Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 6 min readA round stone tower stands on eight arches in a Newport park, and for nearly two centuries people have argued over who built it. The documents and the mortar point to a 17th-century windmill — but the older, stranger theories have never quite gone away.
About 3 min readA sandstone slab in eastern Oklahoma bears eight carved runes — and a claim that Vikings reached the state centuries before Columbus. The runes themselves tell a different story.
About 4 min readIn 1898 a Swedish farmer in Minnesota dug a carved stone out of the roots of a tree. It claimed that Norse explorers reached the American Midwest in 1362 — 130 years before Columbus. Scholars have been arguing about it ever since.