A grieving widow with one of the largest fortunes in America spent 38 years building a mansion that never stopped growing — stairs that climbed into ceilings, doors that opened onto empty air, and rooms without number. The story of Sarah Winchester is stranger, and sadder, than the ghost tale it became.
An illiterate leather-dresser who called himself a lord, Timothy Dexter took every ruinous piece of advice his rivals gave him – ship coal to Newcastle, warming pans to the tropics, cats to the Caribbean – and turned every one of them into a fortune.
In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
In 1859 a ruined San Francisco businessman walked into a newspaper office and declared himself Emperor of the United States. For twenty-one years a whole city played along – and when he died, tens of thousands came to mourn their emperor.
In the autumn of 1984, hundreds of people in a small Oregon town fell violently ill and no one knew why. The truth, when it came, was stranger than any of them imagined: the first large-scale bioterror attack on American soil, carried out to win a local election.
In 1777 a fourteen-year-old orphan made his mark on an enlistment paper because he could not write his own name. Three years later he was buried anonymously at Camden. It took 246 years and three kinds of DNA to give it back to him.
