Category Archives: Mysteries

Otto Rahn

Posted on by

Dan Franke asks: “You want a medieval studies Nazi Germany mystery? Look no further.” From Wikipedia:

Otto Wilhelm Rahn (18 February 1904 – 13 March 1939) was a German writer, medievalist, Ariosophist, and an officer of the SS and researcher into the Grail myths. He was born in Michelstadt, Germany, and died in Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol) in Austria. Speculation still surrounds Otto Rahn and his research.

From an early age, Rahn became interested in the legends of Parzival, the Holy Grail, Lohengrin and the Nibelungenlied. While attending the University of Giessen, he was inspired by his professor, Baron von Gall, to study the Albigensian (Catharism) movement and the massacre that occurred at Montségur.

In 1931, he travelled to the Pyrenees region of southern France where he conducted most of his research. Aided by the French mystic and historian Antonin Gadal, Rahn argued that there was a direct link between Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival and the Cathar Grail mystery. He believed that the Cathars held the answer to this sacred mystery and that the keys to their secrets lay somewhere beneath the mountain peak where the fortress of Montségur remains, the last Cathar fortress to fall during the Albigensian Crusade.

Rahn wrote two books linking Montségur and Cathars with the Holy Grail: Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail) in 1933 and Luzifers Hofgesind (Lucifer’s Court) in 1937. After the publication of his first book, Rahn’s work came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who was fascinated by the occult and had already initiated research in the south of France. Rahn joined his staff as a junior non-commissioned officer and became a full member of the SS in 1936, achieving the rank of Obersturmführer.

It was an uneasy partnership for Otto Rahn; later, he explained his SS membership to friends in the following way: “A man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?” Journeys for his second book led Rahn to places in Germany, France, Italy and Iceland. Openly homosexual, frequenting anti-Nazi circles, and having fallen out of favor with the Nazi leadership, Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937 as punishment for a drunken homosexual scrape. He resigned from the SS in 1939.

But the SS would not allow anyone to resign without consequences. Soon, Rahn found out the Gestapo was after him, and he was even offered the option of committing suicide. He vanished. On 13 March 1939, nearly on the anniversary of the fall of Montségur, Rahn was found frozen to death on a mountainside near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol) in Austria. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

Crazy stuff! 

Links, Various

Posted on by

• The Conversation: “How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation”

Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago.

For 95% of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.

We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.

• New York Times: “Marvin Creamer, a Mariner Who Sailed Like the Ancients, Dies at 104”

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.

But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch.He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.

Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

Skills like these, he long maintained, had let the master mariners of antiquity answer the seafarer’s ever-present, life-or-death question — Where am I? — and in so doing sail safely round the world.

“From everything I’ve read, the ancients didn’t feel uncomfortable out there,” Professor Creamer told The New York Times in 1978. “They didn’t have navigational tools, but they didn’t seem afraid to go to sea. I felt they might have known what they were doing, that they might have made predictable landfalls and having once hit a coast could have returned there.”

• Newsmax: “‘Mystery Is Over’ Regarding Lost Colony of Roanoke”

The English colonists who came to what became known as the “Lost Colony” never actually disappeared, according to a new book.

Rather, they went to live with their native friends, the Croatoans of Hatteras, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

“They were never lost,” said author Scott Dawson, who has researched records and dug up artifacts where the colonists lived with the Indians in the 16th century. “It was made up. The mystery is over.”

Dawson’s book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, which was published in June, highlights his research.

• We Are the Mighty: “The last shots of the American Civil War were fired in Russia”

Historians don’t talk much about naval action during the Civil War, certainly not as much as they do about the ground combat. If it’s not about a riverboat, the Monitor and the Merrimack, or damning torpedoes, it just doesn’t get the same attention.

The CSS Shenandoah did a lot of things worth talking about.

Her flag was the last Confederate flag to be lowered and she was the ship that took the Civil War to the global stage, looting and burning Union merchant shipping from Africa to India to Russia and back.

She took 38 prizes and more than a thousand prisoners, some of them joining the Confederate ship.

