Photo Credit (Pixabay)
There is much more to history than simply learning dull dates by heart. In actuality, history is replete with incredible, surreal, astounding, and unbelieveable tales that have permeated our culture. Though they may not have overthrown governments or altered the path of human history, the stories in this anthology serve as a reminder that historical narratives aren’t always dreary and dusty.
Enjoy the strangeness of nature, the human mind’s gullibility, the head-scratching incidents, and the genuinely perplexing objects of the past as you read these 12 bizarre but true historical tales. History is anything but dull, as you will discover.
The 1518 Dancing Plague
A young woman started dancing on the streets of Strasbourg, a town in modern-day France, in July of 1518. Other residents of the town joined in. They all said they couldn’t resist the impulse to continue dancing. Hundreds of others felt impelled to dance as the dancing craze spread. But they were unable to stop dancing once they got going.
The almost constant dancing started to wear on them as the days stretched into weeks. Dancers passed out from injury, tiredness, and dehydration. A few of them even passed away. The Dancing Plague stopped just as swiftly as it had begun. Mass hysteria is the most widely accepted explanation for the strange dancing condition, however the exact cause is still unknown.
The 1814 Beer Flood
A huge vat that held over 135,000 gallons of fermenting beer suffered a catastrophic structural failure on October 17, 1814. A wall of beer rushed across London’s St. Giles parish. The Meux and Company Brewery was the genesis of the beer tidal wave. Trees were fallen, houses were wrecked, and buildings were ripped from their foundations by the force of the beer.
The beer flood claimed eight lives. The brew drowned some. When their homes collapsed, others suffered fatal injuries. Others were hit by branches of trees or other objects. The incident helped safety standards to be passed by bringing attention to the absence of control and regulations in the beer manufacturing sector.
The Manuscript of Voynich
The Voynich Manuscript is a strange book that is said to have been written in the fifteenth century, but neither its author nor its origins are known. An unidentified and unintelligible language was used to write the entire book. Although there are some distinctive linguistic features in the handwritten writing, no one has been able to interpret it to date.
The Voynich Manuscript’s pictures are equally perplexing. Plants, star charts, and human-like beings are all shown in the book’s exquisitely detailed artwork. However, the humans are portrayed in strange, fantastical settings, and the plants don’t correspond with any actual species. Who wrote the book, why, and what it says are still unknown to researchers.
The State Highway Department’s coastal management section had a huge challenge when the carcass of a massive whale, approximately 45 feet long and weighing about 8 tons, washed up on the shore in Florence, Oregon, on November 9, 1970. How can we get rid of the enormous marine animal before it makes a foul-smelling mess? The wonderful idea of dynamiting the carcass came to someone. After all, this method is effective for removing enormous rocks from roads.
They implemented their plan on November 12. However, the outcome was not the tidy stack of readily detachable parts they had envisioned. Rather, the explosion splattered blood and blubber across the throng of spectators. Whale chunks flew into the air and were dispersed around the neighborhood. One especially big piece caused significant damage when it fell on a parked automobile. Little pieces of whale meat were strewn all over the place, and for weeks afterward, the town smelled of rotting whale meat.
The 1908 Tunguska Incident
On June 30, 1908, a mysterious and tremendous explosion ripped across a distant and desolate area of Siberia close to the Tunguska River. An estimated 80 million trees were toppled by the explosion, which destroyed a 770-square-mile section of the forest. According to researchers, the explosion was comparable to 10–15 megatons of dynamite.
However, what was the source of the explosion? Although no one can be certain, many experts think it was an airburst brought on by a meteor or comet entering the earth’s atmosphere. Some ideas attribute it to a small black hole or natural gas. Nothing hit the ground, that much is certain. Before hitting the ground, whatever it was burst.
The Somber Day of 1780
When a new threat seemed to be looming over New Englanders in 1780, they were still coping with the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. People woke up to a typical beautiful morning in May of that year, but the sun abruptly vanished by mid-morning. The entire area was enveloped in darkness. A weird silence descended upon the land as the birds ceased their song and the hens went to roost.
