Strange Lives

Canada, the Somme, and Gettysburg Fortean tales from Canada, the Somme, and Gettysburg, all celebrated on July 1. Choose your own Fortean adventure!

Supplying Dead Ringers Wax effigies, fake or substitute corpses used by criminals.

A Color Doctor Dr. William Hotchkiss of St. Louis believed that different colors could heal illnesses. He was known as The Color Doctor.

Miss Neas’s Bones of Contention Doctors and other witnesses reported seeing hundreds of bones working their way through Sarah Neas’s skin

The Silent Circumnavigator Kansas ventriloquist George J. Mold takes up a wager to don a clown suit and travel around the world in four years, without saying a word–except through his ventriloquist dummies.

Rictus Mortis: Killer Clowns In these dark days of clown panics, can we identify the possible visual origins of Killer Clowns?

What is a fairy blast? A comparison between a Limerick servant girl struck by a “fairy blast” that turned her into her American-accented sister and the Watseka Wonder case.

The Man Who Bewitched Clocks A young waiter in Chardon, Ohio could make clocks stop or do mysterious things at his command.

Dermographia on Face and Knee Today we peer into the face of Mrs. Marcil of St. Jean Baptiste, Manitoba, Canada, and onto the–well, knee–of a French schoolgirl for some mysterious markings.