History gets a lot weirder when you look at some of the stories which, although they sound fake, are 100% real.
A dance that wouldn’t stop
Let’s go back to the summer of 1518. Over in Strasbourg, France, people began dancing in the street, and they apparently couldn’t stop. It began with one woman, named Frau Troffea. After a few days, more people joined in the dance, and then even more started. But it wasn’t funny.
Some people actually danced for days straight until they collapsed from exhaustion. The city officials’ fix? Hire musicians so that there’d be more organized dancing. It didn’t work. The whole thing continued for weeks until it abruptly stopped. We have no idea why it happened.
A war against birds
Sending soldiers to fight emus sounds like a metaphor for something. It’s not. Hundreds of emus tore through wheat farms in Western Australia in 1932 and caused chaos for the farmers. The military decided to help. They declared war on the emus.
However, the birds weren’t easy to stop because they ran so quickly. They kept outrunning trucks. Seriously. The army spent tons of ammo on killing the birds, but eventually failed to stop the rampage. Yes, the emus won the war.
A flood made of beer
London in the early 1800s was already a stinky city. It got worse on October 17, 1814. A giant vat burst inside the Horse Shoe Brewery, causing a chain reaction of explosions. It led to a beer wave crashing through St. Giles. The wave damaged homes. Eight people died.
Witnesses later spoke about the incident, claiming they saw people scrambling through the streets. They were covered in dark beer. They were covered in debris. It sounds kind of funny now, sure, but it was actually a pretty serious industrial disaster.
A trial with no living defendant
Death doesn’t stop the courts. In 897, Pope Stephen VI ordered that former Pope Formosus be put on trial. The only problem was that Formosus was dead. Church officials dug up the corpse and dressed it in papal clothing.
They then put it on a throne. The deacon spoke for the dead pope. Believe it or not, the court found Formosus guilty and cut off his blessing fingers. They threw his body into the Tiber River.
A pig in the wrong garden
There was a problematic pig on San Juan Island in 1859. It kept eating potatoes. Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer, got so annoyed with the pig that he decided to shoot it. Big mistake. The pig belonged to an Irishman, and there was already a debate over who the island belonged to.
The U.S. and Britain argued over control of the island. When the pig was shot, tensions escalated pretty quickly. Soldiers turned up. Military camps formed. Thankfully, though, nobody from either country died, and the Pig War ended as quickly as it had begun.
A blast in the Siberian sky
People across Siberia saw something pretty weird in the early morning of June 30, 1908. It looked like a giant fireball. It came out of nowhere. There was then a huge explosion that flattened 80 million trees across 800 square miles near the Tunguska River.
The damage was huge. It shattered windows hundreds of miles away. It created shockwaves that knocked people off their feet. But what really made it strange is that we don’t know what happened. Scientists never found a crater. Was it an asteroid? A comet? Or something else?
A school filled with laughter
A boarding school in what’s modern-day Tanzania experienced a weird outbreak. But not the kind you’re probably thinking of. It was a laughing pandemic. Yes, a few students started uncontrollably laughing, and then it spread to ‘infect’ dozens of girls. They couldn’t stop.
Some were laughing, and some were crying. Some were completely distressed. They actually had to close the school temporarily because they couldn’t stop it from spreading. Doctors did find the answer, though. It was a kind of mass psychosis, caused by stress.
A shower nobody expected
Meat falling from the sky. It sounds strange. It really happened. In March 1876, near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, witnesses said they saw huge chunks of flesh raining down from the sky. It was later known as the Kentucky Meat Shower.
People tried tasting the meat. But they couldn’t figure out if it was beef, deer, bear, horse, or lamb. They couldn’t even work out where the meat came from. However, the leading theory is that it might’ve come from vultures that vomited while they were flying above.
A cat with a microphone
The CIA is well-known for having spies. One of their strangest hires was a cat during the Cold War. It was part of something called the Acoustic Kitty project, and it involved placing devices inside a cat. This would help it secretly record conversations.
The reasoning? A cat could walk near Soviet officials sitting on park benches or outside buildings, and not attract attention. The project never worked out, though. It got too expensive. It also turns out that cats aren’t that interested in instructions. Who would’ve known?
A soda deal with submarines
That’s not all for the Cold War. Pepsi was linked to one of the strangest business deals during the 1980s, and it’s all thanks to the Soviet ruble. It wasn’t freely traded internationally. Pepsi decided to accept weird forms of payment so they could keep selling their drinks in the USSR.
One of the deals apparently involved old Soviet naval vessels. It supposedly included submarines and a cruiser. However, don’t believe the headlines. They didn’t own the ‘sixth-largest navy in the world.’
A night of shooting at nothing
Los Angeles, early 1942. It was only a few months after Pearl Harbor. Air raid sirens started going off, and people thought Japanese bombers were coming to attack. The military blasted anti-aircraft guns for hours. They also swept searchlights across the sky.
But there was a problem. Nobody managed to find the enemy planes afterward, not a single sign. What was it? Some people blamed weather balloons. Some blamed nerves.
A fog that shut down a city
Fog’s usually annoying. London’s Great Smog in December 1952 was something else. It was thick and yellowish, for starters. It was so dense that people couldn’t even see their own feet, and audiences couldn’t see the screen in movie theaters. Buses also stopped running.
The Great Smog lasted for five straight days, and it was all because of the cold weather. It trapped smoke from the local coal fires. It got pretty serious. Cattle started dying from breathing the air, and hospitals filled with patients.
A whale disposal plan gone wrong
Florence, Oregon, wasn’t the best place to visit in 1970. There was a dead whale rotting on the beach. But officials had no idea what to do with it, so they decided to do the only logical thing. Blow it up. Yes, they thought blowing it apart would make it small enough for scavengers to eat.
It didn’t work out. The dynamite sent huge chunks of whale blubber into the air, and one of these chunks crushed a car. Spectators had to run for cover from it all.
A rabbit birth hoax
Mary Toft was a woman who, in 1726, convinced people she gave birth to rabbits. Actual rabbits. Doctors went to examine her, and the news even reached King George I. He sent investigators to check her out. Bizarrely, many respected doctors actually believed her.
But it didn’t take long for the truth to come out. People started watching Toft carefully. The rabbit ‘births’ then mysteriously stopped, and Toft confessed that she had faked it all. The respected doctors looked absolutely ridiculous.
A chicken that kept living
That’s not all for weird animals. In 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado, cut off Mike the chicken’s head, hoping to have him for dinner. But something else happened. The blade missed the brainstem and one ear, keeping the chicken alive. Mike continued living.
He walked around. He even tried to peck for food. Mike’s owners fed him with an eyedropper through his throat, and massive crowds paid money to see the headless chicken. He survived for 18 months.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
