Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Treasure hunting and ghosts seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly.  As an example, peruse this story from the “Bartlesville Examiner,” February 13, 1927:

OKMULGEE, Okla. - (AP) -Snake Creek, in Okmulgee county, still believes in her six lively ghosts and sets back to laugh at outsiders when they invade the playground of the spirits.  Investigation has failed to disprove fantastic stories of phantom hailstones, eerie lights and wailing cries about a wooded section where gold is supposed to be buried and guarded by the shades of five Indians and a white man.

No explanation was offered for the tales told by a number of reputable men of the community, in the northeast part of the county.  They, and a number of others, declare they have been terrified a number of times by the ghostly manifestations, while digging for the hidden treasure, located two and a quarter miles south of the county line and a mile and a half south of Snake Creek school on the farm of Arthur Straughan.  Parties from nearby cities have been organized to probe the mystery, but they too have been frightened away, Snake Creek residents say. Now that the story has leaked out, Snake Creek expects to have a lot of fun. Ghost hunters are planning to find out just what is going on.

The six spirits have been at work for several weeks chasing away invaders of their home.  There are six, a spiritualist declares, and they are sad, sad boys, wishing to be let alone and asking mortals to stay away. In defense of their home the Indian ghosts have offered their best in screaming war whoops, while their white comrade flits about the tree tops lighting dim ghost lights. When that fails to dislodge the visitors, the sextet resorts to a thundering storm of invisible hail, which can be felt but cannot be seen, according to the Snake Creek residents.  Several residents of the community, in the northeast corner of Okmulgee county, will testify to the existence of unseen things that utter blood-curdling howls, flash lights and throw hailstones.

One of the men is suffering from nervous prostration. His companions swear they never again will approach the haunted place where the spirits hold forth and defy men to molest them.  Four of the farmers of the Snake Creek district, who have made several trips to the place and claim to have heard and seen the weird signs, are Hayworth Baker, who located the place, James Lee, Bob Benson and Earl Douglas.

The haunted treasure is located two and a quarter miles south of the county line, and a mile and a half south of the Snake Creek school. It is on the farm of Arthur Straughan.  Some of Snake Creek is skeptical, but the majority is not. Those men are well known and the stories they tell hang together well.  The ghostly manifestations are supposed to have begun several weeks ago when the men decided to dig for buried treasure they had heard could be found in a wooded section north of Snake Creek school.

The party had dug a few feet when a frightful Indian war whoop brought them to attention.  It was not repeated, and they began again to dig. The screaming challenge was heard again, this time from several different directions. The men dropped their tools and fled in horror.

A few nights later, the same men regained courage and again started to hunt for the treasure. They just had touched their tools to the earth when the Indian yell was uttered in their very ears, from the tree-tops, from all sides, and some said from the hole where they were digging. They fled.

The original party decided to get in more direct communication with the spirits. They consulted a spiritualist. He told them that the bodies of five Indians and one white man had been buried near the place many years before, The ghosts rather liked the place and were hanging around. They did not wish to be disturbed and were using the only defense a poor ghost has to keep marauders away.

The treasure story was too much of a lure, however, and the men did not stay away long. This time the band of dead men went deeper into their bag of tricks and decided to show the boys just what a ghost really can do. The voices started the show, coming from every direction, above and below. Lights were seen hanging all about. The tree tops were alive with them. The woods looked like phosphorus in the moonlight. The weird lights shone on the ground, in the treasure hole and under the men's feet.

A strange noise began overhead, gathering force until it resembled a heavy thunderstorm.  Something rained down upon the men. The objects fell like hailstones, but when they were caught, the men opened their hands to find they held nothing. The invisible hail fell with more intensity. It was too much for the treasure hunters. They thought they heard ghostly laughter as they sped homeward. Ghost hunters are going to investigate again.

The stories told by the men are terrifying, but Snake Creek has her skeptical ones. They must be satisfied.

The treasure seekers, hunting for the gold that legend has placed there and which spiritual messages are said to have confirmed, have hunted only at night because they wished to hide any possible discoveries from other residents of the Snake Creek district. The search now is expected to be continued by daylight, due to the publicity given the treasure ghosts.

