The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories

by Ventura, Varla

  ISADORA DUNCAN

  Isadora Duncan, one of the world's most famous dancers, died from a broken neck. On September 14, 1927, Duncan climbed into the passenger seat of a Bugatti race car wearing a long red silk scarf. The scarf was a little too long: when the car started off, the tail end wrapped around the wheel and yanked Duncan out of the car, snapping her neck and dragging her for several yards before the driver realized what had happened. In an eerie twist, the day before she died, Duncan had told an Associated Press reporter, “I'm frightened that some quirk accident may happen.”

  MARGARET MITCHELL

  Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, was run down by an automobile when she was crossing busy Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta with her husband. She was halfway across when she saw a speeding motorist bearing down on her. Mitchell had previously said she was certain she would die in a car crash. Perhaps that's why she panicked, darting back across the street and leaving her husband standing in the middle of the road. She got hit; he did not. She died in the hospital five days later. The driver who hit her turned out to be a twenty-nine-year-old taxi driver with twenty-three traffic violations on his record.

  NELSON ROCKEFELLER

  When Nelson Rockefeller, the former governor of New York, the vice president under Gerald Ford, the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, and founder of Standard Oil, died in 1979 at age seventy-one, official reports said he had a heart attack while sitting at his desk. Later, this story was found to be a cover-up. He was actually alone in his townhouse with twenty-five-year-old Megan Marshack, who was on Rockefeller's staff. She supposedly had been working with him on a book about his modern-art collection, but, as the New York Daily News reported, there were no work papers at his house—just food and wine. So how did he really die? What really happened? Two people know, and one of them died.

  OFF WITH HER HEAD

  The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was not the somber operation it should have been. The executioner was not used to executing women, and he was nervous. The first blow missed Mary's neck entirely, hitting the back of her head instead. The second and third attempts hit their target, but didn't cut the queen's neck completely. When the execution was finally complete, the executioner tried to hold up the severed head to show the audience, as was the custom. But he failed to notice that the queen had been wearing a wig, and the head slipped from his hand and bounced three times on the ground.

  A FATAL NOSEBLEED

  Attila the Hun did not die in battle, as many believe. He met his maker on his wedding night. After a night of lovemaking, he got a nasty nosebleed and lost so much blood that he died.

  NAPOLEON'S CODE

  Napoleon Bonaparte used an oracular system based on a series of random dots. This system is a version of what is commonly known as geomancy, but which has come to be referred to as the Oracle de Napoleon. While not a great deal is known about the actual details of the system (Napoleon kept them a closely guarded secret), several attempts have been made to reconstruct it. None are proven to be the exact system he used, although there are versions that have been “confirmed” by a woman who claims to have traveled throughout France with Napoleon's company and witnessed his use of the system on several occasions. She revealed the system after his death.

  WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

  Fleming was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

  The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved. The nobleman offered to repay Farmer Fleming for saving his son's life, but the farmer would not accept payment. At that moment, Farmer Fleming's own son came to the door of the family hovel. The nobleman and the farmer struck up a deal that he would provide Farmer Fleming's son with the same level of education that his son would enjoy. His son attended the very best schools, and in time, graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. He went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.

  Years afterward, the same nobleman's son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia. What saved his life this time? Penicillin. The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill.

  THE UGLY PICKUP PARADE AND CONTEST

  In 1987, newspaper columnist Les Mann wrote an homage to his junker 1974 pickup, “Black Beauty,” claiming it was the ugliest truck on the planet. Irate ugly-truck owners wrote in, saying they could top him. And so the first Ugly Truck Contest was born, in Chadron, Nebraska. Experts pick the Ugly Pickup of the Year. The official rules are that trucks have to be street legal and over a decade old. They have to be able to move under their own power, a majority of their surface area has to be rust and dents, and, most importantly, they've got to have a good Ugly Truck name. Contestants get extra points for something especially ugly about their truck.

  MARY KING'S CLOSE

  The macabre past of Mary King's Close, located in the Old Town section of Edinburgh, Scotland, and sealed off in the 1600s, is seeing the light of day again. In 2003 the close was reopened, becoming a new tourist attraction—a preserved slice of seventeenth-century life.

  Much mystery surrounds Mary King's Close. For centuries, locals have told tales of the close being sealed off to prevent the spread of the Plague. No evidence disputes this story, and there are some who say that the quarantine was voluntary. But lifelong inhabitants of Edinburgh say that after the close was sealed off, those outside heard anguished cries of people dying of starvation and begging to be let out. And they say that after the close was reopened, finger marks were found clawed into the bricks.

  Mary King's Close is now open to the public and is the site of much paranormal and historical investigation. It is thought to be one of the most haunted places in Scotland.

