David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

A noise a bit like amplifier feedback had been heard for three years coming from the right ear of a Welsh pony called Misty, according to the Veterinary Record (April 1995). It varied in intensity, but stayed at a constant pitch of 7 kHz. Hearing a buzzing in one’s ears is called subjective tinnitus; very much rarer is when other people can hear the noise, a condition called objective tinnitus, the cause of which is a matter of debate.

A nine-year-old Chinese girl was playing in Songjiang, near Shanghai, in July 1992 when she was carried off by a whirlwind and deposited unhurt in a treetop almost two miles away. According to a wire report from May 1986, a freak wind lifted up 13 children in the oasis of Hami in western China and deposited them unharmed in sand dunes and scrub 12 miles away.

Gloria Ramirez, 31, died of kidney failure at Riverside General Hospital, California, in February 1994, after being rushed there with chest pains. Emergency room staff were felled by ‘fumes’ when a blood sample was taken. A strange oily sheen on the woman’s skin and unexplained white crystals in her blood were reported. A doctor suffered liver and lung damage, and bone necrosis; at least 23 other people were affected. One hypothesis was that Ramirez, who had cervical cancer, had taken a cocktail of medicines that combined to make an insecticide (organophosphate) but exhaustive tests yielded no clues. The hospital was later demolished. The episode remains a mystery 10 years later.

In April 1997 a turkey hunter in Yellowwood State Forest, Indiana, came upon a huge sandstone boulder wedged between three branches of an oak tree about 35 ft from the ground. The arrow-shaped rock was estimated to weigh 500 lb. Subsequently, four more large boulders were found wedged high up in trees elsewhere in the forest. All were in remote areas. None of the trees was damaged and there were no signs of heavy equipment being used or of tornado damage, and no one recalled any mishaps involving dynamite anywhere nearby.

While on holiday a woman, referred to by the British Medical Journal (December 1997) as AB, heard two voices in her head telling her to return home immediately. Back in London, the voices gave her an address that turned out to be a hospital’s brain scan department. The voices told her to ask for a scan as she had a brain tumour and her brain stem was inflamed. Though she had no symptoms, a scan was eventually arranged and she did indeed have a tumour. After an operation, AB heard the voices again. ‘We are pleased to have helped you,’ they said. ‘Goodbye.’ AB made a full recovery.

A hazard unique to Venezuelan highways is a slippery goo called La Mancha Negra (the black stain), although it’s more of a sludge with the consistency of chewing gum. Although the government has spent millions of dollars in research, no one knows what the goo is, where it comes from, or how to get rid of it. It first appeared in 1987 on the road from Caracas to the airport, covering 50 yards, and spread inexorably every year. By 1992 it was a major road hazard all around the capital and it was claimed 1,800 motorists had died after losing control. The problem remains.

When Jim Wilson’s father died in Natal, South Africa, in April 1967, both Jim, living in England, and his sister Muriel, living in Holland, were informed. Muriel contacted her husband, who was on business in Portugal, and he flew to South Africa right away. Changing planes at Las Palmas airport in the Canary Islands, he bought a postcard showing holidaymakers on Margate beach, Natal, and sent it to Muriel. It was she who noticed that the photograph showed her father walking up the beach.

In October 1975 Mrs Lynn Connolly was hanging washing in her garden in The Quadrant, Hull, when she felt a sharp tap on the top of her head. It was caused by a small silver notecase, 63 mm by 36.5 mm, hinged, containing a used notepad with 13 sheets left. It was marked with the initials ‘SE’, ‘C8’, ‘TB’ (or ‘JB’) and ‘Klaipeda’, a Lithuanian seaport. No one claimed it at the police station, so it was returned to Mrs Connolly. It seems likely it fell only a short distance but from where? If it had dropped from a plane, it would have given her more than a tap.

The village of Canneto di Caronia on Sicily’s north coast has been plagued by mysterious fires. The trouble began on January 20, 2004 when a TV caught fire. Then things in neighbouring houses began to burn, including washing machines, mobile phones, mattresses, chairs and even the insulation on water pipes. The electricity company cut off all power, as did the railway company, but the fires continued. Experts of all kinds carried out tests, but no explanation was found. The village was evacuated in February, but when people began returning in March the fires resumed. Police ruled out a pyromaniac after they saw wires bursting into flames. Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, was quoted as blaming demons.

On June 28, 2002, in the middle of a spate of unexplained cattle mutilations in Argentina, something macabre was found in a field near Suco, west of Rio Cuarto in San Luis province. Nineteen cows were stuffed into a sheet metal water tank, closed with a conical cap. Nine were drowned, the rest barely alive, having endured freezing temperatures, not to mention the shock of their lives.

Three pupils of the Evangelist Primary School in the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri rushed into the headmistress’s office in March 2000 and said that a fellow pupil had been transformed into a yam after accepting a sweet from a stranger. The headmistress found the root tuber and took it to the police station for safe-keeping. Following local radio reports, hundreds of people flocked to see the yam and police were hunting for the sweet-giver. What happened next failed to reach the wire services.

Madame Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etoiles was known throughout Paris as one of the most beautiful and cultured women of her day. In 1745 she met King Louis XV of France. The two immediately fell in love, and Madame d’Etoiles obtained a legal separation from her husband. She was then given the title of the Marquise de Pompadour and installed in the attic apartment of Versailles as the king’s mistress. Her apartment became known as the meeting place for some of the most celebrated people of France, and her guests were assisted in the steep 100-stair ascent by an elementary lift dubbed the ‘flying chair’. But her private life with the king was less than ideal. After two blissful years together, Pompadour lost her physical passion for the king. She feared losing him and believed that a diet of vanilla, truffles and celery would stimulate her desire for sexual activity. It only worsened her already weak physical condition. After five years in the attic, the king moved her to a flat on the ground floor of the palace. It was clear he had now taken new mistresses. Pompadour, however, retained her powerful position as the king’s political and artistic adviser until her death in 1764.

As a boy, Thomas Chatterton was a prodigious poet and scholar, and early Romantic who at the age of ten wrote on a par with his adult contemporaries. His family was poor, his mother a widowed seamstress, and privacy was difficult to come by in their small Bristol home. So young Thomas set up a writing room in the attic, which he jealously guarded as his secret domain. In the attic room, among his books and papers, stood Ellinor, a life-size doll made of woven rushes, which his mother used for dress fittings. Thomas loved Ellinor and always took care to powder her face and do her hair. However, when he moved to London to pursue his literary career, he left his beloved Ellinor behind. He rented a garret reminiscent of his attic study at home, and thereafter suffering repeated personal and professional disappointments, including failure to sell a series of forgeries he claimed had been written by a fifteenth-century monk, Chatterton took arsenic and died at the age of 17.