The Persian Princess of Karachi
In October 2000 Pakistani police seized from dealers in Karachi a mummy in a carved wooden coffin, with a gold mask and a breastplate whose inscription named her a daughter of King Xerxes. Eleven million dollars was being asked for her, and Iran and Pakistan began to argue over ownership. The National Museum ran a CT scan and radiocarbon dating: the mat beneath the body was woven around 1996, the woman was about twenty-one, she had died in 1996 of a broken neck, and the body was mummified afterwards. The cuneiform on the breastplate contained grammatical errors. A case about selling an antiquity became a murder inquiry, and was never solved.
The Stockwell Ghost
On 6 January 1772, in Mrs Golding's house at Stockwell, china began to come off the shelves, clocks fell from the walls and a ham stepped off its hook. She fled to the neighbours and it all happened again there. The two houses had one thing in common: her twenty-year-old maid Ann Robinson went with her. The maid was dismissed and the destruction stopped at once. Years later Robinson told the clergyman Samuel Horsley how it was done — horsehair tied to the crockery, wire, fixings filed through in advance, and a careful sense of when to leave the room. She had wanted the house empty so that her young man could visit.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.