Thomas Gainsborough, short on time for outdoor sketching, reportedly staged miniature scenery to paint by candlelight.
Image: Futility Closet
ENGLAND — Thomas Gainsborough, the painter, is said to have solved a professional difficulty with a tabletop and a good deal of produce. According to Futility Closet, the artist had to earn his living painting portraits and so could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked.
Authorities round up a wandering bird just days after a separate emu incident in the same California city.
Image: UPI Odd News
SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. — Authorities in Santa Cruz, California, have captured an escaped emu found wandering the city's streets, according to a report from UPI's Odd News service. The bird was rounded up just days after a separate incident involving another emu in the same city.
Expedition to Nikumaroro reports the so-called Taraia Object, spotted in satellite imagery, was not the aviator's lost aircraft after all.
Image: Unexplained Mysteries
NIKUMARORO, KIRIBATI — An expedition to the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro has concluded that a much-discussed anomaly in a lagoon, thought by some to be the remains of Amelia Earhart's aircraft, is nothing more than a collection of large trees, according to a report by T.K. Randall of Unexplained Mysteries, citing Mail Online.
Fans of China's BabyQueen debate the paternity of a fictional child after member Mity posts a maternity-leave notice to Weibo.
Image: Daily Star: Weird News
CHINA, VIA WEIBO — Followers of the AI-generated girl group BabyQueen have been thrown into confusion, according to the Daily Star, after one of its five digitally created members announced that she was pregnant and leaving the act.
The Chapel of Expiation, raised over the Madeleine Cemetery, has outlived the monarchy it honored and still draws an annual Mass.
Image: Atlas Obscura
PARIS, FRANCE — A quiet chapel in Paris, according to Atlas Obscura, stands as a monument to a single sin: regicide. The word "expiation," the entry notes, refers to the act of atoning for wrongdoing, and the building was conceived as just such an act.
A mystified reader's letter in 1890 revealed that Samuel Palmer's index entries were often little more than the newspaper's own captions.
LONDON, ENGLAND — According to Futility Closet, the index to the London Times in the 19th century was compiled by one Samuel Palmer, a man of what the site calls an unusual method of working. The peculiarity apparently escaped general notice until 1890, when a reader named Corrie Thompson wrote to the journal Notes and Queries to complain.
A 1978 radio drama, reissued in a five-hour retro broadcast, follows a man who cannot escape one figure.
Image: Weird Darkness
THE AIRWAVES — A four-digit number has taken up residence in the life of one Edgar Logan, according to a program listing posted by the Weird Darkness podcast, and it shows no sign of leaving.
Administrator Jared Isaacman says NASA has a seat at the table on UAP reports, while the Pentagon releases further declassified files.
Image: Daily Star: Weird News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The administrator of NASA, Jared Isaacman, has declined to rule out the existence of alien life, according to a report in the Daily Star, saying the public must remain open minded as reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) climb.
Elon Musk tells a Texas audience the new rocket-assisted car will reach 60 mph in 0.81 seconds and begin production in 2028.
Image: Unexplained Mysteries
MCGREGOR, TEXAS — A new Tesla Roadster was unveiled at SpaceX's Rocket Test and Development Center in McGregor, Texas, according to a report by T.K. Randall for Unexplained Mysteries, which in turn credits the Independent. The vehicle, the report says, was shown driving up a curved ramp until it was upside-down, then dropping, flipping in mid-air and coming gently to rest while hovering.
Scientists used decades-old annotations and a computer to coax a dwindling bird population back into song, according to Futility Closet.
Image: Futility Closet
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — When the local population of rufous-collared sparrows in Buenos Aires began to dwindle, scientists turned to an unusual remedy: voice lessons, according to a post on Futility Closet.
Residents of an Andhra Pradesh village say stones have rained on their homes after dark for nearly a week, with no culprit found.
Image: Gulf Today
APPAJIPETA, INDIA — Residents of Appajipeta village, in Pimdi mandal of Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh, say they have been living in fear after stones began striking their houses during the night hours, according to a report by Gulf Today.
Craig Hamilton-Parker, who styles himself the 'Prophet of Doom', says a dream vision showed something launched at Air Force One amid 'radioactive dust'.
