On March 14, 1887, Rhode Island evangelist Ansel Bourne woke up in an unfamiliar room. To his astonishment, he found that he was in Norristown, Pa., where he had been running a stationery and confectioner’s shop for two months, calling himself A.J. Brown.

His nephew helped him return to Providence, where psychologists diagnosed a case of dissociative fugue, multiple personality, and amnesia.

Inspired, Robert Ludlum borrowed the preacher’s surname for his novel The Bourne Identity.

In 1760, was brought to Avignon, a true lithophagus, or stone-eater. He not only swallowed flints of an inch and a half long, a full inch broad, and half an inch thick; but such stones as he could reduce to powder, such as marble, pebbles, &c. he made into paste, which was to him a most agreeable and wholesome food. I examined this man, says the writer, with all the attention I possibly could; I found his gullet very large, his teeth exceedingly strong, his saliva very corrosive, and his stomach lower than ordinary, which I imputed to the vast number of flints he had swallowed, being about five-and-twenty, one day with another. Upon interrogating his keeper, he told me the following particulars: ‘This stone-eater,’ says he, ‘was found three years ago, in a northern uninhabited island, by some of the crew of a Dutch ship. Since I have had him, I make him eat raw flesh with the stones; I could never get him to swallow bread. He will drink water, wine, and brandy, which last liquor gives him infinite pleasure. He sleeps at least twelve hours in a day, sitting on the ground, with one knee over the other, and his chin resting on his right knee. He smokes almost all the time he is not asleep, or is not eating. The flints he has swallowed, he voids somewhat corroded, and diminished in weight; the rest of his excrements resembles mortar.’

— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876

In 1963, an Indiana construction engineer discovered a small hoard of coins on the bank of the Ohio River. Two of them eventually passed to a Clarksville museum, which identified them as Roman coins from the third century.

No one has explained how they came to be there. The engineer who found them said they’d been grouped as though in a leather pouch which had since disintegrated. But his name, and the rest of the hoard, has been lost.