Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?

On 18 April, 1943, four boys (Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne) from Stourbridge were poaching in Hagley Woods near to Wychbury Hill when they came across a large witch-hazel - a tree often confused by local residents with a Wych elm. 

Believing this a good place to hunt birds’ nests, Farmer attempted to climb the tree to investigate. As he was climbing, he glanced down into the hollow trunk and discovered a skull, believing it to be that of an animal. However, after seeing human hair and teeth, he realised that it was a human skull.

As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody. However, on returning home the youngest of the boys, Tommy Willetts, felt uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his parents, who in turn, informed the police.

When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete human skeleton, a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and some fragments of clothing. After further investigation, a severed hand was found buried in the ground near to the tree. The body was sent for forensic examination and it was quickly established that the skeleton was female and had been dead for at least 18 months, placing her time of death around October 1941. He found taffeta in her mouth, suggesting that she had died from asphyxiation. From the measurement of the trunk he also deduced that she must have been placed there “still warm” after the killing as she could not have fit once rigor mortis had taken hold.

Since the woman’s killing was in the midst of World War II, identification was seriously hampered. Police could tell from items found with the body what the woman had looked like but with so many people being reported missing during the war, and people regularly moving, the records were too vast for a proper identification to take place. The current location of her skeleton is unknown.

‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?’ is a graffito that started appearing soon after the murder. In 1944 the first graffiti message appeared on a wall in Birmingham, reading ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm - Hagley Wood’, whilst the most recent graffiti was sprayed onto the side of a 200 year-old obelisk on 18 August 1999, in white paint.

(Source: Wikipedia)

The Hollywood Freeway Chickens

A little more modern than my usual posts but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed reading a Wikipedia article as much as I have this one:

The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles, California. It is still not definitively known how they came to be there. Chickens underneath the Vineland off-ramp became local celebrities upon their arrival sometime around 1970. By 1976, the flock included about 50 chickens, which became known as “Minnie’s chickens”, named after Minnie Blumfield, an elderly retiree who fed them regularly. 

When she became too frail to feed them, Actors and Others for Animals made arrangements to relocate the chickens. Nearly a hundred of the hens and roosters were relocated to a ranch, but not every member of the flock was apprehended, and those that remained spawned a new population. Subsequent removal efforts in the following years all had a similar outcome. In fact, the first colony at the Vineland ramp has spread and there is now a second colony, two miles away.

Beginning in the 1990s, twenty years after the colony’s arrival, various individuals started coming forward claiming to know the mystery of their origin. Among them:

• In 1990, Jeff Stein of Granada Hills, California claimed that in 1968, when his wife Janet and her twin sister were 12, they learned that a nearby school that raised animals was closing and that its resident chickens would be killed. The twins scooped them up and succeeded in hiding them at home until the roosters started waking up every morning at 5 a.m. The chickens couldn’t stay, so the girls hiked through a field to an open area near the freeway and deposited two pillowcases full of them there.

• In 1992, a North Hollywood man who would give only his first name (“Michael”) claimed that as a child he and his brother put their pet chickens under the freeway after neighbors repeatedly complained about them. “We were afraid to confess after (their numbers) got out of hand because we thought the city would bill us”, he said.

• The widely believed, but never verified explanation about an overturned poultry truck on the freeway resurfaced in 2000 when Joe Silbert of Laguna Hills, California claimed to be the driver of the legendary vehicle, saying, “I tried to avoid a lady who cut in front of me and I turned over. I was taking anywhere from 500 to 1,000 chickens back from the Valley to a slaughterhouse in L.A. They were all hens. We never picked up roosters. These were hens that had stopped laying. They would eat but not produce, so they were costing farmers money. Anyway, I had a crate of eggs on the seat beside me, and when I turned over, my head fell into the crate. But I wasn’t hurt. I started chasing one chicken and it was on the TV news that night.” A colony of hens no longer laying eggs would naturally not be able to renew itself, making this explanation rather dubious.

Nevertheless, there was at least one witness to the overturned poultry truck explanation. A driver on the way to work in Glendale was proceeding south on the 5 Freeway when she spotted three cars off to the side of the road that had been involved in a multiple rear-end collision. Blood and feathers were all over the freeway. On the overpass right above the accident site was a truck loaded with poultry cages, and each cage contained multiple chickens. Below, on the freeway, a smashed poultry cage was off to one side, and chickens could be seen walking around in the freeway meridian.

[Image Source]

(Source: Wikipedia)

Michel Ney’s Great Escape

A 150-year old mystery lies buried in a graveyard … in rural Rowan County, North Carolina. Legend is that Peter Stuart Ney, the schoolmaster who was buried there in 1846, was really the great French general Marshal Michel Ney, who led the bloody winter retreat from Moscow to Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars in 1812. On his deathbed, the 77-year-old Ney was asked by his physician if he indeed was the French general referred to by his men as “the red lion” and by Napoleon as “the bravest of the brave.” He raised himself and responded “By all that is holy, I am Marshal Ney of France!”

