Wellington Avalanche of 1910

Wellington, Washington State was founded in 1883 and was relatively unknown until an event in February 1910, when the community there suffered a 9 day blizzard. Around a foot of snow an hour fell to the ground and initially two trains (one passenger and one mail train) found themselves trapped but the worst was to come.

28^th February and the snow stopped only to have rain and warm winds replacing it. Just after 1am the next day a slab of snow broke loose during a violent thunderstorm and this slid towards the town. A previous forest fire had exposed the approach into the town and down it rolled without resistance.

The impact to the two trains threw them 150 feet downhill to the Tye River, the result was the death of 35 passengers, 58 Great Northern employees and three rail-road employees that were in the depot. The 23 survivors were rescued by rail-road employees.

It took months to recover the bodies, Alaskan-style dog sled, slopes with ropes and pulleys and sheer hard graft took a toll on the physical and mental being of the rescuers. Wellington was renamed Tye in October that year and the depot was closed down in 1929, the town was then abandoned and raised.

The Iron Goat Trail allows visitors to go to the site, however hiking there in the winter is highly discouraged due to the nature of avalanches in the area. A retired editor for the Monroe Monitor newspaper said it is a very eerie feeling to be stood there.

The most common reports are about the sensations experienced at the site of the old town, often people feel that there is someone else watching them and many hikers will avoid camping there overnight. Oak Harbor resident, Bill Robards, is certain it is haunted having been there. He witnessed apparitions following them when they walked at night and even heard a child’s voice and states they captured audio evidence of a man (an immigrant working on the train perhaps) singing in Italian.

By E.J. Frazier, Thompson, Montana – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division
under the digital ID cph.3b13980.
This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, Link

 

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The hall that no one wants

‘It is a cause of unmitigated and disappointment and vexation’ Lord Overstone.

Overstone Hall in Northamptonshire is a 114 room mansion that has been up for sale for one million pounds and is going to be some sort of epic project for anyone taking it on. It has 114 rooms, it’s 20,000 square foot and covers 50 acres of land. It went up for sale in 2011 for that price and did not sell, and the New Testament Church of God are still asking for the same price now.

1832 Overstone Park was acquired by Lewis Loyd for £117,500. Upon his death in 1858 the 10,000 acres of land became Lord Overstone’s. 1860 Lady Overstone commissioned the hall through architect William Milford Teulon; it was to replace the existing house with something more akin to her taste and more lavish to reflect their status. Lord Overstone was reported to have hated the thing since the very start, his wife commissioned a strange mix of Victorian and Renaissance architecture but didn’t live to see it finished She died in November 1864 and in return he left a letter to a friend about the place – ‘The New House, I regret to say, is a cause of unmitigated disappointment and vexation. It is an utter failure although very large and full of pretension, it has neither taste, comfort, nor convenience.’ He refused to live there.

1883 Lord Overstone hated the place that his wife designed and gave it to his daughter Lady Wantage upon his death. She was a philanthropist well known for her interest in hospital and nursing work, she married Robert

James Lindsay, the resided primarily at Lockinge House in Wantage. Lady Wantage was rarely there either, she used it on occasion for winter hunting parties and it was sold to Sir Philip Stott after she died in 1920.

1920’s the building was used by owner Sir Philip Stott who used it as a base for Conservative party members.

He disliked the imposing building and his project there was deemed as a failure in 1928. In 1929 he sold it to the Charlotte Mason Schools Company. They used part of the large building as a girl’s only boarding school.

1979 the school was closed and the building sold privately for £701,000. It was then used by the New Testament Church of God as it’s UK headquarters. 2001 a fire ripped through the building. It came from the top floor and ripped through the principle rooms and carved staircase.

A photographer called Mathew Growcoot went to see the place and described the whole experience as both surreal and haunting, most of the place is slowly being reclaimed by nature. He said: ‘I’ve never been to anywhere like it, it is such an enormous, imposing house that has been reclaimed by nature. He said that the main tower looked unfriendly and that it was very hard to judge it in the current derelict state but that the remains had rooms that looked like they would be far too big and would be draft riddled. He felt on edge the whole time he was there to to noises that surrounded him.

It is worth noting that despite the comments about this building it was advanced for its time. It had cavity wall insulation and even had a heating system, called Mr Price’s Apparatus. The building also had gas lighting and a butler’s lift.

Daventry District Council have said that they are concerned about it’s state, it is in a perilous condition. It seems a shame to let something like this building go to waste, and invariably it’s become a hotspot for ghost hunting though I cannot ascertain why.

http://www.overstoneschool.co.uk/

Dolls House

Anatoly Moskvin hit the news in 2011, for a rather bizarre and disturbing set of criminal charges. He was arrested in connection with a series of grave desecration events in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Moskvin’s occupation was as a local historian and cemetery explorer. He is said to speak 13 languages and described as a ‘genius’ but it seems he had something odd in his home.

