April 8, 2024

TRX | S5E03 | FOUND

How great is it when you finally come across that item you thought was lost for good? Or how about when you come across a surprise treasure in a place that’s completely unexpected? I’m your host, Leah…I’m Phil…and I’m Steve. Today we’ll be talking about those intriguing discoveries. This is Season Five, Episode 3: FOUND

Don’t you love it when you find something that you thought was lost forever? Have either of you ever found anything that you had lost? (Discuss) I was recently reading about a car dealer who had sold a new car to an older couple. They traded in their old car for a new one as a gift to themselves for their upcoming 50th anniversary. While the dealership was cleaning the older car, they noticed something shiny underneath the molding by the door. With a screwdriver they managed to fish out a golden ring. The salesman called the couple and told them he had found something in their car that they might want. When they came in the older gentleman was stunned and overjoyed to see his wedding ring which had been missing for many years. The newfound ring made their 50th anniversary much more special. We have some other stories about found rings later in this episode.

The whole notion of finding things is appealing to everyone. You might recall our S3E4 titled Treasure Hunt which detailed many fortunate finds. Another episode from S4E14 called Outlandish Artifacts described several of the most unusual archeological finds from recent years. Countless bedtime stories, books, and movies detail finding lost treasure, lost items, lost animals, and lost people. In our last episode we featured several prominent items, ideas, and even people who were lost. Today we are on a more upbeat note. This show is all about finding things, many of which were thought to have been long lost and other things which were previously unknown.

Movies

In our last episode, which was called Lost, one of our segments was on movies. We detailed how before 1950 movie film was made of nitrate which was notoriously unstable and flammable. It is estimated that some 90% of movies made before 1929 have been lost. Many of these were due to fires in storage vaults. Originally, many copies of these films were made and distributed to movie theaters throughout the country and around the world. At the end of their run, they were supposed to be returned to the studio, but there is always the chance, and the hope, that some of the copies of these movies might not have been returned and could still be in the hands of private collectors or stored in some forgotten

location. In fact, some movies that were thought lost have been found in this way. And that leads us to this happy segment; movies that were thought to be lost, but are now found!

According to the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov in 2014 they learned of the passing of a collector of old movies named Al Dettlaff of Cudahy, Wisconsin. The manager of their Silent Film Project, a gentleman named Mike Mashon, arranged to purchase Dettlaff’s entire collection. Most of the films were copies of movies that were already known to exist. But there was one canister that contained something that Mike had only dreamed about. It was the only known copy of the 1910 film Frankenstein which was produced by Edison Electric. It is thought to be the first Frankenstein movie ever made. It is only twelve minutes long but has now been digitally restored and is available on the L. of C’s YouTube channel.

Speaking of the Library of Congress Silent Film Project, another rare film came their way completely by accident in 2014. One of their employees, Lynanne Schweighofer, a Moving Image Preservation Specialist, got a call from her mother who lived in a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. It happened that an elderly neighbor with no family had died, and Lynanne’s mother was the executor of the neighbor’s will. In preparing the house for sale, Lynanne’s father had found eight canisters of movie film in the rafters of the garage. “Send them to me,” Lynanne told her mother. When the films arrived, Lynanne began the process of examining them. She was stunned to find that the films contained newsreel footage of the 1924 World Series between the Washington Senators and the New York Giants. There were scenes from various angles showing base hits and runs being scored. The last four innings were pitched by the Senators famous hurler Walter Johnson. The game ended on an infield fly ball. The Senators won the game and the series 4 to 3 and the fans rushed onto the field. Until this film turned up, only a few photographs of this game were known to exist. You can also watch it on the L of C’s YouTube channel.

These weren’t the only films found stored in odd places. In 2006 a carpenter named Peter Massey was making repairs to an old barn in New Hampshire when he came upon seven old film canisters. After hauling them around in his pickup truck for a few days, Massey turned the films over to a local college library which forwarded them to the L of C. One of the films caused researchers’ jaws to drop. It was a 1911 movie called Their First Misunderstanding starring an 18 year old actress named Mary Pickford. Pickford went on to become a big Hollywood star and was one of the founders of United Artists as well as the Motion Picture Academy. This was her very first film. In it, Pickford along with her co-star Owen Moore portray a young couple having their first argument. "It's like finding an early song by George Gershwin, or an unpublished short story by Mark Twain,” exclaimed one film historian.

