Can You Decipher This Mysterious Postcard? [Updated]

I could no more ignore a mystery like this than I could avoid eating that last piece of pepperoni pizza the other night (I can never avoid eating pepperoni pizza in general). It’s a small mystery, mind you, and there doesn’t appear to be anything more at stake than the basic human desire to satisfy curiosity about other’s actions, motivations, thoughts. It’s not even newsworthy, but I dare the average puzzle lover to try and turn their thoughts away from the image above.

The scan was sent to Memphis writer Vance Lauderdale by a friend who explained he’d won an eBay auction for this “very odd and unusual postcard.” The friend wanted to know if Lauderdale had ever seen anything like it

Lauderdale, who is “Memphis’ Premier Trivia Expert,” was a bit stumped, so he put it up for his readers to parse.

He did turn up a smidge of history about the addressee:

The card is addressed to Mr. George Cooper James, who was living at 779 Adams, in Memphis. A look through old city directories tells me that James was a student at the “University School,” which is how Memphis University School was often identified in its early days. I presume that James must have been a grown-up student, because the city directories list him as the only person living at 779 Adams — there’s no mention of parents or other family members.

Lauderdale’s commenters (as of late Wednesday afternoon) were equally flummoxed, though one comment from a “BillN” touched on the first thing I thought of upon seeing the coded message:

I may be mistaken, but it seems it looks a lot like the code used by the Zodiac serial killer. I have not seen the documentary on him in awhile, but I believe I remember seeing some of the same symbols in his communications. I also wonder if there was a lodge or secret organization like the Mason’s who had their own code, or maybe a fraternity of some type. I intend to look at some of the Zodiac letters. I believe they are online.

Indeed they are. Everywhere. But past some symbol choices, the message isn’t very Zodiac-like:

Also, the Zodiac appeared to have at least studied cryptography–the cipher on the right remains unsolved to this day, some 42 years after he sent it to police. The mystery postcard cipher appears to have some distinct repeating patterns, something the Zodiac avoided. For example, it looks like George Cooper James’s correspondent may have used one of the symbols to denote space between words–my initial guess is the semicolon. Also, his (or her) use of the symbol for Pi might be key to solving the mystery–if there even is one. If the symbol for Pi corresponds to some high-frequency letter like “E,” we’re a third of the way home.

The mystery postcard does have one big challenge: it’s relatively short. The shorter the cipher, the harder it can be to suss out a solution, especially if the puzzle-maker put some extra effort into using more than one symbol for a given letter and obscuring naturally-occurring patterns in general.

I may try my hand at it later, but I’m hoping others will too. What did Mr. George Cooper James’s friend find worth hiding from prying eyes in 1909 Memphis? It could have been something very personal, encrypted out of concerns for the much more straitened moral codes of the day. It could have even been in reference to something darker, not all that far in spirit from the Zodiac’s codes after all.

We won’t know unless we try.

EDIT: A comment below jogged loose some knowledge–could this simply be another language? I’m familiar with Cyrillic and it has that feel–however some of the symbols seem to be purely math-related. Not to mention there’s the factor of someone’s idiosyncratic handwriting to deal with.

[Memphis Magazine: Ask Vance]