Author Topic: This Day in History (Read 9065 times)

Murometz · « **Reply #25 on:** May 01, 2006, 11:36:59 PM »

2 May. In 1991 the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) in Swansea announced that it was not releasing any registrations containing the sequence 666 (the Mark of the Beast in Revelations). A spokesman said: 'There was so much hassle about bumps, collisions and accidents with this number that we decided to scrap it... It is the number of the Devil.' We have seen reports that frenzied animals have attacked 666 cars, and that one murderer claimed his 666 van made him do it. Is government policy now dictated by theology, numerology and superstition?

Murometz · « **Reply #26 on:** May 02, 2006, 10:18:45 PM »

3 May. The festival of the Invention (or Discovery) of the Holy Cross. The Empress Helena (mother of Constantine the Great) discovered the Cross in AD 326 deep inside a well on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem. She bequeathed it to the bishop of Jerusalem, who promptly started selling it off in splinters; like most mediaeval relics, it seemed to have magic regenerative powers and the splinters just kept coming. The cross did not appear in Christian art till the 6th century; it was condemned by early Christian fathers as pagan, and still survives as such in scarecrows.

Murometz · « **Reply #27 on:** May 03, 2006, 11:14:16 PM »

4 May. At 7:30pm on 4 May 1897, an airship passed over Jenny Lind, Arkansas, and was pursued by three men on bicycles. It landed by a spring near a mountain, and the men talked to the two pilots, who said they subsisted on birds captures in nets. One of the men, James Davis, was given an aerial ride to Huntington, 15 miles away. With the development of petrol engines and aluminium production in the 1880s, it was possible to construct viable airships, and there was a wave of 'phantom airship' sightings across America in the last four years of the century

Murometz · « **Reply #28 on:** May 05, 2006, 09:55:06 PM »

6 May. Between the 6th and 25th of May 1782, in front of a crowd of distinguished witnesses, James Price FRS, the last English Alchemist, apparently transmuted mercury into gold in his private laboratory in Guildford. Some of the gold was presented to George III. When asked to repeat the experiment in front of his fellow scientists in the Royal Society, he hesitated for many months, called a public meting where he swallowed laurel-water, the quickest and deadliest poison then known, and died dramatically.

Murometz · « **Reply #29 on:** May 06, 2006, 09:05:59 PM »

7 May. On 7 May 1990 a dead man was recovered from the Clyde near Broomielaw in Scotland. In his mid 30s, ha had brown wavy hair and a dark moustache. All he had on him was a lighter with the initials 'J.C.' and a wallet containing a three-figure sum of money. The police were contacted by a New Jersey couple who thought the man might be their son, John Crawford. They came to Glasgow and made a positive identification. The body was flown off to the United States, but by the time the couple had reached home, John Crawford had turned up alive. The body was returned.

Murometz · « **Reply #30 on:** May 08, 2006, 09:39:31 AM »

8 May. The Apparition of St Michael. Climbing one of the sacred mounts on either side of the English Channel St Michael's Mount in England, or Mont St Michel in France is guaranteed to cure madness. Both these mounts were previously dedicated to Mercury, and indeed Michael, the angel of death, has inherited a lot of Hermes/Mercury's attributes, including the trumpet of the Last Trump. During the War in Heaven, Michael commanded the loyal troops and God delegated to him the 'words of power' that defeated the rebellious forces under Lucifer and propelled them down to the underworld.

Murometz · « **Reply #31 on:** May 08, 2006, 08:43:24 PM »

9 May. In 1991, Uwe Grunwald, 31, a German tourist, was walking with his wife Sabine at a resort in Crete when he suddenly collapsed and died. Doctors found that a bullet falling from the sky had directly entered the top of his skull. 'The odds against that happening are one in a billion' ventured a statistical genius from the Cretan police force. The same fate befell Adrian Benitez, aged five, out walking with his mother in Wilmington, California, in March 1992. Police arrested a teenager who fired four or five shots in the air from a .38 calibre pistol half a mile away.

Murometz · « **Reply #32 on:** May 10, 2006, 01:18:29 AM »

10 May. Ivan Inanitz Chabert, 'The Fire King', was born in Avignon in 1972. He made his fortune by drinking boiling oil, lead, sealing wax and poison, massaging himself with a red-hot shovel, eating torches, and the like. His piece de resistance was entering an oven with two raw steaks and emerging, unscathed, with two cooked steaks. The Times announced that the steaks had been eaten with such avidity that Chabert was lucky not to have been consumed as well in a 'Carribean banquet'. His obituary in the New York Herald described him with wonderful understatement as a 'fast liver'.

