Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Some twenty miles west of the Isle of Lewis, out where the gray Atlantic gnaws at the last teeth of the Hebrides, there is a scatter of rock called the Flannan Isles. The largest of them, Eilean Mor, is barely more than a green-capped stone thrust up from the swell, ringed by cliffs that fall two hundred feet straight into white water. No one lives there. No one has ever truly lived there. For centuries the fishermen of Lewis would land only to graze a few sheep and then hurry away before dark, crossing themselves as they went, muttering old cautions about the "little people" and about taking nothing from the island, not even a blade of its grass. They called it a holy place and a haunted one in the same breath, and they did not linger. In December of 1900 three men were left alone on that rock to tend a light. When the relief boat came, the men were gone. The lamp was cleaned and ready. The beds were unmade. A meal sat half-eaten, or so the legend insists. And of James Duc...

In the spring of 1845, two of the finest ships in the British navy sailed out of England and into the far north, carrying one hundred and twenty-nine men and the confident hopes of an empire. Their commander was Sir John Franklin, a celebrated Arctic explorer, and their mission was to conquer the last unnavigated stretch of the fabled Northwest Passage, the sea route through the frozen maze of the Canadian Arctic that had lured and destroyed sailors for centuries. The ships were named Erebus and Terror — words meaning darkness and dread — and they were provisioned for years, armored against the ice, and equipped with every advantage of the age. They were seen by other vessels one last time that summer, moored to an iceberg, waiting for the way to open. And then they sailed on into the white labyrinth and were never seen again by European eyes. Every one of the one hundred and twenty-nine men died. The full story of how they perished, and why so total and terrible a disaster overtook t...

In the far south of Egypt, in one of the driest and most desolate stretches of the Sahara, there lies a place where a great mystery is written in stone across the empty sand. It is called Nabta Playa, and it is one of the oldest known monuments to the human study of the heavens anywhere on earth. Here, some seven thousand years ago and more — a thousand years and more before the first stones of Stonehenge were raised, long before the pharaohs built their pyramids — a people living in what was then a green and watered land set up rings and rows of standing stones aligned to the sun and, it seems, to the stars. They were not the builders of a great civilization with cities and writing. They were nomadic herders of cattle, wanderers of the savanna. And yet they raised a monument of astronomical knowledge so early and so sophisticated that its very existence forces us to reconsider how ancient the human quest to read the sky truly is. How and why these desert herders came to build a star-...

Just across the river from where the modern city of St. Louis now stands, in the fertile bottomlands of the Mississippi, there once rose the greatest city that ever existed in North America north of Mexico. It was called, by us, Cahokia — for we do not know the name its own builders gave it. At its height, some nine hundred years ago, it was a metropolis of many thousands of people, larger in its day than London, a sprawling sacred city of enormous earthen pyramids, vast public plazas, and great timber monuments aligned to the movements of the sun. It was the capital of a powerful and sophisticated civilization, the beating heart of a culture that spread its influence across much of the continent. And then, over the course of a century or two, it emptied. Its people abandoned the great mounds and drifted away, the city fell silent, and by the time European explorers arrived, no one remained who could tell them who had built the giant pyramids or why they had been forsaken. The rise an...

On a cold January morning in 1947, a woman walking with her small child along a quiet residential street on the edge of Los Angeles saw what she first took to be a discarded store mannequin lying in a vacant lot. It was not a mannequin. It was the body of a young woman, and the manner of her death was so deliberate, so theatrical, and so cruel that it seared itself into the memory of the city and the nation, and it has never faded. The victim was a twenty-two-year-old named Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress newly come to the great city of dreams. The press, seizing upon her dark hair and dark clothing and a nickname she had reportedly been given, christened her the Black Dahlia, and that name has become synonymous with one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history. Despite one of the largest investigations the city had ever mounted, despite decades of theories and confessions and accusations, the killer of the Black Dahlia was never found. The case remains open to thi...

For as long as people have huddled indoors during thunderstorms, a small number of them have witnessed something that should not be possible. In the midst of the tempest, a glowing sphere of fire appears — a luminous ball, often the size of a grapefruit or a little larger, burning with a steady or flickering light. It floats. It drifts slowly through the air, sometimes drifting in through an open window or down a chimney, moving across a room past terrified onlookers, hovering, wandering, seeming almost to possess a purpose. It lasts a few seconds, occasionally longer, and then it either fades away, or vanishes silently, or bursts with a sharp report, sometimes leaving behind a sulfurous smell and scorched traces of its passing. This is ball lightning, and though it has been reported for centuries by witnesses of every kind, from peasants to sea captains to scientists, no one has ever been able to fully explain what it is. It is one of the oldest and most stubborn unsolved mysteries o...