Curiosities

In no particular order.

• Gombe Chimpanzee War: a violent four-year conflict observed between two groups of chimpanzees.
• Spite house: a building constructed or modified to irritate neighbors.
• House in the Clouds: a combination water tower and house.
• Seven Mile Bridge: a long bridge in the Florida Keys.
• Bodie, California: a well-preserved gold rush ghost town.
• Cliff Palace: an ancient cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park.
• Lanterns of the Dead: medieval stone structures used to guide or mark locations.
• A Treasury of Great Reporting: an anthology of notable journalism from the first half of the 20th century.
• No Longer Human: a Japanese novel exploring alienation and despair.
• Voynich manuscript: an illustrated medieval codex written in an unknown language or code.
• Shi: ancient Chinese ritual "personators" who stood in for ancestors during ceremonies.
• Illegal number: numbers which represent information illegal to possess, such as copyrighted or forbidden data.
• Blue Brain Project: a Swiss research initiative to digitally reconstruct the mammalian brain.
• Cold War playground equipment: playgrounds designed to inspire excitement about the space race.
• Karoshi: the phenomenon of death caused by overwork, mainly in Japan.
• Sweater curse: the belief that gifting a hand-knit sweater to a romantic partner will lead to breakup.
• Tamagotchi effect: emotional attachment formed with virtual pets or digital companions.
• Accelerating change: the idea that technological and social change are happening at an increasing rate.
• Andromeda-Milky Way collision: a predicted future collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.
• Anthropic principle: the philosophical idea that observations of the universe are constrained by the necessity for conscious life to observe it.
• Chauvet Cave: a French cave with some of the earliest and best-preserved prehistoric cave paintings.
• Chrysler Air-Raid siren: the world's loudest siren, used in the US during the Cold War.
• Collyer brothers: famous New York City recluses and hoarders who died amid tons of rubbish in their home.
• Controversial Reddit communities: self-explanatory.
• Cullinan Diamond: the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found.
• Digital sundial: a sundial that displays the time in a numeric form.
• Discovery Island: an abandoned Disney-owned island in Florida.
• Goiania accident: a 1987 radiological disaster in Brazil caused by the mishandling of radioactive material.
• Leakin Park: a Baltimore park infamous as a frequent site of crime and found bodies.
• Heaven's Gate: a cult linked to beliefs about a UFO following comet Hale-Bopp.
• Hyperthymesia: an extremely rare condition characterized by an exceptional autobiographical memory.
• If a 707 Hit the World Trade Center? (Posted Nov 2000): a spooky and prescient forum post.
• Immortal Game: a famous 1851 chess game.
• Roanoke Colony: failed English settlement in North America with a mysterious ending.
• King of Prussia Inn: a historic tavern in Pennsylvania.
• Locked-in syndrome: a rare neurological disorder in which a person is aware but unable to move or speak.
• Low-background steel: steel produced before atmospheric nuclear testing, valuable for sensitive scientific instruments.
• Marilyn vos Savant: writer and columnist listed as having the world's highest recorded IQ.
• Mel's Hole: an urban legend about a supposedly mysterious and bottomless hole in Washington state.
• Nut rage incident: a 2014 Korean Air scandal involving an executive's outburst over how nuts were served on a flight.
• Olmec colossal heads: giant sculpted stone heads from the ancient Olmec civilization in Mexico.
• One red paperclip: a story of a man who bartered his way from a paperclip to a house.
• Phoebus cartel: a historical agreement among lightbulb manufacturers to artificially limit bulb lifespans.
• Presidential state car: heavily armored car used to transport the US president.
• Problem of time: a physics and philosophy issue regarding time's role in quantum gravity.
• Quantum eraser experiment: a quantum physics experiment showing how measurement alters outcomes.
• RMS Queen Mary: a retired British ocean liner now permanently moored as a hotel in California.
• Robert the Doll: a supposedly haunted doll in Florida associated with many legends.
• Safety coffin: special coffins designed to prevent premature burial.
• Samy worm: a computer worm that spread quickly on MySpace in 2005.
• Six Flags New Orleans: an abandoned theme park left in ruins after Hurricane Katrina.
• Pistol shrimp: a family of shrimp with a snapping claw that stuns prey and can produce heat and light.
• Supercontinent cycle: the process by which Earth's continents repeatedly join and break apart over geologic time.
• The Hole: a facility for confining and punishing Scientology executives.
• The Hum: persistent, low-frequency mysterious noises reported worldwide.
• Ren Zhi: a strange and disturbing Chinese story.
• Titanic II: a proposed modern-day replica of the RMS Titanic.
• Tower of Wooden Pallets: a massive temporary wooden structure assembled as a public art piece.
• Toynbee tiles: mysterious linoleum tiles embedded in city streets with cryptic messages.
• United States Bullion Depository: the guarded facility at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that stores much of America's gold reserves.
• Vantablack: one of the most light-absorbing substances.
• Vivian Maier: a lady who was posthumously recognized as a great street photographer.
• 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot: a thwarted plan to detonate liquid explosives on airliners.
• 2012 Harvard cheating scandal: a high-profile academic dishonesty case involving hundreds of students.
• Bhopal disaster: a catastrophic gas leak incident in India in 1984.
• Bojinka plot: a foiled 1995 plan.
• Bath School disaster: a 1927 attack in Michigan.
• Uncontacted peoples: groups around the world living with little or no contact with global civilization.
• Decasia: an experimental film composed of decaying archival footage.
• Lost film: movies of which no known copies exist.
• DONKEY.BAS: a simple car-dodging video game written by Bill Gates.
