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

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.”

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.”

In 1882, L.C. Woodman of Paw Paw, Mich., wrote to the Michigan Medical News reporting “a singular phenomenon in the shape of a young man living here”:

His name is Wm. Underwood, aged 27 years and his gift is that of generating fire through the medium of his breath, assisted by manipulations with his hands. He will take anybody’s handkerchief and hold it to his mouth, rub it vigorously with his hands while breathing on it and immediately it bursts into flames and burns until consumed. … He will, when out gunning and without matches, desirous of a fire, lie down after collecting dry leaves, and by breathing on them start the fire and then coolly take off his wet stockings and dry them. … I have repeatedly known of his setting back from the dinner table, taking a swallow of water and by blowing on his napkin, at once set it on fire. He is ignorant, and says that he first discovered his strange power by inhaling and exhaling on a perfumed handkerchief that suddenly burned while in his hands.

“It is certainly no humbug, but what is it?” Woodman asked. “Does physiology give a like instance, and if so where?”

‘In the foot of an elm, of the bigness of a pretty corpulent man, three or four feet above the root, and exactly in the centre, has been found a live toad, middle-sized, but lean, and filling up the whole vacant space: no sooner was a passage opened, by splitting the wood, than it scuttled away very hastily: a more firm and sound elm never grew; so that the toad cannot be supposed to have got into it. …’ This is attested by M. Hubert, professor of philosophy at Caen.

— The London Encyclopaedia, 1839