Image: Daily Star: Weird News
LONDON, ENGLAND — A British psychic who describes himself as the "Prophet of Doom" has issued a fresh warning concerning the safety of the President's aircraft, according to a report in the Daily Star. Craig Hamilton-Parker made the claim in a YouTube video titled Trump and America: 2027 World Psychic Predictions.
Ron Wallace's 1,431.5 kg squash, weighed on Saturday, ends a reign by two British brothers that lasted only seven days.
Image: The Mirror: Weird News
RHODE ISLAND, U.S. — The record for the world's heaviest pumpkin has changed hands twice within a single week, according to a report in The Mirror, with the latest holder a grower from Rhode Island whose gourd is said to weigh as much as a small car.
A professional reader writes that two cards lost for two weeks turned up beneath a bag of hair curlers, and that a third briefly vanished mid-reading.
THE INTERNET — A professional tarot reader has reported a run of disappearing cards, in a post to r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix on the popular forum Reddit. The author describes the episode as a glitch in the fabric of things and says it has left the reader baffled.
A civil engineer and his six children excavated tunnels more than 15 metres deep beneath a Tilehurst property, now bound for auction.
Image: Daily Star: Weird News
TILEHURST, READING, ENGLAND — An unassuming family property in the leafy Tilehurst district of Reading conceals a hand-built underground railway, a network of tunnels and hidden rooms, according to the Daily Star. The property is soon to be offered at auction.
A Weird Darkness podcast episode dramatizes a fictional expedition in which a glory-minded commander is told by a young civilian expert that the red planet's straight channels prove something.
Image: Weird Darkness
MARS ORBIT — A Western Alliance ship has taken up orbit around Mars, circling first at the equator and then from pole to pole, according to the synopsis of a Weird Darkness podcast episode titled "We're Civilized: Taking Mars In The Name Of Earth And God," broadcast on October 13, 2026 as part of the Midnight In The Macabre series.
Weird Darkness devotes an episode to Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, a child's warning to cover her feet, and two old Australian accounts of rock-hurling creatures.
Image: Weird Darkness
THE INTERNET — The podcast Weird Darkness has released an episode whose lead segment, according to its show notes, concerns Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, conjoined twins born in Moscow in January of 1950. Their mother, the notes say, was told the girls had died of pneumonia, while Soviet scientists kept them for experiments.
Joshua Weaver, 43, says clients pay him to carry out posthumous requests ranging from tender thanks to confessions of infidelity.
Image: Daily Star: Weird News
WASHINGTON, U.S. — A man who describes himself as a professional funeral crasher says he is paid to carry out the last wishes of the dying, however strange or "uncomfortable" they may be, according to a report in the Daily Star.
A podcast episode pairs alien hand syndrome with a Arizona abduction, shadow figures and an Australian stone-throwing poltergeist.
Image: Weird Darkness
THE INTERNET — The podcast Weird Darkness has issued an episode that opens with a neurological condition said to have been recorded by physicians for more than a century: alien hand syndrome, in which a patient's hand behaves as though it belonged to someone else.
A Reddit user on r/HighStrangeness says the actor's remarks echo what people are claiming online today.
THE INTERNET — A short post on the r/HighStrangeness forum has drawn fresh attention to a video clip in which the actor Jack Nicholson is said to explain that extraterrestrials live among humankind but decline to reveal themselves for a very specific reason.
Dawson City's Gold Rush Cabin, on record by 1900, survived the collapse of the boom town and a near-collapse of its own, and now takes overnight guests.
Image: Atlas Obscura
DAWSON CITY, YUKON — A small log cabin overlooking the Yukon River, believed to date to around 1900 or perhaps earlier, has outlasted the gold frenzy that surrounded its construction, according to a listing on Atlas Obscura. No one, the entry states, knows exactly when it was built.
A Reddit post revisits Natasha Demkina of Saransk, whose claimed "medical vision" drew tabloids, doctors and skeptics in 2004.
SARANSK, RUSSIA — A Reddit user posting to r/HighStrangeness has revived the story of Natasha Demkina, a teenager from Saransk who in 2004 claimed she could look at living people and see their internal organs as distinct, colored images.
