Some things stick around long after we've forgotten about them, while other objects vanish before we can use them. Let's explore both types today.
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Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. For Henry, the abbots of a Cistercian monastery in the check town of Sedleik, it all started with the crucifixion. In seventy eight, King Odoaker the second of Bohemia had sent Henry to Golgatha, just outside of Jerusalem's walls, where Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified. Henry traveled there with one mission to bring a piece of the Holy Land back with him to the monastery. Once he arrived in Galgatha, he gathered up some of the earth at his feet and returned to Sedleik, where he scattered the holy ground over the abbey cemetery. The story of Henry's journey and his act within the cemetery spread throughout the town and much of Europe. To have the earth Jesus had walked on so close by made the sud Look Cemetery one of the most popular burial sites around, and many folks got their wish. As the Black Death spread throughout Europe in the fourteenth century, and then wars of the fifteenth century sent scores of soldiers to their graves. The abbey cemetery eventually reached capacity. More space was required to handle all the bodies coming in, so a new Gothic church was erected right in the middle of the cemetery. This church would have two levels. Its upper level, complete with vaulted ceilings, would act as a common chapel. Its basement level, however, had a more macab use as an ossuary. An ossuary is not unusual. It was a room or a vessel for some kind of skeletal remains to be stored in. Typically, they were built when space was limited within the cemetery itself. Cultures all over the world have been known to utilize them. Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, for example, utilized a deep well as their ossuary in Sedlick. Though such a place was built beneath the cemetery Church of All Saints. When construction began, the mass graves below the surface were exhumed and their contents were replaced within the new ossuary. Such a daunting job was taken up by a half blind monk in fifteen eleven, who started stacking the bones in the corners of the chapel. By the time he was finished, he had created six tall piles, everything from skulls to phalanges. Today only four remain. According to the legend, When he completed the last pile, the monk's site was restored. The bones remained that way for centuries, simple stacks that had gone relatively undisturbed. The land and the chapel were eventually purchased by the Schwarzenburg's, a wealthy check and German noble family towards the end of the seventeen hundreds, who retained ownership well into the nineteenth century. In eighteen seventy, the family hired a check woodcarver named Francis Rint to make something of all those bones collecting dust in the ossuary. Spruce up the place a bit, they told him. He started by cleaning all the bones up, using chlorinated lime to bleach them to a stark white, and then he got to work. He placed cherubs the top towers of skulls that were carefully arranged along tall pyramid frames. He also recreated the Schwarzenburg family crest using femurs. Tibia's and shoulder blades, among other bones. Rint even signed his work. His name and the year of completion were fashioned out of hand and arm bones along one of the walls. He also lined skulls and crossbones along the vaulted ceiling and archways, having them converge in the center of the chapel. There, several feet above the floor, he hung the most startling piece in the entire building, and eight foot chandelier, and yes, it too was made entirely of bone. Rint he used just about every bone in the human body to create that chandelier. Visitors today can see candles glow atop skulls resting at the ends of arms fringed with dangling bones, presumably from actual arms. It is an ornate and disturbingly beautiful peace and has helped the set like assuary become one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe. And even though it might be frightening or difficult to look at, it is not meant to scare visitors. The chandelier, the bones of thirty thousand plague victims, and the chapel that houses them all are a reminder memento mori, or remember that you must die live life to the fullest, because we're only here for a short time. Before long, we'll all return to the earth once more, and our bones will turn to dust or maybe a desk lamp, whichever comes first. Not everything we set eyes on is what it appears to be, whether it's the latest optical illusion to go viral on the Internet or one of those new deep fake videos that puts false words in the mouths of real politicians. Our eyes can't always be trusted, which is counterintuitive. I know we've all been raised on sayings like seeing is believing, But just because we believe something doesn't make it true. Look no further than children who believe they can fly, or the baseball player who steps up to the plate completely convinced he'll hit a home run. This concept played out in a very unique way a little over twenty years ago in the American Midwest. In late March of the Associated Press ran an article in dozens of major newspapers around the country warning the public to be on the lookout for a very specific bank robber. They had already struck banks in Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee, and folks were afraid that their town and would be the thieves next target. They were not, however, worried about guns or violence, because that's not how the thieves worked. Instead, they fooled the eye. Each robbery was really a simple, unassuming series of events. One of the thieves would enter a bank and asked to open an account. They would produce some forms of identification fake, of course, and then the account would be all set up and ready to go. Then the thief would pull a check out of their jacket or pocket and asked to deposit it. They would apologize for how wet it felt, but they had been clumsy and dropped it on the wet pavement outside just a few moments before. Naturally, the bank clerk would smile and then happily oblige. When the transaction was over, the customer would simply leave. A week later, though, that same person would return, fill out a withdrawal slip and asked to empty the account. Each time that happened, the teller would check the bank's computer system and see that the original check had never bounced or been refused, so they would pull out cash in the same value you and handed over. And these weren't small transactions either, like fifty dollars or a hundred, No, these were each in the thousands, and the moment the customer left the bank with that cash in hand, the bank robbery was complete and the teller had no idea it had happened. And banks weren't the only targets either. A few times the thieves went to grocery stores that cash checks for their customers and handed over similarly wet checks in exchange for stacks of cold, hard cash. They had been doing it all through seven and by March of the police and a few check clearinghouse companies were getting worried, and rightly so. Nearly twenty of these checks had been cashed throughout the Midwest, to the tune of close to seventy thousand dollars. Then, after reading through dozens of newspaper articles on the case, I can't seem to determine if they ever caught the thieves, but they certainly figured out how the robberies were happening. It turns out those checks weren't wet because the thieves had been repeatedly clumsy. No, they were wet because they've been doused with the chema goal that turned them into a ticking time bomb. Not the kind that explodes, but the kind that dissolves. Each time, the bank teller would take one of those checks and put it in the drawer. The chemical would get to work away from watchful eyes. Slowly, over the course of about ten hours, each of them would blacken, curl up, and then finally disintegrate into a tiny pile of black ash. The checks never bounced because they couldn't. They had disappeared. And I'll be honest, I could never blame the police if they never managed to catch the thieves, because the odds were certainly stacked against them. After all, they work in a profession that requires them to solve crimes by putting the pieces together. But how can you do that when there are no pieces left. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com and until next time, stay curious, Yeah,