The Grave Creek Stone
Inside the largest burial mound in the eastern United States, diggers said they found a small stone carved with an unknown alphabet.
What was reported
Grave Creek Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia, is a huge earthen burial mound about 20 metres high, built by the Adena people around 2,000 years ago. In 1838, local men dug a tunnel into it, finding burial chambers and skeletons.
One of them said he had also found a small, flat sandstone disc carved with three lines of strange characters. Over the following decades, scholars claimed to read it as Celtic, Phoenician, Runic, Greek and more, offering wildly different translations.
Explanations offered
Most archaeologists now think the stone was a hoax, perhaps made to attract visitors to the mound, which was being promoted as a tourist attraction at the time. The original stone has been lost. The mound itself is real and is protected as a historic site.
- When
- Found in 1838
- Where
- Grave Creek Mound, Moundsville, West Virginia, USA
- Witnesses
- The men who dug into the mound, then scholars
- Status
- Probably a hoax
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.
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