Weekend Link Dump

 

This week's Link Dump is hosted by the lovely (and youthful) Mac!

A very remote island community.

A multi-million dollar royal fraud.

The other Homo sapiens.

A massacre that never was.

Emus find themselves a home.

The grave of a 7th century "Ice Prince."

A case of levitation.

Warning: The very disturbing story of a girl who spent most of her short life in an attic.

The legends surrounding the murder of Rasputin.

In search of the remains of WWII airmen.

A naval odyssey under two flags.

A brief history of monkey bread.

A brief history of Art Deco.

This is not a chair for claustrophobics.

How snails and oysters became luxury foods.  (I personally see them as foods that I'd run miles in tight shoes to avoid, but whatever.)

The healing power of sunlight.

A lost naval portrait.

Rules for 19th century coal mines.

How root beer got its name.

The "Miracle of Amsterdam."

The mysterious moose of New Zealand.

An ancient fish may explain why we get toothaches.  It's a weird old world.

So a bunch of bored Capuchin monkeys have become kidnappers.  Like I said, the world is weird.

Palaeontologists start feuding over an ancient skull.  Like I said...

The last Papal warship.

A visit to Samuel Johnson's house.

Empress Eugenie and a spectral scent of violets.

An ancient mummy with unusual tattoos.

Some notable New Orleans graveyards.

A probable wrongful murder conviction.

Some cases of couples who disappeared along with their cars.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a Weird Will.  In the meantime, here's Neil Young.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Mysterious showers of stones are one of those Fortean classics which never get old.  The “Richmond Dispatch,” September 8, 1886:

Mr. Cuthbert telegraphs from Charleston (upon date of September 5th) the following about the shower of stones.

One of the sensations of Saturday in Charleston was the fall of three showers of stones in the neighborhood of the News and Courier building. The first was observed about 2:30 A.M., mainly in the vacant lot across Elliott street, directly south of the News and Courier job-office. The second, about 7:30 A.M., fell on the roof of the pressroom, the third, about 1:30 P.M., was in the alley alongside, scattered over the places mentioned, and all the space between them, including the roof of the job-office, and for the short space up and down the alley and Elliott street.

The first shower was heard in the darkness by an employee, who was in the vacant lot, but who naturally attributed it at the time to a fall of loose material from the neighboring roofs and broken walls, though there was no shock at the time. When the second shower was observed, five hours later, some of the falling pebbles bounced into the pressroom through the open windows, and it was thought by the pressman and his assistants that some mischievous boy was pelting them. On a close examination, however, no one was found in the neighborhood, and the pebbles themselves were found to be warm. The third fall was witnessed by a number of persons, who noticed it throughout and who are unable to account for it in any way. The line of descent was almost perpendicular, there being sufficient incline from south to north to cause one or more stones to strike the window-sill and rebound into the job-office, where they were picked up from the floor and again found to be warm.

A number of the pebbles were gathered up at once, some of them being taken from the top of the ruins of brick walls and houses that had fallen on Tuesday night. The stones range from the size of a grape to that of an egg. All were worn and polished by the action of nature, and some show clear fractures. The material in most of the cases is flint or of a flinty character, and an expert who examined the collection said that they looked as if they were a part of a cabinet of mineralogical specimens.

Another suggestion by the same person was that the largest stone of the lot was part of the head or neck of an Indian axe, the character of which he was familiar.

However this may be, the stones fell in the way that has been described, and there is no reasonable explanation or suggestion as to the source whence they came. The houses in the neighborhood are covered with tin or tile roofs. The showers fell, as has been stated, almost perpendicular, and the force of the fall, as shown by the breaking of several pebbles, was evidently very great. It should be added that the shower was slight.

The brief account of this which was sent on Saturday night has, it appears, been exaggerated into volcanic eruption, but the above is a correct statement of the occurrence.

The Restaurant That Never Was

In the June/July 1993 issue of “Fortean Times,” a civil engineer named Tony Clark shared a striking story which he claimed to have experienced while working in Iran in 1956.  There is evidently only Clark’s word that his bizarre tale actually happened, but as I can’t resist a good “time-slip” account, I will simply pass it on and let you make of it what you like.

According to Clark, one summer day he and an Iranian engineer traveled to Manjil, about 150 miles from Tehran, to assist with the building of a cement factory.  It was then a very remote place, where they were unable to even find much to eat, so by the time they began the trip back to Tehran, they were famished.  After traveling about 30 miles, they came to a village.  It was a simple settlement of one-story mud huts, with a distinctive-looking pile of rocks.  To their relief, the men also found there a “tchae-khana” (cafe.)  They didn’t expect to find much in the way of nourishment there, but the men were desperate enough to take whatever they could get.

