THE BIG BOOK OF
MYSTERIES
Also by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
Oak Island The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries The World’s Most Mysterious People The World’s Most Mysterious Places Mysteries of the Bible Death: the Final Mystery The World’s Most Mysterious Objects The World’s Most Mysterious Murders Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars The World’s Most Mysterious Castles Mysteries and Secrets of the Masons Mysteries and Secrets of Voodoo, Santeria, and Obeah Mysteries of Secrets of Time Secrets of the World’s Undiscovered Treasures
THE BIG BOOK OF
MYSTERIES
LIONEL AND PATRICIA
FANTHORPE
Copyright © Lionel Fanthorpe and Patricia Fanthorpe, 2010
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 Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Allison Hirst
Design: Jesse Hooper
Printer: Transcontinental
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fanthorpe, R. Lionel
The big book of mysteries / by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe.
Issued also in an electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55488-779-8
1. Curiosities and wonders. I. Fanthorpe, Patricia II. Title.
AG243.F34 2010 001.94 C2010-902419-2
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
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 Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
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 credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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This book is dedicated to our family and friends all over the world who share our interest in the paranormal and the unexplained and who encourage us in our research and exploration.
CONTENTS
4 Mysteries of Lakes, Seas, and Oceans
6 Mysterious Phantom Ships
7 Templar Secrets
8 Arthurian Mysteries
9 Masonic Secrets
10 Secret Societies
11 Rennes-le-Château and the Bloodline Mystery
12 Mysterious Treasures
13 Spectres, Phantoms, Ghosts, and Apparitions
14 Poltergeists, Ghouls, and Zombies
15 Vampires and Other Horrors
16 Unsolved Mysteries
17 Mysterious Appearances
18 Mysterious People
19 Glamis: The Castle of Legends.
20 The Versailles Time-Slip Mystery
Bibliography
We live in an incredibly strange universe. From the tiniest of its subatomic particles to the farthest of its ever-accelerating galaxies, it challenges the most daringly imaginative scientists and philosophers to make some sort of sense of it.
We have been investigating and researching all kinds of unsolved mysteries, paranormal and anomalous phenomena for the best part of a half-century. Whenever possible, we have interviewed eyewitnesses and visited the sites where the mysteries were reported: Oak Island, Nova Scotia; Rennes-le-Château in France; the Chase Elliot Vault in Barbados (where heavy lead coffins moved around); and Croglin Grange, with its sinister vampire traditions. Unsolved mysteries still intrigue us today as much as they did when we took on the very first investigation.
Charles Fort (1874–1932) had the right attitude toward the unexplained: nothing is so firmly proved that it can’t be re-examined — and nothing is so ridiculously improbable that it isn’t worth looking into.
There is a serious side to investigating the paranormal, in addition to the sheer fascination of exploring the unknown for its own sake. If we want to find out more about what’s really out there, then looking in the strangest places is more likely to yield new data than going over familiar territory.
In our adventures into the anomalous we always try to be as objective, as open-minded, and as scientific as possible. We collect the data, examine it critically, evaluate it, categorize it, and formulate a theory or two and test them in so far as it’s possible to