The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (36 page)

Countess Toutschokoff was the wife of a Russian general at the time that Napoleon was invading Moscow. During that time, she woke from a dream in which
her father had come into her room with her young son and said that her husband had been killed at Borodino. The next two nights, she had the same dream. Finally she told her husband about it, and they looked at a map but could find no such town. Later that same year, her father came into her room early one morning, holding her son's hand and saying that her husband had indeed been killed at Borodino, a small town outside Moscow.

In
Paris in the Twentieth Century
, Jules Verne describes the Paris skyline dominated by a large metallic structure. The book was written in 1863, years before the Eiffel Tower was conceptualized in 1887.

TOLD BY ANN B. IGOE

Once my daughter and I went to the airport in Charleston, South Carolina, to pick up a woman and her son from South Africa. We had never seen her before, and I was not enthusiastic to be seeing her at this time. She was a woman that my husband had met on one of his
trips. She had entertained him, and he had invited her to visit us if she ever came to America.

She was not difficult to recognize. She had the audacity to arrive wearing a khaki suit and pith helmet, and she walked about our little airport as though on a safari.

When she marched into our living room, she stopped dead in her tracks, gasped, and shouted for her son to come immediately. He found her standing in front of a painting that my daughter and I had bought in a small village in southern France.

He could not believe his eyes. He said, “This is the painting that my mother and I fell in love with in a small village in southern France, but because our funds were low, we had lunch to think about it before making our decision. When we returned to buy the painting, we were told that it had just been sold to an American woman and her daughter.”

They had settled for a lesser painting by the same artist, and they just happened to have a photograph showing the painting hanging in their living room in South Africa.

Of course, new friendships were cemented on the spot.

MAYBE HE HAD A POINT

An agoraphobic man who had vowed never to leave the house again after he was assaulted at age eighteen decided, after thirty years of self-induced imprisonment, to take a walk outside. But the strain of being out was too much for him: he suffered a heart attack while strolling along.

“Whether we name divine presence synchronicity, serendipity, or graced moments matters little. What matters is the reality that our hearts have been understood. Nothing is as real as a healthy dose of magic which restores our spirits.” —NANCY LONG

ONE HARDY BOOK

When British actor Anthony Hopkins signed up to play a leading role in the film
The Girl from Petrovka
, based on a book by George Feifer, he traveled to London to pick up a copy of the book for research. Although he visited many bookshops, he was unable to find a copy of the book anywhere. Waiting for a train at an
underground station, Hopkins noticed a book sitting on a bench near him, apparently discarded. When he went to see what it was, he was amazed to find that it was
The Girl from Petrovka
, the very book he'd been searching for! As if this wasn't enough, years later while shooting the film, Hopkins was introduced to the book's author. The two men discussed the film and the book it was based on, and Feifer offhandedly mentioned that he didn't own a copy of the book himself anymore. He'd leant it to a friend who had lost it somewhere in London. Hopkins, incredulous, produced his found copy of the book, the margins of which were covered with the original owner's notes—made with Feifer's own hand.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway and poet Hart Crane were both born on July 21, 1899. Both struggled with alcoholism and depression, and both committed suicide.

A man was speeding down a highway at 110 mph when he struck the back of a car, immediately killing the two people inside. The victims? The man's mother and her elderly neighbor, whom she was taking on a leisurely drive to see the town's Christmas lights.

WAKING DREAMS

G. H. Lewis, the companion of novelist George Eliot, told the following story of Charles Dickens: