M.J. Rose

It’s a question that has sparked our imagination for ages: What happened to these people? The mystery continues to unfold…

We Finally Have Clues to How America’s Lost Colony Vanished
Artifacts suggest some members of ill-fated English settlement survived and assimilated with Native Americans.

By Andrew Lawler, National Geographic

“The search began when an anxious Englishman named John White waded ashore on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island 425 years ago this month. Appointed governor of the fledgling Roanoke colony by Sir Walter Raleigh, White was returning from England with desperately needed supplies.

But when he stepped ashore on August 18, 1590, he found the settlement looted and abandoned. The vanished colonists had left behind only two clues to their whereabouts: the word “Croatoan” carved on a prominent post and “Cro” etched into a tree.

Ever since, explorers, historians, archaeologists, and enthusiasts have sought to discover the fate of the 115 men, women, and children who were part of England’s first attempt to settle the New World. Efforts to solve America’s longest running historical mystery, dubbed the Lost Colony, produced dozens of theories but no clear answers.

Now two independent teams say they have archaeological remains that suggest at least some of the abandoned colonists may have survived, possibly splitting into two camps that made their homes with Native Americans…”

For the rest, click here.

Enchanting indeed!

“Majak’s portraits capture the contemporary faces of the occult, be they whisperers, healers, enchantresses, artists, feminists or simply women devoted to personal and spiritual growth. Pretty magical, don’t you think?…”

Enchanting Photos Capture The Modern-Day Witches And Healers Of Poland
The Huffington Post | By Priscilla Frank

Click here for the full gallery from HuffPost.

Who doesn’t enjoy a morbid love of vampires? And who doesn’t love the history of vampires even more?

What Vampire Graves Tell Us About Ancient Superstitions

Hundreds of years ago, ignorance about decomposition and disease sparked fears that the dead returned to drink the blood of the living.

“In 1846, a man named Horace Ray died of tuberculosis in Griswold, Connecticut. Within the next six years, two of his grown sons died of the same disease. When yet another son fell ill two years later, Ray’s family and friends could think of only one explanation: The dead sons were somehow feeding on and sickening the living one—from the afterlife. In an effort to keep the remaining son from getting even worse, they exhumed the dead sons’ bodies and burned them.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. In 1874, a Rhode Island man named William Rose dug up his own daughter’s body and burned her heart, and in 1875 a victim of “consumption,” as TB was called then, had her lungs burned posthumously for good measure.

This practice of digging up, burning, or otherwise attempting to restrain the deceased was a widespread practice in many Western countries until the early 20th century, and it was intended to prevent what people at the time thought of as vampires: Dead victims of disease that literally sucked the life out of the living from beyond the grave.

We now imagine vampires as blood-drinking, cloaked Counts—or possibly sparkly, sexy teenagers—but throughout history everyone from the Ancient Greeks, to the Eastern Europeans, to 19th-century Americans saw them as disease victims (and sometimes simply dead miscreants) who could prey on the living from the Great Beyond…”

For the rest, go here, to The Atlantic.