There seem to be certain haunting cases in which a person has been locked to a certain place, perhaps in a sense imprisoned there or tethered there by some calling. Born in upstate Syracuse on Sept. 18, 1833, Samuel Abbott became a decorated Civil War hero fighting for Union forces working his way up from volunteer ensign to first lieutenant before his duties there were done, serving in Company E of the 12th New York State Volunteer Infantry. He would go on to spend 50 years as a state civil servant, and even in his 70s he was working a job as a night watchman at the Capitol Building at Albany, New York, joining up at the age of 77. His shift usually began at 9 pm and lasted to 6 am, during which he would patrol 3 floors of the extensive State Library and Assembly Library kept there, encompassing 500,000 books and 300,000 manuscripts of great importance, often locking himself in so that he could better protect these treasures. The night of March 28, 1911 would start much like any oth
On March 3, 1998, 67-year-old Rev. Alfred Kunz recorded several episodes of a faith-based radio show called
Our Catholic Family in Monroe, Wisconsin, along with his close friend Father Charles Fiore. When the recording had wrapped, Fiore drove Kunz back to his modest abode at the at St. Michael School in the Roman Catholic church in the quiet rural town of Dane, Wisconsin, and although the priest was described as being in low spirits, there was no particular reason to be concerned, with Fiore driving off. Little did he know that he would be the last known person to see Kunz alive. What would follow would be one of the most shocking crimes of the town’s history, opening up a rabbit hole of conspiracies, nefarious dealings, secret cults, and Devil worship.
On first appearances, 52-year-old William Durrell Patterson and his 42-year-old wife Margaret lived fairly normal lives. They owned a photo supply shop near their home in El Paso, Texas, and seemed to be content and well-liked by their neighbors. They were fairly wealthy, owning a nice Cadillac and a boat, and there doesn’t seem as. Read more »
In October of 2000, police in Karachi, Pakistan received a lead that a man by the name of Ali Akbar was attempting to sell a mummy on the black antiquities market for 600 million rupees, or about $11 million, and it was no ordinary mummy, but rather what was advertised as a “Persian Princess.” When police raided the home of Akbar, he folded under interrogation and led them to the house of his co-conspirator, Wali Mohammad Reeki, who lived in the rural desert region in the province of Baluchistan. There they found the mummy in question, along with its sarcophagus, and Reeki admitted that he had purchased the mummy from a man named Sharif Shah Bakhi after he had found it in the aftermath of an earthquake near Quetta, on the border of Iran and Afghanistan. The men were arrested, but the mystery of the mummy was just beginning, leading down a rabbit hole of strange artifacts, intrigue, and murder.
In 1855, renovation work was being carried out on Bishop Audley’s Chantry, a cathedral in England, when something very strange was found languishing away in the darkness beneath the floor. It was a sheet of vellum, or calf skin, measuring about five feet long and four and a half feet wide, and although faded and damaged, when it was examined and restored it was found to be a medieval world map of some sort, one of the largest ever seen. But this was no ordinary map, as upon its sprawling face were many strange features and wonders that have inspired much discussion to this day and has made what has come to be known as the Hereford Mappa Mundi one of the weirdest and most mysterious maps ever found, as well as one of the most significant historical maps in the world.