“The Spectre Leaguers”

http://books.google.com/books?id=dgDYTndixHoC&pg=PA254&dq=%22the+man+of+the+house+is+now+come%3B+else+we+might+have+taken+the+house%22&as_brr=1&ei=ddWpR5-XK5fayAT0j4SlCw#PPA255,M1

Arriving home late one summer night in 1692, Ebenezer Babson surprised two men leaving his house in Cape Ann, Mass. As they fled, he heard one say to the other, “The man of the house is now come, else we might have taken the house.”

Babson removed his family to a nearby garrison, which by several bizarre accounts was then besieged for two weeks by phantoms dressed as gentlemen, in white waistcoats and breeches. Appearing in groups as large as 11, the “unaccountable troublers” reportedly spoke in a strange tongue, performed incantations, threw stones, beat upon barns with clubs, and made their way through a nearby swamp without leaving tracks. On each sortie from the garrison, they melted into the wilderness, sometimes arising after felled by gunfire.

The siege ended after a fortnight, apparently when the demons tired of their sport. This was the year of the Salem witch hysteria, and it’s likely that pranksters were involved in the later events. But Babson’s curiously specific account does leave questions about his own experience.

| History · Oddities

Odd Duck

This is the opening of Chapter 4 of Mark Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story:

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.

Twain later recalled that few readers noticed anything wrong with it.

| Literature · Oddities

Reading Music

Philadelphia physician Arthur Lintgen can recognize classical phonograph records without hearing them. By studying the spacing and patterns of the grooves, the structure of the vinyl, and the number and length of the movements, he can identify most orchestral music composed since Beethoven’s time.

He’s been tested several times, once in the presence of two musicians from major American orchestras. Lintgen studied each record for 15 to 30 seconds, then correctly named Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Rachmaninoff’s The Bells and Second Symphony, and the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony.

| Oddities

Singing Sand Dunes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kelso_Dunes_01.jpg

Walk on Kazakhstan’s Dune of Altynemel and it will sing. The sound is described as a cross between a roar and a boom; a strong wind can produce the same effect.

Singing sand is found at about 35 sites around the world, including the Eureka Dunes in California, Sand Mountain in Nevada, and the Booming Dunes in the Namib Desert of Africa.

No one’s quite sure how it works. Scientists think it’s a reverberating resonance produced by the sliding of similarly sized grains of sand.

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Fair Enough

[Felix Malleolus] relates at large the proceedings instituted against some mosquitoes in the thirteenth century in the Electorate of Mayence, when the judge before whom they were cited granted them, on account of the minuteness of their bodies and their extreme youth, a curator and counsel, who pleaded their cause and obtained for them a piece of land to which they were banished.

— Sabine Baring-Gould, Curiosities of Olden Times, 1896

| Oddities · Society

Penetrating

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:5thavenue1.jpg

The lectures of 19th-century seer Andrew Jackson Davis weren’t well attended, but perhaps they should have been. His 1856 book Penetralia predicted both the automobile and the typewriter:

Look out about these days for carriages and travelling-saloons on country-roads–sans horses, sans steam, sans any visible motive-power–moving with greater speed and far more safety than at present. Carriages will be moved by a strange, and beautiful, and simple admixture of aqueous and atmospheric gases–so easily condensed, so simply ignited, and so imparted by a machine somewhat resembling our engines, as to be entirely concealed and manageable between the forward wheels. …

I am almost moved to invent an automatic psychographer; that is, an artificial soul-writer. It may be constructed something like a piano; one brace or scale of keys to represent the elementary sounds; another and lower tier, to represent a combination; and still another, for a rapid recombination; so that a person, instead of playing a piece of music, may touch off a sermon or a poem!

| History · Oddities · Technology

More Tall Argentines

Jacob Le Maire, in his voyage to the Straits of Magellan, reports, that on the 17th of December, 1615, they found at Port Desire, several graves covered with stones; and having the curiosity to remove the stones, they discovered human skeletons of ten and eleven feet long.

— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876

See also Tall Tale.

| Oddities

The Spooklight

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Devil%27s_Promenade_Spooklight.jpg

From the three-state junction of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, drive four miles south to Oklahoma East 50 Road, park your car, and look west. You’ll be looking into an uninhabited area known as the Devil’s Promenade, and on many nights you’ll see a ball of light floating about 2 feet above the ground.

No one knows what it is. Beyond the forested hills lies Interstate 44, so possibly it’s an effect of headlights, but the first documented sighting occurred in 1881, and the photograph above was taken in the early 1900s.

| Oddities

Footloose

A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:

He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.

| Oddities