"We know no more our own destiny than a tea leaf knows the destiny of the East India Company." - Douglas Adams
Perhaps the most strange annual culinary affair was hosted by Clodius, a rich Roman actor who had one hundred birds given voice lessons at a cost of approximately $250 per bird. He then had these birds made into a pie for his guests. He then offered a drink which contained a dissolved pearl worth about one-half million dollars. [ Animals | Strange But True ]
The first machine gun, the Puckle Gun, built in 1722, was also the most unusual. It could fire two types of bullets. When targeting lesser enemies such as Christians, round bullets were used, but for truly hated enemies such as Muslims, more destructive square bullets were used. [ Weapons | Firsts | Strange But True ]
One day in 1893, James Ziegland of Honey Grove, Texas, walked out on his fiancée, Metilda Tichnor, who killed herself. In response, her brother shot Ziegland and, believing he had killed the man, then killed himself. His shot at Ziegland, however, just grazed his face before burying itself in the trunk of a nearby tree. In 1913, Ziegland decided to remove the tree from his property by using dynamite. The explosion dislodged the bullet, shooting it violently into Ziegland's head, finally killing him twenty years later. [ Strange But True | Weapons and Battles ] (source)
On the morning of January 1st, 1963, one of Australia's top physicists, Dr. Gilbert Stanley Bogle, and his girlfriend Margaret Chandler were found dead in suburban Sidney, Australia, near Fuller's Bridge, on the Lane Cove River. Despite the best efforts of the Sydney police, Interpol, and the FBI, no-one has been able to figure out who killed them, how they were killed, or why they were killed. This case is unique in that all three of these questions are unanswered. (source)
Biologists divide the animal kingdom into as many as thirty-one different divisions, called phyla (singular phylum). One animal is so strange that it has its own phylum. In hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor lives a reddish worm, Riftia pachyptila, that creates a long, tough tube to live in. It ranges up to 25 feet long and ingests food, but has neither a mouth nor intestines. It appears that these worms are nourished by bacteria that live inside their cells.
Cyprus was one of the world's important mining centres in ancient times, but for reasons still unknown the Romans halted operations there and sealed the tunnels. Many of the tunnels were found and reopened in the 20th century, thanks to clever detective work by an American mining engineer, D. A. Gunther. In the New York Public Library, he had happened to find an ancient account of the mines. Years of ingenious search in Cyprus led him to the tunnels, which he found complete with usable support timbers and oil lamps. Cyprus became an important mining centre again. (source)
Situated at Baalbek, 53 miles from Beirut in Lebanon, stand the ruins of a group of Roman temples constructed in the first century A.D. Surrounding the temples is a massive stone wall at whose western end lie three of the largest cut blocks of stone in the world. The largest of these is 64 by 14 by 12 feet and weighs about 800 tons. This block would have to have been cut from a quarry almost a mile away, transported to Baalbek, and possibly lifted some 25 feet to its final position. Few modern industrial cranes are capable of such a feat, yet the stones are placed so precisely, it is impossible to insert the blade of a knife between them. How these stones were transported is unknown. [ Buildings, Structures, and Monuments | Strange But True ]
In the Pampa Colorada (Red Plain) in the Peruvian Desert, there are large line-drawings of geometric shapes, animals and plants on the desert soil. These drawings are known as the Nazca lines. These were likely drawn by the Nazca Indians approximately 2,000 years ago. These figures are only fully comprehensible from the air. In fact, in 1937, before flight was commonplace, a highway was constructed through the Nazca lines, as no-one was yet aware of the lines' significance. It is unknown how the drawers achieved such geometrical precision in their art, or why they would draw figures that they could not view. [ Strange But True | Ancient Civilisations ] (source)
