Shadows Corner

  THE STONE ON THE CHAIN (UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS) A special story is connected to the Utrecht stone (city in the Netherlands), which is riveted to the corner house of the Eligenhof and the Oudegracht number 364. The large stone was originally placed there to protect the house from damage when towing cargo or driving cars. It was already there in 1520. The stone on the chain But there was something wrong with the stone, which looked so ordinary during the day. Imagine... at twelve o'clock at night at New Moon, when you stuck a pin in one of her pale veins, blood flowed out. And that was not all! Not by a long shot... In the middle of the night all kinds of evil spirits, giants, witches and sorcerers came. They danced around the stone. They marched with it over the boulders of the Oudegracht. They bounced like a ball back and forth from the Vollersbrug over the Oudegracht to the Geertebrug. Back and forth! Hoepla! Fuss! It was a terrible noise and the citizens of Utrecht could not fall...

  TREACHERY, MURDER AND A PHANTOM ON THE BATTLEMENTS CORFE CASTLE Corfe Castle is a fortification standing above the village of the same name on the Isle of Purbeck peninsula i n the English county of Dorset. Built by William the Conqueror , the castle dates to the  11th century  and commands a gap in the Purbeck Hills on the route between Wareham and Swanage. The first phase was one of the earliest castles in England to be built at least partly using stone when the majority were built with earth and timber. Corfe Castle underwent major structural changes in the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1572, Corfe Castle left the Crown's control when Elizabeth I sold it to Sir Christopher Hatton. Sir John Bankes bought the castle in 1635, and was the owner during the English Civil War. His wife, Lady Mary Bankes, led the defence of the castle when it was twice besieged by Parliamentarian forces. The first siege, in 1643, was unsuccessful, but by 1645 Corfe was one of the last remainin...

  Specters and vanishing tombstones at Kennecott Copper Mines Ghosts of the old territorial days are with us everywhere. Alaska is littered with abandoned Russian settlements, deserted prospecting sites and the wreckage of so many doomed expeditions into the cold, dark and mysterious Far North.  Spirits of the ancients are even said to be trapped in the great animals roaming the Great Land, ferrying souls from this realm to the next. And while there's talk of ghosts and spirits rustling in trees, haunting old lodges, moaning in the mountain passes and dwelling near shipwrecks, only one recurring premonition can be said to have scared off state government. It's somehow fitting that perhaps the greatest concentration of paranormal activity in Alaska's vast lands has been reported  near one of the world's richest-known gold and copper strike s. The old railroad that serviced  the Kennecott copper mines  in the Valdez and Chitina mining districts is said to be so ha...

  THE MENHIRS (Wéris, Belgian Ardennes) The menhir (from the Breton "men" = stone and "hir" = long) is a monolith, less wide than high, erected vertically and set in the ground.  Was it placed as a marker of a burial place, as part of a solar cult or as a striking boundary post? Many hypotheses have been put forward, but none of them have been conclusive. Archaeological excavations in Wéris brought to light unprecedented menhirs. Some of these 'recovered' menhirs were probably moved or buried during t he Gallo-Roman period . Others were buried, either by the first Christians who wanted to wipe out all traces of pagan civilisation, or by farmers in the Middle Ages or later who wanted to cultivate the largest possible area of their land. For some of these "recovered" menhirs, archaeologists have rediscovered, in the ground, the traces of the pits in which the dolmen men of the SOM culture,  some 5,000 years ago , put them. But... Not all the stones c...

  The Controversial Dashka Stone: 120 Million-Year-Old Map? The Dashka Stone is a controversial artifact that it is believed by some to be the guidelines used by the architect of the world. Known as  the Map of the Creator , this stone tablet has baffled researchers since its discovery in 1999. As impossible as it may seem, Russian experts believe the stone map, could be  120 million years  old. The Dashka slab depicts not only the environs of the Ural Mountains, but also a series of civil engineering projects including 7457 miles (12,000 km) of channels, several dams, and hieroglyphic notations of unknown origin. The accuracy and perspective of the map suggest that it was created from an aerial point of observation. The hieroglyphs have not, as of the time of writing, been deciphered but are thought to be related to an ancient form of Chinese. Archeologists from the Bashkir State University discovered the Dashka stone in the Ural Mountains of eastern Russia on July ...