A very singular discovery of an inscription was made some time since at Coxwold, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. … An ash was … felled and split for firewood. Upon being riven asunder, the outer part of the tree was cleft in two like a case, leaving the inner portion of the trunk entire, and the following rude inscription was discovered, distinctly legible, both upon the inner part of the trunk, and with the letters inverted, upon the outer casing. The inscription can, without difficulty, be thus read:–

There is no date to the inscription, but … it would … appear that the tree has been cut down nearly a hundred years. Also, by the number of rings in the wood, each indicating a year’s growth, the tree appears to have been about fifty-five years old when the inscription was made, and to have subsequently grown for nearly two hundred years. The closeness of the rings under the circumference prevents this estimation of the date from being regarded as more than an approximation; but all the circumstances render it highly probable that the inscription was made about three centuries ago.

– Kazlitt Arvine, Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes of Literature and the Fine Arts, 1856

Harvard anthropologist Terrence Deacon was walking past the New England Aquarium one day in 1984 when a voice yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get outta there!”

He stopped, but saw no one. Again the voice said, “Hey! Hey you!” Eventually he traced it to an enclosure of harbor seals, and to one in particular that seemed to be speaking English:

On investigating, Deacon learned that “Hoover” (named for his appetite) had been discovered as a pup by a Maine fisherman and donated to the aquarium, where he became a star attraction.

Deacon studied the seal for a year. Regarding the vocalizing, he notes that some birds seem to learn their parents’ songs in early life but sing them only later. “Though we will never know for sure,” he writes, “the image of Hoover guzzling the food in the cupboard and the old fisherman yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hoover! Hey you! Get outta there!’ has a persuasive feel, or twisted irony.”

William Beckford’s 1835 travel memoir Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal contains a startling episode in the monastery El Escorial, near Madrid:

Forth stalked the prior, and drawing out from a remarkably large cabinet an equally capacious sliding shelf–(the source, I conjecture, of the potent odour I complained of)–displayed lying stretched out upon a quilted silken mattress, the most glorious specimen of plumage ever beheld in terrestrial regions–a feather from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel, full three feet long, and of a blushing hue more soft and delicate than that of the loveliest rose. I longed to ask at what precise moment this treasure beyond price had been dropped–whether from the air–on the open ground, or within the walls of the humble tenement at Nazareth; but I repressed all questions of an indiscreet tendency–the why and wherefore, the when and how, for what and to whom such a palpable manifestation of archangelic beauty and wingedness had been vouchsafed.

It should be noted that Beckford was something of an eccentric; his enormous country house had collapsed 10 years earlier, and perhaps his writings too were built on dreams. But the monks aren’t telling.