A photo sometimes said to depict members of Chiloé’s murderous society of warlocks—founded, so they claimed, in 1786 and destroyed by the great trial of 1880-81.

When the Sect needs a new Invunche, the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180, that is until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.

There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a work-bench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the Invunche is complete.

The world’s last great witch trial took place as recently as 1880. It was held on the remote Chilean island of Chiloé, and featured remarkable allegations of mass murder, child mutilation and sorcery, all committed in the name of a strange sort of alternative government known as La Provincia Recta – ‘The Righteous Province’ – a sect of warlocks, based in a hidden cave and given to flying about the island wearing magical waistcoats stitched from the flayed skin of the recently deceased.

The native Chilotes believed these warlocks had real powers. Bruce Chatwin, in In Patagonia, wrote a memorable description of their rites and rituals. (And fans of Swamp Thing era Alan Moore will spot the source of one of his more disturbing plots.) But – truly unusual though the story is, was it ever rooted in reality? This week’s Smithsonian essay explores the evidence. But it’s not for the faint-hearted.

A plan of Baiae’s mysterious “Oracle of the Dead,” showing the complex layout of the tunnels and their depth below ground level.

In 1932, the entrance to a hitherto unknown tunnel was discovered in the ruins of the old Roman resort of Baiae, on the Bay of Naples. Packed with rubble, wreathed in choking gases, and heated to more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit by nearby magma chambers, it was difficult and dangerous to excavate. But when, after 10 long years of work, the amateur team exploring it finally broke through to lower levels, they uncovered something truly remarkable: a complex, pre-dating the Romans, built around a boiling underwater stream that seemed to have been designed to ape a visit to the Greeks’ mythical underworld.

Who built the tunnels at Baiae – and for what purpose? When and why were they blocked up? And do the theories proposed by the discoverers really add up? This week’s Smithsonian essay weighs the evidence.

The Land of Cockaigne, in an engraving after a 1567 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Cockaigne was a peasant’s vision of paradise that tells us much about life in the medieval and early modern periods. A sure supply of rich food and plenty of rest were the chief aspirations of those who sang the praises of this idyllic land.

Men and women have always dreamed of paradise – and for many, in the years before the world was fully explored, it was somewhere that might have a physical existence in some distant corner of the earth. This week’s Smithsonian essay takes a look at what’s been said about an earthly arcadia, from the medieval Land of Cockaigne (a villein’s playground that offered a mirror image of life as it was led in this period, with plenty of rest, a ban on work, and food that literally threw itself into the mouths of inhabitants) to Russia’s much more spiritual peasant paradise, Belovode, the “Kingdom of White Waters.” More intriguingly, it tracks some of the many very real expeditions that set out over the years to locate these lands of dreams – and focuses on one especially remarkable myth in particular: widespread belief among the first Irish convicts who were transported to Australia that it was possible to walk from the penal colony near Sydney all the way to sanctuary China.

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”

That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements.

The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost. One version of the story holds that it was so terrible that the 13th Earl’s heir flatly refused to have it revealed to him. Yet the mystery of Glamis (pronounced “Glarms”) remains, kept alive by its association with royalty (the heir was grandfather to Elizabeth II) and by the fact that at least some members of the Bowes-Lyon family insisted it was real.

This celebrated historical mystery seems to be largely forgotten now, but as late as the 1970s it was chilling new generations as a staple of numerous ghost books. Come to think of it, paperback compilations of old ghost stories seem to have gone the way of the dodo as well, but those crumbly Armada books used to frighten me when I was young. Anyway, you can read the unexpurgated story over at Past Imperfect.

[This is a fully revised, expanded and updated account of a mystery first discussed here, featuring the fruits of much subsequent research.]

he began to contemplate the Passion of Christ… and his fervor grew so strong within him that he became wholly transformed into Jesus through love and compassion…. While he was thus inflamed, he saw a seraph with six shining, fiery wings descend from heaven. This seraph drew near to St Francis in swift flight, so that he could see him clearly and recognize that he had the form of a man crucified… After a long period of secret converse, this mysterious vision faded, leaving… in his body a wonderful image and imprint of the Passion of Christ. For in the hands and feet of Saint Francis forthwith began to appear the marks of the nails in the same manner as he had seen them in the body of Jesus crucified.

In all, Francis found that he bore five marks: two on his palms and two on his feet, where the nails that fixed Christ to the cross were traditionally believed to have been hammered home, and the fifth on his side, where the Bible says Jesus had received a spear thrust from a Roman centurion.

