Born in 1939, George and Charles Finn were both retarded, with IQs around 60. But each twin could remember nearly every event that had ever befallen him, including the weather: “On April 15, 1956, Dr. Williams came to visit me and to ask me questions about dates. It was rainy and windy in the morning, but the sun came out in the middle of the afternoon.”

Both could also almost instantly tell the day of the week for every day on a 40,000-year calendar — and could answer such complex questions as “During what years between 1780 and 1795 did the 7th of August fall on a Wednesday?”

Thus they could have calculated the birthday of Daniel McCartney — who was doing the same thing a century earlier.

The deadliest fire in U.S. history swept through Wisconsin on Oct. 8, 1871, consuming more than a million acres and killing 1,500 people:

Groups of dead bodies were found within a stone’s-throw of the water. Families rushing down for a breathing place, had been blown upon by the rushing blast and struck lifeless. The ghastly throng huddled, shrieking and bewailing, about the flaring embers, and the terrible roll of the missing was soon called from end to end of the ashen waste. … In a great many instances the human remains were distinguished from animals by the teeth alone. One horror-struck relative recognized the relics of his nephew by a pen-knife imbedded in an oblong mound of ashes.

So why haven’t you heard of it? Because, by a bizarre coincidence, the Great Chicago Fire occurred on the same day.

In June 2001, a 10-year-old Staffordshire girl wrote her name on a tag, attached it to a helium balloon, and released it. It floated 140 miles to Wiltshire and came to rest in the garden of another girl.

Both girls were named Laura Buxton, both were 10 years old, both are fair-haired, and each owns a black female Labrador, a guinea pig, and a rabbit.

For Alexander Aitken (1895-1967), a prodigious memory was both a blessing and a curse. He memorized the Aeneid, knew π to a thousand places, and could quote long passages from Milton. But he was plagued by vivid memories of World War I, which haunted him until the end of his life:

I slid the rifle-sight to ‘450’, aimed and fired. … The Turk plunged into the trench in a swirl of dust. … This, of course, was what I was there for, but it seemed no light matter, and kept me awake for some time. I would come to no conclusion except that individual guilt in an act of this kind is not absolved by collective duty nor lessened when pooled in collective responsibility.

Unable to escape these visions, he suffered a chronic depression and had a complete breakdown in 1967, the last year of his life. “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory,” wrote Montaigne, “as the wish to forget it.”

On April 6, 1823, HMS Leven was surveying East Africa when she spied her consort, the Barracouta, about two miles to leeward. This was surprising, as the brig’s sailing orders should have placed her far from that location, but Leven‘s crew recognized her peculiar rig and the faces of her men. Strangely, she stood away when Captain Owen attempted to close with her, and near sunset she lowered a boat, apparently to pick up a man overboard.

The next morning the Leven anchored at Simon’s Bay, and a full week passed before the Barracouta joined her there. Her log showed she had been 300 miles away when the Leven thought she saw her.

So what had the Leven seen? No other vessel of the Barracouta‘s class had been seen about the Cape at that time. The sighting has never been explained.

A Mr. Jonathan Jackson, of Columbus, Ohio, died some thirty years ago, leaving orders to his executors to erect a cats’ home, the plans and elevation of which he had drawn out with great care and thought. The building was to contain dormitories, a refectory, areas for conversation, grounds for exercise, and gently sloping roofs for climbing, with rat-holes for sport, an ‘auditorium’ within which the inmates were to be assembled daily to listen to an accordion, which was to be played for an hour each day by an attendant, that instrument being the nearest approach to their natural voices. An infirmary, to which were to be attached a surgeon and three or four professed nurses, was to adjoin the establishment.

— Virgil McClure Harris, Ancient, Curious and Famous Wills, 1911

“Everything has its beauty,” wrote Confucius, “but not everyone sees it.”

Born in 1834 to a Mexican Indian mother, Julia Pastrana spoke three languages, had excellent taste in music, and gave charitably to deserving institutions. But the world would not see beyond her hypertrichosis, which covered her face and body with straight black hair, and her showman husband paraded her around the world as “The Bearded and Hairy Lady.”

“I well recollect seeing and speaking to this poor Julia Pastrana when in life,” wrote Francis Buckland in Curiosities of Natural History. “She was about four feet six inches in height; her eyes were deep black, and somewhat prominent, and their lids had long, thick eyelashes: her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle, bien chaussé, perfection itself.”

She died bearing a child at 26, and her mummy continues to tour the world — ironically, an object of more enduring fascination than the beauties of its day.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington looks placid from a distance, but don’t climb too high: The summit is blasted by hurricane-force winds 110 days a year (the weather station is literally chained to the mountain) and the wind chill reached minus 103°F in 2004.