Sasha Spesivtsev

In 1996, a pipe broke in an apartment building in the Siberian town of Novokuznetsk. The plumber traced the leak to the flat of Sasha Spesivtsev, who lived with his mother and a dog. He knocked, but no one answered, so he broke open the door.

The flat was an abattoir. The walls were covered with blood, and bowls in the kitchen contained pieces of human bodies. In the bathtub was a mutilated, headless body, and in the living room were a human rib cage and a 15-year-old girl, mutilated but still alive. She survived for 17 hours, long enough to tell police what had happened.

Spesivtsev’s mother had lured three girls into the apartment, where he raped and beat them, killed one and forced the other two to cut her to pieces, which the mother then cooked for dinner. The dog killed the second girl.

Spesivtsev was captured trying to rape a woman in another apartment, and he was eventually put to death. His diary records the murders of 19 girls; the Russian authorities suspected him of 12 more but ran out of money to investigate.

| Crime

Bigfoot East

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yerencave.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

That’s “Wild Man Cave” in Chinese. It’s an inscription near the entrance of the “Yeren Cave” in Western Hubei Province, China.

Known variously as the yeren, wild man, man-monkey, and man-bear, a huge red-haired hominid has been sighted at least 400 times in Hubei since the 1920s. In recent years the Chinese government has even begun distributing posters and funding scientific expeditions.

Maybe it’s just a legend, or maybe it’s a new species of orangutan. Or maybe it’s a remnant line of a giant ape that lived in these very mountains until about 100,000 years ago. Gigantopithecus was the largest ape that ever lived, three times the size of a gorilla — and its bones are still found in local caves. Hmm.

| Oddities

Bang!

Bulletproof vests go back to the 19th century, when a special silk vest could stop a round from a handgun.

Archduke Ferdinand was actually wearing one on June 28, 1914 — but Gavrilo Princip shot him in the neck and started World War I.

| History · Technology

Dighton Rock

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

In May 1502, Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real set out to find his brother Gaspar, who had disappeared somewhere near Newfoundland the previous year. Miguel also disappeared, and was assumed to have died in a storm …

… but no one has explained the inscriptions on Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder in the Taunton River in Massachusetts. It was customary for Portuguese explorers to inscribe their nation’s coat of arms as a land claim during the Age of Discovery, so some scholars believe that Miguel reached the New World and survived long enough to stake an early claim in Massachusetts. No other trace of him exists.

| History · Oddities

How to Get to Carnegie Hall

Most common street names in the United States, as of 1993:

  1. SECOND (10,866)
  2. THIRD (10,131)
  3. FIRST (9,898)
  4. FOURTH (9,190)
  5. PARK (8,926)
  6. FIFTH (8,186)
  7. MAIN (7,644)
  8. SIXTH (7,283)
  9. OAK (6,946)
  10. SEVENTH (6,377)

FIRST isn’t first because it’s often called MAIN instead.

| Trivia

The St. Augustine Monster

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

On Nov. 30, 1896, two young boys came across an unidentified carcass on the beach near St. Augustine, Fla. Pale pink and rubbery, it was huge, 18 feet long and weighing an estimated 5 tons.

An analysis in 1971 agreed with early guesses that it was a gigantic octopus — in this case almost unthinkably huge, “with arms 75 to 100 feet in length and about 18 inches in diameter at the base — a total spread of some 200 feet.”

More recent studies in 1995 and 2004 say it was “the skin of an enormous warm-blooded vertebrate,” probably the entire blubber layer of a whale. Ick.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:O_giganteus16.jpg

| Oddities

Black Friday

Famous people born on Friday the 13th:

  • Don Adams
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Steve Buscemi
  • Fidel Castro
  • Julia Louis-Dreyfus
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen
  • Georges Simenon

The fear of this date is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.

| Entertainment · Language · Trivia

The Skeleton in Armor

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In 1832, a human skeleton was unearthed in a sandbank in Fall River, Mass. A triangular plate of brass covered its sternum, and it wore a broad belt of brass tubes. The grave also contained a number of brass and copper arrowheads. To judge from the skull, the skeleton had belonged to a young man, but from where? The local Indian tribes did not work brass.

One commentator claimed it as evidence that the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, or Egyptians had discovered North America in the remote past. Later historians speculated that an early Norse explorer might have traveled south from Newfoundland, but the style of armor was unknown to medieval Norway. A third possibility is that it belonged to an early European colonist, perhaps a Portuguese explorer.

The skeleton was destroyed in a fire in 1843, so there’s no way now to date the remains scientifically, or to gather any further information. Its identity must remain a mystery.

| Oddities

Boot Champs

Countries with the greatest number of active troops:

  1. People’s Republic of China: 2,255,000
  2. United States: 1,422,494
  3. India: 1,325,000
  4. North Korea: 1,106,000
  5. Russia: 1,037,000
  6. South Korea: 687,000
  7. Pakistan: 619,000
  8. Turkey: 514,850
  9. Vietnam: 484,000
  10. Egypt: 450,000
| Society