Short Stories from the Fortean Times

A collection of weirdness from around the world

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RIGHT DOWN THE BARREL
As agent Carlos Montalvo moved in to arrest a drug dealer in Haileah,
Florida, the suspect pulled a gun and shot at his chest. The bullet was
stopped by Montalvo's own pistol, though, with most of the slug lodged in
the barrel. Montalvo escaped with no more than facial cuts caused by flying
fragments from his own gun.

DREAM COMES TRUE
Pearl Anderson of Oakland, California, dreamt about money gushing from a
slot machine. She woke up and drove straight to Reno, Nevada, arriving at
two in the morning, and went straight to the slot machines. On her second
try, five sevens appeared, winning her one million dollars.

PRIZE SURPRISE
Bill Helko got the winning number in a Californian lottery, with a first
prize of £412,000. He celebrated with a champagne dinner for his wife and
friends at a Hollywood restaurant, ordered a Porsche and booked a family
holiday in Hawaii. When he went to collect his winnings he found that 9,097
others had also won first prize, and his share of the jackpot was £45.

UNLUCKY SACRIFICE
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a Chinese medium beheaded a 16 year old boy as a
sacrifice for a lucky lottery number. No one won the prize that week.

CURSE STRIKES BACK
A beech tree by the churchyard in Walsham le Willow in Suffolk was found to
have a death's head carved high up its trunk, and many villagers thought it
was cursed. Farmer Ronnie Rayson laughed at them and cut the tree down. He
cut his hand badly on his chainsaw, then trod on a nail and his foot turned
sceptic. After that he got jaundice and was rushed to hospital, where he
died.

HORSING AROUND
Peter Jones of Bournemouth kept what he thought was a 'lucky' horseshoe
charm in his Colt car; but he changed his mind after driving past a pub
called The Three Horseshoes near Exeter. His Colt was wrecked in a
collision with three runaway horses, and his face was cut when two of the
horses tried to jump over his car, smashing the windscreen. The horses were
unhurt.

WHAT LUCK!
An Austrian teacher planned to lose £20 on a one-armed bandit in Graz to
demonstrate the evils of gambling to his class. Instead he won £150,000.
His name was Helfried Luck.

GOLD-FISH
Mr Levent Suner bought some Norwegian mackerel in his home-town in Turkey
and found a yellow stone in one of them which turned out to be a nugget of
pure 24 carat gold, weighing 4.5 grams. A jeweller offered him about £50
for it, but he decided to keep it. When the news got around, there was a
rush on imported mackerel; but no one else seems to have got lucky.

WHAT A CHOKER...
In Azerbaijan, an 11 year old girl called Matanet fell asleep in a field
after picking tomatoes and woke up choking. She was rushed to a children's
hospital in Baku and made to drink 3.5 pints of salt solution, after which
she vomited up a two foot long Caucasian cat snake, which had crawled into
her mouth while she slept. She left hospital an hour later feeling fine.

HAZARDS OF XMAS PUDDING
Marie Hefferman was 13 when she celebrated her first Christmas in Australia
after her family emigrated from England. Unknowingly, she swallowed a 1959
silver threepenny piece which her mother had put in the Christmas pudding.
She developed laryngitis and lost her voice six weeks afterwards. Twelve
years later, still unspeaking, she had a coughing fit and brought up a
little black lump which contained the coin. It had been lodged sideways in
her throat and missed by the X- ray machine, but after speech therapy she
was able to talk again - and had acquired a broad Australian accent in her
years of silence.

SNAKE SNACKS
Wang Biao, a young peasant from north-east China, ate more than 1,800 live
poisonous snakes over two years, to cure himself of convulsions. The cure
was effective, but by then Wang had become addicted to snakes and needed to
swallow one before every meal.

RUBBER FOR SUPPER
Chinese health authorities have discovered a woman in her 30s in Taiyuan,
Shanxi province, who likes rubber so much that she has eaten 800 rubber
nipples from baby-feeding bottles since 1990. All her family like the smell
of rubber, and her younger brother is fond of eating rubber bands!

SNAKES ALIVE!
During the making of the Turkish film Suicide Commando, tough-guy actor
Sonmez Yikilmaz slept in a tent with the film crew. One night a black snake
crawled into the tent and into Sonmez through his open mouth. An X-ray
proved that the snake was alive in his stomach, but he refused an operation
to remove it. Instead, he tried out an ancient method of snake removal. He
was hung upside down from a tree with a pot of steaming milk on the ground
below him. The smell of the hot milk lured the snake out.

PEDESTRIAN'S REVENGE
Greta Hagel, from Stuttgart, was out shopping when she was splashed by a
motorist as he drove through a puddle. She noted the number plate, tracked
the driver down a few days later, and shot him dead.

FATHER, TAKE THAT...
Ettore Gagliano, 83, is known as the Priest Basher of Milan, having been
charged with 58 assaults on clerics and church personnel. "I don't like
priests," he says. "When I see one, I just have to give him a punch in the
ear." Ettore is always acquitted because of his advanced years, but still
manages to assault a priest every month, on average. After appearing in
court for leaping out from behind a column and hitting a Greek Orthodox
priest who had gone to the cathedral for morning prayers, he told
magistrates: "There is nothing you can do to save the priests from me. I
shall bash them all until my last breath."

A DEADLY UNDERTAKING
Two undertakers shot each other dead in Paraiba, Brazil, during an argument
over who had the right to conduct the funeral of one of the town's
inhabitants. A third undertaker from a neighbouring town had to be called
in to bury all three bodies.

