This Day in History

[Murometz]

THIS DAY IN HISTORY (I will be adding one item every day, until I'm begged to stop!  )


5 April. The Swedish press announced today in 1987 that a new investigation of Lake Storsjon, in central Sweden, was planned by Sten Rentzhog, director of the local Ostersund museum. A 12-man team would probe the 243-ft-deep lake in the summer, possibly using a submarine. Lake Storsjon has a long 'monster' tradition, and sighting reports go back 350 years. Rentzhog's group had collected 400 accounts, dating 'between 1635 and last month'. Lars Thofeldt, a botanist and teacher, said sightings had described 'large worm-like creature' [and creatures] with a long undulating neck with a horse's mane'.

[Murometz]

6 April. Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo on this day in 1923, supposedly from the result of a mosquito bite, a few months after breaking in to Tutankhamun's tomb. At the same time, his fox terrier Susan howled and died. The rumour of a 'mummy's curse' started to spread after further deaths among the excavators. On the previous 17 March, the day Carnarvon had fallen ill, a naked man was seen running wild on his estate near Newbury, Hampshire. The man was often seen but never caught, and finally vanished around the date of Carnarvon's death.

[Murometz]

7 April. In 1989 it was reported that zoo staff in Qindao, eastern China, had gathered to celebrate the birth of the first-ever baby walrus born in a Chinese zoo, when its 40-stone mother rolled over and squashed it. A similar anti-climax was experienced at Norton nurseries, Sheffield, in November 1988. A 25ft tall succulent, Agave americana, which had survived World War II and 50 British winters, was about to flower for the first and only time in its life. The nurserymen tended the flower spike with great excitement. Then a council workman accidentally reversed his lorry over the plant.

[Murometz]

8 April. On 8 April 1879, Mrs King of New South Wales, Australia, was eating breakfast when her spoon grated against something at the bottom of her boiled egg. It was the wedding ring she had lost while mixing corn meal for her hens the previous February. There are several cases on record of coins found in hen's eggs. 1857 - a silver groat (fourpenny piece) found in an egg in Scotland. 1953 - a Canadian penny found in an egg in a restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ontario. 1975 - Knoxville, Tennessee, housewife found a cent in her breakfast egg.

[Murometz]

9 April. St Casilda's Day. The patron saint of dysentry is generally pictured carrying roses in her lap. She died around 1047 in Toledo, Spain. In 1984 the crews of four airlines reported a mushroom cloud above the 14,000ft cloud deck, somewhere between the Soviet Kuril Island and Sakhalin, a sensitive military area north of Japan. It expanded to a diameter of 200 miles, rose over 65,000 feet at a speed of about 500mph. No traces of radioactivity were found on the planes, and the aircrafts' electronics were undisturbed

[Murometz]

10 April. Today was certainly a Dies Mala, or unlucky day, as far as earthquakes go. Well over 3,000 people died in the 1972 Iranian quake. About 4,000 refugees in junks from Guangdong province, China, were refused permission to stay in Hong Kong until 10 April 1981. Authorities all agreed that fears of an earthquake predicted by Chinese astrologers and Taoist priests were groundless... until a quake measuring 3-4 on the Mercalli scale hit Guangdong right on time.   
 

[Murometz]

11 April. Feast Day of St Gemma Galgani (1878-1903). For 18 months stigmata appeared intermittently on her hands and feet and she had frequent ecstasies and visions. Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, died in his sleep of suffocation at the age of 33 in 1890. By odd coincidence, the Los Angeles Examiner of 11 April 1955 reported that two dead elephants had been washed shore near Wellington, New Zealand. None had been reported missing and the nearest land was 1,200 miles away.

[Murometz]

12 April. On this day in 1961, Yuri Gagarin made, in Vostok 1, what was claimed to be the first manned space flight. In 1975 villagers in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, were watching 'Around the World in Eighty Days' on TV. Just as the hero was about to set off on a balloon, there was a power failure. Outside the village a balloon, attempting to land, had been blown into power lines. In 1981 a pecan tree in Needham, Alabama, started whining like a puppy. The owners were unable to find the reason for the irritating noise.

