Cave of Wonders

how is Lewis Carroll linked to the Knights Templar? Like Carroll's original question, there's no clear answer, at least not that anyone is aware of. However, his story of a girl who discovers a magical world down a rabbit hole is not the only one. Several years ago, a farmer in Shropshire, England, had walked through a wooded area on his property when he noticed several large holes in the ground. He assumed they were rabbit holes leading to a massive

underground warren. Upon closer inspection, though, he discovered the holes led to something else. Somewhere else Beneath the forest was a network of caves and man made rooms, carved entirely from sandstone. Enormous stone pillars held up arched ceilings only a meter below the farmer's feet, and some areas were so small their entrances so narrow they could only be accessible by crawling on one's hands and knees. Known as Kington Temple, the chambers bore a striking resemblance to those

of a place of worship. Many thought the site had been the venue for countless ceremonies, ranging to black magic rituals to Christian gatherings. In fact, the caves possessed several features that lent credence to that belief, including a font and drawings of crosses on the walls. The crosses helped fuel speculation as to the cave's true purpose, as they looked much like the crosses worn by the Knights Templar, the military order that fought in the Crusades and allegedly

protected the Holy Grail. For a long time, it was believed that the underground refuge was the resting area for the Knights. Later, after the order was dissolved, it became a place of worship for their followers. In addition to the crosses, the temple's nave, or central gathering area, was round in shape, carved in the image of the Church of the Holy Sepulture, which according to tradition, sits on the site of both the Crucifixion and the burial of Jesus.

Rumors of the cave's religious origins brought more than historians to its hidden corridors. Since the nineteen eighties, tourists, vandals, and practitioners of the occult have flocked to the sandstone hideaway, carving things into the walls and leaving garbage behind. As a result, the area was closed off to the public by the property owner in two thousand twelve. In that time, more information about the caves has um surfaced. For one, it has never been a place of worship for the

Knights Templar or their followers. It hadn't even been built yet. Kanton Temple was most likely a product of the Victorian era, carved hundreds of years after the Knights Templar had been dissolved. During that time, elaborate ornamental structures such as this were common among wealthy members of the British elite. They provided only decoration, even though they're very architecture betrays a sense

of purpose. However, instead of a replica Roman temple or an Egyptian pyramid in someone's garden, the owner at the time had decided to carve an entire temple out of sandstone beneath an English forest. England is full of ancient

caves and underground structures. Kara Dot Cave and all Stretton is a large opening in volcanic rock and is believed to be where British chieftain Caracticus hid out while resisting the Roman army during first century a d And another folly similar to Kington Temple, the Hawkstone Grotto, was carved out of an old copper mine adjacent to a large manor house. There are many of these edifices and man made caverns we know about, and chances are some have

yet to be rediscovered. England, of course, is a vast country with thousands of years of history behind it, but we still don't know everything. To achieve that, we might just need to dive a little deeper down the rabbit hole. It's the thought that counts, right At least, that's what we tell ourselves when we get a gift that doesn't seem quite the right fit for us. We should just be thankful someone thought of us at all, Except that isn't always the case. Sometimes no gift is the best

gift of all. A woman from Edinburgh must have felt that way when her friend returned from a trip to i row In In the friend's luggage was a modest necklace made from glass beads, a thoughtful token from a far away land, though the woman might not have accepted it had she known where exactly in Cairo, her friend had obtained it an ancient tomb. Even though the necklace had been a gift from someone close, the woman didn't think much of it and set it aside. For seven years.

It lived among her jewelry, getting pushed deeper and deeper out of the way, until nineteen twenty, when she rediscovered it. It still didn't suit her taste, and enough time had passed where she didn't feel guilty getting rid of it, so she tossed it in the small waste basket beside her bed. She awoke the following night and reached for her pair of slippers that she kept nearby when something grabbed her wrist. At least she thought something had grabbed her,

but when she looked down she didn't see anything. There were strange sounds coming from the waste basket, too, like something was crawling around inside it. She looked down, but there was some paper and a string of beads. She snatched the necklace in a panic and threw it outside her door. The woman told her brother about the incident

the following day. He was a doctor and someone who would scoff at stories of strange sounds in the middle of the night, but his sister was not one to make up such outlandish things, so he took the necklace home with him to see it for himself. That night, he placed it under his pillow and went to sleep. At four o'clock the next morning, he was awoken by loud banging on the walls. He also felt a hand moving under his pillow, as though it was trying to

take the necklace from him. His neighbors asked him the following day why he'd been hanging pictures in the middle of the night when he should have been getting sleep. He had woken everyone up, They said, one nightly experiment wasn't enough to render a sound judgment, though, so the man spent another night with the ancient bobble beneath his head. That evening, his bed started to shake, and for a whole week he experienced bizarre visits from an unnamed entity

that haunted his bedroom. His part of the experiment was over, but he needed a wider sample size, so he gave the necklace to a friend who had a similar experience involving an invisible hand reaching for them during the night. That person passed it on to someone else, who gave it to another person, all who reported the same stories

the necklace had invited something into their homes. Even more strange, each person who possessed the necklace woke up in a cold sweat, their hearts beating out in their chest, as though they'd come face to face with a ghost. Eventually, stories about the necklace made their way to a local newspaper. The reporter J. W. Harry's printed an article about the cursed object, including quotes from each person who had slept

with it under their pillows. As you might imagine, the article spread like wildfire, but Harris wanted to learn more about the necklace. He borrowed it and had it examined by the Royal Scottish Museum, which told him the blue beads were rough three thousand years old. Though an interesting piece, there was nothing particularly special about it. It didn't look like something used in a religious ceremony or a ritual

of any kind. Harry's took the piece home, and after his family had retired for the night, he placed it on the mantel and took a seat in his living room, book in his lap. It wasn't long before he started hearing sounds rustling in the sideboard, someone knocking here and there, what steps in the hall. He ran around the house, chasing each of the sounds, but when he looked for a source, he found nothing. Harry's even included his wife, who didn't know that her husband had brought the necklace

home in these experiments. He took it into the bedroom where his wife was sitting up, still awake, and hid the necklace out of sight. The lights dimmed, then returned to normal. They did so consistently for minutes at a time. Eventually Harry's turned off the lights and then the rustling sounds began again. After a week, Harry's decided to unload the necklace on another unsuspecting soul, an architect named James Dunn,

while the others dealt with rustling and mild tapping. Donne experienced crashing sounds in the middle of his bedroom, so loud that they scared his dog. Harry's also told someone else about the necklace, someone familiar with the supernatural, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He told Harry's how ancient Egyptians would enchant their tombs with spirit entities to guard them after

their death. It was possible that the necklace had been taken from one of those tombs without permission, disturbing the entity, and so Harry's gave the jewelry back to its original owner, the woman from Edinburgh, who wanted nothing to do with it. She told her brother, the doctor, to take it away from her, which he did on a trip to Loch Levin. He reached into his pocket, pulled the necklace out, and threw it into the water, where it's been ever since.

But that wasn't the end for the Gyptian relic. Soon after, a young woman in Edinburgh was reported to be writing strange letters that didn't seem to make any sense. Of course, kids make up silly words all the time, but what made this incident noteworthy was that her writing hand was doing it automatically independence of the rest of her body.

It turns out that what everyone thought was gibberish was in fact a message scribbled backwards, supposedly taken from the deity protecting the Egyptian tomb from which the necklace had been taken, and this deity was revealing the location of the necklace and that it was probably best for it to stay there. Jewelry is a lovely gift in most situations. Better than that, though, is something much more comforting relief from an Egyptian curse. 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,