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The Kensington Runestone

Documented folklore from the Club 49 map, told straight and sourced.

The story

In 1898 a Swedish-born farmer named Olof Ohman said he pulled a two-hundred-pound slab out of a tree’s roots while clearing land near Kensington. Carved into it, in runes, was an account of a party of Norsemen camped here in 1362, ten of them found “red with blood and dead.” Runologists have gone over it for a century and the strong consensus is that the language is nineteenth-century, not medieval, and that the stone is a modern carving. It is still one of the great American mysteries, and you can stand in front of the actual slab in Alexandria and decide what you think.

The ground it haunts

Runestone Museum, Alexandria (Douglas County). Source: A real, viewable artifact; scholars overwhelmingly read it as modern. The Club 49 map pins this legend at its documented country, beside the real mines, active claims, land status and modeled honey holes of the same ground. Open the free map and go stand in the story.

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