Free Republic

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.” That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements. The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret...

GREY'S VALLEY WELL — Spanish-speaking men in a black sport utility vehicle attacked two San Diego residents camping near the Plank Road Monument here Sunday evening, a stretch of the east county desert south of the Grey's Well Interstate 8 off-ramp. The men in the SUV reportedly shot at the man and woman after the couple scrambled into their trailer for safety. After trying to bash the trailer open by ramming it with the front of the SUV, the men drove off. The woman, who asked not to be identified, said Monday that the attack was just one of a...