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The Persian Princess of Karachi

added03 September 20262000

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.

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24.85468, 67.02071

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Persian Princess — Wikipedia

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Kuldhara

A village in the Thar Desert near Jaisalmer that its inhabitants abandoned in a single night around 1825 and never returned to. The story goes that the state minister demanded the village headman's daughter, and rather than hand her over the whole community of eighty-four villages walked out in the dark — quietly enough that none of their neighbours noticed them going. On leaving, the brahmins cursed the place: anyone who tried to settle there would not survive the night. The houses have stood empty for almost two centuries since, in the middle of otherwise inhabited land. The stone walls, staircases and doorways are intact — not ruined, simply left, as though the owners had stepped out and never come back.

438 km away

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Dumas Beach

A black sand beach on the Gujarat coast, long used as a Hindu cremation ground. Local accounts have the sand black from ash, and voices and laughter heard from the beach at night; disappearances are attributed to people who went walking along the waterline after dark. The authorities close the beach at night, which does the reputation nothing but good.

718 km away

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The Bleeding Cross of Vile Parle

In March 2012 water began dripping from the feet of a crucifix outside the church of Our Lady of Velankanni in the Mumbai district of Vile Parle; thousands came, collecting the water in bottles and drinking it. The rationalist Sanal Edamaruku arrived with a television crew, followed the damp patch on the wall behind the cross and found a blocked washbasin drain in the room behind it: the water was rising by capillary action through porous concrete and coming out through the figure's foot. He demonstrated it live on air. The Catholic archdiocese of Mumbai filed a complaint against him for outraging religious feelings, and Edamaruku, facing arrest without bail, left for Finland.

877 km away

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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.

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The Beale Ciphers

Bedford County and the city of Lynchburg in Virginia, USA, form the geographic core of one of the most famous cryptographic mysteries in American history. In 1885, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced containing three coded texts purporting to reveal the exact burial site of an enormous cache of gold, silver, and jewels buried in the 1820s by an adventurer named Thomas J. Beale.