Part 2

The Beaked Chaetodon Fish; French Biplane; Largest Number; Mrs. Mathilde Kovacs; Miss Joyce Wethered 108

The Fig-Tree Tomb; Sidis, the Prodigy; The Peg-Legged Cow; W. C. Perry 122

A Kewawnqdu 125

Robert Jones; The Eyeless Infant; Phil Hanna; The Lyre Bird 133

Rameses; Mrs. Elliott Lynn; The Crawling Fish; Squire Osbaldeston 140

O. T. Wertz; W. J. Brassard; John Radcliffe; A Bull Frog 144

Oliver Cromwell; Tom McAuliffe; J. Johnson 147

Sankal-Walah 150

Finger Nails of a Chinese Priest; The Four-Footed Chick; A Caterpillar 154

Champion Hog-Caller; A 67-Year-Old Contortionist; The Word “Personality”; Gus Sundstrom 157

Herr Heinrich Laufer; John G. Anderson; Smallest Church in the World; California’s Lion Hunter; 24-Year-Old Cat 162

A Luzonese Dancer; Japanese Plum Tree 163

Hirohito; An American Palindrome; Beggars’ Newspaper; Walter Hagen 165

World’s Worst Thug; Hopping Toad; Lefty Groves 167

7¹⁄₂ Inch Nose; Empress Marie Louise; Terry McGovern; A Telegram; One Pair of Shoes 169

BELIEVE IT OR NOT----

AN ODYSSEY OF ODDITIES

To obtain material, and to gather strange facts and to portray queer people that go to make up the daily “Believe It or Not” pictures it has been necessary for me to get about the world a bit.

“SEEING IS BELIEVING”

I have traveled in 64 countries--including Hell (Norway), and the strangest thing I saw was man. Man may be the noblest work of God--but even the good Lord must have his joke sometimes. The world was made in seven days, and man in a perpetual daze. The Lord placed a funny-looking little fellow on the earth without telling him what it was all about or where he came from or where he was going. This funny-looking little chap has been running about trying to find out ever since.

“STRANGE IS MAN WHEN HE SEEKS AFTER HIS GODS.”

Therefore the strangest places on earth are the holiest. And the strangest and most remarkable city in the world is the holy city of Benares on the muddy arm of the Ganges, India’s holy river. Here amidst a crumbling confusion of holy places is a temple--The Nepalese Temple. About fifteen feet up on the outside is a frieze of sculptured figures representing in succession the eighty-one sinful positions.

Sin is the curse of the human race--although it is very popular. The question of what causes sin has perplexed the ages. But of all the doctrines which men have propounded in their endeavors to solve the permanent enigma of existence, probably none has had a more potent influence than that which holds that the spirit is eternally pure and that all matter is inherently bad. The spirit of man is pure but his flesh is wicked, and therefore should be subjected to various degrees of mortification.

This gives rise to the various penances and punishments and ascetic practices so highly honored in all great religions.

The 81 sinful positions around the Nepalese Temple are counter-balanced by the same number of positions of punishment. These positions of penitence are practiced by an army of ascetics throughout India--particularly in the holy cities of Benares, Allahabad, Lahore, Mysore, and Calcutta. These sects of ascetics are probably the strangest men of mankind. They are sometimes called Faquirs (often they are fakers), Sadhus, Yogis, etc.

They presume to renounce the world and its ways, cast off their clothing and cover their naked bodies with ashes which gives them a weird white appearance; they neither cut nor comb their hair and usually plaster their heads with cow-dung (as evidence that the cow is holy in India) and adopt one of the ingenious methods of self-torture with the idea of keeping themselves constantly conscious of their penance. They are most often found about the holy places and always flock to all the religious festivals in the sacred cities along the Ganges where they are frequently made objects of veneration by the muddled multitudes of India who shower them with food and money. I have never heard one of them ask for alms, and they accept all offerings in stony silence.

