Stories for slow moments.

Imagine a crack in the earth so narrow that your shoulders brush both walls.

Overhead, a thin strip of sky. Underfoot, cold red sandstone. No road, no house, no footsteps anywhere within miles.

Your right hand is trapped between a boulder and the wall. You pull. You twist. You brace your boot against the rock and throw your whole weight backward, and nothing moves, not even a grain of sand.

So you shout. Your voice runs down the canyon, bounces once, and dies.

Then comes the thought that turns your stomach cold. You never told anyone which canyon you were going to.

That was where Aron Ralston found himself in April 2003, alone in Blue John Canyon. He was an experienced outdoorsman, but experience could not move the stone.

In a small village in the mountains of Gangwon Province, in South Korea, an old couple went everywhere together.

They wore matching clothes: the colourful traditional Korean dress called hanbok, in the same bright colours, like a pair. When they walked to the river or up the hill, they held hands.

The man was Jo Byeong-man. He was 98 years old. The woman was Kang Kye-yeol. She was 89.

They had been married for 76 years.

But the way they treated each other made people stop and stare. They teased each other. They laughed. They played like children.

They spent every day like a newly married couple.

In the village of Gehlaur, in the state of Bihar in India, there was a hill.

It was not a very tall hill. But it was made of hard, grey rock, and it stood between the village and everything the village needed. The fields, the market, the school, the hospital — all of them were on the other side.

Every day, a poor labourer named Dashrath Manjhi worked on the other side of that hill. And every day, his wife, Falguni Devi, climbed the path to bring him food and water.

They had very little. But they had each other.

The hill was just part of life. Nobody thought about changing it.

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man boarded Flight 305 in Portland. Before the plane landed, he had vanished.

At Portland International Airport in Oregon, the crowds were big. People were hurrying home to their families. They carried bags, gifts and tired children. It was cold and rainy outside, and the sky was heavy and grey.

And somewhere in the airport line, there was a man.

At the Northwest Orient counter, he paid cash for a one-way ticket. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. It was not his real name, though no one knew this yet. He looked to be in his mid-forties and about six feet tall. He wore a dark business suit, a trench coat and loafers. To the people around him, he looked like a tired businessman heading home for the holiday.

Nothing about him stood out. That was the point, perhaps.

It has seven notes. Anyone on the plains can whistle them for you, though nobody will, not after sundown. It goes up the scale slowly, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. Then it comes down again, very quick and thin.

Learn this the right way around.

Close means far. Far means close.

If you hear it right by your ear, he's a long way off. If you hear it so faint you aren't sure you heard it, he's right behind you.

If you hear it very faint, you should start saying your prayers.

The guide stops at a door on the second floor, and she lets the group gather around. She opens it.

There's nothing behind it. There's a long drop to the bushes in the garden. If you stepped through, you would break your leg.

Everybody laughs a little.

The house was built by Sarah Winchester, the widow of the man who made the famous rifle. After her baby and her husband both died, she went to a medium in Boston, a person who speaks to the dead. Her family was cursed, the medium said. The ghosts of everyone ever killed by a Winchester rifle were coming for her. She must go west and build them a house, and she must never stop. If the hammers ever stopped, she would die.

So for thirty-eight years, the carpenters worked day and night. She built stairs to nowhere, to confuse the spirits. Every night, she went alone to a blue room to get her orders. She spied on her workers through holes in the walls.

It's a terrific story. People have been paying to hear it since 1923.

A historian named Mary Jo Ignoffo went looking for the proof.