The residents of East Union, Ohio, several miles east of Wooster, are considerably worked up over the discovery of a cave near the village. J.M. Davis, Will S. Grady and Alexander Hunter, while out hunting, chased a rabbit into a burrow on a hill near the line of the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railway. Determined to secure the game, they procured a mattock and shovel and proceeded to dig it out. After excavating the earth to a depth of about four feet they uncovered a curiously shaped stone, upon which were the evident marks of human workmanship. … The stone itself closed the opening into a subterranean chamber, which, with the aid of a ladder and lantern, was found to be in the form of a cubical cistern (perfectly dry), ten feet high, ten feet wide and ten feet long, carved in solid sandstone, with exquisite precision, and containing a few arrow-heads, stone pestle and mortar, the remains of a fire, and in the northwest corner, sitting in an upright position, a human skeleton, in a good state of preservation, with circlets of copper about its neck, wrist, and ankle bones. Its eyeless sockets were turned toward the entrance, and looked sad and ghastly. Upon making the discovery Coroner Huntsberger was summoned, but, viewing the skeleton, refused to hold an inquest. Crowds of people are visiting the cave daily since the discovery.

— The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, May 1891

See Home for Good.

“Armless Wonder” Charles B. Tripp and “Legless Wonder” Eli Bowen share a bicycle, from a publicity shoot in the late 19th century.

Each man spent more than 50 years in the circus world — Tripp could write, paint, cut paper, and do carpentry with his feet, and Bowen trained himself to tumble and do stunts on a long pole. But apart from this photo, there’s no clear evidence that the two worked as a team.

On April 12, 2006, numismatist Scott A. Travers bought a pretzel in Times Square and paid for it partly with a 1914 penny worth $350.

In the same week he spent a 1908 penny worth $200 and a 1909 one worth more than $1,000. “I’m planting a seed,” he told the New York Times, “and I hope that a new generation of people will come to appreciate the history that coins represent.”

In the weeks that followed, seven people came forward claiming to have found the $1,000 penny. “The coins were real, but none of them was mine,” Travers said.

In January 2009, the New York Daily News reported that all three of Travers’ coins were still unclaimed. That doesn’t mean they’re still circulating — but they might be.

In 1740, Norwegian pastor Hans Egede published an account of an extraordinary encounter during one of his missionary voyages to Greenland:

Anno 1734, July. On the 6th. appeared a very terrible sea-monster, which raised itself so high above the water, that its head reached above our main-top. It had a long sharp snout, and blew like a whale, had broad, large flappers, and the body was, as it were, covered with a hard skin, and it was very wrinkled and uneven on its skin; moreover on the lower part it was formed like a snake, and when it went under water again, it cast itself backwards and in so doing it raised its tail above the water, a whole ship-length from its body.

He gives a similar account in A Description of Greenland, published five years later. Eric Pontoppidan, who became bishop of Bergen in 1746, wrote in his Natural History of Norway, “I have hardly spoke with any intelligent person born in manor of Nordland, who was not able to give a pertinent answer, and strong assurances the existence of this fish; and some of our north traders, that come here every year their merchandise, think it a very strange question, when they are seriously asked whether there be any such creature; they think it as ridiculous as if the question was put them whether there be such fish as eel or cod.”