Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

1. The town of Windham was terrorised all night by frogs. In July 1758 the people of Windham, Connecticut, woke to "screams and shrill voices" and were sure the Indians had come: "A notorious reprobate was heard blubbering for a Bible, and a lawyer offered half of all the money that he had made dishonestly to any charity if his neighbors would guarantee to preserve his life until morning." Some swore they heard the voices yelling the names of two rival candidates for office — "Colonel Dyer! Colonel Dyer!" answered by "Elderkin, too! Elderkin, too!" The cause turned out to be a drained pond.
2. US revenue cutters were ordered to patrol Massachusetts Bay with a gun "double shotted" for the sea-serpent. The creature was sighted off Cape Ann in 1817 and repeatedly off Nahant, and rewards were offered to seafarers who could catch it. Skinner notes it was reported "by so many witnesses not addicted to fish tales nor liquor" that there ought to be some reason for it, and that despite its hundred feet of body and goggle eyes it was "of lamb-like disposition." Read it in the book →
3. A hunter shot a witch-bird with his own shirt buttons. A Connecticut farmer named Blakesley fired three times at a mocking blue bird "with long neck... and feet like scrawny hands" and could not touch it; having no silver bullets he cut two silver buttons from his shirt "and rammed them home with a piece of cloth and a prayer." Five miles away an old woman rose from her spinning-wheel and fell dead on her right side — the same side the bird fell on. Skinner cannot resist the aside that "nothing evil can withstand silver -except Congress." Read it in the book →
4. Point Judith, Rhode Island, was named by a half-blind skipper shouting at his daughter. In a gale two centuries ago the old mariner's eyes were too dim to see the coast, so when his daughter cried "Land, father! I see land!" and the wind drowned her reply, he bellowed "Point, Judith! Point!" She pointed, he changed course, and other captains gave the cape her name — an "innocent double entendre." Read it in the book →
5. Father Marquette recorded a winged man-eating monster on the Mississippi bluffs — and Skinner wonders if it was a pterodactyl. The "piasa bird" relief near Alton, Illinois, was visible as late as 1860: body of a panther, bat's wings, and the head and horns of a deer, to which Marquette "gave it a human face." Skinner speculates that "the legend of the man-eater may even have been told by those who killed the last of the pterodactyls." Read it in the book →
6. Marquette also reported unicorns and two-headed turtles "very mischievous and addicted to biting". In the account of his explorations the explorer listed, alongside the man-eater, "other zoological curiosities, such as unicorns with shaggy mane and land-turtles three feet long with two heads." Read it in the book →
7. A treasure dig was abandoned twice — once for a sudden death, once for a man's raving fit. A medium at a Columbia City spiritualist meeting revealed the hiding place; while clearing broken stone "one of the party fell dead," said to have been claimed by the murdered captain's spirit. When a later party resumed in March 1890 and uncovered human skeletons, "a man fell into a fit of raving madness, and again the search was abandoned, for it is now said that an immutable curse rests on the treasure."
8. Detroit's Red Dwarf appeared before every disaster — and once at a wheelbarrow crossing. The Nain Rouge, "a shambling, red-faced creature, with a cold, glittering eye and teeth protruding from a grinning mouth," was seen the night before Bloody Run, in the smoky streets of the 1805 fire, and "on the morning of Hull's surrender it was found grinning in the fog." It also "rubbed its bony knuckles expectantly" when David Fisher crossed the strait to court his love in the only boat available — a wheelbarrow. Read it in the book →
9. The Pima refuse to cross Superstition Mountains because a second flood is dammed behind them. A dying prophet told them wealth would make them arrogant and warlike, and that when it did, "the bad should vanish and the good would leave the earth and live in the sun." So there sits Cherwit Maké, "awaiting the culmination of their wickedness to let loose on the earth a mighty sea that lies dammed behind the range."
10. Missionaries smashed an idol at Belle Isle; the pieces reassembled as a serpent that later attacked La Salle's ship. Dollier and De Galinee tore down the stone image and flung the biggest piece into the river — whereupon the sunken portion called out to the watching faithful to throw in the rest, "and all the fragments united and became a monster serpent." When La Salle came up the strait in the Griffin, forms rose from the water and pushed the ship north, "her crew vainly singing hymns with a hope of staying the demoniac power."
