In the afternoon of Monday, July 25th, 1768, an extraordinary gust of wind near Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire, not only unroofed the dwelling-house, barns, stables, and out-buildings belonging to a farmer named Bishop (levelling one of the buildings with the ground, and tearing up and rending more than sixty apple and pear trees), but also took up his son, a youth of sixteen, and carried him at a height of four or five yards from the ground to a distance of about eight yards, over a stone wall, fish-pond, and a hedge, depositing him in a great state of terror, but otherwise unhurt, in a field of hay.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

The world’s largest population of feral camels is in … Australia.

Thousands were imported between 1840 and 1907 to help explore the continent’s arid interior — it’s said that the first piano in Alice Springs arrived on a camel’s back. (A world away, the same thing was happening in the United States.)

The animals were gradually obviated by automobiles, but as many as a million still wander the country in herds — so many, ironically, that Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.

In October 1871, the American steamer Polaris began to leak, and 19 men, women, and children crowded onto an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. The ship got away from them and, incredibly, they spent the whole of the arctic winter riding the melting floe down the Greenland coast. Excerpts from the journal of steward John Herron:

Oct. 15. … We remained shivering all night. Saved very little provisions.

Nov. 6. Joe caught a seal, which has been a godsend. … Mr. Meyer made a pack of cards from some thick paper, and we are now playing euchre.

Dec. 2. Boiled some seal-skin to-day and ate it–blubber, hair and tough skin. The men ate it; I could not.

April 14. Our small piece of ice is wearing away very fast; our provisions are nearly finished. Things look very dark; starvation very near.

April 25. … We are all soaking wet, in everything we have, and no chance of drying anything. … All is dark and dreary, but, please God, it will soon brighten up.

Finally, as hope was fading, they were picked up on April 30 by a Newfoundland sealer near Labrador. In six months they had drifted more than 1,440 miles — but all survived.

In 1952, a stray cat wandered into Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, Calif. He seemed to be about 7 years old, skinny but healthy, and he was apparently determined to live at the school. The students quickly adopted him, feeding him from their sandwiches, and he made a home in classroom 8, disappearing each night but turning up again in the morning.

The sandwiches must have been pretty good, because “Room 8” stayed at the school for 15 years, reappearing mysteriously at the end of each summer vacation. Thanks to widespread media coverage, including features in Time and Look, he’s said to have received 10,000 letters in that time, which the children dutifully answered. And every year his picture was taken with the graduating class of sixth graders.

Wherever he came from, it seems he’d found what he wanted. He died in August 1968, and his pawprints grace the sidewalk in front of the school.

On Friday morning of the week before last, early risers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, witnessed a peculiar sight in the shape of a shower of birds that fell from a clear sky, literally cluttering the streets of the city. There were wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, and many birds of strange plumage, some of them resembling canaries, but all dead, falling in heaps along the thoroughfares, the singular phenomenon attracting many spectators and causing much comment.

The most plausible theory as to the strange windfall is that the birds were driven inland by the late storm on the Florida coast, the force of the current of air and the sudden change of temperature causing the death of many of the little feathered creatures when they reached Baton Rouge. Some idea of the extent of the shower may be gathered from the estimate that out on National Avenue alone the children of the neighborhood collected as many as 200 birds.

— St. Louis newspaper, quoted in The Osprey, December 1896

British statesman Charles James Fox managed to have two aunts who died 171 years apart:

Fox’s grandfather married twice — once at 27 and once at 76. A baby produced by the first marriage died in 1655, and a son produced by the second marriage married a woman whose sister died in 1826.

Fox himself died in 1806, but his widow survived until 1842 — nearly 200 years after the death of her aunt-by-marriage.

See also Proof That a Man Can Be His Own Grandfather.

Malta is criss-crossed with ruts like these. No one knows who made them, when, or why. If they’re cart ruts, why are some 60 centimeters deep? If it’s an irrigation system or some kind of astronomical undertaking, what was its purpose?

The most popular theory is that ancient sledges hauled limestone to build local temples. But why then do some ruts lead straight into the sea?

London faced a surreal emergency on Oct. 17, 1814, when a giant beer vat ruptured in a St. Giles brewery. The resulting wave collapsed the neighboring vats, and 323,000 golden gallons poured into the West End.

“All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent, which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath,” wrote a correspondent to the London Knickerbocker. “A roar, as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils.”

The flood filled neighboring basements and causing several tenements to collapse. In all, eight people were killed — “by drowning, injury, poisoning by porter fumes, or drunkenness.”

American disasters are sweeter but less stimulating.