I once received an email that stated that the winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid. I’m sure that anyone who has ever seen Niagara Falls in person and witnessed the sheer force of the millions of gallons of water that flow per minute would find this amazing!
Our weather forecasters tell us during cold weather to leave our water running a small trickle to prevent the pipes from freezing. How is it that such a powerful force of nature such as Niagara Falls can freeze solid when tons of water flow over the falls every second, if a mere stream flowing through our plumbing will prevent freezing? Research will shed doubt that Niagara Falls ever froze solid. It can appear so from what can be seen from the surface, but there is still water flowing beneath the surface.
Perhaps occasionally, but not often, people witness things that are not what they seem. When this happens, it can leave people thinking that perhaps they are losing their minds.
I’m sure most of us believed everything we were told when we were young children. I believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, as well as dragons, monsters, demons, and the list could be endless. I was about eight years old, just at the age I had decided that God and Jesus were real, but not monsters. I was playing in the driveway when I looked down and saw a sight that convinced me that there were indeed monsters.
I ran inside the kitchen yelling to my mother that she must come outside—I had found a dead monster in the driveway! She didn’t believe me for an instant, but I was so insistent that she came outside to see what I had found. I showed her my “evidence”. Mother explained that I had not found a monster, just a dead baby bird. I argued that birds had feathers, and this wrinkled creature would have indeed been horrible had it lived to grow up. I don’t know how or when, but I finally became convinced that Mother was right. Nevertheless, I remember exactly how I felt when I felt for that brief time that monsters certainly do exist.
When I was in my very late teens or early twenties, my mother and I lived in a house around a sharp curve, very close to the highway on the north side of Maynardville Ridge. There was usually quite a bit of traffic and noise, but for a short time on a hot, humid, summer day it was eerily quiet. I was washing my car in this unusual period of silence, and Mother was in the house taking an afternoon nap on the couch. All of the sudden I heard a buzzing sound, similar to what might be heard if a bumblebee had been hovering right next to my ear. I looked up, and on the shoulder of the road closest to the house was a man riding down the road in a motorized wheelchair. I estimated the man must be going twenty miles per hour. I was astonished—never had I seen such a thing! I ran inside and pulled Mother into the yard to assure me that I was not losing my sanity. Of course, as luck would have it, the man was long gone. I still have moments when I think the heat was getting to me that day.
Other tales I have heard are stranger. My brother J. C. once told me something a man named Oral Nicely (hopefully spelled correctly) once related. My father once shared a house with Oral between Dad’s first and second marriages. Both Oral and Dad were alcoholics, and once it was said that they got into a fight over who ate the most of a chicken. Oral supposedly cut Dad with a knife during that fight. J. C. said Oral told him there was a woman who lived in their part of the country who was reputed to be a witch. Oral went up to the woman’s house and looked through a window. He said he saw a table floating about a foot above the floor, unsupported in the thin air! J. C. said Oral told him he never got so drunk that he ever forgot that.
Monsters, witches—ghosts must not be left out. My Aunt Lidia (pronounced “Liddy”) Mincey said her father, my great-grandfather Tom Nicely, was once walking somewhere. His journey was to be longer than a day, so he stopped at the home of a family he knew to spend the night. Great-grandfather was “put up” for the night in a bedroom where he woke in the middle of the night. His eyes were drawn to the fireplace. A funnel of smoke came from the fireplace onto the floor, and a black woman wearing a striped dress appeared before my astonished ancestor. Aunt Lidia related that her father decided it might be best to continue his journey on foot in the middle of the night.
On a June day my niece Denise and her husband Greg were once visiting Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, Michigan. As they were looking around, a man who seemingly came from nowhere asked, “Can I help you find someone? I was raised in this cemetery.” The man helped them find Sojourner Truth’s grave. When they finished reading the inscription on the stone, they turned back only to find that the man had seemingly disappeared into thin air.
I wish I had time to speak with each of you, Dear Readers, to hear what is the strangest or most unusual thing that ever happened to you. Perhaps the strangest is yet to come! That can almost be a frightening thought.
I leave you with the words of a traditional Scottish prayer I read in an old literature book, A World of Experience: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!”

ANSWER TO QUESTION OF THE WEEK # 48
What was wrong with the anatomy book Herschel purchased in the college bookstore? (ANSWER: It’s appendix had been taken out.)

QUESTION OF THE WEEK # 49
Aesop said we hang petty thieves. What do we do with great thieves? (See next week’s article in historicunioncounty.com for the answer.)