There was nothing unusual about the interior of the cafe--crude chairs and wooden tables, with a few truck drivers resting on beds of rope and wood hanging from the walls.  The men were greeted by the owner of the establishment, who spoke perfect English.  He was an Armenian named Hovanessian, who was married to a White Russian.  Clark was pleasantly startled when Hovanessian and his wife soon brought out one of the best meals he ever had: cold cucumber and yogurt soup, wine, stuffed vine leaves, and kebab, followed by excellent Turkish coffee.  After such a feast--eaten in a vague air of unreality--the men got a second surprise: the price their host asked was incredibly small.  When Clark complimented Hovanessian on the “fantastic meal,” the Armenian beamed and said, “Do call again and tell your friends to look in.”

Before leaving, Clark took careful notes about his mileage, to ensure he could find the village again.  He was convinced that he had stumbled upon the world’s finest restaurant, and when he returned to Tehran, he couldn’t wait to tell people about it.  No one believed him.  Such wonderful--and cheap--fare from some hut out in the middle of nowhere?  Clark’s friends probably assumed he had been out in the desert sun for far too long.

Three months later, Clark had to make another trip to Manjil.  He brought with him an English engineer who was one of the “miracle cafe’s” biggest scoffers.  Clark was prepared to make his friend eat, not just soup and kebab, but a heaping plate of crow.  Before long, they found the little village with its unmistakable pile of rocks.  The only thing different about the place was the tchae-khana: it had vanished.  When they asked a resident about the cafe, he assured them that in the forty years he had lived in the village, no such place had ever existed.  Hovanessian?  Never heard of the fellow.

The men drove away, feeling hungry, disappointed, and just a little bit frightened.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And the Strange Company staffers are here to remind you that tomorrow is bath night!

An unsolved murder in a brothel.

Argentina's secret Nazi files.

New York's oldest continuously run hotel.

The ongoing search for the Nazi "gold train."

The mystery of Japan's "underwater pyramid."

The kind of thing that happens when you make fairies angry.

Reddit and a fake Roman financial crisis.

The Amazon has been a busy place.

An incident of Decoration Day, 1868.

Did a nuclear test take down a UFO?

The language that took over the world.

Never accept chocolates from Cordelia Botkin.

The dramatic work of a naval artist.

The man who sails like a Viking.

A failed Dickensian theme park.

When you get an Indian village in exchange for a book recital.

A classic armchair historian.

America's worst school massacre.

We now know why orange cats are orange.  In case you've spent many sleepless nights pondering that question.

A famed New Orleans graveyard.

How a Yorkist family navigated the Wars of the Roses.

A real Sweeney Todd.

The invention that bankrupted Mark Twain.

The short 15th century life of Princess Margaret of Scotland.

Kids, if you're ever out looking for a missing Arctic expedition, the first thing you do is talk to the locals.

The docks of Old London.

Isabel, Queen of Castile.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll visit a restaurant that was really out-of-this-world. In the meantime, here's a bit of Bach.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This account of weird times at a seminary school appeared in the “St. Louis Post Dispatch,” July 8, 1906:

NASHOTAH, Wis., July 7.--At commencement time at the Nashotah Theological Seminary, a stronghold of high-church Episcopalianism in the west, you heard a strange story which concerns the man who not only founded the work here, but was also the pioneer of the Episcopalian establishment at Faribault, Minn. At this point is the theological seminary and three miles away at Delafleld Is the military academy, St. John's, which constitutes the group of schools the Rev. William Lloyd Breck began in Wisconsin.

Rev. William Lloyd Breck was known as “The Pioneer of the Church,” in Episcopalian circles. After he founded the Seabury mission, he went on to California, where he established St. Augustine’s college for boys, and St. Mary’s of the Pacific for girls, at Benicia. He died and was buried there. Several years later, the Wisconsin church asked that his body be transferred to the scene of his early labors and it was exhumed and brought to Nashotah.

After his arrival the casket containing the remains lay for a time on the ground floor of one of the seminary buildings, where each night watchers sat with it until the time for the ceremonies attending the reburial should arrive. On the night before these ceremonies, the watchers were Rev. James Ashmun of Chicago, and Rev. Charles P. Dorset, at the time of his death presiding over a parish in Texas, but then and until within the last few years as a resident of La Crosse, Wis. Along in the hours toward morning, the Chicago clergymen left the building for a little turn in the fresh air, but in a moment came rushing back with the exclamation: 

“Dorset, Dorset, the woods are full of ghosts.”