• American chestnut: a once-common tree species nearly wiped out by blight in North America.
• Antikythera mechanism: an ancient Greek analog computer used to predict astronomical positions.
• Apega of Nabis: a torture device modeled after the wife of a Spartan tyrant.
• Bog body: ancient human remains naturally preserved in peat bogs.
• Bottini of Siena: a network of underground medieval aqueducts in Siena, Italy.
• Doggerland: a submerged landmass that once connected the UK and continental Europe.
• Donner Party: a group of American pioneers who resorted to cannibalism after being stranded in the Sierra Nevada.
• Johnstown Flood: a devastating 1889 dam collapse and flood in Pennsylvania.
• Leshan Giant Buddha: a massive 71-meter tall stone statue of Buddha in China.
• Malleus Maleficarum: a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft that contributed to witch hunts.
• Nebra sky disc: a Bronze Age artifact thought to depict a celestial map.
• Philosopher's stone: a legendary alchemical substance believed to turn base metals into gold.
• Port Chicago disaster: a deadly 1944 munitions explosion at a naval base in California.
• Princes in the Tower: two English princes presumed murdered in the Tower of London in the 15th century.
• Salem witch trials: a series of witchcraft trials and executions in colonial Massachusetts in 1692.
• Tollund Man: a well-preserved prehistoric bog body discovered in Denmark.
• 0.999...: a mathematical concept showing that 0.999... equals 1.
• Gravity train: a theoretical train that could travel through a planet using gravity to move.
• 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident: event in which a Soviet officer averted nuclear war by correctly identifying a false alarm.
• Christmas truce: an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front during World War I in December 1914.
• Fogbank: a classified material used in nuclear warheads.
• Bicameral mentality: a hypothesis that the human mind once operated in a state split between conscious and unconscious thought.
• Limnic eruption: a rare natural disaster where dissolved CO2 suddenly erupts from a lake, suffocating wildlife and people.
• Neskowin Ghost Forest: the remains of an ancient forest exposed along the coast of Oregon.
• Aaron Swartz: internet activist, programmer, and co-founder of Reddit who had an unfortunate end.
• Particle spin: an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles.
• Document Number Nine: a leaked Chinese government directive warning against Western liberal ideas.
• why the lucky stiff: an enigmatic and influential Ruby programmer and artist.
• Spacetime: the four-dimensional framework combining three spatial dimensions and time in relativity.
• Tunguska event: a massive 1908 explosion over Siberia widely believed to be caused by an airbursting meteor.
• Ultimate fate of the universe: scientific theories regarding how the universe will end.
• Lady tasting tea: a famous early test in statistics where a woman claimed to distinguish by taste the order in which milk was added to tea.
• SGR_1806-20: a magnetar known for emitting the brightest giant flare ever recorded from Earth.
• Cameron's World: a web art project that collages imagery from 1990s GeoCities websites.
• Old Tjikko: a Norway spruce in Sweden considered among the world's oldest living trees.
• Freemasonry: a centuries-old fraternal society with secretive rituals and traditions.
• Stepan Company: the only company allowed to process Coca leaves for Coca-Cola.
• New Coke: a widely disliked reformulation of Coca-Cola introduced in 1985.
• Gomboc: a mathematical object with one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium.
• Lazarus and Joannes Baptista Colloredo: famous 17th-century conjoined twins exhibited across Europe.
• J.S. Seaverns: a ship that sank in 1884 and is within scuba diving depths.
• Tuba Man: a street performer who met a really tragic end.
• Immortality Drive: a storage device with DNA from notable people sent to the International Space Station.
• 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion: an accident in Arkansas involving a nuclear missile explosion.
• 1966 Palomares accident: a US Air Force nuclear weapons accident over Spain resulting in non-nuclear detonations.
• Quabbin Reservoir: a large man-made reservoir created by flooding several towns.
• Cute aggression: the urge to squeeze, hug, or bite something because it's overwhelmingly cute.
• Uranium glass: glass colored with uranium compounds, often glowing under UV light.
• Luang Pho Daeng: a Thai Buddhist monk whose mummified body is displayed in a temple.
• American Airlines Flight 587: a 2001 plane crash in Queens, New York, soon after 9/11.
• Nazino tragedy: a deadly forced resettlement and famine on a Russian island in 1933.
• SS Edmund Fitzgerald: a Great Lakes freighter that sank in 1975.
• Who put Bella in the wych elm?: an unsolved WWII mystery involving a skeleton found inside a tree in England.
• War of the Bucket: a 14th-century conflict between Italian city-states, allegedly over a stolen bucket.
• The Book of Mozilla: a cryptic Easter egg found in Mozilla products styled as a biblical prophecy.
• Terry A. Davis: schizophrenic programmer who created the TempleOS operating system.
• Mike the Headless Chicken: a chicken that survived for 18 months after being mostly decapitated.
• David Hahn: the "Radioactive Boy Scout" who attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard.
• Coober Pedy: an Australian mining town famous for underground dwellings.
• Nitt Witt Ridge: a folk art house in California constructed from scavenged materials.
• Operation Wandering Soul: a US psychological warfare campaign during the Vietnam War using ghostly sound effects.
• Oak Island mystery: legends of buried treasure and unexplained artifacts on Oak Island, Nova Scotia.
• Sampoong Department Store collapse: a disastrous 1995 building collapse in Seoul, South Korea.
• Tower Hill: a historical execution site outside the Tower of London.
• Kowloon Walled City: a former densely populated urban settlement in Hong Kong.
• Cecil Hotel: a Los Angeles hotel known for mysterious deaths and alleged hauntings.
