Stories of the Strange and Sometimes Bizarre

What connects a medieval city where hundreds danced themselves to death, a plant that can count, a prisoner tapping secret codes on stone walls, and a syndrome that convinces the living they are already dead?

In Stories of the Strange and Sometimes Bizarre, Stanley Armani gathers history’s oddest events, nature’s hidden patterns, and the brain’s most unsettling tricks into a single collection. Each page is a journey into the unusual: phantom limbs and phantom words, bees who understand geometry, monks who measured time by breath, and inventions that vanished for centuries before resurfacing.

Written in Armani’s lyrical, quotable voice and paired with haunting, museum-like illustrations, this is a cabinet of curiosities for modern readers. It reminds us that wonder lies not only in the stars but also in the body, the mind, and the forgotten corners of history.

Strange. Curious. Unforgettable.

Part I – The Strange Body and Brain

• Neuroplasticity in the dark
• Phantom limbs & phantom words
• The mathematics of forgetting
• The man who remembered everything
• Foreign accent syndrome
• Cotard’s delusion
• Foot-painters have “hands” in their brains
• People who can’t feel pain
• Hemispherectomy: Living with half a brain
• The accidental genius

Part II – Nature’s Odd Mathematics

• Plants that count
• Mathematics in beehives
• Timekeeping before clocks
• Animal architects
• The grammar of birds

Part III – History’s Mysteries

• The dancing plague of 1518
• Education underground
• The library of lost inventions
• Marginalia: Secret lives in the margins
• Trial by ordeal
• The cadaver synod
• The invisible colleges

Part IV – Crime & Curiosity

• The birth of forensics
• The secret codes of prisons
• The mathematics of crime
• Blood letters: The history of writing in invisible ink
• Famous hoaxes that fooled the world

Part V – When Reality Breaks

• Sleepy sickness: The epidemic that froze people like statues
• Lichtenberg scars: The tattoos of lightning survivors
• Dream cartography: Maps of the unconscious
• The “laughing epidemic” in Tanganyika, 1962
• The disappearing islands of history
• Raised by animals

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