THE GHATS OF THE GANGES

As I stood on the steps of Dasashwamedh--steps worn smooth by countless thousands of pious ones descending into the water--the sight before my eyes impressed me more than any other in the world.

Nowhere on earth can you see such a weird cross-cut of human life with all of its spiritual and social manifestations set in such a background of picturesque architecture as along the crescent-shaped shore of the holy Ganges.

Several miles to either side extend the bathing ghats, wide flights of stately steps sinking down into the sacred waters. Surmounting them are the strange towers and temples of their gods and the palaces and places of their kings. Above and in back are the narrow streets and lanes which connect the ghats with one another--a bewildering mass of mouldering alleyways, too narrow for wheeled traffic, and overhung by crumbling buildings that reminded me of Canton. These are the “Pukka Mahals.” And so this is Benares!

Crowding my way down the steps of the ghat, among the weirdest collection of humanity on the face of the earth--demented, deluded, diseased, and devout--all struggling after their gods, I clambered aboard a boat and floated slowly down the Ganges before all this pagan panorama, wondering all the while whether leprosy were contagious, and whether that one-eyed beggar with spots and both hands and feet eaten away had tainted me with that unmerciful malady with the red stump of his hand when he nudged me as I passed.

Each ghat and each temple is different. Each is built and dedicated to a different deity and each spot is peculiarly holy to a Hindoo--from the Assi Ghat, built at the junction of a river not visible to anybody but the Hindoo, down past several hundred ghats to the Prahlad Ghat, the last of all.

Five of these ghats are particularly holy, and the millions of pilgrims must immerse in each successively on the same day--the Assi, Dasashwamedh, Barna-sangam, Panchganga, and the Manikarnika. Some are built in honor of monkeys, others, to “Ganesh,” a red idol with three eyes, a silver cap, and an elephant’s trunk, riding on a rat. Another was built for the “Dandas,” ascetics who always carry long sticks upright, never putting them down. The Sitla Ghat was built in honor of “Mother Smallpox,” and the Dasashwamedh Ghat means the “ghat of the ten-horse sacrifice.”

All the ghats are thronged with multitudes who swarm down in multicolored waves to the filthy--but purifying--water.

Strange, but it seems that the dirtier a thing is the holier it becomes in India!

Sanitation and sanctity never come together here. The holy water of the Ganges is muddy and sluggish. Into it empty the city sewers and into it are thrown the dead who are too poor to afford the wood with which to burn their bodies after death. Those who die of loathsome diseases such as smallpox and leprosy are regarded as unworthy of cremation and so are consigned also to the great river.

According to their creed, the holy Ganges water purifies everything, utterly and instantly. Nothing can defile it, no matter how foul.

So the sight of these throngs of people drinking and bathing in this filthy water in which dead bodies are floating and sewage is seeping is not to be wondered at--but you will shudder at it just the same.

I was rowed up and down this panorama of never-ceasing interest all morning and I wish space permitted me to tell all I saw. I had the boat stop near the tall, stately minarets of the Aurangzeb Mosque near where thin columns of smoke were slowly ascending. Climbing over several native boats I reached the shore where several gauze-draped corpses were resting with their feet in the water.

Just above me were several bodies burning.

THE BURNING GHAT

I had seen burning ghats before and was not particularly anxious to see this one at the Jalsain Ghat. However, when I learned that more than a million human beings offered up a daily prayer that they be burned on this very spot I decided to watch the entire ceremony.

I have seen many dead people in India--it is a common thing to die here--and frequently I have seen the bodies being wrapped in winding sheets of thin gauze as they lay on the ground in front of a hut. When a death occurs the body is immediately taken out of the house. If it is that of a woman it is wrapped in red; if it is that of a man it is covered over with white. Children are not wrapped at all, and neither are those who die of leprosy or smallpox. They are simply taken down to the Ganges and thrown in.

This morning on my way to the Burning Ghat I saw two funerals on the way. The procession is simple. There is no hearse--the body is merely tied to a bamboo pole by the neck and ankles and hoisted on the shoulders of two chanting relatives, who carry it down to the river bank.

