In his Lives (1827), Peter Walker recounts a baffling spectacle seen on Scotland’s River Clyde in the summer of 1686:

[T]here were showers of bonnets, hats, guns, and swords, which covered the trees and the ground; companies of men in arms marching in order upon the water-side; companies meeting companies, going all through other, and then all falling to the ground and disappearing: other companies immediately appeared, marching the same way.

Walker says these reports continued for at least three afternoons, but notes that fully a third of the assembled crowd, including himself, could see nothing. That sounds like a mass delusion, but “those who did see, told what works (i.e. locks) the guns had, and their lengths and wideness, and what handles the swords had … and the closing knots of the bonnets.” Make up your own mind.

In the year 1796, died at Wordley Workhouse, Berks, Mary Pitts, aged 70; on being accused of having rummaged the box of another pauper, she wished God might strike her dead if she had; and instantly expired.

— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803

On Dec. 7, 1905, British naturalists J. Nicoll and E.G.B. Meade-Waldo spotted “a creature of most extraordinary form and proportions” during a research cruise off the coast of Brazil. Nicoll described a head “shaped somewhat like that of a turtle” above a 6-foot “eel-like” neck that “lashed up the water with a curious wriggling movement.” Below the water “we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature.”

They later spied it doing about 8.5 knots, slightly faster than the ship: “From the commotion in the water it looked as if a submarine was going along just below the surface.” The witnesses insisted it was not a whale, though Nicoll felt it was a mammal. That’s all we know.

Being at my seat near the village of Meudon, and overlooking a quarry-man, whom I had set to break some very large and hard stones, in the middle of one we found a huge live toad, though there was no visible aperture by which it could have got there. I could not help expressing my wonder how it had been generated, had grown, and lived; but the labourer told me, it was not the first time he had met with toads and the like creatures within huge blocks of stone, in which there could be found no visible opening or fissure.

— Ambrose Pare, chief surgeon to Henry III of France, quoted in The Monthly Magazine, 1798

This one is preposterous, but I have two sources, so here goes.

In the 1870s, visitors to a remote New Mexico sheep ranch discovered the solitary rancher dead in his hut. His records showed that he had been dead two years, but his flocks had actually increased since his death. How was this possible?

It turned out that his dog had been tending the flocks in his absence. The rancher had trained him to drive the flocks to their pasture in the morning, guard them all day, and return them to their fold at night, and he’d continued these duties when the rancher disappeared, killing some sheep as necessary for food but faithfully tending the rest.

According to these reports, in 1879 the New Mexico legislature awarded the dog a pension for life as a reward for his fidelity, “and no doubt as an encouragement to all other shepherd dogs in that territory to be good and faithful.” Draw your own conclusions.

(Sources: The Anti-Vivisectionist, Dec. 15, 1880; Albert Plympton Southwick, Handy Helps, No. 1, 1886)

In the Medical Times & Gazette, May 21, 1853, George Budd recounts the case of 94-year-old Henry Hall, who was fighting a fire at the Eddystone lighthouse near Plymouth in the winter of 1755 when a quantity of molten lead fell from the roof and struck him in the head and face. “From that moment he had a violent internal sensation, and imagined that a quantity of the lead had passed down his throat into his body.”

Hall was attended by a Dr. Spry at Stonehouse, “and swallowed many things, both liquid and solid, till the 10th or 11th day.” But then he suddenly grew worse, seized with cold sweats and spasms, and he died soon afterward.

Spry reports: “Examining the body, and making an incision through the left abdomen, I found the diaphragmatic upper mouth of the stomach greatly inflamed and ulcerated, and the tunica in the lower part of the stomach burnt”—and he drew forth “a great piece of lead” weighing 7 ounces, 5 drams, and 8 grains.

In 1810, the house of a Mr. Chave at Sampford Peverell in southwestern England seemed to be invaded by a violent ghost that hated women.

Charles Colton reported that the women who slept in the house, several of whom he had interviewed under oath, had told that “their night’s rest was invariably destroyed by violent blows from some invisible hand, by an unaccountable and rapid drawing and withdrawing of the curtains, by a suffocating and almost inexpressible weight, and by a repetition of sounds, so loud as at times to shake the whole room.”

Chave and his servants swore they had no hand in it (indeed, the notoriety reduced the value of the house), and a reward of £250 brought no further information. Someone was up to something that spring in Devon, but exactly who, and what, and why, have never been discovered.

The stories illustrating the sagacity of the elephant are innumerable; but few are more remarkable than the following one recorded by a writer in a Bombay paper upon the authority of an artillery officer, who was a witness of the incident:– The battering train was going to the siege of Seringapatam, when an artilleryman, who was seated on the tumbril of one of the guns, by some accident fell almost directly under the hind wheel. The elephant stationed behind the gun, perceiving the man’s danger, instantly, without any order from its keeper, lifted up the wheel with its trunk, and kept it suspended till the carriage had passed clear of him.

— Henry Williams, A Book of Curious Facts, 1903

• Déjà vu — the feeling of having seen an unfamiliar thing previously
• Déjà vécu — the feeling of having experienced an unfamiliar situation previously
• Déjà visité — unaccountable knowledge of an unfamiliar place
• Déjà senti — a sense of “recollection” of an unfamiliar idea
• Jamais vu — a sense of unfamiliarity with a familiar situation
• Presque vu — inability to summon a familiar word

Visiting a ruined English manor in 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne felt “haunted and perplexed” by the idea that he had seen it before. He later realized that Alexander Pope had written a poem about it nearly 100 years earlier.

The people of Buffalo, N. Y., were treated to a remarkable mirage, between ten and eleven o’clock, on the morning of August 16, 1894. It was the city of Toronto with its harbor and small island to the south of the city. Toronto is fifty-six miles from Buffalo, but the church spires could be counted with the greatest ease. The mirage took in the whole breadth of lake Ontario, Charlotte, the suburbs of Rochester, being recognized as a projection east of Toronto. A side-wheel steamer could be seen traveling in a line from Charlotte to Toronto Bay. Two dark objects were at last found to be the steamers of the New York Central plying between Lewiston and Toronto. A sail-boat was also visible and disappeared suddenly. Slowly the mirage began to fade away, to the disappointment of thousands who crowded the roofs of houses and office buildings. … A close examination of the map showed the mirage did not cause the slightest distortion, the gradual rise of the city from the water being rendered perfectly. It is estimated that at least 20,000 spectators saw the novel spectacle.

— Scientific American, Aug. 25, 1894, quoted in Miscellaneous Notes & Queries