The secret of the mummy in the Crystal coffin found in a garage in San Francisco

Mysterious mummies are a symbol of ancient lost times, which we often associate with Egypt and other ancient civilizations. Therefore, the discovery of a coffin made of crystal with the body of a girl come from under the floor of a garage in San Francisco is absolutely shocking.

In 2016, while remodeling an old garage in San Francisco, California, workers found a strange object that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a child’s coffin with an extraordinary design.

Rusted bolts held a metal object together that resembled a large shaped casket, and it was only by unscrewing the bolts that it was possible to identify what it was. Bolts fixed a sheet of metal that covered two windows made of thick glass. Looking inside the box, the workers were taken aback — inside lay the body of a small blonde girl, almost untouched by decay.

The discovery of an old coffin containing the body of a child terrified the people of San Francisco and perplexed scientists. It took them a long time to figure out the mystery of an unusual burial.

Coffin inside lay the body of a blond girl dressed in a lace dress. Her hair was decorated with lavender petals, and on her chest lay a wreath in the form of a cross of blue bindweeds. In her hands, she held a large purple nightshade flower.

There were no details inside the coffin that would help identify the body.  The body was examined, described, and photographed, after which the experts drew up a protocol, placed the metal coffin containing the child in a wooden box, and… handed it over to the garage owner.

According to the law, if the corpse is not a criminal and the relatives are unknown, the burial duties are assigned to the owner of the land where the body was discovered.

During the paperwork, the police gave the deceased the name Eva. And the mistress of the garage, where they found the burial, named the child Miranda.

But how did the coffin with the little dead girl end up under the garage? This was not a surprising occurrence given that the structure stood on the grounds of Odd Fellows Cemetery, San Francisco’s largest cemetery. When the rapidly growing metropolis came close to the extreme graves, a large city churchyard was closed for burials in 1890.

When the cemetery started to negatively impact the neighborhood over time, it was decided to close it down in 1923. Most of the remains were exhumed and buried in common graves, while some of the bodies were taken by relatives for reburial. The coffin with the girl was obviously forgotten in the confusion and remained in the ground, which was handed over to developers.

Tissue and hair samples were taken from the deceased girl for DNA analysis. Erica Karner was busy burying Eva-Miranda while the examination was taking place. The girl’s body began to decompose after the airtight coffin was opened. It was impossible to delay the burial.

Tissue analysis revealed that the baby’s mother was born in the British Isles. Even more interesting were the results of the hair study.

“Hair DNA analysis showed that the child had a protein deficiency and severe malnutrition.

And experts said that most likely this arose due to some kind of illness or due to the amount of medication that the child used,” the lawyer said.

Volunteers explored the city archives. They found a record of the burial of a two-year-old girl who died due to severe exhaustion. Her name is Edith Howard Cook. The child died in October 1876.

The parents’ names were Horatio Nelson and Edith Skaufi Cook. Scientists have even found living relatives of the “girl from the crystal coffin.”

Thus, volunteers and scientists were able to solve the mystery surrounding the mysterious burial and give the girl’s name back who passed away nearly 150 years ago.

Parents often embalmed their dead children’s bodies centuries ago. The famous mummy of a child is kept in Palermo’s Capuchin catacombs. Rosalia Lombardo, the daughter of a Sicilian official, died of pneumonia in 1920. The girl’s body was so well preserved that she was nicknamed “Sleeping Beauty”.

Flotsam May Be Wreckage of Historic 19th-Century Ship

 A chunk of weather-beaten flotsam that washed up on a New York shoreline after Tropical Storm Ian last fall has piqued the interest of experts who say it is likely part of the SS Savannah, which ran aground and broke apart in 1821, two years after it became the first vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean partly under steam power.

The roughly 13-foot (4-meter) square piece of wreckage was spotted in October off Fire Island, a barrier island that hugs Long Island’s southern shore, and is now in the custody of the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society. It will work with National Park Service officials to identify the wreckage and put it on public display.

“It was pretty thrilling to find it,” said Betsy DeMaria, a museum technician at the park service’s Fire Island National Seashore. “We definitely are going to have some subject matter experts take a look at it and help us get a better view of what we have here.”

It may be difficult to identify the wreckage with 100% certainty, but park service officials said the Savannah is a top contender among Fire Island’s known shipwrecks.

Explorers have searched for the Savannah for over two centuries but have not found anything they could definitively link to the famous ship. The newly discovered wreckage, though, “very well could be” a piece of the historic shipwreck, said Ira Breskin, a senior lecturer at the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx. “It makes perfect sense.”

