DebunkedWhite

The Newark Holy Stones

added03 September 20261860

In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

40.05812, -82.40126

Newark Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Newark Holy Stones — Wikipedia

Nearest on the map

DebunkedWhite

The Columbus Poltergeist

In March 1984, in Joan and John Resch's house in Columbus, telephones, lamps and glasses flew around their fourteen-year-old adopted daughter Tina. A Columbus Dispatch photographer caught a sequence of a handset in mid-air and the picture went round the country. A WTVN crew left a camera running while Tina believed she was not being filmed: the tape shows her reach out and pull a standard lamp over. James Randi, who came later, showed that every flight happened strictly outside an observer's line of sight, and the photographer admitted he had only pressed the shutter when the girl was looking away. The parapsychologist William Roll went on regarding the case as genuine.

52 km away

CryptidOrange

Point Pleasant, Home of the Mothman

Between November 1966 and December 1967, people in this town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha reported a winged figure some two metres tall with glowing red eyes — dozens of sightings. The first came from two couples driving past a disused explosives plant at night: the thing, they said, kept pace with their car at a hundred miles an hour. The reports stopped on 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed and forty-six people died — a coincidence that tied the Mothman to premonition for good. A steel statue of it stands downtown.

136 km away

Abandoned buildingYellow

The Moundsville Penitentiary

A Gothic prison in use from 1876 to 1995, once listed among the ten most violent correctional facilities in the United States. Ninety-four men were executed here and some thirty-six more died in prison violence, including a riot in 1986. The Sugar Shack basement and the dark isolation cells have their own reputation. The building stands across the road from an Adena burial mound, which added another layer to the story.

142 km away

More: Debunked

DebunkedOrange

Ghostwatch on the BBC

BBC Elstree Studios and the suburban district of Northolt in Greater London, UK, are the defining locations of one of the most controversial media hoaxes in broadcast history. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired "Ghostwatch," a mock live investigative special into a haunted council home that triggered nationwide public hysteria, regulatory sanctions, and real-world tragedy.

DebunkedYellow

Alternative 3

Anglia House in the historic center of Norwich, Norfolk, UK—the former central broadcast headquarters of Anglia Television. It was from this building in the summer of 1977 that the network aired "Alternative 3," one of the most elaborate television mockumentaries in British broadcast history, which inadvertently laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy lore regarding secret space programs and elite off-world colonies.

DebunkedYellow