Unsurprisingly, there is no record of anyone finding the reputed gold.  The ghosts obviously did their work well.

The Undeciphered Death of Paul Rubin

The Rubin ciphertext

Eighteen-year-old Paul Emanuel Rubin was a sophomore at New York University, where he studied chemistry.  We have contradictory reports about his scholastic success:  His father Samuel said that Paul was an excellent student, while a police detective later told reporters that the teenager was doing so poorly at the University that he was in danger of flunking out.  (This is one of those cases that is full of contradictory details.)  

On the morning of Monday, January 19, 1953, Paul left his home in Brooklyn.  His mother Bessie assumed he was going off to his classes.  She claimed that he seemed in good spirits, showing absolutely no sign that things were about to become very, very weird.

Just before 10 am on the following morning, one Reverend Robert Anderson was walking through Philadelphia International Airport when his attention was arrested by a “wild-eyed” “stocky man” walking on the ramp between the terminal building and the air express office.  Anderson wished the stranger a “good morning.”  The man did not reply, but simply paced up and down.  He stared straight ahead, and appeared very nervous.

About twenty minutes later, U.S. Army Private Madrid King was walking to the airport, when he saw a man’s body at the bottom of a steep ditch.  (Note:  Some newspaper reports stated that the body was found by a taxi driver.)  This was the same man Rev. Anderson had seen pacing in the airport, but as the corpse had no identification on him, immediate identification was impossible.  However, the body was wearing a sports jacket with a label reading “Witte Brothers, 5th Avenue,” which made police suspect he was a New Yorker.

Police had more immediate success finding out how the man died.  According to the coroner, his body contained enough cyanide “to kill ten men.”  The coroner hesitated in calling the death a suicide.  To his mind, the body was so “immaculately arranged”--the dead man’s thick-lensed glasses had not even been dislodged--that it seemed possible that the corpse had been placed where it was found.

It was never determined how the cyanide had been administered.  It was not believed that the poison was taken in capsule form.  An empty test tube was found a few feet from the body, but no traces of cyanide were found in the tube.  

The strangest clue was a small piece of paper taped to the man’s abdomen.  It was a cipher message that, to date, has yet to be decoded, although over the years, many cryptologists have tried.  The man’s wallet contained nothing but a photo of an airplane with a Nazi swastika on its tail and a picture of Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker.”  The other items the man had carried with him were equally bizarre: a plastic cylinder containing a signal fuse, the casing of a spent .38 caliber bullet, a “fountain pen gun,” (whatever that may have been,) forty-seven cents, four keys on a chain, and the February issue of “Galaxy Science Fiction.”

The body was finally identified when Bessie Rubin phoned the Philadelphia police.  She had read a newspaper report about the dead man found near the airport, and thought his description matched that of her son, who had not been heard from since the morning of the 19th.  Paul Rubin’s parents, as well as Bessie’s brother Max Gerstman, flew to Philadelphia, where Samuel was able to identify the mystery corpse as that of his son Paul.

Although the body now had a name, it failed to help solve how or why he had died.  Paul had the habit of sending coded messages to his friends, although no one who knew him could make any sense of the cipher found on his body.  As a chemistry student, Paul would have had access to cyanide, but he had no known reason to kill himself.  No one could explain what he was doing in Philadelphia, or how he got there.  According to Bessie Rubin, Paul had $15 on him when he last left home, but only 47 cents were left by the time of his death.  Where was the rest of the money spent?

Paul’s parents were at least able to explain some of the other unusual items found with him.  Paul was fond of doing magic tricks, and the cylinder with a fuse was probably used for one of them.  The four keys belonged to an old car the family had once owned.  The empty shell cartridge probably came from a friend who did target-shooting.  Paul may have planned to reload it with gunpowder he had created as part of his chemistry experiments.  Bessie added that her son “frequently brought home jars filled with strange liquids.”  She had no idea what they may have contained.