In 1815, after Napoleon’s [dethronement], Ney had sworn allegiance to Louis XVIII [and] When Napoleon left the island of Elba with a small army he had been allowed to maintain … Ney vowed to bring him back to Paris in an “iron cage.” [However,] Ney joined forces with Napoleon and [after] they were defeated at Waterloo by Wellington, Ney was condemned to die for treason [Source]. 

In December 1815 he was supposedly executed by firing squad, though he refused to wear a blindfold and was given the right to give the order to fire himself. However, legend has it that Ney’s Masonic ties, crucially those he had to Wellington himself, helped him fake his death by placing blood packets over his heart and firing blanks at him. He was then smuggled to the USA and lived the rest of his life as a schoolmaster. 

In January 1816, a man calling himself Peter Stuart Ney arrived in the US and disappears from record. In 1821, he resurfaces as a school master in South Carolina. Between 1822 and 1828, he held semi-permanent teaching positions in several Carolina communities. He died in 1846 and on his grave one will find the words: “A native of France and soldier of the French Revolution under Napoleon Bonaparte”. The grave was exhumed in 1887 and a plaster cast made of the skull by a local doctor, though it was then lost. In 1936, a letter sent to TIME magazine  claimed that the skull had been found inan attic “show[ed] evidence of having been scarred by bullets and swords” [Source].

[Thanks to southcarolinadove for bringing this to my attention]

The Man in the Iron Mask

The Man in the Iron Mask is a name given to a prisoner arrested as Eustache Dauger in 1669. He was held in the custody of the same jailer for 34 years. His identity has been thoroughly discussed because no one ever saw his face, which was hidden by a mask of either black velvet cloth or iron. What facts are known about this prisoner are based mainly on correspondence between his jailer and his superiors in Paris.

The first surviving records of the masked prisoner are from July 1669, when Louis XIV’s minister sent a letter to the governor of the prison of Pignerol informing him that a prisoner named Eustache Dauger was due to arrive in the next month or so. Historians have noted that the name Eustache Dauger was written in a different handwriting than the rest of the text, suggesting that while a clerk wrote the letter under dictation, a third party, very likely the minister himself, added the name afterwards.

The governor was instructed to prepare a cell with multiple doors, one closing upon the other, to prevent anyone from the outside listening in. The governor himself was to see Dauger only once a day in order to provide food and whatever else he needed. Dauger was also to be told that if he spoke of anything other than his immediate needs he would be killed. According to many versions of this legend, the prisoner wore the mask at all times. 

The prison at Pignerol was used for men who were considered an embarrassment to the state and usually held only a handful of prisoners at a time, some of which were important and wealthy and granted servants. One prisoner, Nicolas Fouquet’s valet was often ill and so permission was given for Dauger to serve Fouquet on the condition that he never met with anyone else. The fact that Dauger served as a valet is an important one for whilst Fouquet was never expected to be released, other prisoners were, and might have spread word of Dauger’s existence. 

In time the governor was offered positions at other prisons and each time he moved Dauger went with him until he died in 1703 and was buried under the name of Marchioly. Though she may merely have been repeating rumours In 1711, King Louis’s sister-in-law stated in a letter that the prisoner had “two musketeers at his side to kill him if he removed his mask”. 

In 1771, Voltaire claimed that the prisoner was the older, illegitimate brother of Louis XIV but other theories include that he was a Marshal of France; Richard Cromwell; or François, Duke of Beaufort; an illegitimate son of Charles II, amongst others.

Imposter Prince

Ramendra Narayan Roy was a kumar (“prince”) of the large Bhawal Estate in modern-Bangladesh. One of three brothers who inherited the estate from their father, he spent his time hunting, in festivities and with women. In 1909 he went to Darjeeling to seek treatment for syphilis but died there at the age of 25. 

Later there was much discussion of what had exactly happened the day of the funeral: some testified that a hailstorm had interrupted the cremation just before the pyre was lit and the body might have disappeared when the mourners sought shelter. There were rumours that Ramendra’s body had not been successfully cremated, that it had disappeared or had been swapped. His sister gradually became convinced that her brother was still alive.

In 1920 a man appeared in Dhaka covered in ashes. He sat on the street for four months, attracting attention because he was in unusually good physical condition. There were rumors that the kumar had returned, even when the man said he had renounced his family. It was arranged for him to visit the kumars’ family and they became convinced that he was Ramendra.  When they questioned him, he remembered the name of his wet nurse, a fact that was not public. He said he had wandered around India without recollection of his past until his memory began to return and his guru, a man he met in the jungle, told him to return home.

There was considerable rural acceptance that the man was the Second Kumar. Many of his former tenants began paying him rent, which he used to buy lawyers to help him win back his estate from the colonial British. A bitter legal battle ensued in which it was suggested that the claimant must be a fraud and, therefore, not entitled to the estate, because the kumar’s syphilis had advanced to the state of open sores but there were no  syphilitic scars on the claimant’s body; the claimant spoke mainly Urdu, rather than the kumar’s Bengali; and he was illiterate. A full comparison of the kumar and claimant’s physical resemblance can be seen here.

