Patricia Fanthorpe - The Worlds Most Mysterious Objects

THE WORLDS MOST
MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS

This book is dedicated with great affection to our (unofficially!)
adopted son in the USA, Rick Seidita, who shares our fascination
with all things mysterious and unexplained phenomena in general.

THE WORLDS MOST
MYSTERIOUS
OBJECTS

Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

A HOUNSLOW BOOK
A MEMBER OF THE DUNDURN GROUP
TORONTO OXFORD

Copyright Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, 2002

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 other-wise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Copy-Editor: Andrea Pruss
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Fanthorpe, R. Lionel

The worlds most mysterious objects / Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe.

ISBN 1-55002-403-5

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

AG243.F358 2002 001.94 C2002-902289-4

1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

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

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

by Canon Stanley Mogford, MA

by Canon Stanley Mogford, MA

W e live in an ordered universe. There is a pattern to it, a regularity, a system so coordinated and complete that we can base our lives on it. We know, accurately, when darkness is due to fall and the sun to rise. The movement of planets can be pre-dieted long years ahead, and no eclipse of moon or sun now takes us by surprise. The force of gravity is constant and will always make walking on the street safe and falling off a skyscraper dangerous. The tidal system is so regulated that we know when to dock a ship and when not. We have times for planting and times to harvest what we grow. Generations long ago came to appreciate the consistency and order of their world. As the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, put it, centuries before Christ: There is a time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. The universe is, in truth, like the mechanism of a great clock, each piece designed for a purpose and each fitting accurately into the whole.

Into this established order and consistency, human beings like ourselves are born and seek to make the best of our lives. A disordered life on an ordered background would seem a hazardous way to live. Those who set out to buck the system will clearly do so at their peril.

The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe and his wife, Patricia, in the course of a long writing career, have recently completed a trilogy of books, both fascinating in their content and challenging in their interpretations. They have extracted from the orderliness of the world around them, and from its long history of people and events, the disordered, the abnormal, the mysterious and have found much to leave us wondering.

In the first of these books, they singled out people who conformed to no order, system, or established patterns of behaviour. They found for us, to use the modern jargon, one off people, eccentric to a fault. Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar that he Bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus. He stood out from all the others around him. This book introduced us to some weird and wonderful people, and it is a fascinating read.

The second of their books moved away from people and concentrated on areas, places, and houses which, in their turn, looked like all other places and houses, but certainly werent. There are many grand houses in the land, but few like Bowden House, Llancaiach Fawr, or Borley Rectory, with their experiences of poltergeists and ghostly apparitions. There are many feared passages at sea where lives have been lost, but few as feared as the Bermuda Triangle, where whole ships and crews have disappeared without a trace. Only the intrepid and the foolish would venture casually and uncaringly into some of the places the authors outlined for us.

This book is the third of that trilogy. It identifies for us, this time, strange and mysterious objects. Most objects are commonplace. They are around us in millions, their purpose known and easy to understand. Those researched for us in this book are certainly neither ordinary nor commonplace. A box, for example, is by no means something out of the ordinary. The world is full of them, of all shapes and sizes, made of wood, cardboard, iron, or even silver. You will read in this book of boxes more sinister, with strange locking devices so made that if the unwary, or the unwelcome, dared open them the consequences could be fatal. There is another box, which if any truth can be attached to the claim contains within it the secrets of the future. A diamond, by legend, is a girls best friend, but not the great diamond the authors have singled out for us, possession of which over generations has caused misery and death. The curse that was believed to have brought disaster to those who opened the tomb of Tutankhamen was as nothing compared to what appears to have happened to most of those who bought or inherited the Hope Diamond.

The authors have identified for us, in this, their latest work, machines, mazes, steeples, wells, precious stones, and more and all of them have stories to tell. Some of what they describe for us seems almost beyond belief. Often, they will admit themselves baffled by what they have found. Sometimes they venture into interpretations. For many years, scholars were left baffled by the great mass of Egyptian writing that had been found but could not be read. The picture-based hieroglyphic language was like none other, and it could well have remained a mystery forever had not a stone been unearthed at Rosetta bearing a like inscription in three languages: two known, and one, the Egyptian, unknown. From the known it was possible to decipher the unknown, and thus were released the secrets of that picture language, so long hidden from us.

What mysteries, if any, could these objects explain? The secret of perpetual motion might have become known if only the paranoid Orffyreus had not taken an axe to his machine. The authors leave us in no doubt that