The majority thought it was an indication of the end of the world. They prayed for salvation and ignited their lamps in response to the gloom. The sun reappeared the following day, thus their prayers were heard. No, an eclipse did not cause the Dark Day of 1780. Meteorologists now think that a mix of fog and smoke from wildfires blocked off the sun’s brightness.
The Vibrant and Unusual Baronet Who Eats Toads
During the 18th century, Sir Francis Dashwood was a vibrant and gregarious member of the British aristocracy. He had a reputation for being strange, out of the ordinary, and eccentric, yet he was also charming and gained friends easily. He appeared to enjoy the attention that his outlandish actions brought him.
Eating live toads as a way to shock appropriate society was one of his favorite party acts. He hosted meetings of the “Dilettanti Society” with a few friends who shared his views. Strange rites and activities involving “sex, drink, food, dressing up, politics, blasphemy, and the occult” were rumored to be practiced by the organization. The moniker “Toad-Eating Baronet” seems to have come naturally to him.
Mania Tulips
Nowadays, you can never predict what the next big, viral trend will be, as any social media marketer will tell you. as well as when it will finish. The common tulip gained popularity in the Netherlands in the 17th century. To outdo their peers, they demanded fresh, unusual, and ostentatious flowers, even if everyone had to have some tulips. At the time, tulips were the most prominent status symbol.
Tulip bulb prices skyrocketed as Tulip Mania spread across Europe. Some bulbs were so costly that buying one would require a person to use all of their earnings for a full year. Purchasing a single lightbulb is frequently more expensive than purchasing a home. Investors risked their fortunes on tulip bulbs. However, Tulip Mania ended as swiftly as it began, leaving many people broke despite the lovely landscape.
The Eternal Count
Count Known to have lived for several centuries, Saint-Germain was an odd and enigmatic person. He had intelligence, charm, and good looks. He knew a great deal about history, was multilingual, and played a variety of musical instruments. He seemed to have experienced hundreds of years of European history.
Saint-Germain, by most accounts, never grew old. People say that they first saw him as kids and then again decades later, and he looked exactly the same. No one ever saw Count Saint-Germain eat or drink, despite the fact that he attended all the best feasts and gatherings. It was thought that he had discovered the secrets of immortality because he was known to experiment with alchemy.
The Hoax of the Cottingley Fairies
The idea that two little girls could fool so many people, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, into thinking they possessed photographic evidence of fairies’ existence is astounding. The girls, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, took a number of pictures of themselves interacting with small, winged fairies using Elsie’s father’s camera.
The images were widely shared throughout England. They rekindled curiosity about supernatural creatures. Many well-known people supported the girls, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who firmly thought the pictures were authentic. There was only one issue. They weren’t. The girls admitted decades later that they staged their well-known photos by pasting paper cutouts of fairies they had taken from a book onto thin sticks.
The 1859 Pig War
A potentially violent dispute broke out between American settlers on one side of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State and British troops stationed on the other side. There was some disagreement over whose country held the property because this island and many of its nearby islands are located in the waterway between the United States and Canada.
When a British military officer’s stray pig was shot and killed by an American settler in 1859, the situation reached a breaking point. The incident sets off a chain of events that led to the manning of American and British battle stations. Thankfully, diplomatic negotiations rather than violence were used to settle the dispute. Except for the pig, no one perished in the Pig War.
The 1919 Molasses Flood
A massive holding tank that held over two million gallons of molasses burst on January 15, 1919. A brownish tidal wave of the thick, sticky material swept into Boston’s North End neighborhood at a speed of 35 miles per hour. Homes were overturned and structures were knocked off their foundations by the wall of molasses’s force and velocity.
Sadly, the Molasses Flood claimed the lives of 21 people. Several city blocks were damaged, and another 150 people were hurt. The cleanup attempt was halted as the temperature dropped. It is thought that the molasses fermented due to unusually warm temperatures, and the gas that resulted increased the tank’s pressure.
