If you see a kangaroo wearing a man’s waistcoat with $20 in one pocket, please notify William Thompson, farmer of Grafton, near Sydney, Australia. When Thompson found a kangaroo caught in a wire fence he acted on impulse, removing his old waistcoat and buttoning it firmly on the kangaroo, which then bounded away. It was several hours later when he remembered the money in the pocket.
— The Paris News, Feb. 4, 1946
One summer afternoon in 1917, Royal Flying Corps trainee Graham Donald prepared to try a new maneuver with his Sopwith Camel. He ascended into a vertical loop, intending to flip the plane at the top and fly off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, when the airplane was fully inverted at 6,000 feet, his safety belt gave way and “suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit.”
“The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly, and terra firma looked damnably ‘firma,'” he recalled later. But as he fell, “I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby.” He dropped onto the diving plane and managed to grip its top wing, “and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller, which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine.”
As the ground neared at 140 mph, he reached into the cockpit and pulled back on the control stick. Unfortunately, this sent the plane into an inverted spin. With 2,500 feet left, Donald managed to put his right foot on the stick and push it forward, and he found himself clinging to a plane that was flying upside down. He reached the controls, righted the plane, and climbed into the cockpit with about 800 feet to spare. To prevent further strain on the wings, he cut the engine and glided back to the airfield.
“I made an unusually good landing, but there was no one there to applaud — every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place — popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I’d also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield had been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.”
(From Joshua Levine’s 2008 book On a Wing and a Prayer. Thanks, Paul.)
At a dinner for law alumni of New York University in 1907, Walter Lloyd Smith of the New York Supreme Court read “the most remarkable document that ever came into his possession” — the will of an inmate of the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning, Ill.:
I, Charles Lounsbury, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make and publish this, my last will and testament, in order as justly as may be to distribute my interest in the world among succeeding men.
That part of my interest which is known in law and recognized in the sheep-bound volumes as my property, being inconsiderable and of no account, I make no disposal of in this my will.
My right to live, being but a life estate, is not at my disposal, but these things excepted all else in the world I now proceed to devise and bequeath.
Item: I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and generously, as the needs of their children may require.
Item: I leave to children inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the Milky Way to wonder at, but subject nevertheless to the rights hereinafter given to lovers.
Item: I devise to boys jointly all the useful idle fields and commons where ball may be played; all pleasant waters where one may swim; all snowclad hills where one may coast, and all streams and ponds where one may fish, or where, when grim Winter comes, one may skate; to have and to hold the same for the period of their boyhood. And all meadows with the clover blossoms and butterflies thereof, the woods and their appurtenances, the squirrels and the birds, and echoes and strange noises, and all distant places which may be visited, together with the adventures there found. And I give to said boys each his own place at the fireside at night, with all pictures that may be seen in the burning wood, to enjoy without let or hindrance and without any incumbrance of care.
Item: To lovers I devise their imaginary world with whatever they may need; as the stars of the sky; the red roses by the wall; the bloom of the hawthorn; the sweet strains of music, and aught else by which they may desire to figure to each others the lastingness and beauty of their love.
Item: To young men jointly, I devise and bequeath all boisterous, inspiring sports of rivalry, and I give to them the disdain of weakness and undaunted confidence in their own strength, though they are rude; I give them the power to make lasting friendships, and of possessing companions, and to them exclusively I give all merry songs and brave choruses, to sing with lusty voices.
Item: And to those who are no longer children or youths or lovers, I leave memory, and I bequeath to them the volumes of the poems of Burns and Shakespeare and of other poets, if there be others, to the end that they may live over the old days again, freely and fully, without tithe or diminution.
Item: To our loved ones with snowy crowns I bequeath the happiness of old age, the love and gratitude of their children until they fall asleep.
The original, it turns out, was written by Williston Fish in 1897 and published in Harper’s Weekly the following year. He had intended it as a poetic trifle, but newspapers around the country had picked it up and run it as fact, often embellishing the language, until, Fish wrote in 1908, “this one of my pieces has been translated into all the idiot tongues of English.” Charles Lounsbury was the name of an old relative of his — “a big, strong all-around good kind of man,” but not, evidently, insane.
In September 1749, Arthur Davis, a sergeant in the British army, went missing while shooting in the Highlands of Scotland. A search found no trace of him, but at length his landlord’s son, Alexander Macpherson, announced that Davis’ ghost had roused him from bed, told him the location of the body, asked him to bury it, and named his murderers.
At trial, this astounding testimony was corroborated by a servant who had seen the ghost enter Macpherson’s house and approach his bed:
She saw something naked come in at the door; which frighted her so much that she drew the clothes over her head: that when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture; that she cannot tell what it was; that next morning she asked Macpherson what it was that had troubled them the night before? and that he answered, she might be easy, for it would not trouble her any more.
