On May 13, 1872, the barque St. Olaf was sailing from Newport to Galveston when a crewman called out that “he saw something rising out of the water like a tall man”:

On a nearer approach we saw that it was an immense serpent, with its head out of the water, about 200 feet from the vessel. He lay still on the surface of the water, lifting his head up and moving the body in a serpentine manner. We could not see all of it, but what we could see from the after-part to the head was about 70 feet long, and of the same thickness all the way, excepting about the head and neck, which were smaller, and the former flat like the head of a serpent. It had four fins on its back, and the body of a yellow, greenish colour, with brown spots all over the upper part, and underneath white.

The weather was calm, the sea smooth. “The whole crew were looking at it for fully ten minutes before it moved away,” Captain A. Hassel reported later. “It was about 6 feet in diameter.”

In February 1959, a search was organized when nine Russian ski hikers failed to return from a trek in the northern Ural Mountains. After six days, their abandoned camp was found in a mountain pass.

All the hikers were dead. Two were found on the opposite side of the pass, near the remains of a fire; three others had died closer to camp, apparently trying to return; and the remaining four were found only three months later, under 4 meters of snow in a nearby stream valley.

Apparently the victims had fled the tent suddenly on the night of Feb. 2, tearing their way out from the inside and running down the mountain. Though the temperature had been around -25° C, all were inadequately dressed, some wearing only underwear. Though the bodies had no external wounds, one showed severe skull damage and two had major chest fractures. One woman’s tongue was missing.

In the end, Soviet investigators could conclude only that a “compelling unknown force” had caused the hikers’ deaths. That’s all that’s known.

When 5-year-old May Pierstorff asked to visit her grandmother, her parents had no money to buy a rail ticket.

So they mailed her.

On Feb. 19, 1914, May’s parents presented her at the post office in Grangeville, Idaho, and proposed mailing her parcel post to Lewiston, some 75 miles away. The postmaster found that the “package” was just under the 50-pound weight limit, so he winked at their plan, classed May as a baby chick, and attached 53 cents in stamps to her coat. May passed the entire trip in the train’s mail compartment–and was duly delivered to her grandparents in Lewiston by mail clerk Leonard Mochel.

There is found, in some of the rivers of British North America, a species of smelt so rich in oil that it may when dried be used as a candle or torch. … At certain seasons the fish swarms up the rivers from the sea, and is then caught by the natives in wickerwork traps. … When a candle is required a dried fish is stuck, tail upwards, in a lump of clay or in a cleft stick; a light is applied to the tail, which instantly flames up, and the fish burns steadily downward, giving a light superior to that of the best quality of ‘dips.’

— The World of Wonders, 1883

Rain which on touching the ground crackles and emits electric sparks is a very uncommon but not unknown phenomenon. An instance of the kind was recently reported from Cordova, in Spain, by an electrical engineer who witnessed the occurrence. The weather had been warm and undisturbed by wind, and soon after dark the sky became overcast by clouds. At about 8 o’clock there came a flash of lightning, followed by great drops of electrical rain, each one of which, on touching the ground, walls, or trees, gave a faint crack, and emitted a spark of light. The phenomenon continued for several seconds, and apparently ceased as soon as the atmosphere was saturated with moisture.

— Western Daily Mercury, Nov. 1, 1892, quoted in Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, December 1892

American businessman Russell Arundel and his friends were drinking rum in a Nova Scotia fishing lodge in 1948 when they got blearily ambitious: They drew up a declaration of independence for tiny Outer Bald Tusket Island, renaming it Outer Baldonia:

Fishermen are endowed with the following inalienable rights: The right to lie and be believed. The right of freedom from questioning, nagging, shaving, interruption, women, taxes, politics, war, monologues, cant and inhibition. The right to applause, vanity, flattery, praise and self-inflation. The right to swear, lie, drink, gamble and be silent. The right to be noisy, boisterous, quiet, pensive, expansive and hilarious.

Baldonia’s currency, they declared, was the tunar; all citizens who caught bluefin tuna would be named princes; and exports would include empty rum and beer bottles. Women were banned — though an exception was eventually made for Arundel’s former secretary, “princess” Florence McGinnis, because “I was doing all the paperwork.”

Baldonia made a modest name for itself: It was recognized in the Washington D.C. telephone directory, and Rand McNally put it on a map. But Arundel tired of the joke and eventually sold the island to the Nova Scotia Bird Society — he’d spent only one night in the “royal palace,” he said, and found it “windy, cold, and miserable.”

Here are two principles about shadows:

1. They don’t pass through opaque objects. Your shadow can fall on a wall, but not through it.
2. Light must strike an object in order to cast a shadow. If you’re in the shade, you have no shadow.

Right? But now suppose the sun is behind you and you’re contemplating a butterfly:

The shadow under the butterfly is not cast by you (Principle 1), and it’s not cast by the butterfly (Principle 2). So what’s casting it?

“This is a genuine problem,” writes philosopher Robert Martin. “The rules for shadows aren’t inconsistent, but they are empirically inadequate — there are phenomena they do not fit.”

The winter of 1886-87 will be long remembered throughout the north-west for the extreme severity of the temperature and the unusual depth of snow. … Near Matt. Coleman’s ranch [in Fort Keogh, Montana] on January 28 the flakes were tremendous, some were larger than milk-pans. Some flakes measured 15 inches square and 8 inches thick. For miles the ground was covered with such bunches, and they made a remarkable spectacle while falling. A mail-carrier was caught in the same storm and verifies it.

— New York World, Feb. 14, 1887, quoted in a letter to Nature, March 3

The celebrated Daniel Wildman will exhibit several new and amazing experiments, never attempted by any man in this or any other kingdom before, the rider standing upright, one foot on the saddle, and one on the neck, with a mask of bees on his head and face. He also rides, standing upright on the saddle, with the bridle in his mouth, and by firing a pistol makes one part of the bees march over the table, and the other swarm in the air and return to their hive again, with other performances too tedious to insert.

— Advertisement for a June 20, 1772, exhibition, quoted in Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary, or, Bees, Beehives, and Bee Culture, 1878