In 1943, authorities at a German POW camp in Poland discovered that three prisoners were missing. A considerable space separated the prisoners’ huts from the perimeter fence, so at first it wasn’t clear how they’d escaped.

But the three inmates had something in common — all three had exercised during the day on a vaulting horse in the yard. On investigating, the Germans discovered a 100-foot tunnel leading from that spot to an opening beyond the fence.

The truth became clear. Each day, the prisoners had carried the horse to the same spot with a man hidden inside. While they exercised, the hidden man had used a bowl to lengthen the tunnel, then hid again in the horse as it was carried back inside. The Germans had used siesmographs to detect tunneling, but the prisoners’ vaulting had masked the sounds of their digging.

All three escapees — Eric Williams, Michael Codner, and Oliver Philpot — reached neutral Sweden and were reunited with their families.

In 1620 the Duke of Buckingham dug a hole at the center of Stonehenge.

John Aubrey, who interviewed local residents about it in 1666, reports that “something was found, but what it was Mrs. Mary Trotman … hath forgot.”

Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford admired one another. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told the Detroit News in 1931, explaining why kept a portrait of Ford next to his desk.

Four months after Hitler invaded Austria, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal the Nazis bestowed on foreigners.

Ford elsewhere said, “History is more or less bunk.”

A prophecy told that Henry IV would die in Jerusalem. He assumed this meant he would die on crusade.

In fact, he died in the house of the abbot of Westminster — in the Jerusalem Chamber.

The following curious effect of the combination of figures has been sent to us by a friend in Paris, who states that it has been extensively circulated in that capital. We have not yet seen it in print here.

The votes upon the Presidency of Louis Napoleon were,–

Place the above in front of a mirror, so that the reflection of it may be visible:

This reflection will read, ‘III Empereur‘–Third Emperor. Louis Napoleon affects hereditary superstition, and it is stated that this singular coincidence confirmed him in the belief which he has always entertained of the exalted destiny for which Providence reserved him.

— Harper’s Magazine, 1857, quoted in Appleton Morgan, Macaronic Poetry, 1872

When a surgeon took off Lord Uxbridge’s leg after the Battle of Waterloo, a local resident asked permission to bury the limb in his garden in a sort of shrine. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned gruesomely bathetic: Visitors were shown the bloody chair on which Uxbridge had sat during the amputation, the boot he had worn, and finally a tombstone that read “Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge … who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory [in 1815].”

By 1862 the grave was being mocked openly; a poem by Thomas Gaspey included this verse:

A leg and foot to speak more plain
Lie here, of one commanding;
Who, though his wits he might retain,
Lost half his understanding.

Get it? Things went downhill from there. A steady stream of paying customers visited the tomb, including the king of Prussia and the Prince of Orange, but in 1878 Uxbridge’s son discovered that the family were displaying only the naked bones, which had been exposed in a storm. Rather than rebury them as ordered, the proprietors merely hid them, and in 1934 a widow finally burned them ignominiously in her furnace. C’est la guerre.

“Tecumseh’s curse” refers to an odd coincidence in U.S. history: Every 20 years, we elect a president who dies in office:

• William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, died of pneumonia in 1841.
• Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was assassinated in 1865.
• James Garfield, elected in 1880, was assassinated in 1881.
• William McKinley, elected in 1900, was assassinated in 1901.
• Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920, died of a heart attack in 1923.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1940, died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1945.
• John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was assassinated in 1963.

The curse was supposedly invoked by a Native American chief’s mother as he died. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, for some reason, seem to have escaped.