Unlikely creatures from American folklore:

• The gillygaloo lays cubical eggs that won’t roll downhill (hard-boiled they make excellent dice).
• The gyascutus has legs of unequal length so that it can walk easily on hillsides.
• The Funeral Mountain terrashot is shaped like a casket and explodes in the desert heat, leaving a grave-shaped hole.
• The squonk weeps continually at its own ugliness, and when surprised dissolves entirely into tears.
• The tote-road shagamaw has a bear’s front feet and a moose’s hind feet, leaving tracks that change every quarter mile.
• The slide-rock bolter, above, skids on its own drool across valley paths, scooping up tourists.

“A forest ranger … conceived the bold idea of decoying a slide-rock bolter to its own destruction. A dummy tourist was rigged up with plaid Norfolk jacket, knee breeches, and a guide book to Colorado. It was then filled full of giant powder and fulminate caps and posted in a conspicuous place, where, sure enough, the next day it attracted the attention of a bolter which had been hanging for days on the slope of Lizzard Head. The resulting explosion flattened half the buildings in Rico, which were never rebuilt, and the surrounding hills fattened flocks of buzzards the rest of the summer.” (William Thomas Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, 1910)

The London Medical and Physical Journal records the case of Kate Hudson, a 31-year-old single woman who was admitted to the general hospital at Nottingham on Aug. 4, 1783. “On inspection of the arm two needles were discovered under the skin, a little above the dorsal side of the wrist.” These were removed with forceps, but more needles were discovered farther up the arm.

This continued, on and off, for nine years. Needles were discovered in Hudson’s leg, foot, breast, and stomach; she passed needles in her urine and stool and vomited up still more. Just as abruptly, on June 12, 1792, she was dismissed as cured, and was reported in July to be married with two children and enjoying “better health than for several years past.”

“At present, I shall make no Comment on the Case,” writes physician Hugh Moises. “I feel it, however, a duty I owe to myself, (and to anticipate the attacks of puny Criticism) that I should here observe, that the language of the Case throughout, is strictly that of the minutes preserved in the Case Books of the Hospital, as taken thence by myself upwards of ten years ago.”

In the winter time, when northern ports, such as the Baltic, are closed by ice, it is a very common thing for the sailors to pass the time in skating, or rather sailing upon skates. This pastime has a charm of its own unknown to the ordinary skater, and when practice has engendered confidence and dexterity in directing the sail, the proficient may bend backwards and, as it were, sleep upon the wind.

This exercise is very agreeable, and not very dangerous; the falls made by a learner in practising at the beginning are not serious, as they generally take place backwards, and are thus modified by the sail.

A short time ago, I was pricking out some annuals on a flower-bed, on which some geraniums were already planted, when I was surprised to see flashes of light coming from a truss of geranium flowers. At first I thought it was imagination, but my wife and a friend who were present also saw them. Time was about 9 p.m., and the atmosphere clear. There were other geraniums a different colour on the same bed, but there was no effect on them. The particular geranium was a Tom Thumb. Is this at all common? I have never seen or read of it before. — S. Ingham

— Knowledge, July 27, 1883

January 5, 2010February 6, 2010 | Oddities

In September 1893, London doctor Farquhar Matheson was sailing with his wife on Scotland’s Loch Alsh, between the isle of Skye and the mainland. “Our sail was up and we were going gaily along when suddenly I saw something rise out of the loch in front of us–a long, straight, necklike thing as tall as my mast.”

The thing was 200 yards away; it was not until it began to submerge that Matheson saw “it was a large sea-monster–of the saurian type, I should think.”

He likened the head and neck to those of a giraffe. He watched the creature surface again three times, at intervals or two or three minutes, as he followed it for perhaps a mile. “It was not a sea-serpent, but a much larger and more substantial beast–something of the nature of a gigantic lizard, I should think.”

He denied emphatically that he had seen only an optical illusion, noting that he had watched the creature’s head gradually descend and ascend several times, and saw the light glisten on its smooth skin.

That evening he described the event to some gentlemen, including Sir James Farrar. They laughed at first, but “when I showed them that none of their theories would fit the case, they admitted that the sea-serpent, or sea-monster, could not be altogether a myth.”