Both clergymen went out. In every direction through the trees they saw figures flitting hither and thither in a wild and fitful dance. The clergymen approached them, but the figures in front drew back, moving off to the left and right of them. The clergymen asked themselves several questions. Had the farming population of the lonely neighborhood turned out to dance there in the small hours of the morning in the seminary woods? Were the staid theological students out at an unseemly hour, on a night made solemn as the eve of the reburial of the founder of the school? And even if farmers or students had been moved to do such strange things, where did they get the untiring strength that made these creatures in the woods dance so constantly and so lightly?

The clergymen did not believe the apparitions were men, nor did they afterwards learn that anybody had been abroad in the woods at that time. They were convinced that the figures were ghosts, or that some strange phantasmagoria had deceived not one mind, but two, which an illusion does not often do. But the strange experience of the watchers had not ended. In the morning when the casket was moved, there was a round hole burned through the floor on the spot where the casket stood. A heap of old papers underneath the floor also had been burned. Had fire found its way underneath the building to this spot in the mass of paper, and so up through the floor? Perhaps. The freaks of the real are often as strange as anything we attribute to the unreal.

But several things must be noted. If the fire came in under the floor from without, it escaped setting fire to other debris in its progress. Moreover, the appearance of the hole and the area of burned paper seemed to indicate that the fire had burned from above downward, like the ray of a burning glass. How did the fire come to burn the hole under the casket, which, it must be explained, rested directly upon the floor?

A few nights later, the faculty of the institution sat in the office of Dr. Gardner, the president, discussing the recent mystifying events. Suddenly their discussion was terminated by a tremendous racket just outside the door. Waiting a moment in the hope it would cease, Dr. Gardner threw open the door. The noise ceased instantly. All was silent and dark in the hall.

Whoever it was had taken himself off with a rapidity that was astounding. Three times more the noise was resumed and three times it ceased as the door was jerked open and two searchers of the building failed to discover in it a living soul except the members of the facility. When Dr. Gardner had looked out a fourth time upon an untenanted corridor, he said, “If you are gentlemen, you will cease this disturbance.” It did not begin again.

In any other than a theological school, such a manifestation would be assigned to a very natural cause, but there is the presumption that theological students do not indulge in such unseemly pranks. While students might play tricks upon their own number in their own lodging, it seemed strange that they should go into another building to annoy their faculty. Between believing in ghosts and the impeccability of clerical neophytes, it must be said many of the clergy incline to attribute the disturbance to ghosts, while the students themselves in relating this tale, say it is a queer magnifying of a trivial student joke, unseemly, to be sure, but one which some postulant for holy orders did not perpetrate.

After the burial of Dr. Beck, a photograph was taken of the cemetery of the seminary. One of the students was the photographer. In the foreground of the picture can be seen two graves, just as they appear in the cemetery. But at the foot of each grave stands its occupant, Rev. Dr. Cole, former president of the seminary, in full canonical. At the foot of the other, stands the counterfeit presentment of its occupant, a lady who during life was a benefactor of the seminary. 

As in many other unexplainable phenomena, we may dismiss all these queer tales of a theological seminary by repudiating the testimony purporting to substantiate them. At Nashotah no one does this. At Nashotah, the testimony is believed to be unimpeachable.

A Double Disappearance

When one person inexplicably disappears, it’s weird.  When two people vanish, presumably together, things get stranger still.  When two people and a boat all go missing, never to be seen again…

In the late 1960s, an Irish couple named Kieran and Ornaith Murphy emigrated to California.  They settled in the Bay Area, where they soon did very nicely for themselves.  The couple made a small fortune investing in increasingly prestigious real estate.  As landlords, they were considered “tough, but fair.”  Kieran, a brilliant mathematician,  also worked as an actuary for San Francisco’s retirement system.  Ornaith, meanwhile, became a skilled long-distance sailor, often voyaging alone.  In 1998, she became the first woman to sail alone from San Francisco to Cape Horn.  Arthritis and a serious car accident left Ornaith unable to walk without difficulty, causing her to cherish all the more the freedom and mobility she was able to find on the water.  “I just want to go as far as I can and as far as my legs will let me,” she wrote.  “I don’t want to triumph.  I don’t want to conquer.  I’m just very happy being at sea.”  The Murphys were both witty and intellectually-inclined, fond of reading and discussing literature.  The couple had two sons.  The family was seen as hard-working, talented, and friendly.