An article in movieweb.com details several other recently found movies. They include:

Zepped 1916 Starring Charlie Chaplin. In this 7 minute WWI propaganda film Chaplin’s Little Tramp character helps to warn the public about the potential dangers of a Zeppelin attack. The film was found in 2008 in a thrift store in London.

Outside the Law 1920 Starring Lon Chaney. This gangster picture was found in the 1970s in a barn in Minnesota.

Tarzan and the Golden Lion 1927. This featured James Pierce, a well-known actor and football player as the leading man. The film was found in a French hospital in the 1990s, and

The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928. The French silent film was found in a mental hospital in Norway in the 1980s.

Who knows what other missing film treasures might be out there. Let’s start searching!

Where’s My Mummy?

For this next story we are shifting the direction a bit from finding something that was lost to finding something unexpected inside something else. From history.com and also cnn.com we learn about a private investor from The Netherlands who purchased a bronze statue from a Buddhist Temple in China. While the statue was being carried to a preservation specialist in The Netherlands, workers detected that the statue’s weight appeared to shift in an unexpected manner. The preservationist suspected that there might be something inside the statue. To confirm his suspicion, he had the statue taken to the Meander Medical Center in the nearby Dutch town of Amersfoort (pronounced amerzfort). There, the medical staff carefully slid the statue into a full body CT Scan. The image on the screen showed the form of a human body in the lotus position sitting inside the statue.

It appears that over a thousand years ago Buddhist monks in China, Japan, and Thailand developed the unusual practice of self mummification. Evidently they believed that this would better prepare them for the afterlife. Monks interested in mummification would spend several years eating a special diet of acorns, berries, tree bark, and pine needles. They would also drink poisonous tea made of tree sap that repelled maggots and acted as an embalming agent.

After years of this strict diet the monk was nearing starvation. His buddy monks would bury him in an underground chamber but give him a bamboo tube to breathe through. He was also given a bell to ring each day to let the other monks know that he was still alive. Breathing through the tube, the monk would sit in the lotus position and repeat chants. When the bell stopped ringing the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. Three years later the monks would dig him up. If the body had mummified it was moved to a nearby temple and honored.

Back at the hospital in Amersfoort (amerzfort) technicians used a specially designed endoscope to retrieve samples of the mummy’s body. Studying the CT Scan they also discovered that the mummy’s internal organs had been removed. Inside the chest cavity they found small pieces of paper with Chinese characters written on them. From these, researchers believe the monk’s name was Liuquan (Leah Quan). They believe that he lived about a thousand years ago.

Though historians have long been familiar with the practice of Buddhist monks from that era mummifying themselves in this fashion, this is the first one ever to be found inside a statue. Carbon dating on the statue places it from the 14th century, thus the monk mummy was already some 300 years old before the statue was created. It is unknown why this particular monk was encased inside the statue of Buddha.

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Uluburun Shipwreck

This story comes to us from the Institute of Nautical Archeology and their website nauticalarch.org. Leah mentioned our S4E14 called Outlandish Artifacts. One story in that episode featured Pharaoh Kufu’s boat which was found buried next to the Great Pyramid. It gave evidence of the superior ship building techniques that were used by the Ancient Egyptians 4,500 years ago. They have just opened a new museum for it in Cairo.

Well, in 1982 a sponge diver named Mehmet Cakir was diving off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey when he stumbled upon what he described as “metal biscuits with ears”. Exploring a bit further he realized that he had happened upon the remains of an ancient shipwreck. The ancient wreck had been at the bottom of the sea for so long that much of its cedar hull had disappeared, but Çakir spotted several ceramic jars as well as hundreds of glass, copper and tin ingots.

