12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, February 19, 2024

Built right next to the infamous “suicide forest,” and down the road from Aum Shinrikiyo’s nerve gas production facility, Gulliver’s Kingdom was a theme park that featured a 150-foot statue of Lemuel Gulliver in recline and a bobsled course. It was tragically demolished in 2007.

In the 1990s, seven Santa Clara Goodwills run by members of the same family were found to be operating an elaborate scam. The managers were skimming the best junk donated to their stores and selling them on the side, raking in a total of $15 million that would have otherwise gone to charity.

This 106-mile trail run takes place in the French, Italian and Swiss Alps, and usually takes about 20 to 40 hours to complete.

What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls was a game for little girls that let them imagine becoming a teacher, hostess, actress, nurse, model, dancer and nothing else. A decade later, they added med school and law school.

The belief was that as soon as you die, the countdown begins and half of your spirit has to rush through the battlefield of Duat to get to the paradise of Aaru. You can’t do that with a rotten body. Meanwhile, the other half of your spirit leaves your body for daily excursions, but if you become a skeleton, it won’t recognize you when it returns at night.

William Marsh Rice’s valet conspired with a crooked lawyer to falsify a will (including his wish to be cremated ASAP, conveniently destroying any evidence of his potential poisoning). The valet then chloroformed Rice to death, and the lawyer set their legal plan into action, attempting to cash some checks, which is what ultimately got them caught.

She’s been married to Carl Dean since 1966. But he’s so good at staying out of the limelight, rumors have incessantly swirled that either he’s fictional, or he’s a beard, providing cover for Parton’s relationship with her best friend, Judy Ogle.

Windsor is home to an infuriating, seemingly random phenomenon: a phantom humming. Researchers believe they’ve finally narrowed down the source to a steel plant on an island in Michigan. However, they still don’t know which machine, or series of machines, performing which functions, is creating the vibrations driving Canadians nuts.

Arsenic used to be a super popular murder device, since it’s odorless and makes it look like your victim just had cholera. In 1936, chemist James Marsh invented the Marsh Test, a reliable way to chemically detect arsenic in a tissue sample. Once word got out, arsenic poisonings rapidly diminished.

Bahla is a fort in Oman that’s heavily associated with djinns and the occult, and is sometimes considered the birthplace of black magic. There are lots of reported hauntings, and a thriving tourist business based around fortune telling and other mystical practices. Oman is a largely Muslim nation, and lots of these practices are generally forbidden, making this UNESCO World Heritage Site all the more taboo.

The London Underground used to have a stop directly beneath the British Museum, the single most potentially-haunted place on Earth. A fabled secret tunnel to the Egyptian Room and the disappearance of two women from the subway got people thinking: The ghost of Amun-ra must be out for revenge.

NASA has a panel of volunteer sniff-testers, whose job is to determine if stuff is too sickeningly or distractingly stinky for astronauts to bare. George Aldrich, a self-styled “nasalnaut,” was given the Silver Snoopy Sniffer Award after his 800th sniff mission.