• Ripley drew all his cartoons upside-down.
• Ripley received more mail than any other individual in history-more than 3,500 letters per day, over one million per year. During a Ripley's contest, he received more than 2.5 million letters in just two weeks.
• Wayne Harbour of Bedford, Iowa, was obsessed with proving that Ripley was a liar. For 26 years, this postmaster wrote a letter a day challenging at least one of the claims in the daily cartoon. As of 1970, he had written 22,708 letters to people highlighted in the cartoon. He never received a single contradiction to the claims Ripley made. His letters are now part of the Ripley's collection.
• Ripley visited 201 countries during his career, travelling a distance equal to 18 complete trips around the world.
• Ripley's prized possession was a sculpture of Japanese artist Hananuma Masakichi. The life-size, life-like self-sculpted statue incorporated Masakichi's own hair, fingernails and toenails to make it apppear more real. Ripley kept the statue in a special curtained area of his bedroom.
• Ripley owned one of the largest and most expensive collections of automobiles in the world, but he never learned to drive.
• A memorial to Ripley stands in his hometown of Santa Rosa, Calif., in a church built entirely from one redwood tree.
• Ripley is buried in Santa Rosa's Odd Fellows Cemetery.