In his diary, Samuel Pepys tells of an odd feat performed by four little girls, who put “each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead: [at a signal] they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach.” Pepys calls this “one of the strangest things I ever heard” but affirms that his friend Brisband witnessed it and saw the feat repeated on Sir G. Carteret’s cook, “who is very big.”

Strangely, I’ve found two other mentions of this. In Milledulcia (1857), his collection of selections from Notes and Queries, Robert Conger Pell notes that “a living man, lying on a bench, extended as a corpse, can be lifted with ease by the forefingers of two persons standing on each side, provided the lifters inhale at the moment the effort is being made.” “The inhalation of the lifters the moment the effort is made is doubtless essential.”

And in his Letters on Natural Magic (1883), David Brewster tells of an experiment in which “a heavy man is raised with the greatest facility, when he is lifted up the instant that his own lungs and those of the persons who raise him are inflated with air”:

The heaviest person in the party lies down upon two chairs, his legs being supported by the one and his back by the other. Four persons, one at each leg, and one at each shoulder, then try to raise him, and they find his dead weight to be very great, from the difficulty they experience in supporting him. When he is replaced in the chair, each of the four persons takes hold of the body as before, and the person to be lifted gives two signals by clapping his hands. At the first signal he himself and the four lifters begin to draw a long and full breath, and when the inhalation is completed, or the lungs filled, the second signal is given, for raising the person from the chair. To his own surprise and that of his bearers, he rises with the greatest facility, as if he were no heavier than a feather.

“As you have repeatedly seen this experiment, and have performed the part both of the load and of the bearer, you can testify how remarkable the effects appear to all parties, and how complete is the conviction, either that the load has been lightened, or the bearer strengthened by the prescribed process.”

I haven’t tried this myself, and for all I know it’s a joke or a stunt, but the accounts of Pepys and Brewster appear earnest and independent, and it seems unlikely that young girls could (or would) master a sophisticated illusion. I offer it here for whatever it’s worth.

On May 19, 1780, the sky went dark over New England. From Portland, Maine, to southern New Jersey, candles were required between noon and midnight; frogs piped and evening birds sang.

In Connecticut, the state legislature adjourned because none could see to read or write. Col. Abraham Davenport opposed adjourning the governor’s council: “Either the day of judgment is at hand or it is not,” he said. “If it is, I wish to be found in the line of my duty.”

But the darkness lifted the following night. Probably it was really a combination of heavy clouds, fog, and smoke from forest fires.

Obituary of Angelo Faticoni (1859-1931), “The Human Cork,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 13, 1931:

Faticoni could sleep in water, roll up into a ball, lie on his side, or assume any position asked of him. Once he was sewn into a bag and then thrown headforemost into the water, with a twenty-pound cannonball lashed to his legs. His head reappeared on the surface soon afterward, and he remained motionless in that position for eight hours. Another time he swam across the Hudson tied to a chair weighted with lead. Some years ago he went to Harvard to perform for the students and faculty. He had been examined by medical authorities who failed to find support for their theory that he was able to float at such great lengths by the nature of his internal organs, which they believed were different from those of most men. Faticoni had often promised to reveal the secret of how he became ‘The Human Cork,’ but he never did.

If there’s a trophy for the world’s best-traveled canine, it belongs to Owney, a mixed-breed terrier who wandered into the Albany post office in 1888. The workers found he was attracted to mail bags, following them onto wagons and eventually trains, so they adopted him as a mascot.

They gave him a collar (“Owney, Post Office, Albany, New York”) and sent him off through the system, where he became a sort of perpetual parcel. Each time he returned to Albany he bore a new assortment of tokens and tags from mail clerks around the country; eventually these numbered 1,017. In 1895 he traveled entirely around the world via train and steamship.

He retired in 1897, and his carefully preserved remains are on display in the U.S. Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.