Maine farmhand Leonard Trask was 28 years old when he was thrown by a horse and began to develop a curious stiffness in his back and neck. The following spring his neck and spine began to curve, forcing him to “bow forward,” but he was able to continue working.

He suffered another fall in 1840, though, and the condition grew worse. He went to 22 physicians seeking advice but was finally told that “no benefit would be likely to result therefrom.” According to an 1857 account, “his neck and back have continued to curve, more and more, every year, drawing his head downwards upon his breasts so there appears but little room to press it further without stopping entirely the movement of the jaws.”

In time he had difficulty even in sitting and reading, and he felt unsafe in riding a horse because he could not see where he was going. In his prime he had stood 6 foot 1, but by 1857 his stature had shrunk to 4 feet 10.5 inches, as his head had bowed entirely below his shoulders. He wrote:

In that celestial, bright and happy land,
Beyond this vale of sorrow, pain and tears,
Where I, erect in glory, hope to stand,
In faith and hope, the future bright appears.

Trask’s condition was unknown at the time of his death in 1861, but it was diagnosed afterward as ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease of the skeleton in which vertebrae can fuse together. His was the first published clinical account of the disease in the United States.

In the fifth century B.C., a storm upset the pontoon bridges by which Xerxes’ armies were crossing from Persia into Greece. Xerxes punished the strait with three hundred lashes. (Herodotus called this a “highly presumptuous way to address the Hellespont.”)

In the ancient Athenian summer festival known as Buphonia, an ox was slain with an ax, which was then charged with murder and thrown into the sea.

In 1428 Pope Martin V ordered English theologian John Wycliffe’s 44-years-dead body to be dug up and burned for heresy.

In 1519 a group of field mice in Stelvio, Italy, were charged with damaging crops by burrowing. The prosecutor argued that the loss of income prevented local tenants from paying their rents. The mice were assigned a defense attorney, Hans Grinebner, who claimed that his clients aided society by eating insects and enriching the soil. The judge banished the mice but promised them safe conduct and “an additional respite of fourteen days … to all those which are with young and to such as are yet in their infancy.”

In 1685, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle, France, was condemned to be demolished. Its bell was spared, with a condition:

To expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew.

— James George Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, 1918

(Thanks, Brody.)

On Aug. 31, 2004, this man was discovered, naked and unconscious, behind a Burger King restaurant in Richmond Hill, Ga. When he regained consciousness in the local hospital, he was unable to remember who he was or how he’d came there.

That was nine years ago, and he still can’t remember. Benjaman Kyle — a name he adopted simply because it shares initials with Burger King — has been diagnosed with dissociative amnesia. He believes his birthday is Aug. 29, 1948, and he has some fragmentary memories of Denver and Indianapolis. But beyond that his life is largely a blank. He has been the subject of numerous newspaper stories and has appeared on national television, but no one has recognized him. He is the only American citizen whose whereabouts are known and yet is officially listed as missing.

The lack of a name or a Social Security number makes the search uniquely difficult. Benjaman has snapshots of memory: buying a grilled cheese sandwich at the Indiana state fair in the 1950s, and public debates over mass transit in Denver in the 1980s. But these lead nowhere. The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles tried and failed to match his face with anyone in its records, and the FBI has been unable to match his DNA or fingerprints.

In 2010 he told told the Guardian that he often refrains from telling his story to new acquaintances because “you get two reactions. They want to tell you their theories or they think you’re mad. Neither is much fun for me.”

He acknowledges that many stories such as his turn out to be hoaxes. “It sounds crazy, I know that,” he says. “All I can say is I’m telling the truth.”

(10/05/2015 Some progress, after 11 years!)