Someone has piled the stones and boulders of Berks County, Pa., into walls, piles, and cairns.
No one knows who, when, or why.
The Oley Hills Site
Oddities
Room Service
On Dec. 9, 1873, something strange happened to Thomas B. Cumpston and his wife in Bristol’s Victoria Hotel. From the London Times of Dec. 11:
They were alarmed at about four o’clock in the morning by terrible noises which they could not explain, and which frightened them very much. The bed seemed to open, and did all sorts of strange things. The floor, too, opened, and they heard voices. They were so terrified that they opened their bed-room window and leapt out. Mrs. Cumpston, also, gave her version of the affair. She said they heard terrible noises at about four o’clock in the morning. The floor seemed to be giving way. It certainly opened, and her husband fell down some distance, and she tried to get him up. What they said was repeated every time they spoke. Being very much frightened she asked her husband to fire off his pistol, which he did, into the ceiling.
The two leapt into the yard and ran to a nearby railway station, where police charged them with disorderly conduct and letting off firearms and released them into the custody of a friend. “No explanation can be given of this strange affair, and the belief is that it was an hallucination on the part of the husband.”
Eating One’s Words
One Theodore Reinking, lamenting the diminished glory of his race, wrote a book entitled Dania ad exteros de perfidia Suecorum (1644). It was not a very excellent work, neither was its author a learned or accurate historian, but it aroused the anger of the Swedes, who cast Reinking into prison. There he remained many years, when at length he was offered his freedom on the condition that he should either lose his head or eat his book. Our author preferred the latter alternative, and with admirable cleverness devoured his book when he had converted it into a sauce. For his own sake we trust his work was not a ponderous or bulky volume.
— P.H. Ditchfield, Books Fatal to Their Authors, 1895
“Mad Jack”
Some of us just aren’t cut out for the gentry. Shropshire squire John Mytton hunted naked, rode a horse through the Bedford Hotel, fed his dogs on steak and champagne, overturned gigs, pelted babies with oranges, inebriated his horse, and tried to cure hiccups by setting his shirt on fire. He died in debtor’s prison in 1834.
A biographer notes drily that Mytton once rode a bear into his drawing room in full hunting costume. “The bear carried him very quietly for a time; but on being pricked by the spur he bit his rider through the calf of his leg.”
The Savage Breast
That brutal monarch, Louis XI of France, is said to have constructed, with the assistance of the Abbé de Baigne, an instrument designated a ‘pig organ,’ for the production of natural sounds. The master of the royal music, having made a very large and varied assortment of swine, embracing specimens of all breeds and ages, these were carefully voiced, and placed in order, according to their several tones and semitones, and so arranged that a key-board communicated with them, severally and individually, by means of rods ending in sharp spikes. In this way a player, by touching any note, could instantly sound a corresponding note in nature, and was enabled to produce at will either natural melody or harmony! The result is said to have been striking, but not very grateful to human ears.
— J. Crofts, “Colour-Music,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1885
See also That’ll Do It and Attaboy.
Topsy-Turvy
Proof that age depends on perspective. By Rex Whistler (1905-1944).
“The Spectre Leaguers”
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.
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.
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.
Singing Sand Dunes
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.