• Star Breeze: a modern cruise ship that was attacked by pirates.
• Sonderkommando photographs: rare photos covertly taken in a concentration camp.
• Hachiko: a loyal dog remembered for waiting for his deceased owner at a Japanese train station.
• The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: a psychological study involving three psychiatric patients who each believed they were Jesus.
• Battle of Alcatraz: a violent 1946 escape attempt in the infamous Alcatraz prison.
• Rotary jail: a type of jail with cells arranged on a rotating cylinder.
• Everywhere at the End of Time: an experimental music project about dementia.
• Capitol Hill mystery soda machine: an enigmatic and untraceable vending machine in Seattle selling rare sodas.
• HeLa: the first immortal human cell line, derived from Henrietta Lacks.
• Turnspit dog: a now-extinct breed used to turn meat on spits in old kitchens.
• Radithor: a radioactive "health" drink sold in the early 20th century.
• White House Farm: a notorious 1985 murder case in England.
• Catacombs of Paris: extensive underground ossuaries in Paris.
• Mellified man: a legendary medicinal substance made from a corpse preserved in honey.
• Pan Am Flight 7: a mysterious 1957 airline crash still unsolved.
• Mummia: an old medicinal product made from ground-up mummies.
• Citicorp Center engineering crisis: a critical flaw in a New York skyscraper discovered and discretely fixed decades later.
• Waco siege: a deadly 1993 standoff between US law enforcement and the Branch Davidians sect in Texas.
• Fossil water: ancient groundwater trapped underground for thousands to millions of years.
• Beijing Underground City: a vast underground shelter complex in Beijing.
• Derinkuyu underground city: a multi-level ancient underground city in Cappadocia, Turkey.
• Aka Manto: a Japanese urban legend about a ghost haunting public restrooms.
• Martin Manley Life and Death: an autobiographical website about a man and his unusually calm, rational decision to end it.
• Molecular motor: molecular-scale structures that rotate and walk.
• Jeffrey Manchester: an American criminal known for living secretly inside a Toys "R" Us store.
• TransAsia Airways Flight 235: a 2015 plane crash in Taiwan dramatically caught on dashboard cameras.
• Aeroflot Flight 593: a 1994 aircraft crash caused by a pilot's child interfering with controls.
• Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans: genetic mixing between Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others.
• Surfside condominium collapse: a 2021 building collapse in Florida due to a structural weakness that was not taken seriously enough in time.
• Baron Hill: a ruined mansion in Wales.
• Pollepel Island: an island on the Hudson River known for the ruins of Bannerman's Castle.
• Cabinet of curiosities: historical collections of notable objects.
• The Day the Clown Cried: an unreleased and infamous Jerry Lewis film about a clown in a concentration camp.
• Raising of Chicago: a massive 19th-century project to literally lift city buildings and streets in Chicago.
• Castrato: a type of classical male singing voice produced by castration before puberty.
• HitchBOT: a hitchhiking robot project that traveled hundreds of miles before being vandalized.
• The Wreck of the Titan: an 1898 novel eerily similar to the actual Titanic disaster.
• Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva: a rare disorder where muscles and connective tissue turn to bone.
• Moonlight tower: tall structures with arc lamps erected in the 19th century for nighttime city lighting.
• Robert Johnson: legendary blues musician with an interesting story.
• Fata Morgana: a complex form of mirage producing supernatural-looking horizon images.
• Cult of the Dead Cow: an early US hacker group.
• Trinitite: a unique glassy residue left after the first atomic bomb test.
• Hiroo Onada: a Japanese soldier who didn't surrender until 1974.
• Phil Sokolof: an American businessman and health advocate who campaigned against saturated fat.
• i am lonely will anyone speak to me: a famous internet forum post.
• Michael Rockefeller: son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who disappeared during an expedition in New Guinea.
• Infomart: a large Dallas building designed for information technology trade shows and data centers.
• 2008 Universal Studios fire: a fire that destroyed thousands of master recordings and film archives.
• Man in the Iron Mask: an unidentified prisoner in France whose face was always hidden.
• 2022 Paria diving disaster: a fatal accident involving underwater pipeline work off the coast of Trinidad.
• Daniel Aric Johnson: memorial page for an Insomniac Games employee.
• Clear Channel memorandum: a list of songs suggested to be avoided by radio stations after 9/11.
• Heartbeat in the Brain: a 1970s documentary film involving self-trepanation.
• Chicago Tunnel Company: an underground freight tunnel network under downtown Chicago.
• Anthropodermic bibliopegy: the practice of binding books in human skin.
• 1995 San Diego tank rampage: when a man stole a tank and drove it through city streets before being stopped by police.
• Catacombe dei Cappuccini: Palermo catacombs known for thousands of mummified corpses on display.
• Depression glass: inexpensive colored glassware popular during the Great Depression.
• Terminal Studio website frozen in time: a website seemingly frozen in time.
• Ferdinand Cheval: a French postman who built an elaborate palace from stones he collected.
• Old Summer Palace bronze heads: twelve zodiac animal fountainheads looted from a Chinese imperial garden.
• Mimizuka: a strange monument in Kyoto.
• Anatomical Machines: detailed 18th-century anatomical models on display in a Naples chapel.
• Ulillillia: an internet personality famous for obsessive video game design and surreal personal website.
• George Washington's teeth: myths and facts about the false teeth of America's first president.
• Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate: a famous 1992 online dispute over kernel design.
• Early world maps: ancient representations of the world by various civilizations.
• Mowing-Devil: a 17th-century English pamphlet describing a field mysteriously mowed overnight, thought by some as a precursor to crop circles.
