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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is sponsored by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Lawrence stepped outside of his Philadelphia apartment one afternoon to find a box of seemingly discarded objects. This was not uncommon in his neighborhood, where people often left old furniture or boxes of books out for passersby to pick through. Lawrence took a look inside. A couple of knickknacks, including a bronze statue, lay on top of something massive and sparkly. He dug through the box, unearthing an enormous crystal ball. To Lawrence, it looked like a prop from a movie or a Halloween costume, the sort of fortune teller or witch might use. He made to move the box to his garage, but he found that it was so heavy that he had no choice but to drag it. Lawrence had no use for the knickknacks, but he knew someone who would love the crystal ball. His friend Kim Beckles cleaned Lawrence's house for him. Occasionally, Kim liked to joke about being a witch and was all too happy when he presented her with a crystal ball the next time he saw her. Six months later, a man nicknamed Al the Trash Picker passed through Lawrence's neighborhood hunting for items to pawn. Al and Lawrence weren't close friends, but he had given Al a key to his garage and told him to take anything that he wanted to sell. That day, Al picked up the bronze statuette that Lawrence had found next to the crystal ball. Al didn't have much use for it either, but he knew that the old adage was true. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Al slipped the statue in with his other finds for the day, and he made his way towards South Street Garage and Pawn Shop. The shop bought from Al regularly, and that day they offered him $30 for the statue and a wooden table he'd picked up elsewhere. Twelve days later, on October 24th of 1991, Penn Museum employee Jess Canby took advantage of a free afternoon to do some shopping. As a self described thrift store junkie, Jess loved to pick through piles of discarded treasures. She entered the South Street Garage and pawn shop that afternoon with no idea what she was about to find. A bronze statuette behind the counter caught Jess eye. She asked the clerk if she could inspect it more closely. In her hands, the metal was cold and heavy. It depicted Osiris, the Egyptian God of the afterlife. Jess examined the statue, first in fascination and then in disbelief. Without a word of explanation, she dropped the statue onto the counter and raced out the door. Less than an hour later, she returned, this time with two Penn Museum directors and the police. You see, three years earlier, on November 10th of 1988, the Penn Museum staff had conducted their morning checks and found the unthinkable in a room called the Harrison Rotunda, where priceless artifacts from Japan and China were displayed. Three objects were a silver Japanese sculpture resembling a crashing wave, a bronze statue of the Egyptian God osiris, and a 55 pound crystal ball that had once belonged to the dowager Empress of China. Together they were valued at over half a million dollars. Museum officials alerted the police and raced to check their security footage. They were horrified to discover that security had been undergoing repairs to their camera system and no footage of that night existed. Word of the heist traveled quickly and the Japanese wave sculpture was recovered the same day. It had been dumped outside of a building on the UPenn campus without fingerprints or forensic evidence. Police and FBI searched for the crystal ball and the statue, but without any leads, the case went cold. That is, until Jess Canby spotted and recognized the stolen artifact at the pawn shop. That day, investigators questioned the pawn shop owners, who led officials to Al, the trash picker, who led them to Lawrence Stimitz. When questioned by the FBI and museum officials, Lawrence told them how he had found the statue in a box with other objects, including the crystal ball that he had given to Kim Beckles. Kim happily returned the crystal ball to the museum, where it was identified as the stolen artifact. Kim, Al and Lawrence were all questioned extensively by the police and FBI but cleared of any suspicion in the robbery. Today, the crystal ball is back in pride of place at the Penn Museum Harrison Rotunda, along with the Osiris statue and Japanese sculpture. The story of their time away from the museum is not widely known, and the heist itself remains unsolved and as far as the year or so that the crystal ball spent in Kim Beckle's possession, she told investigators that she had used the priceless antique as a hat rack. This episode is sponsored by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC this show is sponsored by American Public University. You want your master's degree, you know you can earn it. But life gets busy. The packed schedule, the late nights. And then there's the unexpected. American Public University was built for all of that. With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40/ flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life. Start your master's journey today at APU Apus Edu. You want it? Come get it at APU. Today. The Natchez Tres Parkway is a two lane road winding through the tranquil forests of Tennessee. It's a favorite for hikers, bicyclists and tourists looking for a scenic Drive. But 200 years ago, Long before the road was paved, the Natchez Trace was more than just a place for a quiet getaway. It was one of the main routes for traders and explorers crossing the American frontier. On a cool autumn evening in 1809, a lone traveler stopped at one of the few inns along the remote trail, a log cabin called Grinder's Stand. The innkeeper's wife noticed right away that the man was behaving strangely. He kept pacing back and forth, talking to himself, and she gave him the key to the main cabin and started preparing his bed. But he told her not to bother. He preferred to sleep on the floor. Late that night, around 3 o' clock in the morning, the innkeeper's wife was startled by the sound of gunshots from the main cabin. She woke up the servants and hurried over for them to break open the door. Inside, she saw her guest crawling on the buffalo hide rug, bleeding from bullet wounds to his head and chest. He begged them for a drink of water. The servants poured him a glass and helped him sip, but that was all they could do for him. There were no doctors this far out in the wilderness. By sunrise, he was dead. The man's servants were traveling a day or two behind him, and they soon arrived at Grinder's Stand, carried him along the trail. The man's friends all assumed the death was a suicide. He had lifelong struggles with depression, and he was dealing with money problems, too. He'd recently had to leave behind a job that he absolutely loved for a desk job, and it was a difficult adjustment. He'd been drinking heavily to get through the days. He'd even tried, unsuccessfully, to take his own life just a few weeks earlier. But there was something odd about the situation. The man was a skilled gunman. He. He was a former soldier and an expert hunter. How could he have shot himself twice at point blank range and missed badly enough that he survived for hours? Many people, though, thought his death was actually a murder. It may have been roving bandits searching the trail for someone to rob. But another scandalous theory was that the innkeeper had caught the man in bed with his wife. And some believe that it was an assassination. Because this man wasn't just any old lonesome traveler. He was one of the greatest explorers in American history. Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition. There's a conspiracy theory that Lewis was killed by James Wilkinson, an army general who served as governor of the Louisiana Territory. Wilkinson was secretly a spy for the Spanish, and he was also involved in some corrupt land deals that Lewis had information about. The idea was that Wilkinson had killed Lewis to protect his secrets. And while there's no hard evidence to support this theory, it has stuck around almost 40 years after Lewis death. In 1848, a Tennessee state commission opened his grave and examined his body. Their final report found that even though the death was officially ruled a suicide, it was, and I quote, more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin. The commissioners erected a monument over Louis Grave, a broken column symbolizing a life cut short. It's still standing there along the Natchez Trace, near a replica of the original Grinder's Stand. In recent decades, some of Lewis's descendants have tried to convince the National Park Service to exhume his body again for more forensic testing. But the request has been repeatedly denied. Unless they change their minds, the truth about what happened to Meriwether Lewis might never be known. He might have been a trailblazer who navigated a continent. But in the end, he became lost in the fog of a personal mystery. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting curiositiespodcast.com the show was created by me, Erin Mankey in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series and television show and you can learn all about it over@theworldoflore.com and until next time, stay curious.
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Guaranteed Human.