THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEEDED TO KNOW

  Benjamin Bathurst was born in 1784 and entered the British diplomatic corps at an early age. He married Phillida Call in 1805. In 1809 he was sent an as an emissary to Vienna to encourage an alliance between Austria and England, and to encourage the Austrian Emperor to declare war on France - led by Napoleon. On November 25, 1809 Bathurst traveled with his courier, a man named Krause, to Perleberg, Germany. They used aliases while traveling. They stopped to order fresh horses. While they waited they dined at the White Swan Inn then retired to a sitting room.  Bathurst  wrote letters and burned some papers in a fireplace. At 9:00 horses were ready to be harnessed to their coach. Bathurst left the room,  Krause  followed behind, but by the time  Krause  reached the carriage, Bathurst was nowhere to be seen. News did not reach  Phillida Call  for a few weeks, nor did authorities take much interest in the case. At the time Prussia was full of bandits and German revolutionaries. Travel wa

On February 27th, 1920 a woman attempted to jump to her death from a bridge in Berlin. The woman, known in German as Fraulein Unbekkant ("Miss Unknown") was rescued and brought to an asylum. The woman refused to ID herself or reveal any personal details for 2 years. Then in 1922 she got a little chatty and dropped her name to a nurse. She was no Jane Doe from small village Europe. She is the missing Grand Duchess Anastasia, heir to the Romanov throne. Anastasia herself was only 16 when the Royal family died as the result of the Russian Revolution. She was beloved by those who knew her, but wasn't on a Princess Diana world level of fame. Only Russian aristocrats stripped of their money and titles would have been invested on a personal level. But a princess, thought to be dead but now alive in an asylum?  That's world headline grabbing news. The woman who claimed to be Anastasia would do so for nearly 50 years. Reasons for the Russian Revolution were multiple and varied

  In 1917, two little girls tricked the world into believing fairies were real. Even the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most unassailably logical human ever to exist, fictionality be damned - believed the girls. But the question is not why did two little girls play the trick, but why adults so eagerly believed two little girls. The answer is simply sometimes the desire to believe in something overtakes logic. To begin our fairy tale we go back to two other teen girls I've covered - the Fox Sisters. Their little prank of saying they could speak to the dead validated the emerging religion of spiritualism. Spiritualism was a whole cloth ideal that people could speak to the dead ; Theosophy, Spiritualism's offspring, saw the whole cloth and how it could be cut down to actually make something. Theosophy was logic applied to belief. You could believe people can talk to the dead, but something like spirit photography, with a technological element, could be analyzed and disproved. The

Introducing Find Me Friday - The last Friday of each month I will discuss a famous disappearance.  Seek, but he may not always find...

Don't believe a word January's ladies say... Frances and Elsie told Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quite the fairy tale Anna was a roaming "Romanov"