Le bleu de France ("the Blue of France"), and the Tavernier Blue, is a large, 45.52-carat (9.104 g) deep-blue diamond, and now housed in the National Gem and Mineral collection at the National Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. It is blue to the naked eye because of trace amounts of boron within its crystal structure, and exhibits red phosphorescence after exposure to ultraviolet light.

It is classified as a Type IIb diamond, and is notorious for supposedly being cursed. It has a long recorded history, with few gaps, in which it changed hands numerous times on its way from India to France to Britain and eventually to the United States, where it has been regularly on public display since. It has been described as the "most famous diamond in the world"

The Queen’s House ghost

What follows is based on correspondence and documentation about the Rev. Hardy’s famous photograph of ghostly figures in the Queen’s House. Much of the source material is held in the Museum’s archives

We are instinctively sceptical of 'ghost’ stories, but are completely mystified about this…

Perhaps the most extraordinary and credible research into the ghost phenomenon ever documented is the so-called "Ghosts of Flight 401." On December of 1972, an Eastern Airlines Tri-Star jetliner, Flight 401, crashed into a Florida swamp.

The pilot, Bob Loft (on the left), and flight engineer Don Repo (on the right), were two of the 101 people who perished in the air crash.

Not long after the crash, the ghosts of Loft and Repo were seen on more than twenty occasions by crew members on other Eastern Tri-Stars, especially those planes which had been fitted with parts salvaged from the Flight 401 wreckage.

The apparitions of Loft and Repo were invariably described as being extremely lifelike. They were not only reported by people who had known Loft and Repo, but their ghosts were also subsequently identified from photographs by people who had not known Loft and Repo.