Bizarrely, a court eventually ruled in a favour of the claimant, however, that same evening, when he went to offer prayers, he suffered a stroke and died. Funeral rites were performed on August 13, 1946.

The Mystery of The Mary Celeste

The Mary Celeste was a merchant ship famous for having been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean on 4 December 1872, unmanned and apparently abandoned. On November 5, 1872, under command of Captain Briggs, the Mary Celeste took on board a cargo worth $35,000 and set sail from New York to Italy. In addition to Briggs and a crew of seven, she carried Briggs’ wife and young daughter. Both captain and crew were considered experienced, trustworthy and capable seamen.

A month after the Mary Celeste left port, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia, sighted a curious ship about five miles off their own port bow through his spyglass. He detected at once that there was something wrong with the other vessel: she was yawning slightly and her sails were torn. They cautiously observed the ship, which their captain recognised to be the Mary Celeste, noticing that she was sailing straight towards the Strait of Gibraltar, yet on an erratic starboard tack. They concluded she was drifting after seeing no one on deck, though the ship was flying no distress signal.

Upon boarding the Mary Celeste they found no sign of the crew and although they reported that ”the whole ship was a thoroughly wet mess,” it was still seaworthy. All of the ship’s papers were missing, except for the captain’s logbook. The ship’s clock was not functioning, and the compass was destroyed; the sextant and marine chronometer were missing. The only lifeboat was also missing. The peak halyard, used to hoist the main sail, had disappeared. A rope, perhaps the peak halyard, was found tied to the ship very strongly and the other end, very frayed, was trailing in the water behind the ship. A six-month supply of food and fresh water was still aboard, and the crew’s personal possessions and artifacts were left untouched, making a piracy raid seem extremely unlikely. It appeared the vessel had been abandoned in a hurry. There was no sign of a struggle, or any sort of violence. The crew was never seen or heard from again.

Theories range from alcoholic fumes, to underwater earthquakes, to waterspouts, to paranormal explanations involving extraterrestrial life, UFOs, sea monsters, and the Bermuda Triangle, although it is not thought to have sailed through the area. The ship was said to be “cursed” and had a long history of disasters and catastrophes, and three captains died on the ship. The ship was destroyed in 1885 when it was intentionally wrecked off the coast of Haiti in an attempted insurance fraud.

[Image Source: Smithsonian Magazine]

(Source: Wikipedia)

Dead Sea Scrolls: Copper Scroll

The Copper Scroll is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but differs significantly from the others. Whereas the other scrolls are written on parchment or papyrus, this scroll is written on metal and its Hebrew, orthography, palaeography and date (c.50-100 AD) differ from the others. Furthermore, it is not a literary work, but a list of locations at which various items of gold and silver are buried or hidden.

The text is an inventory of 64 locations; 63 of which are treasures of gold and silver, which have been estimated in the tons. 

The following English translation of the opening lines of the first column of the Copper Scroll shows the basic structure of each of the entries in the scroll. The structure is 1) general location, 2) specific location, often with distance to dig, and 3) what to find.

1:1 In the ruin that is in the valley of Acor, under
1:2 the steps, with the entrance at the East,
1:3 a distance of forty cubits: a strongbox of silver and its vessels
1:4 with a weight of seventeen talents. K^εN.

It has been suggested that the Ancient Romans found the treasure, however, there is no conclusive proof of this and, as such, it is likely the treasure has never been found.

The Female Stranger

During the fall of 1816 in Alexandria Virginia two people, a man and his wife walked into the Gadsby’s Tavern Hotel. The woman was ill and it was thought she was suffering from Typhoid fever. The woman’s condition continued to deteriorate despite being attended by one of Alexandria’s doctors. The husband then summoned the doctor and hotel staff and even the owner’s wife to the room to ask a very unusual request: He asked that everyone present swear an oath never to reveal their identities. All agreed and each took the secret to the grave. Several days after the oath was taken the Female Stranger died and to this day no one knows their identity. Before disappearing, her husband commissioned an extravagant headstone and buried her at St. Paul’s Cemetery in Alexandria Virginia.

The engraving on the headstone reads:

To the Memory of a
FEMALE STRANGER
whose mortal sufferings terminated
on the 14th day of October 1816
Aged 23 years and 8 months.
This stone is placed here by her disconsolate
Husband in whose arms she sighed out her
latest breath and who under God
did his utmost even to soothe the cold
dead ear of death.
How loved how valued once avails thee not
To whom related or by whom begot
A heap of dust alone remains of thee
Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be
To him gave all the Prophets witness that
through his name whosoever believeth in
him shall receive remission of sins.
Acts.10th Chap.43rd verse

(Source: listverse.com)