From The World of Wonders, 1883:

“There was a widow [Anne] and her daughter [Jane], and a man [George] and his son [Henry]. The widow married the son, and the daughter married the father. The widow was therefore mother [in law] to her husband’s father, and grandmother to her own husband. By this husband she had a son [David], to whom she was also great-grandmother. Now, the son of a great-grandmother must be grandfather or grand-uncle to the person to whom his mother was great-grandmother; but Anne was great-grandmother to him [David]. Therefore David is his own grandfather.”

Hood’s Magazine (1846) adds, “This was the case with a boy at a school at Norwich.”

In 1891, Sybell Corbet took this photograph in the library of Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. The abbey’s owner, Lord Combermere, had just died after a London accident and was being buried that day in the family vault a few miles away.

Members of the family felt the figure in the chair was very like the dead man. But physicist William Barrett, noting that it was distinct only from the waist up, suggested that perhaps a manservant had sat down briefly during the 15 minutes that Corbet had left the shutter open.

Barrett had just published an article with these particulars in the Westminster Gazette when he received a letter from a Combermere relative. She shared his doubts, she said, but wanted to correct one error in the article. “You say he had not lost his legs,” she wrote, “but he died from an accident in which they were so much injured, he could never have used them again. He was run over by a wagon at Knightsbridge, crossing the street, and only lived a few weeks.”

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

— Zhuangzi, Chinese text, fourth century B.C.

In 1776 an unfortunate woman was found sheltering under a haystack in Bourton, near Bristol. By day she would seek charity from the local people, but at night she would always return to the haystack, saying only that “trouble and misery dwelt in houses.”

Curiously, she appeared well bred and accustomed to good society. Hannah More, who took up her cause, found her “handsome, young, interesting, enough Mistress of her reason carefully to shut up from our observation every avenue that might lead to her secret.”

More published “A Tale of Real Woe” in the St. James’s Chronicle in 1785, offering what little she had been able to learn about the woman: “that her Father was a German, her Mother an Italian; that she has one brother and one Sister; that her father had a very fine garden full of olive and orange Trees.”

Rumors abounded that “Louisa” was an illegitimate daughter of Francis I, emperor of Austria, and thus a half-sister to Marie Antoinette, but these have never been substantiated. Whoever she was, the woman spent the next 16 years in a succession of hospitals, never giving her identity, and when she died in 1801, she took her secret with her.

The South Australian town of Coober Pedy is the opal capital of the world, but in summer the temperature can reach 104°.

So the residents moved underground. A three-bedroom cave costs about the same as a house, and you don’t need air conditioning.