[Murometz]

13 April. In 1984 Anne Schutterlin from the Salvation Army decorated a hen's egg for Easter with a thorn-crowned head of Jesus, and gave it to Naomi Drury, 11, who took it to Doncaster Junior School, in Mexborough, Yorkshire, where it joined 160 other eggs. Trevor Whitehead, her teacher, noticed the face of Jesus was weeping from his right eye. 'There was certainly no jiggery pokery', he said. The headmaster wiped the tear away at least a dozen times, but it always reappeared. Ms Schutterlin was sure there was no moisture in the egg. 'I boiled it for 10 minutes. It was rock hard.'

[Murometz]

15 April. The 'unsinkable' White Star passenger liner Titanic sank in 1912 on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, after hitting an iceberg off Newfoundland, with the loss of over 1,500 people. Fourteen years earlier, Morgan Robertson's novel 'Futility' had a giant ship called Titan sink on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg in about the same place. In 1939 a ship called the Titanian was damaged by an iceberg in the same place the Titanic went down.

[Murometz]

16 April. Dr Albert Hofmann had the first LSD trip on this day in 1943. Shortly before sunset in 1651, two English country women saw, in the sky, a battle followed by angels of 'a bluish colour and about the bigness of a capon, having faces (as they thought) like owls.' Ninety years earlier, on 14 April, a large number of 'plates', 'blood-coloured crosses', and 'two great tubes' stages an aerial dog-fight, enthralling and frightening the whole population of Nuremberg.

[Murometz]

17 April. In 1989, for the second time in five days, a man hunting for bamboo shoots in a thicket near Yokoama, Japan, found a bag containing 100 million yen (£434,000). The total haul was worth over a million pounds. The money turned out to belong to Kazuyasu Noguchi, who had made a fortune stamp-dealing. Rather than pay tax, he said he had left the money hoping that whoever picked it up would give it to charity! Two months later, a garbage collector found almost as much money on a Yokohama dump. This belonged to a militant Buddhist called Haruro Nakanishi.

[Murometz]

18 April. A 1984 UPI report of strange trees in China culled from the official Xinhua news agency mentioned a weather-forecasting tree - its leaves change from dark green to red three days before any rain - and one which glows in the dark when the leaves become wet. In 1988 a pine tree in Jiangsu province rained mysterious 'water' which cured a paralysed woman who drank it. Forty thousand people flocked to the tree to pray for good fortune. Police cut the tree down and discovered the healing 'water' was the urine from millions of insects.

[Murometz]

19 April. In 1991 Luziente Josepa Silva gave birth in a hospital near Recife, Brazil, to a baby with one large eye in the place where the nose should have been. 'Living cyclopia' as they are called, are quite rare in the medical literature. Back in 1973, the Bulgarian News Agency BTA reported the discovery of a 'cyclops' skeleton near the town of Razlog in southern Bulgaria. It was 5ft 8ins tall and had one eye socket in the coronal bone above the nasal cavity. The discovery was made in a burial ground near the ruins of a building of unknown age.

[Murometz]

20 April. According to English folklore, this is the day the cuckoo fist sings. The cuckoo is the subject of the oldest sample of English secular music accompanied by musical notes, and dates to the early 13th century. Here are the opening words in modern English: 'Summer is coming in,/ Loud sing cuckoo,/ Grows the seed, and blooms the mead/ And sprouts the wood anew./ Sing cuckoo.' The cuckoo is actually the bird of May, sacred to ritual pagan promiscuity, hence the phrase 'being made cukold or cuckoo' by a spouse's infidelity.

[Murometz]

21 April. In 1989, it was revealed that perhaps 'the biggest paleontological fraud of all time' had been perpetrated by Dr Viswa Jit Gupta, a professor at the Punjab University, Chandigarh, author of over 300 papers describing his 'Himalayan' fossil discoveries. Research by paleobiologists from New South Wales showed that many of Gupta's key fossils came from a Moroccan site, where their quarrying was a cottage industry, and from a quarry at Amsdell Creek in New York State. It was like claiming that 'kangaroos are native to Kashmir, or rhinoceroses to Rio.'

[Murometz]

22 April. 'Even city yuppies,' wrote a newspaper today in 1989, 'have been seen with trays of eggs on their passenger seats, ready to pelt unsuspecting passers-by.' The egg fusilage began the previous month, when elderly people in Hayes, Middlesex, had eggs hitting their windows or aimed at them in the streets. In mid-April, Kerry Mofatt, 17, and her boyfriend David Jordan, had eggs thrown at them from a speeding car in South Yorkshire. One went straight into Kerry's eye, damaging the membrane beyond repair. That same week, there were three facial injuries caused by eggs flung in east London.

