N. Stanley

I'm 69 years old and attended Catholic grade school before the liberalization of the church; penmanship was an important part of each day's lessons, employing an older form of cursive. That parchment fragment brought up in the late 19th Century may not read "vi" but "ri". It would depend on where the cursive lower case "r" fell within a word.

As a child I liked this film--a lot. But it wasn't until 1985 that I learned the truth while cruising the stacks at my university library. Sitting on a shelf was a slim book with a tantalizing title: Curses and Lucks. A British publication of the first half of the 20th Century, it contained accounts of screaming skulls, etc. One story, however, was the inspiration for The Maze. A titled family had a secret. Upon reaching his majority, the heir to the title was told a deep, dark family secret. At the time of the book's writing, a university friend of the then heir pressed him to tell all. What he replied was "All I will say is it's something you would not want in YOUR family."