Journal of the Bizarre

The British ship Lamorna sailed from Puget Sound on March 1, 1904, with a cargo of wheat destined for Australia. The 2,159-tonne vessel, under the command of Captain Crichton, ran into a terrible southeaster shortly after departing Tacoma on March 6. Wreckage believed to be from the Lamorna washed ashore on Vancouver Island a few days later, but neither Captain Crichton nor his crew were ever seen alive again.

But the disappearance of the crew of the Lamorna is not the strangest part of this epic mystery of the sea.

Officers from the steamer Tees spotted wreckage at Vancouver Island shortly after the storm, with the officers identifying portions of Lamorna's deck boats, deckhouses, hatches and spars. Chaff from the ship's wheat cargo that had washed ashore seemed to clearly establish the fact that the lost ship had been found, and that the ship had been utterly demolished by the gale. Meanwhile, the schooner Alliance recovered one of Lamorna's empty lifeboats adrift in the …

The above story appeared in the Ottawa, Kansas Evening Herald on October 11, 1906, and wins our vote for the strangest way to die on a baseball field.

By now you've probably heard some liberal elitist bonehead proclaim that Harvey and Irma are the result of climate change. And although these individuals love to flaunt their affinity for science, it seems that none of them can produce a shred of scientific evidence to prove this claim. As we all know, correlation does not imply causation, and even the correlations proposed by the climate change crowd are weak at best:

"But Irma is the biggest hurricane ever recorded!"

So what? Robert Wadlow was the tallest human ever recorded. Yet this did not signal the beginning of an era in which every human being grew to 8 feet 11 inches in height.

Ludlow was an anomaly, just as Hurricane Irma is an anomaly. Imagine if evolutionary scientists across the country looked at Ludlow in 1940 and pronounced that the human race was on the brink of a gigantism epidemic. These scientists would be mocked relentlessly. Yet climate scientists make similar nonsensical claims all the time.

"But …

For centuries, the poor and unknown have been laid to rest in potter's field. The name is derived from the passage in the New Testament in which Judas Iscariot hangs himself after betraying Jesus. In Matthew 27:3-27:8, the high priests debate what to do with Judas' body:

"And after they had consulted together, they bought with them the potter's field, to be a burying place for strangers. For this the field was called Haceldama, that is, the field of blood, even to this day."

In the United States, potter's fields came into prominence during the latter half of the 19th century as immigration and industrialization caused urban populations to explode. Many victims of typhoid, influenza, tuberculosis and other epidemics were heaped into mass graves by the tens of thousands, along with countless stillborn children, infants, murder victims and suicides.

Not surprisingly, many of the best known potter's fields were located in major cities; New York's Hart Islan…