• Cargill: one of the world's largest privately, family-owned corporations.
• Here be dragons: phrase and concept historically used on maps to indicate dangerous or unknown regions.
• Gros Michel banana: an original commercial banana variety wiped out by disease.
• Velvalee Dickinson: an American convicted of using doll shipments to send wartime espionage messages.
• The Tcl War: an internet argument over the merits of the programming language Tcl.
• Odesa catacombs: an extensive labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath Odesa, Ukraine.
• Akmal Shaikh: a British national executed in China under controversial circumstances.
• A Crow Looked at Me: an album creatively driven by the loss of the artist's wife to cancer.
• Igor Panarin: Russian professor known for inaccurate predictions of US collapse and partition.
• Coca wine: a 19th-century alcoholic beverage made with coca leaf extract.
• Drunken boxing: a style of Chinese martial arts meant to mimic the movements of a drunk person.
• Oldest McDonald's restaurant: the world's oldest operating McDonald's.
• Vasily Arkhipov: a Soviet officer credited with averting nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Stanislov Petrov: a Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear crisis by recognizing a false alarm.
• Chandelier Tree: a giant California redwood with a drive-through tunnel carved into it.
• United States airmail service: early postal deliveries by airplane in the US.
• Centralia, Pennsylvania: a near-abandoned town due to an ongoing underground coal fire.
• Edsel Ford Fong: a notoriously rude waiter at San Francisco's Sam Wo restaurant, became a local celebrity.
• Billups Neon Crossing Signal: a unique railroad crossing signal with neon lights and an air raid siren.
• Probert Encyclopaedia: an early, extensive, now defunct online encyclopedia.
• Jumbo Kingdom: a gigantic floating restaurant in Hong Kong, now closed.
• Concealed shoes: phenomenon of old shoes hidden in buildings.
• Superpermutation: a mathematical concept associated with an Anime-derived proof.
• Futurama theorem: a mathematical theorem invented for a Futurama episode about swapping minds.
• Tarrare: a 18th-century Frenchman famed for his insatiable appetite and bizarre eating habits.
• Hitobashira: the historical practice of entombing people in building foundations.
• Ibadan forest of horror: Nigerian site of mass graves and trafficking scandals.
• Quartz crisis: the upheaval in the watchmaking industry caused by the advent of quartz watches.
• Rhythm 0: a performance in which the audience could do anything they wished to the performer.
• Priest hole: secret hiding places for Catholic priests in English houses during persecutions.
• Economy coffin: a coffin designed for reuse or for mass burials to save costs.
• London deep-level shelters: deep underground bunkers built during WWII.
• Cheyenne Mountain Complex: a secure military installation built into a Colorado mountain.
• Myles Standish Burial Ground: historic cemetery in Massachusetts with graves from early colonial days.
• Puyi: the last Emperor of China who would later interact with Forbidden City visitors as a commoner.
• Sonic hedgehog protein: a glycoprotein named after the character.
• Immovable Ladder: a wooden ladder kept in the same place for centuries at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre due to rivalries between religious sects.
• Anting: a behavior in which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers.
• Gloomy Sunday: a song supposedly with negative psychological effects.
• Snake Island: a Brazilian island notorious for its dense and deadly population of snakes.
• X Windows Boot Stipple: someone's investigation into the origin of the pixel graphic pattern displayed when the X Window System boots.
• Arshile Gorky: a pioneer of abstract expressionism and influential Armenian-American artist.
• Silphium: an ancient, now-extinct plant once prized for its medicinal and culinary uses.
• Lion of Babylon: an ancient Mesopotamian statue.
• Gary Kildall: computer scientist and creator of the CP/M operating system with a somewhat tragic story.
• Wonton font: a decorative typeface designed to evoke stereotyped East Asian scripts.
• Ian Murdock: founder of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
• SafeHarborGames.net: an apparently active board and card game website with a dated aesthetic.
• Goldin Finance 117: an unfinished, supertall skyscraper in China.
• Principality of Sealand: a self-proclaimed micronation on a former WWII sea fort off England's coast.
• Doctor DOS Betamax's DOS Website: a passionate website about DOS, probably a time capsule.
• Valeriepieris circle: a circle drawn on a map enclosing most of the world's population.
• Abuja Airplane House: a residence in Nigeria shaped like an airplane.
• Giraffe Manor: a boutique hotel in Kenya where giraffes freely roam among guests.
• The Black Hole of Calcutta: an infamous small prison cell.
• Bokhdi Amusement Park: an abandoned amusement park in Turkmenistan with some interesting visitors.
• Darvaza gas crater: a fiery, continuously burning sinkhole in Turkmenistan.
• Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum: the world's oldest known museum dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.
• Gate Tower Building: a Japanese office building pierced by a highway passing through its middle floors.
• Hallstatt: a Chinese town built as an imitation of an Austrian village.
• Haesindang Park: a South Korean park famous for its collection of certain wooden statues.
• Hang Nga Guesthouse: structure in Vietnam that reminds me of something from Morrowind.
• Jackson Hole: an American themed town in China.
• Khewra Salt Mine: the world's second largest salt mine.
• Kirisuto no Haka: a site in Japan claiming to be the true burial place of Jesus.
• Living root bridge: bridges made from the interwoven roots of trees.
• Porcelain Palace: the world's largest public toilet complex.
• Rednaxela Terrace: a street in Hong Kong with a name likely the result of an adminstrative mistake.
• Robot Building: a Bangkok office building designed to look like a robot.
• Roopkund: an Indian Himalayan lake famous for hundreds of ancient human skeletons.
