A Massachusetts paper says that Isaiah Thomas, the almanac-maker, when preparing the ‘annual’ of 1780, being asked by one of his boys what he should put in opposite July 13th, for weather predictions (a date overlooked), he replied ‘anything, anything.’ The boy returned to the office and set up ‘Rain, hail, and snow.’ The country was all amazed when the day came, for it actually rained, hailed, and snowed violently.
— Bizarre Notes & Queries, March 1887
In 1975, a veterinary student came across a curious bone in south-central Chile, about 36 miles east of the Pacific. It proved to be that of a mastodon, and as archaeologists explored the discovery site, they found the remains of ancient hearths, a brazier pit, and a 20-foot tentlike structure made of wood and animal hides.
The site is estimated to be 12,500 years old. If that’s accurate, these people occupied Chile a full millennium before humans are generally thought to have colonized the Americas. Who were they?
Abraham de Moivre correctly predicted the date of his own death.
He noted that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each day and surmised that he would die on the day he slept for 24 hours. That date, he calculated, would be Nov. 27, 1754.
He was right.
On June 15, 1822, Jane Williams claimed to have seen a doppelgänger of her friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two, in fact. Mary Shelley described the episode in a letter:
She was standing one day … at a window that looked on the Terrace with [Edward] Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — ‘Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?’ Shelley, said Trelawny — ‘No Shelley has past — What do you mean?’ Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him.
Two weeks later, Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia.
Christian Henry Heinecken, born at Lubeck, in 1721, spoke his mother tongue fluently at ten months of age; at one year old he knew the principal events of the Pentateuch; in two months more he was master of the entire histories of the Old and New Testaments; at two years and a half he answered the principal questions of geography, and in ancient and modern history. He spoke Latin, French, German, and Dutch with facility before the commencement of his fourth year. His constitution was so delicate that he was not weaned till a few months before his death which occurred in 1725.
— Bizarre Notes & Queries, April 1886
In his 1902 geology of Oregon’s Crater Lake, Joseph Diller mentioned that he’d seen a great stump bobbing vertically in the lake six years earlier, in 1896.
It’s still there. Apparently the lake is so cold that it’s preserved the 30-foot stump for more than a century. And the “old man” is pretty spry: In 1938, when the sketch above was made, the log wandered more than 62 miles in one three-month period.
In the course of some structural alterations to an ancient house near Edinburgh three unknown rooms were brought to light, bearing testimony of their last inmate. One of them had been occupied as a bedroom. The clothing of the bed was disarranged, as if it had been slept in only a few hours previously, and close by was an antique dressing-gown. How interesting it would be to know some particulars of the sudden surprise which evidently drove the owner of the garment from his snug quarters — whether he effected his escape, or whether he was captured! The walls of this buried chamber, if they could speak, had some curious story to relate.
— Allan Fea, Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places, 1908
In 1394, a pig was hanged at Mortaign for having sacrilegiously eaten a consecrated wafer; and in a case of infanticide, it is expressly stated in the plaintiff’s declaration that the pig killed the child and ate of its flesh, “although it was Friday,” and this violation of the jejunium sextae, prescribed by the Church, was urged by the prosecuting attorney and accepted by the court as a serious aggravation of the porker’s offence.
— E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 1906
A curious account of a subterranean garden formed at the bottom of the Percy Main Pit, Newcastle, by the furnace-keeper, was lately communicated to the Caledonian Horticultural Society. The plants are formed in the bottom of the mine by the light and radiant heat of an open stove, constantly maintained for the sake of ventilation. The same letter communicated an account of an extensive natural hot-bed near Dudley, in Staffordshire, which is heated by means of the slow combustion of coal at some depth below the surface. From this natural hot-bed, a gardener raises annually crops of different kinds of culinary vegetables, which are earlier, by some weeks, than those in the surrounding gardens.
— Curiosities for the Ingenious, 1825
On July 18, 1969, two days before the first lunar landing, presidential speechwriter William Safire composed the following text to be read by President Nixon if astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were stranded on the moon:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
Safire also suggested that Nixon call the “widows-to-be” before the speech, and that a clergyman should commend the astronauts’ souls to the “deepest of the deep” when communications ended.