A REAL BOOBY
Giacario Burranti got fed up after his shop in Milan was burgled for the
tenth time, and booby-trapped the place with a bomb. Unfortunately, one day
he arrived at the shop and forgot to switch the device off. He was blasted
to death by his own bomb.

BAD LOSER
Ernst Tomachek was watching the 1992 European football championship final
with his girlfriend, Waltraud, in Hamburg. He backed Germany, while she
cheered for Denmark. When the Danes won 2-0, Tomachek poured a bottle of
schnapps over Waltraud, set her on fire, and locked her in her room for 23
hours.

PEE-D OFF
Michael Debaets returned home to Santa Clara, California, after a short
holiday with his family, to find his newspaper soaked with what he believed
to be urine from the dog of his neighbour, Martin Myslinski. A heated
argument ensued between the two men's wives, but Debaets decided on a more
direct course of action: without saying a word, he shot Myslinski dead.

CHARMED!
In November 1991 an argument broke out in Togo, between two members of the
rival Mossi and Konkonba tribes, about who had the most effective magic
charm to ward off bullets. One of the men suddenly pulled a gun and shot
the other, winning the argument on the spot...but sparking off a tribal
conflict which left hundreds injured and many buildings wrecked.

BURNING WITH ANGER
Jacob Mandel, 18, went into a barber shop in Los Angeles and asked for a
short back and sides. He wasn't at all happy with the result, so he burned
down three barber shops and a four-million dollar shopping mall.

UNKIND CUT
Joseph Fallar Sr was arrested for the murder of his wife in Harrison City,
Pennsylvania. He had stabbed her 219 times because she kept stacking the
refrigerator full of vegetables and hiding the milk.

BLACK WIDOW
Egyptian born Omaima Nelson was a rape crisis counsellor by day and a
hooker by night. She had a row about money with her husband William, in
Santa Ana, California, and hit him with a lamp. Then she tied him to a
mattress before dressing up in red shoes, a red hat and blood-red lipstick.
After that she hacked him to pieces, skinned him, barbecued his ribs and
ate them, then ground up the rest of the body in the garbage disposal unit.
At her trial, she said she was "a warm person who wouldn't harm a
mosquito."

DON'T ASK ME
Farmer Cao Hungxi of Jiangsi province, China, cut off his tongue with a
pair of scissors rather than take sides in a long-running argument between
his wife and father. His family wrapped the tongue in a cabbage leaf and
rushed him to hospital, but the damage was beyond repair.

SNAPPED
Max Hoffmann went berserk 11 hours after his wedding in Bavaria, when his
camera failed to work at the reception. In the ensuing fracas he gave his
father a black eye. After that his mother Astrid stabbed her son to death
with a kitchen knife in front of the bride and 40 guests.

PLAYING HIS OWN TUNE
Pianist Giovanni Mancuso played a funeral march by Chopin every day in his
flat in Messina, Italy. Eventually, neighbour Pietro Pettinato couldn't
take it any more, and shot him dead.

RAISING TWO FINGERS
In 1979, art writer Gerald Marzonati of New York's Soho Weekly News got a
phone call from Henry Benvenuti, who wanted to talk about the art world.
Marzonati was busy and said he'd call him back. What he didn't realise was
that Benvenuti, himself an artist, was calling from the reception desk
phone...and Benvenuti didn't like being fobbed off. He had arrived with a
briefcase and a rat-trap containing a dollar bill and, when given the
brush-off took an axe out of his case and, with considerable artistic
panache, chopped off two fingers. Then he stormed out of the building
leaving briefcase, rat-trap, axe and fingers on the counter. He was found
in a taxi by police, who took him to hospital, but the fingers could not be
reconnected.

CROOKS CROCKED
Michael Wightman of Toronto ended up pleading guilty in court to beating to
death David Marlatt in a dispute over which of them had the longest
criminal record...thus adding another item to an already lengthy list.

CHICKEN WAR
When a chicken flew into a house in Miranshah in Pakistan, the householders
tried to keep it, in spite of claims from another family that the bird was
theirs. The argument got out of hand as the two families tried to settle
the dispute with assault rifles, grenades, and rocket launchers, leaving
four people dead. What happened to the chicken isn't known.

COULDN'T WAIT
In Russia, a man burned himself to death in a Siberian village store after
learning that he faced more than a year's wait to buy a washing machine.

It can be dangerous being a vegetarian. Geetaban Rachiya campaigned against
people eating mutton, until two butchers dragged her from a motorised
trishaw in the Indian city of Ambavati and hacked her to death with meat
cleavers. They blamed her campaign for a fall in business.

SNACK ATTACK
In the Siberian town of Omsk a Russian named Viacheslav bought a special
smoked sausage as a gift for his family, then went drinking with a friend
called Nikolai. An argument broke out: Viacheslav grabbed the nearest thing
to hand - and beat Nikolai to death with the sausage

FOOTBALL CRAZY
An Australian man was jailed for five years for stabbing his wife to death
after she refused to change the TV channel so that he could watch a
football match.

CURING A COUGH
Near Perth, Australia, drug addict Joseph Taylor got fed up with the
coughing of his brother Dale, 16. He locked him in the boot of his car,
doused it with petrol and set it on fire. "He'd just coughed one time too
many," Taylor told police. He was jailed for life.