• Ryugyong Hotel: a massive, never-opened hotel skyscraper in North Korea.
• Thames Town: a new town in China built to replicate classic English architectural styles.
• The Line: a planned "smart city" in Saudi Arabia.
• Villaggio Mall: a Venice-themed shopping mall in Doha, Qatar, known for its indoor canal.
• Wang Saen Suk: a Thai Buddhist park featuring graphic depictions of Buddhist hell.
• Wonderland Amusement Park: an unfinished and abandoned amusement park near Beijing, China.
• Luna Park: a famous historic amusement park in Coney Island, New York.
• Brennender Berg: an underground coal fire in Germany that has been burning for centuries.
• The Broomway: a dangerous ancient tidal causeway in Essex, England.
• Cologne sewerage system: an system of historical sewers beneath Cologne, Germany.
• The Crooked House: a famously tilted pub in England.
• Crooked Forest: a grove of oddly bent pine trees in Poland.
• Flannan Isles Lighthouse: site of the mysterious 1900 disappearance of three lighthouse keepers.
• I Love You Will U Marry Me: a famous graffiti marriage proposal painted and preserved in Sheffield.
• New York-Dublin Portal: a public video feed between New York and Dublin that was shutdown due to inappropriate behavior.
• Predjama Castle: a Slovenian castle built into a cave mouth.
• White's: one of the oldest and most exclusive clubs in London.
• Zeljava Air Base: a huge underground Yugoslav military airbase now abandoned.
• Devil's Island: a notorious French penal colony off the coast of South America.
• Fordlandia: Henry Ford's failed attempt to build a rubber-producing utopia in the Amazon.
• Hacienda Napoles: Pablo Escobar's extravagant estate in Colombia.
• Island of the Dolls: an island in Mexico's canals covered in hanging and decaying dolls.
• El Ojo: a mysterious circular floating island in Argentina.
• Freedom Ship: a never-built proposal for a massive floating city.
• 33 Thomas Street: a windowless skyscraper in New York.
• Bishop Castle: a hand-built, ever-expanding stone castle in rural Colorado.
• Bubbly Creek: a heavily polluted Chicago river branch known for bubbles from decomposing animal waste.
• Clinton Road: a New Jersey road infamous for ghost stories and mysterious happenings.
• Colma, California: a small city notable for having more dead people than living ones.
• Desert of Maine: a large patch of exposed glacial sand in otherwise forested Maine.
• Dixie Square Mall: an abandoned Illinois shopping mall.
• Florence Y'all Water Tower: a water tower with an unusual greeting.
• Habitat 67: a futuristic modular apartment housing complex in Montreal.
• Holy Land Experience: a former biblical theme park in Florida.
• Indianapolis Catacombs: a network of tunnels and storage vaults beneath Indianapolis city market.
• Island of California: the mistaken belief that California was an island off the coast of North America.
• Just Room Enough Island: the smallest inhabited island, with just enough space for a single house.
• KRDK-TV mast: one of the tallest structures in the world, used for television broadcasting in North Dakota.
• London Bridge in Arizona: a relocated London bridge reconstructed in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
• Mary Ellis grave: a lone colonial-era grave now surrounded by a New Jersey parking lot.
• Mexia Supermarket: a supermarket that was closed and abandoned for months before being cleaned out.
• Mojave phone booth: a remote phone booth in the Mojave Desert.
• North Oaks, Minnesota: a private city known for restricting mapping and photography.
• Sam Kee Building: a famously narrow commercial building in Vancouver, Canada.
• Winchester Mystery House: a sprawling, labyrinthine California mansion with an odd story.
• World's littlest skyscraper: an unusually tiny high-rise in Wichita Falls, Texas, built as part of a con.
• Banjawarn Station: an Australian sheep station possibly linked to apocalypse cult activity.
• Burning Mountain: a hill in Australia with a continuous underground coal fire.
• Jellyfish Lake: a lake in Palau home to millions of non-stinging jellyfish.
• Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir: an ancient Babylonian letter of complaint about poor-quality copper.
• Erfurt latrine disaster: a fatal 12th-century accident where people fell into a latrine during a meeting.
• Hegelochus: an ancient Greek actor remembered for a notorious mispronunciation.
• Onfim: a medieval Russian boy whose childhood writings on birch bark have survived.
• Glass delusion: a historical psychiatric phenomenon where people believed they were made of glass.
• Nottingham cheese riot: a riot over cheese prices in 18th-century England.
• Andrew Johnson's drunken vice-presidential inaugural address: incident when the future US president gave an embarrassing speech while intoxicated.
• John Bentinck: an eccentric English duke known for reclusive habits and underground tunnels.
• Johann Georg August Galletti: a German historian remembered for unintentionally humorous statements.
• I Am Going to the Lordy: a low-quality poem written by Charles J. Guiteau before his execution.
• Jerome of Sandy Cove: a mysterious Canadian castaway found with both legs amputated.
• Kentucky meat shower: a baffling 1876 incident where pieces of meat rained down in Kentucky.
• London Beer Flood: a 1814 industrial accident that released a flood of beer into London streets.
• New England vampire panic: a 19th-century outbreak of anti-vampire exhumations and rituals.
• Heinrich Schliemann: the archaeologist who discovered and damaged the site believed to be ancient Troy.
• Toronto circus riot: a 19th-century riot between circus performers and local firemen.
• Great Michigan Pizza Funeral: a 1973 disposal of recalled pizzas.
• Great Molasses Flood: a deadly 1919 flood of molasses that swept through Boston.
• Julia Butterfly Hill: environmentalist famous for living in a redwood tree for over two years to protest logging.
