That Book of Perfectly Useless Information

Bizarre Almost Unexplainable Events

A pair of identical American twin boys were separated at birth in 1940 and adopted by different people who didn't know each other. Each boy was named James, each boy married a woman named Linda, had a son named James Alan and was then divorced.

In 1975 in Detroit, a baby fell out of a building fourteen stories up. Fortunately, it landed on a man named Joseph Figlock. A year later, another baby fell from the same building and survived by falling on...Joseph Figlock.

A nun at a convent in Clwyd tried but failed to grow mush- rooms in the convent grounds. She died at the age of seventy- nine in 1986, and a decent crop of mushrooms has grown on her grave every autumn since. Nowhere else in the convent do mushrooms grow.

In 1938, Phyllis Newcombe, twenty-two, combusted spontaneous- ly at a dance hall during a waltz. Many people witnessed this unexplained phenomenon, which has parallels with the combustion of a British pensioner, Euphemia Johnson, who died after suddenly bursting into fire during her afternoon tea.

In 1984, a Greek Orthodox priest was cooking a sheep's head when he discovered that the sheep had a jaw composed of fourteen-karat gold (worth some $6,000). The sheep had come from a herd owned by the priest's own brother-in-law, and he couldn't come up with any plausible explanation.

In 1986, American judge Samuel King was annoyed that some jurors were absent from his Californian court because of heavy rain, so he issued a decree: "I hereby order that it cease raining by Tuesday." California suffered a five-year drought. So in 1991 the judge decreed, "Rain shall fall in California beginning February 27." Later that day, the state had its heaviest rainfall in a decade.

In Bermuda, two brothers were killed precisely one year apart at the age of seventeen by the same taxi driver carry- ing the same passenger on the same street. The two boys had each been riding the same moped.