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The Bonfire of Letters
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Creepy DiscoveriesMay 19, 2026

The Bonfire of Letters

The Bonfire of Letters In 1860, Charles Dickens lit a bonfire at Gad's Hill. He fed it twenty years of personal letters. Friends, family, secrets — all to ash. He asked correspondents to burn his replies too. Scholars still mourn what vanished that afternoon in Kent.

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Ben Underwood, a boy from Elk Grove, California who was diagnosed with retinal cancer at age two and had both eyes removed at age three, taught himself to navigate the world by human echolocation — clicking his tongue and interpreting the returning sound — and could ride a bicycle, skateboard, shoot baskets, and identify parked cars by clicking, until his death from the same cancer on January 19, 2009 at age 16.
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Ben Underwood, a boy from Elk Grove, California who was diagnosed with retinal cancer at age two and had both eyes removed at age three, taught himself to navigate the world by human echolocation — clicking his tongue and interpreting the returning sound — and could ride a bicycle, skateboard, shoot baskets, and identify parked cars by clicking, until his death from the same cancer on January 19, 2009 at age 16.
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