This ghostly evidence seemed to be swaying the jury until the defense attorney asked a fateful question: “What language did the ghost speak in?” When the youth answered, “As good Gaelic as I ever heard in Lochaber,” the jury found the accused murderers not guilty. A ghost’s testimony might be reasonable — but Arthur Davis had never learned Gaelic.
J.G. Christopher, of Minneapolis, Minn., is the possessor of a canary bird, the voice of which has been developed in a peculiarly painstaken manner, so that now this ‘educated’ songster can successfully render the well-known air, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave.’ The bird will commence to warble like any other of these pets, and after uttering a few notes will immediately strike into the tune, and when its voice has attained full height the above tune will be sung entire, and in a manner that sounds singularly melodious and attractive, literally setting to note its natural vocal powers. This was only achieved after the most diligent and patient attention. As soon as the bird was old enough to pick up a living it was put in a room apart from all others, and a music-box also placed in the apartment and kept perpetually going, so that this singular pupil had nothing to learn from but that. After four months of such apprentice-ship, the owner was rewarded by hearing his little favorite render ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ as naturally and perfectly as if that was the song of its ancestors.
— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879
Readers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford must take an oath that they will not kindle fires in the library.
A village in southeastern Michigan (population 45) has, for years, been enjoying a tourist boom. People would come from all over just to be able to mail a card postmarked Hell or to purchase bumper stickers for their cars stating ‘WE’VE BEEN THROUGH HELL!’ In addition to this attraction, the village has lately acquired a reputation as a marriage mill. Seventy two couples were wed there in 1965 and 61 the following year, a large percentage of them having been divorced at least once. One couple is alleged to have told the local justice of the peace that since they’d already been through Hell twice, they might just as well start there.
— Robert M. Rennick, “Obscene Names and Naming in Folk Tradition,” in Names and Their Varieties, 1986
Frontiersman Samuel Brady was being chased through northern Ohio by a band of Sandusky Indians in 1780 when he found his way blocked by the Cuyahoga River:
“He made his way to Standing Rock, and intended to cross at that ford, but the Indians were awaiting him, and he ran farther along the bank, to a place where the rocks rose at some points to a height of twenty-five feet. The body of the river at the narrowest part was from twenty-three to thirty feet wide, and was deep and dangerous. There was no other ford than Standing Rock for miles, and the Indians felt assured of their prize, but faint heart was not known to the Captain of the Rangers, and even a rushing torrent of water did not stop him in his course. Gaining a less precipitous edge of the cliff, he ran back into the forest, to get a good start, and was so near the approaching red men, that he heard their shots and exclamations. Across the expanse of water, at a height of probably twenty or twenty-five feet, he bounded, and with the eye of a practiced marksman, struck the bank on the other side, and stood on the cliff, as the wild yell and wilder appearance of the first pursuer denoted his disappointment and rage.”
Could this have happened as described? The river is broader and its banks much lower than in former times, so it’s hard to judge. The best evidence I can find supporting the tradition is an 1856 letter by Frederick Wadsworth, who writes that “many years ago” he had visited the spot with a companion who had heard the tale from Brady himself. “We measured the river where we supposed the leap was made, and found it between twenty-four and twenty-six feet; my present impression is that it was a few inches less than than twenty-five feet. There were bushes and evergreens growing out of the fissures in the rock on each side of the stream. He jumped from the west to east side; the banks on each side of the stream were nearly of the same height, the flat rock on the west side descending a very little from the west to the east.” Decide for yourself.
(Thanks, Mike.)
Another gentleman, mentioned in the text-books … seemed to have a ruling passion against waste, which the court respected. The testator devised his property to a stranger, thus wholly disinheriting the heir or next of kin, and directed that his executors should cause some parts of his bowels to be converted into fiddle strings; that others should be sublimed into smelling salts, and that the remainder of his body should be vitrified into lenses for optical purposes. In a letter attached to the will the testator said: ‘The world may think this to be done in a spirit of singularity or whim, but I have a mortal aversion to funeral pomp, and I wish my body to be converted into purposes useful to mankind.’
— Basil Jones, “Eccentricities of Sane Testators,” Law Notes, November 1908
In 1911, Kansas farmer Charlie Faust approached New York Giants manager John McGraw and said that a fortune teller had predicted that he would pitch for the Giants and that they would win the pennant. Perhaps superstitious, McGraw let Faust suit up for the games and warm up on the sidelines. He pitched only two innings (and gave up one run), but the Giants did indeed win the pennant that year.
Faust remained with the club in 1912, and the team won the pennant again. They won again in 1913, but when the pitcher’s mental problems led him to be institutionalized in 1914, the Giants finished 10 games behind the Braves. When Faust died in 1915, at age 34, they finished last.
