The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (19 page)

The first city in the U.S. to fluoridate its water was Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945.

The first state to use the gas chamber was Nevada in 1924.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, but only by Charles Thomson and John Hancock. The majority of the people signed it on August 2, and the final signature wasn't until five years later.

EDISON'S PARANORMAL EXPERIMENTS

Thomas Edison was a scientist and legendary inventor, but he also held great interest in the paranormal. In 1948 the Philosophical Library published a book called
The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison
, which is a collection of Edison's personal essays, letters, and journal entries. Much of the content talks about his attempts to communicate
with the beyond and his numerous experiments contacting the dead and the afterlife.

THE NUN CAME BACK

A young Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary at a cave near Lourdes, France, at the tender age of fourteen. When she told people of what she'd seen, she was accused of lying, but within two weeks water began to trickle from the same cave, and it became renowned as a place of healing. Bernadette was declared a visionary and a saint.

Ironically, Bernadette herself never benefited from the healing waters, suffering a variety of ailments, including asthma and tuberculosis. The Sisters of Nevers, the local convent, cared for Bernadette until her death at the age of thirty-five, in the year 1879.

A few decades after someone believed to be a saint has died, it is customary to dig up his or her body to see if it remained intact. Bernadette's body did, in fact, remain quite preserved. Her recovered body was washed and then reinterred. Several years later, in 1919, she was again dug up and again found in a preserved state. She was reburied, only to be dug up once more in 1925, fortysix years after her death. Her body was remarkably well
preserved, so much so that she was put on display at the Church of St. Gildard in Nevers, where she sits to this day.

Seventeenth-century queen Anne of England gave birth to seventeen children. Of these, only one made it past infancy, and even then the child lived until only the age of twelve.

SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Can you name them?

• Pyramids at Giza
  
• Statue of Zeus at Olympia
  
• Hanging gardens of Babylon
  
• Colossus of Rhodes
  
• Lighthouse at Alexandria
  
• Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
  
• Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
  

ABE LINCOLN: AFTER THE FUNERAL