11 Strangest Wikipedia Articles You Can Fall Into Tonight

Wikipedia keeps an internal list of its own strangest pages. It is called Wikipedia:Unusual articles, and the criteria are blunt: a subject qualifies if it is “something a reasonable person would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.” Several hundred entries sit there, sorted by continent and stamped with flag icons, because even the weird stuff gets a filing system.

We read the list, then the sources underneath it, because plenty of famous internet-weird facts are exaggerations laundered through listicles until nobody checked. Eleven survived. Set against the stranger corners of online shopping or the machine-generated sludge filling the rest of the web, a citation-heavy encyclopedia at two in the morning is a better class of rabbit hole. Without further ado.

1. Dancing Plague of 1518

In July 1518 a woman recorded as Frau Troffea walked into a Strasbourg street and started dancing. She could not stop. Within a week thirty more had joined her.

The city’s prescription was more dancing, so guild halls were cleared, musicians hired, strong men paid to keep the afflicted upright. It went badly. Strasbourg banned public dancing instead and walked the survivors to a shrine of Saint Vitus in red shoes sprinkled with holy water. Contemporary city records mention no deaths, which makes the endlessly repeated “fifteen a day” toll a later invention.

2. Tarrare

Born near Lyon around 1772, dead at Versailles in 1798. In between, Tarrare ate.

At seventeen he weighed roughly 100 pounds and reportedly got through a quarter of a bullock in a day. Army doctors watched him finish a meal prepared for fifteen people in one sitting. French intelligence fed him a wooden box holding a document, pointed him at the Prussian lines, and recovered the paper from his stool two days later, still legible.

3. Great Molasses Flood

On 15 January 1919 a steel tank at 529 Commercial Street in Boston’s North End came apart. Fifty feet tall, ninety feet across, holding 2.3 million US gallons.

The wave peaked at twenty-five feet and moved at an estimated 35 miles per hour. Twenty-one people died and around 150 were hurt. One of the first class actions in Massachusetts history followed, 119 plaintiffs against United States Industrial Alcohol, settled at roughly $628,000. Residents reported for decades afterward that on hot days the neighborhood still smelled of molasses.

4. Mike the Headless Chicken

On 10 September 1945 a Colorado farmer called Lloyd Olsen went out to kill a rooster for dinner. The axe took the head, missed the jugular vein, and left most of the brain stem intact. The bird got up.

Olsen fed him milk and water through an eyedropper, cleared his throat with a syringe, and toured him at 25 cents a head for around $4,500 a month. Mike lasted eighteen months, dying in a Phoenix hotel room in March 1947 after the Olsens left the syringe at the previous show. Fruita has thrown a festival for him on the third weekend of May since 1999.

5. The Cadaver Synod

January 897. Pope Stephen VI had his predecessor Formosus dug up after nine months underground, dressed the corpse in papal vestments, propped it in a courtroom and tried it for perjury.

A deacon was appointed to answer on the body’s behalf. The verdict was guilty. Formosus was stripped, had the three fingers of his right hand used for blessing cut off, and was thrown into the Tiber. Stephen was deposed, imprisoned and strangled before the year ended. In 898 Pope John IX banned the trial of corpses outright, which is the sort of rule you only have to write once.

6. The Wow! Signal

The Big Ear telescope in Delaware, Ohio, caught a narrowband burst on 15 August 1977 at 1420.4556 MHz, right beside the hydrogen line where astronomers had argued a deliberate broadcast would sit. The printout read 6EQUJ5, a running intensity measure rather than a message.

Jerry Ehman circled it and wrote “Wow!” in the margin, which is the entire origin of the name. The burst filled the full 72-second observation window and has never been heard since. A Planetary Habitability Laboratory team reworking decades of archival data now favors a cold hydrogen cloud briefly lit up by a passing burst of radiation.

7. Toynbee Tiles

Somebody has been embedding messages in American street asphalt since 1983, and the wording barely varies: “TOYNBEE IDEA / IN MOViE `2001 / RESURRECT DEAD / ON PLANET JUPiTER.”

Several hundred have turned up across two dozen US cities plus Buenos Aires and Santiago, each about twelve inches by six and built from linoleum and asphalt crack filler. Kubrick’s film, for the record, contains no Toynbee and no resurrection. Justin Duerr traced them to a Philadelphia recluse named Severino Verna, a case laid out in Jon Foy’s Sundance-winning documentary Resurrect Dead. Fresh tiles started appearing again in 2016.

8. Kentucky Meat Shower

Bath County, Kentucky, 3 March 1876, between eleven and noon. A farmer’s wife identified as Mrs. Crouch was making soap on her porch when meat began falling out of a clear sky. She said it was snowing meat.

The flakes covered a strip roughly a hundred yards by fifty, most about two inches square. Two men tasted it, as men will, and reported lamb or venison, while microscopy found lung tissue and cartilage. The explanation that has held since 1876 came from a physician named L. D. Kastenbine, who blamed a flock of vultures emptying their stomachs in flight. One piece survives in alcohol at Transylvania University.

9. The Exploding Whale of Florence, Oregon

A 45-foot sperm whale washed up near Florence on 9 November 1970. The beach belonged to the Oregon Highway Division, whose engineer George Thornton settled on half a short ton of dynamite, assuming scavenging birds would handle the rest.

A bystander named Walter Umenhofer, explosives-trained in the military, told them twenty sticks would do the job. They were planning to use twenty cases. Nobody listened. The charge went off at 3:45 on 12 November and flung blubber 800 feet, one slab flattening the roof of Umenhofer’s new Oldsmobile Regency 98, bought days earlier at a dealership promotion called Whale of a Deal. The site is now Exploding Whale Memorial Park, named by public vote in 2020.

10. Bir Tawil

There is a 795-square-mile patch of desert on the Egypt-Sudan border that neither government wants. Britain and Egypt drew a political line along the 22nd parallel in 1899, then an administrative line in 1902 following actual tribal use.

Egypt argues for the 1899 version, which puts Bir Tawil in Sudan. Sudan argues for the 1902 version, which puts it in Egypt. Each preferred border gives the place away, because the same argument settles the Hala’ib Triangle nearby, ten times larger with a Red Sea coast. In June 2014 a Virginian named Jeremiah Heaton planted a flag there on his daughter’s seventh birthday and declared the Kingdom of North Sudan. Nobody has recognized it.

11. List of People Who Have Died While on the Toilet

It is a real article, with tables, date columns, citations and a semi-protected edit lock. The earliest entry is Duke Jing of Jin, who in the summer of 581 BC fell into a toilet pit.

Edmund Ironside was stabbed in a privy in 1016. George II collapsed at Kensington Palace on 25 October 1760 shortly after attending to his close stool, and his valet, hearing the noise and running in, found the king on the floor. Lenny Bruce in 1966, Judy Garland in 1969, Elvis in 1977. The edit lock exists because people keep adding jokes, which means somewhere an unpaid volunteer keeps quietly reverting them so the citations stay clean.