When the Russian prince Dimitri, the son of Ivan II, was assassinated on May 15, 1591, at Uglich, his place of exile, the great bell of that town rang the signal of insurrection. For this serious political offence the bell was sentenced to perpetual banishment in Siberia, and conveyed with other exiles to Tobolsk. After a long period of solitary confinement it was partially purged of its iniquity by conjuration and re-consecration and suspended in the tower of a church in the Siberian capital; but not until 1892 was it fully pardoned and restored to its original place in Uglich. A like sentence was imposed by a Russian tribunal on a butting ram in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

— E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 1906

Under a waterfall in New York’s Chestnut Ridge Regional Park there’s a grotto that emits natural gas.

It can be lit to produce a flame.

In crossing the Atlantic, in the month of November, 1749, the crew of an English ship observed a large ball of blue fire rolling on the water. It came down on them so fast, that before they could raise the main-tack, they observed the ball to rise almost perpendicularly, and within a few yards of the main chains: It went off with an explosion as if hundreds of cannon had been fired off simultaneously, and left behind it a great smell of brimstone. The main-top-mast was shattered into a thousand pieces, and spikes driven out of the main-mast which stuck in the main deck. Five seamen were knocked down, and one of them greatly burnt, by the explosion. The fireball was of the apparent size of a large mill-stone, and came from the N. E.

— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822

On April 25, 1908, the American liner St. Paul collided in the English Channel with the cruiser HMS Gladiator, killing 27 sailors.

Ten years later the St. Paul was chartered by the Navy to serve as a troopship in World War I. While in Brooklyn to be fitted out and repainted, she heeled over mysteriously in New York Harbor. Divers found that a port had been left open, flooding the lower boiler room.

No one ever discovered a reason for this, but it was noted that the St. Paul sank at 2:30 p.m. on April 25, 1918 — 10 years almost to the minute after she had sunk the Gladiator.

“The Hartford Times tells a curious story of a flock of crows in that vicinity who recently lost their way in a fog. They lost their bearings at a point directly above the South Green, in Hartford. For a good while they hovered there, coming low down, circling and diving aimlessly about, like a blindfolded person in ‘blind man’s buff,’ and keeping up a hoarse cawing and general racket beyond description. It was plain enough that of the entire company each individual crow was not only puzzled and bothered, but highly indignant, and inclined to utter ‘cuss words’ in his frantic attempts to be heard above the general din, and tell the others which way to go. Once or twice the whole flock swept down to a distance of not more than one hundred feet above the street. Finally, after going around for many times, they saied away in a southerly direction, evidently having got some clue to the way out of the fog, or desperately resolved to go somewhere till they could see daylight.”

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

On Oct. 17, 1917, the sailing schooner Zabrina was found hard aground on the Cherbourg Peninsula in northwestern France. She had sailed from the English port of Falmouth two days earlier and should have made fast passage across the English Channel. No trace of her four-man crew was ever found.