Shenandoah was built by the British. A fast, steam-powered screw ship, the Brits transferred her to a Confederate skeleton crew under Capt. James Waddell off the coast of Africa. From there, Shenandoah terrorized American ships in sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Pacific, and into the Bering Sea off Alaska.

At the time, however, Alaska belonged to the Russian Czar. And the Czar was friend to the United States. When Shenandoah began burning American whaling fleets in his territory, the Czar was not at all pleased.

Even after the Civil War was over, Shenandoah continued her Pacific rampage. The skipper just didn’t believe Lee’s surrender ended the war, even when American whaling captains told him so.

Pretty soon, he was the only Confederate still fighting. So he moved to shell the defenseless city of San Francisco. It was on his way to California that he met a British ship who confirmed the news: The Confederacy was gone and the captain and crew of the Shenandoah were going to be tried and hanged.

With every Navy in the world looking for Shenandoah and a hefty bounty on his head, Capt. Waddell disguised the ship, stowed its weaponry, and made a mad dash for Great Britain – the long way around.

Joanna Southcott

Posted on by

This advertisement appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1968 (hat tip: Ron Good). Who is Joanna Southcott, and what might be in her box? The indispensable Wikipedia tells us that:

Joanna Southcott (or Southcote) (April 1750 – 27 December 1814) was a self-described religious prophetess. She was born in the English hamlet of Taleford, baptised at Ottery St Mary, and raised in the village of Gittisham, all in Devon, England.

Originally of the Church of England, in about 1792 she joined the Wesleyans in Exeter. Becoming persuaded that she possessed supernatural gifts, she wrote and dictated prophecies in rhyme, and then announced herself as the Woman of the Apocalypse spoken of in a prophetic passage of the Revelation (12:1–6).

Coming to London at the request of William Sharp, the engraver, Southcott began selling paper “seals of the Lord” at prices varying from twelve shillings to a guinea. The seals were supposed to ensure the holders’ places among the 144,000 people who would be elected to eternal life.

At the age of 64, Southcott affirmed that she was pregnant and would be delivered of the new Messiah, the Shiloh of Genesis (49:10). The date of 19 October 1814 was that fixed for the birth, but Shiloh failed to appear, and it was given out that she was in a trance.

Southcott died not long after. The official date of death was given as 27 December 1814, but it is likely that she died the previous day, as her followers retained her body for some time in the belief that she would be raised from the dead. They agreed to its burial only after it began to decay.

Her followers are said to have numbered over 100,000 at the time of her death. As for her box:

Southcott left a sealed wooden box of prophecies, usually known as Joanna Southcott’s Box, with the instruction that it be opened only at a time of national crisis, and then only in the presence of all 24 bishops of the Church of England (there were only 24 at the time), who were to spend a fixed period of time beforehand studying Southcott’s prophecies. Attempts were made to persuade the episcopate to open it during the Crimean War and again during the First World War. In 1927, the psychic researcher Harry Price claimed that he had come into possession of the box and arranged to have it opened in the presence of one reluctant prelate, the suffragan Bishop of Grantham. It was found to contain only a few oddments and unimportant papers, among them a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol. Price’s claims to have had the true box have been disputed by historians and by followers of Southcott.

Southcottians claimed that the box opened in 1927 was not the authentic one and continued to press for the true box to be opened. An advertising campaign on billboards and in British national newspapers such as the Sunday Express was run in the 1960s and 1970s by one prominent group of Southcottians, the Panacea Society in Bedford (formed 1920), to try to persuade the twenty-four bishops to have the box opened. According to the Society, the true box is in their possession at a secret location for safekeeping, with its whereabouts to be disclosed only when a bishops’ meeting has been arranged. Southcott prophesied that the Day of Judgement would come in the year 2004, and her followers stated that if the contents of the box had not been studied beforehand, the world would have had to meet it unprepared.

