A sad catastrophe is reported to have happened to this Italian vessel, the Rosina, bound from Catania for New York. One day at the end of October she was nearly capsized by a sudden squall in the middle of the Atlantic. All hands were summoned instantly to take in sail, and all, together with the captain, were actively engaged, when an enormous wave swept the deck of every living person, leaving only one of the crew, who happened to be below. On running up on deck this man, named Criscuolo, found not a living soul, not even the ship’s dog, and saw himself the sole occupant of a half-wrecked vessel in a tempest in the Atlantic. For eight days he struggled against wind and sea without taking an instant’s repose, constantly on the watch for some sail, and had abandoned himself to despair, when the Marianna, a Portuguese brigantine, descrying the damaged vessel, bore down upon her as she was sinking and rescued Criscuolo, who was taken on to New York.

– “Wrecks and Casualties,” The Shipwrecked Mariner, January 1882

On several occasions, mathematician Maria Agnesi (1718-1799) arrived in her study to discover that a vexing problem had been solved for her — and, eerily, solved in her own handwriting.

Agnesi was a somnambulist. In her sleep she would walk to the study, make a light, and solve a problem that she had left incomplete.

Then she’d return to bed with no memory of what she’d done.

Sailors can navigate Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo easily at night — the sky is lit with almost continuous lightning 150 nights a year. The flashes are visible for hundreds of miles, but there is no thunder.

No one knows what causes it.

In Detroit, year ago, Street Sweeper Joseph Figlock was furbishing up an alley when a baby plopped down from a fourth-story window, struck him on the head and shoulders, injured Joseph Figlock and itself but was not killed. Last fortnight, as Joseph Figlock was sweeping out another alley, two-year-old David Thomas fell from a fourth-story window, landed on ubiquitous Mr. Figlock with the same results.

– Time, Oct. 17, 1938

From The Strand, April 1901. R.C. Hardman of Meadhurst, Uppingham, ordered a ton of coal and found a coin dated 1397 embedded in one lump.

If there’s an explanation for this, I can’t find it.

He was hatched near Birmingham, purchased in the market of Alcester, in the county of Warwick, and is now the property of Mr. John Weisman, tailor, residing at No. 6, Lombard Street, Mint Street, Southwark. … He is strongly made, his plumage beautifully variegated and spangled, and of a fine tone of colour. When seen in front he appears to resemble any other animal of the same species, except that his beak is small for his size, and his comb and wattles are considerably larger than usual: but connected with the rump there is a smaller body, which is provided with a second pair of legs, with spurs equal in size to those of the other legs, being three inches in length and remarkably strong. These hinder legs the animal does not employ in walking; they hang down behind the others, not loosely, but on the contrary, in a firm and strong manner. He has two vents which he uses indiscriminately; and crows both loud and well.

– Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1820

A very singular discovery of an inscription was made some time since at Coxwold, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. … An ash was … felled and split for firewood. Upon being riven asunder, the outer part of the tree was cleft in two like a case, leaving the inner portion of the trunk entire, and the following rude inscription was discovered, distinctly legible, both upon the inner part of the trunk, and with the letters inverted, upon the outer casing. The inscription can, without difficulty, be thus read:–

There is no date to the inscription, but … it would … appear that the tree has been cut down nearly a hundred years. Also, by the number of rings in the wood, each indicating a year’s growth, the tree appears to have been about fifty-five years old when the inscription was made, and to have subsequently grown for nearly two hundred years. The closeness of the rings under the circumference prevents this estimation of the date from being regarded as more than an approximation; but all the circumstances render it highly probable that the inscription was made about three centuries ago.

– Kazlitt Arvine, Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes of Literature and the Fine Arts, 1856

Harvard anthropologist Terrence Deacon was walking past the New England Aquarium one day in 1984 when a voice yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get outta there!”

He stopped, but saw no one. Again the voice said, “Hey! Hey you!” Eventually he traced it to an enclosure of harbor seals, and to one in particular that seemed to be speaking English:

On investigating, Deacon learned that “Hoover” (named for his appetite) had been discovered as a pup by a Maine fisherman and donated to the aquarium, where he became a star attraction.

Deacon studied the seal for a year. Regarding the vocalizing, he notes that some birds seem to learn their parents’ songs in early life but sing them only later. “Though we will never know for sure,” he writes, “the image of Hoover guzzling the food in the cupboard and the old fisherman yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hoover! Hey you! Get outta there!’ has a persuasive feel, or twisted irony.”

William Beckford’s 1835 travel memoir Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal contains a startling episode in the monastery El Escorial, near Madrid:

Forth stalked the prior, and drawing out from a remarkably large cabinet an equally capacious sliding shelf–(the source, I conjecture, of the potent odour I complained of)–displayed lying stretched out upon a quilted silken mattress, the most glorious specimen of plumage ever beheld in terrestrial regions–a feather from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel, full three feet long, and of a blushing hue more soft and delicate than that of the loveliest rose. I longed to ask at what precise moment this treasure beyond price had been dropped–whether from the air–on the open ground, or within the walls of the humble tenement at Nazareth; but I repressed all questions of an indiscreet tendency–the why and wherefore, the when and how, for what and to whom such a palpable manifestation of archangelic beauty and wingedness had been vouchsafed.

It should be noted that Beckford was something of an eccentric; his enormous country house had collapsed 10 years earlier, and perhaps his writings too were built on dreams. But the monks aren’t telling.