OUT OF HAND
A quarrel in a market over a piece of poultry meat sparked several days
bloodshed around Bimbila in Ghana. Houses were burned down, bodies littered
the roadsides and hospitals ran out of medical supplies. After 12 days, the
death toll had topped 500, some 30 villages had been burned and thousands
made homeless.

SNUFFED OUT
In a Bangkok karaoke bar Thai property tycoon Chen Ka Sek hogged the
microphone for three hours and, amongst other things, sang Candle in the
Wind four times. When another man asked to have a go, Chen had his
bodyguards shoot the presumptuous fellow dead. "We were carried away by the
beauty of my voice," Chen confessed.

GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL
A man in Naples was so annoyed when a fortune teller forecast he would go
to jail that he shot him - for which he was duly sent to jail.

GETTING IN SHAPE
Police in Hong Kong stopped a man because he seemed to be 'oddly shaped'.
He was found to be wearing 18 bras and 45 pairs of ladies' panties.

RIGHT ON THE NAIL
Denis Widdison of Newark, Notts, had been out of work for five months and
told his neighbour he was depressed and couldn't stop shivering. Two days
later, he killed himself by hammering two five inch nails into his head.

A FINAL TURN ON
77 year old Arthur Sharland was found dead in an armchair with two
crocodile clips attaching bare electric wires to his chest. He had been
electrocuted, but as his torso was a mass of tiny scars, it seemed he'd
spent most of his life plugging himself into the mains - for the thrill of
it.

MISPLACED VENGEANCE
A Masai tribesman went into the Ministry of Tourism offices in Nairobi,
Kenya, broke into a glass case containing a stuffed lion, and began trying
to strangle it. When arrested, he explained that his brother had been
killed by a lion, and he wanted revenge.

WAVING GOODBYE
Having reached the age of 82, Joseph W. Charles retired from his 'job' as
the Waving Man of Berkeley, California, in October 1992. He had made a name
for himself during the previous 30 years by standing in his front yard
every day during the morning rushing hour, and waving to passing motorists.

SHOP TILL YOU DROP
A busload of Russian shoppers refused to break off their trip to Poland
when one of them died of a heart attack. They tried to get the man buried
on the spot, but the Polish authorities wouldn't allow it; so they
continued bargain-hunting for days, while leaving the corpse on a
back-seat.

A MAN OF FEW WORDS
Surly Ernst Hort spoke an average of 3.5 words a day over a two month
period, his wife Suzanne told a divorce court in Bielefeld, Germany. "We
never have rows because he never says anything," she said. Having kept a
notebook, she was able to tell the judge that his longest utterance during
the period was: "This coffee tastes like dish-water." When asked for a
divorce, he simply said: "I agree."

FULLY-LOADED
Police stopped a car in Vinton, Louisiana, after reports that it contained
naked people. The driver got out, wearing only a towel, then jumped back
in, drove off and crashed into a tree. After that, 20 completely naked
people spilled out of the car, including five children who'd been riding in
the boot, and began religious chants.

They explained that they were Pentecostalists from the Texas town of
Floydada, on their way to a religious retreat in Florida. The group, who
were all related, believed that the devil was after them, and that Floydada
would be destroyed if they stayed there. They'd started off in five or six
cars, abandoning them and their posessions along the way. They stripped
because they believed their clothes were possessed by the devil.

HIGH IN THE LIFT
Palle Birkelund was jailed for being drunk in charge of a lift, in Aalborg,
Denmark. Shoppers complained when he kept yelling: "This is the captain of
your aircraft - we will be landing in the next few seconds!"

JUST CHECKING
Jean Cellise of Toulon cut open his stomach with a razor to check that
surgeons had removed his appendix properly. They had, but he had to go back
into hospital to recover from his do-it-yourself efforts.

TICKLED PINK
Jonathan Thomas was walking home through Oxford after a night out with
friends in April 1992. On a secluded footpath he was seized by a man who
tied his hands behind his back and blindfolded him with sticky tape. His
assailant then forced him to ground, stripped him of his shoes and socks,
and mercilessly tickled his feet for several minutes. He then engaged in a
brief conversation with his victim before untying him and vanishing into
the night, leaving him shaken but unhurt, and with his wallet and other
possessions intact.

MAKING WHOOPEE
Harold Brown rushed past a security guard at the 48- storey Transamerica
pyramid in San Francisco, calling out "I want to see the man at the top.
I've been sent by God!" Followed by the guard, he sprinted to the 29th
floor, spat at witnesses and jumped 300 feet down an airshaft. Shouting
"whoopee!" all the way down, he landed on a concrete floor at an estimated
100mph, his t-shirt and jeans torn off during the fall.

He lay unconscious for two minutes, then woke up and laughed. He had broken
his thighs, knees and heels, but suffered no internal injuries. In the
ambulance he was heard humming "Camptown Races".

STONED AGAIN
Passers-by were astonished at the sight of a man, one arm handcuffed to a
tree and with blood on his face, shouting, kicking and apparently trying to
climb up a branch of the tree at North Beach in Durban, South Africa. A
beach inspector said the blood was from a fairly deep cut, self- inflicted
by throwing a stone in the air and letting it fall on his forehead. The man
was taken to a doctor.

NAME THAT TUNE
A man scaled a 10-foot concrete wall at the Honolulu Zoo, stripped to his
underwear and played a harmonica to Empress, a 51-year-old Indian elephant.
Empress apparently didn't like the music and cornered the man until he was
arrested by police. He was charged with cruelty to animals. The arresting
officer said he couldn't name the tune.

