Excerpt from the St. James, Mo., Leader, June 4, 1931:

Plennie L. Wingo, a man walking around the world backwards, stopped in St. James long enough to get some new toe taps for his shoes. This was the 4th pair he had wore out. He started from Fort Worth, Texas, April 15th, and has been walking ever since. He wears periscopic eyeglasses, fastened over his ears like regular spectacles, which enables him to see where he is walking. He will continue on 66 to St. Louis then on Highway 40 to New York where he will secure passage to Europe. Wingo expects to complete the trip in about four years. He depends entirely on the sale of postcards for his expenses. He averages about 20 miles per day.

Wingo had covered 8,000 miles by October 1932, when Istanbul authorities denied him a visa and he gave up and went home.

His wife had divorced him in absentia.

Declaration made before a stipendiary magistrate at Dale Street Police Court, Liverpool, by the captain and crew of the British barque Pauline, July 1875:

We the undersigned, captain, officers, and crew of the barque Pauline, of London, do solemnly and sincerely declare that on July 8th, 1875, in latitude 5° 13′, longitude 35° W., we observed three large sperm whales, and one of them was gripped round the body with two turns of what appeared to be a large serpent. The head and tail appeared to have a length beyond the coils of about thirty feet, and its girth eight or nine feet. The serpent whirled its victim round and round for about fifteen minutes, and then suddenly dragged the whale to the bottom, head first.

GEORGE DREVAR, Master,
HORATIO THOMPSON,
HENDERSON LANDELLO,
OWEN BAKER,
WILLIAM LEWAN

In Algeria there is a river of genuine ink. It is formed by the union of two streams, one coming from a region of ferruginous soil, the other draining a peat swamp. The water of the former is strongly impregnated with iron, that of the latter with gallic acid. When the two waters mingle, the acid of the one unites with the iron of the other, forming a true ink. We are familiar with a stream called Black Brook, in the northern part of New York, the inky color of whose water is evidently due to like conditions.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

Only the poor are crazy — rich people are “eccentric.” William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck certainly fit that bill. When he inherited the dukedom of Portland in 1854, he retired to his estate in Nottinghamshire, holed up in the west wing, and had all the other rooms painted pink.

That was just the beginning. Apparently struck with a pathological shyness, the duke had all his doors fitted with letterboxes and would let not even a doctor in. His tenants were instructed not to acknowledge his presence, and only one valet could see him in person.

He wouldn’t go out, but he did go down, employing hundreds of workmen to create a vast underground complex with a library, an observatory, a billiards room and 15 miles of tunnels, one of which was wide enough to accommodate two carriages.

No one knows what he did down there — the ballroom had a hydraulic lift that could carry 20 people, but he never invited anyone to see it. He left the house only at night, preceded by a servant who was ordered to carry a lantern 40 yards ahead of him. He died in 1879, departing a lonely world of his own making.