A dead jockey who won, a dancing plague, a flood of beer and a con man who sold the Eiffel Tower. Every fact here comes from the question bank of Bullshit, our bluffing party game, and each one was checked before it went into the game.
It happened on June 4, 1923, at Belmont Park in New York. Hayes had a fatal heart attack near the end of the race, and his horse, Sweet Kiss, crossed the line first. He is the only jockey known to have won a race after dying.
At the end of 1932, soldiers with two machine guns and ten thousand rounds were sent to Western Australia because emus were destroying crops. After about a month the force withdrew, and the emus kept damaging the fields.
It started in July 1518, when one woman began dancing uncontrollably in the street. Between 50 and 400 people joined her and danced for weeks, until September.
On January 15, 1919, a huge tank holding about 8,700 cubic meters of molasses burst. The wave swept through the streets at an estimated 56 km/h (35 mph), killing 21 people and injuring 150.
On October 17, 1814, a giant wooden vat almost seven meters tall, full of dark beer, burst at the Horse Shoe Brewery in London. Eight people were killed.
According to Roman writers, Caligula only planned to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul and never actually did. The horse was said to have a marble stable and 18 servants. Historians suspect it was a joke to mock the Senate.
In 1945 Princess Elizabeth joined the women's branch of the British Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a driver and mechanic.
The real thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre worker. During the investigation the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested, and he implicated his friend Picasso, who was brought in for questioning. The painting returned to the Louvre in January 1914.
In 1925 Lustig posed as a senior French official and told scrap dealers that the government was selling the tower for scrap. A dealer named André Poisson paid him. Lustig later came back to Paris and tried the same trick again.
The light was designed by John Peake Knight and stood outside the Houses of Parliament. On January 2, 1869, it exploded, and it was later taken down.