HAVING A BED TIME
Presley Bishop of Littleton, Colorado, came home from work one day feeling
depressed and went to bed. He stayed there for three years, during which
time he lost nine stone, grew a beard down to his stomach and fingernails
six inches long. Finally, his desperate sister Bernice called in the cops,
who removed him to a nursing home. Asked by police how he felt, he replied:
"Fine". It was the first word he had uttered since taking to his bed.

COLOURFUL CHARACTER
A man identified by Los Angeles police only as "Leonardo Da Toenail" was
caught after a number of young women in the library of the University of
Southern California had their toenails painted different colours. Posing as
a student, he would sit opposite his chosen victim, apparently hard at
work, then drop something on the floor. While under the table he would
paint her toenails. When arrested, he had 16 pots of nail varnish on his
person. Charges were dropped later when no one wished to testify.

METAL MOUTH
Allison Johnson of Lincoln is an alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat
cutlery, who's spent 24 years in jail. He repeatedly went to restaurants on
his release from prison and ordered lavish meals. When he couldn't pay, he
would tell the owners to call the police and would then eat cutlery until
they arrived. At the time of his last arrest he had eight forks in his
stomach. He was jailed for another four years.

HITTING THE NAIL ON THE HEAD
Shouting "Nobody loves me!" a smartly-dressed man nailed his left hand to
the door of the Barrister's Robing Room at the High Court in London. Said a
court official: "He pleaded he wanted to crucify himself like Jesus. He had
a hammer and another nail but would have had a terrible job nailing his
other hand up." When the ambulance crew arrived they said: "Oh no, not you
again!" He had done the same thing some weeks before.

CLEANED OUT
Told to get lost by an irate housewife who answered their knock at the
door, two vacuum-cleaner saleswomen in Ljungby, Sweden, saw red. Instead of
leaving, they vacuumed every carpet in the house, while accusing the owner
of failing to keep it clean. The struggle to evict them took three hours.

OFF HIS TROLLEY
A man pushing a supermarket trolley down the M4 motorway near Swindon was
stopped by police. He carried a sign saying Addis Ababa and said he was
taking the food to help starving Ethiopians. He was detained under the
Mental Health Act.

TOMATO TAN
A young woman in Hull became addicted to tomato soup and ate several bowls
a day, with unfortunate consequences. Her intake of carotene, the
yellow-red pigment that colours carrots and tomatoes, became so high that
her skin turned orange.

BETTER NOT KNOWING
A 36 year old man who had lost his memory asked police in Hamburg, Germany,
to find out who he was. He wished he hadn't bothered when they discovered
he was wanted for fraud and arrested him.

SLICK TRICK
Stopped for speeding at 80 mph, Michelle Radin told police in Indiana that
she had no oil in her car and was racing home as fast as possible before
the engine blew up.

HAIR TODAY...
Police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, charged Redmond McGee with breaking into
a woman's house and brushing her hair against her will.

A SAFE BET?
Inept bank robbers in Cooperville, Ohio, drilled through a safe door, then
hit a brick wall and carried on drilling...only to find themselves out in
the street again.

CLEAN SWEEP
The owner of a house in Gilroy, California, found that a burglar had hung
new curtains, made the bed, dumped the trash, done the dishes, stacked
newspapers, put dirty clothes in a hamper and put away the ironing board.
Nothing was taken except the old curtains, and the burglar left a note
signed 'Prince Eddie', saying: "Dear Sir, I hope you don't mind. I cleaned
your house. Don't worry. I won't take anything because my father is a duke
in Spain..." Police later arrested a mentally disturbed youth.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY
The victim of a car thief in Trevise, Italy, couldn't believe his luck when
the car was returned with a full tank and a note apologising for borrowing
the car and offering dinner at a restaurant. Finding that a table for four
had been booked in advance, the man took his whole family and their host
even phoned to ask if they were enjoying the meal. When they returned home
they found that their house had been cleared of its entire contents,
including jewellery and £800 in savings.

IN ONE HAND...
Bank robber Anthony Colella was making a clean getaway with $1,300 he had
grabbed during a a New York hold-up when he was stopped by a passer-by who
promptly mugged him. Deeply distressed, Colella went straight round to the
police station to report the mugging - and was arrested for the original
robbery.

A FAIR COP
Colin Braggs was arrested when he tried to break into a police car in
Frome, Somerset. As the windows were misted up, he hadn't realised two
policemen were sitting inside.

REALLY DUD
An unemployed US printer who turned to counterfeiting was caught because he
used black ink instead of bright green on his phoney bills. It turned out
he was colour-blind.

NINJA TURTLE
Pizza delivery man Troy Brewer was robbed of $50 by two men in Balch
Springs, Texas. He was in a phone booth when two men came up to him, thrust
a snapping turtle at his face and said: "Don't move or you're gonna get
bit!"

SMART MOVE
Chaos reigned at Bulawayo Magistrate's Court when Smart Ngwenya faced a
charge of tampering with cars. His name was called, but another Smart
Ngwenya, a witness waiting to give evidence in another case, was brought
into the courtroom. The mistake was discovered when the charges were read,
and officials hustled him out and brought in another Smart Ngwenya, who
also turned out to be the wrong man. At the third attempt, the 'right'
Smart Ngwenya was brought in, but he denied the charge, claiming mistaken
identity.