• Masabumi Hosono: the only Japanese survivor of the Titanic, shunned at home for having survived.
• Kilroy was here: a popular WWII-era graffiti tag found around the world.
• Self-propelled barge T-36: the crew survived 49 days on 3 days of food.
• Albert Stevens: a man who unknowingly received a dose of radiation as part of US government testing.
• Dean scream: a widely broadcast outburst by presidential candidate Howard Dean that ruined his 2004 campaign.
• Rudi Dekkers: Dutch flight school owner who trained the 9/11 hijackers and got into various other trouble.
• John McAfee: former eccentric antivirus software pioneer and fugitive.
• Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist: the theft of millions of dollars worth of maple syrup in Canada.
• Monty Hall Problem: a counterintuitive probability puzzle.
• Numbers station: mysterious shortwave radio stations broadcasting coded messages.
• Ruth Belville: the "Greenwich Time Lady" who sold accurate time in Victorian London by letting people look at her watch.
• Bouba/kiki effect: a psychological experiment showing a cross-cultural link between sounds and shapes.
• Contronym: a word with multiple opposing meanings.
• Hopi time controversy: debate about whether the Hopi language contains concepts of time.
• Pronounciation of GIF: the long-running dispute over whether to say "jif" or "gif."
• Response to sneezing: cultural customs and superstitions regarding sneezing.
• Robert Shields: a man who documented his life in five-minute intervals for decades.
• Rohonc Codex: a mysterious illustrated manuscript in an undeciphered script.
• Skunked term: words whose meaning has become unclear or disputed due to changing usage.
• Uncleftish Beholding: an essay explaining atomic theory using "pure English".
• Unpaired word: a word that seems like it should have a related opposite, but doesn't.
• Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory: a 1950s children's science kit that actually included radioactive materials.
• Nobel disease: the phenomenon of Nobel laureates developing eccentric or unscientific ideas later in life.
• Timeline of the far future: projections of major cosmological or geological events in the distant future.
• Anatoli Bugorski: a Russian scientist who survived being hit by a particle accelerator beam.
• Impossible color: colors that cannot normally be perceived by the human eye.
• Shower-curtain effect: the unexplained tendency for shower curtains to billow inward when water is running.
• Bone Wars: a rivalry between paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope during the 19th-century American "dinosaur rush."
• Floyd Collins: a cave explorer trapped and killed in a Kentucky cave, sparking major media coverage.
• Waffle House Index: an informal metric of disaster severity based on whether Waffle House restaurants remain open.
• Alien hand syndrome: a rare neurological disorder causing one hand to act involuntarily.
• Gen Z stare: a reported trend of Gen Z staring expressionlessly in response to questions.
• Millenial pause: a reported phenomenon where Millenials leave an awkward pause before speaking on camera.
• Therac-25: a radiation therapy machine responsible for accidents due to software failure.
• Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress: a letter by Benjamin Franklin offering unconventional advice.
• Jeanne Clement: the oldest verified person, who lived to age 122.
• Benjaman Kyle: a man with mysterious amnesia who could not recall his identity.
• Donald Mastick: a chemist who accidentally ingested plutonium.
• Paris Syndrome: the disappointment felt by some tourists in Paris.
• Great Sheep Panic: a 19th-century incident where sheep across southern England inexplicably stampeded.
• Human: the article is interesting because it describes Humans in a detached way as if they were just another animal.
• Street dogs in Moscow: the unique population of stray dogs in Moscow, some of which travel by subway.
• Ming the clam: the oldest known animal, a clam estimated to be over 500 years old.
• Penelope the platypus: an individual platypus known for faking pregnancy and escaping a zoo.
• Plant arithmetic: the apparent ability of plants to perform kinds of arithmetic calculations.
• 300-page iPhone bill: early AT&T iPhone usage bills were sometimes massive.
• Bild Lilli Doll: a German doll that inspired the creation of Barbie.
• Friendly Floatees spill: a shipping accident where thousands of toy ducks were lost at sea and used to track ocean currents.
• Shoe-fitting fluoroscope: an X-ray machine once commonly used in shoe stores to fit shoes to feet.
• Dagen H: Sweden's dramatic switch from left- to right-side driving in 1967.
• 2018 Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 incident: an airliner stolen and crashed by an apparently thrill-seeking ground worker in Seattle-Tacoma.
• Aeroflot Flight 6502: a Soviet plane crash caused by a pilot flying "blind" as a bet.
• China National Highway 110 traffic jam: an exceptionally long and slow traffic jam that lasted weeks in 2010.
• Human mail: instances of people mailing themselves via postal services.
• Mehran Karimi Nasseri: an Iranian man who lived in Paris Charles de Gaulle airport for 18 years.
• The wrong type of snow: a much-mocked British phrase for train delays during winter weather.
• .su domain: the internet domain assigned to the Soviet Union, still sometimes in use.
• 999 phone charging myth: a mistaken belief that dialing emergency services charges your mobile phone battery.
• Crungus: a bizarre creature invented by an AI image generator with a nonsense prompt.
• GPT-4Chan: an AI language model trained on 4chan posts.
• Tay: a Microsoft Twitter chatbot shut down after it started posting offensive tweets.
• Trojan Room coffee pot: the world's first webcam, created to monitor a coffee pot at Cambridge University.
• Action Park: a notorious New Jersey amusement park infamous for its dangerous rides and accidents.
• Frozen Peas: a famous outtake of Orson Welles struggling to record a frozen food commercial.
• Lawnchair Larry flight: a man who flew in a lawn chair attached to weather balloons over Los Angeles.
