Wow! A really tough puzzle. I love trying to sort this stuff out.
So I hit as many dead ends as everyone else when it came to Googling the list. Instead, I decided to ignore the content of the note and focus on the circumstances surrounding it (a little Poe detective work). Below is what we know about the note:
- It was hand delivered.
- It is not an original.
- It alone was in the mailbox (no second note)
- It was hand written.
- It requires additional knowledge to comprehend
So let’s look at these points and see what little we can learn about the note and where it came from.
- It was hand delivered.
This is very significant, and I’m surprised no one has really brought this up. We still don’t know if this note was ever actually intended for you, but if it was then the creator knows your home address. However, if the creator does not know you than they A) drove around until they found a random mailbox, B) were walking around and picked yours as the lucky winner or C) intended the note for a nearby house but didn’t choose the correct mailbox.
Option A seems highly unlikely. Option B, however seems highly likely (though a little unusual). I’ve opened up my mailbox before to find a discarded gum wrapper. Maybe this is just some scrap of garbage and your mailbox became the receptacle. As for Option C, the only way to know is to ask more of your neighbors (unless of course they are secretly Illuminati and the note really is coded).
Ok. So the highest probability is that the note is either intended for you or it’s a random piece of garbage (perhaps only understandable to the creator). On to the next point:
- It is not an original.
Now this can shed a little bit more light on the situation. There are really only two reasons to copy something: Either it is very important (like a legal document or a masters thesis) or it is intended for multiple recipients.
Again, keep in mind the note was hand delivered. If you intended the note for many recipients, hand delivery is not a particularly efficient way to communicate. So if the note was copied for multiple recipients, then it was certainly was not intended for mass distribution (as the spam mail theory suggests).
Can we tell why the note was copied just yet? Not really.
And it’s hard to cross-examine this point with our first one. If it was copied, why not toss it out as trash (there’s still at least one other copy)? But at the same time, if it was important enough to copy in the first place, then why throw it away? Logic alone doesn’t seem to resolve anything.
However we can establish that the note (at least at one point) had significant meaning. Significant enough to copy it.
- It alone was in the mailbox (no second note)
If the note was intended for your eyes only, then it’s intended to be understood by you and you alone. And the note is intended to speak for itself as well. This obviously doesn’t seem to be the case -which supports the idea that the creator of the note doesn’t know you.
Either that or any second note was stolen/destroyed, which doesn’t seem too likely (but still possible!).
- It was hand written.
This one is very important for a few reasons. The first is that we cannot place a date on when the note was written. I found an interesting thing when I searched for Zephyr oil. It turns out that there was an old St. Louis based petroleum company by the same name back in the 30s. What if Zephyr oil used to be a universal term for castor oil?
With a note done in Microsoft Word, we could at least trace to the past couple of decades -maybe even hone in more by examining the font style used.
I only bring this up because we are all assuming that this note was written recently. This seems plausible, but is certainly not proven.
There’s another more important point to be made, though: Handwriting is traceable. Let’s suppose something very unlikely: This note is a secret message wrongly delivered to your house and contains a sinister hidden message inside. If that were true, do you think the note’s creator wouldn’t go through the trouble of concealing his own identity? Basically, all I am saying is that this is probably a pretty harmless note -even if it is coded.
- It requires additional knowledge to comprehend
This is probably the most telling part of the note’s story. It has been copied and hand delivered with no other indication as to what it means. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way to figure it out.
The idea of this being a coded message makes a lot of sense when looking at the content of the text, but it may also be that we are missing connotation/jargon/context for the words. For instance, look at this list:
Suede Shoes
Pork Pie Hat
Zoot Suit
Shiny Stockings
It may look like a really bad outfit, but any music fanatic can tell you that these are all famous jazz standards (a few of them abbreviated, of course)
People have eluded to the idea that the items in the note may be more related than we think (painter’s supplies? construction supplies? a schizophrenic’s prescription). What makes it difficult is all of the misspellings.
Consider this: Whoever constructed the note was able to spell aura and zephyr correctly, but not toffee or dioxin. They could spell Balsam, but not fir. What if Aura and Zephyr are brand names for products used by the creator (like brands of paint), so he/she is able to spell them correctly, but otherwise the creator just has awful spelling. If this is true, then the note makes much more sense than any of us are giving it credit for.
Ok. So let’s try and take all of this into consideration, along with the following points:
-The first two words are bigger than the rest
-Most words are capitalized
-The handwriting is supposedly difficult to read
-There are many misspellings
-I also noticed a few words that may be of foreign origin. Lape is Spanish for matted (as in: Gerund, dear friend, my pet Lucient’s fur is too matted). There were some other words that didn’t seem to translate, but what if inuista and niello are actually misspelled Spanish words? And as for inuista, is it possible that there’s a lower case “L” at the beginning? As in “Linuista”? I still don’t recognize the word, but just a thought.
Ok. So let’s synthesize this information. Imagine this scenario:
You’re an underling construction worker/handyman/etc. and your boss needs you to get supplies. He rattles off a list really quickly. You jot down the first item (Brandishing Irons) in large letters, but you realize the list might be kind of long so you scale it back down. Continuing, you write down Zephyr Rosin oil. “What’s that?” you ask your boss. “Castor oil,” he replies.
Too bad you can’t spell very well. So, you continue to jot down the rest of the list quickly (since Mr. Boss is a fast-talker). Some words you are very familiar with because they are on the labels of the products your company uses. However, some are not and you do your best to spell them out. When the list is finished, your boss realizes that he needs those items right away and tells you to copy the list so that you can split it with the other new guy.
Off you go (with the copied note), buying your illegal toffee chips, etc. When finished you just slip the list into your coat pocket and forget about it. The next day on the job, you’re exhausted. You feel inside of your pocket and feel the note you forgot about. You don’t see a trash can, but don’t really care. So, while walking past a mailbox, you decide to just throw the note in there.
And voila!
As for the idea that this is a coded message, I have three clues to try to decode it but not the time to pursue them:
-
Branding irons is a real thing. Brandishing irons are not. The phrase “brandishing irons” might be considered a gerund. Is this a real connection? Unlikely.
-
Some words may be intentionally misspelled to appear as other words. “Gerund” might be ground. “too lape” might be tulip.
-
What I would love to do is pick out the misspellings as see if the wrong letters (or the corrections) yield a hidden message. For instance, “Caster” yield either an “e” or an “o”. “Niehlo” yeilds an “h” or an “l”. “Balsam fur” yeilds a “u” or an “i”.
Any thoughts.