Stories

In 1916, a small town in Tennessee gathered to witness a 10,000-pound (4,535 kg) Asian elephant named Big Mary hang from an industrial crane.

Suspended 25 meters above the churning Tasman Sea, a perfectly cuboid, white sandstone formation in Australia became an overnight viral sensation.

On October 12, 1964, a shooter fired two bullets on a quiet Georgetown towpath, ending the life of a woman who held Washington’s highest secrets.

In 1927, physicist Thomas Parnell placed dark bitumen into a glass funnel at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

A sudden loud clap rings out across a pasture, and several goats lock their limbs completely rigid, toppling sideways onto the grass like wooden statues.

In May 1934, a rural farmhouse in Ontario, Canada, became the center of an unprecedented medical anomaly.

The man who typed those famous scenes did not know the basic formatting rules of a movie script.

In 1991, the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia launched into orbit at an altitude of roughly 175 miles (282 kilometers), carrying almost 2,500 highly unusual passengers sealed in bags of artificial seawater.

In July 1995, the world learned that Oseola McCarty had amassed a massive financial fortune, giving the majority of it to the University of Southern Mississippi.

In the winter of 1913, a tax collector in northeast Scotland seized an ordinary dairy cow to settle an unpaid government bill.