The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  It may have been the knife evidence that caused unpleasant rumors to circulate (Mainard merely says “observations of divers circumstances”). The coroner was asked to reopen the case and agreed to a reinvestigation. The body was exhumed, and it was found that the neck was broken. Clearly, the woman could not have broken her own neck. It was noted, moreover, that there was more blood on the floor of the room than on the bed, which seemed odd if Joan had cut her throat in bed. Moreover, Arthur Norkot’s alibi collapsed when his friends in Tewkesbury declared that they had not seen him for three years. Altogether, the evidence against the accused was so strong that the prosecution decided not to mention the strangest and most incredible piece of evidence at their trial. But for some reason, the jury did not think it was conclusive, and the four were acquitted. The judge, a man named Harvey, was incredulous and “let fall his opinion that it were better an appeal were brought than so foul a murder should escape unpunished”.

  This could only be done in the name of Joan Norkot’s baby. Accordingly, the four were retried in front of Justice Harvey. And it was at this retrial that a nameless clergyman – the minister of the parish – presented the evidence that the corpse had accused her murderers. The incredulous judge asked if anyone else had seen it, and the old man replied, “I believe the whole company saw it”.

  What had happened, it seemed, was this: Thirty days after she was buried, the body of Joan Norkot was taken from the grave and the coffin placed beside it, almost certainly on trestles. It must have been an unpleasant sight, since the severed jugular vein would have drained her of most of her blood. Then, in accordance with an ancient superstition, each of the accused was asked to touch the body. According to the superstition, if a corpse is touched by its murderer, the wounds will bleed afresh. Mrs Okeman fell to her knees and prayed to God to grant proof of their innocence. Then, like the others, she was asked to touch the corpse.

  The clergyman deposed the following:

  The appellers did touch the dead body, whereupon the brow of the dead, which was all a livid or carrion colour . . . began to have a dew or gentle sweat, which reached down in drops upon the face, and the brow turned and changed to a lively and fresh colour, and the dead opened one of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done several times. She likewise thrust out the ring- or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropt blood from it on to the grass.

  It was at this point that the judge expressed his doubts, and the clergyman then turned to his brother, the minister of the next parish, who had also been present. The brother repeated the evidence: that the brow had begun to perspire, that its colour had changed from livid (i.e., a bruised colour) to fresh and normal, that the eye had opened, and that the finger had three times made a pointing motion. (This seems to have been taken to imply that only three of the four accused were guilty.)

  What followed was a repetition of the main evidence that had already been presented at the first trial. The body of Joan Norkot lay “in a composed manner” in the bed, the bedclothes undisturbed and her baby beside her. This in itself was evidence enough to convict someone of murder, for it was obviously impossible that she could cut her throat elsewhere in the room – the floor was heavily bloodstained – then lie down and carefully cover herself up. Moreover, the broken neck seemed to indicate that considerable force had been used against her. It is just about possible for a person to break her own neck but not to cut her throat afterwards. It is equally impossible to cut the throat first and then break the neck.

  What had happened, quite clearly; was that the husband and wife had quarreled violently and that he had ended with his hands around her throat. She had fallen and struck her head against something, breaking her neck. Now in a panic – for the death was almost certainly accidental – Arthur Norkot conferred with his mother and sister about what could be done, with his brother-in-law, John Okeman, an unwilling participant. To hide the bruises on Joan’s throat and her broken neck, the solution seemed to be to cut her throat. But they were in such a panic that they did this on the floor of the room instead of in the bed. Then Joan Norkot was arranged in her bed and the baby – who had probably slept through it all – placed beside her. Someone left a bloodstained fingerprint and thumbprint on her hand. (Chief Justice Hyde, who heard the case, seems to have been so inexperienced in such matters that he had to ask how they could distinguish the prints of the left hand from those of the right.) And as they were leaving the room, someone tossed the bloodstained knife – which probably lay near the door – back into the room, so it stuck in the floor a few feet from the bed. Then Arthur Norkot hastily washed off his bloodstains and took his leave, instructing his mother to “find” the body the next morning and explain that her son was away in Tewkesbury.

  It is clear that the attempt to make the murder look like suicide was so bungled that a moderately intelligent investigator could have seen through it right away. But in 1629 scientific crime investigation was unknown. It would be almost another two centuries before Britain even had a police force. If someone was suspected of a crime, the standard method of “investigation” was to torture him until he either confessed or died. No one, it seemed, felt that the evidence against the Norkot family was sufficiently strong for an accusation.

  This brings us to the most difficult question of all. Did the corpse really “revive” and accuse the criminals? Any reader who has studied chapter 42 in this volume may concede that the evidence for the “survival” of the human personality is at least plausible. It would even seem that spirits can, under certain circumstances, “possess” the living and cause unexplained movements of material objects (“poltergeist” effects). And in one extraordinary case, the spirit of a murder victim seems to have returned to accuse her killer (see chapter 5). It seems just as conceivable that Joan Norkot was momentarily able to “repossess” her old body in order to accuse her attackers. But it must be immediately admitted that there are no other known examples in the history of paranormal research.