[Murometz]

23 April. St George's Day. 'Green George' was the spirit of spring, and his image was common in old church carvings, a human head surrounded by leaves or looking out of a tree trunk. Some called him the witches' god. George the dragon-killer evolved from a mixture of Green George, the Northern hero Sigurd (Siegfied) the dragon-slayer and an Arian bishop of Alexandria who put to death an orthodox Master of the Mint called Dracontius (dragon). St George was adopted as the patron saint of England in 1349 when Edward III founded the Order of the Garter.

[Murometz]

25 April. In 1977 Japanese trawlermen off New Zealand landed a two-ton corpse resembling a plesiosaur, reported variously as 30 and 180 feet long. It smelt so bad they threw it back, after taking photos. On the same day, corporal Valdes of the Chilean army, on patrol in the northern desert, vanished in front of six men, reappeared 15 minutes later, and fainted. He had five days' growth of beard and his calendar watch had advanced five days. Coming to, he said: 'You do not know who we are, nor where we came from. But I tell you that we shall soon return.'

[Murometz]

26 April. The S****horpe Evening Telegraph (26 April 1975) tells of golfer Jim Tollan, who teed off towards the 14th hole at the local golf club. His ball hit a six-and-a-half pound mallard in flight and brought it down by the green, called the Mallard after the public house that overlooks it. In August 1981, GF Tomlinson and a friend were playing golf. The friend played a shot which landed near a fox basking in the sunshine, which made off with it. Mr Tomlinson gave the chase and the fox dropped the ball. When examined it had a red fox logo on it.

[Murometz]

27 April. In 1990 the China News Agency reported that oil prospectors in the Taklemakan desert in Xinjiang province had found a tribe of more than 200 Turkic-speaking Uygurs living in a small oasis. They had no contact with the outside world since before the foundation of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1644. They had no government, schools, markets or any form of writing. Their houses were built of poplar wood. They hunted and followed a 'slash and burn' style of cultivation. A rough translation of Taklemakan is 'You go in, you don't come out,' which might explain the tribe's isolation.

[Murometz]

28 April. The following story appeared in the press today in 1985. Walter Sawchuck ran a fish and chip shop and a grocers in Haddington, Lothian, in Scotland. In 1970 he bought two small electric wall clocks from a stallholder for £1.50 and jokingly asked for a guarantee. The stallholder told him: 'I promise these clocks will never break down as long as you are in business.' Five years later, he sold the chip shop and the day he handed it over, the clock in the shop burnt itself out. Five years after that, he sold the other shop and the second clock broke down.

[Murometz]

29 April. A miracle was declared by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1991 after blood appeared to pour from the communion bread in the city of Zarka, near Amman in Jordan, on 21 April. The blood had appeared as the priest prepared for communion, spilling in the brass holder. The worshippers 'started daubing it on their faces and eating it,' said the Mother Superior of a local convent school. At the same time, a local man who had been bedridden for a year threw off his oxygen mask and sprang out of bed, telling his wife that something had happened at the church.

[Murometz]

30 April. St Sophia's Day. She was originally the spirit of female wisdom, symbolised by the dove of Aphrodite, later transformed into the dove of the holy ghost. Sophia was God's female soul, source of its power, just as Kali-shakti vitalised the Hindu gods. Her greatest shrine is Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, one of the wonders of the world. For the Celts, May Eve was Beltane, the spring festival when witches and spirits were abroad. They burnt an effigy of the God Bel. As the sun sets, Walpurgisnacht begins with the ceremonial cutting of the May bush.

[Murometz]

1 May. Beltane - May Day. The May Queen is probably a representative of either the Roman goddess Flora or else Freya, whose mating with Frey in the woods insured that spring would be fertile. In 1990 China Youth News reported that four-year-old Tong Tangjiang from Hunan province was catching fire. In mid-April his grandmother saw smoke pouring from his trousers, and a hole was burned through two layers of clothing. He was rushed to hospital where he spontaneously ignited four times in two hours. His right hand, armpits and private parts were burnt.