A 25-foot wall of syrup traveling at 35 mph. Twenty-one dead. Horses drowned. And the company blamed anarchists.

A two-month epidemic of involuntary dancing swept through Strasbourg. The city council's response was to hire musicians and open a dance floor. This did not help.

For nearly three months, Mary Toft fooled some of London's most eminent physicians into believing she had delivered seventeen dead rabbits. It took a porter buying a suspiciously small rabbit to end the charade.

Farmers in Western Australia were losing their wheat to twenty thousand migrating emus. The government's answer was two machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and a major who had never fought anything quite this fast.

A 22-foot wooden vat holding over a million pints of porter ruptured in a single afternoon, sending a wave of beer through a slum and killing eight people — five of them mourners at a child's wake next door. A jury ruled it an act of God.