The Sailing Stones of Death Valley

A typical Death Valley "Sailing Stone" and it's Track

Source: wikipedia

The Sailing Stones of Death valley

The Racetrack Playa is a place in Death Valley National Park in California USA. It is a dry lake bed 1130 metres above sea level and some 4.5 Km long. The bed is also incredibly flat with the height differential between the north and south ends being a mere 4cm.
When it rains, the dark Dolomite mountains that surround the Racetrack funnel the water onto the lake bed, creating a shallow lake. The incredibly hot temperatures of the area quickly evaporate the lake and cracking the mud to leave a fascinatingly regular mosaic type pattern on the dried lake bed floor.

The track lengths of some of the "Sailing Stones" are incredible.

Source: wikipedia

What are "Sailing Stones"?

The lake bed is also home to some rocks - But these aren't just ordinary rocks - These rocks move. Nobody has ever seen them move, and nobody knows how or why they move - but move they do.
They are known as "Sailing Stones", and when they move, they leave trails and tracks behind them, sometimes hundreds of metres long. Occasionally the tracks take the form of furrows which have been gouged out of the surface mud. Sometimes they will move with other rocks in parallel. Sometimes one or more will change direction abruptly and for no apparent reason. Sometimes the lines are as straight as a rule, other times they curve in large majestic sweeps.
The rocks are not all tiny tiddlers either. Some Sailing Stones can weigh as much as a man. the weight of the individual rocks, or the resistance of the surface they are travelling on seems to have no effect on the Sailing Stones ability to move, or the distance they can cover.

"Sailing Stones" Movements

Sailing Stones seem to move only every couple of years, and the courses of the individual tracks can take a number of years to develop. The tracks have no standard direction or length, and the paths of different rocks often cross.
Occasionally Sailing Stones will even turn over during their travels, as evidenced by the changes in the tracks they leave behind. Sometimes, two rocks that are similar in weight and size will travel together as "companions" before one rock inexplicably stops and lets it's companion travel on alone.

"Sailing Stones" tracks often change direction for no apparent reason.

Source: wikipedia

"Sailing Stones" Theories

One theory suggested by geologists was that Sailing Stones moved by the action of the wind when the ground was still muddy after a deluge. But this does not take into account the fact that the rocks do not all travel in the same direction (which one would assume to be the case if they being pushed by wind), and that they also travel at the height of summer when the ground is baking dry.
One of the largest "Sailing Stones" to be studied by geologists was given the name "Karen". This was a 29 by 19 by 20 inch lump of Dolomite weighing 700 pounds that had created a straight track 570 feet long on the dry lake bed. When geologists went to check on Karen in May 1974, they were surprised to discover that the rock had just disappeared!
There was no way that the rock could have been stolen or moved artificially because the truck needed to do so would have left it's marks in the soft lakebed surface.
A sighting of Karen was claimed to have been made in 1994 some 800 metres away from the playa. The stone was eventually found in 1996 by San Jose Geologist Paul Messina.

And so the mystery of the "Sailing Stones" continues. While theories and guesses about this strange phenomenon abound, it is safe to say that nobody really knows - because nobody has ever seen them move.

Curse of the Crying Boy Picture

Cursed Picture? "The Crying Boy"

 

Curses and Jinxes

Images in the form of paintings or photographs hold a special place in the folklore of strange phenomena. From creepy tales such as "The Picture of Dorian Grey" to the surprisingly popular belief that a portrait that falls from a wall foretells a death, it seems that we believe that the artistic capturing of an image captures more than just the image of the sitter - a bit of their soul perhaps?
But of course the notion of "curses", attached to pictures or anything else is a mind-set from a bygone age... Isn't it? Surely no one these days (outside the bounds of religious nuttery) could believe in such a thing as a modern cursed picture... Could they?

The Curse is Born.

