In 1984, a British homemaker was reading at home when a voice told her, “Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.” She tried to ignore it, but the voice said, “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following,” and gave her three pieces of information that she had not known. When these proved to be true, she consulted her doctor, who referred her to Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, a consulting psychiatrist at the Lambeth Healthcare NHS trust.

An examination found nothing, so he diagnosed her with a functional hallucinatory psychosis, and after two weeks of counseling and thioridazine the voices ceased and she went on holiday. But they soon returned, telling her that she needed immediate treatment and giving an address, which turned out to be the computerized tomography department of a large London hospital. The voices told her that she needed a brain scan because she had a tumor and her brain stem was inflamed.

Azuonye found no evidence of this, but she was so distressed at this point that he ordered the scan anyway, and it showed evidence of a meningioma with a left posterior frontal parafalcine mass extending through the falx to the right side. She elected immediate surgery (the voices agreed), and the operation was carried out in May 1984. When she regained consciousness, she heard the voices for the last time. They said, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”

When Azuonye presented this case at a conference in 1996, three opinions seemed to prevail. Some thought that the voices had been telepathic communications from people who had learned about the tumor psychically and were trying to warn the patient. Others thought that the patient had known about the tumor before coming to the U.K. and had invented the story in order to get free medical care under the National Health Service (this seems unlikely, as she’d been living in the U.K. for 15 years before hearing the voices).

The third explanation, which Azuonye shared, was that the presence of the meningioma had triggered enough residual sensations to alert her that something was wrong, and that her fear had led her unconsciously to take in information about London hospitals, which was expressed by the voices. The fact that the voices stopped when the tumor was removed showed that the symptoms had been related to the presence of the lesion.

(Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, “A Difficult Case: Diagnosis Made by Hallucinatory Voices,” BMJ 315:7123 [December 20, 1997], 1685-1686.)

The last confirmed sighting of New Zealand’s huia wattlebird occurred in 1907. Sound recording was then in its infancy, so no recording of the bird’s call is known to exist. But in 1949 local historian Robert Batley arranged this recording of Hēnare Hāmana, a skilled caller who as a young man had participated in an expedition to seek the huia in the Ruahine Ranges north of Wellington. That effort was unsuccessful, but Hāmana, now in his 60s, remembered the call and performed it in the studios of radio station 2YA. So, to that extent, the call has been “rescued.”

Birds have occasionally returned the favor: See The Parrot of Atures and Ghosts of Scotland.

(Thanks, Charles.)

In 1659, when Louis XIV of France and Philip IV of Spain met to sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees following the Thirty Years’ War, they did so on Pheasant Island, an uninhabited island in the Bidasoa river between their two nations.

Ever since, the island has remained under joint sovereignty — it’s governed alternately by Spain and France, changing hands every six months.

In February 1978, five young men disappeared after attending a college basketball game in Chico, California. Several days later their car was discovered high on a mountain road in Plumas National Forest, far from their route home to Yuba City. It was stuck in a snowdrift but could easily have been pushed free by five men; the gas tank was a quarter full.

In June, the bones of three of the men were found 20 miles deep in the forest. Inside a nearby trailer were the remains of a fourth, Ted Weiher, wrapped in eight sheets. He had died of starvation and hypothermia. His feet were badly frostbitten, his face bore 13 weeks’ beard, he’d lost half his 200 pounds. The trailer was stocked with food and fuel, but he’d used none of it. Still missing was the fifth man, Gary Mathias (right), whose shoes were found in the trailer.

As it happened, a Sacramento man had been lying in his car on the same mountain road that night, suffering a mild heart attack. He told police he saw a car parked behind him during the night, surrounded by a group of people, but when he called for help they went silent and turned off their headlights. Later he saw flashlights, but these too went out when he called for aid.

Gary Mathias remains missing to this day. “We don’t know what happened to them — we’ve a real mystery on our hands,” Yuba County Undersheriff Jack Beecham said that March. “The prevalent theory is it could be anything.”