The Panacea Society was founded by a “clergyman’s widow, Mabel Barltrop, who declared herself the ‘daughter of God’, took the name Octavia and believed herself to be the Shiloh of Southcott’s prophecies. She and twelve apostles founded the Society, originally called the Community of the Holy Ghost.” It really was a community – some seventy members lived at its building on Albany Street in Bedford in the 1930s. According to BBC Travel, it was:

Dominated by single women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, [who] sent squares of linen that they claimed would heal any affliction to more than 120,000 believers worldwide….

These women were unable or unwilling to keep up with a period of intense social change, according to museum manager Gemma Papineau. “They had the mentality of scared people trying to protect themselves,” she said. “They built high walls around their campus, locked themselves inside it and made sure that everyone living with them believed exactly the same as them.”

The Panaceans were mostly conservative, right-wing, Christian ‘spinsters’, raised in the Victorian era and excluded from positions of authority within the church and in their lives. Part of the reason they fell in love with Joanna Southcott’s story, perhaps, was because of the power it granted to an ageing, childless, single woman. They went so far as to configure the Christian Trinity as a square, with Octavia as the Daughter of God. Just as Eve had first brought sin into the world, they believed, it was up to a woman to erase it – and provide mankind’s ultimate redemption.

Alas, the number of members dwindled over the years and the last one died in 2012. With that, the society’s assets were transferred to the Panacea Charitable Trust, which exists to promote research into millenarian movements and to help relieve poverty in the Bedford area. It also operates the Panacea Museum, which is devoted to the society.

What about the box? If you’re really interested, a replica box is on display at the museum, and a book by Frances Brown can tell you more:

If the name of Joanna Southcott strikes a chord today, it is usually in connection with her famous Box of Sealed Prophecies. But, if asked what that Box is, some will assure you that it contains the secrets of the second coming, while others say that it holds nothing more significant than a woman’s lacy night cap and a pistol. As to where the Box is now, some repeat that it was opened in 1927 in Westminster Hall and that it is now housed in the Harry Price Library in London. Others have suggested that its contents are in the British Library, while the Box itself languishes in a cellar of the British Museum. Still others maintain that the Box no longer exists – if, indeed, it ever did.

The truth is far simpler yet in some ways more mysterious. The Box does exist. The author has seen and examined it. There has been an unbroken chain of custodians from Joanna’s day to this, and the present guardians of the Box take their responsibilities every bit as seriously as their predecessors. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that Joanna Southcott’s Box has not been opened for at least a hundred and fifty years and that it contains prophecies which have been kept with their seals intact ever since her death.

This book, by establishing the provenance of the Box, dispels the falsehoods that have blurred its history. Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Prophecies is locked, nailed and corded, its contents still awaiting examination.

Both Joanna Southcott and the Panacea Society sound very interesting and well worth further research. (Were they really a bunch of conservative spinsters, afraid of social change? The unconventionality of their faith would suggest otherwise.) Southcott herself reminds me of Hildegard of Bingen, Brigitte of Sweden, or Julian of Norwich – medieval women who received inspired messages, but of whom the Church had a great deal of suspicion. A website dedicated to reprinting Southcott’s writings may be found at joannasouthcott.com; judge for yourself if she was heretical. 

Georgia Guidestones

Posted on by

Raynah Roberts.

Reinhardt’s Provost Mark Roberts recently enjoyed a visit to the Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument erected in 1980 in Elbert County, Georgia. From Wikipedia:

The monument is 19 feet 3 inches (5.87 m) tall, made from six granite slabs weighing 237,746 pounds (107,840 kg) in all. One slab stands in the center, with four arranged around it. A capstone lies on top of the five slabs, which are astronomically aligned. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a short distance to the west of the structure, provides some notes on the history and purpose of the guidestones.

A set of 10 guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient language scripts.

