Ten human skeletons have been discovered at Fattey Llyn, near Llandebie, at a depth of thirty feet from the surface of a limestone rock. The skulls are of a very uncommon size and thickness, and all the bones are of a larger calibre than those of the present race of men.
— Edinburgh Star, Aug. 27, 1813
RMS Queen Mary was one of the world’s largest ocean liners in December 1942, but that didn’t impress Mother Nature. As the ship steamed off the coast of Scotland during a gale, an enormous freak wave struck her broadside and sent her listing fully 52 degrees. The wave may have been 28 meters high; it smashed windows on the bridge 90 feet above the waterline. Later investigations estimated that 5 more inches of list would have turned her over.
The incident inspired Paul Gallico to write The Poseidon Adventure.
The above sketch represents a chamber which was discovered in a barrow, situated near Paradis, in the parish of the Vale, in the island of Guernsey. On digging into the mound, a large flat stone was soon discovered; this formed the top, or cap-stone, of the tomb, and on removing it, the upper part of two human skulls were exposed to view. One was facing the north, the other the south, but both disposed in a line from east to west. The chamber was filled up with earth mixed with limpet-shells, and as it was gradually removed, while the examination was proceeding downwards into the interior, the bones of the extremities became exposed to view, and were seen to greater advantage. They were less decomposed than those of the upper part; and the teeth and jaws, which were well preserved, denoted that they were the skeletons of adults, and not of old men. The reason why the skeletons were found in this extraordinary position it is impossible to determine. Probably the persons who were thus interred were prisoners, slaves, or other subordinates, who were slain — perhaps buried alive — on occasion of the funeral of some great or renowned personage, who was placed in the larger chamber at the end of the passage; and this view of the case is considerably strengthened by the fact that the total absence of arms, weapons, or vases, in the smaller chamber, denotes that the quality of the persons within it was of less dignity or estimation.
— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860
There’s something unusual about the Ulas family of southern Turkey — five of its 19 adult children have never walked upright. Instead they move in a “bear crawl,” using their feet and the palms of their hands. This is not knuckle-walking, as apes do. The five share a congenital brain impairment that prevented them from learning to crawl normally as infants, and apparently they developed the bear crawl to compensate.
The five affected children are 18-36 years old now and the subject of intense study by neurologists, evolutionary theorists, anthropologists, and geneticists, as such a gait has never been reported before. The cause of their disorder remains a mystery.
London dentist Martin van Butchell always read the fine print. So when his wife Mary died in January 1775, he noted that their marriage certificate promised him income so long as Mary was “above ground.”
He enlisted a pair of local doctors to preserve her corpse, replaced her eyes with glass ones, dressed her in a lace gown, and put her on display in his window.
Eventually Butchell remarried, and his new wife objected to the display, so Mary was retired to the Royal College of Surgeons, where she slowly decomposed. In 1941, she was destroyed in a German bombing raid, faithful to the last.
At Pensey, in Buckinghamshire, a swan sitting on her eggs, on one side of the river, observed a fox swimming towards her from the opposite side; rightly judging she could best grapple with the fox in her own element, she plunged into the water, and after beating him off for some time with her wings, at length succeeded in drowning him.
— Monthly Magazine, April 1796
Composer Arnold Schoenberg was fascinated with numerology. Born on Sept. 13, he came to fear that he would die at age 76, because its digits add to 13. He examined a calendar for 1951 and was dismayed to see that July 13 fell on a Friday. When the fateful day came he took to his bed, fearing the worst. The day passed uneventfully, and shortly before midnight his wife entered the bedroom to say goodnight. Schoenberg uttered the word “harmony” and died.
The time of his death was 11:47 p.m., 13 minutes before midnight on Friday, July 13, in his 76th year.
A rat, lately visiting a tub of oysters at the post office in Falmouth, and whisking his tail between the open shells of one of them, it closed upon him, and held him so firmly, that he was prevented from escaping through his hole, and was found in the morning with the oyster still holding fast of his tail at the entrance of it.
— La Belle Assemblée, January 1800
Followers of Breatharianism believe that humans can live without food or water. Wiley Brooks, founder of the Breatharian Institute of America, even claims to have survived mainly on a diet of fresh air for the past 30 years.
It’s not clear what he counts as fresh air — in 1983 he was spotted leaving a Santa Cruz 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, a hot dog and a box of Twinkies.
Louis-Auguste Cyparis was lucky to be in solitary confinement. After a bar fight in May 1902, the 27-year-old laborer had been put in an underground bomb-proof magazine in the city jail of St. Pierre, Martinique, when he saw the day grow suddenly dark outside the narrow grating in his door. Presently Cyparis was blasted with scalding air and ashes, suffering deep burns on his hands, arms, legs, and back. He spent four days nursing these wounds before he managed to attract a rescue team.
He had lived through the eruption of Mount Pelée, the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. Of the town’s 28,000 inhabitants, only three had survived.