Detectives questioned Paul’s friends, relatives, and classmates, as well as NYU faculty members, but they were unable to find any solid leads pointing to either suicide or murder as the cause of the young man’s death.  An inquest was held on February 23, which produced the unsatisfactory verdict that Paul had died under “circumstances presently unknown.”  It remained a mystery how--or why--the dead youth had traveled to Philadelphia, or how he came to ingest cyanide.  And that, as far as law enforcement was concerned, seemed to be that.

There is one footnote to this extremely odd story:  While researching the Rubin case for his book, “Unsolved!: The History and Mystery of the World's Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies,” Craig P. Bauer obtained a copy of the FBI file on Paul’s death.  The file held no “smoking guns,” (other than the curious information that Paul had used the alias of “Galen Templar,”) but Bauer found it notable that the FBI had quietly devoted three months to investigating the teen’s death, suggesting that the Bureau felt this was more than a simple suicide.  Even more tantalizingly, the FBI had classified the Rubin case under “Espionage.”

Assuming the cipher found on Paul’s body is ever decoded, will it finally explain what led to his utterly inexplicable death?  Or will it be just another brick wall?

[Note: For what very little it’s worth, here is my take on this case:  The little we know about Paul gives the impression of a bright, eccentric youth who may well have been going through typical teenage angst--a sort of Brooklyn Holden Caulfield.  Paul was interested in spycraft, politics, and ciphers. My personal hunch--and that’s all it is, a hunch--is that he decided to commit suicide, but in a way that he could playact the role of an espionage agent, leaving a trail of baffling clues behind him.  I suspect that the reason no one has yet been able to decode the message found on his body is that it was no real cipher at all--just a stream of gibberish to add to his self-created mystery.

If I am right about this, Paul Rubin deserves a lot of credit.  If he wanted to leave this world confusing people, he did an excellent job of it.]

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And you're just in time for afternoon tea!

A flying horse in Staffordshire.

A mysterious murder-suicide.

New York's war against banana peels.

The houseplant that can count.

Fun and games in medieval London.

Hitler's dress rehearsal for war.

A coded letter from Napoleon has finally been deciphered.

A woman is cleared of being a witch.  Three hundred years after she died.  All together now: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.

So maybe we've been reading the Voynich Manuscript incorrectly.

Moths and butterflies as souls of the dead.

How to mail yourself a ghost.

An ancient mystery hidden in spear points.

Ghost stories from the mortuary.

Edward Despard:  Hero or traitor?

A very weird "cone hill" in the Amazon.

The mystery of the "Phoenix Lights."

Pancho Villa's well-traveled skull.

More rewriting of human history, fresh off the grill!

George III visits Oxford.

A brief history of spittoons.

The difference between ghosts and ghouls.

The cat who has taken over a train station.

If you want to drink a mix of battery acid and orange syrup, do I have the recipe site for you.

A cursed murderer.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a teenager's baffling death.  In the meantime, here's some Handel.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Bring on the Mystery Fires!  The (Napoleon, Ohio) “Democratic Northwest,” January 6, 1890:

In regard to the mysterious fires that have visited the home of W. F. Miller, and which have been noted in the Advertiser, a Bairdstown friend sends us the following, which we are sure our readers will peruse with interest:

The first of the series of unaccountable fires that have gradually destroyed the household effects of W. F. Miller and family occurred in August last, one and one-half miles south of McComb, in a large frame house on the Morgan Shaffer farm. In the morning before breakfast Mr. and Mrs. Miller were engaged in driving some stock into the barn-yard and when they entered the house they heard something fall up stairs and noticed a smoky odor in the air. Hastening up stairs Mr. Miller discovered a sack containing rags in flames on the floor, it having burned so as to fall from the hook on which it had been hanging against the wall. He succeeded in carrying it out of the house, wondering how it could become ignited when there had been no one near the spot. In the course of a couple of hours another fire broke out in the adjoining room up stairs, this time burning the paper covers from some stone jars containing lard, apple butter, etc. The heat was so intense that one or two of the jars cracked open and the lard ran over the floor but did not ignite. This fire was easily extinguished with water.

