Strange Fate: An Extraordinary True Story of Paranormal Discovery by Graham Phillips & Jodi Russell

Author:Graham Phillips & Jodi Russell [Phillips, Graham & Russell, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-17T22:00:00+00:00

-10-

The Secret Vault

“Well, we’re not the only ones who think the date’s changed,” Jodi said as she and Graham sat in her hotel room. They had checked and rechecked everything online to establish that the day of the Biddulph fire was still a year earlier than they—and now Edith—remembered. Yet bizarrely, all their own notes and writing still recorded the event as having taken place in 1897.

Graham shook his head, bewildered. “I’d decided that I must have mixed up the date and that you’d inadvertently gone along. But now Edith! She’s an academic. That she made the exact mistake we did! I don’t buy it.”

“So, what is going on?”

Graham held out his upturned palms. “I’ve no idea.”

For the first time in a while, Graham opened his text messages. He was about to contact Tara’s friend Jack, an authority on occult history and the Knights Templar, and ask him about the coffin slabs at St. Lawrence Church. Surprisingly, Jack had already sent him a message. Tara had told him of her latest trip to Biddulph and had shared photographs of the tunnel. Jack was immediately reminded of something: an illustration from an old book depicting an artificial cave very similar to the one in Biddulph Park. Enigmatically, Jack only sent Graham a copy of the picture with no accompanying note. He obviously thought that Graham would get the connection. And he did.

“What does it mean?” Jodi asked when she saw the image.

Graham remained silent for a moment, staring at his phone. “I think I know what little Mary may have found at Spring Wood Priory. It’s all to do with the original Order of Meonia.”

“The original order? Remind me.”

“Remember, an Elizabethan group also called the Order of Meonia existed in the late 1500s and early 1600s. I doubted the two groups had any connection with one another. For a start, they existed two and a half centuries apart. I thought they had coincidentally used the same name for their groups merely because the land of Meonia was considered the birthplace of Western mysticism. Other than that, I assumed there was no link. Now, I’m not so sure.”

“How would the Elizabethan Order of Meonia have any relevance to what little Mary found in Spring Wood years later?”

“I’ll give you my take on it soon. First, there’s a place you should see.”

* * *

“You’re doing your usual thing by keeping me in suspense,” Jodi complained from the passenger seat as Graham drove them across the Midlands of England the following morning.

“Yes … and no.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You need to understand the background to my thinking.”

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?” Jodi said with a sigh.

“Canons Ashby House. About seventy miles north of London.”

Canons Ashby House, near Daventry in the East Midlands, is a Tudor manor dating back to the late 1500s, the period of Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare. The rear of the house is faced with honey-colored blocks of local Cotswold stone from a later era, but most of the building has remained unchanged since it was first built.

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