The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (37 page)

Dickens dreamt that he was in a room where everyone was dressed in scarlet. He stumbled against a lady standing with her back towards him. As he apologized, she turned her head and said, quite unprovoked, “My name is Napier.”

He knew no one of the name Napier, and the face was unknown to him. Two days later, before he was to give a reading, a lady friend came into his waiting room accompanied by an unknown lady in a scarlet opera-cloak. The unknown woman, said his friend, “is very determined of being introduced.”

“Not Miss Napier?” he jokingly inquired.

“Yes, Miss Napier.”

Although the face of the woman Dickens had seen in his dream was not the face of the actual Miss Napier, the coincidence of the cloak and name was striking.

American author Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife and then wrote a novel about it (
An American Dream
).

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL?

The Bible is the number one book stolen in the United States, according to booksellers across America. Strange, seeing as people are giving out Bibles for free so often—and not to mention that the Bible's Ten Commandments forbid stealing.

BAD SHOT

Despite being a self-avowed junkie and homosexual, William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was a real lady-killer—literally.
One long night in Mexico, filled with booze and drugs, he tried to shoot a martini glass off the head of his common-law wife, Joan, with a pistol. He missed, hitting her in the forehead and killing her. Charged with involuntary manslaughter, he fled Mexico.

Surrealist Salvador Dali owned an ocelot as a pet.

Author Isabelle Allende always begins writing her next novel on January 8.

FRAMING YOUR HUSBAND

Agatha Christie nearly pulled off a real-life hoax worthy of her mystery novels. Upset that her husband was leaving her for another woman, she set up an incriminating scene that almost got him arrested for her “murder.” Luckily for him, an employee at a distant seaside hotel saw news photos of Christie and recognized her as the woman who had slipped into the hotel under an assumed name. Although Christie claimed amnesia, the police were not amused after having wasted a week of searching rivers and bogs for her body.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

This hoax is still accepted by many as genuine:
The Education of Little Tree
by Forrest Carter was purported to be the genuine memoir of a Cherokee orphan learning the ways of his tribe and nature while struggling to live in a white world. The book, still in print, turns out to have been written by a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member named Asa Carter.

Misha Defonseca's 1997 holocaust memoir,
Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years
, attracted media attention in 2007 when a genealogical researcher found that the author had fabricated details about her life during World War II. The book, which was sold to its publisher as non fiction, tells a fascinating story of the author's travels through Europe following the execution of her parents by Nazis. The author, who represents herself as a Jew, kills a German soldier, is taken in by a pack of wolves, and wanders into the Warsaw Ghetto and escapes. After it was discovered that
Ms. Defonseca spent the war safely in Brussels (and that she was not even Jewish), she confessed: “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not actual reality—it was my reality.” The “memoir” had been a best seller in Europe and Canada, and was the basis for a French film.