5 historical secrets that are unlikely to be solved

1. Who the Beast of Gevodans really was

From 1764 to 1767, in the north of the county of Gevaudan in France, something or someone committed about 250 attacks on local residents. 123 victims were brutally killed, 51 injured - exact numbers were recordedG. Todaro. The man-eater of Gévaudan: when the serial killer is an animal in parish books. And it is still unknown who was capable of such atrocities.

A few survivors described a creature resembling a wolf, but the size of a horse. He allegedly had a long tail with a tassel like a lion, and an elongated muzzle with fangs, reminiscent of the head of a greyhound dog. The beast paid little attention to livestock, but attacked people, especially women and children.

The first recorded victim of the Gevodan beast on June 30, 1764 was a fourteen-year-old girl named Jeanne Boulet. Over the next two months, he killed 11 more people.

Neither traps, nor traps, nor wolf pits, nor poisoned bait helped stop the monster. The monster effortlessly bypassed all the traps, and even large-scale raids organized by order of King Louis XV did not bring any results. With each failure of the hunters, the superstitious peasants only strengthened their suspicions: the Zhevodan beast is not just a wolf, but werewolfinvulnerable to conventional weapons.

Organized the huntR. H. Thompson. Wolf-Hunting in France in the Reign of Louis XV: The Beast of the Gévaudan on the monster, arrows and dragoons under the command of the Versailles lieutenant François-Antoine de Beauternes killed 1,200 wolves. However, the killings continued.

But one day a certain hunter Jean Chastelle, armed with a Bible and silver bullets, went into the forest, tracked down the Beast and shot him. They made a stuffed animal out of the monster and brought it to the king. Only it smelled so bad that Louis XV ordered to throw it out.

The murders seemed to end there, but many inconsistencies were immediately found in the story of Jean Chastel. Moreover, the stuffed animal he presented looked suspiciously like his hunting mastiff.

Be that as it may, historiansJ. M. Smith. Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast still do not know what the Zhevodansky beast was. Maybe it was big Wolf or even a few wolves. Or maybe a lion escaped from the royal zoo, and that is why eyewitnesses talked about the tassel on the tail?

Or it was an endemic cave hyena - similar in description, except for size. Finally, there is a more insane theory: the murders could have been committed by a maniac or a group of robbers who set an aggressive dog on the victims.

2. Where Genghis Khan is buried

According to legend, the lord of the Mongol Empire ordered to be buried without honors and monuments. So where the tomb of Genghis Khan is located and what is interesting in it is still, unfortunately, unknown to modern science.

In the chronicle "The Secret Legend of the Mongols" is writtenJ. Weatherford. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World the exact year of the death of the ruler of the nomads is 1227 (if translated from the Chinese chronology), but it is not said where his final resting place is.

Marco Polo wrote in his chroniclesC. Peers. Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machinethat the emperor of the Mongols was buried by 2,000 slaves who built a mausoleum for him. And then the soldiers killed them. Then another group of soldiers killed the soldiers guarding the builders. Well, then the third group killed everyone in general, and then themselves. So everyone who could know where the khan lies, followed him to a face-to-face meeting with Tengri, the supreme Mongol deity.

Sounds impressive, but it is not clear where Genghis Khan found so many psychopaths ready to commit hara-kiri.

Modern historians believeC. Peers. Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machinethat the khan was buried somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Burkhan Khaldun. This is a sacred place for the Mongols, where the most noble rulers of the nomads were traditionally buried. But the exact location of the tomb is unknown to archaeologists to this day.

3. Where did Woolpit's green children come from?

In the XII century in England, in the village of Woolpit, in the county of Suffolk, an inexplicable event took place. Once, local peasants found two lost children in a field, who, as it turned out later, were brother and sister to each other. They were 12 years old or so. And they could not explain where they came from and what happened to them, as they spoke in an incomprehensible language.

But the biggest oddity of the Woolpite children was their appearance. They had green skin.

The records of the local monks and chroniclers did not specify what exactly was meantJ. J. Cohen. Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England / Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England underneath that. That is, it is not clear how the children looked - like orcs or goblins, or simply they had an unhealthy, earthy complexion. Chronicler Ralph Coggshall in his "Chronicle of England" wrote only "green skin" (lat. Chronicum Anglicanum) - and understand how you want.

The oddities did not end there. The children not only were of an unusual color and did not understand English, but also refused any food except green beans. However, the peasants, into whose hands the foundlings fell, were kind-hearted people, so they baptized them and taught them the human language.

The boy then fell ill and soon died, and the girl, named Agnes Barr, grew up and even began to eat normal food. After that, her skin turned pink, like ordinary people.

Soon she was able to communicate with the farmers who sheltered her and said that she and her brother were born and raised in an area called St. Martin's Land. This is an underground country where all people are green, but otherwise quite normal. It is dark all the time there, and only in the evening a slightly lighter twilight sets in.

When the girl grew up and left foster parents, she began to work as a servant for no one knight, Sir Richard de Calne.

It was mentioned that she was violent, dissolute and unrestrained, but lived a completely ordinary life.

To this day, it is not known what kind of Saint Martin's Land is and why the children were green. Alternative history fans claimJ. Clark. Small, Vulnerable ETs: The Green Children of Woolpit / Science Fiction Studiesthat there was contact with aliens or creatures of another world, some underground elves. Skeptics, however, argue that there were no children at all, and the chroniclers were simply either retelling old tales or drinking a lot.

Historians put forward other versions.N. F. Partner Serious Entertainments: The Writings of History in Twelfth-Century England / University of Chicago Press. For example, the children might have been fugitive Flemings. The story allegedly took place around 1173, during the reign of King Henry II, and then many inhabitants of Flanders illegally emigrated to England after an unsuccessful uprising against the monarch.

The orphaned children got lost in the woods, starved and hid in the Grimes Graves flint mines. And their skin became greenish from hypochromic anemiacaused by exhaustion is not uncommon.

Another option: brother and sister escaped from slavery from copper mines. This explains their stories about the underworld. And prolonged contact with copper causes the skin to turn green. But we will hardly know what really happened to the Woolpeet children.

4. Whose skull is in the diorama of the Carnegie Natural History Museum

Museum dioramas are generally pretty creepy things. There is hardly anyone in the world who likes how all these lifeless things stare at visitors with their empty eyes. But some of the exhibits are even more intimidating than others because of what might be stored in their bowels.

Take a look at the photo above. This is a dioramaFound: A Real Human Skull in a Museum Diorama / Atlas Obscura An Arab Messenger Attacked by Barbary Lions, made by the French company Maison Verreaux in the 19th century. It was first shown at the Paris World's Fair in 1867, where it received an award for realism. Later, in 1899, it was bought by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (no, not the one that wrote motivational books) in Pittsburgh, USA.

All museum workers have long noted that the rider on the dromedary has simply disgustingly realistic teeth.

And when the diorama was restored in 2016Ridiculous History: Famous Museum Diorama Includes Human Remains / How Stuff Works, it turned out that the teeth were... real. Claws lions, the dromedary ribs and some other bones were taken from real animals. But the most amazing thing is that inside the head of the messenger was a real human skull.

It turned out that the composition was created by the taxidermists, the Verro brothers. One of them, Jules Verrault, noted that he once illegally exhumed the body of an African soldier in Botswana. These guys stopped at nothing to get materials for their work.

It is still unknown whose head was stuck in the diorama and whether the donor voluntarily donated such an important part of the body. It has been speculated that Verro removed her from someone's grave in Europe. Or did taxidermists get the skull in a more brutal way?

According to the established rules, human remains from the museum should be sent to relatives for burial, but in this case the skull remains unclaimed.

5. Who was hiding behind an iron mask

In 1669, a mysterious prisoner was placed in the French prison of PignerolH. R. Williamson. Enigmas of history. He was wearing a black velvet mask, which the jailers were forbidden to remove personally by Louis XIV's minister of war, the Marquis de Louvois. The man was extremely taciturn and rarely spoke to the valet and overseers.

According to the king's instructions, the prisoner's cell was located behind several doors so that it was impossible to overhear what was happening inside. The prisoner was added to the lists of prisoners under the name Eustache Dauger, but it, of course, was fictitious.

For 34 years he was held in captivity, and several times he was transferred from one prison to another, including the famous Bastille. Throughout this period, until the death of the prisoner, his guard was the jailer Benigne Dovern de Saint-Mar.

The philosopher Voltaire somehow suggested that the prisoner was no less than the illegitimate older brother of Louis XIV. He also wrote that the man wore not a velvet, but an iron mask.

Alexander Dumas did not ignore this mysterious person, describing his possible fate in the sixth volume of his books Famous Crimes.

It is still unknown who the Iron (or Velvet) mask was. In total, more than 50 likely versions have been put forward.J. Noone. The Man behind the Maskwhat kind of important bird is this and why the sun king planted him personally for life, and even in the strictest secrecy.

Perhaps it was his brother or father, and Louis eliminated a competitor to the throne. Or the illegitimate son of King Charles II of England, whom the ruler took prisoner because he knew too much about the internal affairs of France. Or the Italian diplomat and adventurer Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli.

It came to really insane versions. Allegedly, the Man in the Iron Mask is Peter I, kidnapped by Louis during his visit to France with the "Grand Embassy". And the impostor was returned to Russia under the guise of a tsar. True, historians do not take this idea seriously.