His house contained 29 life-sized dolls made from various female corpses in mummified states. The dolls were brightly dressed and their faces and limbs were covered in cloth. At the point the details were released it was not clear is each body/doll had actual remains in each one and I couldn’t see much in the way of a follow up, but the police and teams involved likely have a hard job of identifying all of them.

In the flat the investigators found the photographs and nameplate taken from headstones, instruction for making dolls and maps of cemeteries in the region. Shoes found in his home matched footprints found in the cemeteries and it is reported that he singled out Muslim Graves.

Lonely? Disturbed? Moskvin was caught out and no doubt this bizarre story will yield more details in the future but for now it is a curious psychological piece, what was he aiming at in the end if anything at all?

There we go a creepy tea break read!

Russian UFO Stones

When I googled Siberian discs it started to lead me off to the Dropa Stones but I could not find anything concrete or really new to go into that, so I turned my attention to something more recent

Volgograd, Russia saw something interesting that I have picked on, it is a place famous for the Battle of Stalingrad and has quite a few tourist attractions. Volgograd Oblast is also the region and it is in the region that a team of Russian investigators found more than a dozen stone discs, the claim from the team said that there was tungsten inside an in 2015 they were saying that the origins for them remains a mystery.

The report came from Bloknot Volgograd, Russian news site and says that the finding was made by a group called Kosmopoisk, led by Vadim Chernobrov. Kosmopoisk are a Russian UFO and cryptozoology group and they were in the Zhirnovsky area as it is said to be known for its mystical phenomenon.

Chernobrov told the newsite that they’d found a similar similar one 2 metres in diameter at Kuzbass and some researchers are quite adamant that the tungsten is part of the indication that UFO’s and aliens exist. One of those proponents is Scott Waring of UFO Sightings Daily (via ancient-origins.net)

I’m going to say that if I had more time I think I could get lost on his site following links and different UFO subjects on there. Scott Waring concludes on the site that they might have been military drones like alien/UFO ones he had previously picked up on as present around Mars.

So I’m off on a rabbit hole again. I looked up the post on the original site, Bloknot-Volgograd.ru presented on 09.09.15 and it has pictures of the recovery of the stones with the locals watching the excavation. They say that they are sending them to Zhirnovsky Museum of local lore, to date the stones and here is where I rolled my eyes a bit.

UFOholic.com leap in on the 14^th September, 2015, to proclaim the ‘initial’ geological analysis puts their age at over 1 million years old. The other claim that it has been known for mythology and folklore also comes from a statement from Chernobrov. So, so far all links back to this one group and I am still sat digging … I tend to want to see more when I start on these blogs, and if you are reading I will tend to presume that you feel the same.

I went back to Kosmopoisk, Vadim Chernobrov’s own site would not go through my firewall and caused my internet a small apoplectic fit so I backtracked again. Kosmopoisk.org is a very details site and my Russian just isn’t strong enough to navigate it, along with google translate not really helping I think someone native or more educated would be better off taking a look.

So moving on I found another article on ntd.tv from 29^th August 2017, about how another disc had been discovered by a Russian mining company. This time they explain Boris Elazkov found the object 40 metres underground, it looks artificially crafted and dated at around 10,000 years old.

The article goes back to mention the Volgograd artifacts, it mentions the Kuzbass disc as well and it mentions in there how tungsten is a military grade used metal and it asks readers if perhaps they might be representations of extra-terrestrial spacecrafts and not spacecrafts themselves.

So schools of thought, UFO’s and musing all came to be discussion points, sometimes the comments on articles or these discussions one quite enlightening. On Bloknot-Volgograd there is a comment from a man, Michael, who basically states that knowledge of the local area would tell you it’s formerly an area that was the sea and they are likely just pebbles in his view.

Assaultsweb forums also had a discussion thread about it and they said that tungsten is known to be quite prolific in the area, that similar disc objects had been found in China. Another comment says that they looked like something from their local coal mines called kettle bottoms and just considered natural things.

So are they UFO’s, carvings of them or just naturally eroded stones?

Sources: UFOsightingsdaily.com, wikipedia, bloknot-volgograd.ru, kosmoposik.org, ufoholic.com, ntd.tv/inspiring, asssaultweb.net, ancient-origin.net

Picture below is actually of Yorkshire Peak District but thanks to copyright and paranoia of Article 13 I don’t think I best link the ones they used!

