Jerusalem Syndrome

Between 1980 and 1993, 42 visitors to Israel experienced a peculiar psychotic episode with seven consistent clinical stages:

  1. Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
  2. Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone.
  3. A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
  4. Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, togalike gown, which was always white.
  5. The need to scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, religious hymns, or spirituals.
  6. A procession or march to one of Jerusalem’s holy places.
  7. Delivery of a “sermon” in a holy place. The sermon was usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.

These people had no history of psychiatric illness and arrived as regular tourists, with no special mission in mind. They recovered fairly spontaneously on leaving the country and were reluctant afterward to discuss the episode. No explanation has been found.

(Bar-el Y, et al. (2000) Jerusalem syndrome. British Journal of Psychiatry, 176, 86-90.)

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Bon Appétit!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chapulines.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Menu proposed by Vincent M. Holst in Why Not Eat Insects? (1885):

  • Slug soup
  • Boiled cod with snail sauce
  • Wasp grubs fried in the comb
  • Moths sauteed in butter
  • Braised beef with caterpillars
  • New carrots with wireworm sauce
  • Gooseberry cream with sawflies
  • Deviled chafer grubs
  • Stag beetle larvae on toast

“Why on earth should these creatures be called loathsome, which, as a matter of fact, are not loathsome in any way, and, indeed, are in every way more fitted for human food than many of the so-called delicacies now highly prized?”

He has a point — viewed as livestock, house crickets convert energy to protein about 20 times more efficiently than beef cattle.

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“Fairy Castles”

http://books.google.com/books?id=RVmOSM2RlOcC&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#PPA60-IA1,M1

On Oct. 21, 1796, at about 4 p.m., “a number of spectators” witnessed a curious mirage in clear weather near Cork, Ireland:

It appeared on a hill, on the county of Waterford side of the river, and seemed a walled town with a round tower, and a church with a spire; the houses perfect, and the windows distinct. Behind the houses appeared the mast of a ship, and in the front a single tree, near which was a cow grazing: whilst the Waterford hills appeared distinctly behind. In the space of about half an hour the spire and round tower became covered with domes, and the octagonal building, or rather round tower, became a broken turret. Soon after this change, all the houses became ruins, and their fragments seemed scattered in the field near the walls; the whole in about an hour disappeared, and the hill on which it stood, sunk to the level of the real field. The hill and trees appeared of a bright green, the houses and towers of a clear brown, with their roofs blue.

From Curiosities for the Ingenious, 1825.

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The Cardrona Bra Fence

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cardrona_bra_fence.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

If aliens are studying us, they must be baffled sometimes.

In late 1999 four women’s bras appeared on a wire fence in southern New Zealand. That’s innocent enough, but by February the number had grown to 60. In October it reached 200, and by the following February nearly 800.

Why? Who knows? The local council waited until September to clear the fence — by which time it had accumulated more than 1,500 bras.

See also Love Padlocks and Shoe Trees.

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“Extraordinary Prediction”

It is recorded of the poet Dryden, by Charles Wilson, in his ‘Life of Congreve,’ that having, strange to say, belief in astrology, he was careful to ascertain to the second the time at which his son Charles was born. He then calculated the boy’s nativity, and was alarmed to discover that evil influences prevailed in the heavens. … He concluded that in his eighth year, and on the day of birth, his son’s life would be seriously endangered if not lost; and that if he lived, the same danger would exist when he attained his twenty-third birthday, and again on his thirty-third or fourth. On the boy’s eighth birthday, despite every precaution to keep the boy from every possible danger, he was nearly killed by the fall of a wall. On his twenty-third birthday he was seized with giddiness and fell from an old tower belonging to the Vatican at Rome; and he was drowned at Windsor while swimming across the Thames in his thirty-third year.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

| Death · Literature · Oddities

“A Bird Caught by a Fish”

In a pond near Lewes, in Sussex, a pike, in appearance about a foot long, was seen to seize and gradually gorge a swallow (probably one of the web-footed kind), as it was wantoning on the surface of the water. The above is an indubitable fact, as witnessed and related by a clergyman, whose veracity cannot be disputed, and on whose authority we feel a pleasure in recording this piscatory anecdote.

— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822

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Showoff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_cyr_lg.jpeg

Feats of Canadian strongman Louis Cyr (1863-1912), “the strongest man who ever lived”:

  • In 1881 he lifted a horse weighing at least 1500 pounds.
  • In 1886 he lifted a 218-pound barbell with one hand and raised 2,371 pounds on his back.
  • In 1895 he raised a platform that held 18 men.
  • In 1889 he shouldered a 433-pound barrel of cement with one arm and lifted 552.5 pounds clear of the floor with a single finger.
  • In 1891 he resisted the pull of four draft horses even as grooms drove them apart with whips.

Where did he get these gifts? “The mother of Louis Cyr … could easily shoulder a barrel of flour and carry it up two or three flights of stairs.” (Josephine Beiderhase, American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, 1906)

See also Jack Lalanne.

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“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

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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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