On Nov. 30, 1896, two young boys came across an unidentified carcass on the beach near St. Augustine, Fla. Pale pink and rubbery, it was huge, 18 feet long and weighing an estimated 5 tons.

An analysis in 1971 agreed with early guesses that it was a gigantic octopus — in this case almost unthinkably huge, “with arms 75 to 100 feet in length and about 18 inches in diameter at the base — a total spread of some 200 feet.”

More recent studies in 1995 and 2004 say it was “the skin of an enormous warm-blooded vertebrate,” probably the entire blubber layer of a whale. Ick.

In 1832, a human skeleton was unearthed in a sandbank in Fall River, Mass. A triangular plate of brass covered its sternum, and it wore a broad belt of brass tubes. The grave also contained a number of brass and copper arrowheads. To judge from the skull, the skeleton had belonged to a young man, but from where? The local Indian tribes did not work brass.

One commentator claimed it as evidence that the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, or Egyptians had discovered North America in the remote past. Later historians speculated that an early Norse explorer might have traveled south from Newfoundland, but the style of armor was unknown to medieval Norway. A third possibility is that it belonged to an early European colonist, perhaps a Portuguese explorer.

The skeleton was destroyed in a fire in 1843, so there’s no way now to date the remains scientifically, or to gather any further information. Its identity must remain a mystery.

The following remarkable account of the stoppage of Niagara Falls, appeared in the Niagara Mail at the time of the occurrence: “That mysterious personage, the oldest inhabitant, has no recollection of so singular an occurrence as took place at the Falls on the 30th of March, 1847. The ‘six hundred and twenty thousand tons of water each minute’ nearly ceased to flow, and dwindled away into the appearance of a mere milldam. The rapids above the falls disappeared, leaving scarcely enough on the American side to turn a grindstone. Ladies and gentlemen rode in carriages one-third of the way across the river towards the Canada shore, over solid rock as smooth as a kitchen floor. The Iris says: ‘Table Rock, with some two hundred yards more, was left dry; islands and places where the foot of man never dared to tread have been visited, flags placed upon come, and mementoes brought away. This unexpected event is attempted to be accounted for by an accumulation of ice at the lower extremity of Fort Erie, which formed a sort of dam between Fort Erie and Buffalo.'”

— Barkham Burroughs’ Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889