The Frog Boys

It was 26^th March, 1991 and five Korean boys went missing, they had gone out to Mount Waryong, near Daegu, to catch frog eggs, but more likely salamanders but the translation is easier for frogs, the name frog boys would stick easier. The five boys never returned and the name the Frog Boys (개구리소년 or Gaegurisonyeon) is really the term to identify the group of boys. The boys went missing on what was a national holiday in South Korea at the time, it was the 1991 local elections and the boys went out to play, no doubt the political interest being little to zero given their age. The local elections being held would also no doubt contribute towards people not paying as much attention to their behaviours that day, as all eyes would be centered on the events and so they were free to do pretty much most things without the usual adult eyes around them, perhaps this was a good time up until the end which seems a shame, when I was young being a little naughty was a big highlight! 

They were: 
Woo Cheol-won, aged 13 years.
 Cho Ho-yeon, aged 12 years.
 Kim Yeong-gyu, aged 11 years.
 Park Chan-in, aged 10 years.
 Kim Jong-sik, aged 9 years.

The boys disappearance had 321,000 police officers, volunteers and interested parties all searching for them, the searches were shown live on TV. Several of the parents left their jobs so they could continue in the search and sadly around 550 false claims about what had happened were made, no doubt making that job even harder.

The boys were not likely to have got lost as they knew their way around Mount Waryong living only a few miles away from it, there was no trace of the boys found and a reward offering 42 million won (around $35,000 for the USA audience) did not seem to tempt anyone to come forward that knew about the events either. There was one man that called the police claiming that he had kidnapped them in exchange for a ransom and that they were dying of malnutrition but it was established that it was a lie and so nothing more came of it. 

In 1992 a film was made about the events called Come Back, Frog Boys and has a running time of 1 hour and 37 minutes. I really wasn’t able to find a lot more about this and the film I could find on youtube had no translation, I don’t know Korean so it wasn’t really something I felt I could get any merit out of watching.  Around this time there were several speculations about how it might have been the authorities that did it, alien abductions, South or North Korean involvement and the inevitable accusations that it might have been the parents themselves. 

26^th September 2002 and a man searching for acorns found the bodies in an area that had already been searched, the man first reported them anonymously (later being named as Mr Choi Hwan-tae) and the police recorded that finding to be death by hypothermia. The bodies had been found huddled up together and entwined, suggestion that maybe they had tried to get warm or comfort one another but again they knew the area and they were close enough to people for their cries to have been heard. 

It is worth a small mention, for the sake of trying to be a little thorough, that even if the boys knew the area there is a chance with mist or even going a little off track it can be possible to get lost even if it is temporary. As a young child I went up Pendle Hill, Lancashire, many times and I can locally pop to the Peak District, you can think you know your way around well enough but the mist can really affect it and familiar things seem very unusual until you can wait it out and look again. Now I am not saying that this is part of the cause of death (carry on reading it will be obvious why) but it just more information about the local area to keep context and to keep information collated.

In the end Mount Waryong had been searched around 500 or more times before the boys were found and nearby they had found shell casings that would not have supported the theory of hypothermia either.  The bodies had been buried in a way that forensics determined had meant they were hastily buried, moss had grown in their skulls and they had lain in a gully, eventually the water gave way and this exposed their bodies. The parents refused to accept the initial outcome and a full investigation was put into action to find out the truth. 

The boys clothes had been found tied in knots and had not naturally entwined, they were found in an area that the boys already knew and that they would have called out for help and been heard most likely.  Forensic experts also determined that three of the children had died from blows to the head, and that one of the boys had died from a shotgun wound to his head and two skills had traces of blood on them. The forensic team was led by professor Kwak Jeong-sik who said that three of the boys showed marks on the skulls and tentatively confirmed they had died by being beaten to death. 

On 25^th March, 2004 a funeral was held for the boys and their skulls were donated to medical science by their parents.The sad part of this? In 2006 the statute of limitations passed for the case which meant that the killers could go free if they were found but in 2015 it appears that for this case this restriction was lifted, so they can still continue to pursue it with charges being made if anything knew should arise. It is pretty clear from the notes that the case was not managed particularly well and that the parents pressing for further results was the only way to get the correct judgement on their passing but this has all ended up with little further evidence to go by and many potential clues having been missed. 

In 2011 a film was made, Children, and was created based on what information they could find on the case. Now I highly doubt this film is accurate and the synopsis even mentions alien abduction but my feeling is that this really is just a tragic event and if anyone is to be blamed it is a natural human involvement not a supernatural one. A more sensible theory listed amongst many is that it might have been hunters who then panicked and buried them too afraid to come forwards or hunting illegally knew they could not admit to it without getting themselves into further trouble. 

There is a Wikipedia Entry for the film – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_(2011_film) (link will remain unless Article 13 kicks in I guess)

Sources: Wikipedia, youtube, bizarreandgrotesque.com, englishchosun.com, reddit r/UnresolvedMysteries
LINK I would highly recommend this link if you want something from a more local point of view, and someone there at the time and a few theories in there you might think make sense.