Murometz · « **Reply #33 on:** May 10, 2006, 09:13:47 PM »

11 May. On 11 May 1842 clothes on lines on a Liverpool common suddenly shot upwards and moved away slowly, although, according to the Annals of Electricity (6-499), there was 'not a breath of air'. Smoke from chimneys indicated that above ground there was a southward wind, but the clothes moved away northwards. A few weeks later, on 30 June, it happened again - at Cupar in Scotland. On a bright, clear day there was a sharp detonation, and clothes on lines shot upward. Some fell while others went on and vanished.

Murometz · « **Reply #34 on:** May 11, 2006, 10:39:06 PM »

12 May. St Pancras Day. He is very a popular saint all over Europe, in spite of little being known about him except that he was a Roman martyr in about AD 304, buried on the Aurelian Way. Legend says that he was a 14-year-old boy from Phrygia. The oldest church in England - in St Pancras, London - was dedicated to him by St Augustine, and contains the claw marks left by the devil whom the saint had to expel from the site. He had sensible views on devils -'All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons' - which must have made diagnosis much easier.

Murometz · « **Reply #35 on:** May 12, 2006, 07:34:48 PM »

13 May. A fire broke out in the Philippine presidential palace in Manila, apparently caused by a fault in an air-conditioning unit, according to a report in 1991. A souvenir shop was gutted, but the fire spared 2,000 pairs of shoes amassed by Imelda Marcos, who was at that time still in exile. Earlier in the year, a shop-keeper in Hawaii placed three leaves and a bottle of gin in the path of molten lava flowing from Mount Kilauea, in order to appease the volcano goddess Pele. After the lava had passed, all that was left from the town was the church and the prudent man's shop.

Murometz · « **Reply #36 on:** May 13, 2006, 11:34:23 PM »

14 May. In 1921, the Daily Express reported that a kitten had been born in Nice with the date '1921' distinctly marked in grey fur on the white of its belly. 'The mother cat had probably been looking intently at something, such as a calendar, so dated' joked Charled Fort in Wild Talents. We are reminded here of another odd appearance of a date. Around 17 April 1926, Mrs Alfred Turner of North Bay, Ontario, found an egg in her henhouse with the message 'Earthquake, beware April 21' in raised lettering on the side of the shell, slightly darker than the rest of the shell

Murometz · « **Reply #37 on:** May 15, 2006, 06:50:45 PM »

16 May. In 1808 the sun was observed to turn brick-red near Skeninge in Sweden. On the western horizon, a great number of round dark brown bodies appeared, seemingly the size of a hat crown. They passed overhead and disappeared on the eastern horizon. The procession lasted two hours. Some fell, and a 'soapy and jellied' film, which soon dried and vanished, was found on the ground. This was reported in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences (1808-215) by A Acharius.

Murometz · « **Reply #38 on:** May 16, 2006, 09:51:16 PM »

17 May. On this day in 1890, the Religio-Philosophical Journal reported a scare in Japan: inch-long slashes appeared on people's necks as they walked in the streets or sat in their houses, in broad daylight. Little pain was felt at the time of the attacks. This was similar to the periodic queue-snipping panics in China during the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), when 'uncatchables' were said to be going round cutting off pigtails and leading to serious loss of face. The Manchu emperors of this period decreed that all men should wear their hair in a queue or pig-tail.

Murometz · « **Reply #39 on:** May 17, 2006, 10:32:42 PM »

18 May. In 1909 Mr C Lethbridge came upon two men in big fur coats while walking home at 11pm over Caerphilly Mountain near Cardiff in Wales. A tube-shaped contraption was nearby, in which the men took off when they saw Lethbridge, after 'jabbering furiouusly in a strange lingo'. 1909 saw an 'airship flap' in England; many sightings of the craft were reported but never substantiated. The popular explanation was that German spies were flying on secret missions.

Murometz · « **Reply #40 on:** May 18, 2006, 10:38:30 PM »

19 May. St Dunstan's Day. Dunstan (c. 909-988) was born near Glastonbury, and in about 943 Edmund I commissioned him to restore monastic life there: from that moment dates the revival of organised monasticism in England, which had ceased to exist since the Scandinavian invasions. Dunstan founded or refounded many abbeys, including Malmesbury, Westminster, Bath and Exeter and in 959 he became archbishop of Canterbury. The present coronation rite of the English sovereign derives from that compiled and used by Dunstan for King Edgar at Bath in 973.

Murometz · « **Reply #41 on:** May 19, 2006, 10:35:00 PM »

20 May. 'Christopher Columbus' died in 1506... or did he? He is thought by some scholars to be a conflation of two characters, Cristofero Colombo of Genoa (1451-1480) and Cristobal Colon (1460-1506), born illegitimately in the Jewish Ghetto of Majorca, the son of prince Carlos of Viana and Margarita Colon, who took on the identity of the old mariner to protect himself from assassination by his uncle, King Ferdinand, over whose throne he had a claim. Ferdinand had succeeded to the throne in 1461 after the death of the aforementioned half-brother Carlos, who was probably poisoned.

