The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
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.