M.J. Rose

So many stories to imagine of so many lost lives – this is a journey into the minds of other people…

Abandoned Suitcases Reveal Private Lives of Insane Asylum Patients

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford

“If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you’d ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center’s closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a locked attic. Working with the New York State Museum, former Willard staffers were able to preserve the hidden cache of luggage as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

“There were many patients in these asylums who were probably not unlike friends you and I have now.”

Photographer Jon Crispin has long been drawn to the ghostly remains of abandoned psychiatric institutions. After learning of the Willard suitcases, Crispin sought the museum’s permission to document each case and its contents. In 2011, Crispin completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund the first phase of the project, which he recently finished. Next spring, a selection of his photos will accompany the inaugural exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium’s new location…”

For the complete article click here to go to Collector’s Weekly.

What’s a museum caretaker to do when a statue that was an offering to the ancient Egyptian god of death starts inexplicably rotating in its display case? Click here for a time-lapse video of the 4000-year-old relic of Neb-Senu as it inexplicably moves on its own…

From the comments in the original article, here are two interesting pictures:

Why is this Egyptian listening to a record player and holding a remote control? Is this merely a lotus and an ankh?

And what’s this? A laptop and a stylus?

Makes one wonder… 🙂

Ah, this is a very interesting mystery indeed! Was Queen Elizabeth I really an imposter? And was that imposter a man?

It may be time to check the grave…

Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag? Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS (Daily Mail)

“The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history?

If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie.

And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire…”

Click here to read more.