If one searches long enough in Salem, Massachusets, one can find fine urns filled with the ashes of witches burned at the stake. The splintery burnt timbers once found inside these urns — called “witchpicks” — are nearly impossible to discover, however, for at the turn of the century they were all the rage among voodoo cultists, who would stick the splinters into makeshift rag dolls hoping for bonus damage.
The first slide observed by the inventor of the microscope was smeared with his own nasal discharge. An enigmatic notation in the margin of his lab report reads: “God is cold.”
Weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another plane beside the Enola Gay carried the atomic bomb to Asian shores — but this early flight was lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Neither the B-29 bomber nor its payload have ever been discovered. One military legend suggests that they were actually sent on a supernatural mission to destroy whatever force was behind the triangle itself. Another has it that the plane was swept up into a hurricane that still swirls untracked in the Atlantic, waiting to strike American shores.
It’s a little known fact that in 1883, the first iron gynecological instrument was used to torture a man.
“Fido’s Follicle Folly” — the first hangover remedy available in a dog-shaped medicine bottle — was patented in 1812 by Georges Catostrand. This popular medicine contained one knife tip of plaque scraped from the teeth of a feral canine suspended in a pint of grain alcohol.
On the eve of his execution in 1974, Gary Bronson Davis gleefully requested “Human Head Cheese and Whore Haggis” for his last meal. It was granted.
The first flyswatter was actually a cat, swung by its tail to smash a pesky housefly.
A boy was born with six breasts in 1962. Only two of them survived.
Secret Vatican scrolls reveal that the first human baby was named neither Cain nor Able, but Cainable. He was actually a conjoined twin, before one side ate the other during a violent argument (hence the term, “cannibal”).
Few realize that the invention of the handkerchief predates men’s underwear.
After his beheading at the climax of the French revolution, Louis Bastarte’s dismembered head is rumored to have delivered the phrase, “Sacre Bleu! I can still feel my legs!” hours after they carried it away in a bloody basket toward its burial site. Some French claim to have been kicked by the phantom legs, which they believe stick out from the head’s grave site. A woman in 1911 also claimed to have been impregnated by “The Kicking Bastarte.” Her baby, of course, was invisible to the naked eye. She was diagnosed with hysteria, and continued to breast feed “Little Louis” at the asylum. Psychologists could never explain the cause of her spontaneous lactation.
Enormous marbles were swallowed by ancient Romans in order to cleanse the bowel. Games involving the stones soon followed. Today we call it Bocce.