Born in 1849, “Blind Tom” Wiggins found himself with three burdens and a gift: He was blind, he was mentally challenged, he was a slave, and he was a musical prodigy.

He was playing piano by ear at age 4, before he could speak. At 5 he composed a tune and found he could reproduce perfectly any piece from memory. His vocabulary was only about 100 words, and he spoke of himself in the third person (“Tom is pleased to meet you”), but in time he learned 7,000 piano pieces, mostly classics.

At age 8 a successful concert in Columbus, Ga., led to a tour. He played for James Buchanan and Mark Twain, accepting challenges to repeat original compositions to show there was no trickery. By age 16, he was touring the world.

He retired in 1883 but returned briefly for a series of New York concerts in 1904. He died in 1908.

In 1844, Sir David Brewster discovered an iron nail in a block of stone in Scotland’s Kingoodie Quarry. The nail was embedded in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era; in 1985, the British Geological Survey dated the bed at between 360 and 408 million years old.

An iron nail has no business in the Mesozoic era, and no ordinary nail could avoid oxidation for more than 400 million years.

So how’d it get there? No one knows.

In 1973, over Ivory Coast, an aircraft collided with a Ruppell’s griffon, a kind of vulture.

It had been flying at 37,000 feet — that’s seven miles high.

Dioniso Pulido must have angered the gods.

On Feb. 20, 1943, the Mexican farmer watched a volcanic fissure open in the middle of his cornfield. Within 24 hours the cone was 50 meters high; within a week it was twice that. By August his whole town was buried in lava and ash.

The new volcano, called Paricutin, eventually grew to be 10,000 feet high, and it didn’t go quiet until 1952.

And the gods got their due. No one died in the eruption — but three people were killed by associated lightning strikes.

This iron pillar, part of a complex of monuments in Delhi, India, has stood for 1,600 years without rusting, despite harsh weather.

Metallurgists think it’s protected by a thin layer of “misawite”, a compound of iron, oxygen and hydrogen, that formed shortly after it was made.

In January 1892, Rhode Island farmer George Brown buried his daughter Mercy. She had died of consumption, as had her mother and sister.

Two months later George’s son, Edwin, also became sick, and the farmer decided that one of his dead family members was returning from the grave as a vampire to cause his son’s illness.

So he dug up his daughter’s body, cut out her heart, mixed it into a potion, and told his son to drink it.

Edwin died two months later.

The June 1851 issue of Scientific American reported that a zinc and silver vase had been blasted from solid rock 15 feet below the surface of Meeting House Hill in Dorchester, Mass. The bell-shaped vessel had floral designs inlaid with silver.

Experts at the time estimated it to be about 100,000 years old, which would obviously throw everything we know out the window.

Unfortunately, it disappeared after circulating through several museums. What’s the real story? Who knows?

In 1805, the French writer Émile Deschamps was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fontgibu.

Ten years later, Deschamps ordered plum pudding at a Paris restaurant, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer — to M. de Fontgibu, as it turned out.

Seventeen years after that, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered plum pudding, and he told his friends about the strange coincidence. At that moment, M. de Fontgibu entered the room by mistake.

“Three times in my life have I eaten plum pudding, and three times have I seen M. de Fortgibu!” Deschamps exclaimed. “A fourth time I should feel capable of anything … or capable of nothing!”