The message is presented in a different language on each side of the four exterior stones: Russian, Chinese, Swahili, Spanish, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, and English. In this language it reads:

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

Who would have sponsored such a thing? No one knows! The story of how one R.C. Christian appeared out of nowhere, commissioned the monument from Elberton Granite Finishing, paid for it, and then disappeared, never to be seen again, is detailed in an interesting Wired article from ten years ago now. People surmise that “R.C. Christian” is a reference to “Christian Rosenkreuz,” the alleged founder of Rosicrucianism, and that the deliberately lowballed total human population number is intended as advice for the survivors of a nuclear war (this was a concern in 1980). Of course, the prescribed One-Worldism, the appeal to Enlightenment-style “reason,” and the seeming endorsement of eugenic practices are objectionable to a lot of people, especially around these parts. That Yoko Ono found it inspiring probably doesn’t help on this front. Some people have called the Guidestones a “sinister site,” the “Ten Commandments of the Antichrist,” and “of deep Satanic origin,” and vandals have occasionally attacked them.

But Elbert County, which owns the monument, has no plans to tear it down. In fact, locals appreciate the fact that they have such an enigmatic tourist attraction – one that, if nothing else, showcases the county’s granite, its most well known product.

Death in Australia

Posted on by

Something I just discovered: Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia from early 1966 until late 1967, disappeared while swimming near Melbourne on December 17, 1967. His body was never recovered, leading to a conspiracy theory that he was abducted by a Chinese submarine. John McEwan succeeded him as Prime Minister.

This is rather the opposite of another famous Australian death: the Tamam Shud case, for which there was a body, but no identity. An unidentified man was found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide on December 1, 1948. He carried nothing that revealed who he was, and even the tags on his clothing had been removed. An autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death. The mystery deepened when on January 14, 1949, a suitcase likely belonging to the man was recovered from the Adelaide railway station, which contained a number of things, none of which could help establish who he was. Shortly after that, a tiny piece of rolled-up paper was found in a fob pocket in the man’s trousers. It had been cut out of a book and bore the words “Tamam Shud” – Persian for “ended” or “finished,” the final words of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Following a public appeal, the edition from which the paper had been excised was found – along with indentations from handwriting on the inside of the back cover reading:

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

What this means has never been satisfactorily explained, and the identify of the Somerton Man and the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.

Mary Celeste

Posted on by

From History Today:

***

The Mary Celeste: ‘A curiosity that has never been satisfied’

The true story behind the much-mythologised ship and its vanished crew.

In 1884, the ‘phenomenally successful’ literary journal Cornhill Magazine published, anonymously, J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement. Purporting to ‘subjoin a few extracts’ from an article that appeared in the Gibraltar Gazette, it began:

In the month of December in the year 1873, the British ship Dei Gratia steered into Gibraltar, having in tow the derelict brigantine Marie Celeste, which had been picked up in latitude 38 degrees 40′, longitude 17 degrees 15′ W. There were several circumstances in connection with the condition and appearance of this abandoned vessel which excited considerable comment at the time, and aroused a curiosity which has never been satisfied.

The Gibraltar Gazette is fictional, Marie a variation on Mary, and the discovery takes place a year late, but otherwise, the above represents a fairly accurate summary of fact: on December 4th, 1872 a small cargo ship carrying 1700 barrels of alcohol bound for Genoa from New York was found by the Dei Gratia adrift in the Atlantic ocean. As is now well known, the Mary Celeste was completely abandoned. Speculation as to what happened to its crew has been a renewable source of debate ever since.

From hereon in, however Jephson’s statement on the fate of the ship and its crew enters the realm of fiction and, arguably, has stayed there ever since. It was the first work to be published in a major publication by Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous as creator of Sherlock Holmes and victim of the Cottingley Fairies hoax. Most writers could only dream of creating such an legacy with their first notable work. Conan Doyle’s sensational solution to the mystery (the culprit is a mutilated stowaway on a cutthroat jihad against all white men) captured public attention to such an extent that the British and American governments were prompted to respond with formal denials and official investigations. In something approaching a self-fullfilling prophecy, the Statement created an interest in the Mary Celeste that has endured, unsatisfied, for well over 100 years becoming a genre in its own right.

***

More at the link. Or perhaps not: see the Wikipedia article for more information, including the detail that Dei Gratia was not British, but Canadian.

