What do you think about this?
High in the mountains on the eastern edge of California sits Bodie, once a roaring gold mining town of as many as ten thousand people, with saloons, opium dens, and enough violence that it earned a fearsome reputation. When the gold ran out, people left, often in a hurry, and the town simply froze.
Today Bodie is preserved in what the state calls arrested decay. Walk in and you find tables still set, goods still on the store shelves, curtains still hanging in the windows, all slowly weathering under a huge open sky. And then there is the curse. For decades, visitors who pocket a nail, a bottle, a shard of glass as a souvenir have mailed the items back, sometimes years later, with letters begging forgiveness and describing the run of bad luck that followed them home. The park rangers keep a thick file of these letters. Here is the twist. Staff say a ranger invented the curse years ago to stop people pocketing pieces of the town, and it worked far better than he ever intended.
Could it be that a place abandoned in a hurry holds onto what was left, and pushes back when you try to carry a piece of it away?
A guilty conscience and coincidence, or a real Bodie curse? What do you think follows people home from that town?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
Field reports, theories, and intel from the X-Files straight to your inbox. No filler, no algorithms, just the work.
Phone is optional. If you add it, we may text you tour drops, book launches, and breaking news from the X-Files up to 4 messages a month. Reply STOP anytime. Msg & data rates may apply.