You can collect a cool $1000 if you can come up with an account of “repressed memory” — fictional or non-fictional — recorded before 1800.

The prize is being offered by Harrison G. Pope, Jr. and James I. Hudson, directors at the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Their theory is that repressed memory (the notion that someone who underwent a trauma might suffer temporary amnesia) is a romantic notion rather than a scientifically valid phenomenon. If they’re wrong, they reason,

somewhere, in the thousands of years prior to 1800, would have witnessed it and portrayed it in a non-fictional work or in a fictional character.

You have to be the first one to report a qualifying account to win the money. Details here.