"'Great God!' he said; 'the dead come to life, then."  From Pearson's, 1898.

"I got over the fence in record time."  From English Illustrated, 1900.

"Behind him boomed the vast laughter of Sant' Anna."  From Harper's magazine, 1917.

From How to Believe in Your Elf.

Q: "What's back of the man who wins?"

A: See image from Popular Mechanics, 1926.

From Jugend, 1912.

It's an easy sort of error, mistaking a hospital for the insane with a university's art department.  From Canadian Horticulture and Home Magazine, 1897.

From The Russian Story Book by Richard Wilson, 1916.

Well, of course learned doctors of The Medical Standard sought to perform an autopsy on a Ouija board, to literally get an inside scoop.  But more fools they, as there is no "inside" to a Ouija board.  They found nothing and celebrated their own genius.  Sad.  From 1921.   See The Care & Feeding of a Spirit Board.

Here's some relationship outsourcing: "Hell Upon Earth" Made Heaven, or The Marriage Secrets of a Chicago Contractor as told to Rev. George Washington Savory, 1907.  See The Collected Lost Meanings of Wedlock.

"The hot dog fiend."  From Cartoons Magazine, 1920.

From Jugend, 1896.

"The elephant gave a skirt dance!"  From Andy's Adventures on Noah's Ark by Douglas Zabriskie Doty, 1902.

"He found he had been making a great fool of himself."  From The Magic Mirror by William Gilbert and illustrated by John Menzies, 1907.

The heir to castles in the air is one John Putkins, census-taker, as revealed in Putkins, Heir to Castles in the Air, A Comic Drama in One Act by William R. Emerson, 1871.

An astrolger studies the stars.  From Die Muskete, 1926.

Here's the day science caught up to the age-old power of broomsticks, in Popular Mechanics, 1908.

From the Glasgow University Magazine, 1934.