• Hobby tunneling: the act of digging tunnels for personal enjoyment or obsession.
• Katrina refrigerator: a phenomenon of ruined refrigerators stacked on the streets after Hurricane Katrina.
• Project Graham: a model of what the human body might look like if it evolved to survive car crashes.
• William Utermohlen: an artist who documented his decline from Alzheimer's disease through self-portraits.
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: a literary autobiography detailing drug addiction in 19th-century England.
• Henry Darger: a reclusive hospital janitor posthumously discovered to be a prolific outsider artist.
• Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den: a coherent Chinese poem written with nearly all words pronounced "shi" but different characters.
• Wonders of the East: an Old English text describing strange lands and creatures.
• Great Stalacpipe Organ: the world's largest musical instrument, made from cave stalactites in Virginia.
• Pyrophone: a musical instrument producing sound via explosions.
• Ram Ranch and Grant MacDonald: a curious song and eccentric artist.
• Amore: an album released by Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian dictator.
• Backstroke of the West: a notoriously poor Chinese-to-English DVD translation of "Star Wars: Episode III."
• Logistics: an extremely lengthy experimental film showing the entire production chain of a pedometer in reverse.
• 2005 Connecticut false evacuation alert: an accidental emergency broadcast that was overwhelmingly ignored by residents despite appearing real.
• 2013 Emergency Alert System hijackings: a series of incidents where US TV emergency alerts were spoofed with false zombie attack warnings.
• 2018 Hawaii false missile alert: a mistaken statewide emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile.
• Captain Midnight broadcast signal intrusion: a 1986 television signal hijacking protest against satellite TV fees.
• Max Headroom signal hijacking: a 1987 incident where Chicago TV broadcasts were interrupted by a disguised intruder.
• Mikhail Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial: the former Soviet leader appearing in a 1997 Pizza Hut commercial.
• Southern Television broadcast interruption: a 1977 British TV signal hijack delivering a bizarre message.
• Turner Doomsday Video: a video created by CNN to broadcast in the event of the end of the world.
• TV pickup: a phenomenon in the UK where power usage spikes during TV ad breaks due to kettle usage.
• Battle of B-R5RB: one of the largest and costliest battles in the history of the game EVE Online.
• Chain World: a unique Minecraft world passed between players via USB stick.
• Corrupted Blood incident: a virtual pandemic spread in World of Warcraft, studied by researchers.
• Hong Kong 97: a curious and notoriously bad unlicensed video game for the Super Famicom.
• The Bogdanoff Twins: French twin media personalities known for their eccentricity.
• Unfavorable Semicircle: an enigmatic YouTube channel that uploaded thousands of bizarre videos.
• Meow Wars: a 1990s Usenet flame war involving email "meowing."
• Charles Harrelson: contract killer and father of actor Woody Harrelson.
• Crypt of Civilization: a time capsule at Oglethorpe University sealed in 1940, to be opened in 8113.
• Man in the Hole: an indigenous man in Brazil, last of his tribe, living alone for decades.
• Bitcoin buried in Newport landfill: a hard drive with a massive fortune in Bitcoin supposedly lost in a UK landfill.
• Oil futures drunk-trading incident: a trader who cost his company millions by trading while intoxicated.
• 2014 Midwest FurFest gas attack: an apparent chlorine gas attack during a furry convention in Illinois.
• Animal trial: medieval legal proceedings in which animals were prosecuted for crimes.
• Attempted theft of George Washington's skull: a failed 1830 plot to steal the first president's skull from his tomb.
• Glasgow ice cream wars: a violent turf war between Scottish ice cream van operators.
• Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal: US business caught smuggling ancient artifacts from the Middle East.
• Illegal flower tribute: a humorous phrase from authorities warning against leaving flowers at the Google HQ in China.
• Perry Mason moment: when key evidence dramatically surfaces during a trial, changing the outcome.
• Ugly law: historic US laws prohibiting the appearance of "unsightly" people in public.
• United Airlines Flight 976: a notorious 1995 in-flight air rage incident on a transatlantic flight.
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse: the spectacular 1940 collapse of a suspension bridge due to wind-induced oscillations.
• Attack of the Dead Men: WWI counterattack by Russian soldiers despite being poisoned by gas.
• Ngogo chimpanzee war: a long-term chimpanzee conflict studied in Uganda.
• Mercy Brown vampire incident: a real-life case that fueled vampire folklore in New England.
• Fan death: a South Korean urban legend that electric fans can kill people by suffocation at night.
• Green Boots and "Rainbow Valley": the nickname for a deceased Everest climber whose body acts as a landmark.
• Hell money: imitation banknotes burned in East Asian ancestral rites for the afterlife.
• Sogen Kato: a Japanese man whose death went unnoticed for decades, sparking a government scandal.
• London Necropolis railway station: a former dedicated train station for transporting the dead to cemeteries outside London.
• Elmer McCurdy: an outlaw whose mummified body became a carnival attraction for decades after his death, later unknowingly.
• Prohibition in the United States: when the US tried to outlaw alcohol.
• Micromort: a measure of how deadly or risky activities are.
• Oliver Cromwell's Head: severed in 1661 and then displayed or privately owned until being burried in 1960.
• Salish Sea human foot discoveries: phenomenon of human feet being found on the coast of Canada.
• Somerton Man: an unidentified man found dead on an Australian beach in 1948.
• Xin Zhui: the remarkably well-preserved body of a Chinese noblewoman from over 2,000 years ago.
• Cartesian theater: a philosophical concept critiquing the idea of a central mental "stage" where consciousness observes experience.
• Lychgate: the covered gateway at the entrance to a traditional English churchyard.
