“The Day the Clowns Cried”

On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers big top caught fire during a performance in Hartford, Conn., and more than 160 people were killed in the ensuing blaze.

Among the victims was a young blond girl in a brown dress, whose body was assigned number 1565 by the morgue. A photograph was circulated locally and then throughout the United States, but no one came forward to claim her.

To this day no one knows who “Little Miss 1565” was or how she came to be at the circus that day.

05/23/2013 UPDATE: Connecticut investigator Rick Davey has identified the girl as 8-year-old Eleanor Cook, who had attended the circus with her mother, Mildred. Eleanor received only minor burns in the fire but was trampled by the crowd, and efforts to identify her were unsuccessful. Mildred confirmed her identity to Davey.

(Thanks, Patricia.)

Lex Talionis

http://books.google.com/books?id=Jg0xAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&dq=%22The+Criminal+Prosecution+and+Capital+Punishment+of+Animals%22#PPR2,M1

In 1386, the tribunal of Falaise sentenced a sow to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and arms of a child and thus caused its death. … As if to make the travesty of justice complete, the sow was dressed in man’s clothes and executed on the public square near the city-hall at an expense to the state of ten sous and ten deniers, besides a pair of gloves to the hangman.

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

A Polyhedral Mystery

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_dodecahedron.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

What is this? Well, it’s a dodecahedron, but what was its purpose? More than 100 of these objects have been found between England and Hungary; this one was discovered among Roman ruins near Frankfurt. Typically they’re made of bronze or stone, with a hollow center and a round hole in the middle of each face, and they range in size from 4 to 11 centimeters.

The Romans likely made them in the second or third century, but strangely they appear in no pictures from that period and they’re not mentioned in Roman literature.

Best guesses so far: survey instruments, candlesticks, or dice.

See Other Sign

Pity the sign makers in this Welsh village:

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

That’s the longest place name in the United Kingdom. It’s Welsh for “St. Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St. Tysilio of the red cave.”

That doesn’t take the prize, though. The longest place name in an English-speaking country belongs to a hill on New Zealand’s North Island:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:New_Zealand_0577.jpg

It means “the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who traveled about, played his flute to his loved one.”

Forward in Reverse

Excerpt from the St. James, Mo., Leader, June 4, 1931:

Plennie L. Wingo, a man walking around the world backwards, stopped in St. James long enough to get some new toe taps for his shoes. This was the 4th pair he had wore out. He started from Fort Worth, Texas, April 15th, and has been walking ever since. He wears periscopic eyeglasses, fastened over his ears like regular spectacles, which enables him to see where he is walking. He will continue on 66 to St. Louis then on Highway 40 to New York where he will secure passage to Europe. Wingo expects to complete the trip in about four years. He depends entirely on the sale of postcards for his expenses. He averages about 20 miles per day.

Wingo had covered 8,000 miles by October 1932, when Istanbul authorities denied him a visa and he gave up and went home.

His wife had divorced him in absentia.

“Monster of Monsters”

http://books.google.com/books?id=i3cFAAAAMAAJ&printsec=titlepage&rview=1#PPA91,M1

Declaration made before a stipendiary magistrate at Dale Street Police Court, Liverpool, by the captain and crew of the British barque Pauline, July 1875:

We the undersigned, captain, officers, and crew of the barque Pauline, of London, do solemnly and sincerely declare that on July 8th, 1875, in latitude 5° 13′, longitude 35° W., we observed three large sperm whales, and one of them was gripped round the body with two turns of what appeared to be a large serpent. The head and tail appeared to have a length beyond the coils of about thirty feet, and its girth eight or nine feet. The serpent whirled its victim round and round for about fifteen minutes, and then suddenly dragged the whale to the bottom, head first.

GEORGE DREVAR, Master,
HORATIO THOMPSON,
HENDERSON LANDELLO,
OWEN BAKER,
WILLIAM LEWAN

“A River of Ink”

In Algeria there is a river of genuine ink. It is formed by the union of two streams, one coming from a region of ferruginous soil, the other draining a peat swamp. The water of the former is strongly impregnated with iron, that of the latter with gallic acid. When the two waters mingle, the acid of the one unites with the iron of the other, forming a true ink. We are familiar with a stream called Black Brook, in the northern part of New York, the inky color of whose water is evidently due to like conditions.

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

Nowhere Man

welbeck abbey

Only the poor are crazy — rich people are “eccentric.” William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck certainly fit that bill. When he inherited the dukedom of Portland in 1854, he retired to his estate in Nottinghamshire, holed up in the west wing, and had all the other rooms painted pink.

That was just the beginning. Apparently struck with a pathological shyness, the duke had all his doors fitted with letterboxes and would let not even a doctor in. His tenants were instructed not to acknowledge his presence, and only one valet could see him in person.

He wouldn’t go out, but he did go down, employing hundreds of workmen to create a vast underground complex with a library, an observatory, a billiards room and 15 miles of tunnels, one of which was wide enough to accommodate two carriages.

No one knows what he did down there — the ballroom had a hydraulic lift that could carry 20 people, but he never invited anyone to see it. He left the house only at night, preceded by a servant who was ordered to carry a lantern 40 yards ahead of him. He died in 1879, departing a lonely world of his own making.

The Eltanin Antenna

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eltanin_Antenna.jpg

What is this? The oceanographic research ship USNS Eltanin discovered it off the Antarctic coast in 1964, at a depth of 13,500 feet — that’s 2.5 miles down.

It could be an alien ship buried under the seafloor. It could be ancient technology left by a forgotten civilization. It could be a well-hidden gift left by time travelers from the remote future.

Or it could be a sponge, Cladorhiza concrescens. You decide.