandal.

The first viral crop circle.

A disappearance in Pennsylvania.

A brief history of Wonder Bread.

A brief history of "hand mnemonics."

George Washington's beer recipe.

A disgrace at sea.

The women of the American Revolution.

WWII's Operation Sea Lion.

Was there a Jack the Strangler?

The 19th century Grand Prix de Paris.

The ship that conquered the Northwest Passage.

Some fatal weddings.

A 12th century liturgical comb.

Mysterious airborne saboteurs in WWI.

One heck of a medieval barn.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the bizarre murder of a teenage girl.  In the meantime, let's dance!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

Proof of reincarnation--sort of--appeared in the “Ottawa Citizen," December 16, 1933:

LONDON (by mail).-Here is the man who has "died" three times in three years. He is Mr. Tim Sandell, of Templar street, Camberwell.

On the first occasion the report spread among his friends that he had met with a sudden and mysterious death, and that a post-mortem was to be made. His wife's friends called to console her.

A few months ago he was in hospital. Again the report went round that he had died.  Again the friends called to sympathize.

At five o'clock on a recent Monday morning a policeman knocked at the door to tell Mrs. Sandell that her husband had been knocked down by a motor car at Wandsworth and was dead.

Mr. Sandell answered the knock, and protested that he hadn't and wasn't.  The cause of the mistake was that the dead man had with him a pair of boxing gloves bearing Mr. Sandell's name and one-time address.

Mr. Sandell told the story of his latest "death" to a press representative.

"The police, in their efforts to trace me," he said, "first went to the address in Brixton marked on the gloves, and subsequently to every address at which we have lived since.

"All along the trail the news spread like wildfire that I had been killed.  A friend at Smithfield disgustedly informed me last night that they had whipped round for a wreath for me!

"A man I met that night turned deathly pale when he saw me. He took some time to recover.

"Then I attended the inquest on the still unidentified body.  I shall always think of it as my own inquest."

When Mr. Sandell finally did shuffle off this mortal coil for good and earnest, I assume everyone--including Mr. Sandell--was a bit surprised.

“Deserved A Better Fate”: The Misadventures of the “Great Eastern"

Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, by Robert Howlett

It would not be overly hyperbolic to describe Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the man who built the Victorian Era.  Brunel was not merely a brilliant engineer, he was a visionary.  His building projects such as massive dockyards, steamships, bridges, tunnels, and the Great Western Railway, were all tangible symbols of his age's optimism, drive, and fervent belief of humanity's limitless potential.

His magnum opus was the “Great Eastern,” one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the 19th century.  Sadly, his greatest achievement proved to be his biggest disaster.  "Great Eastern" is now often alluded to as a “cursed” ship.  While her history was certainly one of the most ill-starred in maritime history, this can largely be attributed to a combination of simple mismanagement, not the occult.  Brunel's creation was (if you will pardon the cliche) ahead of its time.

"Great Eastern" was designed to be not just a ship, but a thing of wonder, a floating palace that would travel the world in grand style.  It could hold up to 4,000 passengers.  The hull was 692 feet long.  Brunel designed a remarkable series of bulkheads that formed 16 watertight compartments, which he believed would make the ship virtually unsinkable.  The monster ship was held together by over three million inch-thick rivets--all of which were driven in by hand.  The ship weighed 22,500 tons, and looked it.  Brunel's "great babe," as he affectionately dubbed it, was six times bigger than any ship that had ever been seen before.  Its vast storage capability meant it was capable of sailing around the world without ever needing to stop to refuel.  (The vessel was originally christened "Leviathan," which would have been almost too appropriate.)

When the "Great Eastern" was finally completed, just launching it into the Thames was itself a herculean effort.  Ordinary chains and barges snapped and sank under the effort.  It took days just to move the ship a few inches.  Finally, on January 31, 1858, "Great Eastern" was afloat.  The effort of moving it the 330 feet down to the water had taken three months and cost an estimated £1,000 a foot.  

The total expenses that went into building the "Great Eastern" were over a million pounds.  The cost sent the company behind the ship into bankruptcy.  Undaunted, Brunel managed to raise more money under a new board of directors.

It was this new ownership that helped doom "Great Eastern."  Brunel had designed the ship for long ocean journeys to India and Australia.  Unfortunately, the new management decided they wanted a quicker return on their investment.  They abandoned these plans in favor of making shorter runs across the North Atlantic.  The day before the ship first set sail, Brunel himself came to give his masterpiece one last inspection.  It proved to be the last act of his illustrious career.  Just after posing for photographs in front of the ship, the 53-year-old engineer suddenly collapsed.  He had suffered a massive stroke which led to his death one week later.