The legend of the Loch Ness Monster began around the year 565, when St. Columba claimed to meet a water beast at Loch Ness, granting it "perpetual freedom of the loch". [ Saints | Ancient Britain and Ireland | Strange But True ] (source)
The classical period of Mayan culture lasted for six centuries and then quickly collapsed for reasons that have not been determined. There are several theories, ranging from an epidemic to poor farming methods that led to the land becoming exhausted, to clear-cutting resulting in climate change. The collapse occurred quite quickly—Mayan cities that were flourishing at the start of the ninth century were abandoned by the end of the century. [ Incas, Aztecs, and Maya | Strange But True ] (source)
In June 1872, the steamship Iron Mountain, with a line of barges in tow, left from Vicksburg, Pennsylvania, heading towards Pittsburgh. It was never seen again. Late on the morning it left, the crew of another steamship spotted the line of barges. The tow line had been cut, indicating that the crew of Iron Mountain had sensed a problem. However, there were no traces of the steamship, its crew, or its cargo, which should have dotted the river for miles had the steamer sank. (source)
Off the coast of Nova Scotia lies tiny, irregular-shaped Oak Island. In 1795, Daniel McGinnis and two friends found an old ship's tackle block hanging above a filled-in depression on the island. They dug thirty feet down, finding three oak platforms at ten-foot intervals. Nine years later, a more concerted effort to uncover what lay underneath began. More oak platforms were found, as well as a "cipher stone" in obscure symbols that were interpreted to indicate an enormous treasure below. Several channels were later found that connect to the island's beaches that serve to flood the shaft with water. Even with the benefits of modern technology, the bottom of the pit, and the treasure supposedly there, has not yet been uncovered. It is also not known whose treasure it is, or why they went to such trouble to bury it. (source)
In 1950, in a senatorial primary election in the U.S., George Smathers, who was running against Claude Pepper, worked at exposing Pepper's secret "vices". Smathers disclosed that Pepper's sister was a "thespian" and his brother a "practicing homo sapiens". Pepper himself was "a known extravert", he "matriculated" when he went to college, and he "practiced celibacy" before marriage. Apparently rural voters were horrified, and Pepper lost.
Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd, was at the scene of three presidential assassinations. On April 14th, he rushed to Ford's Theater, where his father had been mortally wounded. In 1881 he was at President James Garfield's side just after he was shot. In 1901, he was about to join President McKinley at the Pan American Exhibit when he learned that McKinley had been shot. (source)
In the early part of the 20th century, a young Russian journalist named Shereshevsky attended an editorial meeting, and others noticed that he was not taking notes. When asked, he said that he could remember what the editor was saying, so there was no need. He was able to reproduce the entire speech, word for word, sentence for sentence, and inflection for inflection. Alexander Luria, Russia's leading psychologist, tested Shereshevsky and determined that he was in no way abnormal but that his memory was perfect.
In 1977, as an experiment, Chuck Ross typed up a fresh manuscript copy of Jerzy Kosinski's novel Steps, which had won the National Book Award in 1969 for best work of fiction, changed the title, and submitted the work under his by-line to 14 publishers. All of them rejected the novel, including Random House, the book's original publisher. [ Strange But True | Misconceptions ] (source)
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story in 1838, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", in which three shipwreck survivors in an open boat kill and eat the fourth, a man named Richard Parker. In 1884, in the real world, three shipwreck survivors in an open boat killed and ate the fourth, whose name was Richard Parker. [ Books and Literature | Strange But True ] (source)
In 1946, when Mildred West, the obituary writer on the Alton Evening Telegraph, went on vacation for a week, no deaths were reported in the city of 32,000 that week.