The family was more than ever puzzled to know how the fire originated.  The fact that the second fire started by burning the paper covers from the jars destroyed the theory that the first had originated from spontaneous combustion, and yet it was spontaneous, the flame following a puff of smoke as subsequent developments demonstrated.  In the afternoon the family were speculating as to the almost supernatural character of the fires when one member remarked, "I wonder what will be the next thing to burn." The words had scarcely been uttered when a puff of smoke and flame shot out from beneath the lid of a chest which was used to store clothing, etc. Water was quickly thrown upon the fire but it was not extinguished before the contents were materially damaged. The next day the clothing of a bed caught fire and was thrown out of the house and consumed. Within three days after the first fire, seven fires in all destroyed clothing, bedding, carpet, etc., but did not in the least damage the furniture or the building, except to smoke the walls and ceilings, besides the glass in the windows being mostly broken by the excessive heat. At the end of several days Mr. Miller concluded that he was fighting an unequal battle with the mysterious element, and after his insurance had been adjusted he vacated the premises, but not before thousands of curious visitors had thronged to the scene, attracted by the mystery with which the occurrence was surrounded.

Mr. Miller removed his remaining effects to the home of his father, Daniel Miller, who resides one mile southeast of Bairdstown, occupying a part of the paternal abode. In the meantime Mrs. Miller had washed and cleansed everything possible, and for several months everything passed off quietly, and in the ordinary routine of country life the matter of the fires was almost forgotten.

About five weeks ago, however, another fire originated in the same manner and in the same chest as at МсComb, in August. As before the fire was quickly quenched by the aid of water, but the clothing was considerably burned before it could be removed.  This ended the fires for the time being and in a week or two afterward the family removed again, this time into the Lenhart farm tenant house, two miles southeast of town, where about the first of December another fire started in the morning about 8 o'clock, in the clothing on a bed in which a little six year old son had been sleeping.  The bedding was carried out and allowed to burn. The carpet in the room was ripped loose, dragged out and the torch applied. By this time none of their old clothing remained except one suit for each member of the family and one extra dress belonging to Mrs. Miller and an overcoat to Mr. Miller.

On Friday, the dress and clothing of Mrs. Miller caught fire and was considerably burned before her husband, who was working near the house, could reach her. Her body and limbs were severely but not seriously burned. This was the first fire to occur in which any member of the family was injured. In the afternoon of the same day an overcoat hanging against the wall caught fire and was partially burned before it was discovered and the fire put out.

The family consists of Mr. and Mrs. Miller and two children, a boy, six years old and a babe, eight months old. By many who are unacquainted with the facts, the source of the fires is attributed to carelessness, but incorrectly, as the family use every precaution to prevent the loss of their property by the destructive element.

As yet no scientific investigation as to the cause of the fires has been made and from the simple and direct statements made by both Mr. and Mrs. Miller, it is impossible to state whether they are the result of the clothing being saturated with some chemical substance, or are occasioned by the antipathy of some restless hoodoo spirit.

Another incipient Miller family "hoodoo" fire was discovered early this morning, in time to prevent any damage. This time it occurred in a barrel of refuse in an out house into which Mrs. Miller had thrown a discarded apron. The calico or print cloth was completely saturated with moisture from the recent rains, as the barrel happened to be placed directly beneath a leak in the roof of the building.  Mr. Miller entered the building on an errand when he noticed smoke issuing from the barrel. An investigation disclosed the apron slowly burning, but not in a flame. This is the fourth visitation of the fire since the family returned to this section from the vicinity of MeComb. So far all the fires but one have consumed cloth or carpets. The one exception was some paper covers on some jars containing. provisions. The frequent appearance of the mysterious smoke and flame has made the presence of the fire an occurrence so common that the family has come to regard them as a necessary evil, but each succeeding report of a visit from the fire-fiend only intensifies the interest exhibited by a more than usual curious public. How much longer the family is to suffer from fire, time alone can tell.

I was unable to learn when the unusually persistent “visits from the fire-fiend” finally ended.

The Ceremony on Clonmillan Hill

Maximilian Pirner, "Funeral of a Fairy"

The following tale comes from Dermot MacManus’ 1973 book, “The Middle Kingdom: The Faerie World of Ireland.”  Whether the narrator encountered ghosts, fairies, or, well, something else, it is certainly one of the more unusual alleged encounters with supernatural beings.