Brunel breathed his last just as word came of the first great disaster to hit the "Great Eastern."  As the ship was making a trial run, through some unaccountable negligence, a steam valve had been left shut, causing an explosion.  Six men died in the accident, and the ship's luxurious grand salon was destroyed.  The planned maiden voyage to America had to be canceled.

While they waited for the ship to be repaired, its owners brought the "Great Eastern" to Holyhead, Wales, where they opened it to paying sightseers.  When the repairs were nearly finished, a massive gale wrenched the ship from its moorings and flung it out to sea.  Although Brunel's bulkheads kept the "Great Eastern" from sinking, by the time it was recovered, the newly-finished salon had been re-demolished.  Weeks later, the ship's captain, the coxswain, and the young son of the chief purser were drowned in a storm.

When news of this latest calamity reached London, the directors of the ship's managing company threw up their hands and resigned.  Word was spreading that Brunel's magnificent vessel was a massive iron-hulled hoodoo.

"Great Eastern's" maiden voyage had been scheduled for June 9, 1860, but various difficulties forced a week's delay.  Three hundred people had bought tickets for the 12-day journey, but most got tired of waiting and booked passage on a Cunard liner instead.  By the time "Great Eastern" finally set sail for New York on June 16, there were only 35 passengers.  They must have felt very small and lonely in the enormous surroundings.  Adding to the increasing aura of failure and unease was the fact that this would be the very first time the ship's new captain had ever crossed the Atlantic.

As a money-saving measure, the cheapest coal had been used to power the ship.  This proved to be yet another mistake.  It damaged the funnel casings, which made the dining room so hot as to be unusable.  Aside from that, the voyage was uneventful (a word one seldom gets to use when discussing the "Great Eastern,") and the ship arrived in New York to something of a hero's welcome.  So great was the interest in the amazing vessel that the owners charged the curious $1 a head to tour the ship.  (This high price so offended Gothamites that they chose to increase the return on their money by vandalizing the ship for souvenirs.)

While awaiting the return to England, a short two-day pleasure trip was planned.  The excursion attracted two thousand passengers, all of whom would very soon regret their decision.  It was only after they set sail that the paying guests learned there were only 300 beds available.  A burst pipe flooded the food supply, leaving nothing to eat but dried chicken, salt beef and biscuits that could have passed for the iron rivets holding the ship together.  And soon, even that wretched fare was gone.  When the passengers went on deck, the five funnels rained soot on them.  And there was no water available for them to clean up.  The first night out, a navigation error left the ship 100 miles off-course.  By the time the nightmare cruise finally ended, there were two thousand more people firmly convinced that the "Great Eastern" was a floating curse.  

New York had had enough of the ship.  When the "Great Eastern" left for Milford Haven with 90 passengers, it virtually slunk out in disgrace.  During the voyage, a screw shaft broke.  As the "Great Eastern" approached the harbor, it fouled the hawser of a small nearby boat, drowning two of its passengers.  As a sort of encore, it then rammed into a frigate.

After all this, the captain, not surprisingly, never wished to set eyes on the "Great Eastern" again.  The third captain had what were probably prudent second thoughts and quit before he had even set foot on the ship.  

The next voyage of the "Great Eastern" carried only 100 passengers.  Hundreds of would-be emigrants were willing to travel on it in steerage, but the board of directors, with remarkable short-sightedness, refused to invest the money to add third-class accommodation to the ship.  They wanted the "Great Eastern" to be solely a luxury cruise ship for rich passengers, ignoring the fact that the enormous vessel would have been uniquely well-suited for transporting large amounts of emigrants.  Instead, they dismissed what would surely have been an immensely lucrative enterprise in favor of trying to lure in the wealthy--most of whom had more alluring travel options than the slow, notoriously unlucky "Great Eastern."  The ship was too cold to cross the ocean during the winter, which only decreased its profitability.  Adding to the its problems was that there were no docks or harbors anywhere in the world fully capable of handling such an overwhelming vessel.

In September 1861 the "Great Eastern" was hit by a hurricane which caused £60,000 worth of damages.  The next year, it hit an uncharted rock that ripped its outer hull.  This latest escapade cost £70,000 to repair.

By 1864, the owners gave up on ever turning the "Great Eastern" into a luxury liner and sold it for £25,000.  It was to be used to lay cable across the ocean floors.  Typically, its first effort in this new role ended in disaster, when an accident caused the cable to slip and sink to the ocean floor.  The cable was never recovered.  However, the "Great Eastern" went on to have a successful run as a cable layer until 1874, when the debut of ships specially designed for cable made the "Great Eastern" obsolete.

The owners just did not know what to do with the ship after that.  They simply dumped it in the harbor at Milford Haven and left it to the rust and the barnacles.  By this point, the ghost of Isambard Brunel was undoubtedly weeping.

