In 1926 an English probate court accepted a will written on an empty eggshell.
A Manchester widow had found the shell on her husband’s wardrobe. On it was written, “17-1925. Mag. Everything i possess. — J. B.”
The dead man had been dieting and used to bring eggs with him to work. His initials had been J.B., the message was in his handwriting, and he had always called his wife “Mag.” The court accepted the shell as a valid will (Hodson v. Barnes, 1926).
See also Let’s Get This Over With.
Shortly after Joseph Haydn died in 1809, two phrenologists dug up the composer’s corpse to determine whether his talent was somehow reflected in his cranium. Johann Peter, governor of a local prison, found indeed that “the bump of music” in Haydn’s skull was “fully developed,” and he proudly kept the skull in a box adorned with a golden lyre.
Eleven years later, Haydn’s old patron Prince Esterházy discovered the outrage while arranging to have Haydn’s remains transferred elsewhere, and the phrenologists were forced to stash Haydn’s skull briefly in a straw mattress while they passed a different one to Esterházy.
The real skull was bequeathed eventually to the Viennese Society of the Friends of Music and was reunited with its corpse only in 1954, 22 years after Esterházy’s descendant had built a marble tomb for the purpose. Even in death, there’s paperwork.
Other truant heads: Oliver Cromwell, Jeremy Bentham, Albert Einstein.
At Honolulu on Dec. 12, 1794, the American merchant sloop Lady Washington fired a 13-gun salute to greet the English schooner Jackal.
The Jackal returned the salute — instantly killing the other ship’s captain and several crewmen.
One of its cannon had been loaded with real grapeshot.
Stonewall Jackson was killed by his own troops. As he was reconnoitering after the Battle of Chancellorsville, a Confederate infantry regiment mistook him for Union cavalry and fired. He died a week later.
On Dec. 30, 1888, Joseph Néel killed a Mr. Coupard on the tiny island of Île Aux Chiens off the Newfoundland coast.
France, which owns the island, shipped a guillotine from Martinique so that Néel could be beheaded on Aug. 24, 1889.
He is the only person ever executed by guillotine in North America.
An hour before his death in April 1955, Albert Einstein muttered a few sentences in German.
The night nurse did not understand them.
In March 1942, HMS Trinidad launched a torpedo at a German destroyer.
The torpedo had a faulty gyro: It swam in a circle and returned to the ship.
Thirty-two men were killed.
Married: Moses Alexander, aged 93, to Mrs. Frances Tompkins, aged 105. They were married in Bath, Steuben county, N. Y., June 11, 1831. They were both taken out of bed dead the following morning.
— The Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, 1938
During a party on July 9, 1993, lawyer Garry Hoy threw himself at a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, to prove that it was unbreakable.
It wasn’t.
In Hitler Moves East, former SS officer Paul Carell records a bizarre scene from the bitterly cold winter of 1941 on the eastern front. At Ozarovo a rearguard of the German 3rd Rifle Regiment came across a group of Russian troops standing motionless in waist-deep snow. On investigating, they found that the Soviets, horses and men, had frozen to death where they stood:
Over on one side was a soldier, leaning against the flank of his horse. Next to him a wounded man in the saddle, one leg in a splint, his eyes wide open under iced-up eyebrows, his right hand still gripping the dishevelled mane of his mount. The second lieutenant and the sergeant slumped forward in their saddles, their clenched fists still gripping their reins. Wedged in between two horses were three soldiers: evidently they had tried to keep warm against the animals’ bodies. The horses themselves were like the horses on the plinths of equestrian statues — heads held high, eyes closed, their skin covered with ice, their tails whipped by the wind, but frozen into immobility.
Lance Corporal Tietz couldn’t take photos because “the view-finder froze over with his tears” and the shutter refused to work. “The god of war was holding his hand over the infernal picture,” Carell writes. “It was not to become a memento for others.”