Puzzle geeks help crack coded message left by dying grandmother to her grandchildren

INTERNET sleuths have united to help a woman crack a decades-old riddle left to her by her dying grandmother.

The partial decode of the front of the index card, posted on Ask MetaFilter.

INTERNET sleuths have united to help a woman crack a decades-old riddle left to her by her dying grandmother.

Janna Holm turned to the site Ask MetaFilter to help her crack her grandmother's "cancer-addled ramblings" - a code written on the front and back of index cards left to her and her cousins when her grandmother died in 1996.

Ms Holm was 11 when her grandmother Dorothy Holm died of brain cancer.

"She declined rapidly; she lost a lot of her memory," Ms Holm told Mashable.

"She seemed really confused, but she left these cool codes that I thought I would decipher."

The family had spent months trying to solve the puzzles using substitution ciphers but had no luck. But Ms Holm decided to give it another go after her father came across them several days ago.

"In my grandmother's final days battling brain cancer, she became unable to speak and she filled dozens of index cards with random letters of the alphabet. I'm beginning to think that they are the first letters in the words of song lyrics, and would love to know what song this was," Ms Holm wrote on Ask MetaFilter

"This is a crazy long shot, but I've seen Mefites pull off some pretty impressive code-breaking before!

Puzzle geeks took up the challenge and within 14 minutes had solved the back of the card - the first letters of every word of the Lord's Prayer.

The back of the index card, which puzzle geeks deciphered as the first letter of every word of the Lord's Prayer. Picture: Janna Holm

Armed with the knowledge the code had a religious theme, forum members began scouring Christian texts, with one member even converting the text of the King James Bible to acronyms.

Ms Holm now believes the front of the card was a personal prayer of her grandmother's and posted the following partially decoded text on the forum.

The partial decode of the front of the index card, posted on Ask MetaFilter.

"I don't know if anyone is going to be able to truly decode the whole thing," Ms Holm told Mashable.

"It's nice to just have an idea of what it is and what, in general terms, an idea of what she was thinking about in her last couple weeks."

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