The Princes in the Tower

Posted on by

One of the more evocative episodes in English history is the story of the “Princes in the Tower,” that is, the two sons of King Edward IV (d. 1483). Edward V (aged 12) and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York (aged 9), took up residence in the Tower of London in May 1483, but they subsequently disappeared, and their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, seized the throne as King Richard III. He may have enjoyed some initial support in this move (no one wanted a child monarch), but it didn’t go over well in the medieval equivalent of flyover country, giving Henry Tudor the opening he needed to get an invasion force together and defeat Richard at Bosworth in 1485.

From Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, *How to be Topp* (1954), chapter on “Uncles.”

But were they actually killed? Of course there would be rumors that the princes were still alive, and of course people would claim to be them, in the mode of the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn – thus Perkin Warbeck, a pretender who appeared during the reign of Henry VII. Workmen in the Tower uncovered a coffin containing two children’s skeletons in 1674; on the presumption that they were the remains of the Princes, Charles II had them buried in Westminster Abbey.

But their true fate remains a Mystery. Enter Philippa Langley, the finder of Richard III’s remains in 2012, who has embarked on a new quest to determine it. The Independent reports that she has:

“three key lines of investigation – two that have never been investigated before,” she said. “There are a couple of European lines of inquiry that are looking very interesting. We do know that [Richard III’s successor] Henry Tudor tried to destroy all copies of Richard’s legal right to the throne, the Titulus Regius. What we don’t know is how much of the other paperwork he destroyed quietly behind the scenes. So, we’re hoping that further [destruction] might not have taken place on the Continent. There might be more information available over there.”

Some British families with private archives dating to the Plantagenet and Tudor periods are also coming forward to open their doors to Ms Langley and her research team.

“We now have this incredible network of specialists around the world who are willing, ready and able to start new research into the princes. They just need to be told when, where and how and they’re ready to get on with it.

“This is a pure research project and it’s exciting in that we can go into it with a focus on this particular mystery.”

Ms Langley said she will be teaming up with professional cold case investigators, some of whom work with the police on unsolved murders.

“When you keep the paper historians out of it and ask those whose job it is to look into cold case histories, like the police, lawyers and private investigators they all say the same thing: that’s it’s very questionable whether there was a murder at all, considering what happened with all the pretenders that arrived under Henry Tudor’s reign; and second, that Richard III is not their prime suspect – because they go on motive, opportunity and proclivity.

“I’ll be using cold case history specialists because this project needs to go in places it has never gone before.”

My back gets up at her denigration of “paper historians” but hey, if she finds out what really happened, good for her. (But I guess that her attempt to discover Henry I didn’t pan out?)

UPDATE: From the article:

One area where no researcher will be allowed to investigate is the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey – where the bones said to belong to the princes were interred by Charles II four years after the discovery in 1674 of two children’s skeletons. The remains were found by workmen 10ft under the staircase leading to the chapel of the White Tower.

The Church of England, supported by the Queen, has repeatedly refused requests to exhume the remains so that forensic tests can be carried out.

The point of this is to make the Queen look obtuse, but the article does not mention that the bones were already exhumed in 1933, with a report published in Archaeologia in 1935. (I gleaned this information just now from Alison Weir’s The Princes in the Tower.) After examining the bones, Lawrence Tanner (archivist at Westminster Abbey) and William Wright (dental surgeon and president of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain) certainly came to believe that they were most likely the remains of the Princes. (Whether Richard III was directly responsible for their deaths is another question, of course, and perhaps the more contentious one: the Richard III Society has for years insisted that their namesake didn’t do it.)

A Medieval Mystery!

Posted on by

From Smithsonian.com:

A 13th-Century Sword Is Giving Historians a Headache
The sword’s inscription is an 800-year-old mystery

By Danny Lewis
smithsonian.com
August 4, 2015

The double-edged steel sword, which belongs to the British Museum, is on loan as part of an exhibit celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. Discovered in a river in 1825, the sword dates back to the same time that the Magna Carta was first written and was likely owned by a wealthy knight or a noble, writes Julian Harrison for the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog.

