Curse Of The Ruins

“A few hundred yards ahead there is a long wooden bridge that the donkeys will be afraid to cross. But do not worry. After you cross the bridge, the ruins will not be far away.” Cousins Kate, Sam, and Shala quickly see why the donkeys are so afraid to cross the bridge— it’s old and rickety and spans a deep rocky canyon. But they have to get across it. They have to find Katie and Sam’s dad, an anthropologist who’s studying the ancient cliff dwellers at El Debajo. Dr. Crockett was supposed to meet the cousins at the airport in San Marcos, New Mexico, but he never showed up. They don’t know whether he has enemies who might have kidnapped him or whether there really is a curse on the ruins of El Debajo. But they’re about to find out.

Beware...this book is cursed! These strange but true stories of the world’s most infamous items will appeal to true believers as well as history buffs, horror fans, and anyone who loves a good spine-tingling tale. They’re lurking in museums, graveyards, and private homes. Their often tragic and always bizarre stories have inspired countless horror movies, reality TV shows, novels, and campfire tales. They’re cursed objects, and all they need to unleash a wave of misfortune is . . . you. Many of these unfortunate items have intersected with some of the most notable events and people in history, leaving death and destruction in their wake. But never before have the true stories of these eerie oddities been compiled into a fascinating and chilling volume. Inside, readers will learn about: • Annabelle the Doll, a Raggedy Ann doll that featured in the horror franchise The Conjuring • The Unlucky Mummy, which is rumored to have sunk the Titanic and kick-started World War I • The Dybbuk box, which was sold on eBay and spawned the horror film The Possession • The Conjured Chest, which has been blamed for fifteen deaths within a single family • The Ring of Silvianus, a Roman artifact believed to have inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit • And many more!

On the island of Santorini, a team of archaeologists uncover a find that could change the world's understanding of history. Across the globe in Australia, two detectives struggle to solve a mysterious murder only to find that it is part of a far darker conspiracy. The sunshine of the Gold Coast is darkened by a fierce storm as a group of teenagers fight to survive an attack by strange mythical creatures. In France, a Napoleonic historian uncovers clues to a mystery over three thousand years old. As they each seek the truth they are all drawn together to fight a common enemy. After three thousand years, the race of Rataal has returned to earth to reclaim their king.

In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction—with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth, particularly to Indigenous people and ways of understanding, this book illuminates the myth-making intimately tied to place. From the ground up, the project of settlement, expansion, and extraction became entwined with the spiritual values of those who hoped to gain from it. Every nation tells some stories and suppresses others, and In Whose Ruins illustrates the way American myths have been inscribed on the earth itself, overwriting Indigenous histories and binding us into an unsustainable future. In these pages, historian Alicia Puglionesi​illuminates the story of the Grave Creek Stone, “discovered” in an ancient Indigenous burial mound, and used to promote the theory that a lost white race predated Native people in North America—part of a wider effort to justify European conquest with alternative histories. When oil was discovered in the corner of western Pennsylvania soon known as Petrolia, prospectors framed that treasure, too, as a birthright passed to them, through Native guides, from a lost race. Puglionesi traces the fate of ancient petroglyphs that once adorned rock faces on the Susquehanna River, dynamited into pieces to make way for a hydroelectric dam. This act foreshadowed the flooding of Native lands around the country; over the course of the 20th century, almost every major river was dammed for economic purposes. And she explores the effects of the US nuclear program in the Southwest, which contaminated vast regions in the name of eternal wealth and security through atomic power. This promise rang hollow for the surrounding Native, Hispanic, and white communities that were harmed, and even for some scientists. It also inspired nationwide resistance, uniting diverse groups behind a different vision of the future—one not driven by greed and haunted by ruin. This deeply researched work of narrative history traces the roots of American fantasies and fears in a national tradition of selective forgetting. Connecting the power of myths with the extraction of power from the land itself reveals the truths that have been left out and is an invaluable torch in the search for a way forward.

The world has become a cold, hard place to livea place where freedom is found only in the departure from living. Its people are enslaved by fear, suffering, and chaos, and even Mother Nature is at war with herself. Earth has become a giant graveyard of destruction, all thanks to an unspeakably evil curse. The beginning of the new world order started the moment Professor Goldsmith pushed off the gold marbled lid from a sarcophagus in a tomb hidden deep within the Sahara desert. An ancient curse was released upon mankind and all life on Earth, causing reality to crumble into chaos. Only the strong survive in this new world. But one man holds the key to free the future from the past, and his journey becomes a test of free will. Ruins of the Mind is his storya sweeping saga of courage, love, loss, and pain.

In the heart of Panama, a volcanic lake feeds a serpentine river—its stone banks laid by the Inca, who took back the gold and jewels plundered from them by the conquistadors. Legend has it that the Twice-Stolen Treasure has been buried for centuries in the Panamanian jungle. Discovering it means surviving the unpredictable black waters of the River of Ruin.... It begins at a Paris auction house, with a favor granted by an old high school friend to geologist Philip Mercer: the opportunity to buy a rare diary written during the French attempt at digging the Panama Canal. But Mercer isn’t the only one who wants it. Three Chinese assassins have been dispatched to get it, forcing Mercer into a subterranean game of cat and mouse that takes him from the hellish maze of l’empire de la mort and through the sewers of Paris. Mercer realizes he has uncovered an intricate Chinese plot to trigger a deadly shift in the world’s balance of power. At stake is control of the canal, recently handed over to the government of Panama by the United States. Only Philip Mercer—with help from beautiful U.S. Army officer Lauren Vanik, a cell of tough French Foreign Legion commandos, and a crusty eighty-year-old retired sea captain named Harry White—can stop them.