24.5.2009
A Fare Cop
A Fare Cop
http://www.netsaga.is/media/files/haunted.mp3
A common complaint the world over is that taxi drivers do not know how to find the address you want. An Athenian taxi driver had no such problem. The fare he picked up one day gave the driver's own address as his destination. Once there the driver watched as the man took out a key and let himself in.
Using his own key the driver followed and interupted the man as he was about to make love to the driver's wife. Said the driver later: -It must have been his unlucky day. Athens has 70000 taxis.
Shakespeare Puzzle Solved
Audrey Best was visiting a cousin in New Zealand some years ago. The cousin, a district nurse, took her to meet some of her 'flock' in a small community on the South Island. They included a gentleman who was well over seventy, who lived in a self-built wooden house. As Miss Best wrote: He had a considerable collection of books and I mentioned that I too was avid reader. He said his particular inerest, indeed mania was the theory that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. He had been trying for years, all over the world to get a copy of a book published in 1913 called Is Bacon Shakespeare? I asked him to write down the name of the author and said I would contact my librarian cousin in England to see if he could help.
I duly wrote to him and by return of post received the book. It seems that my cousin had visited a dealer in second-hand books, with whom he was very friendly, to find that the previous day (the day on which my cousin received my letter) a man had walked into the shop offering the very book for sale. The book dealer had not seen a copy for years and years.
Table for Four
Geoff Kenihan and his wife, travel-writer Kerry, entered Hotel Leningrad dining room by one door as an elderly couple, Roger and Alice, entered from another on 2 August 1971. Both couples in on the only empty table in the room and ended up sharing it. They enjoyed the meal and one another's company and departed never expecting to meet again.
On 2 Aug 1972 (note the date), Geoff and Kerry enterd the Indian restaurant of the Hotel Oberoi in Singapore and headed for the one empty table as another couple, who had simultaneously entered through another door were doing the same-Roger and Alice from Leningrad.
Violent Deaths 100 Years Apart
In Jan 1889 Elizabeth Bromfield was walking home from church along Adelaide Street in the New South Wales town of Blayney when she was killed by lightning.
In Jan 1989 a man was charged in the town with the murder of a woman in that month. Her name Elizabeth Bromfield!
Now for an eerily similar story. 2 girls of the same age were murdered on the same day and in the same place, 157 years apart. The details: On 27 May 1817, Mary Ashford, 20, was found dead at Erdington, then a village about 8 km from Birmingham. On 27 May 1974 the strangled body of Barbara Forrest, 20, was found in Erdington by then a suburb of Birmingham. Forrest's body was found in long grass near the Erdington children's home where she worked as a nurse about 350 m from the spot where Ashford's body had been dumped. And 26 May in both 1817 and 1974 was not only a Monday but a Whit Monday.
The pattern of the girls' movements just before their deaths was similar. Both had visited a friend earlier in the evening where they had (both) changed their dress to go on to a dance. Both women had been raped before being murdered. They had died at about the same time. The man arrested for each murder was named Thornton! Both were acquitted. So both cases remain unsolved.