Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The House of the Seven Gables and “Young Goodman Brown,” often wrote about the Salem Witch Trials, but he never really believed in witches until he saw a photo of Emily Dickinson.

Every two hundred miles (or, as Dickinson might put it, “Miles”), America has a train museum, and each and every one of them has a copy of this poem tacked up somewhere. People always wonder what a poem about horses is doing in the train museum.

The house where Emily Dickinson was born and spent most of her life is open to the public as a museum in Amhurst, Massachusetts. It does not smell like a place anyone would want to hole up in to churn out short weird poems.

The one-woman play The Belle of Amhurst, based on the life of Emily Dickinson, opened on Broadway in 1976 and has been a favorite of community theaters to this day. The vast majority of tickets to this play have been sold to shut-ins who would never dream of setting foot out of their homes.

Every year, at the annual Emily Dickinson Festival in Vulga, South Dakota, the person who can eat the most pork hocks in fifteen minutes wins a tee-shirt with a picture of Emily Dickinson fast-eating pork hocks (artist’s rendition).

Saturnalia festival. Scholars consider this to be proof that oxen follow the Gregorian and not the Julian calendar.

When oxen and other barnyard animals seem to be kneeling, their hind legs are actually bent backwards. For some reason, Mr. Hardy seemed to think this potentially painful condition is hilarious.

Someone once tried that old “Come see the oxen kneel in the lonely barton' by yonder coomb our childhood used to know” line on Thomas Hardy. Hardy turned the matter over to Scotland Yard, who found out that the “man” was actually Mrs. Hardy, disguised in one of the poet’s cast-off old moustaches.