On February 18th, 1986, U.S. district court judge Samuel King, unhappy with juror absences due to rain, decreed "I hereby order that it will cease raining by Tuesday." California suffered through drought until February 27th, 1991, when King ordered that "rain shall fall in California beginning February 27, 1991", whereupon four inches of rain fell on the state. King noted that these events were "proof positive that we are a nation governed by laws." (source)
Charles Francis Coghlan (1841–1899), a native of Prince Edward Island, was an internationally known actor. He was appearing in Galveston, Texas, when, after a short illness, he died on November 27, 1899. He was buried in a granite vault in a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, in a coffin lined with lead. On September 8, 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston, and Coghlan's coffin was washed out to sea. In October 1908, off the coast of Prince Edward Island, some fishermen found Coghlan's barnacle-encrusted coffin, only a few miles from his birthplace. It is believed that the coffin had floated into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have been caught by the West Indian current and carried into the Gulf Stream, moving north in the Atlantic Ocean until it reached the vicinity of Newfoundland, where it would have been thrown off course by a gale, and and then drifted aimlessly until it reached Prince Edward Island. [ Strange But True | Geography ] (source)
In 1985 the Chinese press announced the discovery of a strip of land 1,000 metres by 15 metres, running down from a hill to a river, in Huanre County, Liaoning province. In winter when the surrounding temperature dips to -30° Celsius, the strip remains at 17° Celsius. In summer the reverse occurs, and the strip freezes to a depth of 1 metre. The locals use the strip for growing vegetables in winter and as a refrigerator in summer. [ China | Strange But True ] (source)
In 1867, a falling tree severely injured Belgian Pierre de Rudder's left leg. A surgeon had to remove a piece of bone that had become lodged in tissue, leaving the leg bone separated by a space of over one inch. The leg, which had an open wound and the lower part of which could be manipulated in all directions, was useless, and doctors said nothing could be done except for amputation. In 1875, Rudder went to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in Oostakker, arriving on April 7. Sitting on the ground, he prayed, asking to be able to work again. He felt deeply moved and then rose, walked through the crowd and knelt before the statue before realizing that he was walking again. The wound had closed and the leg appeared normal. After his death in 1898, one of his doctors, Dr. Van Hoestenberghe, performed an autopsy. He found that the bones of the left leg were still deformed, but the legs were of equal length so that the weight of the body was equally supported, and there was a healthy white piece of bone over one inch long that connected the two sections that still showed traces of breakage. (source)
At 7:25 pm on March 1, 1950, five minutes after the scheduled start of a choir practice, a church in Beatrice, Nebraska, exploded. However, the church was empty, as all fifteen members of the choir were late for practice, for ten separate and entirely unconnected reasons. (source)
It has been shown that there is a half-second delay between when one's unconscious mind makes a decision and when one's conscious mind becomes aware of that decision.
One of the most widely known geological curiosities in the vicinity of Cork is a series of knobs or knots projecting from the face of a cliff. There are sixteen of these huge projections all together, all regularly set in the face of the cliff, one above the other, forming a series of such uniformity as to give it the general appearance of a stairway. Since time out of memory this unusual ascent and its projecting "steps" have been known as the Giant's Staircase. (source)
In October 1969, in the woods of Yrjo Kanto in the Palloneva region of Finland, farmer Heinous Seppi, splitting an aspen log, discovered a rotten middle of the log forming a hollow that contained a dry fish around 1.3 feet (40 centimetres) long. It is not known how the fish got there. (source)
In 1877, during the height of violent labour unrest in the United States, three men were found guilty of the murder of a foreman of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and sentenced to hang. Two of them went stoically to their deaths, but the third, Alexander Campbell, swore that he was innocent. As he was being dragged from his cell to the gallows, Campbell rubbed his left hand in dust from the floor and pressed his palm against the plaster wall, and shouted repeatedly, "This handprint will remain here for all time as proof of my innocence." Even after Campbell's death, the handprint remained. In 1931, Carbon County Sheriff Robert L. Bowman undertook a renovation of the cell, removing the section of plaster wall containing the handprint, replacing it with a new section of fresh plaster. However, the handprint still came back, and still exists today. (source)
Some apparently ghostly experiences, such as feeling an odd sense of presence, can be caused by low-frequency sound waves that are produced by wind blowing across an open window. (source)