Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Why is a raving
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like a writing desk? It's a question asked by the
Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's famous title Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
and though many have tried to answer it, the truth
is the question has no answer, much like another question,
how is Lewis Carroll linked to the Knights Templar? Like
Carroll's original question, there's no clear answer, at least not
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that anyone is aware of. However, his story of a
girl who discovers a magical world down a rabbit hole
is not the only one. Several years ago, a farmer
in Shropshire, England, had walked through a wooded area on
his property when he noticed several large holes in the ground.
He assumed they were rabbit holes leading to a massive
underground warren. Upon closer inspection, though, he discovered the holes
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led to something else. Somewhere else Beneath the forest was
a network of caves and man made rooms, carved entirely
from sandstone. Enormous stone pillars held up arched ceilings only
a meter below the farmer's feet, and some areas were
so small their entrances so narrow they could only be
accessible by crawling on one's hands and knees. Known as
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Kington Temple, the chambers bore a striking resemblance to those
of a place of worship. Many thought the site had
been the venue for countless ceremonies, ranging to black magic
rituals to Christian gatherings. In fact, the caves possessed several
features that lent credence to that belief, including a font
and drawings of crosses on the walls. The crosses helped
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fuel speculation as to the cave's true purpose, as they
looked much like the crosses worn by the Knights Templar,
the military order that fought in the Crusades and allegedly
protected the Holy Grail. For a long time, it was
believed that the underground refuge was the resting area for
the Knights. Later, after the order was dissolved, it became
a place of worship for their followers. In addition to
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the crosses, the temple's nave, or central gathering area, was
round in shape, carved in the image of the Church
of the Holy Sepulture, which according to tradition, sits on
the site of both the Crucifixion and the burial of Jesus.
Rumors of the cave's religious origins brought more than historians
to its hidden corridors. Since the nineteen eighties, tourists, vandals,
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and practitioners of the occult have flocked to the sandstone hideaway,
carving things into the walls and leaving garbage behind. As
a result, the area was closed off to the public
by the property owner in two thousand twelve. In that time,
more information about the caves has um surfaced. For one,
it has never been a place of worship for the
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Knights Templar or their followers. It hadn't even been built yet.
Kanton Temple was most likely a product of the Victorian era,
carved hundreds of years after the Knights Templar had been dissolved.
During that time, elaborate ornamental structures such as this were
common among wealthy members of the British elite. They provided
only decoration, even though they're very architecture betrays a sense
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of purpose. However, instead of a replica Roman temple or
an Egyptian pyramid in someone's garden, the owner at the
time had decided to carve an entire temple out of
sandstone beneath an English forest. England is full of ancient
caves and underground structures. Kara Dot Cave and all Stretton
is a large opening in volcanic rock and is believed
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to be where British chieftain Caracticus hid out while resisting
the Roman army during first century a d And another
folly similar to Kington Temple, the Hawkstone Grotto, was carved
out of an old copper mine adjacent to a large
manor house. There are many of these edifices and man
made caverns we know about, and chances are some have
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yet to be rediscovered. England, of course, is a vast
country with thousands of years of history behind it, but
we still don't know everything. To achieve that, we might
just need to dive a little deeper down the rabbit hole.
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It's the thought that counts, right At least, that's what
we tell ourselves when we get a gift that doesn't
seem quite the right fit for us. We should just
be thankful someone thought of us at all, Except that
isn't always the case. Sometimes no gift is the best
gift of all. A woman from Edinburgh must have felt
that way when her friend returned from a trip to
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i row In In the friend's luggage was a modest
necklace made from glass beads, a thoughtful token from a
far away land, though the woman might not have accepted
it had she known where exactly in Cairo, her friend
had obtained it an ancient tomb. Even though the necklace
had been a gift from someone close, the woman didn't
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think much of it and set it aside. For seven years.
It lived among her jewelry, getting pushed deeper and deeper
out of the way, until nineteen twenty, when she rediscovered it.
