The French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval had a pet lobster, which he would walk through Paris on a blue ribbon.

He said he regarded lobsters as “peaceful, serious creatures who know the secrets of the sea and don’t bark.”

American building designers often skip the number 13 when numbering their floors, because 13 is considered an unlucky number.

The Chinese are similarly superstitious — they omit the fourth floor, because the word “four” sounds like “death” in Mandarin.

If you think you’re a packrat — cheer up.

In 1929, brothers Homer and Langley Collyer holed up in a Harlem townhouse and basically set the all-time record for reclusive hoarding. They kept to the house during the day, and at night Langley fetched their water from a park four blocks away, dragging home abandoned junk.

In 1942, when they missed a mortgage payment, the police investigated but couldn’t get past a solid wall of junk behind the front door. In 1947, when rumors surfaced that Homer had died, a team of seven men finally began excavating the foyer, which was choked with old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes and parts of a wine press. A patrolman broke into the second floor and spent two hours crawling through packages and newspaper bundles before he discovered Homer, dead in a bathrobe, his head on his knees. The recluse had been dead only 10 hours, so the smell was coming from somewhere else.

Authorities began unpacking the house. Among other things, they found baby carriages, rusted bicycles, a collection of guns, gas chandeliers, the folding top of a horsedrawn carriage, three dressmaking dummies, a kerosene stove, thousands of books about medicine and engineering, human organs pickled in jars, a clavichord, two organs, the chassis of an old Model T, a horse’s jawbone, an early X-ray machine, and more than six tons of newspapers, magazines, and wood. After several weeks of searching, they found Langley 10 feet from his brother. He had been crushed in one of his own booby traps.

In total, police and workmen took 136 tons of garbage out of the house, including 14 pianos and more than 25,000 books. It was eventually torn down as a fire hazard.

The Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation in Amarillo, Texas: Ten junker Cadillacs are buried nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

What will future archaeologists make of this?

A note found stuffed in a vase in a Massachusetts thrift store.

More at Found Magazine.

In 2002, charity fundraiser Lloyd Scott ran the London Marathon wearing a 120-pound deep-sea diving suit.

He finished the 26.2-mile course in five days, eight and a half hours — a record high.

The youngest confirmed mother in medical history is Lina Medina of Paurange, Peru, who gave birth to a 5.9-pound boy at age 5. The delivery was done through caesarian section; it’s not known how she conceived the child. Her son, Gerardo, was raised believing that Lina was his sister.

An optical illusion. Move your nose toward the dot in the center.

Freud would have loved San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House,” a mansion-sized emblem of its owner’s mental illness. Rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester started construction in 1884, and never stopped. A medium had told her of a family curse, and convinced her that she would die if the construction ever ceased.

So it went on, 24 hours a day, for 38 years. There was no plan; the house was just continuously rebuilt. Worse, Sarah believed that vengeful spirits of gun victims were seeking her, so she slept in a different room each night, and the layout is full of secret passages and stairways and doors that lead nowhere.

The result shows what $5.5 million worth of insanity looks like. Altogether there are 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 1,260 windows, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two ballrooms, two basements and three working elevators.

It takes 20,000 gallons to paint the place, so painting never stops. In that sense, Sarah’s weird wish lives on.