One quiet September afternoon, an amateur with a metal detector dug up nearly ten pounds of Viking-age silver in his own hometown in Finland. Then his detector beeped again. The largest hoard the country has ever found had waited a thousand years for him.
It was advertised as absolutely fireproof. Five weeks after it opened, a holiday matinee in Chicago’s grandest new theatre became the deadliest single-building fire in American history — and it was over in about fifteen minutes.
In 1962 a small Pennsylvania coal town lit a fire it could not put out. More than sixty years later Centralia is a ghost town of a dozen souls, its streets empty and the ground still smoking — and the fire may burn for centuries more.
In September 1788, a vast Austrian army marched out to fight the Ottoman Turks and, in a single confused night, tore itself apart instead — no enemy required. It is remembered as one of history’s strangest self-inflicted defeats.
For a few frozen hours in December 1914, soldiers who had been killing each other climbed out of their trenches to sing carols, bury their dead, and shake hands in no man’s land. It happened only once at that scale, and the generals made sure of it.
In December 1872 a sailing ship was found adrift in the Atlantic, seaworthy and fully stocked, her cargo intact and a half-eaten meal below decks. Every one of the ten people aboard had vanished, and no trace of them was ever found.
In 1947, police dug 140 tons of debris out of a Harlem brownstone to reach two brothers who had walled themselves inside it. One had been killed by his own booby trap.
On Easter Monday 1930, a careless candle set a Columbus prison ablaze. Behind steel doors, hundreds of men waited for keys that came too late.
On Christmas Eve 1945 a fire took the Sodder family home in West Virginia in less than an hour. Five of the children were never seen again, and not a single bone was ever found in the ashes. Their parents spent the rest of their lives certain the children had been carried off alive.
In January 532, a cheer from the chariot races became a battle cry. For five days a mob burned Constantinople to the ground and crowned a rival emperor, until the empress Theodora refused to run and the streets ran red with thirty thousand dead.
