Patricia Fanthorpe - The Worlds Greatest Unsolved Mysteries

This book is dedicated with grateful thanks to our many friends all over the world who have so generously given their time, energy and hospitality to help us during our long years of research into these unsolved mysteries.

Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
Cardiff, Wales, UK 1997

Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe

Copyright Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe 1997

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Hounslow Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.

Hounslow Press

A member of the Dundurn Group

Publisher: Anthony Hawke

Interior photographs: Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe

Printer: Webcom

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Fanthorpe, R. Lionel

The worlds greatest unsolved mysteries

ISBN 0-88882-194-8

1. Curiosities and wonders. I. Fanthorpe, Patricia.

II. Title.

2 3 4 5 BJ 01 00 99

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The authors and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

Second printing: January 1999

by Canon Stanley Mogford

Everyone loves a good mystery and those capable of writing one, and writing it well, will always be assured of many readers. The list of such writers is long and stretches from Wilkie Collins, to Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and the prolific Agatha Christie. The best of them are skilled at weaving a story which leaves the average reader puzzled about its ending until the very last pages of their books. Their ingenuity in creating a mystery, and then solving it, knows no bounds.

What all these writers give us is fiction. They offer us imagined situations and invented characters. The book we have here, incredible as it may seem, is not fictional at all. It is fact. It is hard to believe a lot of it. Much of it defies common sense, seemingly remote both from human experience and reality. All of what we read here actually happened. None of it is from imagination; everything is from life.

The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, with the help of his wife Patricia, has achieved three things in this book of his, one of many he has written in his very busy life:

First, he has highlighted for us a selection of the most bizarre happenings that have occurred over the years, some of them taken from the natural world, and some from human character and behaviour. He has identified for us twenty such mysteries and could have shared with us many more had space allowed. Of course he is not the only researcher who has looked at these strange stories over the years. Many others have been fascinated by them and there will be others yet to come. We owe them much, these researchers, with their enquiring minds, for, left to ourselves, we, more average, ordinary mortals, would never have made the effort. We would have been content to believe everyone and everything as normal and ordinary as we are ourselves.

We may, for example, have a friend who is a parish priest. We see him at work, visiting the sick, preaching in his Church, burying the dead. He will be one of many thousands living the ordinary life of any such parish priest. Here, in this book, we meet one who was very different. A poor priest, inexperienced, coming new to a run down parish, with a dilapidated Church, in a remote area of France, suddenly becomes wealthy, able to fund grandiose schemes and costly works. Where did his sudden riches come from? During his life time it was a mystery and it remains so. He took his secret with him to the grave.

We are aware of children being abandoned by their parents. It happens sadly all over the world. Dr Barnardo, a few generations ago, found many such rejected youngsters and gathered them into his homes. But what would even Dr Barnardo have made of the young Kaspar Hauser you will read of in the book, who appeared suddenly in Nuremberg, sixteen or so years old, oddly dressed, unable to speak but able to write his name, never able to explain where he had been during the early years of his life and the only food he could bear to eat bread, washed down with water.

In this book, run of the mill people like us, come face to face with the extraordinary. The normal, every day behaviour we are used to is challenged with much that seems totally out of this world. Whether our lives are enriched or troubled by meeting unusual people and strange events we cannot tell. At least this book makes us aware of them.

The author has not only introduced to us certain strange happenings he has carefully researched them. Here, no doubt, his wife, as in so many other ways has been his greatest asset. For many years of his life he has written and lectured on the strange, the paranormal leading him in recent weeks to front a series of programmes on TV which have fascinated a large company of viewers. His understanding of the strange things of life is considerable but, of course, it did not come of itself. He had to work at it. He and his wife have visited, talked to people, read widely, verified everything as closely as they could. In this book, for example, we read of the Money Pit of Nova Scotia. Its vividly described for us, but not merely from books. He has been to Oak Island, where the pit is, several times and talked to those who are still longing to find what treasure if any lies at the foot of it. He gives one the impression of longing to have a dig at it himself.

Even without this book, most people would know something of the Mary Celeste. It remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea. Here the ship is brought alive for us its building, its size, its captain, its crew, its cargo, the course it was taking at the time of its abandonment. The fate of the ship becomes ever more poignant for us for he helps us know the people who were on board on that fateful day.