12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, February 26, 2024

In the 1960s, a NASA engineer took it upon himself to build a human-shaped robot to test their expensive space suits, so they didn’t have to stick actual humans in there for hours on end. But its hydraulic valves kept popping open and shooting oil everywhere, so the weird metal man was stuck in storage.

Epping Forest is a popular place for gangsters and serial killers to dump their bodies, but the organization in charge of maintaining it says, “It’s impossible to police 24 hours a day. It’s not a viable thing to do and financially it would be impossible and I don’t think people would like it.” As for all the murders, they say, “We don’t have a running total. The police don’t always inform us.” But helpfully, “the warden can’t remember the last time a murder was committed in the forest.”

In the original script, Bond is about to parachute into Vietnam when a CIA agent tells him, “You know what will happen. It will be war. And maybe this time, maybe we’ll win.” The U.S. government protested the idea of calling a mulligan on a disastrous war, and the line was scrapped.

Cinco Saltos, known as the City of Witches, has an unusually high amount of supernatural activity reports — from witches to UFOs. After a mummified 12-year-old was found chained inside of her coffin, the ghost of a young girl began haunting the local cemetery. There’s also a lake that radiates disembodied screams when someone crosses its bridge in the middle of the night.

Rudolf Virchow was the first person to use fiber analysis in court in 1861. The entrance of cloth and hair fiber analysis into evidence became widespread after he introduced it, at which point he felt compelled to change course, insisting it should not be considered conclusive evidence.

Someone found a strange golden rolling pin-looking thing in a Jerusalem cemetery in 2015, and experts began studying to it figure out if it had some sort of historical significance. Facebook figured it out: It’s an “Isis Beamer,” a weird tool developed by a German company that’s meant to harness the power of the Egyptian god Isis.

Billy Ray Cyrus credits Parton with jump starting his career, saying she believed in him while he was still living out of his car. He later honored her by asking her to be the godmother of his daughter, Destiny Hope “Miley” Cyrus.

The loose end of a gruesome 1879 murder was finally tied up in 2011. A skull was dug up in Attenborough’s yard, and was found to belong to Julia Martha Thomas. Thomas had been murdered by her maid, who chopped up her body, boiled her flesh, fed some of it to local children and dumped the rest over a bridge. She never revealed where she’d hidden her employer’s head.

Some interpretations of the hieroglyph for Duat, the Egyptian underworld, have led people to believe their afterlife was up in the sky, or even in space. In that case, the pyramids were to ensure that the ultra-wealthy could climb up into the sky and get to heaven before their bodies rotted and their souls drifted away forever.

In 1847, two doctors in Portland, Maine devised a plan to expose the increasing grift of local mediums in the area. When a spiritualist turned off the lights during her seance and started doing spooky ghost stuff around those in attendance, one of the doctors asked a spirit to shake his hand. He grabbed the spiritualist’s arm, and held on until his accomplice switched on the lights.

That song that all your aunts, uncles and grandparents have been joyously dancing to for decades? It’s about a woman who hates her boyfriend and goes to dance clubs to pick up men. In the first version of the song, the woman was merely angry at her boyfriend for joining the army, so she slept with two of his friends while he was gone.

Detroit was founded by French settlers in 1701, then the British took it over in 1760 as part of a treaty to end the French and Indian War. They held onto it until 1787, at which point it started getting passed around between American and British forces for decades. The Brits finally retreated for good in 1813, when a plucky fleet of small American ships took on the six ships Britain had stationed in Lake Erie.