Evidence includes the 1-to-1.3-inch (2.5-to-3.3-centimeter) wooden pegs holding the wreckage’s planks together, consistent with a 100-foot (30.5-meter) vessel, park service officials said in a news release.

The Savannah was 98 feet, 6 inches (30 meters) long. Additionally, the officials said, the wreckage’s iron spikes suggest a ship built around 1820. The Savannah was built in 1818.

Breskin, author of “The Business of Shipping,” noted that the Savannah’s use of steam power was so advanced for its time that the May 24, 1819, start of its transatlantic voyage is commemorated as National Maritime Day. “It’s important because they were trying to basically show the viability of a steam engine to make it across the pond,” he said.

Breskin said a nautical archaeologist should be able to help identify the Fire Island wreckage, which appears likely to be from the Savannah. “It’s plausible, and it’s important, and it’s living history if the scientists confirm that it is what we think it is,” he said.

The Savannah, a sailing ship outfitted with a 90-horsepower steam engine, traveled mainly under sail across the Atlantic, using steam power for 80 hours of the nearly month-long passage to Liverpool, England.

Crowds cheered as the Savannah sailed from Liverpool to Sweden and Russia and then back to its home port of Savannah, Georgia, but the ship was not a financial success, in part because people were afraid to travel on the hybrid vessel. The Savannah’s steam engine was removed and sold after the ship’s owners suffered losses in the Great Savannah Fire of 1820.

The Savannah was transporting cargo between Savannah and New York when it ran aground off Fire Island. It later broke apart. The crew made it safely to shore and the cargo of cotton was salvaged, but the Augusta Chronicle & Georgia Gazette reported that “Captain Holdridge was considerably hurt by being upset in the boat.”

Explorers have searched for the Savannah over the two centuries since it but have not found anything they could definitively link to the famous ship.

Until now, perhaps.

Live Civil War Shell Discovered at Pennsylvania Battlefield

Archaeologists working at a historic battlefield at Gettysburg recently made an explosive find: a live 160-year-old artillery shell that had to be detonated by a specially trained U.S. Army disposal team.

The shell was found on Feb. 8 at Little Round Top, a hill that offered Union forces a strategic position during the Civil War. On July 2, 1863, the second day of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the North and the South struggled for 90 minutes to control Little Round Top, leaving thousands of soldiers dead.

The rocky hill was not, however, an ideal platform for an artillery offensive, as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee suggested in his 1864 report about the Gettysburg campaign. Lee reported that Confederate Gen. Longstreet was delayed by Union forces firing from Little Round Top, but Longstreet decided to go around them rather than attempt to take the hill.

An 18-month-long rehabilitation project is currently taking place at Little Round Top as the National Park Service works to preserve and protect the battlefield landscape and to add new signage for Gettysburg visitors.

Archaeologist Steven Brann and his team from Stantec, a consultancy company that also performs archaeological work, were sweeping the area with metal detectors when they hit on something nearly 2 feet (0.6 meter) underground. “It is standard procedure to use metal detectors on battlefields,” Brann told Live Science in an email.

The unexploded round they discovered was about 7 inches (18 centimeters) long and weighed about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms). “There are procedures in place in case such objects are found,” Brann explained.

Ultimately, the Army’s 55th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company (EOD) from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was called in to remove the shell and destroy it safely.

“Unexploded ordnance still found on the battlefield is a fairly unique circumstance,” Jason Martz, a spokesperson for Gettysburg National Military Park, told Live Science in an email. “It’s only the fifth found since 1980.” 

“Most of the objects we find are much smaller, such as percussion caps, bullets, and uniform buttons,” Brann said. “Much of what we find turns out to be modern trash or objects that were discarded during the construction of monuments, such as iron straps and nails.” Still, these artifacts are not usually discovered unless excavation is happening. And as evidenced by the current find, excavation at a battlefield can be dangerous.

“Archaeology work is always completed before any ground disturbance takes place, and it’s a federal offense to dig or metal detect for these items by the general public,” Martz said.

Many commenters and history buffs on the Gettysburg National Military Park’s Facebook post lamented the fact that the ordnance — which Capt.

Matthew Booker, commander of the EOD, identified as a 3-inch Dyer or Burton shell for a rifled cannon — had to be destroyed. 

Nonetheless, “this particular shell hasn’t told us its whole story yet,” Martz said. The park is researching the shell and its discovery location in greater detail now, trying to figure out, for example, whether it was fired by Union or Confederate troops, and will release that information to the public when it is available. 

“The fact that this shell was found nearly 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg is a very powerful and tangible connection to the past,” Martz added. “It also reminds us that the battlefield still has stories to tell.”