The wizard of Mauritius

Port Louis, Mauritius, August 1782. The French Indian Ocean colony—highly vulnerable to British attack at the height of the American Revolutionary War—is in a state of alert. The governor, Viscomte François de Souillac, has been warned that a flotilla of 11 ships is approaching his island. Fearing that this is the long-awaited invasion fleet, De [...]

Inside the Great Pyramid

There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot [...]

“Tamám Shud”

Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it. The wife did it. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives are generally clear. Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template, where the killer is a stranger or the [...]

Three 1950s youths in a medieval plague village

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. And, when the boys thought about [...]

Natives of the Red Dragon

Today is St David’s Day, the national day of Wales, and it seems an appropriate moment to post what remains perhaps my very favourite story among all the thousands of strange tales that I have read. That is a large claim – I tend to read a fair bit – but I still find what [...]

An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end

There is no more forbidding place on earth. Bouvet Island lies in the furthest reaches of the storm-wracked Southern Ocean, far south even of the Roaring Forties. It is a speck of ice in the middle of a freezing fastness: a few square miles of uninhabited volcanic basalt groaning under several hundred feet of glacier, [...]

Erotic secrets of Lord Byron’s tomb

It was hot and dusty in the crypt, and it had been hard work breaking into it. Now the vicar had gone, along with his invited guests, to take his supper. The churchwarden and two workmen armed with spades were left to wait for their return, loitering by the grave they had come to examine [...]

The chupatty movement

“There is a most mysterious affair going on throughout the whole of India at present,” wrote Dr Gilbert Hadow in a letter to his sister at home in Britain dated March 1857. “No one seems to know the meaning of it… It is not known where it originated, by whom or for what purpose, whether [...]

The miniature coffins found on Arthur’s Seat

It may have been Charles Fort, in one of his more memorable passages, who described the strange discovery best: London Times, July 20, 1836: That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’ burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon [...]

The Monster of Glamis: a first draft

[For a completely revised and more detailed account of the same mystery, featuring the fruits of much new research, see here.] Glamis Castle, in Scotland, is a famous place: a picture-postcard tourist destination, childhood home of the late-lamented Queen Mother Gawd Bless ‘Er™, and – not incidentally for the purposes of this blog – notoriously [...]