On April 15, 1912, the German liner Prinze Adelbert was steaming through the North Atlantic when its chief steward noticed an iceberg with a curious scar bearing red paint. He took this photo.

He learned only later that the Titanic had gone down in those waters less than 12 hours earlier.

In December 1796, a young man named Graham, a resident of Lancaster, went to Workington, to fulfil a promise of marriage made to a young woman of that town. — On entering the room in which she also was, he became indisposed, and tottering to where she sat, fell dead at her feet.

— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803

Charter pilot Trevor Wright was flying over South Australia in 1998 when he discovered something astonishing: the colossal image of a human being, 4.2 kilometers long, carved into the earth.

It must have taken weeks to etch the figure into the arid soil with a tractor and a plough. Even planning the work probably required aerial photography or satellite imagery, surveying skill, and GPS technology.

But no one knows who created the figure, when, or why.

On the 20th of May, 1736, the body of Samuel Baldwin, Esq., was, in compliance with a request in his will, buried, sans ceremonie, in the sea at Lymington, Hants. His motive for this extraordinary mode and place of interment was to prevent his wife from ‘dancing on his grave,’ which she had frequently threatened to do in case she survived him.

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