Play the game. Read the stories and decide which one is false
IT'S GAME TIME! Do you know when your friends are lying? Can you tell when something is a hoax or a tall tale? If so, you might be good at our popular game: Which Story is False. This is installment #15 in our game in which you are presented below and on the next three pages with four stories of the paranormal and the unexplained. Three of the stories have been documented as true. But one of them has been made up by me. Your job is to decide which is the false story. Think you can do it?
STORY #1: THE ANGEL OF LEEDS
The story of Agnes Linsdale's childhood is one of horror, cruelty and ultimately an unexplained miracle. It was 1902 when Agnes was just six years old and her mother died, leaving her to live with her distraught father in a poor section of Leeds, England.
A week after her mother's burial, Agnes was noticed as "missing" by her school and the neighborhood children. When the police inquired about the girl's absence, Mr. Linsdale explained that he was no longer able to care for her and had sent her to live with his sister in London.
In reality, Mr. Linsdale, like some callous character in a Dickens novel, had shut up little Agnes in the attic of their dilapidated house, which he kept locked at all times. Having clearly lost his mind, he held the poor girl prisoner there, feeding her only scraps of food and little water, never speaking to her, never letting her out - for five long years. The dark attic was cold and empty, visited occasionally only by curious mice that sought, perhaps, to steal Agnes' scraps.
Visitors never came to the Linsdale home, and Agnes was often left alone there when her father went off to work at the factory. But she had no way of alerting the outside world of her imprisonment, and in a strange way, no inclination to do so. She was discovered only by chance. After five years, Agnes had grown just tall enough to peek out of the attic's one small window that faced the street, and she was spotted by a neighbor.
Shortly, the police rescued Agnes, who found her sitting calm, smiling and naked on the floor beneath the window. Her father was carted off to prison.
The local authorities were horrified by Agnes' plight, but also puzzled by her apparent excellent health and good spirits. One policeman described her countenance as "radiant" - hardly what anyone expected. What Agnes told the authorities of her five years of imprisonment puzzled them even further. Agnes insisted that she was visited almost nightly by a "kind lady" who entered through a door in the ceiling (there was no door) and brought her food, cakes and tea, and who would brush her hair. During the day, "bright-haired children" would come and play with her, teach her games, and sing songs with her.
The authorities could find no evidence for these visitations, of course, and explained Agnes' story as the creation of an imaginative child's mind coping with extraordinary circumstances. Yet they could not explain her ample weight and health nor the strange songs the "bright-haired children" taught her, which Agnes could sing in a clear, "angelic" voice.
Next story: Saved by Voices from Nowhere
