A blast of hot air passed from south to north through portions of New Ulm and Renville County last Sunday evening. It lasted only a minute or two, but so intense was the heat that people rushed out of their houses believing them to be on fire.
— Minneapolis Tribune, July 10, 1879
Undoctored photo of a church window at Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.
Skeptics say the image in the center is just rippled glass. Believers say it’s the face of Martha Rendell, who was hanged there in 1909 for killing her children.
“I can believe anything,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “provided that it is quite incredible.”
The smallest post-office in the world is kept in a barrel, which swings from the outermost rock of the mountains overhanging the Straits of Magellan, opposite Terra del Fuego. Every passing ship opens it to place letters in or take them out. Every ship undertakes to forward all letters in it that it is possible for them to transmit. The barrel hangs by its iron chain, beaten and battered by the winds and storms, but no locked and barred office on land is more secure.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Frankenstein nearly came true in 1803, when Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini ran electric current through the newly dead body of murderer George Forster.
The prison record states that “on the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”
One witness reportedly died of fright, but there was really no cause for alarm. If Forster had returned to life, the prison planned to re-execute him — after all, he’d been sentenced to “hang until he be dead.”
A “wonderful fish” caught near Eastport, Maine, in August 1868, as depicted in Harper’s Weekly.
It’s known that basking sharks can reach 40 feet in length.
Then again, basking sharks don’t have legs.
Another sighting of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, previously discussed here:
This singular production of nature, which is one of the curiosities of the East, though not commonly known, has heretofore engaged much of the attention of the learned naturalists. To the eye, though a perfect vegetable in its internal form, particularly at a distance, it carries an exact resemblance of the animal whose name it bears. It has four stalks or stems, which appear like feet, and the body is covered with a brownish kind of down, which has the medicinal quality of stopping blood; its head also bears an exact resemblance to the representation we have given of it.
— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803
In 1958 the U.S. Air Force mistakenly dropped an atom bomb on South Carolina. A B-47 was over Mars Bluff when navigator Bruce Kulka accidentally released the device. Its fissionable core was stowed elsewhere, fortunately, but the bomb still contained thousands of pounds of conventional explosives. It fell 15,000 feet into the home of William Gregg, where it created a mushroom cloud and left a 75-foot crater.
Presumably they raised his insurance rates.
1861 came with its own entertainment: Earth passed through the tail of a brilliant comet. Observers watched streams of material converge toward its distant nucleus, and by day its gas and dust obscured even the sun.
Sorry you missed it? Sit tight — it’ll be back in 200 years.
Every year, the citizens of Mount Horeb, Wis., celebrate the achievements of Elm Farm Ollie, a courageous Guernsey who in 1930 became the first cow to fly in an airplane.
Festivities include an opera called Madame Butterfat.
See For the Record.
What does this say?
Read it again.
