Founded in 2017, Strange Times is a twice-monthly newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. To get free games and the original PDFs of every article that runs in Strange Times—plus stories that didn’t make the cut—back me on Patreon.
To Kill a Cook
If you didn’t preorder To Kill a Cook it’s too late now, because the book is out today! I started cooking up this madcap tale of murder and fine dining around four years ago, and the thought that it’s actually out in bookstores now has me a bit dazed. If you like food, history, sarcastic bisexual reporters, or (fictional) murder, call up your local bookstore and ask them to get you a copy—or use the link below to order it online:
Things I Like
Calling Your Reps! During the first Trump administration I was in the habit of calling my Senators and Congressmen daily to urge them to stand up against fascism. In 2025, the barrage of horrors perpetrated by our budding dictatorship—and the uselessness of my Democratic senator—left me too despondent to make the daily calls. But the ongoing assault on Minnesota has encouraged me to start haranguing the bastards again and I recommend you do the same. If you’d like a more direct way to help the brave people of Minnesota, click here.
This Cool Poster! I was digging through the Library of Congress’s collection of classic WPA posters last week—for a project I hope to announce next month—when I found a reprint of this beauty. I bought it immediately. I spend a lot of time telling my family members to go the library, but now this poster will do it for me.
She-Ra! I just found out that the extremely rad She-Ra reboot is leaving Netflix on February 20 and you absolutely must watch it before it’s gone!
Today we’ve got a poltergeist on Staten Island, 295 beans in Boston, and a love strategist in the suburbs. Watch out for g-g-g-ghosts on…
August 27, 1921
A new report from Russia describes horrifying scenes of starving villagers being reduced to eating grass and clay.
Although several hundred of the marching union men agree to a truce, thousands more continue on toward Blair, in Logan County, with some of them traveling on a stolen train after a shootout with police.
A Brooklyn building superintendent recovers his stolen auto, only to find that the gears have been manipulated so that the car only runs backward.
Across the country, women celebrate the one year anniversary of achieving suffrage.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and recent Democratic nominee for Vice President, is recovering from “a serious illness” at his summer home in Campobello.
Freelance reporter Albert Schneider, 20 years old, becomes the youngest ever winner of the National Shorthand Reporters’ Association championship, setting a record of 175 words per minute with no errors.
Wesley Redding becomes the first Black detective in the history of the NYPD.
The Weather: Fair today; Sunday partly cloudy with moderate temperature; moderate to fresh southeast winds.
Scooby-Doo comes to Staten Island!
If the weary and restless ghost that ambles out of the old Emerson Hill Cemetery on Staten Island with a tombstone on its back shows up again there is an eager police Sergeant and three patrolmen, warranted ghostproof, who are going to club him to death and put him back in his grave for another hundred years.
The ghost has Staten Island all wrought up. Amulets and lucky pieces are being hunted up by the people who live about Concord. Housewives go to bed at night with their fingers crossed and a candle burning outside the door. Automobiles for the last few nights have been flocking about the cemetery from all parts of the island, and last night and the night before several hundred men waited with clubs and stones to see if the wraith was substantial enough for a brick to bounce off it.
Early yesterday morning the ghost was said to have appeared and so frightened nineteen young men, last of the watchers, that they hurled stones and sticks promiscuously through the windows of a near-by car barn. The Superintendent, being a skeptical person, had his doubts about the ghost and sent a hurry call for the police. The nineteen were arrested and arraigned before Magistrate Fetherston, who said that there did not seem to be evidence of malicious intent, except toward the ghost, and let them go, ghosts being fair game for any one.
The shower of bricks came just after a manifestation of the ghost before John Haynes, a motorman-conductor, who drives one of Mayor Hylan’s one-man trolley cars through this lonely section of Staten Island. Haynes swears that he saw the ghost twice. The first night he saw it toiling out of the cemetery with a tombstone, as if it had been evicted by the landlord and had no place to go. Haynes did not stop to sympathize, but made a record run to the barn.
Yesterday morning he came along Clove Road and switched into Oak Street near the cemetery. As he passed, the trolley bound off, and when he got out to put it on, he saw the ghost flitting into the front door of the car. It flitted right along, sort of misty and sad looking, and through the closed window in the rear. That was too much for Haynes’ nerves and he let out a yell. When the nineteen youths ran down the hill they said they found Haynes so frightened that his knees knocked together.
The ghost wandered around, and the nineteen followed, throwing anything they could pick up. They didn’t hit a thing but the car barn windows. In the midst of the racket, the Rev. John A. Mix of St. Simon’s Episcopal Church came out and asked the young men to please stop making so much noise and go home. He didn’t think much of the ghost story.
But all last evening people near by called up the Stapleton Police Station and demanded protection against a dispossessed ghost. So Sergeant Johnson Humphries and three patrolmen were sent to Emerson Hill and are awaiting the coming of whatever it was that scared John Haynes.
Earlier this week the Times reported on the cost of the Massachusetts cheese sandwich and they’ve followed up that blockbuster story with the news that far from “a thousand on a plate,” the hungry diners of Boston are getting a mere 295.
BOSTON, Aug. 26.—The average plate of baked beans served in arm-chair lunch rooms in Boston contains 295 beans, which, together with bread and butter furnished with it, costs about 2.5 cents, the State Commission on Necessaries of Life reported today. The usual charge to the public is 15 cents, the commission’s investigators found.
Frankfurt sandwiches, popular with those who patronize quick lunches, cost an average of 2.4 cents, including mustard, and usually sell for 10 cents, the report said.
I suppose “Love strategist” sounds nicer than fuckboy.
MONTGOMERY, N.Y., Aug. 26.—Usurping the age-old right of woman to change her mind on the brink of marriage, Lawrence Donnelly on Aug. 16 obtained a license to marry one of his sweethearts and four days later got a second license and married another. One explanation is that he changed his mind. Another is that Lawrence was a “love strategist.”
Everybody in the town is acquainted with all three of the principals, and the village has found an unbreakable topic of conversation. The least disturbed seems to be Miss Marion Lieff, the eighteen-year-old girl who escaped.
Donnelly appeared before the Town Clerk on Aug. 16 and obtained the license to marry Miss Lieff, but he returned on Aug. 20, handed back the license and got another bearing the name of Virginia Shafer, who is also 18 years old. Later the license was returned, with the certification of the Rev. John F. Quinn that the change of mind was complete.
Donnelly, who is 21 years old, made a third visit to the Town Clerk today, but merely to ask that the first license to wed Miss Lieff be destroyed and all trace of the first decision be obliterated forever from the record. he was informed that the license, even if not used, would have to remain in the records, because the law said it should.
In a voice far from shaky, a young woman, who said she was Miss Lieff, said that it was true that Lawrence had wed another, and she added:
“There is nothing I care to say.”
According to the town of Montgomery, Donnelly knew Miss Shafer first, and unrecorded town history has the date of the switching of his attentions, but apparently not of his affections. The town noted the progress of the new match, and some of the more observant, who now look upon the second affair merely as a piece of strategy, are now saying “I told you so.”
