“Hanged by a Ghost”

An old volume of the Quarterly Review mentions a crime discovered in a most extraordinary way in Australia in the year 1830, of which a public record is preserved, and which figures with full details in the journals of that period. The confidential steward of a wealthy settler near Sydney stated that his master had suddenly been called to England on important business, and that during his absence the whole of his immense property would be in his exclusive care. Some weeks after an acquaintance of the absentee settler riding through his grounds was astonished to perceive him sitting upon a stile. He strode forward to speak, when the figure turned from him with a look of intense sorrow and walked to the edge of a pond, where it mysteriously disappeared. On the morrow he brought a number of men to the water to drag it, and the body of the man supposed to be on his way to England was brought up. The steward was arrested, brought to trial, and, frightened at the story of his master’s ghost, confessed the crime, stating that he did the murder at the very stile on which his master’s ghost had appeared. He was duly executed.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

| Crime · Oddities

Crocker Land

In 1906, standing on a headland in northern Canada, Robert Peary spied a landmass about 130 miles away in the Arctic Ocean, at about 83°N 100°W.

An expedition eight years later found no sign of it. Peary’s landmass was never seen again.

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Waste Not, Want Not

The following resolutions were passed by the Board of Councilmen in Canton, Mississippi:–

  1. Resolved, by this Council, that we build a new Jail.
  2. Resolved, that the new Jail be built out of the materials of the old Jail.
  3. Resolved, that the old Jail be used until the new Jail is finished.

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-fields of Literature, 1875

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“The Anatomie Vivante”

http://books.google.com/books?id=1OwTAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA513&dq="claude+seurat"&as_brr=1&ei=T9uFSdmUMJ6cMuPNiK0F

There was a ‘living skeleton’ brought to England in 1825 by the name of Claude Seurat. He was born in 1798 and was in his twenty-seventh year. He usually ate in the course of a day a penny roll and drank a small quantity of wine. His skeleton was plainly visible, over which the skin was stretched tightly. The distance from the chest to the spine was less than 3 inches, and internally this distance was less. The pulsations of the heart were plainly visible. He was in good health and slept well. His voice was very weak and shrill. The circumference of this man’s biceps was only 4 inches.

— George Gould and Walter Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1896

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A Myth Melts

On Nov. 1, 1986, Nancy C. Knight collected two identical snowflakes on a glass plate about 20,000 feet over Wausau, Wis.

“In many years of snow-crystals collection,” she wrote in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “the author has seen no other example of such crystals, nor are any given in the standard references.”

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A Rude Awakening

On the 3rd of this month, Nicephorus Glycas, the Greek-Orthodox Metropolitan of Lesbos, an old man in his eightieth year, after several days of confinement to his bed, was reported by the physician to be dead. The supposed dead bishop, in accordance with the rules of the Orthodox Church, was immediately clothed in his episcopal vestments, and placed upon the Metropolitan’s throne in the great church of Methymni, where the body was exposed to the devout faithful during the day, and watched by relays of priests day and night. … On the second night of ‘the exposition of the corpse,’ the Metropolitan suddenly started up from his seat and stared round him with amazement and horror at all the panoply of death amidst which he had been seated. The priests were not less horrified when the ‘dead’ bishop demanded what they were doing with him. The old man had simply fallen into a death-like lethargy, which the incompetent doctors had hastily concluded to be death.

— London Echo, March 3, 1896, quoted in William Tebb, et al., Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, 1905

| Death · Oddities

The Doctrinal Paradox

You’re overseeing a murder trial. The defendant will be hanged if his crime is judged to be both willful and premeditated. You poll the jurors:

doctrinal paradox

A majority think it was willful, and a majority think it was premeditated, so you order the death penalty. As he’s dragged off to the gallows, the defendant screams that this is unfair and swears that his ghost will return for revenge.

You think nothing more of this until the evening, when a strange thought occurs to you. If you’d simply asked the jurors, “Should this man receive the death penalty?”, most would have voted no — only one of the three jurors believed that the crime was both willful and premeditated. Was your own reasoning unsound?

And who’s that behind you — ?

| Oddities · Science & Math

Vide Infra

Edward Edwin Foot was a poet with the mind of an attorney — in his 1865 elegy for Henry Temple, a single verse contains three footnotes:

Altho’ we* mourn for one now gone,
And he — that grey-hair’d Palmerston,†
We will give God the praise,–
For he, beyond the age of man,‡
Eleven years had over-ran
Within two equal days.

*The nation.
†The Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, K.G., G.C.H., &c. (the then Premier of the British Government), died at “Brockett Hall,” Herts, at a quarter to eleven o’clock in the forenoon of Wednesday, 18th October, 1865, aged eighty-one years (all but two days, having been born on the 20th October 1784). The above lines were written on the occasion of his death.
‡Scriptural limitation.

| Oddities · Poems

The Rich Are Different

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belcourt1895.jpg

Oliver Belmont loved horses so much that he shared his house with them. When planning his summer mansion in Newport, R.I., in 1891, the American socialite insisted that the first floor be devoted to stables, paneled in teak and heated with steam, with quarters for eight grooms. The family lived on the second floor.

That’s not all. Reportedly Belmont’s horses had morning clothes, afternoon clothes, and evening clothes; slept in white linen sheets; and had harness hooks made of sterling silver. Belmont couldn’t bear to part with two of his favorites even at their death, so he had them stuffed and mounted in a drawing room.

“It’s your client’s money you’re spending,” wrote architect Richard Morris Hunt. “If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it’s up to you to do it, and still get the best possible results.”

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