A lot of things in life require careful planning and preparation. No one becomes an expert in anything all of a sudden, you need to put time and effort into learning skills to make things happen. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t happy accidents all the time. People win the lottery or narrowly miss getting hit by a car. For the most part we recognize a difference between these things, though. Skills and behaviors tend to develop over time, while things that happen spontaneously are often random and unpredictable. But every once in a while some wires get crossed and some amazing things can happen right out of the blue.

10. Richie Havens Spontaneously Composed Freedom on Stage at Woodstock

Songwriting is one of those things most people really have to work at to be successful. The Beatles weren’t freestyling their way through their career by any means. You have to work at making a hit song most of the time. But as Richie Havens proved, most of the time isn’t all the time.

Havens’ song “Freedom” is arguably his biggest hit. You might remember it from the movie Django Unchained if you’re not already familiar. He debuted the song in 1969 at Woodstock and there’s a hell of a story behind it. The video is amazing too, especially as you watch Havens, literally soaked in sweat, jamming on his guitar and dancing as the crowd get on their feet with him. All of this is more amazing when you realize he made it up on the spot.

Havens was out of songs to sing at this point in the show. He’d been on stage for three uninterrupted hours and had nothing left. He had to go to the theater after Woodstock to watch the footage of himself playing it so he could learn the song, music and lyrics, since he didn’t remember any of it. Since then he’s had to play it at almost every single show he’s ever done. 

9. Wild Mice Run on Wheels

If you ever had a hamster or a gerbil as a pet, you probably had a wheel to go along with it that the little guy could run in. Mice and other rodents like these toys as well, and they’ll gladly run on them for ages with little to no prompting whatsoever. What you may not have considered was exactly how and why these animals do that. There’s nothing in nature like a wheel that these animals could run on out of instinct. So how do they learn it?

It turns out that mice spontaneously run on wheels for no real reason at all. Wild rodents have never been exposed to wheels, nor have their ancestors, which suggests it’s a learned behavior of domestication, and they’ll hop on and run their little hearts out. They do this without being offered any reward, even. They will also run for times that are equivalent to those of captive mice.

The ramifications of this aren’t world changing, but if you ever feared your pet was running because it was a bored captive with nothing else to do, worry not. It’d do it in the wild if it had the chance, too. 

8. Nicaraguan Sign Language

Sign language has proven to be an invaluable communication tool for the deaf and hard of hearing, but not everyone is aware that there are over 300 different sign languages in use around the world. One of those was developed by children on a playground with no prompting or influence from adults. It’s the only spontaneously developed language that’s ever been recorded as it developed with no influence from any other languages at all. 

When the language was developed in the 1970s, children from all over the country had come together but struggled with lip-reading in the school setting. So they began to communicate on their own with a language that is not a direct offshoot of Spanish. Scientists studying the language have even learned how language shapes our thoughts thanks to tests that show a marked difference in spatial awareness testing between those who developed those languages versus those who grew up with it and never knew anything else. 

7. Spontaneous Facial Expressions

In addition to spoken language, humans have developed an ability to communicate through visual cues. Body language and facial expressions convey a lot of meaning. Something like a smile is obviously considered a sign of happiness, a frown one of sadness. A scowl can denote anger and a raised eyebrow may indicate curiosity or confusion. But how do we learn what facial expressions mean?

It seems likely that we learn facial expressions from seeing facial expressions but research has shown that the spontaneous expressions of people who cannot see at all and therefore could not have learned these expressions from others are innate. 

Researchers studied the spontaneous expressions of athletes, some of whom were sighed, some of whom were born blind and others who lost their sight later in life. During matches, after wins or losses and during medal ceremonies, spontaneous expressions were basically the same across all three groups meaning that the way we express emotions like sadness, anger, disgust and joy on our face is not a learned behavior.  

