Weird Universe Archive

April 2025

April 30, 2025

Bell Haven Museum

Back in the 1950s, Oliver Elliott had a rural milk-delivery route in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Whenever he approached a house he would ring a bell so the residents would know to come out and get their milk, and this inspired him to start collecting bells. By the 1970s he had amassed the largest collection of bells in the United States, and probably the world. He turned his home into what he called Bell Haven Museum. People were welcome to tour free of charge.

His collection included: "a bell from 14th century China, a bell that came from Gettysburg in 1776, 75 handblown glass wedding bells, 125 strings of sleigh bells, eight sets of Conestoga bells and 32 temple gongs from the Orient."

Pittsburgh Press - Apr 18, 1976



Elliott died in 1983, but his collection was taken over by his daughter, Iva Mae Long, who proved to be an even more passionate bell collector than he was. She soon had grown the collection to over 35,000 bells.

By this time it included: angel bells in porcelain, ceramic or silver plate; bells made in Spain in the shapes of turtles; bells used as paperweights; bells that do not ring, but nod; town crier bells; an ornate railroad bell used to commemorate the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, Utah, in 1869; a Nepalese temple bell with engravings in Sanskrit; a mission inn Spanish crown bell made by Vigas in 1834; and a bronze bell made in England in 1874 for the Earl of Derby.



Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Apr 7, 1988



York Dispatch - Nov 30, 1989



Long died in 2009. Apparently some of her children and grand-children were also interested in bell collecting, but maybe not to the same extent because I can't find any evidence that Bell Haven is still around. Google Maps doesn't show any bells outside the address that (I'm pretty sure) was where it was located. Though I wonder what could have become of all those bells.

The only other museum devoted to bells that I can find in the U.S. is the Bast Bell Museum in Germantown, WI. It claims to host the "5000+ bell collection from Sila Lydia Bast who was born and raised in Germantown, WI." Evidently the bells from Bell Haven didn't end up there.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Apr 30, 2025 - Comments (0)
Category: Museums, Collectors

April 29, 2025

Warhol work thrown out as trash

Andy Warhol may finally have joined the ranks of artists whose works have been accidentally thrown out as trash. A 1980s print by him depicting Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was being stored in the basement of the town hall of Maashorst, and somehow the print was disposed of with other "bulky waste."

Actually, I don't think this is a good example of 'art mistaken for trash.' That weird-news genre typically involves works of art on display that a hapless janitor takes out to the dump, not recognizing them as art (such as here, here, and here). What happened to the Warhol piece was an example of a valuable object accidentally thrown out. But I don't think a janitor looked at it and thought, 'Oh, that looks like junk. Better get rid of it.'

More info: cnn.com

Posted By: Alex - Tue Apr 29, 2025 - Comments (0)
Category: Art

Birthday Cake Germ Shield

How many birthday parties have you attended where your anxiety about germs being sprayed on the cake prevented your full enjoyment of the celebration? If only there were a kind of "sneeze shield" for the dessert... But wait, there is!

Full patent here.







Posted By: Paul - Tue Apr 29, 2025 - Comments (2)
Category: Dinners, Banquets, Parties, Tributes, Roasts and Other Celebrations, Food, Hygiene, Patents, Twenty-first Century

April 28, 2025

Breeder Trucks

Feb 1986: A truck carrying "enough semen to impregnate 90,000 cows" skidded off Route 2 in Maine.

I knew that artificial insemination was important for the cattle industry, but it had never occurred to me that there were truckloads of bull semen being routinely shipped across country.

click to enlarge



Waterville Morning Sentinel - Feb 20, 1986



In 1958 Tonka came out with a model of an American Breeders Service truck.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Apr 28, 2025 - Comments (2)
Category: Cows, 1980s, Trucks

April 27, 2025

Rat wine connoisseurs

Researchers successfully trained rats to distinguish between two varieties of wine: Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc.

We investigated generalization over complex olfactory categories by examining rats' discrimination of wine varieties, a challenging task for humans that has been suggested to rely heavily on human-specific linguistic, cognitive and categorization abilities. Nine rats were trained in an olfactory discrimination task (go/no-go) using a specific wine variety (Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc from different winemakers) as the S + . Rats were then tested using novel wines of the same varieties in unrewarded probe trials to assess their abilities to correctly assign instances of wine to specific categories. Interestingly, all nine rats successfully learned to discriminate the two varieties, and most rats generalized within two test trials to novel wines of the same varieties.

More info: "Rats can distinguish (and generalize) among two white wine varieties" in Animal Cognition (Feb 2025)

Posted By: Alex - Sun Apr 27, 2025 - Comments (1)
Category: Animals, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Experiments

Marble Music Machine

An oldie but goodie that is perhaps new to some WU-vies.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Apr 27, 2025 - Comments (0)
Category: Inventions, Music, Rube Goldberg Devices

April 26, 2025

The Logical Bassoon

Giles Brindley believed that the design of the bassoon was illogical. So, in 1967 he created a "logical bassoon." The footage below aired on the British show Tomorrow's World in 1969.

Posted By: Alex - Sat Apr 26, 2025 - Comments (2)
Category: Music, Instruments and Measuring Devices, 1960s

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Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid.

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Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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