In April 1851, sailing in clear weather off the Newfoundland Banks, the English brig Renovation encountered an enormous ice floe bearing two black three-masted ships, one heeled over and the other upright.
The crew observed them for about an hour, until they were lost to sight. No explanation has ever been found.
Playing whist at a Suffolk club in January 1998, Hazel Ruffles shuffled the deck and dealt a full suit to each player.
The odds of this happening are 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,599,999 to 1.
A pangrammatic anagrammatic verse composed by Edwin Fitzpatrick — each line contains each of the 20 consonants once and each of the six vowels twice:
Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp,
Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr’s gawky vice?
Guy fed by work, quiz Jove’s xanthic lamp —
Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice.
And it rhymes!
M. Ofilius Hilarus, an actor of comedies, after he had highly pleased the people upon his birth-day, kept a feast at home in his own house; and when supper was upon the table, he called for a mess of hot broth, and casting his eye upon the visor he had worn that day in the play, he fitted it again to his face, and taking off the garland which he wore upon his bare head, he set it thereupon: in this posture disguised as he sat, he died, and became cold before any person in the company knew any thing of the matter.
— Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, 1806
When Gregor MacGregor returned to England from the New World in 1820, he brought auspicious news: He had been created prince of Poyais, a Central American nation of 12,500 square miles.
The Scottish soldier became the toast of London and was soon entertaining dignitaries at elaborate banquets. He published a glowing guidebook, raised a loan of £200,000 for his new government, and began selling land rights to excited settlers.
But when two ships arrived at the described location in 1823, they found nothing but jungle. Lacking shelter and beset by disease, the settlers had to be evacuated to British Honduras, and only 70 of the 250 survived. A warning reached London in time to stop five additional ships from making the voyage.
A furor erupted, but by that time MacGregor had left for France, where he attempted the same hoax. Officials there locked him up, but he was acquitted at trial and brazenly returned to England, where he kept up similar schemes through 1837. He died, blithely, in Venezuela in 1845.
“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” — William James
John Lewis Candiac … was born at Candiac, in the diocese of Nismes, in France, in 1719. In the cradle he distinguished his letters; at thirteen months he knew them perfectly; at three years of age he read Latin, either printed or in manuscript; at four, he translated from that tongue; at six, he read Greek and Hebrew, was master of the principles of arithmetic, history, geography, heraldry, and the science of medals; and had read the best authors on almost every branch of literature. He died of a complication of disorders, at Paris, in 1726.
— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876
Grey Owl (1888-1938), left, a pioneer in Canadian conservation, turned out to be Archibald Belaney, a farmer’s son from Hastings, England.
Two Moon Meridas (1888-1933), right, a promoter of herbal medicines, was really Chico Colon Meridas.
Meridas must have been pretty convincing — when he was indicted in 1932, 26 Sioux spoke in his defense.
A thrill passed through London in January 1762, when a 12-year-old girl reported that she was visited nightly by a dead woman.
Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of the parish clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, said that she heard knockings and scratchings and witnessed the apparition of a woman surrounded by a blazing light. The girl said the ghost resembled Fanny Kent, a lodger in her house who had died recently of smallpox.
Witnesses too heard the knockings, which attended the girl wherever she slept. They learned to communicate with “Fanny” through a system of knocks — and learned that her husband had poisoned her.
The whole thing reached a climax when the ghost agreed to attend a gentleman into the vault where Fanny’s body lay, and to knock upon the coffin there. Unfortunately, no knock came, and the girl asked to return to her father.
She had been using a simple wooden clapper to produce the sounds; her father, who had owed money to the “poisoner,” had invented the whole scheme.