HOME RUN
Thieves who stole 15 homing pigeons from bird fancier Peter Ball of
Langley, Berkshire, tried them out - and they flew straight back to his
loft.

OLD LAGS
Two 78 year old burglars were caught red-handed in Sao Paolo, Brazil, when
the occupants of the house returned unexpectedly. The one inside was too
deaf to hear the warning of his friend outside, and the look-out man was
not fit enough to escape.

BLIND LUCK
Blind Edward Bennett of Nuneaton appeared at Warwick Crown Court charged
with acting as a lookout for his burglar friend Peter Hiatt. As soon as
Bennett heard a car he called his dog, which was the warning signal, and
then fled.

TICKLED PINK
New Yorker Richard Hunter received a three month sentence for breaking into
a house to tickle Oyra Ostad's feet and steal her shoes. He was caught when
he returned three weeks later to do the same thing to Oyra's older sister,
Farbia.

FAIR COP
Christopher Logan, charged with impersonating a policeman, escaped from Bow
Street Court - by impersonating a policeman.

BURGLAR ALARMED
A burglar broke into a baker's shop in Viblach, Austria. As he crept across
the office in the dark, he was attacked by Lola the cockatoo. During the
fight, the burglar knocked over a glass tank containing Egor the viper. As
he watched Egor slithering toward him by torchlight, the baker's pet mynah,
Peppino, started his favourite imitation: a doorbell. The terrified burglar
crashed through a window, cutting himself as he escaped. Baker Robert
Koloini came downstairs to find his office in chaos, but the £2,000 in his
safe still intact.

CHEQUE OUT
Police in Indianapolis allowed a woman accused of passing $100,000-worth of
dud cheques to post bail with a cheque. It bounced.

BEAR-FACED CHEEK
At an airstrip on Alaska's Barter Island, teams of polar bears have taken
to walking in a dead straight line to the runway's landing lights, and then
bashing them until they go out. Naturalists are mystified.

REVENGE OF THE MOUSE
In China's Jiangsu province, farmer Xu Guihuai found he had unwelcome
tenants: a female mouse and her three babies. He set traps and poison, and
the three offspring were soon killed. The mother vanished, though, and then
mounted a campaign of vengeance against Xu. She attacked him in his sleep,
and one morning he woke to find his hand had been gnawed. Another night she
bit his ear so seriously that he had to go to a local clinic for help. At
last report, the 10-ounce mouse was still wreaking havoc in Xu's household.

BATS IN THE BELFRY
Turkish seaman Rafit Belir jumped ship in 1991, hoping to start a new life
as an illegal immigrant in Australia. He was walking along a road in north
Queensland when he saw a cloud of flying bats darkening the sky. Convinced
that they were vampire bats craving his blood, he turned himself in and
asked to be flown back to Turkey. After he was gone, officials revealed
that the 'winged horrors' were nothing but harmless fruit bats.

FISH-FACE
Carmen Malavasi crashed her moped into a passing car as she rode through
Suzzara in Italy. She lost control when a giant carp leapt out of a nearby
canal and smacked her in the face. Having survived the crash, she ate the
carp for supper.

RATS RUN RIOT
A couple in Oslo, Norway, bred rats at home to sell to a pet shop. When the
shop went bankrupt, they decided to keep 15 rats. Before long, more than
1,000 rats were roaming the house, forcing the couple to abandon the
bedroom and sleep on a mattress in the living room. Then the rats captured
the living room and the couple fled. The rats were eventually gassed to
death, and a rather wiser couple reclaimed their home.

POTTY POTOROOS
The rabbit-sized Tasmanian potoroo is an 'at risk' species, and attempts to
breed them in captivity have run up against unexpected problems: if
unsupervised males are left together, they have a tendency to tear off each
other's genitals.

WOODEN ACTING
People were worried that an owl perched on a pylon at Johnstown, near
Wrexham, never flew away, so someone called the RSPCA. An official spent an
hour trying to coax the bird down before a neighbour told him: "You're
wasting your time. It's made of wood." The local electricity company had
installed it as a decoy to discourage nest- building.

ELEPHANT'S REVENGE
In February 1993 a train knocked down and injured an elephant calf in the
Sylhet region of Bangladesh. When the next train came along an hour later
the calf's mother blocked the track, then banged her forehead against the
engine for 15 minutes, until it could no longer run. Then she walked off
into the jungle again, leaving about 200 passengers stranded for over five
hours.

MAN'S BEST FRIEND
Jack Fyfe, 75, was paralysed by a stroke at his home in Sydney, Australia,
in December 1991. He was kept alive for nine days by Trixie, his pet
sheepdog, who kept soaking a towel in her drinking bowl and draping it over
her owner's face so that he could suck it. Trixie remained at the foot of
the bed the whole time, except to wet the towel whenever Mr. Fyfe called
"water". When the bowl was dry, Trixie took water from the lavatory. Mr.
Fyfe's daughter eventually found him when he failed to turn up for a family
dinner; by then he had lost four stone in weight

DOLPHINS TO THE RESCUE
Francois Colombier was out in a 10 foot rubber dinghy with his son and a
friend when they were caught in a violent storm off Brittany in October
1993. Low on fuel and with the outboard motor spluttering, they were tossed
about by 10 foot waves, until four dolphins appeared. Two took up positions
at the stern and one on either side. Then they nudged against the boat and
guided it away from nearby rocks. Half an hour later, the dolphins had
brought the boat safely to shore, and swam off to sea again.