Francis had been marked by the stigmata. But how? Had they been placed there by God? Or had the future saint inflicted the wounds on himself? Why are so many stigmatics women – and why are so few Protestants? The answers are revealing, and you can read more in this week’s Past Imperfect essay here.

In 1782, an unknown French engineer offered his government an invention better than radar: the ability to detect ships at distances of up to 700 miles. There were many who said that his ideas worked. But was Étienne Bottineau a genius, a fantasist or a fraud?

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet.

No structure in the world is more mysterious than the Great Pyramid. But who first broke into its well-guarded interior, and when? And what did they find there?

A reinvestigation of a neglected mystery. Old Arab accounts say that it was the Caliph Ma’mun who first broke into the Great Pyramid in 820 AD – driving a new tunnel into the north face of the monument and, by an astounding coincidence, striking the interior network of passages at precisely the point where the hidden upper network of tunnels leading to the King’s Chamber branches off from the main descending passage.

How credible is this story? Why has every writer on the pyramids since the mid-nineteenth century misdated Ma’mun’s visit to Giza by more than a decade? And what exactly is the lost source for some of the most remarkable of the details given in traditional accounts?

Fresh research in medieval Muslim chronicles provides at least some of the answers… and you can read the full story here.

Name: unknown. Cause of death: unknown. Occupation: unknown – but perhaps a former ballet dancer. Possessions: one pack of cigarettes (half filled with a different brand of smoke); one hidden pocket, concealing a scrap of paper with two words in Persian, torn from a rare first edition book; five lines written in an unknown code. Welcome to the world’s most perplexing cold case. Can you help to solve the mystery?

The discovery of a body on an Adelaide beach in December 1948 sparked an investigation that remains active to this day. Was the dead man a lover or a fighter – a new father or a spy? Why might an expert witness at the inquest suggest that he had habitually worn high-heeled shoes? Was Australia’s most eminent pathologist right conclude he had been killed by an ultra-rare muscle relaxant normally used to tip poison arrows in Somalia? And what of the mysterious phrase ‘Tamám Shud’? It’s from Omar Khayyam, but how is it that the two editions of the poet’s famous Rubaiyat that are central to the case seem not to actually exist?

It’s a fifty-one-star, gold-plated puzzler, all right. Confused? I’m afraid you probably still will be even after reading the full article here…

Kersey in 1957. Although Jack Merriott's watercolor presents an idealized image of the village – it was commissioned for use in a railway advertising campaign – it does give an idea of just how 'old' Kersey must have looked to strangers in the year it became central to a 'timeslip' case.

Looking back, the really strange thing was the silence. The way the church bells stopped ringing as the little group of naval cadets neared the village. The way even the ducks stood quiet and motionless by the shallow stream that ran across the road where the main street began.

When Bill Laing and two other new recruits to the Royal Navy were ordered to take part in a routine map-reading exercise one October day in 1957, the aim was to find their way a few miles cross country to the Suffolk village of Kersey – not back in time to the village as it had been sometime between 1349 and 1420. But the strange, frightening and deserted place that the three boys encountered looked nothing like any 20th century hamlet. So where – and when – were they?

A reinvestigation of a little-known ´´timeslip´´ case kicks off the new Smithsonian blog Past Imperfect – and you can read the full article here.

Change of address...

Just a brief note to let everyone know that for the time being, at least, I’m going to be consolidating the work I do on the blogs I write – this one, the parent site maintained at CFI Blogs, and my history blog A Blast From The Past. Or to put it another way, I’m going to be writing a future posts – mostly historical, but with some Forteana thrown in when I get the chance to do it – for a new blog, Past Imperfect, which is being launched by the Smithsonian.

There are a few reasons for this decision. The Smithsonian’s a high profile and prestigious institution, and it makes sense to use its considerable clout to get my work in front of as many new people as possible. They’re willing to pay me, which isn’t that common in the blogosphere. And because of that I can justify creating a lot more content, which ought to work for everyone, I hope. I’m certainly painfully aware that I’ve been letting work for AFITA slip for quite a few months now.

The deal I’ve done gives the Smithsonian exclusive rights to new content for the first three months, but after that I’m free to repost. So I plan to announce new articles of Fortean interest here with a preview and a link for now, and will come back and repost full articles when the exclusivity period expires.

The good news is the first article the Smithsonian has selected is Fortean in content – it’s another timeslip case, a sister piece for my post on the Battle of Nechtanesmere. And there should be more of interest to readers of the CFI site within a week or two.

Wish me luck.