Cakir’s discovery has come to be called the Uluburun Shipwreck named for the coastal region of Turkey where it was located (Uluburun translates to Grand Cape in Turkish). Dating to the 13th Century B.C., it is one of the oldest shipwrecks to be discovered. The Institute of Nautical Archeology spent eleven seasons diving to the site completing some 22,000 dives. They recovered a treasure trove of relics ranging from elephant tusks, hippopotamus teeth, jewelry, and a scarab inscribed with the name of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.

But perhaps the most important part of the find was the cargo which was still intact. It consisted of ingots of copper and tin in a 10:1 ratio. And what do you get when you mix ten parts of copper with one part of tin? The answer indicates the Age in which this ship comes from: Bronze.

Researchers have determined that the copper ingots came from Cyprus, so it is likely that this ship was transporting these raw materials across the sea to the Greek mainland where they would be worked into bronze products. However, it is unknown if this was a Greek ship. Personal effects from the passengers and crew ranged from a wide area. Researchers speculate that the ship was a merchant vessel manned by an international crew.

Portions of the ship’s hull, constructed of Lebanese cedar, were still intact. Similar to Pharaoh Khufu’s boat, this ship had been constructed of individually carved wooden pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Quoting from the INA’s website, “Close study of the cargo and hull remains of the Uluburun wreck has provided a special glimpse into the Bronze Age, its material cultures, and aspects of construction, economic exchange, and transportation.” It is a unique window into the Bronze Age world of some 3,300 years ago.

Lake Michigan StoneHenge

Speaking of shipwrecks, back in 2007 Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan University was conducting some underwater research at Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay near Traverse City. This is located on the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Holley was hoping to locate and chart the locations of various shipwrecks. Using sonar technology and underwater cameras he did locate a half dozen or so sunken barges and ships as well as a Civil War era pier and several cars, but no sign of Jimmy Hoffa from our S4E15. But Holley did find something totally unexpected which has caused a good deal of excitement.

Buried in about 40 feet of water Holley spotted a circular pattern of large stones arranged like the famous StoneHenge in England. Intrigued by these images he conducted a personal dive to the site and brought back some remarkable photographs. The stones appeared to be deliberately placed in a pattern on the bed of Lake Michigan. Even more exciting was the presence of marks on the rocks that didn’t look natural. Examining the photographs Holley determined that one rock had the image of a mastodon clearly carved into it.

Holley immediately held a press conference detailing the find. He has asked for a team of petroglyph experts to come to Michigan and verify the find, but there is a problem. The stone is still buried under 40 feet of water. Quoting Holley, “They want to actually see it,” he said. “Unfortunately,” he added, “Experts in petroglyphs generally don’t dive, so we’re running into a little bit of a stumbling block there.”

If verified, the Traverse City Rock Circle as it has come to be called would not be out of place. Other known rock circles have been discovered in Michigan and other Midwestern states including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. The fact that the Traverse City site is some forty feet under Lake Michigan does make this unusual, but it can also perhaps help to date the discovery.

Holley explained that during the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years ago, the level of Lake Michigan was considerably lower than it is today. The Traverse City site would not have been underwater at that time. In addition, mastodon may have also still been in the area then, though they were rapidly becoming extinct.

This information was in an article from zmescience.com from 2017. We haven’t been able to locate any further details about Holley’s find being verified by petroglyph specialists. Perhaps we can help. If any of our listeners happens to know a petroglyph expert who can fit into a wetsuit, please contact Professor Mark Holley at Northwestern Michigan University. We need to get to the bottom of this!

Lascaux Cave

1940 was certainly a turbulent time in Europe as Germany was on the march, conquering and occupying much of the continent. One afternoon in September of that difficult year a French teenage boy named Marcel sought some respite from the troubling news by taking a hike with his dog through the hills of the Dordogne region in southern France.

Halfway up the hill that rises above the town of Montignac (Mont in yak) was what appeared to be an abandoned fox den. As teenage boys are known to do, Marcel began poking and digging around the den when he discovered that it led to what appeared to be a larger chamber. The opening was too small for him to fit through, so Marcel went home.