6. Pistachios Spontaneously Combust

Pistachios are some of the most popular nuts you can buy and with good reason, they’re pretty tasty. But unlike most other kinds of nuts, pistachios present a hidden danger that can strike at any time. Pistachios are known to spontaneously combust.

Pistachios are high fat and low moisture. They can be up to 55% fat. If you pack a lot of pistachios together in a high heat environment, that fat begins to decompose in the air and break down. Moisture and oxygen can cause them to start producing carbon dioxide through an enzymatic reaction that also produces considerable heat. 

They need to be transported in cool, dry conditions to minimize the risk. Not only can they explode under these conditions, they can also suffocate you if you’re in an enclosed space with them due to the carbon dioxide they produce. 

5. Ambien Can Temporarily and Spontaneously Reverse Neurological Damage

Ambien has been a fairly popular sleeping pill since it was developed in the late 1980s. Side effects range from pretty common things to sleepwalking, sleep eating and even sleep driving. But there’s another very rare side effect from Ambien that’s even more remarkable. In a handful of cases, Ambien has led to people with serious brain damage spontaneously regaining the ability to move or speak after years of being unable to do so. 

In one case, a man who had not spoken or moved in 8 years after suffering a lack of oxygen to his brain after choking began to speak again after being given Ambien. He called his dad; he asked for fast food; he even walked around with help though he also had retrograde amnesia to three years before his accident. 

The effects were unfortunately only temporary and each new dose gave him less time until finally it only worked with a few weeks in between doses.

4. A Lawyer’s Pants Spontaneously Caught Fire

Sometimes the world is just dripping with irony, and that seems to be the case with this story. Lawyers, for all the good they can do in the world, are much maligned people and the butt a lot of jokes. Lawyers are stereotyped as unscrupulous, as predatory and as deceitful. That last one is a biggie. Lawyers are thought to bend the truth a lot, if not outright lying to try to win their cases. True or not, it’s a reputation that they have.

With that in mind, the story of a lawyer’s pants catching on fire spontaneously in the middle of a trial is something that seems like it was scripted for a Hollywood movie. The whole “liar, liar pants on fire” thing is just too on the nose. 

Adding another level of charm to the story, the Florida defense attorney was in the middle of an arson trial, defending his client, when his pants began to smoke. The man had stored some batteries for his e-cigarette in his pocket earlier and they began to overheat. 

A quick run to the bathroom where he tossed the battery in some water saved him from serious harm and he even went back to work with slightly damaged pants. 

3. Google’s Artificial Brain Spontaneously Taught Itself to Recognize Cats

People have been making morbid jokes about artificial intelligence for years. Thanks to movies like The Matrix and the Terminator, we’ve all been made aware of the idea that intelligent machines may one day rise up and either destroy us or enslave us. But not all AI is pure doom and gloom and we can look to Google for proof of that. 

Back in 2012, Google was trying out a neural network that connected 16,000 computer processors with a billion connections between them constituting an artificial brain. They did what anyone in the modern world with a computer brain would do and let it watch YouTube. 

You may or may not be surprised to learn that the brain spent three days on YouTube and had experienced 10 million images in that time. Though the machine had never been told what a cat was or what a cat looked like, it began identifying cat videos all on its own, proving what many of us learned years ago that the internet is just a repository for cat videos and then ancillary materials. 

It began to identify faces without being taught what faces were or how it should identify them, and cat faces were right there alongside human faces. The programmers behind it never gave it any cat information, so the brain taught itself the entire concept of cat. 

2. Corpses Can Spontaneously Open Their Eyes

It’s long been believed that a person’s hair and fingernails continue to grow after death, which isn’t actually true. But that doesn’t mean a human body won’t spontaneously do some pretty unsettling things after it’s shuffled off this mortal coil. Far more disturbing than potential hair growth, a human corpse may open and close its eyes.

Known as cadaveric spasms, muscles in use at the time of death may be stiff and rigid and then later relax, giving the impression of the body moving or adjusting. Rigor mortis will set in later, stiffening the whole body, and then a secondary relaxation occurs which can make a corpse appear to shift and adjust its muscles more than once after death. 

