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
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.
The following resolutions were passed by the Board of Councilmen in Canton, Mississippi:–
- Resolved, by this Council, that we build a new Jail.
- Resolved, that the new Jail be built out of the materials of the old Jail.
- 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
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.”
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
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:
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 — ?