Fighter pilot William Rankin bailed out of a failing jet in 1959 and found himself inside a thunderstorm:

I saw lightning all around me in every shape imaginable. When very close, it appeared mainly as a huge, bluish sheet several feet thick, sometimes sticking close to me in pairs, like the blades of a scissors, and I had the distinct feeling that I was being sliced in two. It was raining so torrentially that I thought I would drown in midair. Several times I had held my breath, fearing that otherwise I might inhale quarts of water. How silly, I thought, they’re going to find you hanging from some tree, in your parachute harness, your lungs filled with water, wondering how on earth you drowned.

The stormcloud toyed with him for 45 minutes before it finally put him down — 65 miles from where he’d bailed out.

In 1909, 22-year-old housewife Alice Huyler Ramsey drove from New York to San Francisco, covering 3,800 miles in 59 days in a Maxwell touring car. She encountered Indians (hunting jackrabbits) in Nebraska, a posse (hunting a murderer) in Wyoming, bad roads, bad weather, flat tires, and breakdowns. All of this is chronicled in her memorably titled 1961 memoir, Veil, Duster and Tire Iron.

With her went two sisters-in-law and a female friend — none of whom could drive a car.

See also Annie Londonderry.

Lately, in a coal-pit situated upon the outwood, near Wakefield, and belonging to Wm. Fenton, Esq. out of the lower bed or seam, at a distance of 150 yards from the surface of the earth, a block of coal was dug up, which, when broken, contained a lizard, of the species vulgarly called askers; the animal was alive, but upon being exposed to the air, it soon died. The cavity in which it was found, being the exact mould of its own form, no chasm, hole, or external crack appeared on the surface of the block.

— Monthly Magazine, 1812

Kansas farmer Will Keller was fleeing a tornado on June 22, 1928, when he turned at the door of his cyclone cellar and looked up:

To my astonishment I saw right up into the heart of the tornado. There was a circular opening in the center of the funnel, about 50 or 100 feet in diameter, and extending straight upward for a distance of at least one half mile, as best I could judge under the circumstances. The walls of this opening were of rotating clouds and the whole was made brilliantly visible by constant flashes of lightning which zigzagged from side to side. Had it not been for the lightning, I could not have seen the opening, not any distance into it anyway.

Only a handful of people have witnessed this sight and lived.

At the town of Arimentières, in France, there is a fete du pays, called hermesse, or ducasse d’ Amentières, in which the chaffinch and its fellows are the chief actors and objects of attraction. Numbers of these birds are trained with the greatest care, and no small share of cruelty, for they are frequently blinded by their owners, that their song may not be interrupted by any external object. The point upon which the amusement, the honour, and the emolument rests, is, the number of times which a bird will repeat his song in a given time. A day being fixed, the amateurs repair to the appointed place, each with his bird in a cage. The prize is then displayed, and the birds are placed in a row. A bird-fancier notes how many times each bird sings, and another verifies his notes. In the year 1812, a chaffinch repeated his song seven hundred times in one hour. Emulated by the songs of each other, they strain their little ‘plumed throats,’ as if conscious that honour was to result from their exertions.

— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860

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.”