Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (11 page)
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Authors: Albert Jack
For reasons best known to themselves, Vatican officials refused to release the third secret until the late 1990s, when Pope John Paul II finally unveiled Sister Lucia's (somewhat disjointed) account:
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an angel with a flaming sword in his left hand. Flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated toward him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And we saw in an immense light that is God: “something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it,” a Bishop dressed in White, “we had the impression that it was the Holy Father.” Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious
[sic]
going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark
[sic];
reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fire
[sic]
bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died, one after another, the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium [a vessel for holding holy water] in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
It is said that Pope John Paul II believed that the text refers to the attempt on his life in St. Peter's Square by Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981, while others have suggested it is a prediction of the end of the world. I, to be honest, can make neither head nor tail of it.
In 1946, Sister Lucia joined the Convent of the Carmelite Sisters at Coimbra, where she remained until her death on February 13, 2005, passing away shortly before her ninety-eighth birthday. During her lifetime she wrote six memoirs and two books. The day of her funeral, February 15, was declared a national day of mourning, even disrupting political campaigning for the Portuguese parliamentary elections a few days later. Before she died, Sister Lucia claimed to have seen her “pretty lady from Heaven” many times throughout her lifetime, although nobody else ever witnessed or corroborated her claims. I wish I could. In fact I only wish the Blessed Virgin would appear round here. We could do with a few heavenly visitations to pep things up a bit.
The events in Fatima during 1917 have never been fully explained and remain as mysterious today as they did in the beginning. Nobody knows what happened, although everybody agrees that something did. I find it hard to completely rule out the appearance of some sort of vision or natural phenomenon occurring near Fatima on those four separate occasions because that would suggest that around one hundred thousand people were either mentally ill, deluded, or simply lying. The sightings were, however, made in the midst of the Great War, when things looked particularly gloomy. Perhaps people so badly needed evidence of something spiritual, some proof of divine interest in them, that they were able to convince themselves that they had witnessed something rather more impressive than they actually had. After all, the famous incident of the Angels of Mons (the supposedly supernatural force of ghostly warriors that intervened to help protect British forces at the crucial moment in the battle of Mons), which had happened only a couple of years earlier, is commonly considered now to be a mixture of morale-boosting prop aganda and hallucinations on the part of sleep-deprived soldiers. And we have seen how it is possible to create an illusion on a huge scale, as evidenced by the way in which magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish before the eyes of millions of people, and yet we know it didn't really go anywhere.
So that leaves us with one final question. Even without the assistance of “magic,” is such mass deception otherwise possible— convincing a vast group of people to believe in the same lie at roughly the same time? Anybody would have to hesitate before saying yes. But then you think of Tony Blair's second and third election victories and you realize that of course it's possible; in fact it's surprisingly easy. Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, it's perfectly feasible to “fool all of the people some of the time.”
,
really survive or was someone just pretending?
After the French royal family had been cut down to size—by the guillotine-wielding revolution aries in 1793—a story about Louis-Charles, eldest son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and heir to the throne, quickly spread throughout Europe.
According to the official version of events, the eight-year-old had been separated from his parents and elder sister at the Temple prison in Paris and had been incarcerated on his own in an attempt to prevent loyalists from rescuing the boy and reestablishing the monarchy. To make the point that he was now just one of the people, his captors called him “Louis Capet”—after his ancestor Hugh Capet, founder of the royal dynasty, but also as a deliberate insult, as royalty tend not to use surnames—and set him to work as a cobbler's assistant. The former dauphin was also forced to sing revolutionary songs, drink alcohol, and curse his mother and father. He remained in prison for two years, dying of tuberculosis in 1795.
But when his death was announced, a story circulated the courts of Europe that soldiers loyal to the king had substituted a dying peasant boy for the royal lad and he had been spirited away to safety and to await his coming of age and a suitable moment to retake the throne. It was suggested that the dauphin might have been smuggled out in a bathtub: a guard claimed that one of the men carrying a tub of water from the dauphin's room stumbled and the cry of a young boy could clearly be heard.
The doctor who performed the autopsy on the dead boy removed his heart, as was common at the time when a member of the royal family had died, and pickled it in alcohol—presumably to keep the royal livers company on the shelf. Ten years later, one of his students stole the jar and kept it hidden until his own death, when his wife sent it to the archbishop of Paris.
In 1814—shortly before Napoleon, escaping from exile in 1815, was thoroughly routed by the Duke of Wellington (not relevant at all to the story, but I like to remind people anyway)— the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII, brother of Louis-Charles, or Louis XVII as he would have been. At the time, hundreds of claimants to the throne, all professing to be the “lost dauphin,” arrived in Paris from all over Europe, some from as far away as Canada, South Africa, and the Seychelles.
Of these only one seemed plausible to many royalists, a German clockmaker by the name of Charles-Guillaume Naundorff, who had mysteriously appeared in Berlin during 1810, seemingly from nowhere. His claim was sup ported by proof that his age matched the birth date of the real dauphin, but very little else could be established as he had no birth certificate and no proof of who his parents were. Some claimed him to be the son of Marie Antoinette and her lover Axel de Fersen, while others dismissed him as an impostor, and he never managed to establish a true claim to the French throne. Nonetheless, his death certificate, issued in Holland, named him as Louis-Charles of Bourbon, Duke of Normandy, the correct form of address known only in royal circles. His tomb in Holland bears the inscription: “Here lies Louis XVII, Charles Louis, Duke of Normandy, King of France and of Navarre.” Subsequent forensic and DNA testing of his remains have proved inconclusive, however.
