Count Jean V d'Armagnac (1420-1473) was described by a contemporary as "short and stocky of stature, even pot-bellied, but gifted with great bodily strength. His neck was short, surmounted with an acne-pocked visage, with squinty eyes, crowned by a shock of red hair."

The Count fell in love with his younger sister, Isabelle, whom he affectionately called ma mia costa (my own rib). She was said to be one of the great beauties of her time. He had two sons with her, after which he sought approval from the Pope to marry her. The Pope refused.

Undeterred, the Count bribed a papal official, Antoine d'Alet, Bishop of Cambrai, to forge a papal bull allowing the marriage. A few months later, the Count and his sister had a third child together, a daughter. The three children were known as the Bastards of Armagnac. Isabelle referred to them in public as her niece and nephews, which technically they were.

When the Pope learned of what the Count had done, he excommunicated him. Eventually the Count married another woman (not related to him).

Later the Count rebelled against King Charles VII of France, who sent an army to crush him. The army killed the Count and dragged his body through the streets. They locked his wife, seven months pregnant, in a cell with her husband's dead body. Her child (the Count's one legitimate heir) was stillborn, thus ensuring the end of the House of Armagnac.

James Graham was one of the more notorious medical quacks that worked in London during the eighteenth century. He called himself a doctor, even though he had never completed his medical studies. He promised customers he could cure them of a variety of ills (but in particular sterility and impotence) if they slept in his "celestial bed," for which he charged £50 a night.

The Celestial Bed was twelve-feet long by nine-feet wide, could be tilted so that it lay at various angles, and had a mattress filled with "sweet new wheat or oat straw, mingled with balm, rose leaves, and lavender flowers."

As lovers lay in the bed, they could stare up into the large mirror suspended above them on the ceiling. Behind them, electricity crackled across the headboard of the bed, filling the air with a magnetic fluid "calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves." The phrase "Be fruitful. Multiply and Replenish the Earth" was inscribed on the headboard. Hidden musicians played soft music.

In other words, a night in the bed probably was an unusual romantic experience. However, it had no curative powers.

In 1784 Graham moved to Edinburgh, where he took up the cause of mud baths, claiming that they were the secret to immortality. He died in 1794. More→

On December 16, 1873 the Los Angeles Evening Express published an article describing a man in San Bernardino who, because of a loophole in the law, was legally allowed to remain married to two women, despite the efforts of townsfolk to force him to divorce at least one of his wives. News of the case caused an uproar in California. However, the story was entirely fictitious, as the Evening Express revealed two weeks later. Unfortunately, the retraction was not as widely publicized as the original story, and so the case made its way as fact into a number of legal textbooks. More→

Dan Baca, a 29-year-old network engineer, was going about his life, minding his own business, when suddenly people began staring at him. He noticed it first while he was standing at the busstop in the morning. Crowds of people were gathering, looking at him, whispering to each other. It happened a few days in a row. Finally he confronted them. Why, he demanded to know, was everyone staring at him? The reason, they told him, was that he was an internet celebrity.

On May 11, 2001 Dan's picture had been posted on a local internet portal, San Francisco's craigslist.org, in the 'Missed Connections' forum. The picture's caption read, "Gorgeous Guy @ 4th and Market at the MUNI/Amtrak Bus Stop (Mon-Fri)." The person who had posted the message talked about how she wanted to meet this guy, but she didn't know his name. She was hoping he would see her message and contact her. More→

Georgia residents Jennifer Wilbanks and John Mason were to be married on April 30, 2005. But four days before the wedding Jennifer disappeared, sparking a nationwide search for her. She reappeared three days later in Albuquerque, New Mexico claiming she had been kidnapped. According to the statement she gave police, she said that while jogging on April 26 she had been grabbed by two individuals, a "hispanic male with short black hair and rotten teeth" and a "heavy set white female with blonde, frosted shoulder length hair." They had thrown her into the back of a van, sexually assaulted her, and then driven her to Albuquerque, where they let her go. During questioning, the police told Wilbanks they were skeptical of her story, and eventually she confessed it was false. In reality, she admitted, she had fled her home, taking a greyhound bus first to Austin, Texas and then to Albuquerque. She had done so "because of the pressures of the wedding" and because "the list of things she needed to get done and no time to do it made her feel overwhelmed." More→

The website MarryOurDaughter.com appeared online in September 2007. It claimed to be "an introduction service assisting those following the Biblical tradition of arranging marriages for their Daughters." In plainer language, it purported to be a service that would arrange marriages between underage girls and older husbands. More→

The story of how Herman Rosenblat first met his wife, Roma, was remarkable. Rosenblat was imprisoned as a child in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He claimed that Roma, a Jewish girl disguised as a Christian who lived in the nearby town, used to throw apples over the fence for him. Twelve years later, the two met in Coney Island and realized where they had previously seen each other. They fell in love and got married. Rosenblat first shared this story in the mid-1990s, when he submitted it as an entry for a newspaper contest about "best love stories". He said he had been told to share the story, which he had kept secret for so many years, by his dead mother who appeared to him in a vision while he was lying in a hospital bed after being shot during a robbery. More→