Between 1884 and 1896, visitors to Coney Island could stay in an elephant. Each leg of the tin-skinned wooden behemoth was 60 feet long; its ears were 40 feet wide; and the enormous trunk measured 72 feet. The forelegs housed a diorama and a cigar store, and the hind legs contained staircases leading to 31 hotel rooms above — advertised entertainingly as “a main hall head room, 2 side body rooms, 2 thigh rooms, 2 shoulder rooms, 2 cheek rooms, 1 throat room, 1 stomach room, 4 hoof rooms, 6 leg rooms, 2 side rooms, 2 hip rooms, 1 through room from which the Elephant is feeding.” (Presumably this last carried a discount.)

The hotel idea didn’t work out, and in the end the building served mostly as a concert hall and amusement bazaar, with novelty stalls, a gallery, and a museum. Visitors could use telescopes to peer out of the monster’s glass eyes, and it was said that the mists of Niagara could be seen from the howdah on its back, which teetered at a height of 175 feet.

The contractor that built the colossus said that it would last half a century, but within 12 years it had been abandoned and burned to the ground. All that remained was part of a foreleg.

The hero of this exploit (it is a little difficult to locate him among so many) is Maurice Pardo–the “Herculean Human Motor,” as he modestly styles himself. This wonderful cyclist balances and propels, solely by his own power and skill, twenty-five persons on his specially-made machine, which is unquestionably of the two-wheeled variety; whether or not it may be styled a ‘safety,’ however, is rather for the human cargo to say. The total weight on the bicycle is a little more than 4,000 lb.

— Strand, October 1896

When Dora Ratjen competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, her teammates thought it strange that she always bathed behind a locked door. “I thought something was a bit funny, because she had a deep voice and she snored in her sleep,” recalled fellow high jumper Elfriede Kaun. “She also had to shave, not just her legs and under her arms, but also her face.”

Ratjen took fourth place and went on to set a world record (1.67 m) in the 1938 European Athletics Championships. On the way home she was detained by the Magdeburg police, who discovered that she was a man. Because of his malformed genitals, the midwife at his birth had mistakenly told his parents that he was female, and he was christened Dora and raised as a girl. “From the age of 10 or 11 I started to realize I wasn’t female, but male,” he told police. “However, I never asked my parents why I had to wear women’s clothes even though I was male.” He learned to pursue his love of sport as a loner.

After the discovery in Magdeburg, Ratjen promised to stop competing, and the prosecutor declared that no finding of fraud was possible because there was no intention to reap financial reward. Dora returned his medals, changed his name to Heinrich, and quietly took over his parents’ bar, declining numerous interview requests.

It’s often reported that the Nazis forced Ratjen to compete in the Olympics as a deliberate ruse “for the honor and glory of Germany,” but a 2009 investigation by Der Spiegel found no evidence of this. Sportswriter Volker Kluge told the magazine, “On the basis of the available documents, I think it is completely out of the question that the Nazis deliberately created Dora Ratjen as a ‘secret weapon’ for the Olympic Games.” He conceded that the Reich Sport Ministry may have been aware that Ratjen was a “borderline case.”

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border between Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Quebec. The library’s front door is in the United States, but the circulation desk and all of the books are in Canada. Opera is performed on a Canadian stage before an American audience.

Hence it’s the only library in the U.S. with no books, the only opera house in the U.S. with no stage, and the only library in Canada with no entrance.

See Four-Dimensional Basketball, A Freak of Navigation, and An Inland Archipelago.

WESTPHALIA.–If the east has its Fata Morgana, we, in Westphalia, have also quite peculiar natural phenomena, which, hitherto, it has been as impossible to explain satisfactorily, as to deny. A rare and striking appearance of this description forms now the subject of universal talk and comment in our province. On the 22nd of last month a surprising prodigy of nature was seen by many persons at Büderich, a village between Unna and Werl. Shortly before sunset, an army, of boundless extent, and consisting of infantry, cavalry, and an enormous number of waggons, was observed to proceed across the country in marching order. So distinctly seen were all these appearances, that even the flashing of the firelocks, and the colour of the cavalry uniform, which was white, could be distinguished. This whole array advanced in the direction of the wood of Schafhauser, and as the infantry entered the thicket, and the cavalry drew near, they were hid all at once, with the trees, in a thick smoke. Two houses, also, in flames, were seen with the same distinctness. At sunset the whole phenomenon vanished. As respects the fact, government has taken the evidence of fifty eye-witnesses, who have deposed to a universal agreement respecting this most remarkable appearance. Individuals are not wanting who affirm that similar phenomena were observed in former times in this region. As the fact is so well attested as to place the phenomenon beyond the possibility of successful disproof, people have not been slow in giving a meaning to it, and in referring it to the great battle of the nations at Birkenbaum, to which the old legend, particularly since 1848, again points.

— J. Macray, in Notes and Queries, March 25, 1854

On Feb. 12, 1908, mechanic George Schuster joined five other motorists in Times Square to undertake an insanely ambitious race to Paris — by driving west to Alaska, across the Bering Strait, and then all the way through Siberia and Europe, a total of 20,000 miles.

“The drivers would surely have to make their own roads in many districts, and for many days most of the driving would be done on the low gear,” consultant Joe Tracy told the New York Times, which co-sponsored the contest. Tracy recommended that each team carry a windlass and block and tackle “to pull the car up steep grades and prevent it from dashing over cliffs in going down the mountains.”

One team got stuck in Hudson Valley snow, a second got lost in Iowa, a third was caught loading its car onto a train, and a fourth dropped out in Russia. Schuster finally arrived in Paris on July 30 to take first place, 170 days after leaving New York.

The prize was $1,000, but appallingly Schuster didn’t collect it until 60 years after the race, when he was 95 years old and nearly blind. After realizing its oversight the Times presented the payment at a 1968 dinner in Buffalo, acknowledging “what is probably the slowest payoff in racing history.”