Four days later, on September 12, 1940 he returned with three friends; Jacques, Georges, and Simon, as well as some picks and shovels and a small lantern. After enlarging the hole, Marcel was the first to crawl through the opening. He slid down a rock-strewn slope until he came to the bottom of a cavern. Soon the other boys followed after him.

With the aid of their small lantern, they boys began walking through a subterranean room that was nearly one hundred feet long. Before long they spotted something unusual. Along the walls were brilliant paintings of fabulous beastly animals. Excitedly the boys explored the walls of the cave until they came to a black hole leading down into what appeared to be a deeper shaft.

Swearing one another to silence, the boys went home, but came back the next day with a coil of rope and a better lantern. Upon reentering the cave they moved toward the black hole. Using the rope and a lantern, Marcel descended into the black hole. At the bottom he was awed by a stunning painting of a man confronting a bison.

The boys decided to tell their teacher, Leon Laval, about their discovery. Taking him to the site they helped Mr. Laval through the entrance and into the heart of the cave. Of course, he was amazed by the boys’ find. He had learned of a noted historian named Henry Breaul from Paris who was taking refuge in the area due to the Nazi invasion. A few days later, Mr. Laval and the four boys led the noted historian on a tour of the cave. And of course, that led to an extensive archaeological exploration of the site that is now known as the Lascaux Cave paintings.

Some 6000 separate images have been identified which can be grouped into three main categories: animal, human, and abstract signs. They are believed to be some 15,000 to 17,000 years old. As many of the paintings depict hunting scenes, it has been speculated that the caves may have been the sight of religious ceremonies associated with hunting. The paintings were created with red, yellow, and black colors made by compounding various minerals together. It has been nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.

Little attention was paid to the Lascaux Cave during the war years, but after the war was over activity at the site dramatically increased. To help fund research, the Lascaux Cave was opened to the public in July of 1948. Some 1,200 visitors a day toured the site for the next decade.

However by 1955 researchers began to notice that the paintings were deteriorating at an alarming rate. It was determined that moisture from the tourists’ lungs, along with the electric lighting, was changing the environment within the caves. The warm humid air was facilitating the growth of lichens, mold, and fungus on the walls of the cave. This was doing damage to the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963. (In the 1980s a replica of the cave paintings was opened nearby for tourists to visit.) Since that time, restoration work has been attended to the damaged paintings, but the mold has proven to be very difficult to remove. Some areas where the mold was removed show visible signs of damage to the paintings.

In 2008 authorities closed the cave completely for three months. Not even researchers and preservationists were allowed to enter. After that, a single individual was allowed to enter the cave once a week for twenty minutes to monitor the conditions. Today only a limited number of researchers can enter the cave. Efforts to reverse the effects of the mold damage are ongoing.

Information came from history.com and from the French government site https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/lascaux/en

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Underground Theatre in Paris

Let’s stay with the theme of French teenagers finding things. Back in 1981 six French teens, a mix of boys and girls this time, snuck into the basement of the Ministry of Telecommunications in Paris. While poking around they discovered a cable running through the basement floor and into the famed Paris underground. They also found a couple of maps detailing the entire system of underground passages. After searching around in the underground for awhile they followed the cable back into the basement then walked upstairs and exited the building via the front door. With their maps the teens spent the next several months exploring the many networks of passages that exist below the sidewalks of the beautiful city.

The 170 miles of tunnels and catacombs underlying Paris have been featured in numerous movies including Les Misérables as well as Peabody and Sherman. These empty spaces are the remains of former quarries from which the city was built. They date back as far as the Roman Empire. Tourists can take guided tours through a very small section of these passages which include Les Catacombes. Here you can see the skeletal remains of long past Parisians. Their bones were moved here in the 1700s as the city’s cemeteries were becoming too crowded. However, since 1955 the bulk of the underground network is posted as being off limits to the general public, primarily for safety reasons.

Now back to our six teens. As they grew up, they continued to be fascinated by the prospects and possibilities of the vast underground space that existed just below their feet. Throughout the 1990s they were hosting private parties and even live entertainment in various caverns located along the network. The group keeps their individual names secret but are collectively known as Cataphiles. They sneak their guests through drains and ventilation shafts to prepare underground entertainment areas.

