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.

Are you thinking what we’re thinking? Great place to write the great American horror novel, yes?

Get Paid to Live in a Haunted Ghost Town
By Sarah Spencer (Wide Open Country)

“If you could spend the summer in a historic, haunted ghost town in Montana, would you do it?

If the paranormal is your thing, check out this job posting from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. They’re looking for volunteer residents to help out with the care and conservation Garnet Ghost Town. Back in the day, Garnet was a frontier mining town but has been mostly abandoned for about 100 years.

Your lodging is absolutely free. You’ll be provided with a furnished cabin, complete with a propane powered refrigerator and range (sorry, no electricity or running water available in historic ghost towns). You’ll even be paid a stipend and allotted a food allowance.

All you’d have to do is assist with tours, help set up exhibits, work in the gift shop, and other general upkeep. Oh, and, you know, live with the creepy sounds of haunting laughter and music that’s often heard in Kelly’s Saloon, the most active spot on the premises…

For the rest, click here.

Well, we’ll be damned…Cat pianos?

Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon’s 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation.

“Numerous museums are dedicated to musical instruments. In Berlin and Brussels, Paris and Phoenix, one can wander rooms lined with musical artifacts from many times and places. Strolling through these rooms, one might admire the exquisite craftsmanship of a Stradivarius violin or the opulent artistry of a French harpsichord. One might linger over forgotten curiosities like the tromba marina, or abortive experiments like Adolphe Sax’s seven-bell horn. One’s path might follow changes in the instrumentarium from Renaissance woods and metals to modern plastics and electronics, and the experience might lead one to wonder at the diversity of species born from the physics of vibrating strings, air columns and resonating bodies.

Missing from such collections, however, is the peculiar class of what we like to call “fictophones”: imaginary musical instruments. Though these instruments, due to some measure of impracticality and impossibility, did not take sounding form, they were nonetheless put forth in the various means available to conjure objects in our minds: in writings, drawings, sometimes even in detailed schematics. One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. What’s more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life; they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real. No less than instruments you hold in your hand, imaginary instruments act as interfaces between mind and world, limning the edges of what we may think and do…”

For the rest, click here. Lots of amazing illustrations!