While the sword’s design is similar to others found and depicted in illuminated manuscripts from the same period, it has several distinctive features, namely an inscription down the length of the blade. Written in gold wire inlaid on one side of the blade, the inscription has baffled scholars for more than a century. It appears to read “+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+” and experts believe it has religious significance, writes Harrison. However, the language it was written in is still a mystery, making it impossible to translate.

The blade is also unusual in that it has two grooves running down its length and ending at the hilt. The grooves and the appearance of the characters used in the inscription have led some to believe the blade has Viking origins, but the overall shape and make of the sword is more likely Medieval European, according to the British Museum.

If all this is perking up your ears and you think you have the solution to the centuries-old conundrum, contact the British Museum and you might just win their eternal affection. Of course, if medieval scholarship is your thing, you’ll probably think the following is old news indeed: this kind of sword was common around the year 1300 and is considered to be a “classic ‘knightly’ sword.” While it weighs just shy of three pounds, the steel was so strong and flexible it wouldn’t shatter in battle — and with enough force, says the British Museum, it could cleave a man’s skull in two. Now that’s packing a punch.

 

The Green Children of Woolpit

Posted on by

From Pam Wilson, an interesting article (on MentalFloss):

Sometime during the 12th century, two children appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, seemingly out of nowhere. These were no ordinary orphans: The boy and girl spoke in an unknown tongue, sported strange clothing, and only ate raw beans. Oh, and their skin was green.

The green children’s story began when they emerged from one of the wolf-trapping pits for which the town is named. The pits—designed to lure and ensnare dangerous wolves—were likely at least twice as tall as the children and a couple hundred square feet in area. A reaper discovered the pair and took them into town, where Sir Richard de Calne gave them a home. In time, they lost their viridescent pallor and diversified their diets, though the boy became increasingly depressed and sickly before succumbing to illness and dying.

When the girl learned to speak English, she relayed the story of their underground homeland—St. Martin’s Land—where everything was green and it was always twilight. According to the girl, the boy was her brother. In one version of the story, she said that the siblings had been herding their father’s cattle when they heard a loud noise and suddenly found themselves at the bottom of a wolf pit. An alternate report states that the children had followed the herd into a cave and had become disoriented. The sound of bells led them out, but when they emerged from the cavern, they did so in Woolpit rather than St. Martin’s Land.

Historians have stitched the Woolpit narrative together from the reports of Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh. Although neither man had firsthand experience with the Green Children, and their secondhand retellings differ in their details, the overall story is the same. Ralph was a sixth abbot of Coggeshall who lived in a nearby county and had repeatedly heard the story from Richard de Caine himself. He wrote of it in the Chronicon Anglicanum around 1189. Monk and historian William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum also contains the story of the children, though he was more removed from the incident both physically and in time: His version was published circa 1220 and reportedly came from many “trustworthy sources.”

Even if you prefer one account over the other, a larger question remains: is this story a folktale or some botched version of actual history?

If the story is based on actual events, there are a few plausible explanations for the green tint. One theory is that the children had arsenic poisoning. The story goes that their caretaker, an earl from Norfolk, left them to die in a forest near the Norfolk-Suffolk border. Another more likely (and less depressing) culprit is chlorosis, a type of iron-deficiency spawned from malnutrition that leads to a greenish complexion.

Yet another (and perhaps most likely) theory postulates that they were the children of Flemish immigrants who were persecuted and killed—possibly in the battle at Fornham in 1173. Fornham St. Martin was a nearby village, separated from Woolpit by a river and just a few miles from Bury St. Edmunds, where loud bells often chimed. It’s possible that the children had been orphaned, suffered a poor diet while lost and on their own, and eventually made their way to Woolpit from Fornham St. Martin by following the clanging bells.

Whatever the children’s origin, the sister eventually became integrated into English society. She was baptized and allegedly later married a man at King’s Lynn, possibly an ambassador of Henry II, though conflicting reports say she became “rather loose and wanton in her conduct.” She may have taken the name “Agnes Barre,” though as with most things in the story of the Green Children, there’s simply no definitive evidence.