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Angel Hair is a rare phenomenon that has so far defied explanation. It is made up of silken threads that rain down on to the earth, but reach out to touch it and it will almost certainly vanish before your eyes. It...

Children are seemingly not safe in Japan, either, especially since a demon named Eight Feet Tall uses a masculine voice to call out “Po . . . Po . . . Po” in an attempt to lure kids between the ages of...

William Archibald Spooner is forever locked into history because the linguistic phenomenon known as a “spoonerism” is named after him. A spoonerism involves the accidental (or sometimes intentional) swapping of letters, words, or vowels in a sentence – for example: “Go and...

The great train robbery I think you know the English word “famous”. If someone is famous, it means that everyone has heard of them, that they are well-known. So, Beethoven was a famous composer, and the Eifel Tower...

Father Urbain Granadier was a French Catholic priest who was burned at the stake after being convicted of witchcraft. He served as priest in the church of Sainte Croix in Loudun, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Poitiers. Ignoring his vow of...

A Japanese legend tells about a female ghost called Kuchisake-onna, who is the soul of a woman murdered by her jealous husband. This spirit is blamed for many deaths since the 1600s. She walks along dark streets and alleys, covering her mouth...

San Francisco, California A psychedelic labyrinth on the San Francisco bay. PEOPLE STUMBLE ABOUT THE LABYRINTH, arms outstretched. Even so, they sometimes find themselves smacking headfirst into their own reflection. Shrieking and giggling...

Forman took up astrology in mid-life, and between 1596 and 1603, he averaged 2,000 consultations every year. That means he had an impact on huge number of Elizabethan lives, and since he documented them—and himself—in such detail, he is one of the...

Carl Linnaeus was an 18th-century botanist who developed a system of classification and taxonomy that we still use today. He saw similarities that allowed plants and animals to be grouped into categories, and he believed in a lot of mythical creatures that...

Imagine, if a bold explorer had pioneered the sea route from Europe to India centuries before Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama. Well, that’s exactly what the brothers Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi attempted to do in 1291. The...