In 1886, the "Great Eastern" was sold for £20,000.  The new management towed it to Liverpool (it crashed into a tug along the way.)  It was used as a giant advertising banner.  The ship was plastered with slogans touting local stores and brands of tea. It was as if an aging, once-magnificent movie icon had been reduced to doing late-night infomercials.

The "Great Eastern" was finally sold to metal dealers in 1889.  The ship was so well-built it took 200 men two years to tear it apart.  Brunel's ambitious dream ended her days as a great heap of anonymous scrap parts. 

The final victim of the legendary "Curse of the Great Eastern" turned out to be the ship itself.  Sir Daniel Gooch, one of the engineers who sailed with the ship during its cable-laying days, wrote sadly, "Poor old ship; you deserved a better fate."

Let that be the "Great Eastern's" epitaph.

[Note:  Five people were killed while the "Great Eastern" was being built--not an overly high death rate for such a project--but the real source of the alleged "jinx" on the ship is believed to stem from another tragedy.  During the "Great Eastern's" construction, it is said that a riveter and his apprentice disappeared.  According to this legend, their fate remained a mystery until the ship was dismantled.  Inside the double hull, two skeletons were discovered.  They had accidentally been riveted inside the ship, with the noise of construction drowning out their desperate cries for help.  Popular belief has it that this dreadful incident, which in effect turned the "Great Eastern" into a floating graveyard, was responsible for the long run of bad luck that plagued the ship.

Accounts differ on whether or not this macabre tale is fact or imaginative fiction.  In either case, as I said at the beginning of this post, the true curse of the "Great Eastern" was human stupidity rather than spectral revenge.]

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

It's a family affair!

How Napoleon took Malta.

Is consciousness everything?

Tesla's key to the universe.

The mystery of the Great Sheep Panic.

A whole lot of info about the Bayeux Tapestry.

Some popular medieval swear words.

A 108 year old female soldier.

If your laboratory is haunted, consider bringing a sword to work.

An ancient cosmic massacre.

A shipwreck that was turned into dresses.

The role of a Jewish Caribbean community in the American Revolution.

A very rare King Arthur manuscript is going up for auction.  Don't assume you'll be able to buy it with the spare change in your pocket, though.

The origins of the phrase "cutting corners."

The Great Airship Semi-Hoax.

The unsolved murder of Kate Scharn.

Two dueling steam warships.

The "psychic sensitive" and the apports.

The weather forecast that changed the course of WWII.

A freaking big fence that is one of those "It could only happen in the 1970s" stories.

The link between mushrooms and fairies.

Following the trail of Johnny Appleseed.

Ancient Roman backpacks for the win!

The "repulsive graft" of undertakers.

The strange patterns of Venus.

A serial rapist is killed by his victims.  Right in the courtroom.

The shipwreck at the top of the world.

3I/Atlas might have seeded some of its weirdness into our solar system.

The Year Without a Summer.

A little blue octopus is making scientists very happy.

How water affects our minds.

That's a wrap for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll sail on an ill-fated ship.  In the meantime, here's some '70s country rock.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

So, who’s ready for some walking extraterrestrial stumps?  The “Spokesman Review,” October 18, 1966:

NEWPORT, Ore. (AP)-People in this coastal logging area didn't believe 16-year-old Kathy Reeves when she told them about "the three little stumps that walked across the pasture."

Not only did they move, said Kathy, but they also were of different colors--orange, light blue, white, yellow and "watermelon-colored."

That was six months ago. 

Since then, 25 persons have seen the unidentified flying objects and 15 statements were taped by newsmen. They are from two deputy sheriffs and a chemist for Georgia-Pacific.  There are about 10,000 persons in the communities of Newport, Siletz, Toledo and Camp 12.

The latest reports were Friday.

Kathy's mother didn't believe her at first, either.

"One morning about 2," said Mrs. Reeves, "I woke up and my whole bedroom was a rosy glow so bright you could read a newspaper by it."

The Reeves family then moved out of its home on Pioneer Mountain. The new owner, Delbert Mapes, said he saw the lights before the Reeves moved out, but hasn't seen any since.

The chemist, Max W. Taylor. camped on the Reeves front lawn and saw two bluish lights on the Reeves' house, but he couldn't find the source of the light.

Taylor called Thomas Wayne Price, a deputy sheriff.

"I saw a flying object myself," said Price. "I don't know what it was, but it was orange and it was bigger than any star. I know it wasn't a meteor or a satellite because it was maneuvering. There was a noise like a giant spinning top.  It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

Kathy said her house was not surrounded by UFOs until one incident that happened while she and another girl were walking at night. They said they saw what appeared to be a flashlight with a cover over the end.

"I thought it was somebody playing a trick, so I threw a rock at the light," said Kathy. "A lot of big ones went on all around it and we ran home."

