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? 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? 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?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
What do you think about this? On November 24, 1971, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 dollars and vanished. In 1980, a boy found 5,800 dollars of that exact cash along the Columbia River. Survived, or never told a soul?
What do you think about this? On September 12, 2023, researcher Jaime Maussan presented two small, elongated bodies to Mexico’s Congress, calling them non-human. Scientists who studied similar specimens found them manufactured. Hoax, or evidence a government put on the record?
What do you think about this? At age two, James Leininger began describing a WWII plane crash in detail, and researchers later matched his account to pilot James Huston Jr, killed near Iwo Jima in 1945. Coincidence, or memory that should not exist?
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