• Corpse road: paths historically used to transport the dead from villages to remote cemeteries.
• Hearth: a fireplace or the floor of a fireplace, historic center of home life and cooking.
• Plague doctor costume: the distinctive beaked outfit worn by doctors treating plague patients in Europe.
• Ellis Island: US immigration station in New York that processed millions of immigrants.
• Emerald Tablet: legendary alchemical text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, source of the phrase "as above, so below."
• Eridu: one of the earliest cities in ancient Sumer, often considered the oldest city in the world.
• Florentine Codex: a 16th-century ethnographic research project about Aztec culture, compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún.
• Gokstad ship: a well-preserved Viking ship discovered in a burial mound in Norway.
• Halve Maen: the Dutch ship ("Half Moon") sailed by Henry Hudson in 1609 to explore North America.
• HMHS Britannic: a sister ship to Titanic, used as a hospital ship during WWI and sank in 1916.
• Jinn: supernatural beings in Middle Eastern and Islamic tradition, also known as Djin or Genie.
• Lyres of Ur: ancient Sumerian musical instruments discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur.
• Oracle bone script: earliest known form of Chinese writing, found on turtle shells and ox bones.
• Oseberg ship: a richly decorated Viking ship used as a burial ship, found in Norway.
• Physical history of the US Declaration of Independence: drafts, copies, and locations of the document, including a copy found recently in England.
• Plymouth Colony: an English colonial venture in North America established in 1620 by the Pilgrims.
• Richard III: King of England whose remains were found in modern times.
• RMS Titanic: famed British passenger liner that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.
• Sumer: the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia.
• Towle Silversmiths: American maker of fine silverware and flatware originally founded in the 17th century.
• Amarna letters: diplomatic correspondence between Egypt and other ancient powers written on clay tablets.
• Beowulf: epic Old English poem.
• Cyrus Cylinder: ancient clay artifact recording the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great.
• Finnesburg Fragment: a surviving fragment of Old English poetry that seems to talk of conflict between Danes and Frisians.
• Greek numerals: the numerical system used in ancient Greece, based on the Greek alphabet.
• Hildebrandslied: an Old High German heroic poem about a tragic duel.
• Junius manuscript: a major Old English illustrated manuscript of biblical poetry.
• Nowell Codex: the manuscript containing Beowulf and other texts in Old English.
• Rosetta Stone: inscribed stone that provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Tower of Silence: circular structures used in Zoroastrian tradition for exposing the dead to scavenging birds.
• Aethelred the Unready: King of England with an amusing title.
• Bayeux Tapestry: an embroidered cloth depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
• Codex Gigas: the largest extant medieval manuscript, famous for its full-page "Devil's Portrait."
• Khufu ship: an ancient Egyptian full-sized vessel buried at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• RMS Mauretania: an ocean liner of the Cunard Line, launched in 1938.
• RMS Queen Mary 2: a modern, transatlantic ocean liner still in service, flagship of Cunard Line.
• Roman concrete: ancient construction material credited for the longevity of Roman architecture.
• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a set of annals chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons in England.
• Domesday Book: a detailed survey of land and property in England, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086.
• The Discoverie of Witchcraft: a 16th-century book skeptical of witch trials and magical claims.
• Epic of Gilgamesh: Mesopotamian epic poem, one of the earliest works of literature.
• Exeter Book: an Old English manuscript containing poetry and riddles.
• 1906 San Francisco earthquake: a devastating earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco.
• Babylonian Map of the World: a clay tablet describing the then-known world, centered on the Euphrates river.
• Herculaneum papyri: carbonized scrolls from a Roman villa, preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
• Rassam cylinder: an Assyrian clay cylinder inscribed with a royal inscription from Ashurbanipal.
• Xanthian Obelisk: a pillar covered in inscriptions, key to deciphering the Lycian language.
• Boltzmann brain: a thought experiment about conscious experience and reality.
• Explanatory gap: the philosophical idea that physical processes alone can't fully explain consciousness.
• Hard problem of consciousness: the challenge of explaining why and how subjective experiences arise.
• Metaphysical solipsism: the philosophical position that only one's own mind is certain to exist.
• Problem of other minds: the philosophical issue of how we can know other minds exist.
• Why is there anything at all?: the ultimate philosophical question about the existence of the universe.
• Qualia: the individual subjective qualities of conscious experience.
• Vertiginous question: a philosophical question about personal identity and subjective experience.
• Four Pest campaign: a Chinese government initiative targeting "pests" that had catastrophic consequences.
• Dragon Throne: the symbolic seat of imperial authority in China.
• Four Olds: a campaign during China's Cultural Revolution to eliminate old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.
• Empress Dowager Cixi: the controversial ruler of Qing dynasty China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang: the monumental tomb of China's first emperor, famous for the Terracotta Army.
• La Garita Caldera: the site of one of the world's largest known volcanic eruptions, located in Colorado.
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9: a comet that spectacularly impacted Jupiter in 1994, leaving visible marks.
• Living Fossil: an organism that has remained largely unchanged over millions of years and resembles ancient relatives.
• Procoptodon: a genus of giant, short-faced kangaroos from prehistoric Australia.
• Trilobite: extinct marine arthropods with distinctive segmented bodies, commonly seen as fossils.
• Alex the parrot: an African grey parrot famous for his advanced communication and cognitive abilities.
• Ancient woodland: areas of forest in Europe that have existed continuously since at least the year 1600.
• Pink House: a former, iconic, often-photographed pink house in Massachusetts.
• Phoenician alphabet: the ancestor of many modern writing systems.