Distances to which objects were carried by the tornado at Mount Carmel, Ill., June 4, 1877:

A letter from Mount Carmel was found at Vincennes, Ind., twenty-five miles northeastward. A piece of tin roofing was picked up near Hazleton, Ind., seventeen miles northeastward. The spire, vane, and gilded ball of the Methodist church were found near Decker’s Station, Ind., fifteen miles northeastward. A letter from Mount Carmel was carried by the wind to Widner Township, Ind., forty-five miles north-northeastward. A discharge from the military service of the United States belonging to a Mount Carmel man was found near Edwardsport, Ind., nearly fifty miles northeastward, and a letter from Mount Carmel was found near the same place. … I was also told that a paper sack of flour from a demolished store was found nearly five miles distant in Indiana, with no further damage than a small hole in it.

From the Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1877.

In September 1931, the Irving family claimed to hear a scratching behind the walls of their farmhouse on the Isle of Man. That seemed mundane enough until the scratcher revealed itself as Gef, a 79-year-old talking mongoose from New Delhi. Over the next four years, James Irving kept a journal recording the family’s bizarre interactions with the creature, which he said threw objects, boasted about its powers, and gossiped about the neighbors.

Investigations went nowhere, as Gef appeared and spoke only to the Irvings. A hair sample and tooth impressions suggested only a dog; a set of pawprints were found not to be those of a mongoose.

It’s hard to credit such an outlandish story, but it’s equally hard to see why anyone would invent it. The Irvings profited nothing by it and were widely ridiculed in the media; when the family finally sold the house in 1937, they lost money, as it was now reputed to be haunted.

In 1947, the new owner claimed to have discovered and shot a real mongoose on the property. You don’t suppose … ?

Modern meteorologists might envy Patrick Murphy: In compiling his Weather Almanac for the Year 1838, Murphy had made a year’s forecasts at once, including the prediction that Jan. 20 would be “fair” with probably the “lowest degree of winter temperature.”

The weather complied in spades: On Jan. 20 the thermometer plunged 56 degrees and stood below zero for several hours, marking the coldest day of the century. Such a throng filled Murphy’s London shop that police were called in to keep order, and the forecaster was immortalized in verse:

Murphy has a weather eye,
He can tell whene’er he pleases
Whether it will be wet or dry,
When it thaws and when it freezes.

The almanac made £7,000 and went through 50 reprintings, and for many years afterward the winter of 1837-38 was remembered as Murphy’s Winter.

Somehow he never repeated the feat, though.

See Lucky Guess.

In the afternoon of Monday, July 25th, 1768, an extraordinary gust of wind near Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire, not only unroofed the dwelling-house, barns, stables, and out-buildings belonging to a farmer named Bishop (levelling one of the buildings with the ground, and tearing up and rending more than sixty apple and pear trees), but also took up his son, a youth of sixteen, and carried him at a height of four or five yards from the ground to a distance of about eight yards, over a stone wall, fish-pond, and a hedge, depositing him in a great state of terror, but otherwise unhurt, in a field of hay.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

The world’s largest population of feral camels is in … Australia.

Thousands were imported between 1840 and 1907 to help explore the continent’s arid interior — it’s said that the first piano in Alice Springs arrived on a camel’s back. (A world away, the same thing was happening in the United States.)

The animals were gradually obviated by automobiles, but as many as a million still wander the country in herds — so many, ironically, that Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.