“Port Coon Cave”

Port Coon Cave

The above is a sketch of a cave which well deserves a place among our collection of Wonders. It is called Port Coon Cave, and is in the line of rocks near the Giants’ Causeway. It may be visited either by sea or by land. Boats may row into it to the distance of a hundred yards or more, but the swell is sometimes dangerous; and although the land entrance to the cave is slippery, and a fair proportion of climbing is necessary to achieve the object, still the magnificence of the excavation, its length, and the formation of the interior, would repay greater exertion; the stones of which the roof and sides are composed, and which are of a rounded form, and embedded, as it were, in a basaltic paste, are formed of concentric spheres resembling the coats of an onion; the innermost recess has been compared to the side aisle of a Gothic cathedral; the walls are most painfully slimy to the touch; the discharge of a loaded gun reverberates amid the rolling of the billows, so as to thunder a most awful effect; and the notes of a bugle, we are told, produced delicious echoes.

— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860

| Oddities

Skunk Ape

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Myakka_skunk_ape_1.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The skunk ape is Florida’s answer to Bigfoot, a large primate that reportedly lives east of Interstate 75, near Myakka River State Park.

In December 2000, an anonymous writer mailed two photographs and a letter to the Sarasota sheriff’s department. “Is someone missing an orangutan?” she asked, identifying herself as a grandmother who had taken the photos when she found the beast stealing apples from her backyard. “It is hard to judge from the photos how big this orangutan really is. … I judge it as being about six and a half to seven feet tall in a kneeling position. … It had an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard. The orangutan was making deep ‘woomp’ noises.”

That’s a bit hard to swallow. If the skunk ape is 7 feet tall kneeling then it must be nearly 10 feet tall standing. The largest male orangutans are 4 feet 5 inches. The letter writer says she was standing within 10 feet of the monster when it stood up (“an animal this big could hurt someone seriously”), but she stood there anyway and took a second picture. And why send an anonymous typewritten letter?

There have been other “sightings” since this one, but of course no evidence. Nice photos, though.

| Oddities

“Curious Turkish Contrivance”

curious turkish contrivance

Passing some cemeteries and public fountains, we came to the outskirts of the city, which consist chiefly of gardens producing olives, oranges, raisins and figs, irrigated by creaking water-wheels worked by donkeys. To one of these the droll contrivance which attracted our notice was affixed. The donkey who went round and round was blinded, and in front of him was a pole, one end of which was fixed to the axle and the other slightly drawn towards his head-gear and there tied; so that, from the spring he always thought somebody was pulling him on. The guide told us that idle fellows would contrive some rude mechanism so that a stick should fall upon the animal’s hind quarters at every round, and so keep him at work whilst they went to sleep under the trees.

— Albert Smith, A Month at Constantinople, 1850

| Oddities · Technology

“Old Parr”

In Westminster Abbey there’s a gravestone that reads as follows:

THO: PARR OF YE COUNTY OF SALLOP. BORNE
IN AD: 1483. HE LIVED IN YE REIGNES OF TEN
PRINCES VIZ: K.ED.4. K.ED.5.K.RICH.3.
K.HEN.7.K.HEN.8.K.EDW.6.Q.MA.Q.ELIZ
K.JA. & K. CHARLES. AGED 152 YEARES.
& WAS BURYED HERE NOVEMB. 15. 1635.

That’s right, Thomas Parr supposedly lived to be 152 years old. Said to have been born in 1483, he was discovered still alive in 1635 by the Earl of Arundel, and London went nuts. Parr met Charles I; Rubens and Van Dyke painted him; poets lionized him; and the fuss finally killed him.

Most likely his records had been confused with his grandfather’s, but he was certainly very old. He attributed his longevity to vegetarianism and clean living, though he said he’d had a kid out of wedlock at around age 100. Youthful indiscretion.

| Death

Substitute Players

You can’t always rely on baseball’s record books — they’re haunted by “phantom” players. According to one box score, a player named Lou Proctor walked as a pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns against the Boston Red Sox on May 13, 1912. It turns out that Lou Proctor was really a Cleveland telegraph operator who had inserted his own name in place of Pete Compton’s. More than two dozen such errors have been uncovered; this one wasn’t found until the mid-1980s.

| Entertainment

Smile

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg

In 1911, Argentine con man Eduardo de Valfierno found a way to steal the Mona Lisa six times over at no risk to himself.

First he made private deals with six separate buyers to steal and deliver the priceless painting. Then he hired a professional art restorer to make six fakes, and shipped them in advance to the buyers’ locales (to avoid later trouble with customs).

In August he paid a thief to steal the original from the Louvre, and when news of the theft had spread he delivered the six fakes to their recipients, exacting a high price for each. Then he quietly disappeared. The flummoxed thief was soon caught trying to sell the red-hot original, and it was returned to the museum in 1913.

05/27/2020 UPDATE: This is false but extraordinarily widely retailed. The painting was stolen in 1911 by an Italian criminal named Vincenzo Peruggia, but the original was recovered and returned to the Louvre two years later. There is no evidence that Valfierno ever existed, and none of the six supposed copies has ever surfaced. The myth was conceived by a writer named Karl Decker and retailed as fact in a 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, which was still havering equivocally as to its falsity as recently as 2013.

| Art · Crime · Hoaxes