There are so many moments in history that sound completely made-up because they’re so strange, yet they’re very much real, and seriously deserve to be remembered.
Noon went quiet
May 19, 1780, was a weird day for New England. It was a day when the morning turned darker and darker, right up to the point where they needed candles around noon, and chickens went to roost, it was that dark. The darkness went way into the night in some places.
So what was the cause? Some said it was judgment day, others said it was weird weather, but later research figured out that it was because of heavy wildfire smoke drifting in from farther north and west. Doesn’t make it any less weird, though.
Bad wine, bad night
All it took was a bad glass of wine in Oxford for three days of chaos to break out. It all started on Feb. 10, 1354, at the Swindlestock Tavern, where two students complained about the wine and one of them threw a pot at the landlord, typical drunk guy behavior. Then the bells rang.
Then crowds gathered, and the whole thing became a fight between the town and the university, one that involved bows and arrows. 62 scholars were dead at the end. It was such a terrible loss of life, all from one glass of bad wine, and one tavern argument.
Across the line
In October 1925, near the Greek-Bulgarian border, the Petrich Incident began, a historical incident that’s far stranger than it sounds. It began with a dog. Yes, a dog. A Greek soldier apparently crossed the border while he was looking for it near the Demir-Kapu pass.
The Bulgarian guards warned him not to go, he did anyway, so they shot him, and his comrades came after. That’s when the shooting began, and the two countries were engaged in a real border crisis that began over a real dog.
Halfway over
Driving a bus is always difficult, especially when you’re in a busy city like London, but it became a lot harder for Albert Gunter on Dec. 30, 1952. He was driving over Tower Bridge when the road in front of him started lifting, literally, because the bridge was opening.
The bus was too far along. What did he do? He accelerated and made the bus jump the gap between the two bascules, you know, normal action-movie stuff. Only one person was hurt, and the nineteen other passengers were completely fine, a complete stroke of luck.
Chainsaws at the line
Two U.S. Army officers were killed in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in August 1976, over something really trivial. It was a tree. Apparently, a poplar tree blocked a view from a United Nations observation post, and there was an argument over whether it should be trimmed.
The U.S. and South Korea responded by creating Operation Paul Bunyan, a mission that included 16 engineers, 124 ground troops, 27 aircraft, and artillery support nearby, just to cut down the tree. Nothing more, nothing less, just trim the tree. What a use of resources.
Smoke on the river
A river on fire? Sounds impossible, but it really happened, a few times in fact, to Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River. It had already caught fire before 1969, and on June 22 of the same year, a spark from a passing freight train set the whole thing ablaze again.
The spark landed on the oil and debris floating on the water, although firefighters managed to put it out in thirty minutes with no lives lost. Still, the fact that a river caught fire sure was weird.
Dinner did it
In 1522, people in Zurich had a very odd lunch problem that centered around eating sausages during Lent. Christoph Froschauer served them at his home during a time when church rules banned meat.
A man named Huldrych Zwingli was at the feast, he didn’t eat the sausages himself but defended people who did. Some of them were punished for breaking church law. The whole affair actually helped lead to the early Swiss Reformation.
Passed off as something else
Georgy Zhukov was one of the Soviet Union’s top marshals and liked Coca-Cola, perhaps too much. He couldn’t be seen drinking a very American soda, it wouldn’t look good for such a high-ranking Soviet official, so he did something special.
He had a special clear version made for him, called White Coke. The special variety came in plain bottles with white caps marked by a red star, looking just like a glass of vodka, funnily enough, because that was Soviet enough.
All at once
Sheep across parts of Oxfordshire, England, completely lost it around 8 p.m. on November 3, 1888. It wasn’t just a normal freakout, flocks on many farms bolted from fields and pens, all at the same time, leaving farmers to find the sheep miles away the next morning.
They were under hedges, they were scattered around, basically everywhere they shouldn’t have been. It couldn’t be a prank because the area was too large for that to be possible. Lightning, maybe? Nobody knows, really, it’s not like the sheep told us the answer.
One hand, one slip
Physicist Louis Slotin was working at Los Alamos on May 21, 1946, trying to show how to keep apart two halves of a plutonium setup, using just a screwdriver. Bad idea. The screwdriver slipped during the demonstration, and the halves closed around the core.
The entire room was hit by a deadly burst of radiation, leaving Slotin to push the pieces apart by hand, but he’d already received a fatal dose. He died nine days later. He died a horrible death, simply because of one faulty screwdriver.
No roar for hours
Niagara Falls. It’s one of the most famous landmarks in the world, but in 1848, the water actually disappeared for around 30 hours. A rough winter caused strong winds to push Lake Erie ice into the Niagara River. It jammed up near Buffalo and Fort Erie, exposing the riverbed.
Curious locals decided to walk out onto it, of course they did, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Even the mills stopped working, and the Falls’ famous roar went quiet for the first time in, well, ever, really.
Lights in the wrong place
World War I was a dangerous time to be in Europe, and especially France. Officials were worried about German bombers destroying the capital city, so officials did the obvious thing and built a decoy version of Paris outside the real city. It was meant to confuse German bombers.
In fact, the plan was pretty detailed, with fake railway lights, a fake Gare de l’Est, factory roofs made from painted canvas, and moving boards meant to look like trains, basically anything to make it look real. The war ended in 1918, however, while it was in the planning stages.
Noise against wings
Pests were a serious problem in twentieth-century China, to the point where the government created the Four Pests campaign to deal with them. The goal? Defeat the rats, flies, mosquitoes, and surprisingly enough, sparrows too, because they were eating grain.
People went after them everywhere. They smashed nests and broke eggs, shot birds and clanged pots to stop the birds from landing. Some birds dropped from exhaustion, it was that bad, and records indicate around two billion sparrows were killed.
Macbeth got crowded
New York’s Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, featured a production of Macbeth. Things weren’t exactly calm outside, though, while British actor William Charles Macready was performing and fans of American actor Edwin Forrest gathered nearby.
They were angry about the rivalry. A simple Shakespearean argument soon became a street crowd, then militia troops, then gunfire, killing at least 22 people. A theater riot over Macbeth led to over twenty people dying, who would’ve thought it?
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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