Welcome to my highly curated list of Historical Mysteries (That Interest Me). I had intended to do Small Town Historical Mysteries since I write the Gravesyde Priory Mystery series set in a very small town in Regency, England, but oddly enough, there aren’t too many newspaper accounts of dead bodies in the Regency era because there were no reporters at the time. If the government didn’t report it, or a customer didn’t pay for it, you didn’t read about it.
So now you have the opportunity to judge the warped interests of a mystery writer. Without further ado:
7) The Salish Sea Feet
As far back as 1887, booted feet have shown up on the shores of the Salish Sea, stretching from British Columbia to Washington State. At the turn of the twentieth century, they had no way of identifying foot corpses, so those earlier mystery feet remain unresolved. In 2007, though, feet with athletic shoes started bobbing up. With the aid of DNA, they have identified some from suicides or people who have fallen in and drowned. The theory is that the soft tissues of the ankles separate more easily, and the athletic shoes give them buoyancy. I’m not going to try to explain boots, however.
6) The San Bernardo Mummies
High in the Andes, in the small arid town of San Bernardo, Columbia, the dead refuse to compose, right down to the clothes they were buried in, which the locals discovered after a flood.
The rationale veers between believing the deceased were blessed (or cursed) or that the region’s healthy diet preserved the remains. Since diet has very little to do with clothing and science can’t prove curses, others look to the location of the burial ground. The other two cemeteries in town had no mummies, but the newer one has above-ground vaults on a steep slope battered by constant hot winds. It’s possible the conditions turned the vaults into ovens and dehydrated the remains… but we’ll never know, will we?
5) The Voynich Manuscript: Code or Hoax?
This one really resonates with me, not only because we’re talking about a manuscript, but because the earl who gives my Wycliffe Manor series its name used code to conceal the family’s jewels.
Dating back to the early fifteenth century, this manuscript was acquired by the antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich. Illustrated on parchment, it appears to be in an unknown language. No one has ever translated the text, though not for lack of trying. Theories veer wildly, from alien library to medieval women’s manual. Witch script, anyone?
4) Somerton Man
In December 1948, an unidentified male body was found on the beach of Adelaide, Australia. Well-dressed, and clean-shaven with the tags cut from his clothes, the police never identified him or the cause of death. It was as if he fell from space… cue alien music. In his pocket, they found a piece of paper torn from a book with a phrase from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Now, don’t you want this mystery solved? And just because I’m on a code kick: on the back of the paper was scribbled five lines of letters and at least one phone number. With the onset of DNA testing, the case is being investigated again, and they may be close to a solution.
3) A Psychic Finds a Body
This one has finally been solved, but because I also write small-town contemporary psychic mysteries (The Psychic Solutions), I couldn’t resist a mystery solved by a spiritualist!
In 1901, wealthy and beautiful 19-year-old Nell Cropsey disappeared from her home in North Carolina. Her boyfriend, the son of the sheriff, was immediately suspected, but with no body and no evidence, they couldn’t hope for a conviction. Then Snell Newman, a psychic from Norfolk, Virginia said the boyfriend had used chloroform on Nell and dumped her down a well. She knew so many correct details, that search parties started searching. Eventually, her body was recovered in the river connected to a well. She’d been hit on the head and had not drowned. The boyfriend was eventually convicted, based almost entirely on the psychic’s accuracy.
2) The 1912 Villisca Ax Murders
Serial killers and hallucinating madmen aren’t limited to contemporary times. In 1912, in small-town Iowa, a family of six and two visitors were bludgeoned to death in their sleep. The family were fairly prominent church-goers and the children visiting belonged to a wealthy neighbor. When the father didn’t appear at work, neighbors attempted to enter the locked house. The sheriff had to break down the door. They found a victim in every bed, a four-pound slab of bacon in the kitchen, and all the mirrors covered. A local preacher was caught fleeing the town, talking about voices in his head, but with no other evidence, they couldn’t convict him. Did the devil do it?
1. Dyatlov Pass
In 1959, nine hikers in the Russian mountains camped out for the night and were never seen alive again. Searchers found the camp. They traced barefoot footprints into the snow and found two undressed bodies, so they blamed hypothermia. They had second thoughts later. After months of searching, they found the other seven, some suffering from blunt force trauma, others with third-degree burns; one had been vomiting blood, one was missing a tongue, and some of their clothing was found to be radioactive. Aliens!!!!
The world is full of unsolved mysteries, which is why it’s so satisfying to read (and write) books that give us answers!
Read more from Patricia Rice here.
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