The next account I have is of a very different kind of being. One might be tempted to classify it as a ghost rather than an elemental, but taking everything into consideration I feel that it never was a human being but is truly of the fairy world. My informant is Mr Gowran, who is today a prosperous owner of shops in Dublin, but who hails from Offaly. The incident happened in 1901 when he was a boy of ten.

Mr Gowran's family lived at that time in the small county town of Edenderry. One day in May, when the cowslips were out and everything was bright and cheerful with the promise of coming summer, he and a school friend, eight-year-old Jack Gooley, set off for a stroll about four in the afternoon. With two nine-year-old girls, Mary Gooley, Jack's elder sister, and her friend Maggie Grehan, they wandered along the road running north towards Mullingar. After going about a mile the girls, who were behind, turned to the right along a lane which led fairly steeply upwards to Clonmillan Hill. There was a farmhouse there, where they were certain of refreshment from an aunt and uncle of Mary's. They had been told to collect some buttermilk from them to take home for baking bread.

Clonmillan Hill has always had a reputation for being connected with the fairies, including the great Shee as well the lesser Shee-og. A number of years before, some man had ploughed up a small fairy ring or fort there, causing a good deal of discussion in the neighbourhood, most people deprecating the act as a trouble-making piece of vandalism. I have heard that he died unexpectedly a few years later. The farm lay halfway up the hill but to the far side of it, and the lane, after going straight for some distance, turned to the left so as to reach the house.

The two girls had not got halfway up when the boys, who had only gone on a short distance down the Mullingar road, heard them call out. When the lads looked back they saw that the girls had stopped and were looking earnestly into the field on their right. After a few moments, they saw the girls turn back and run down the lane on to the main road again. On reaching the road, the girls went over to a gate opposite the lane and stared into the field beyond it. Then they began urgently beckoning to the boys to join them there. The boys, who were thirty or forty yards away, ran up at once, little dreaming what an extraordinary thing they were about to see.

When they joined the girls at the gate and looked through it, to their utter astonishment they saw, some forty yards away, a group of dark figures of human size standing in a circle about ten yards in diameter. Black capes or shawls were draped over their heads and hung across their shoulders and from there dropped straight down to or into the ground, but with no crease or bend where they reached it. The figures stood so close together that their draperies touched from their shoulders down, making it impossible to see past them. They were quite motionless, even to the folds and pleats of their draperies, as if carved out of some black stone, and their heads were erect. Mr Gowran says emphatically that these black cloaks were not woollen but were made of some very fine cloth that was not shiny, and could not have been silken either.

Another remarkable feature was that the whole centre of the circle of figures appeared to be covered by a black cloth at the height of their shoulders. From it rose what seemed to be a chest--or, though the children did not think of it at the time, a coffin--and it, too, was covered by the same black material, which lay snugly on the chest and showed its shape clearly. The top of the chest was a foot or a little more above the heads of the surrounding figures. And on the top of this chest lay a set of old Irish bagpipes. Mr Gowran can still describe them in detail and can remember just how they lay. There were three drones, each about three feet long, one of which lay towards him and the other two away from him. The bag and the mouthpiece hung down over the side of the box. The drones were of unusual shape and were as thick as a big man's wrist.

The children had stood looking at this curious sight for a considerable time, probably two or three minutes, when they saw Dan Jackson, the owner of the field, and his eighteen-year-old son approaching from the field beyond it, which was divided from it by a small ditch. The two men took long steps across the ditch and strolled unconcernedly on. It seemed as if they were going to walk up to the figures, but it was soon clear that neither of them saw anything unusual, and after passing within six feet of the dark, silent figures, they approached the gate.

Afraid of being asked awkward questions, and being rather alarmed at what they saw, the four children ran off towards the town just before the two men reached the gate. But the two boys, being bolder than the girls, stopped after they had gone a short distance and peered through the hedge again. They were now alongside the next field and so had to look through the side hedge as well, but they found a gap and saw that the mysterious figures were still quietly standing, but the circle had moved some ten yards farther away and was now close to the ditch of the next field, covering the track along which the two men had just passed.