I arrived at the Burning Ghat before them, passing the Nepalese Temple with its eighty-one indecent carvings, and the Dharm Kup, the sacred well in which the lepers bathe and where the water is changed but once a year. I stood for a few minutes watching the ghastly fires of several corpses leaping viciously to the sky, when behind me came the chanting of the procession I had passed near the Chowk.

Down the crumbling steps they went to the edge of the sacred water and advancing gave the body its last bath in the holy Ganges, for without that bath any shadow which might fall upon it would convey impurity. Then, resting the feet of the white-robed figures in the water, the two bearers set about building the funeral pyre.

An ordinary pile of logs and boughs, about four feet high, costs five dollars. This was just an ordinary one. The body was placed on top and several cakes of cow dung laid on its chest, while the nearest relative, the dead man’s wife, ascended a few steps to a sacred spot where the holy fire was brought to burn the body.

As I waited a sacred cow came wandering down the steps and calmly proceeded to eat the grass strands that bound the winding sheet to the corpse. The widow returned with shaven head and snow-white garments, waited for the cow to finish, then placed a handful of meal on her dead husband’s mouth, walked five times around the pyre and without the slightest sign of emotion set fire to the pile at her husband’s throat.

The flames spread rapidly. From time to time the woman, assisted by a near relative, used long poles to make the fire burn faster. Not a pleasant sight.

You are never so dead as when you die in India.

When the fire died away the widow threw the remaining parts into the Ganges. The relatives led her to the water’s edge and broke the jewelry from her wrists and ankles and threw them into the water also. Then, filling an earthen jar with the sacred water, she placed it on her shoulder, ascended to the smouldering pyre, and tipped it backward from her shoulder onto the glowing ashes of her master. Straightway she walked on up the steps; never again will she look backward at the spot.

On and up she went through an archway where monkeys were clambering and above which several vultures were soaring. And just as she disappeared from sight into the dingy crevices--called streets--of the Pukka Mahals she passed by a high platform on top of which is an image of Mahadeva where the worshippers of Mahadeva dwell, a sect supposedly immune to the possibility of earthly defilement.

So they say.

THE SUN GAZER

“Strange is man when he seeks after his gods.” Sometimes he thinks too much and seeks too long, yet learns nothing and loses everything ... like the naked faquir who sits all day glaring at the blazing sun. He has looked too long and now sees nothing. The fiery rays of the sun have burned out his eyes long years ago.

Each morning as I floated down the sacred stream I saw this sun gazer being carried down the steps to his accustomed place on the Dasashwamedh Ghat. His brothers placed him down gently--he could not walk as his legs had withered away from years of inactivity--and turned his face toward the east. Slowly he opened his eyes to greet the morning sun as it raised its burning head over the temple tops of the Holy City; here he remained the whole day long with his wide staring eyes fastened on the blazing sun without once turning them away or closing them for an instant until the dying disc had sunk once more below the horizon. He had been doing this for fifteen years.

BURIED ALIVE

“Samadai,” the act of suspended animation, is a power long claimed by the Hindus. Although I was not fortunate enough to witness a performance of this seeming impossibility, there are many reliable records of such burials and subsequent restorations.

The best known performance of this mysterious power of suspending the functions of the body (with the exception of a faint heart action) was given before the Maharajah Runjeet Singh in Lahore during the summer of 1837. A Yogi by the name of Haridas attained “samadai” and was buried in the ground for forty days, after which he was dug up again and revived. Yogi Haridas fell into a trance and his assistants stopped his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes with wax; then, wrapping him in a winding cloth, they lowered him into a grave and filled it tight with earth. A guard was placed about the spot to prevent trickery. When the Yogi was uncovered forty days later he appeared slightly emaciated but otherwise was little the worse for his remarkable experience.

Yogi Haridas, by the way, was the same Yogi who could touch his forehead with his tongue. (See page 95.)

