Shades of Death Road is a real two-lane road in Warren County, New Jersey, running 6.7 miles through forest and swamp. According to Weird NJ, residents have gone "so far… Read the rest of the article: New Jersey has a road called Shades of Death and residents grease the sign to stop theft

By the summer of 1858, three million Londoners were flushing their sewage into the Thames through an aging system that emptied directly into the river. Temperatures hit 48 °C (118… Read the rest of the article: In 1858 the Thames smelled so bad that Parliament fled and Disraeli called it a 'Stygian pool'

From July to September 2001, heavy downpours of red-colored rain fell across the southern Indian state of Kerala, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain also appeared. Each milliliter… Read the rest of the article: Blood-red rain fell on India for two months and some physicists blamed a comet

In August 2008, German developer Armin Heinrich released I Am Rich on the App Store for $999.99 — the maximum price Apple allowed. The app displayed a glowing red gem.… Read the rest of the article: The $999.99 iPhone app that did absolutely nothing sold 8 copies before Apple killed it

In 1847, a young Crow hunting party killed the wife of John Garrison Johnston, a former Navy deserter turned mountain man in Montana Territory. According to historian Andrew Mehane Southerland,… Read the rest of the article: A mountain man spent 25 years eating the livers of the people who killed his wife

Carlos Castaneda's 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan recounted his apprenticeship to a peyote-dosing Yaqui shaman named don Juan. The University of California Press published it as anthropology; it… Read the rest of the article: Carlos Castaneda faked an anthropology classic, then built a cult

In 1916, a bearded Long Island showman named Louis Enricht gathered reporters on his lawn and offered them a gasoline substitute that would "sell for a penny a gallon" —… Read the rest of the article: In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford

Writer John Biggs wanted no part of psychedelics, he writes in his newsletter — he pictured being "trapped in a room with a bunch of weirdos while they sang songs… Read the rest of the article: Mushrooms got him off antidepressants, so he built TripSitter

Kevin Mitnick, the legendary hacker, once tried to social-engineer his way into Novell's network by phoning a network admin named Shawn Nunley late at night, posing as an employee who… Read the rest of the article: Kevin Mitnick left the man who helped jail him enough for a Porsche 911

Radio-frequency chips — the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals — have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as… Read the rest of the article: AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones

Sporothrix brasiliensis is a fungus that gives cats oozing skin ulcers, can spread through their whole body, and jumps to the people around them. Since it emerged in Brazil in… Read the rest of the article: A cat-borne fungus infected 11,000 people; the US is next, CDC says

A standard office printer, a paper cutter, and a book binder — that's the "printing press" the FBI logged when it raided Elizabeth and Ines Soto's Texas home. That, plus… Read the rest of the article: Zine publisher sentenced to 50 years in prison for "material support to terrorists"

Irish artist Niall de Buitléar's eight-minute found-footage piece Duplicate Content splices video art from the mid-1960s through mid-1970s together with recent social-media clips — most of them, in his words,… Read the rest of the article: Duplicate Content splices 1960s video art with today's TikToks

The Playdate's hand crank was built for games, but it keeps luring developers to go weird. Ancient Loops, a free download from the two-person French team EVB Studio, isn't a… Read the rest of the article: Ancient Loops turns the Playdate's crank into a sound instrument

The Colossi of Memnon are "two large stone statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III" that have stood on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor since about 1350 BC.… Read the rest of the article: For centuries, a cracked Egyptian statue sang at dawn

Every year around the end of the Buddhist Lent, crowds gather along the Mekong River to watch the Naga fireballs — glowing balls that, according to Wikipedia, "are alleged to… Read the rest of the article: Mysterious glowing balls rise from the Mekong every year

The Man in the Iron Mask was "an unidentified prisoner of state during the reign of Louis XIV of France." According to Wikipedia, he was arrested in 1669 under the… Read the rest of the article: The masked prisoner of Louis XIV whose name was never spoken

The Anti-PowerPoint Party is a real Swiss political party "dedicated to decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint and other forms of presentation software." According to Wikipedia, the party claims presentation… Read the rest of the article: There is a real Swiss political party devoted to abolishing PowerPoint

Wesley Willis was "an American musician and visual artist" from Chicago who, after being "diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989," became a cult figure in the outsider-music tradition. According to Wikipedia,… Read the rest of the article: The schizophrenic Chicago artist who became an outsider rock legend

For three decades, a Hollywood director who wanted to disown a film could take his name off it and replace it with one man: Alan Smithee. According to Wikipedia, the… Read the rest of the article: For 32 years, every director who disowned a film became Alan Smithee