Fact or Fiction? 30 Unsettling Real-Life Stories – Part 3

The Toynbee Tiles are cryptic messages placed in asphalt on roads in about two dozen major cities in the United States and South America. They started appearing in the 1980s and while there have been different suspects no one has been clearly identified as the creator of them.

There used to be a thing called horse diving. A person would literally jump a horse off a sixty-foot ramp into a shallow pool of water. A girl named Sonora Carver was a horse diver in the late 19th century, and she went blind doing it when her retinas detached during a dive.

A woman named Ruth Belville made a living selling people the correct time. Every day she will calibrate her pocket watch to the official Greenwich Mean Time and travel around town letting people set their clocks to hers.

Germans have a word for the proper labeling of beef: Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

During the Norwegian Butter Crisis of 2011, two Swedes were arrested for illegally smuggling more than 250 kg of butter into the country. The police destroyed the confiscated illegal butter.

Alien hand syndrome is a neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening. The afflicted person may reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand.

A DMV employee named John Quijada invented Ithkuil, a language so precise and concise that the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

The Danish Protest Pig is a reddish pig breed with a white stripe that looks like the Danish flag. When Danes in Prussian North Frisia were banned from raising their flag, they displayed the protest pig instead.

There is a delusional condition called "koro", seen in Southeast Asian and Chinese men, where the patient suddenly grasps his penis, fearing that it will retract into his abdomen and ultimately cause his death.

There is something called RAS Syndrome. RAS syndrome (where "RAS" stands for "redundant acronym syndrome", making the phrase "RAS syndrome" self-referential) is the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym (or other initialism) in conjunction with the abbreviated form.