The various “Rama Beys” etc., who have been appearing in American vaudeville recently with “buried alive” acts in which they claim the power to suspend animation are merely tricksters. None of them ever saw India--as a matter of fact, the most successful one is an Italian. Houdini performed the same trick under water.

Hindoos are credited with marvelous powers of magic, but I was unable to see any of it. They do remarkable sleight-of-hand work, and I had a faquir do the tree-growing trick on my bed-room floor. It is a fair trick, but in my opinion, Thurston and Houdini were far more clever than any Hindoo.

THE BED OF NAILS

Sadhus who sit on beds of sharp spikes have been more or less featured in the Sunday supplements of our country. This stunt is a popular one in India and I saw half a dozen of them. In Mysore a six-year-old boy was starting out in life by assuming a sitting position on a home-made “kiddie car” of nails.

One old fellow that I saw in Benares had been on his trundle bed for eighteen years, I was told. After some persuasion, highly emphasized with rupees, the venerable old faquir stood up on his spiny mattress and gave me the opportunity to see that there was no fake about it.

THE EVER-STANDING MEN

They were standing by the river not far from the Kali-Ghat in Calicut. They had been standing for ten years or more without once sitting down, and were apparently prepared to remain upright the rest of their lives. I doubt if there be two more homely objects. Their bodies and faces were smeared a dirty sickly white leaving two black spots for their eyes which were divided by perpendicular red and yellow caste marks. They had forced two poles into the sand from which were suspended arm rests on which they leaned now and then, but never at any time did they take their weight entirely off their feet, or attempt to sit down in any manner.

HUMAN INCH-WORMS

Pilgrimages are quite the thing in the Far East. All Mohammedans hope to make a pilgrimage to Mecca before they die. All Hindoos hope to bathe at least once in the Ganges at Benares. Their penchant for penitence has created some ingenious methods of locomotion. They come crawling and rolling long distances to their temples on the Ganges. One deluded disciple of Siva crawled all the way from the Himalayas taking more than two years to make the journey.

I happened to be in the Kali-Ghat Temple one day and witnessed the finish of one of these pilgrimages of penance. A woman--followed by a curious crowd--was progressing by means of a series of prostrations. Standing up straight she would extend her arms above her head and then kneel and slide her hands forward on the ground until she was lying at full length on her face in the dust. Keeping her finger tips to the ground she raised the rest of her body in much the same way as an inch-worm and gaining her feet she stepped along until her toes reached the tips of her fingers--then she stood up again and repeated the performance. She had been traveling many days in this fashion to reach the Kali-Ghat. The Goddess Kali, the object of her struggles, is a large black figure with four arms, three red eyes, a long scarlet tongue reaching out three feet from the mouth, a necklace of human skulls, and no legs.

The curse of India is the Hindoo religion. More than two hundred million people believe a motley mixture of mythology that is strangling the nation.

“_He who yearns for God in India soon loses his head as well as his heart._”

Modern Hindoo theology is a development of several ancient and odd forms of worship, the first form of which was called Vedism--the worship of nature. Some, representing these sects of the middle ages, still survive and we see them about the streets of Calcutta, particularly at the Kali-Ghat Temple: Nail-men, whose nails grow until they pierce their palms; Sky-facers, who hold their faces rigidly upward till unable to bend them back; Up-arm men, who hold up their arms in the same way until they wither away; Tree-men, who hang upside down in trees like monkeys; Skull-men and Pot-men, who carry these symbols, and other forms of religious fanatics.

Most of the wretches that we see around the holy places of worship have no idea what their attitudes and symbols mean; all are intellectually degraded and some are mere fakers.

The modern Hindoo has one God who pervades everything, called Brahma. His three personal manifestations are as Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Siva, the Destroyer. Brahma is generally represented with four heads and four arms, in which he holds various symbolical objects. From Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva have sprung a multitude of lesser gods, whom the Hindoos, faithful to their practice of exaggeration, reckon up to the astounding total of 330,000,000.