SNAKE WARS
In October 1993, thousands of snakes, including cobras and king cobras,
were seen fighting in a snake sanctuary at Chiang Mai in Thailand. The air
was filled with the stench from the decomposing bodies of the losers, but
many fights ended inconclusively, with exhausted rivals abandoning the
fray. The fighting was seen as a bad omen. A Buddhist abbot told
journalists that in ancient times such an event foretold imminent invasion.

HAIR RAISING
A falcon swooped on an elderly visitor to the Milky Way Falconry in North
Devon, grabbed his toupee and carried off the furry object to its perch to
eat it. The falconer quickly retrieved the toupee, but by then it had
become unwearable.

KEEP ROLLING ALONG...
In May 1992, an Indian elephant-keeper called Mr. Sreedharam was trapped
for 42 hours on the back of his elephant, which was in heat, and ran amok
for 200 miles through Kerala and Karnataka. It was eventually tranquillised
and he was rescued. He'd managed to eat by snatching fruit that had been
tied to trees for him along the animal's route.

MAN'S BEST FRIEND
60 year old Jesus Martinez had a heart attack at the wheel of his car on a
motorway in Houston, Texas. His Schnauzer dog, Bitsy, leapt into the
driving seat, knocked the steering wheel to force the vehicle onto the hard
shoulder, and bit his master so that he would take his foot off the
accelerator. His prompt action saved the day, and Martinez recovered in
hospital.

FALLING OUT OF THE SKY
In October 1992, hundreds of birds, of 16 different species, plummetted to
the ground at Campeche, on the Yucatan coast of Mexico. They were migrating
from Canada and the USA to winter feeding grounds in South America, and
there was no apparent explanation. More than 200 fell on a single ranch,
and all had died from head injuries when they hit the ground.

PLAYING THE GOAT
Miss Adele Brown and her mother, of St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica, met a talking
goat while they were out collecting fruit during an election campaign in
1992. The goat prophecied that unless the Green Party of Jamaica came to
power very soon the destruction of the planet would accelerate. They asked
the goat what they should do and it said: "There are no limits to
creativity and no limits to subversion. Vote for any candidate opposed to
the Year 2000 Party." Then it wandered off into the trees.

GOING APE
A French tourist was strolling with his wife in the orangutan sanctuary at
Sandakan, Borneo in 1992 when Raja, a 14 year old male orangutan, grabbed
him and stripped him naked. The tourist kept still for fear of being
injured, and Raja fled into the forest with trousers, shirt and underwear.
The tourist, in turn, fled to the park office where someone lent him a pair
of trousers.

GONE TO THE DOGS
In a bizarre but humane way of dealing with animal pests, a Colorado
entrepreneur, who says the idea came to him in a dream, has invented a
machine which vacuums prairie dogs from their burrows and deposits them,
unharmed "but somewhat confused", in a truck for relocation. His business,
appropriately called Dog-Gone, is booming.

FRESH FISH
Mehdi Qassemi bought a carp from a shop in Hamedan, Iran, and put it in his
freezer. A week later he took it out and started to thaw it by pouring hot
water over it...then watched in amazement as it leapt back to life.

A RUM DO
In recent years, elephants have regularly made off with scores of bottles
of rum from a military supply base in the jungle area of Bagdogra, northern
Bengal. The elephants have learned to douse fires lit to scare them away,
and manage to short-circuit electrified fences with uprooted trees. Once
inside the depot, the huge raiders make short work of thin steel railings
and wooden window-frames, then help themselves to the rum, sugar, flour and
bananas inside.

The elephants break the bottles by curling their trunks around them and
smashing off the necks. After that they sway around enjoying themselves
before returning to the jungle. Soldiers who attempt to resist regret it
later. One elephant never forgot the man who poured hot water on him one
night, and returned regularly to demolish his hut.

BEAR-FACED CHEEK
A bear was bought from a Russian circus by a tourist agent after he was
asked to provide an American visitor with a "wild bear hunt". The tourist
was taken to the Perdelkino Forest near Moscow and when all was ready, the
bear was released. As the hunter closed in on his prey, a postman passed by
on his bike, saw the bear, and tumbled off in surprise. Recalling his Big
Top training, the bear grabbed the bike and pedalled off, leaving the
American to sue for fraud.

VAMPIRE ANTS
In March 1993, the town of Envira in the Amazon jungle was invaded by vast
swarms of giant blood- drinking ants. The 10,000 residents were permanently
forced to wear plastic bags round their ankles, and fought back with poison
and boiling water, but to no avail. Seeking meat, salt and blood, the ants
devoured cats, chickens and turtles, leaving nothing but the bones behind.
Children were at risk, and people who died were buried 40 miles away, as
the local graveyard was no longer safe. The ants appeared after local
jungle was cleared, eliminating their natural predators, such as birds and
spiders, and within a few weeks they'd conquered 70% of the town, with
ant-hills every four yards.

WHAT A BOUNDER
Assuming that the kangaroo he had knocked over on the road from Perth to
Adelaide was dead, Emilio Tarra dressed it in his Gucci blazer and was
about to take its photograph when the animal recovered, knocked him out
with a blow from its tail and vanished into the bush with his passport,
$2000 and 16 credit cards.

FISHY YARN
A fisherman's dog disappeared while swimming across the Pechora river in
northern Siberia. Moments later the fisherman cast his net and hauled in a
massive pike, nearly six feet long, with a tail sticking out of its mouth.
He cut it open and his dog struggled out, barking and none the worse for
its experience.

