An engaging feature of the papers of the past is the “what-is-it.” This is a monster, sometimes of plausible animal appearance and behavior; sometimes an alien creature seemingly hybridized from a variety of species. Today we look at a few of these colorful “what is its.”
In 1861, on a slow-news day, a journalist scribbled a story about a wildman. Suddenly people began reporting encounters with the tall, hairy creature. Was it a hermit, a wendigo, a lunatic, an idiot, or a true monster?
The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Telephone India has always been seen as the home of mystic powers and ancient inventions: flying machines, atomic weapons, rust-proof iron. But there was one little-known Indian invention, claimed to have been in use long before “rediscovered” in the western world: A two-thousand-year-old telephone.
Any sky-gazing culture has traditions about faces or figures in the moon: the proverbial Man, a hare, two children carrying water, a thief laden with cabbages or sticks. A lady miniature artist of Boston, a woman of keen, albeit sentimental vision, had a startling night-sky revelation in 1906 of the Madonna of Seven Moons.
Prince Albert I of Monaco, the distinguished oceanographer, goes on a fishing trip for sea serpents, with fat pigs for bait. Several other well-attested stories of sea serpent sightings are related.
An unassuming little man who worked for an insurance company found that he had a strange gift. He had only to touch a writing sample for it to conjure up accurate visions of the person who had written it. Sometimes those visions solved crimes.
I stated recently in my post on the skeleton driver of Old Route 40 that phantom automobiles are a rare category in the spectral spectrum. I’m here to (marginally) prove myself wrong with a couple of tales from the United States.
The Flagman and the Skeleton: A Vision in the Sun From the time of the War of 1812 comes a story of an unusually vivid three-day vision of a man with a flag and a skeleton, observed by many onboard HMS Majestic, then lying off Boston.