1. Hawaii’s Spontaneous Orgasm Mushroom

This entry is a little iffy because there is very little evidence to support it but, by the same token, there is nothing to disprove it yet, either. It stems from a single study done in the year 2001 about a kind of mushroom found in Hawaii. The study, conducted by a pair of medical students, suggests that the smell of the mushroom can cause women to experience spontaneous orgasms. 

The claim is so far unproven because people were obviously skeptical of the claim but, because it’s not really at the cutting edge of pressing science concerns, no one has gone out of their way to debunk it fully.

According to the study, the mushrooms grow in recent lava flows. Men who smelled the mushroom thought it was disgusting but about half of the women had the spontaneous reaction. There were only 16 women included so the sample size was not big to begin with and the actual species of mushroom was never named.

You’d expect urban settlements to be carefully planned. After all, things like street structures, power grid and, let’s face it, plumbing are all things that require professionals with expertise and knowledge of the big picture.

Or so you’d think. Turns out, there are lots of communities that just spontaneously popped into existence, with no one really supervising their construction. The results, as you can probably imagine, have been mixed, but at least the stories are always interesting. Here are some of our favorite spontaneously created cities. 

10. Slab City

The amazingly named Slab City in Niland, California is a spontaneous “alternative living community” located in Camp Dunlap, an old WWII marine base. The base itself has been bulldozed long ago, but several concrete slabs (which give the site its name) remain. Apart from the “slabs,” the military is also present in the modern day: Slab City is located close to an active bombing range. 

Slab City is an off-the-grid community that employs solar panels for electricity and has its own waste disposal systems. There’s very little in the way of rules, laws or government interference, which results in the occasional shootout or arson. However, the community is largely peaceful, and the residents have teamed up to create sculptures, live music stages, a library, and a golf course. There’s even a communal shower, fueled by a nearby hot spring. 

The community has several full-time residents known as “slabbers,” but it’s largely a seasonal community of mostly elderly people who arrive by the thousand to spend the winter months in the comparatively warm climate of the desert site. It’s also extremely hard to miss, should you decide to see the place for yourself: Visitors to Slab City are greeted by a 50-foot-tall mound called Salvation Mountain, a massive, colorful folk art installation that a Slab City resident named Leonard Knight spent decades creating.  

9. Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania

In 1971, Denmark’s defense ministry decided to close down a large fortress in Copenhagen and left it to its own devices. Recognizing a cool thing when they saw it, residents of the city soon took down the fences and let their kids play in the area. Eventually, squatters arrived, but they weren’t just happy to live in the place — they outright took it over. They renamed the place Christiania and declared it to be an autonomous “free city,” with its own laws, taxes and whatnot. 

Remarkably, the Danish government didn’t do the obvious thing and forcefully evict everyone involved. Instead, they went along with the idea, and declared it a “social experiment.” Christiania slowly grew into a settlement of roughly 1,000 people who shaped it into an open, anarchist community where both selling and using drugs is legal. However, in some ways Christiania’s success is the very thing that has ultimately turned it into a failure. Though the freetown was successful in its mission to create a “hippie utopia,” it has ultimately fallen victim to the same thing so many other cool places suffer from: Gentrification. Over the years, Christiania has become “normalized” under Danish law and in 2011, the squatters had to resist the government’s attempts to bring the Freetown back to fold by buying the area’s land from the state. This, combined with a huge interest in the area, has dramatically shifted the area’s economy, and rents have risen so much that original citizens can barely afford to live there anymore: One long-term resident had to move away when his rent rapidly rose from $300 to $1,300.

8. Deadwood

Yes, that Deadwood. The infamous gold rush mining town HBO made famous for its utter lawlessness and brutality came into existence thanks to the discovery of vast gold deposits in the Black Hills. By 1876, the miners had torn through Southern Black Hills and moved into the north, where they discovered a river rich in gold — and surrounded by a ravine full of dead trees.  

