
~Edgar Allan Poe

Friday, March 8, 2019

Weekend Link Dump

This week's Link Dump is getting corny.

Allan Grant, Life Magazine, 1951

What the hell happened to the Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers?

What the hell happened to the survivors of Vesuvius?

The world of 18th century fans.

A woman gets her wish: she's now a museum exhibit.

Deplatforming Ezra Pound.

Fairy tales are even older than we thought.

America's river communities.

A look at slipcoat cheese.

A look at ancient women.

Speaking of which, here are three ancient rebel queens.

When historians look for Victorian data and get racehorses.

Napoleon's attitude towards women.

Resuscitation in the 18th century. 

The ghost and the murder house.

The man with the elephant nose.

The man who was the Beast of Macabu.  Or was he?

The days when men made a living searching Niagara Falls for corpses.

An ancient tomb containing a mysterious board game and an unlucky looter.

A guide to psychic self-defense.

The real Cyrano.

The Case of the Disappearing Basketball Players.

The Case of the Cursed Soccer Player.

There have been a lot of extinct humans.

Victorian "Ragged Schools."

Let's talk coffin scams.

The strange lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton.

How the Georgian era celebrated Shrove Tuesday.

An extreme example of why practical jokes are very seldom funny.

Hey, doesn't everyone carry around human ashes in a snuff box?

Want to find out the best-selling book from the year when you were born?

How Mardi Gras was celebrated over a century ago.

A man fakes his own murder.

Archaeologists have discovered the first Denisovan skull fragments.

A Chinese tomb containing the elixir of life.

William Bennett, meet your soulmate, Morton Bartlett.

A ghost in a snowstorm.

18th century servant trouble.

Why Paris once had a museum full of forgeries.

The history of Mother Goose.

A mysterious object crashes in Ireland.

Indian seamen in WWI.

A mysterious ancient Scottish stone.

A peculiar man, and a dreadful murder.

The tomb of an ancient Roman baker.

Studying the dreams of the dying.

A grisly unsolved murder.

Isaac Newton, alchemist.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the time a trapped cat made headlines across the U.S.  In the meantime, there's, uh, this:


  1. Fascinating story about the woman who willed herself to the Mutter...as long as they included her jewelry! Good for her!

  2. Napoleon can go lick wallpaper. Especially the nice green wallpaper .

  3. Mike Dash’s meticulously researched analysis of the Flannan Isles case is worth a read:

    As for Napoleon, he was a power-mad dictator who started terrible wars for his own personal glory so he should be reviled for all the needless death and suffering he caused regardless of what he might have said about women.

  4. The Flannan Isles mystery is one of the few stories on here that inspired an opera. Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse.

  5. The ghosts and the murder house was a creepy if short article. I find something unsettling about 'third-person' ghosts, neither victim nor perpetrator but someone tied to the event nonetheless.