  SCRYING FOR LAMAS

  Every Tibetan Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of his predecessor. After the thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, the search for his replacement began. Lake Lhamoi Latso at Chokhorgyal, Tibet, is a lake long believed by Tibetans to reveal visions of the future. So the regent of the government-appointed search party traveled to Lake Lahmoi Latso, hoping that meditation and prayer would help him find the next Dalai Lama. After several days the regent saw a vision in the lake waters: a great monastery with green and gold roofs, and near the monastery, a small building with turquoise tiles. The young boy who was destined to be the fourteenth Dalai Lama lived in a house with turquoise tiles.

  NO FEAR

  The first human cannonball was a beautiful young girl named Zazel. She was only fourteen when the London circus she worked for recruited her for the honor. Zazel was catapulted out of the cannon not with gunpowder, as is widely believed, but with elastic springs that made no sound; the circus used firecrackers to create sparks and crackling sounds that mimicked gunpowder.

  “In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the presses.” —CALVIN TRILLIN

  ARMAGEDDON BRAS

  In 1999, the Times of London reported that the firm Triumph International Japan had invented a bra that lets its wearer know of any incoming missiles. Called the Armageddon bra, it was designed to take advantage of the doomsday-prophecy craze sweeping Japan. It had a sensor on the strap and a control box. Unfortunately, it didn't work all that well under clothes; to be most effective, it had to be worn on the outside. No word on how many women took advantage of this spin on bust control.

  BATHING BEAUTIES

  Cleopatra is said to ha
ve bathed in donkey milk, and Mary Queen of Scots bathed in wine. Novelist George Sands preferred cow's milk (three quarts) and honey (three pounds). Isabeau, queen of France in the late twelfth century, was renowned for her beauty. To keep her looks, she used a beauty regimen that included bathing in asses' milk and rubbing crocodile glands and the brains of boars onto her skin.

  PAIN FOR BEAUTY

  For thousands of years, women poisoned themselves with their face makeup by using ceruse, a powder that caused lead poisoning. Rouge, too, was not safe—it contained mercury, which leads to miscarriages and birth defects.

  Chicago's Lincoln Park, created in 1864, was originally a burial ground. The 120-acre cemetery had most of its graves removed and was expanded to more than 1,000 acres for recreational use.

  The first city in the U.S. to fluoridate its water was Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945.

  The first state to use the gas chamber was Nevada in 1924.

  The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, but only by Charles Thomson and John Hancock. The majority of the people signed it on August 2, and the final signature wasn't until five years later.

  EDISON'S PARANORMAL EXPERIMENTS

  Thomas Edison was a scientist and legendary inventor, but he also held great interest in the paranormal. In 1948 the Philosophical Library published a book called The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, which is a collection of Edison's personal essays, letters, and journal entries. Much of the content talks about his attempts to communicate with the beyond and his numerous experiments contacting the dead and the afterlife.

  THE NUN CAME BACK

  A young Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary at a cave near Lourdes, France, at the tender age of fourteen. When she told people of what she'd seen, she was accused of lying, but within two weeks water began to trickle from the same cave, and it became renowned as a place of healing. Bernadette was declared a visionary and a saint.

  Ironically, Bernadette herself never benefited from the healing waters, suffering a variety of ailments, including asthma and tuberculosis. The Sisters of Nevers, the local convent, cared for Bernadette until her death at the age of thirty-five, in the year 1879.

  A few decades after someone believed to be a saint has died, it is customary to dig up his or her body to see if it remained intact. Bernadette's body did, in fact, remain quite preserved. Her recovered body was washed and then reinterred. Several years later, in 1919, she was again dug up and again found in a preserved state. She was reburied, only to be dug up once more in 1925, fortysix years after her death. Her body was remarkably well preserved, so much so that she was put on display at the Church of St. Gildard in Nevers, where she sits to this day.

  Seventeenth-century queen Anne of England gave birth to seventeen children. Of these, only one made it past infancy, and even then the child lived until only the age of twelve.

  SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

  Can you name them?

  Pyramids at Giza

  Statue of Zeus at Olympia

  Hanging gardens of Babylon

  Colossus of Rhodes

  Lighthouse at Alexandria

  Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

  Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

  “HISTORY COULD PASS FOR A SCARLET TEXT, ITS JOT AND TITLE GRAVEN RED IN HUMAN BLOOD.” —ELDRIDGE CLEAVER

  ABE LINCOLN: AFTER THE FUNERAL

  On May 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln's body was laid to rest in a temporary vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, while a permanent mausoleum was under construction. The body was moved three more times, then placed in its permanent resting place within a newly constructed granite tomb on October 15, 1874.

  But in 1876 a ring of counterfeiters made two attempts to snatch Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom until an accomplice was freed from prison. The second attempt was nearly successful—it was foiled just as the conspirators were prying open the sarcophagus.