Of course, you can’t keep a thing like this a secret for long. Soon rumors of the Cataphiles and their wild parties began circulating throughout the city. The police department certainly was interested in finding them out. In fact, one party site which was brazenly located directly under a maximum security prison was discovered when a former girlfriend of one of the Cataphiles ratted. It probably wasn’t necessary as the prisoners may have occasionally heard music coming through the plumbing system.

In 2004 several police officers were on a routine training exercise in the tunnels when they spotted something odd. There was a large tarp with a sign painted on it stating Building Site – No Access. Behind that a desk guarded the entrance to a tunnel. A motion-activated closed-circuit TV system recorded the images of anyone entering the tunnel. The system also played a recording of dogs barking loudly, obviously in an attempt to scare intruders away.

The officers followed the tunnel for several more meters until it opened up into a larger cavern which had been shaped to be like an amphitheater. The floor had been terraced and chairs were sitting on the various levels. A large screen sat on one side of the room and a video projector on the other. Several VHS style tapes were stacked on a table, but contrary to what you and investigators were thinking, these were not adult films. They were primarily 1950s era film noir flicks. One officer was quoted as saying, “None of these films had been banned. They were not even offensive!”

The cavern was complete with professional lighting and sound equipment as well as three phone lines. A smaller adjacent room had been fitted out like a petite bar/restaurant. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, and a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

Three days later the police returned with representatives from the electric and phone companies to determine where the power and phone lines were coming from. When they arrived, they found that all the cables had been cut and the equipment moved. A note on the floor had this message. “Do not try to find us.” Though they have tried for the past twenty years, police still have no idea who the Cataphiles are.

This information came from theguardian.com and from unvelievable-facts.com

The Rosetta Stone

This story has a French connection too, although a minor one. Four years ago my wife and I were in London for a three-day stay. Now London is noted for being a very expensive city to visit, and it is. We stayed in a very small spartan apartment that closely resembled a dorm room. The shower was so tiny that you had to step outside of it to bend over and pick up any dropped soap or other items. Yet for the bargain traveler, there are some wonderful things to do in London for free, and perhaps the best one is the British Museum. This museum is enormous. I believe that you could spend weeks there and not see everything. I watched as some London pensioners carried small stools with them to sit on while they read the display placards as they moved from room to room.

One of the things that I was most interested in seeing was in their Egyptology area. Of course, this area as well as other parts of the museum are somewhat controversial because many items in the British Museum were procured during Britain’s colonial period. We can talk about that in another episode, but the item I was most interested in viewing here was the Rosetta Stone.

You may be thinking I’m talking about that software that you can buy that helps you learn other languages. No, that software was named after this large piece of rock which was found in Egypt in 1799. In that year Napoleon had led his army on an invasion excursion to Egypt. Napoleon himself explored the Great Pyramid and other sights. But the most significant result of this adventure was found inside the walls of an abandoned fortress. Helping to shore up the walls was an old road sign.

Well, not exactly a road sign, but it was part of a public notice sign that had been erected in Egypt some 2,000 years prior. The reason this sign is so important to modern Egyptologists has little to do with the message on the sign, but rather that the message was printed in three different languages, Greek, Egyptian Coptic, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. You see, by the time this sign was located in 1799, the meanings of Egyptian Hieroglyphic writings had been lost over time. This message, written in all three languages, allowed researchers to decipher the meanings of Hieroglyphic symbols and thus read and understand inscriptions all over ancient Egypt.

Let me back up just a tad, I made that sound like it was a simple task for researchers to make the translation. It was not so simple. Dozens of plaster casts of the Rosetta Stone were made and sent to researchers all over the world. Even with the best minds working, it still took about twenty years to fully decipher the meanings of the Hieroglyphic writings, but without the Rosetta Stone, we still might be in the dark about the history of Ancient Egypt. Thus, it was a very important found item.

