In 1882, New Yorker Joseph Richardson found himself with a plot of land that was only 5 feet wide, at Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street. He offered to sell it for $5,000, but the buyer offered only $1,000. Richardson called him a tightwad and vowed to put up an apartment building of his own.

He managed to fit eight three-room suites into the four-story structure. (“Everybody is not fat,” he said, “and there will be room enough for people who are not circus or museum folk.”) The dining tables were 18 inches wide, and only one resident at a time could use the stairs. Even visitors found it an ordeal: One summer day in the 1890s, reporter Deacon Terry of the American became wedged in a stairway while trying to reach Richardson on the roof; he was finally forced to slip out of his clothes and interviewed the landlord in his underwear.

Nonetheless, the building stood for 33 years. It was torn down in 1915.

An illusion, of sorts. Step back from the screen.

Henry Welby, an eccentric character, confined himself in an obscure house in London, where he remained unseen by any one until his death, a period of 44 years. He died in 1636.

— Bizarre Notes & Queries, April 1886

Newly arrived in Fresno, Calif., in 1906, Baldasare Forestiere found the soil would not support an orchard like his father’s in Sicily — there was a layer of hardpan below the surface. But after two years digging tunnels as a laborer in Boston and New York, he had become handy with a pick and shovel, and he soon dug out a skylighted room 10 feet underground, in which an orange tree flourished.

So he kept digging. In time, he added a kitchen, a pantry, a living room, a reading room, two bedrooms, and a tree-filled courtyard that included a bathtub that he could fill with water warmed by the sun.

Forty years later, Forestiere had built a multi-level underground complex that covered 10 acres and included 100 rooms and passageways, including a chapel, a hothouse, a winery, and a “fish-viewing room” whose glass-covered skylight opened onto the bottom of a pond. He estimated the whole thing cost only $300. When he died in 1946, he was adding a 3,500-square-foot ballroom.

Some children at play in a new-mown field, near Kensington gardens, horrid to relate, found the head of a female, with the skull split, the back part of it broken entirely off, and the nose cut away close to the face; the eyes were scooped out, and an iron spike was driven straight up the head through where the neck was amputated. To add to the horror of this occurrence, the head being extremely small, the children brought it, as a matter of curiosity, to show their parents. With a view to the discovery of the perpetrators of this deed, the circumstances were withheld from the neighbours for a time, when, in a lane adjoining the same field, the headless trunk was found extremely mutilated, the arms and thighs having been cut off close to the body. The limbs could not be traced. A hue-and-cry was now raised throughout the vicinity, where horror only kept pace with anxiety for a full investigation of all the circumstances. The result proved to be that some person, not having the fear of mischief before his eyes, had thus treated — a wooden doll!

— William Oxberry, ed., The Flowers of Literature, 1822

In 1699, weary and discouraged at the poor sales of his new almanac, Francis Moore set to work on creating the next number.

“What shall I put in for June 4?” his assistant asked.

“Oh, cold and snow!” Moore said irritably.

Remarkably, snow actually fell on June 4. Sales of Old Moore’s Almanack bounded into the thousands, and it’s still being published three centuries later.