  Between 1876 and 1901, Lincoln's body was moved fourteen more times—sometimes for security reasons, other times to repair the granite tomb and its dilapidated crypt. In 1901 Abe was laid to rest a final time. As his son Robert supervised, Lincoln's coffin was encased in steel bars and buried under tons of cement. The body hasn't been moved since—as far as anyone can tell.

  WHICH BODY IS FRANCISCO PIZARRO'S?

  Francisco Pizarro, the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and conquistador of the Incas, was stabbed to death by his countrymen in 1541. His body was buried behind the cathedral in Lima, Peru, on the night he died, and it remained there for two and a half years. In 1544, his bones were exhumed, placed in a velvet-lined box, and deposited under the main altar of the cathedral.

  Over the next 350 years, Pizarro's remains were moved repeatedly because of earthquakes and repairs to the cathedral. On the 350th anniversary of his death, in 1891, a mummified body authenticated as his was placed in a glass and marble sarcophagus, which was set out for public display. Then in 1977, some workers repairing a crypt beneath the main altar found two boxes—one lined with velvet and filled with human bones. The other box bore the Spanish inscription, “Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro, who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile.”

  Which body was Pizarro's? In 1984, forensics experts from the United States flew to Peru to compare the two sets of remains, and they determined that the bones in the velvet-lined box were those of Pizarro. His bones were then placed in a box in the glass sarcophagus, and the imposter mummy (who was never identified) was returned to the crypt underneath the altar.

  JOHN PAUL JONES'S CHEAP FUNERAL

  John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary War hero and founding father of the U.S. Navy, died of kidney disease and bronchial pneumonia in 1792 in Paris. Though he was one of the greatest heroes of the American Revolution, that counted for little when he died. Rather than pay to ship his body back to the U.S. for burial, the American ambassador to France instructed Jones's landlord to bury him as privately as possible and with the least amount of expense.

  In 1899, 107 years later, another U.S. ambassador to France, Horace Porter, became obsessed with locating Jones's grave and returning his remains to the U.S. for a proper burial. After six years of searching, Porter was pretty sure that Jones was buried in a cemetery for Protestants. The cemetery, abandoned decades earlier, had since had an entire neighborhood built on top of it.

  Acting on information that Jones had been buried in a lead casket, Porter hired a digging party to tunnel under the neighborhood and search for a lead casket among the hundreds of rotting and exposed wooden caskets. They found three lead coffins—and Jones was in the third. In fact, his body was so well preserved that it was identified by comparing its face to military medals inscribed with Jones's likeness. An American naval squadron returned him to the U.S. Naval Academy in July 1905, where the body was stored under a staircase in a dormitory for seven more years until Congress finally appropriated enough money to build a permanent crypt.

  OUT OF PEP

  Dale Christensen, a high school football coach in Libertyville, Illinois, once staged a fight and his own death at a pep rally to motivate the football team and fans for the game. When the community became up in arms about his “motivational skit,” he resigned from his job, claiming the students and athletes simply didn't understand where he was coming from.

  THE “REAL” JESSE JAMES

  The Wild West bank and train robber Jesse James was shot by one of his gang members in 1882. In the years after his death, several men came forward claiming to be the real Jesse James, arguing that the person in James's grave was someone else. Finally, in 1995, the remains in James's grave were exhumed, and their DNA was compared with that of James's living descendants. The body turned out to indeed be that of the real Jesse James.

  ZACHARY TAYLOR

  On July 4, 1850, Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president of the United States, ate a fresh bowl of cherries and iced milk. Hours later, he
complained of stomach pains and diarrhea. On July 9, he died. Historians have always assumed that Taylor died of natural causes, but rumors that he was poisoned with arsenic never quite disappeared. Taylor opposed the extension of slavery into newly admitted states, and conspiracy theorists have speculated that he was murdered by pro-slavery forces.

  In 1995, Taylor's heirs finally consented to an exhumation to settle the controversy once and for all. The tests were negative, proving that Taylor was not poisoned.

  IN LOS ANGELES IN 1976, A WOMAN LEGALLY MARRIED A 20-POUND ROCK WITH TWENTY GUESTS PRESENT.

  THEY'LL SELL ANYTHING ON EBAY

  In November 2006, a Michigan woman tried to sell mummified human remains on eBay. The remains, likely from a child, were once part of a Scottish anatomist's collection that came to the United States in 1820. The attempted sale was stopped, but the woman was ultimately not charged with any crime.

  THE MARY CELESTE

  The disappearance of the ship Mary Celeste is one of the most famous unexplained disappearances ever recorded. The vessel set off from New York on November 5, 1872, carrying a cargo of 1,701 barrels of commercial alcohol. The captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, was a well-known seaman who allowed no drinking on his ship and regularly read the Bible to his men. The crew had been carefully chosen for their character and seamanship, especially because the captain had brought along his wife and two-year-old daughter.