>>14037>There used to be public access to "Old Catania" until a group of schoolchildren disappeared while on a field trip.This story gave me a strange feel, until I realized I had read a much similar tale from the Italian island of Malta, just 100km south of Sicily.
A group of school children and their teacher visited the Hypogeum (some underground cave thing) on an outing and entered the same burial chamber, which then collapsed while they were inside.
Search parties could not conduct a thorough search for the children or their teacher due to the cave-in.
Tradition holds that before the British govt. sealed up several tunnels, one could walk from one end of Malta to the other underground.
One of the labyrinths, discovered by excavators, is the Hypogeum of Sal Saflini [or Saflienti!?], in which excavators discovered the bones of over 33,000 people who had been sacrificed by an ancient pagan neolithic cult.
National Geographic, Aug. 1940 issue, told of several school children who had disappeared without a trace in the Hypogeum.
http://www.philipcoppens.com/hypogeum.html 