If you love megaliths but live south of the equator, check out Stonehenge Aotearoa, located in New Zealand about an hour’s drive from Wellington.
It’s a replica of Stonehenge adapted for the Southern Hemisphere, with 24 pillars about 4 meters high.
Oddities
Kanizsa Triangle
An optical illusion. There is no triangle.
Better Safe …
In the 1920s, the U.S. military devised a contingency plan for attacking Canada. After a first strike with poison gas, we’d occupy Halifax, invade Montreal and Quebec from New England, strike at the Great Lakes from Detroit and Buffalo, and impose a naval blockade on British Columbia.
At the same time, Canada’s Col. James Sutherland Brown developed a counter-invasion strategy where flying air columns would occupy Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Gen. George Pearkes called it a “fantastic desperate plan [that] just might have worked,” but it was withdrawn in 1931.
Evermore
Every year since 1949, a mysterious figure has visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poe on the author’s birthday, Jan. 19.
Early in the morning, a black-clad figure with a silver-tipped cane enters the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, goes to Poe’s grave, raises a toast of cognac, and leaves behind three red roses.
He wears a black coat and hat and obscures his face, so his identity is unknown, but in 1993 he left a note saying “The torch will be passed.” In 1999, a second note said that the toaster had died … but since then a younger person has apparently taken his place.
“All that we see or seem,” Poe wrote, “is but a dream within a dream.”
Hodag
In 1896, to draw tourists to Rhinelander, Wis., Eugene Simeon Shepard staged an encounter with a hodag, a legendary creature with “the head of a bull, the grinning face of a giant man, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with a spear at the end.”
According to the story, Paul Bunyan’s ox had to be burned for seven years to cleanse its soul of all the profanity that local lumberjacks had hurled at it. The hodag rose from its ashes.
There’s no telling whether anyone bought this, but the hodag is now the official mascot of Rhinelander High School.
Loveland Frog
Sightings of the “Loveland frog,” a humanoid creature with the face of a frog:
- 1955: A businessman sees three or four frog-faced creatures, three feet tall, squatting under a bridge near Loveland, Ohio. One of them holds up a bar that sheds sparks, and they exude an odor of alfalfa and almonds.
- 1972: Police see a 4-foot frog-faced humanoid creature near Loveland. It jumps into the Little Miami River. They spot it again two weeks later, lying in a road. A farmer reports a similar sighting.
- 1998: The frogs, apparently on vacation now, are spotted by security personnel at a motel in the Dominican Republic. And they’re getting bigger: five feet long and three feet wide.
Interestingly, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft had described similar creatures in a story written in 1931:
I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.
Maybe he knew more than we realized.
Next Stop …
If Hélène Smith wasn’t a real psychic, she was a remarkably ambitious fake — she claimed to be able to visit Mars:
“How funny, these cars! Hardly any horses or people that are on the move. Imagine different kinds of armchairs that slide but don’t have wheels. It is the tiny wheels that produce the sparks. People sit in their armchairs. Some of them, the larger ones, hold four to five people. To the right of the armchairs a kind of handle stick is at tached, fitted with a button that one presses with the thumb to put the vehicle in motion. There are no rails. One also sees the people walking. They are built like us and hold onto each other with the little finger. The clothing is the same for both sexes: a long blouse tight around the waist, very large trousers, shoes with very thick soles, no heel and of the same colour as the rest of the outfit which is in shammy, white with black designs.”
Between 1894 and 1901 she gave 60 séances, detailing the Martian language and eventually inspiring a book, From India to the Planet Mars, by University of Geneva psychologist Theodor Flournoy.
Matisse wrote, “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
A Modern Kaspar Hauser
On Nov. 28, 1999, a man in his mid-20s wandered into an emergency room in Toronto. His nose was broken, his wallet was missing, and he carried no identification. He claimed not to know who he was, and staff diagnosed him with post-concussive global amnesia.
“Mr. Nobody” had a slight Yorkshire accent, according to language experts, and he spoke fluent French and Italian and could read Latin. After his release he began living in Canada, changing his name and residence often.
The story ends even more strangely. In June 2001, a gay porn actor named Sean Spence claimed the mysterious man was really a French model named Georges Lecuit. Mr. Nobody was jailed and disappeared shortly after his release. Now both he and his wife have disappeared.
Arboreal Genocide?
During aerial surveys in 1992, German forestry students were surprised to see a giant swastika north of Berlin. Apparently locals had planted larches in that pattern in 1937, presumably to prove their loyalty to the party. After the war it was forgotten, as the effect could be seen only from the air, and only as the leaves changed.
When the giant Nazi symbol was rediscovered, though, Brandenburg authories worried that it would attract right-wing extremists — so they started cutting down the larches. In the end, 68 of the 100 trees had to fall before the effect was obscured. There’s an irony here, somewhere …
Who?
In May 2005, someone delivered a box of ashes to the council chambers of Queanbeyan, a city in New South Wales, Australia. It was engraved with the words “Elizabeth Clarke Cunningham, Aged 59 years, Died 13 June 1997.”
The box was passed on to the New South Wales police, but no one has been able to discover who Cunningham was, whether she had any relatives, or who delivered her ashes.