It still didn't suit her taste, and enough time had
passed where she didn't feel guilty getting rid of it,
so she tossed it in the small waste basket beside
her bed. She awoke the following night and reached for
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her pair of slippers that she kept nearby when something
grabbed her wrist. At least she thought something had grabbed her,
but when she looked down she didn't see anything. There
were strange sounds coming from the waste basket, too, like
something was crawling around inside it. She looked down, but
there was some paper and a string of beads. She
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snatched the necklace in a panic and threw it outside
her door. The woman told her brother about the incident
the following day. He was a doctor and someone who
would scoff at stories of strange sounds in the middle
of the night, but his sister was not one to
make up such outlandish things, so he took the necklace
home with him to see it for himself. That night,
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he placed it under his pillow and went to sleep.
At four o'clock the next morning, he was awoken by
loud banging on the walls. He also felt a hand
moving under his pillow, as though it was trying to
take the necklace from him. His neighbors asked him the
following day why he'd been hanging pictures in the middle
of the night when he should have been getting sleep.
He had woken everyone up, They said, one nightly experiment
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wasn't enough to render a sound judgment, though, so the
man spent another night with the ancient bobble beneath his head.
That evening, his bed started to shake, and for a
whole week he experienced bizarre visits from an unnamed entity
that haunted his bedroom. His part of the experiment was over,
but he needed a wider sample size, so he gave
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the necklace to a friend who had a similar experience
involving an invisible hand reaching for them during the night.
That person passed it on to someone else, who gave
it to another person, all who reported the same stories
the necklace had invited something into their homes. Even more strange,
each person who possessed the necklace woke up in a
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cold sweat, their hearts beating out in their chest, as
though they'd come face to face with a ghost. Eventually,
stories about the necklace made their way to a local newspaper.
The reporter J. W. Harry's printed an article about the
cursed object, including quotes from each person who had slept
with it under their pillows. As you might imagine, the
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article spread like wildfire, but Harris wanted to learn more
about the necklace. He borrowed it and had it examined
by the Royal Scottish Museum, which told him the blue
beads were rough three thousand years old. Though an interesting piece,
there was nothing particularly special about it. It didn't look
like something used in a religious ceremony or a ritual
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of any kind. Harry's took the piece home, and after
his family had retired for the night, he placed it
on the mantel and took a seat in his living room,
book in his lap. It wasn't long before he started
hearing sounds rustling in the sideboard, someone knocking here and there,
what steps in the hall. He ran around the house,
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chasing each of the sounds, but when he looked for
a source, he found nothing. Harry's even included his wife,
who didn't know that her husband had brought the necklace
home in these experiments. He took it into the bedroom
where his wife was sitting up, still awake, and hid
the necklace out of sight. The lights dimmed, then returned
to normal. They did so consistently for minutes at a time.
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Eventually Harry's turned off the lights and then the rustling
sounds began again. After a week, Harry's decided to unload
the necklace on another unsuspecting soul, an architect named James Dunn,
while the others dealt with rustling and mild tapping. Donne
experienced crashing sounds in the middle of his bedroom, so
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loud that they scared his dog. Harry's also told someone
else about the necklace, someone familiar with the supernatural, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle. He told Harry's how ancient Egyptians would
enchant their tombs with spirit entities to guard them after
their death. It was possible that the necklace had been
taken from one of those tombs without permission, disturbing the entity,
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and so Harry's gave the jewelry back to its original owner,
the woman from Edinburgh, who wanted nothing to do with it.
She told her brother, the doctor, to take it away
from her, which he did on a trip to Loch Levin.
He reached into his pocket, pulled the necklace out, and
threw it into the water, where it's been ever since.
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But that wasn't the end for the Gyptian relic. Soon after,
a young woman in Edinburgh was reported to be writing
strange letters that didn't seem to make any sense. Of course,
kids make up silly words all the time, but what
made this incident noteworthy was that her writing hand was
doing it automatically independence of the rest of her body.
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It turns out that what everyone thought was gibberish was
in fact a message scribbled backwards, supposedly taken from the
deity protecting the Egyptian tomb from which the necklace had
been taken, and this deity was revealing the location of
the necklace and that it was probably best for it
to stay there. Jewelry is a lovely gift in most situations.
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Better than that, though, is something much more comforting relief
from an Egyptian curse. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me
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Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make
another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,