“But wait,” I can hear you thinking, “I thought you said Napoleon found it. Why isn’t it in Paris?” Well, you see in 1801 the British defeated the French in Egypt and took the Rosetta Stone home with them. Both Egypt and France would like to have it back, but the British have said, “No thanks, it’s nice and safe here, we will keep it.”

This information came from britishmuseum.org and also from allthatsinteresting.com.

The Bom Jesus

The country of Namibia is located on the Atlantic Coast of Africa just north of South Africa. It is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. It is larger than Texas but the population is only about 2 ½ million or 10% as large. It is primarily a desert country.

However, in 1908 a German explorer found a diamond on the ground near the Atlantic coast. Further German explorers came and set up a diamond mining operation which helped to fund the German military during WW I.

Today Namibia is an independent country, but diamonds are still mined in the area. The diamond company DeBeers still co-owns the area of that original find, and, along with the Namibian government, operates a diamond mine there. But cnn.com reports that in 2008 workers at the diamond mine found something else.

Using a bulldozer to clear an area the workers scraped up a mass of metal, wood, pipes, and . . . gold coins! An archeologist was called in as further scrapings turned up more gold coins as well as a 500 year old musket. The archeologist named Dieter Noli suspected that the miners had happened upon a shipwreck, but not just any shipwreck. He suspected that this was the famous lost Portuguese ship called the Bom Jesus or Good Jesus.

In the 1530s the Bom Jesus had set sail from Portugal headed for India. On board it had a cargo of tin, ivory, and 22 tons of copper ingots as well as a chest full of gold coins from Portugal and Spain. The ship never arrived in India and has been considered lost at sea. So how did it get up on land?

Noli suspects that the coastline was shaped differently in the 1500s than it is today. He surmised that an Atlantic storm may have blown the ship eastward causing it to crash into the land. The crash would have caused the ship’s cargo as well as it’s masts and decking to lurch forward. The stormy waves may have also caused a surge which would have pushed the crashed ship further onto the land.

The shipwreck site is in the area controlled by the DeBeers company and their guards have secured the area. Efforts to search the site have been coordinated by the Namibian Government, The Portuguese Government and an archeological team from Texas A&M University. It has yet not been determined what will happen to the cargo, but the Portuguese government issued a statement that expressed the hope that a museum could be built to display the ship’s remains as well as the treasure.

The Bom Jesus is thought to be the most valuable shipwreck ever located.

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People Who Have Lost Things Then Found Them

OK, now how about some stories about people who have lost things and then found them much later. Perhaps this has happened to you. These come to us from an article on boredpanda.com titled 50 Unbelievable Stories Of People Finding Things They Thought They Lost Forever. Unfortunately, they did not include any names, so we don’t know for certain whether these stories are true or not, but so what! Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, so here goes. Oh, and we aren’t going to cover all fifty of these unbelievable stories, just the most interesting ones because, frankly, about forty of them are pretty lame.

A fisherman at a lake in Austria lost his wallet in 1997. In 2017 he was fishing this lake again and, you guessed it, he fell in the lake and drowned. Oh, wait, that’s the wrong story there. Here’s what happened. He was pulling up one of his nets and his wallet was part of the debris at the bottom of the net. It had been in the lake for 20 years!

A woman lost her wedding ring in 1995. Then in 2011 she was pulling up carrots in her garden. She saw something shiny encircling one particular carrot. Upon further examination she discovered that it was one of her spoons, no wait; it was actually her wedding ring. It had been in the ground for 16 years.

Another man lost his wallet in the Atlantic Ocean in 1993. A Good Samaritan found it and returned it to him in 2017. It was somewhat deteriorated, but his student ID was still intact.

In 1986 a man bought a ticket to see Prince live in concert. Before the concert he lost the ticket and couldn’t go. In 2015 he found the unused ticket in the back of a book.

An 82 year old man lost his wedding ring. He later found it when he pulled up a carrot in his own garden. The ring was encircling the carrot and had caused a large dent in it.

A woman lost a very special earring while traveling overseas. She spent several hours searching for it, to no avail. A couple of months after she returned home, she found the earring embedded in the sole of her sneaker.

A different woman lost her wedding ring in 2004. She found it in 2017 in her vegetable patch. You guessed it, it had a carrot growing through it.