The pickled heart many believe to be that of Louis XVII passed through several hands between 1830 and 1975, when it was finally laid to rest in the royal crypt in the Saint Denis Basilica, close to the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Even then, there was a challenge to its authenticity by one of the descendants of Naundorff, his great-great-grandson Charles Louis Edmond de Bourbon, who fought to assert his claim to the title of prince. To this day nobody has satisfactorily confirmed whether Naundorff was in fact a prince or a prat, or if there is much difference anyway.
Nuremberg, Germany, and was he really
as backward as he first appeared?
On the morning of May 26, 1828, a boy approximately sixteen years of age and dressed in rags was found wandering the streets of Nuremberg. He appeared unable to speak except to say “horse” and “I want to be a soldier like my father.” (Although that is about as much German as I would like to know myself, it didn't help him explain his unusual circumstances.) In the street he approached a shoemaker called Weissman and handed him the two pieces of paper he carried in his pocket. The first was dated October 1812 and appeared to be a letter from his mother:
This child has been baptized and his name is Kaspar. You must give him his second name yourself. I ask you to take care of him. His father was a cavalry soldier. When he is seventeen, take him to Nuremberg, to the 6th Cavalry Regiment; his father belonged to it. I beg you to keep him until he is seventeen. He was born on 30th April 1812. I am a poor girl; I can't take care of him. His father is dead.
The second letter was undated. It read:
Honored Captain,
I send you a lad who wishes to serve his king in the Army. He was brought to me on 7th October 1812. I am but a poor laborer with children of my own to rear. His mother asked me to bring up the boy, and so I thought I would rear him as my own son. Since then, I have never let him go one step outside the house, so no one knows where he was reared. He himself does not know the name of the place or where it is.
You may question him, Honored Captain, but he will not be able to tell you where I live. I brought him out at night. He cannot find his way back. He has not a penny, for I have nothing myself. If you do not keep him, you must strike him dead or hang him.
The shoemaker took Kaspar to the town magistrate, who passed him into the care of Andreas Hiltel, a jailer at the Vestner Gate Tower, who placed him in his own private living quarters. To Kaspar's obvious delight, many curious people came to visit him. They found a boy appearing to have a mental age of about six, who walked barely better than a toddler and could eat only bread and water. Hiltel observed the lad closely and noticed that despite these deficiencies, he had an excellent memory, which led Hiltel to think Kaspar was of noble origin. (It's never seemed to me that the posher you are the better you are at remembering things, but maybe things were different back then.) Over a period of three months Hiltel patiently taught Kaspar enough words for the boy to communicate what had happened to him.
It appeared that Kaspar, for as long as he could remember, had been kept in a dark two-meter-square cell with nothing but a straw bed and a wooden horse for a toy. Bread and water were placed in the room through a small hatch. Sometimes the water tasted bitter—suggesting it had been drugged—and on these occasions he fell asleep and woke to find his hair and nails had been trimmed and his clothes changed. The first human contact of his life came when a man opened the door of his cell and led him outside. Kaspar said he then fainted and woke up to find himself on the streets of Nuremberg.
Following his time at Vestner Gate, Kaspar was given into the care of schoolteacher Friedrich Daumer, who took a close interest in him and taught him to speak, read, and write. Over the ensuing year, the lad developed into an intelligent and likable young man who appeared to thrive in his new environment.
Then, on October 17, 1829, a hooded man attacked Kaspar in the street and tried to stab him, succeeding only in wounding him in the forehead. Officials quickly moved Kaspar into the care of Baron von Tucher, who found him employment at a local law office. But why had someone tried to kill him?
Because of a faint family resemblance, rumors had begun to circulate that Kaspar was in fact the son and heir of Karl, Grand Duke of Baden, and Stephanie de Beauharnais, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte. According to these rumors, Duchess Stephanie had given birth at around the time Kaspar would have been born but the baby was quickly taken from her bedchamber. She was later told that her child had died. Because the duke then appeared to have no heir, his successor was to be Leopold I of Baden. This had all been engineered by his mother, the Countess von Hochberg, who had arranged the kidnapping of the duchess's child and the subsequent attempt on Kaspar's life.
Four years later, on December 14, 1833, having been moved to Ansbach, Kaspar was contacted and told he could learn about his ancestry if he went to the Court Gardens. On his way there, Kaspar was attacked again and stabbed in the chest. He survived long enough to stagger home but died only a few days later without being able to identify his assailant.
Kaspar was buried in a small, peaceful graveyard, and his headstone reads: “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was un known, his death mysterious.” A monument was later erected to him in Ansbach, which reads,
“Hie occultus occulto occisus est”
(“Here an unknown was killed by an unknown”). His death gave birth to one of Europe's best-known and most enduring mysteries, one that will probably never be fully solved. (See “The Piano Man,” page 197, for the story of a modern-day Kaspar Hauser.)