Murometz · « **Reply #42 on:** May 21, 2006, 10:32:22 AM »

21 May. In 1921 a frog fall during a thunderstorm in Gibraltar covered the north of the colony with thousands of little amphibians. Frogs are the most common animal to fall from the sky mysteriously; such falls have been registered regularly since Pliny and the Annamese historical almanacs. Athenaeus, in The Deipnosophists (4th century AD) , records a frog fall in Greece so serious that the roads were blocked, people were unable to open their front doors and the town stank for weeks. There are records of hundreds of frog falls in the last 200 years.

Murometz · « **Reply #43 on:** May 24, 2006, 03:55:13 PM »

24 May. In 1889, a cow on the farm of John H Carter of South Simcoe in Canada gave birth to a calf and two lambs, larger and coarser that ordinary lambs, which had tuffs of hair like calves' hair on their breasts. This was reported in the Toronto Globe and the Quebec Daily Mercury, which published statements by well-known stock-breeders that they had examined the lambs and were compelled to accept the story of their origin. As Charles Fort pointed out, to a conventional biologist this yarn is about as preposterous as an elephant producing two bicycles and a baby elephant.

Murometz · « **Reply #44 on:** May 25, 2006, 09:11:16 AM »

25 May. Attorney Thomas Graves from Shreveport, Louisiana, was trying out his new speedboat with three friends on Lake Bistenau on Memorial Day (25 May) 1987. 'Here I am!' shouted Graves and threw his arms up. A bolt of lightning struck him dead. There was no thunder, lightning, or sign of lightning before the bolt struck, said witness Dan Russell Jr, who added that the remark was directed at Graves' girlfriend, a point omitted by the AP report, which embroidered by saying that he looked skywards as he made it. Graves was working on a case involving a fatal boating incident on that very lake.

Murometz · « **Reply #45 on:** May 25, 2006, 09:30:04 PM »

26 May. The Feast of St Philip Neri (1515-1595). He experienced an ecstasy in 1544, which left a physical effect on his heart. In great fervour a fist-sized palpitating swelling appeared on his left breast which he would cool against the floor. The post mortem found two ribs broken and thrust outwards, an injury of some age. In 1907 hailstones, containing images of a robed woman, 'like the Virgin of the Hermits', fell at Remirement in France. An enquiry called by the bishop of Saint-DiÈ heard 107 witnesses to the fall.

Scrasamax · « **Reply #46 on:** May 27, 2006, 10:30:34 PM »

28 May. St Theodolous the Stylite sat on top of a pillar in Asia Minor for 48 years. He then got a message from God to come down and talk to a clown who told him that his sacrifice had been utterly selfish. He returned, unabashed, to the top of his pillar to repent his selfishness. In 1881 there was a violent thunderstorm near Worcester and tons of periwinkles and hermit crabs came down from the sky, covering fields and a road, for about a mile. It was suggested that they had been dumped by a fishmonger, which greatly amused Charles Fort.

Murometz · « **Reply #47 on:** May 31, 2006, 09:29:26 AM »

31 May. In 1968, Dr Gerardo Vidal and his wife, driving outside Bahia Blanca in Argentina, went into a dense fog and lost consciousness. They came to on a strange road. Their car was badly scratched, and their watches had stopped. They discovered that 48 hours had passed, and they were in Mexico. A similar thing had happened to a Bahia Blanca businessman in 1959. A strange cloud had enveloped him and his car and the next moment he was standing in the countryside. Hailing a truck, he discovered he was in Salta, over 1,000 kilometres away. His car was still parked outside his hotel.

Murometz · « **Reply #48 on:** May 31, 2006, 10:22:17 PM »

June 1. The first day of the 15 day annual pilgrimage to St Patrick's purgatory, where the saint showed unbelievers the hell to come by opening the earth beneath their feet. The supposed site, a cave on an island in Lough Derg, Donegal, was established by a Benedictine monk, Henry of Saltry, in the 12th century. Pilgrims were locked overnight in the cave by the prior. If they were found when the gate was re-opened they were received with great joy; if not, they were understood to have perished in the Purgatory, and were never mentioned again. The site is still visited.

Murometz · « **Reply #49 on:** June 01, 2006, 06:46:34 PM »

June 2. Feast Day of St Elmo (died AD 303?). Elmo, or Erasmus, was supposedly a bishop in Syria who died in exile in Formiae, Campania. A legend said he was put to death by having his intestines wound out of his body on a windlass, a picture of which is his symbol. The resemblance of a windlass to a capstan might explain why he is honoured as the patron saint of sailors. The electrical discharge sometimes seen at the masthead of ships is called 'St Elmo's fire' and was taken as a sign of his protection. It is possible that the Hindenburg airship disaster of 1937 was caused by St Elmo's fire.