  In his Unsolved Mysteries, Valentine Dyall suggests a commonsense solution: that the two doctors who presided over the exhumation decided to shock the suspects into a public confession. A tiny pouch of some dark red fluid was stuck to her left hand and a fine thread attached to its stopper. The thread was passed through the wedding ring. Another thread was tied to one of the eyelashes. Then both threads were attached to the coffin handles. When the “touching test” was suggested, each doctor (standing on either side of the coffin) pulled on a thread. The eyelid twitched, the ring-finger jerked, and the “blood” was released so that it ran down the side of the corpse and out of a crack in the bottom of the badly made coffin. The bleeding wound “proved” that Joan had been murdered by someone who had just touched her. The evidence states that someone put his finger into the blood and testified that it was real; but this, Dyall suggests, would obviously have been one of the doctors themselves.

  It might be just possible, although one would think that in broad daylight the threads would surely have been visible. And what about the evidence of both clergymen that the face lost its “dead” colour and seemed to come to life? Pure imagination? That is also possible – except that they claimed that this was the first thing that happened, before the eye opened or the finger twitched. The imagination theory would be more acceptable if the face had “come to life” after the corpse “winked”.

  Whatever the explanation, the evidence of the two clergymen convinced the court. Arthur Norkot, together with his mother and sister, was sentenced to death. For reasons that Sir John Mainard (who was Sergeant Mainard when he took part in the trial) does not explain, the jury decided to acquit Norkot’s brother-in-law, John Okeman. When sentenced, all three repeated, “I did not do it”. In fact, Agnes Okeman was reprieved when she was discovered to be pregnant. Mary and John Norkot were hanged. Mainard concludes: “I inquired if they confessed anything at execution, but they did not, as I was told”.

  39
/>   The Oera Linda Book

  The Forgotten History of a Lost Continent

  In 1876 there appeared in London a bewildering work entitled the Oera Linda Book and subtitled From a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century. It was published by Trubner and Co., one of the most respectable names in publishing, so there could be no suggestion that it was a hoax. And the fact that the original text in Frisian (the language of Friesland, a part of northern Holland) was published opposite the English translation offered scholars the opportunity to check for themselves. Yet if the claims of the Oera Linda Book were true, then the history of the ancient world had to be completely rewritten. It suggested that in the third millennium BC, at about the time the Great Pyramid and the original Stonehenge were built, there was a great island continent in northern Europe that was inhabited by a highly civilized race. In 2193 BC this island was destroyed, like the legendary Atlantis, by some immense catastrophe. But enough of its inhabitants escaped to carry their civilization elsewhere – including ancient Egypt and Crete. In fact, the Oera Linda Book suggested that the legendary King Minos of Crete (creator of the Labyrinth) was a Frisian and that the same ancient civilization gave democracy to Athens.

  All this seemed so extraordinary and so confusing that the first reaction of Dutch and German scholars was to suggest that the book was a forgery. Yet they seem to have agreed that it was not a modern forgery and that it was probably a century to a century and a half old. But that would date it roughly to the 1730s. And it is hard to imagine why anyone would have wanted to forge such a document in the 1730s. A century later, in the Romantic era, there would have been some point in creating this mysterious narrative with its marvelous hints of a golden age in the remote past. But it is virtually impossible to imagine why, in that rather dull era of Frederick the Great and the Prince of Orange-Nassau (dull, at any rate, from the literary point of view), anyone should have bothered. It is true that a famous forgery of “ancient” Gaelic poetry – the works of “Ossian”, actually written by James MacPherson – became immensely popular in England and on the Continent in the 1760s; but if the Oera Linda Book was inspired by MacPherson’s Ossian, why did the forger put it in a drawer and forget about it until 1848, when it finally saw the light of day?

  According to its Introduction, written in 1871, the Oera Linda Book had been preserved in the Linden (or Linda) family from “time immemorial” and was written in a peculiar script that looked a little like Greek. It began with a letter from one “Liko oera Linda”, dated AD 803, in which he begged his son to preserve the book “with body and soul”, since it contained the history of their peoples. The manuscript was inherited by a certain C. Over de Linden – a modernized version of Oera Linda – in 1848, and a learned professor named Verwijs asked if he could look at it. He immediately recognized its language as ancient Fries, a form of Dutch. The manuscript examined by Verwijs had been copied in 1256 on paper manufactured from cotton and written in a black ink that did not contain iron (which eventually turns brown).

  According to the Introduction (by Dr J. O. Ottema), the Oera Linda Book records the history of the people of a large island called Atland, which was roughly on the same latitude as the British Isles, in what is now the North Sea (in other words, off the coast of modern Holland). Dr Ottema seems to think that Atland is Plato’s Atlantis,17 which most commentators have placed somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. But since Plato says only that it was “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” (what is now Gibraltar), Ottema could be correct.