HORSE SENSE
A horse bolted and galloped through Fakenham, Norfolk. It finally stopped
running at a pub called The Rampant Horse.

MONKEY BUSINESS
A man driving to work through the southern desert of Saudi Arabia ran over
one of a troop of monkeys. When he made the return trip later that day, the
remaining monkeys were waiting for him. They spotted his car, jumped on it,
and smashed the windows with their fists.

CAT NEST
A tortoiseshell cat, owned by Pamela Fletcher of Bradwell, Derbyshire,
climbed a 15 foot tree to give birth to three kittens in an abandoned
magpie's nest.

IT'S A LAUGH
A new religion called Taisokyo is sweeping Japan. Its two million devotees
have to laugh at everything, including floods, fire and famine. Followers
can be expelled for not laughing at death and disaster, and funerals are
also a source of hilarity. "We smash mourning members of the family in the
face with cream pies," explained devotee Nansui Kita. "We draw a moustache
on the face of the corpse and set fire to the casket if we feel like it."

IT'S A MIRACLE?
Hundreds of people testified to cures effected by the 'holy water' sold by
a pedlar in Mexico City. When police arrested the man, he confessed that he
drew the water from a local well and added a drop of home-made tequila.
Even so, the fame of the water spread to Argentina, where health officials
banned it, because it was untreated water from a cholera area. The miracle
seems to be that nobody caught anything fatal!

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GODS?
In Lucena City, Philippines, human footprints, from five to seven inches
long and half an inch deep, suddenly appeared overnight, impressed in
concrete and asphalt. It was two days before Christmas, 1992, and traffic
jams were caused by the sightseers. Roman Catholics lit candles near the
footprints, which they believed might have divine origins.

TALK OF THE DEVIL
On 22 January 1993, Joy Bolante, 12, saw "a black man with a tail and
horns" after she and some of her classmates burned some wood at the foot of
a tamarind tree at the Camp Crame Elementary School in Quezon City,
Philippines. The horned figure was described as gigantic. The next day Joy
collapsed at school and was sent home. When she regained consciousness, she
shouted with a man's voice: "There is no God!" Four days later, fifteen
pupils collapsed and began talking in various voices, and showing
extraordinary strength. They were rushed to a Roman Catholic chapel, where
a priest cured the problem with prayers and holy water.

MINI-DROUGHT
In July 1992, drought struck the country of Niger, West Africa. Muslim
zealots from the Izala sect, crying "Allahu akbar" (God is great) began
beating up women wearing mini- skirts, who they blamed for causing the
drought with their provocative attire. Several women were attacked in the
town of Zinder, but the torrential downpour that occurred the following day
hit the town of Niamey...where two men and an elderly woman were drowned.

ALL HOT AIR
In the Philippine capital, Manila, a cult called the Reserved Manpower Of
The Good Wisdom For All Nations brought traffic to a halt for several hours
by letting the air out of the tyres of rush hour traffic, saying it was
"God's way of stopping bad deeds." With hundreds of buses, trucks and cars
immobilised, motorists ran for cover as armed police chased the cultists,
who swarmed through the stalled traffic deflating more tyres and waving
streamers and placards bearing religious messages. "This is God's order to
let out air," explained Honora Dimagila, one of 32 people charged with
malicious mischief. "Air is from God. This is the solution to the crisis in
our country."

DIVINE RETRIBUTION
Priest Don Giacomo Perini cursed the rain as he stood outside his church in
Alto Adige, Italy; whereupon a cross, loosened by the rain, fell on his
head and killed him.

UN-HOLY WATER
A 19 year old man made a remarkable recovery after attempting suicide from
a 10th floor window in February 1989. He had multiple skull, spine, pelvic,
knee and leg fractures, and received 53 pints of blood. After six weeks of
intensive care, doctors were well-satisfied; but then blood poisoning sent
him into rapid decline.

It turned out that the man's aunt, from Ireland, was visiting him daily and
liberally anointing him with holy water. The water contained a bacterium,
which was constantly reinfecting him through his wounds, mouth and nose,
and almost killing the patient for the second time. When the problem was
traced, the aunt stopped, and the man was eventually discharged after three
months in hospital.

A HEAVENLY TUNE
In May 1992 an elderly woman fell asleep while watching The Sound of Music
at a Birmingham theatre, and then caused chaos when she woke up during the
nuns' chorus. She thought she had died and was being welcomed to heaven.

FALLEN ANGEL
Ken Seymour was doing his Christmas shopping in Plymouth city centre in
1991, when a four foot illuminated angel fell from an ovrhead display and
crashed at his feet. "It wasn't a guardian angel," he said.

DIVINE PROTECTION
In September 1991 a fire in the Kepa Duri district of Jakarta, Indonesia,
razed 1,300 houses and left more than 4,500 homeless. 31 people took refuge
in a two-storey house owned by a Mr. Subur, regarded by many as a medicine
man. He had had a revelation from God that his house would survive, while
all the others would be destroyed. When the fire died down, his was the
only house still standing, with the only sign of damage being a scorched
doorframe.

BLEEDING STATUE
Policeman Antonio di Giovanni found a plaster statue of Christ on a rubbish
tip near Naples in November 1993. After taking the statue home and cleaning
it up, he noticed red liquid welling up in its eyes. Later, red blotches
appeared on its head, hands, chest and feet. Word got around, and thousands
came to pray. A temporary shrine was set up, but eventually there were
traffic jams two miles long and the crowds had become vast. While the local
bishop set up an investigation, police spirited the statue away before any
more chaos was caused.

