Mr. Zachariah Pearce, aged 21, died at Cranbrook, Kent, October 17, 1786. The following remarkable occurrences are related as matters of fact, which can be attested by many persons in Cranbrook. Mr. W. Pearce, the father of the above Zachariah, died of a frenzy fever, November 30, 1785. Some time before he died, a small bird, of the dish-water kind, came often every day, and pecked hard against the chamber window where Mr. Pearce lay sick. The window was set open, to try if the bird would enter the room, but it did not; and means were used to catch it, but in vain. The bird continued to come and do the same, till Mr. Pearce died, and was buried, and then it ceased to return. Since the above Zachariah Pearce was taken ill, the same bird, or one of the like kind, frequented his chamber window, and continued to do so occasionally to the time of his death. A similar circumstance occurred in the same parish, about two years and a half before. These are real facts.

— Gentleman’s Magazine, 1786

In August 1971, a human face formed on the kitchen floor of María Gómez Cámara in Bélmez de la Moraleda, Spain. Her husband and son destroyed it with a pickaxe and laid new cement, but the face formed again. In the ensuing 30 years, the family says, a succession of human faces, of varying shapes and sizes, have appeared on the cement floor.

An excavation beneath the house reportedly found human remains, but removing them didn’t stop the apparitions. Spanish parapsychologist Germán de Argumosa claimed that the faces continued to develop even when the floor was sealed to prevent fraud, which he said proved their “paranormal origin.”

But, using infrared photography, his colleague Ramos Perera concluded that pigmentation had been added to alter one face, “and even the paint brush bristles could be perceived.” A third parapsychologist, José Luis Jordán, believes that an acid was used to oxidize the cement.

Maybe they should just switch to linoleum.

On Sept. 3, 1873, an inebriated English shoemaker named James Worson wagered he could run from Leamington to Coventry and back, a distance of about 40 miles. He set out followed by three friends in a light cart. The first few miles went well, but suddenly Worson stumbled and fell, “uttered a terrible cry,” and vanished before touching the ground. He was never seen again.

That’s a good tale, but it’s probably fiction, originating with “An Unfinished Race,” a short story by American author Ambrose Bierce.

That explanation would be reassuring … except that Bierce himself later disappeared.

Boy Scout Lane isn’t a very dramatic name for a haunted road, but maybe that’s par for Wisconsin. The wooded, dead-end lane, in Linwood Township, was once slated to get a scout camp, but somehow a story sprang up that a troop was murdered there, and now it’s the subject of paranormal investigations. Scouts make pretty well-behaved spooks, by all accounts: Witnesses have reported ghostly buses, phantom scoutmasters and the sounds of … hiking.

Now compare that to New Jersey.

This is El Castillo, the 1,100-year-old Mayan pyramid on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. It’s long been known that if you stand at the base of the staircase and clap your hands, the pyramid will return a “chirped echo” — a curious “chir-roop” with a characteristic lilt.

In 2002, on a hunch, acoustical engineer David Lubman compared the echo with a Cornell recording of the quetzal bird, which was revered in ancient Mesoamerica.

They matched perfectly.

A piece of sperm whale skin bearing scars from a giant squid’s suckers. Once thought to be legendary, the squid normally keep to the deep sea; almost everything we know about them has been learned from specimens found in whale stomachs.

On Jan. 9, 2003, Australian officials found the Taiwanese ship High Aim 6 adrift off the West Australian coast. It had plenty of fuel, and the crew’s personal belongings were still aboard (including seven toothbrushes), but it was mysteriously empty, drawing comparisons to the Mary Celeste of 1872.

Authorities spent two days inspecting the vessel and conducted an aerial search of 7,300 square nautical miles, but they found no trace of the crew, who had last contacted the owners on Dec. 13 from the Marshall Islands, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.

That’s all. The unwanted ship was finally sunk to serve as a fish habitat, but no one knows what happened to the crew.

A “sea-monster” reported by the officers and crew of H.M.S. Osborne in calm waters off northern Sicily, June 2, 1877. These sketches were produced by Lt. Haynes, a witness, for the London Graphic.

A Lt. Osborne told the New York Independent that the row of fins pictured in the first sketch was 30 to 40 feet long. The second sketch, he said, shows the creature “end on,” depicting only the head, which was “bullet-shaped and quite six feet thick,” and flippers. Osborne estimated that the animal was 15 or 20 feet wide across the back, and “from the top of the head to the part of the back where it became immersed I should consider about fifty feet, and that seemed about a third of its whole length.”

“Thus it is certainly much longer than any fish hitherto known to the zooelogists,” concludes the Independent, “and is, at least, as remarkable a creature as most of the old wonder-makers ever alleged.”