The year is 1985. the place is the Mining town of Rotherham in the UK. Ron and May Hall had been the victims of a devastating house fire, the result of an unattended chip-pan, which reduced the lower story of their terraced house to ashes.
Although the ground floor was ravaged and reduced to little more than charcoal and cinders, there in the middle of all the devastation remained one solitary item, completely untouched by the inferno that had raged about it - A cheap framed print of a crying child.
Ron Hall's brother was a Rotherham-based firefighter. and he told Ron that his station manager had told him that he knew of a number of other incidents where the same print - The Crying Boy" had remained unscathed after infernos had reduced the rest of the building to ashes.
The story was picked up on the 4th of September by "The Sun", a UK Newspaper which at the time, was the most-read tabloid news paper in the English-speaking world. The headline screamed "Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy". It also suggested (using some creative journalism), that firemen had said that the picture was cursed The Sun also informed it's readers that some fifty-thousand prints of "The Crying Boy" by G.Bragdolin had been sold to the British Public by department stores throughout the country.

The Sun Headline

The Curse Grips the Nation

Within a matter of days, the "Curse of the Crying Boy" had become accepted as a virtual fact amongst a large proportion of the British public.
The switchboard of The Sun was innundated with readers phoning in to say that they too had been victims of the curse. Dora Mann from Mitcham in Surrey told readers that just six months after she had purchased a copy of "The Crying Boy", her house had been gutted by an horrendous fire. She said "All my paintings were destroyed – except the one of the Crying Boy" adding that her sister-in-law, and a friend had both been the victims of devastating fires after they had purchased copies of the cursed picture.
Another reader, Brian Parkes explained how he had been left homeless after a terrible blaze at his home. He, his wife and three children were treated for smoke inhalation, and on his return from hospital, he was horrified to find his print of "The Crying Boy" still hanging amidst the ruins - completely undamaged.

One reader wrote to The Sun to tell them that after reading about the curse, she had been so frightened that she had tried to destroy her copy of the print in a garden bonfire, but was horrified to discover that it would not burn!
A Security Guard by the name of Paul Collier, who was the owner of two "Crying Boy" prints, read the story and tried burning one of his in a bonfire. He reported that although the print had been in the fire for a whole hour, it was not so much as scorched! He told The Sun that he now believed that the pictures were indeed jinxed. He said that he was determined to get rid of them, because he felt that owning two copies put him doubly at risk.

What Could Have Caused the Curse?

Although Rotherham Fire Station Manager Alan Wilkinson had personally recorded fifty such "Crying Boy" fires, he nevertheless rejected the suggestion that they were in any way the result of a curse. They were, he said, the simple result of human carelessness. However when asked to explain how the prints could consistently survive fires which reduced everything around them to ashes, he conceded that he could offer no rational explanation.
The Newspaper interviewed Mr.Roy Vicary, Secretary of the British Folklore Society to hear his opinion on what might be behind the curse. He suggested that perhaps the Artist had in some way mistreated the child model, and that the fires were due to the child's curse - his way of seeking revenge

Placing The Curse to Rest?

As the hysteria surrounding the cursed picture was approaching it's peak, The Sun suggested that if any of it's readers were worried about any copies of the picture that they might own, they could send them in to the newspapers offices, where they would be officially disposed of.
Within days, The Newspapers offices were completely swamped, with copies of the cursed picture stacked twelve feet high, leaving very little office space to work in.
The Sun publicly burned, on Halloween, in a specially constructed pyre, two van-loads of the cursed picture. The event was covered by reporter Paul Hooper, and it was hoped that the mass burning would lay the curse to rest.
But did "The Sun" boss, Kelvin MacKenzie actually believe in the curse or was it just a convenient device to sell more newspapers? - There is a story that suggests that he might have done.
The story goes that the assistant editor at The Sun removed a picture of Winston Churchill from the wall of the newsroom and replaced it with a copy of "The Crying Boy". It is said that when MacKenzie saw it, he visibly paled, and curtly ordered that it be taken down immediately saying "I don't like it - It's unlucky"