  According to the Oera Linda Book, Atland had an excellent climate and an abundance of food. And since its rulers were wise and deeply religious, it was a peaceful and contented land. Its legendary founder was a half-mythical woman named Frya – obviously a version of the Nordic Freya, the moon goddess, whose name means “a lady”. (In the same way, frey means “a lord”.) Its people worshiped one God, under the (to us) unpronounceable name of Wr-alda. Frya was one of three sisters, the other two being named Lyda and Finda. Lyda was dark-skinned and became the founder of the black races; Finda was yellow-skinned and became the founder of the yellow races. Frya was white.

  All of this is obviously legend. But the Oera Linda Book then goes on to describe historical events.

  In the year 2193 BC, a great catastrophe of some sort struck Atland, and it was overwhelmed by the sea. Logic suggests that the same catastrophe must have struck the British Isles, since they were so close; but if Atland was as low and flat as Holland, we can understand why it was submerged. (The Dogger Bank, where Atland would have been situated, is the shallowest area of the North Sea.)

  According to Plato, Atlantis had been destroyed in a great catastrophe more than nine thousand years earlier. But one modern authority, Professor A. G. Galanopoulos, has argued that all the figures associated with Atlantis (which were recorded by Egyptian priests) were about ten times too great – for example, Plato says that the moat around the royal city was ten thousand stades (more than a thousand miles) long, which would make the royal city about three hundred times larger than Greater London or Los Angeles. If we divide nine thousand years by ten, we get nine hundred. The Egyptian priests told the Athenian lawgiver Solon about Atlantis around 600 BC, which would make the date for the destruction of Atlantis about 1500 BC (nine hundred years earlier). This is roughly the date of the explosion of the volcano of Santorini (north of Crete) that devastated most of the Mediterranean, and Galanopoulos argues that the island of Santorini was Atlantis. The only problem is that Plato placed Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules – in which case, Atland is certainly a contender.

  Another reason for the relative neglect of the Oera Linda Book is that its narrative seems so unfamiliar and its names are so strange; in this respect it resembles the Book of Mormon or that extraordinary work entitled Oahspe, which was “dictated” to an American medium named J. B. Newbrough at roughly the same time the Oera Linda Book was published. But these two documents claim some kind of “divine” origin, while the Oera Linda Book purports to be a historical document.

  Nevertheless, the people mentioned in it are not pure invention. A later book speaks at length about a warrior named Friso, an officer of Alexander the Great (born 356 BC), who is described in other Nordic chronicles. (The Oera Linda Book also speaks at length of Alexander the Great.) These chronicles state that Friso came from India. The Oera Linda Book says that Friso was descended from a Frisian colony that settled in the Punjab about 1550 BC; moreover, the Greek geographer Strabo mentions this strange “Indian” tribe, referring to them by the name Germania. The Oera Linda Book even mentions Ulysses and recounts how he went in search of a sacred lamp – a priestess had foretold that if he could find it, he would become king of all Italy. After an unsuccessful attempt to buy the lamp from its priestess-custodian, the “Earth Mother” (using treasures looted from Troy), he sailed to a place named Walhallagara (which sounds oddly like Valhalla) and had a love affair with a priestess named Kalip (obviously Calypso), with whom he stayed for several years “to the scandal of all who knew it”. From Kalip he obtained a sacred lamp of the kind he wanted, but it did him no good, for he was shipwrecked and had to be picked up, naked and destitute, by another ship.

  This fragment of Greek history, tossed into the Oera Linda Book is interesting for two reasons. It dates this adventure of Ulysses about 1188, which is about fifty years later than modern archaeology would date the fall of Troy (see chapter 23). But the Oera Linda Book could be correct. And it states that the nymph Calypso was actually a burgtmaagd (a word meaning “borough maid” – literally, a virgin priestess in charge of vestal virgins). This is consistent with the central claim of the Oera Linda Book: that after the “deluge”, the Frisians sailed the globe and became the founders of Mediterranean civilization, as well as settling in India. It is obvious why scholars have ignored the book. To take it seriously would mean virtually rewriting ancient history. If, for example, we accept that Calypso’s island, Walhallagara, was the island of Walcheren, in the Nort
h Sea (as the commentary on the Oera Linda Book claims it was), then Ulysses sailed right out of the Mediterranean. It is certainly simpler to accept Homer’s version of the story.

  After nearly a century of neglect, the Oera Linda Book was rediscovered by an English scholar named Robert Scrutton. In his fascinating book The Other Atlantis, Scrutton tells how, in 1967, he and his wife – a “sensitive” with strong psychometric powers18 – were walking over Dartmoor when she experienced a terrifying vision of a flood: great green waves higher than the hills pouring across the land.

  Eight years later he found legends of a great deluge in ancient poetry known as the Welsh Triads (which also speak of King Arthur). The Triads explain that long before the Kmry (the Welsh) came to Britain, there was a great flood that depopulated the entire island. One ship survived, and those who sailed in it settled in the “Summer Land” peninsula (which Scrutton identifies as the Crimea – still called Krym – in the Black Sea). These peoples decided to seek other lands, because their peninsula was subject to flooding. One portion went to Italy and the other across Germany and France and into Britain. (In fact, this account does not contradict the little we know about the mysterious people called the Celts, whose origin is unknown.) So the Kmry came back to Britain – probably around 600 BC – and brought their Druidic religion, which involved human sacrifice.