Moviegoers watching classic winter scenes from early Hollywood might assume they’re seeing innocent holiday magic.

In the early 1960s, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography faced difficulties using a submarine as a stable platform for acoustic studies.

Among the attractions were two albino African-American men, George and Willie Muse—billed as Eko and Iko, “sheepheaded cannibals from Ecuador.”

In the 4th century BCE, Alexander the Great rode into Pasargadae, a quiet green city in what is now Iran.

On 14 August 2010, traffic on China National Highway 110 and the Beijing–Tibet Expressway ground to a halt in Hebei and Inner Mongolia.

In May 1901, French police received an anonymous letter describing a woman imprisoned in a home in Poitiers. The shocking claim led officers to the Monnier family residence, where they discovered a padlocked attic room.

In 1942, a strange letter from “Mary Wallace” in Ohio to Argentina caught the attention of U.S. postal censors. The letter, filled with descriptions of dolls, was flagged for suspicious content.

In 1879, Ferdinand Cheval, a mail carrier in southeastern France, stumbled over a strange stone during his rounds. It reminded him of a vivid dream he had years earlier—of building a palace.

When President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, demand for bulletproof vests soared. But years earlier, in 1893, a Polish priest in Chicago named Casimir Zeglen had already begun working on bullet-stopping armor.

In 1824, Charles Waterton returned from South America carrying a bizarre object: the head and bust of an unclassified being with close-set eyes, a red mane, and an eerily human expression.