Seventeen tiny coffins

The London Times, in its July 20, 1836 edition, as well as the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, 3-12-460, reported that boys searching for rabbits’ burrows at Arthur’s Seat near Edinburgh found some thin sheets of slate in the side of a cliff. When they pulled them out, they found a little cave, within which were seventeen tiny coffins, three or four inches long. Inside the coffins were miniature wooden figures, each dressed differently.

The coffins had been “deposited singly…and at intervals of many years.” The older ones, in a bottom tier of eight, were “quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away.” The middle tier, also of eight coffins, did not appear quite as old, while the one on top, starting a new tier, was “quite recent-looking.”

–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 169 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).

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