From CrimeReads: “In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Alexander MacDonald had built the house in 1887. He lived there with his wife Janet and their adopted teenaged daughter Mary Ellen. Around 1912, strange events began to plague the farm. Balls of light floated through the air. Banging noises emanated from the house. Doors refused to open. People struggled to breathe. Unseen hands released cows from their barn. Horses’ manes were found braided. Laundry, rugs, and eating utensils were stolen, some later found buried, others discovered in the tops of trees. A mysterious hand was seen waving out of an upper story window when no one was home. A strange blue glow emanated from the ground and barn.”
He was a hospital janitor but had a secret life as an artist and fantasy novelist
From The Official Henry Darger: “Henry was a reclusive hospital janitor and dishwasher who led a secret life as a prolific visual artist and epic novelist. His vast collection of creative work was discovered in 1972 when his two-room apartment in Chicago was cleared out shortly before he died. Over some 350 watercolor, pencil, collage and carbon-traced drawings, most of them stitched into three enormous albums, as well as seven typewritten hand-bound books, thousands of bundled sheets of typewritten text, and numerous journals, ledgers and scrapbooks were discovered. Darger’s unpublished 15,000-page typewritten fantasy novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and its 8,500-page handwritten sequel of sorts were the sagas upon which he based several hundred panoramic “illustrations.”
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After almost 50 years The Times finally solved the murder of its Middle East reporter
From The Times: “Experienced and road-worn, with slicked-back brown hair and china-blue eyes, David Holden was 53 when he landed in Cairo on a warm night not long before Christmas, 1977. This was to be the foreign correspondent’s last reporting trip. His body was found the next morning, dumped in the dirt beside a road close to the airport, stripped of all means of identification. He had been shot from behind with a single bullet to the heart. The Sunday Times Insight team, overseen by Harold Evans, had cracked some of the biggest stories of its time, including the damage done by the Soviet mole Kim Philby and the birth defects caused by the morning sickness drug thalidomide. Yet the murder of their own correspondent was an enigma that went unsolved.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
They were kicked out of Disney’s most exclusive club so they filed a lawsuit
From New York: “September 3, 2017, was like so many other late-summer evenings at Disneyland. As the heat began to break on Main Street, swarms of exhausted families packed up their impulse purchases and their double-wide strollers and called it a day. It was almost 10 p.m. when security received an urgent dispatch. A guest was apparently showing signs of distress on a log-cabin-style bench. Rodriguez did not realize yet that the barely cogent man was Scott Anderson, Club 33’s most notoriously outspoken member. But he knew he needed to get him out of the park — conspicuous drunkenness at Disneyland is strictly forbidden. Five days later, Anderson received a letter letting him know that his, along with his wife’s, Club 33 membership had been suspended for being allegedly drunk in public. Game over. It had taken him and his wife nearly a decade to get into the club in the first place. So they filed a lawsuit.”
Two islands, one belonging to Russia and one to the US, are close together but a day apart
From Wikipedia: “The Diomede Islands, also known in Russia as the Gvozdev Islands, consist of two rocky, mesa-like islands: The Russian island of Big Diomede, also known as Ratmanov Island, and the U.S. island of Little Diomede, also known as Krusenstern Island. The Diomede Islands are located in the middle of the Bering Strait between mainland Alaska and Siberia. Because they are separated by the International Date Line, Big Diomede is almost a day ahead of Little Diomede, but not completely; due to locally defined time zones, Big Diomede is only 21 hours ahead of Little Diomede (20 in summer). Because of this, the islands are sometimes called Tomorrow Island (Big Diomede) and Yesterday Island (Little Diomede). The international date line and the border are about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from each island, at 168°58’37″W. The two islands are about 3.8 kilometres (2.4 mi) apart at their closest points.”
She has Tourette’s Syndrome but her twin sister does not
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com