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.

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.”

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.

The Langdell Law Library at Harvard University contains a book bound in human skin. Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae, a treaty of Spanish law, contains this inscription on the last page:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King btesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.

The Wavuma were an African tribe in what is now Zimbabwe.