Unfortunately, the beginning of the 21st century was not nearly as kind to the couple as had been the end of the 20th.  They hit a rocky patch, both personally and professionally.  Ornaith was deeply distraught to discover that her husband was having an affair, and the couple separated.  A divorce was planned.  They also began facing problems with their real estate holdings.  In 1999, there had been a fire at an apartment building they owned which left a child badly burned, and the Murphys were facing a costly lawsuit over the incident.

These were grave problems, to be sure, but no worse than those successfully weathered by other couples.  For the Murphys, however, things would soon take a far darker turn.  On December 15, 2001, the estranged pair planned to meet to discuss their various legal issues.  Ornaith was seen doing work on her 39-foot sloop, the Sola III, as it was docked at Oakland’s Jack London Marina.  A friend stopped by that afternoon.  Ornaith mentioned that she was planning to go for a sail with a friend that evening.  (However, she did not file a sail plan for this trip, which would be highly unusual for this experienced and meticulous sailor.)

That night, people nearby saw a man onboard who matched Kieran’s description.  (If this was indeed Kieran, it would be unusual for him to be on the sloop--he did not know how to sail and hated being on the water.)  A short time later, witnesses heard a disturbance coming from the direction of the Sola III, a loud bang that may--or may not--have been a gunshot.  At 8:36 p.m., the Sola III sailed out of the marina.  It had about a week’s worth of food onboard, but it was not otherwise outfitted for a long journey.

Early the next morning, Ornaith phoned a niece whom she had been living with, saying she was in Berkeley.  She declined an invitation to breakfast.  She also left several voicemails for one of her sons, saying she was at the Berkeley Marina, on her boat.  She sounded quite calm and normal.  But that day, the Sola III vanished.  So did the Murphys.  No one has seen either Kieran or Ornaith--or the boat--since.

"San Francisco Examiner," December 28, 2001, via Newspapers.com

The complete paucity of clues in this triple disappearance has led to any number of wildly-varying theories.  Did Ornaith lure her husband on board her boat, only to shoot him, deliberately sink both the boat and the body somewhere, and disappear to start a new life?  Or was it Kieran who was the murderer?  Was it murder/suicide?  Did the beleaguered couple agree to reconcile and escape their problems together?  

Or was a third party responsible for their disappearance?  Everyone who knew Ornaith insisted that she had no thoughts of ending her life, and was utterly incapable of plotting her own disappearance.  And Kieran was too unskilled a sailor to take the boat for even a short journey.

At least some investigators believed this was a grim case of murder followed by suicide (they declined to state publicly who they believed to be the killer.)  However, to date, not a scrap of evidence about the final fate of the couple has been found, leaving this as a particularly eerie mystery.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this Friday's Link Dump!

Our hosts for this week are some Caledonian visitors.

Bad company in 1950s Los Angeles.

The life and work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The failed attempt to get Canada to fight for the colonies in the American Revolution.

Early newspaper reporting about the Loch Ness Monster.

The origins of England's common law rule.

Napoleon's traveling bookcase.

Legends of the Emily Morgan Hotel.

Yet another case of a young girl being blamed for poltergeist manifestations.

The tragedy of Zeppelin L-19.

So, let's talk cursed souvenirs.

Chimpanzees make pretty good doctors.

The art of the Catholic counter-reformation.

The scent of ancient sculptures.

Extraordinary treasures found in ordinary places.

So, literary parties can get weird.

Why ancient reptile footprints are giving scientists migraines.

A Roman aqueduct full of cats.

The man who rebuilt the UK Parliament.

A brief history of demons.

Why you can't go on the world's longest train journey.

The days when the worst part of widowhood was ordering the mourning dresses.

The mysterious murder of San Francisco socialites.

The many lives of a container ship.

A family triple murder.

The world of intraterrestrials.

Bessie Coleman, pioneering aviator.

The man who sold his wife for 20 shillings.  And a dog.

We're all glowing.

HMS Achates and the "worst journey in the world."

A tribute to "Hoosier cabinets."

Folklore's "otherworldly brides."

When Calvinists criminalized singing.

Some particularly cold cases.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a couple's unsolved disappearance.  In the meantime, I read the other day that the former lead singer for The Spinners died.  They were one of those groups that made listening to the radio in the '70s fun.