The Best Wikipedia Rabbit Holes

Most of the brain stem stayed attached when a Wyandotte rooster in Fruita, Colorado, was beheaded on September 10, 1945, and a clot stopped the bleeding — he lived another eighteen months. Farmer Lloyd Olsen fed him milk and water through an eyedropper, then took him on tour. One send here, the brain stem article, and you're gone.

Late 1932, Western Australia: the army sent Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery out with Lewis guns to cull emus that were eating wheat. By 8 November, six days after the first engagement, 2,500 rounds had been fired. Meredith's report on the birds gives the article its pull — they "can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks." The Lewis gun page is your next stop.

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston's North End burst and sent a wave of molasses through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour. Twenty-one people died. The tank stood 50 feet tall and 90 feet across, and the company paid out $628,000 in damages — small against what followed, because the article steers you straight to the Eighteenth Amendment and why a distiller was hoarding molasses in the first place.

A Newburyport businessman, 1747 to 1806, who styled himself a lord and got rich on jokes played at his expense. He sent coal to Newcastle and hit a miners' strike, so it sold at a premium. His book, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, had no punctuation; the second edition answered complaints with an extra page of 11 lines of punctuation marks for readers to distribute as they pleased. The book has its own article. Click it.

Drilling began on 24 May 1970 on Russia's Kola Peninsula, and by 1989 the third hole reached 12,262 metres, still the deepest human-made hole on Earth. The fourth hole stopped in 1992 at temperatures of 180 °C, far above the forecasts. Microscopic plankton fossils turned up six kilometres down. Three sends from here: Project Mohole, the Mohorovičić discontinuity and the Well to Hell hoax, which is the one you'll tell people about.

French showman, soldier and spy, born around 1772, famous for an appetite nobody could explain. The army tried using it: a document was sealed in a wooden box, Tarrare swallowed the box, and two days later it was retrieved with the paper still legible. The surgeon Pierre-François Percy treated him with laudanum, wine vinegar and tobacco pills — none of it worked. Two sends: Percy's article and the War of the First Coalition.

The doctors came to Godalming, Surrey, in 1726 because a woman there was, they were convinced, giving birth to rabbits. Local surgeon John Howard came first, then Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household of George I. She confessed on 7 December. The sends are the fallout — William Hogarth's print, Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation, and St. André's page, which shows what a royal surgeon's career looks like after a rabbit hoax.

Somewhere in Strasbourg in July 1518 a woman known as Frau Troffea began dancing in the street, and Troffea kept up the constant dancing for a week as others joined, until the thing ran into September. The authorities' answer, by some accounts, was to lay on musicians and guild halls so the dancers could keep going. Three sends: ergot poisoning and mass psychogenic illness, the two explanations on offer — and then the Saint Vitus article.

Rome, January 897: Pope Stephen VI had his predecessor Formosus dug up, about nine months dead, dressed in vestments and propped on a throne in the Lateran to stand trial, with a deacon appointed to answer for the corpse. Liutprand of Cremona says the three blessing fingers were cut off afterwards. Stephen was deposed by an uprising and strangled in prison that summer — Formosus and Liutprand are the two sends, then every ninth-century pope in sequence.

Inside British Hong Kong, an ungoverned Chinese enclave that by 1987 held an estimated 33,000 residents on 2.6 hectares, under a height restriction of 13 to 14 storeys because of the flight path into Kai Tak Airport, whose approach is its own read. Unlicensed dentists worked openly, the 14K and Sun Yee On triads took hold in the 1950s, and demolition came in 1993 and 1994 — four sends: British Hong Kong, Kai Tak and the two triads.

Someone in a Max Headroom mask broke into WGN-TV's Nine O'Clock News at 9:14 p.m. on Sunday, November 22, 1987, in Chicago, then at about 11:20 p.m. cut into PBS station WTTW during the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock for around 90 seconds. Nobody has been identified since. Four sends — broadcast signal intrusion as a category, the original Max Headroom, WTTW itself, and the serial.

Messages of unknown origin pressed into the asphalt of about two dozen US cities and three in South America, first confirmed in Philadelphia in 1983. The text, with small variations, reads TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER. That one line sends you four ways at once — Arnold J. Toynbee, Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead, which chased a South Philadelphia street address found on a tile in Santiago.

1816, when the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora dropped global temperatures and snow fell in Albany, New York, on June 6. The pull is the spread, four sends at least: rain at Villa Diodati kept Mary Shelley and Byron indoors and produced Frankenstein, the tephra sunsets turn up in Turner's paintings, and a shortage of oats for horses may have pushed Karl Drais toward the draisine — the bicycle's ancestor.

An illustrated codex of around 240 pages in a script nobody can read, vellum carbon-dated to 1404 to 1438, bought by book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 and held at Yale's Beinecke Library since 1969. None of the plants drawn in it can be identified with certainty, and one section shows small nude women bathing in pools. Then come the codebreakers who failed, William and Elizebeth Friedman and John Tiltman — five sends counting Voynich himself and the Beinecke.