In 1912, workmen digging a tunnel for New York’s new subway discovered a carpeted room decorated with oil paintings, chandeliers, and a grandfather clock.
According to Tracy Fitzpatrick in Art and the Subway, it was the waiting room for an early prototype subway built in 1870 — a block-long tunnel in which a single car was pushed by a giant fan. Funding had failed, and the project had been forgotten.
In Britain this wouldn’t be redundant — in British English an avenue is a row of trees.
Unfortunately, that’s not so in Toronto, where Avenue Road is a major thoroughfare.
Local journalist Robert Fulford called it “an identity crisis with pavement.”
Between 1980 and 1993, 42 visitors to Israel experienced a peculiar psychotic episode with seven consistent clinical stages:
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.)
Menu proposed by Vincent M. Holst in Why Not Eat Insects? (1885):
“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.
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.
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.
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
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
Feats of Canadian strongman Louis Cyr (1863-1912), “the strongest man who ever lived”:
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.
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