A small camp of miners almost immediately grew into a large, lawless town that drew all kinds of fortune seekers and shady characters, as depicted in the HBO show with significant historical accuracy. While Deadwood endured several large fires and severe economic troubles, and eventually became a more or less respectable and law-abiding gambling town, its start as a spontaneous, seedy haven to some of the most notorious names in the Old West remains its most enduring legacy.

7. Guryong

Guryong village is a large shantytown located in the most unlikely place of them all: In Gangnam, the extremely wealthy neighborhood in South Korea’s Seoul that PSY made fun of in his smash hit Gangnam Style. Guryong formed spontaneously in 1988, when the officials forced many people to leave their homes when the city hosted the Olympics. They set up shop on a plot of private land in Gangnam as a last resort, and have remained there since.   

Residents of the Guryong village have existed in this limbo for decades, and although the government has plans to relocate them (yet again) and demolish the shoddily built village, the redevelopment plan has been delayed multiple times because politicians can’t agree on how to compensate the villagers.

6. Miami’s Umoja Village

Umoja Village in Miami, Florida was a spontaneous shantytown built in the Liberty City area of the town by a bunch of housing activists who wanted to draw attention to the city’s vast housing problems. The cardboard-and-wood construct started out as “part protest, part street theater,” but soon filled up with the area’s actual homeless, who set up gardens and a communal kitchen. 

The community attracted a lot of media attention and became the symbolic heart of the city’s affordable housing crisis. When Miami hosted Super Bowl XLI, international journalists visited Umoja Village, presumably to the chagrin of city officials. Unfortunately, the village only survived around six months: In 2007, a candle that had been left unattended torched the whole Umoja Village to ground. The activists and residents wished to rebuild their community, but the city considered Umoja a massive PR disaster, fenced away the area and threw enough red tape at the activists to derail the rebuilding attempts. 

5. Trench Town

Jamaica’s Trench Town was born in 1937, but people had lived there much longer. Before it got its new name, it was known as Trench Pen, a farming and cattle area where a great number of poor people started squatting. Eventually, the government decided to build permanent housing to the squatters, and the method they chose was “sub-dividing” the area into several separate plots called tenement yards. Every yard could house roughly 16 tenants, who paid a monthly rent of 12 shillings to the government. 

Though it nominally transformed from an illegal squat into an officially sanctioned urban township, Trench Town was (and remains) very much a slum — a blocky, dilapidated area with bad prospects and high crime rate. However, it’s also a community that greatly affected the history of Jamaica, and the world in general, by giving birth to a little thing called reggae. Bob Marley grew up there. Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Alton Ellis and a whole host of other reggae legends also hail from Trench Town. Unfortunately, the neighborhood’s fame in music history has done little to improve its conditions, and apart from the occasional Bob Marley mural and the ever-present scent of a certain herb, pretty much the only things that reveal the area’s reggae greatness are the Trench Town Museum and the Trench Town Culture Yard, a colorful compound that was created as “an informal meeting place for musicians.”

4. Right 2 Dream Too

Right 2 Dream Too, a.k.a. R2DToo, might not technically qualify as a city due to only being roughly 80-90 people strong, but it has touted the cause of thousands of homeless people in the area, so it’s just fair to give it a pass. Right 2 Dream Too was created as a large homeless encampment on an empty private lot in Portland, Oregon. It came to existence when a man called Ibrahim Mubarak decided to do something about the city’s homeless, and set up a nonprofit organization to do just that. He struck up a deal with a landowner who had “trouble developing and selling the property,” and voila! A homeless camp right across the street from the city’s high-end boutiques. 