As far as I know, it’s still anyone’s guess what the heck was going on.

The Cursed Chest of Cornwall

"Western Morning News," January 8, 1949, via Newspapers.com

In late 1948, Trevor Ley of Stanbury Manor, Morwenstow, bought an old hand-carved, cedarwood chest from a Cornwall antique shop.  The woman who owned the shop let him have the chest for a low price, explaining that since she had acquired it, anything placed on the walls kept falling to the ground.  She thought that “some sort of ghost seemed to be attached to it.”

This purchase soon led Trevor to question his life choices.  As the shop owner had warned, wherever the chest was placed, the most damnable--literally--things began happening.  Six antique shotguns that were securely fastened to the wall suddenly smashed to the floor, even though the nails and wires that had held them were still intact.  A heavy painting leaped two feet from the wall, hitting Trevor on the head.  Two other large pictures which had been “hanging safely for generations” also propelled themselves into the center of the room.  In another bedroom, a painting did something even weirder--it somehow was pushed backwards through the paneling.  An electric light bulb which had been placed on a window sill hurled against the wall on the opposite side of the room.  

And so on.  The Leys were naturally curious why their ghost--which they had nicknamed “Old George”--had attached itself to the chest, but Trevor had a healthy distrust for self-proclaimed “mediums” and declined most of their offers to contact their “spirit.”

In January 1949, Trevor brought in the local vicar, the Rev. K. Rees, to try to exorcise “George.”  When Rees examined the chest, the men were bemused to find what appeared to be bloodstains on the object.  The red stains  were on carved figures on the outside of the chest.  One was on the arm of a woman holding a corpse. The other, three feet away, was on the body of a headless man.  Rees made the cheery remark that "The chest would make an ideal hiding-place for a body.”  When asked about conducting an exorcism, Rees demurred.  "I'm not well versed in exorcising,” he explained.  “I must look it up."

Finally, the Leys brought in a spiritualist from London to rid them of their poltergeist.  These efforts were apparently successful, as “George” subsequently ceased to bother them.  However, just to be on the safe side, the Leys put the now-famous chest up for auction.  This failed to find a buyer, and the chest was withdrawn from sale.  I have been unable to learn of its subsequent history.

Despite his efforts to trace the chest’s history, Trevor never learned for sure why the chest came to be haunted, but he did uncover one wonderfully M.R. James-ish clue.  He wrote to a psychic researcher named William H, Gilroy that he had received a letter from a Cornish curate who had recognized the chest from its photos in the newspapers.  

This curate told Trevor that “many years ago there were two sisters living in the Manor House, Newlyn, (he gave their names but I cannot find his letter at the moment, but will look it up if it is of interest to you). They had in their house quite a collection of antiques and among them was this chest which they kept in their bedroom. One time, after having been away for a few days, they returned late one night and being rather tired, placed their heavy baggage on the chest rather than unpack at such a late hour. Early the next morning their attention was drawn to the chest and as they went over to it the lid, although weighted down by the heavy baggage, slowly opened and they looked inside. What they saw they would never reveal, but it was so horrible that they were both struck stone deaf; and although they lived to an old age they never got their hearing back.

“When they died the house and furniture were sold at auction and all trace of the chest was lost until it turned up in the antique shop where I purchased it.”

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to the Link Dump!

And we tip our hats to our hosts for this week!

Who the hell was Christopher Columbus?

Henry I's most "notorious" daughter.

The world's second-tallest man.

The loneliness of being a French POW in Britain.

Heads up, Egypt's prehistory is getting rewritten again.

Aboriginals and a dingo's well-tended grave.

A man's rant against floral funerals.

The woman who saved 13th century England.

A newly-discovered document dealing with victims of the Black Death.

Przybylski’s Star, weird stellar object and epic tongue-twister.

Science may be able to "erase" bad memories, but you might not want to.

Since the world has been longing for a scientific analysis of how geologists are portrayed by the film industry, here ya go.

The puzzle of Turkey's ancient underground city.

A very mysterious and very creepy disease.

Bermuda turns out to be a very strange island.

The man who was on the Royal Navy list for nearly 100 years.

A talented counterfeiter.

A canine hero of WWI.

A mysterious murder in Mutton Town.

British volunteers in WWI Italy.

Some 13th century plates and bowls.

A popular Georgian-era medicine.

Beluga whales are smarter than we thought.  I suspect that holds true for all animals.

People in the Andes are aces when it comes to digesting potatoes.

An unsolved murder in the Tenderloin.

A "solution" to the "Mary Celeste" mystery.  (Not that it's a new idea; I remember reading about this theory years ago.)

The mummified cat of Chetham's Library.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the dangers of buying an antique chest.  In the meantime, here's a remarkable video which explains why I will never never never never never ever even think about going anywhere near Mount Everest.