11. Dying Indians would not drink from a Wisconsin lake even in their last thirst. All game within its precincts belonged to the manitou; "not a fish might be taken, and not even a drop of water could be dipped to cool the lips of the traveller." So strong was the fear of offending him that the sick and wounded "would refuse to profane the lake by touching their lips to it." Read it in the book →
12. An engineer saw a phantom train wreck, then found a misspelled threat written in the frost of his cab window. The message read: "A frate train was recked as yu saw. Now that yu saw it yu will never make another run... If yu ever run on this road again yu will be recked." Edwards quit the road that morning and went to work for the Union Pacific; no wreck was found in the canyon next day. Read it in the book →
13. Indians beat the ground with clubs when gathering salt, believing each blow struck the witch beneath. A pillar of snowy salt on the Nebraska plain was said to stand where a chief's wife vanished into the opening earth. "For years the Indians maintained that the column was under the custody of the Salt Witch, and when they went there to gather salt they would beat the ground with clubs, believing that each blow fell upon her person." Read it in the book →
14. Roxbury pudding-stone was supposedly a giant's family flinging their dinner about. According to Dr. Holmes the conglomerate strewn south of Boston consists of "fragments of a pudding, as big as the State-house dome," thrown about by a giant's family in a fit of temper and petrified where it fell. Skinner deflates it at once: "But that would have been called pudding-stone, anyway, from its appearance." Read it in the book →
15. A New England drifter set up as a doctor knowing "less about doctoring than any village granny". Tompkinson arrived ragged and half-starved at Carondelet on the Mississippi, was taken in out of pity, and as soon as he had clothes and funds "hung a shingle out announcing that there he practised medicine." His reputation expanded because "a few sick people that he attended had the rare luck to get well in spite of him." Read it in the book →
16. A Californian governor's dreaded "evil eye" was a glass one. When rain that threatened flood passed off the very day his manner softened, the clergy sang "Te Deum" in the church. "The old commandant never, to his dying day, had the heart to confess that the evil eye was only a glass one." Read it in the book →
17. A Connecticut ghost must turn into a seven-headed snake twice a year, wearing a jewel in the largest head. An old prophecy promises wealth to whoever wrests the carbuncle from the serpent on the 20th of March and 20th of September. "But thus far the people of Connecticut have found more wealth in clocks and tobacco than in snakes and carbuncles." Read it in the book →
18. A skeleton in brass armour was dug up at Fall River in 1834. The body, wearing a brass breastplate and a belt of metal tubes and lying near copper arrow-heads, "had been artificially embalmed or else preserved by salts in the soil." Its arms suggested Phoenician origin, though it was thought to be a Norseman — and some claimed the nearby Dighton rock inscriptions were cut by "the inevitable Captain Kidd" to mark buried treasure.
19. A Bad Lands skeleton will play a violin all night if you leave one where it can reach. It haunts the camps "in a search for music" and nods in time outside the door; if it finds a fiddle it plays until dawn, "now as soft as the stir of wind in the sage, anon as harsh as the cry of a wolf." But do not follow it when it moves off: "the music will intoxicate, madden, and will finally charm his soul from his body." Read it in the book →
20. Goody Cole was jailed with a chain on her leg partly for "a mumbling habit". The Hampton goodwife was "so 'vehemently suspected to be a witch'" that she was imprisoned in 1680. Against her: two dead calves, "a mumbling habit, which was bad, and a wild look, which was worse," and a cyclone that drowned merrymakers who had insulted her that morning.
21. Lovers' leaps are so universal that Skinner mocks the effort involved. "In most of these places the disappointed ones seem to have gone to elaborate and unusual pains to commit suicide, neglecting many easy and equally appropriate methods." He lists the best-known: the upper Mississippi, Jump Mountain in Virginia, Jenny Jump Mountain in New Jersey, Mackinac, Monument Mountain, the Wissahickon and Muscatine, Iowa. Read it in the book →
22. Detroit had a "rolling muff" that could be repelled by asking it the date of Christmas. Like the feu follet, this strange thing at Grosse Isle "could be driven off by holding a cross toward it or by asking it on what day of the month came Christmas." One Tremblay brother met it and came home convinced he had received "a devil's baptism" — though his neighbours, noting the odour on his garments, "view of the matter was that he had met a skunk."