As you can probably imagine, property owners and developers started complaining pretty much instantly, and the city started looking into possibilities to relocate the camp to a more suitable location. The encampment eventually relocated to a riverside spot near the Moda Center, and along with other active homeless nonprofits such as Dignity Village and Hazelnut Grove, they seem to have attracted enough awareness to the homeless issue that in 2019, the city of Portland announced a new outreach program to hopefully help the area’s homeless. 

3. Heliopolis

Brazil is known for its giant shantytowns, “favelas,” and few favelas are more famous than Sao Paulo’s massive Heliopolis. The massive improvised neighborhood has an estimated 210,000 residents, is located just six miles from the business district, and keeps sprawling in every direction thanks to “puxadinhos,” spontaneously sprouting additions to existing buildings that Heliopolis residents build whenever a relative returns home, a new child is born or some other event necessitates some extra space. While there is technically an architect who “supervises home-improvement projects in the region,” the results can be highly eccentric. 

Over time, Heliopolis’ buildings have become sturdier and its infrastructure better — longtime resident Sandra Regina dos Santos says that they have access to electricity and water these days, which wasn’t a given back in the day. Apart from new buildings and annexes popping up constantly, the original buildings from the 1970s have been rebuilt and expanded. What used to be a quickly thrown-together wooden shack may have become a sturdy, three-floor, 2,150 square foot brick building over the decades. Some of the buildings can be up to eight floors high. 

2. Cairo’s Garbage City

Cairo’s Garbage City is technically a walled area called Mansheyat Naser, a slum neighborhood that’s home to 262,000 of not only the city’s, but the entire country’s poorest inhabitants. A large number of its residents are Coptic Christians who are known by the derogatory name Zabaleen, which means “Garbage Men.” In the 1940s, the Zabaleen used to be farmers, but poverty and hunger caused them to start migrating from Upper Egypt. By the 1970s, they had settled in an abandoned quarry, and started developing a modest economy by sorting out the giant city’s trash.

Cairo’s waste disposal system is lacking, to put it mildly, so the Zabaleen collect trash from the streets free of charge — and bring it all to Garbage City to manually sort it all out and see what they can use. Metals, plastics, cardboards and fabrics are all separated from each other and sold to the “next layer” of the economy who go on to further process the materials. Even the rotting food found in the trash is put to good use as pig food.  

For many denizens of Garbage City, this way of life is quite humble: Their living conditions are poor, and every flat surface (including the roofs of the buildings) tend to be covered by trash. Still, some have managed to acquire a significant amount of wealth from the recycling business, and it’s not uncommon to see young men in fancy suits. The city of trash also hides amazing beauty: the Garbage City features a majestic and vast cave church called Saint Simon Church, which the locals have carved from rock. The elaborately built and decorated cavern can seat over 15,000 people. 

1. Kowloon Walled City

Kowloon Walled City started its life as a thick-walled military base in Hong Kong, but a series of establishment changes after World War II left the place open to a massive number of immigrants. Soon, both the British administration and the Chinese authorities discovered they had absolutely no way to control the spontaneously created, dense and massively overpopulated network of existing buildings and new, 10-story makeshift one built by the Walled City’s denizens.

Over the years, the area swelled to a point where its population density was around 3,3 million people per square mile — which meant that the Walled City’s 2.7-hectare area was estimated to house around 35,000 people, making it easily the most densely populated area on the planet. Its makeshift high-rise buildings were all interconnected, and the maze-like structure made sure that you could navigate the area over rooftops, corridors and bridges without ever setting your foot on the ground. 

The conditions within the Walled City were abysmal: Sunlight had no place within the complex, which was instead largely lit with neon signs. There was sewage dripping on the surfaces. Law was nonexistent, and the Triads reigned supreme. Despite all this, many residents loved the place and resisted the authorities’ multiple attempts to empty (or at least slightly clean up) the place. Eventually, though, the “decrepit city” was set for demolition, and in 1993 even the most stubborn elements accepted compensation and rehousing. Today, what used to be the imposing, lawless Kowloon Walled City is a public park.