Below are two tweet threads written by Twitter user JSP (@CommutrBarnacle). Here's a Twitter link to the first thread's first tweet; here's also a Nitter link; and here's a Twitter link to the second thread's first tweet, and a Nitter link. These were all written between May 9th and 11th 2023. You can jump directly to the second, third and fourth weirdest stories.

Anything in italics (like this) is an annotation or comment by me. I have kept all the words and most of the punctuation of the original tweets unchanged, but I have removed the original boundaries between all the tweets. I have also done 4 capitalization fixes. (The 240 character limit broke up the story at unnatural places, so I've fixed those breaks. While doing that I've done stuff like removing the "..." at the end of one tweet and the start of the next, which in a Twitter thread would have worked as a glue anyway, tying text together and implying the lack of a paragraph break.) For completeness, I also have a version that keeps the original thread's tweet boundaries, but I believe this version is nicer to read

Replying to this (screenshot of a) tweet by @elonmusk, on 9 May 2023, which itself is a rely to @TRHLofficial:

Didn’t the story come from @bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations?

I don't want to hurt their feelings, but this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop!

No. Here is the weirdest story ever.

King Umberto I of Italy went to a restaurant on July 28, 1900. He had a trusted aide with him and apparently there were a couple witnesses to this. King Umberto and his friends all noticed the owner of the place looked exactly like Umberto.

I want to be up front that this is not a setup for a joke. I am describing a documented thing that happened.

So, of course they got to talking with this guy who looked like the king of Italy. It turned out his name was also Umberto and he had the same birthday as the the king.

And in fact he'd been born in Turin, same place the king had. This fascinated the king and his crew, as probably you can imagine. They got to comparing lives. They found they'd both gotten married on the same day, both to women with the first name Margherita.

He'd opened the restaurant on the same day as the king's coronation. Umberto found this a profoundly moving and curious experience.

The next day he requested an aide go find the other Umberto and invite him to an upcoming event, because the king wanted to see the man again. He then learned that the man, the other Umberto, with the same birthday, the same wedding date, the same place of birth, the same face – had been shot to death that morning, under circumstances not yet known at that time. Obviously disturbing! It was now July 29, 1900, btw, which is also the evening King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated, by gunfire. And I think that even if you take the most mercilessly skeptical mental scalpel to this story, even if you dissect it at each juncture and pick apart any one piece, even if you render this story as mundane as you can, no matter how you slice it, a man met his doppelganger, and then the doppelganger died and then he died. No matter how you pull it apart, it is still the weirdest story ever.

The second weirdest story ever is Futility, by Morgan Robertson. It is a work of fiction. And it is about a guy who works as a deckhand on the Titan, a large ship.

Around the middle of the book, the Titan is sailing in April in the north Atlantic ocean. It hits an iceberg. There are not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. The Titan sinks.

This book was first published in 1898. Again, it is a work of fiction. The RMS Titanic sank in 1912. I think that's probably the second weirdest story ever.

An addendum to this: I wrote the above thread in full awareness that one of the possibilities here is that literally nothing about this story is true. And that is correct! It's one of the possible explanations. But if this story is all bullshit, it means someone made up this absolutely wild hallucination of a story about the actual real king of Italy, who was assassinated, and like why? I honestly don't think that would be much less weird! It's like the Voynich manuscript where if it's all nonsense, that would still be intensely fucking bizarre that someone spent all the time and energy to make something like that. And it gets "decoded" every couple of years but then they always turn out to be wrong.

anyway that's all, thanks

The third weirdest story ever is probably the story of Germain Garnier. To get this out of the way: it's about someone who appeared to experience a spontaneous sex change in the 1500s, but that's not what makes it so weird. What makes it weird is the circumstances and outcome.

What happened to Germain certainly isn't everybody's idea of a normal occurrence, but it's well known that human bodies are weird as hell. You don't see people suddenly grow a dick every day, but stuff like this happens. It just doesn't usually present as a sports injury.

This one is a little better documented than Umberto I of Italy; it appears in writings by Ambroise Pare (one of the fathers of modern surgery) and the philosopher Montaigne. It was also recorded by officials Germain dealt with. It also describes a phenomenon we now understand.

Last disclaimer before we get going: Germain spoke freely and easily about having previously been named Marie, so I don't feel like it's disrespectful to mention that name in context. But generally it's good practice to not deadname people.

This happened sometime in the 1500s, in Vitry-le-Francois, which is east of Paris and is in the Champagne region of France. I'm not going to make the "Champagne region of France" joke but I won't stop you if you want to. In Vitry lived a young swineherd named Marie Garnier.

Garnier was either 15 or 22 when this happened; sources differ. To all appearances, he had been a normal girl. One day he came home early, appearing at his mother's house in visible distress. He was weeping and in pain. He explained to his mom what happened:

He'd been minding the pigs, and some ran & needed to be chased. Chasing them, he encountered a ditch and leaped over it, at which point he felt something rip in his crotch. He reported it was quite painful. When he looked at the injury, he didn't know what to make of it... because, to him, it looked like his belly had split open and his guts were falling out. Absolutely losing his mind, he hurried home to show his mom, who didn't know what to make of it either because on examination, her daughter had just sprouted a penis and testicles.

Garnier was examined by physicians and surgeons, who – quoting Pare here – "found that she was a man, and no longer a girl." (Something that gets lost in telling sometimes is that Marie had already had some facial hair – she had the nickname "Marie la barbue" (Marie the Bearded).)

Marie was taken to the Bishop of Lenoncourt to figure out what the hell to do now. The Bishop called an assembly to come up with a new name for him and give him men's clothing. He was rechristened Germain Garnier and lived to an old age as a man and grew a thick red beard.

(It would be tempting to view this as an indication that people were more progressive than we think, but Germain had contemporaries who were designated female at birth but lived as men and courted women and were executed by the state for sodomy. Transmedicalism, you know?)

I think what makes this story so weird is two things. The first is what happens if you try viewing it from Germain's perspective. He jumped over a ditch, and something completely unprecedented and inexplicable happened that his mind had no context for. I cannot even imagine how cosmically bizarre it must have been to experience what probably felt like a painful pulled muscle or something, only to look down and think it's your guts falling out, only to find out it is not that.

The second reason this is so weird, I think, is that when Montaigne visited Vitry in 1580 and heard the story, he also heard about a song girls sang to each other, warning each other not to take strides that were too big, lest they turn into a boy like Germain Garnier did. In the absence of much medical knowledge or the internet or anything like that, they – being human and good at seeing patterns whether they're there or not – reached the understandable conclusion that what happened to Germain could happen to anyone and that the jump was probably what caused it.

And I think this story is a good example of how something can be intensely, powerfully weird even if it's not especially mysterious to us.

I think the fourth weirdest story ever is the toads in this one pond in Hamburg, Germany, who started exploding in 2005 and no one knows why.

Veterinarians and conservationists alike witnessed this happening: toads swelling up to three times their normal size and then exploding, launching entrails up to three feet. There are some theories about why but no consensus. It happened most commonly between 2 AM and 3 AM.

An environmentalist in the area stated this happened to at least a thousand toads over a few days. Tests found no viral or fungal infections. The official report states the incident lacks a satisfactory explanation. I think that's probably the fourth weirdest story ever.

This page was created on 2023-12-08, with the hope of preserving these stories longer than Twitter can be trusted with.