Another different woman lost her class ring in a river in Virginia in 1983. Recently a Good Samaritan found the ring and through her high school was able to track her down and return the ring.

A still different woman lost her purse in a lake in 1993. Twenty-five years later a boy snagged it with his fishing line and managed to return the purse to her. It still contained credit cards, photographs, lipstick and eyeliner.

And finally, a man lost his wedding ring in 2002. Fifteen years later he found it in his garden. Can you guess where? That’s right, around a piece of bamboo.

Chapel Under House

Well we have brought you quite a variety of Found stories today. In fact, we thought we were done, that is until we saw this headline from elitereader.com: Drunken Couple Finds Chapel Under Their House. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Pat and Diane Farla own a Victorian home in Telford, England. When they bought the home in 2014 they noticed a rectangular metal grate in the hallway near the front door. They always assumed that it had something to do with the ventilation system. But then one weekend in 2017 they had been celebrating their time off with some adult beverages. Actually quite a few adult beverages. Thus emboldened with liquid courage they decided to lift up the grate and have a closer look. All they saw was ground, but wait, that looks like a passageway under the kitchen. Pat and Diane were too large to fit into the passageway so they persuaded their skinny nephew Gareth who had also been celebrating to shinny down the hole and take a look. What Gareth found was a small chapel.

The chapel had been reinforced with bricks and had a curved ceiling. Brick pews were located along the sides. A wooden cross was laying on the floor. It appeared to have once been attached to the end wall before falling down.

Another article in dailymail.co.uk about Pat and Diane and Gareth quoted a local historian named Richard Brooks who believes that he knows what the chapel was for. As the house was built in the late 1700s, Brooks believes that the chapel may have been a clandestine Catholic Church. “It was illegal at that time to be Catholic. If you were found out, you could be persecuted and even executed. It also may have been what was known as a priest hole (a hiding place for priests).” We mentioned Priest Holes during our S3E24 titled Once Upon A Time as priest holes played a role in a popular fairy tale from that time.

Brooks also surmises that the chapel may have been used as a bunker during WWII. A rotting wooden crate was also found in the chapel. It contained newspapers and other items dating from the 1930s.

Other than showing off the chapel to some news media and a few curious neighbors, Pat and Diane have no plans to utilize the chapel other than perhaps for storage. The family is a bit superstitious. “We didn't like to touch the stuff too much,” said Gareth.

O U T R O

Phil here reminding you to check out our Facebook and Instagram pages @RemnantStewPodcast. Drop us an email at StayCurious@RemnantStew.com just to say hi or to let us know about any topics you would like to hear us cover in an upcoming episode.

Remnant Stew is part of Rook & Raven Ventures and is created by me, Leah Lamp. Steve Meeker researches and writes each episode that we then host together. Our audio producer is Phillip Sinquefield. The Oddity Du Jour is brought to you by Sam Lamp. Theme music is by Kevin MacLeod with voiceover by Morgan Hughes. Special thanks goes out to Judy Meeker. For a complete list of sources for this episode please see the show notes.

Before you go, please hit the FOLLOW button so you won’t miss an episode, head over to Apple Music and leave us a review. Share Remnant Stew with your friends, family,

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Until next time remember to choose to be kind…AND ALWAYS STAY CURIOUS!

--SOURCES ----------------------

https://movieweb.com/formerly-lost-films-that-were-rediscovered/#outside-the-law-1920

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/11/the-first-film-version-of-frankenstein-newly-restored/

https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/27/asia/mummified-monk-statue/index.html

https://www.history.com/news/ct-scan-reveals-mummified-monk-inside-ancient-buddha-statue

https://nauticalarch.org/projects/uluburun-late-bronze-age-shipwreck-excavation/

https://www.history.com/news/7-historical-treasures-discovered-by-accident

https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/stonehenge-under-lake-michigan-3125445/

https://anthropology.msu.edu/anp264-ss15/2015/03/25/lake-michigan-stonehenge/

https://www.history.com/news/7-historical-treasures-discovered-by-accident