What were these eerie black figures that stood so still, and what was the meaning of the bagpipes lying upon the draped chest? The girls had first seen this silent group in the field halfway up the lane and had called out. They had then run back to the main road in fear, only to see exactly the same sight again, for there were apparently the same figures standing before them in this other field.

This sight has been seen by others round about, but only at rare intervals of years, and the story of it persists throughout the neighbourhood. However, it was not till a number of years later, when Mr Gowran was a young man, that his uncle told him that he also had seen the figures, a few years before the children had encountered them.

Locally, these apparitions are looked upon as fairies and not as ghosts, and rightly so, I think. It has been suggested that they were members of the fairy hosts, perhaps even the people of Bel, the great Celtic God who is honoured with fires on May Eve--Beltane, as it should be called--and that they lamented the passing of some special Celtic piper who had learned the fairy tunes to play to them. However that may be, I feel they fit in much more reasonably as fairy folk than as ghosts.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

However, I'm not sure I like what the Strange Company HQ staffers are planning for today's menu.

What the hell was the Dover Demon?

An archaeological mystery near Yellowstone.

A fatal obsession with an actress.

The "f word" goes a long way back.

In 1900, these were women's favorite weapons.

A look at the latest book about Poe.  It sounds a bit pretentious, but whatever.

How do we talk to aliens?  Assuming we want to.

Witchcraft has become a big business.

The "Black Bird" of Chernobyl.

Borley Rectory, our most controversial haunted house.

The Royal Navy versus pirates.

The man who went from reporting on Parliament to becoming an MP.

Pasteur and the "accidental vaccine."

Why some witches were hanged and some were burned.

Elephants are darn good doctors.

Octopuses are darn smart.  Probably good doctors, too, who knows?

Over 700 years ago, a man died from being hit by a car.  Well, all right, maybe it was a trebuchet.  

The end of the Bronze Age.

Plants are turning themselves into fairy circles.

An "ancient underwater city" and Noah's Ark.

The Normandy invasion and "Operation Sparrow."

The Black Death really didn't know when to leave.

Selling coffins isn't always fun and games.

Brahms and "Madame Composer."

Several young women who were abducted from their cars.

The secretaries who made Elizabeth I sound angrier.

The legends of a haunted Alaskan island.

More talking dogs than you can shake a stick at.

A brief history of London Freemasonry.

A brief history of bedpans.

The doors of Old London.

The burials at Gobekli Tepe.

An influential Admiral.

A small town with a lot of ghosts.

What disease did the Elephant Man have?  (Short scientific answer: "Dunno.")

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at an encounter with...fairies? Ghosts? God knows what?  In the meantime, here's Handel.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Sit back and enjoy what is probably the weirdest "letter to the editor" in history.  “The Guardian,” November 30, 1976:

Recent reports of peculiar events have reminded me of a mysterious experience I had in East Anglia a few years ago. I was teaching in a small village school and the caretaker's husband declared that he had seen strange orange lights in the school field as he walked the dog home at about 10.30 pm. Cynics suggested that he had seen more light ale than anything else. I thought little of it. 

The next day a little lad brought me a small plastic toy pistol which he had found near the school.  I popped it into my drawer until such time as some-one claimed it. Near the end of the afternoon of hectic activities I felt that I could not tolerate the compulsive and ceaseless chatter of one Sandra and on an impulse pointed the pistol at her saying mentally, “Gottya!” 

To my astonishment she immediately vanished. The other children, conditioned to ignore her perpetual trivialities, didn't even notice. At the end of the session I dismissed the class and sat down in the ill-lit room to ponder over the unprecedented situation. I was suddenly aware of the figure of a man standing by me dressed in some kind of boiler-suit protective clothing.  I assumed he was a parent on the way home from work. He extended his hand, lying in the palm of which was another toy pistol. Wordlessly I passed the first one over to him. He examined it briefly, clicked a small ratchet at the side, pointed it toward a corner of the room and pulled the trigger. To my utter amazement Sandra reappeared immediately in full spate, breaking off only to observe that it was time to go home.  And as I sat there, Sandra and the stranger independently disappeared into the evening gloom. 

A Wiltshire Teacher.