The Hindoos believe that all evil proceeds from antecedent evil and that the penalty must be suffered in each succeeding existence. There are eighty-four lakhs (8,400,000) of different species of animals through which the soul of man is liable to pass, and the Hindoo’s object is to rid himself of this series of continuous transmigrations so that he may live in the same heaven with his god.

To this end he makes offerings to the image of a god, abstains from killing any animal, gives money to priests; does penance which at times extends to severe bodily torture, propitiates demons and keeps strictly the rules of caste. And there are almost a hundred different castes, each entirely separate with regard to marriage and trades.

This, briefly, is Hindooism.

Sounds almost unbelievable, doesn’t it? Yet more than twice as many people as there are in all the United States believe such things with a burning fervor that we, as Christians, cannot understand.

A strange country is India!

A POUND OF FEATHERS WEIGHS MORE THAN A POUND OF GOLD

A pound is a pound you say?

Not always.

A pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold because feathers are weighed by “avoirdupois” weight which has 16 ounces to a pound, while gold is always weighed by “troy” weight which only contains 12 ounces to a pound.

A GALLON OF VINEGAR WEIGHS MORE IN THE WINTER THAN IN THE SUMMER

This is puzzling--but a fact nevertheless.

The difference in weight is due entirely to the contraction and expansion of the vinegar due to the changes in temperature. During the heat of the summer months the vinegar, as any other liquid, will expand and thus the weight will be slightly less because a gallon jug will hold less.

A gallon jug of 4 per cent. (Acetic Acid) cider vinegar measured at 80 degrees (Farenheit) or summer heat, weighed 8.403 pounds--or 134¹⁄₂ ounces. When the same gallon jug filled with the same vinegar was measured at 40 degrees (Farenheit), or winter temperature, it weighed 8.457 pounds--or 135¹⁄₂ ounces. In other words, a gallon of vinegar will weigh approximately one ounce more in the winter than in the summer.

THE BOY WHO DIED OF OLD AGE BEFORE HE WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD

This strange anomaly of an aged youth attracted considerable attention during the last century. He was Charles Charlesworth, born of normal parents in Staffordshire, England, March 14, 1829. He reached maturity and grew whiskers at the age of four and died suddenly in a faint (syncope) when but seven years old.

Charlesworth was of small stature and proportions, and with imperfectly developed clavicles, lower jaw, and membrane bones of the skull. His face was wizened, hair and whiskers white, skin shriveled, hands knotted with conspicuous veins and tendons, voice piping, and gait and standing posture those of an old man.

_Ref.: “Progeria” and “Premature Senility” in any Medical Text Book._

THE LONGEST FIGHT

The longest battle within the ropes of a squared circle took place in the Olympic Club of New Orleans, April 6, 1893, between Andy Bowen (colored) and Jack Burke.

The contest lasted 110 rounds--7 hours, 19 minutes.

Iron men! Doubtless that will be your comment; but the irony of it all was the fact that the referee, Jack Duffy, stopped the struggle in the 110th round and declared it “no-contest.”

Following is the report as it appeared in the Police Gazette on the day following the match:

THE LONG-WINDED BOWEN-BURKE FIGHT AT NEW ORLEANS

The Bowen-Burke fight took place last Thursday night and Friday morning before several thousand spectators at the Olympic Club in New Orleans. It was stopped Friday morning in the 110th round by the referee, Jack Duffy, who decided that it was no contest. The purse will probably be divided. Bowen wanted to fight to a finish. The bones in both of Burke’s hands were broken.

Bowen, who is a New Orleans man, and Burke, a Texan, fought for a $2,500 purse, of which the loser was to get $500, and the light-weight championship of the South. The betting previous to the fight favored New Orleans, and the largest crowd ever held by the Olympic Clubhouse was in attendance when the men entered the ring. That was at 9.30 o’clock Thursday night. In the twenty-fifth round Bowen was nearly knocked down and out by two punches on the head. His opponent failed to follow up his advantage.