HOLY CHILD
A baby boy with a long nose, born at the end of 1992 in Amritsar, India,
drew large crowds who believed he was an incarnation of the elephant-headed
Hindu god, Ganesh, while priests led prayers in the courtyard of his
parents' house. The boy had very little upper lip and, months before teeth
normally appear, two teeth that protruded like tusks.

WEEPING BLOODY TEARS
Hundreds of devotees at Baringay San Antonio in the Philippines saw a
wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary shed tears of blood. At the same
time the sun was said to have 'danced', while a luminous white cloud hung
over the head of a young visionary called Judiel Nieva. The statue has
apparently wept blood six times.

HOLY FOREARM
A baby girl has become a celebrity in the Muslim desert nation of Chad
after she was born with two birthmarks on her left forearm that appeared to
read 'Mohammed' in Arabic. Her parents are naturally confused, as both of
them are Christians.

RING OF DEATH
In December 1992, Ken Charles Barger of Newton, North Carolina, woke up in
the night to the sound of the ringing telephone by his bed. Sleepily
reaching out for it, he mistakenly grabbed the loaded Smith & Wesson .38
Special lying next to it, which discharged when he held it to his ear,
shooting him dead.

SHADY EXIT
Stubborn Armando Pinelli, 70, won an argument with another man over who
should sit on the only chair in the shade of a palm tree in Foggia, Italy -
then died when the tree fell on him.

REVENGE OF THE CAR
In 1977, a man was knocked down by a car in New York, but was fortunately
uninjured. A bystander told him it would be a good idea to pretend he was
hurt and claim the insurance money, so he lay down in front of the car
again. No sooner had he done so than the car rolled forward and crushed him
to death.

UNLUCKY CLOVER
Salvatore Chirilino was walking with his wife when he picked a four-leaf
clover on a cliff-top in Vibo Marina, Italy. As he was congratulating
himself on his good luck, his foot slipped on the wet grass. He fell over
the cliff edge and plunged 150ft to his death.

ON TARGET
Believing her husband had betrayed her, Vera Czermak of Prague jumped from
her third storey window - and landed on him as he passed by below. She
recovered in hospital, but he died instantly.

TOUR OF HELL
After watching a Taiwanese soap-opera about the supernatural, four 13 year
olds in China's Henan province ate a water-melon laced with rat poison, "to
take a tour of hell". They left a note saying: "If hell is no better than
earth, we will return." Two died, two came back.

SUNK
Gerard Hommel was a veteran mountaineer who had survived six Everest
expeditions. One day he fell off a ladder while changing a lightbulb at
home in Nantes, France. He cracked his head on the sink and died.

TWICE DEAD
Armando Cassa got so depressed when he was reported to have died in a fire
in 1991 that he jumped to his death from a high-rise building in Puerto
Rico.

BEDDED DOWN FOR GOOD
Holidaymaker Adelaide Magnasco, 80, pulled down the cupboard bed from the
wall of her chalet in Aosta, Italy, and got in - and then died when it
suddenly snapped closed again.

FISH KNIFES MAN
A South Korean fisherman, preparing his catch after landing it in New
Zealand, thought the tuna he was about to gut was dead. Suddenly, its tail
flicked, sending the knife he was holding straight into the luckless man's
chest and killing him.

A FITTING END
Vincent Orr served four years in jail for the murder of his girlfriend on
New Years Day 1985. He admitted repeatedly hitting her head on the concrete
floor of their home in Radcliffe, during a drunken row. In the summer of
1991 he went on holiday to Corfu with his new girlfriend. Taking a swim on
the first morning, he smashed his head on some rocks and died a few hours
later.

CROCODILE MADNESS
When President Felix Houphouet-Boigny died after ruling the Ivory Coast for
33 years, an unidentified man in his twenties turned up at his palace. He
declared that he could no longer bear to live without the president, and
then hurled himself into the crocodile-filled moat. Huge crowds gathered to
watch as the crocodiles spent two days devouring his body.

WRONG NAME ON THE BOX
New Yorker Julia Carson was pronounced dead from heart disease, and
preparations for her burial began. At the funeral parlour she 'came back to
life', sat up in her coffin and asked what was going on. Her daughter Julie
promptly dropped dead of shock.

DREAM OF DEATH
Obstetrician Dr. Linda R. Goudy of Stoneham, Massachusetts, cancelled a
Caribbean cruise in the autumn of 1993, after a premonitory dream convinced
her that if she went she would die in her car. She probably should have
gone anyway, as four days later she was found strangled in her car in the
parking lot of the hospital where she worked.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
A crowd of 50 people gathered on a bridge in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to
watch as a girl attempted suicide. The bridge collapsed under their weight,
and nine people were killed. The girl was rescued.

SNAKE SOUP
Four boys in the Algerian city of Maghnia died shortly after eating soup.
Their mother had inadvertantly brought home a poisonous snake hidden in
vegetables which she put in the family refrigerator. When she took the
vegetables out, the snake, seeking warmth, slithered into the soup pot and
discharged its venom into the soup.

BUNNY BITES BACK
Rabbit-hunting farmer Vincent Caroggio of Chartres, France, paused for a
rest and laid down his gun. He was immediately shot dead by a rabbit which
rushed from its burrow and bumped against the trigger.

WHAT A CHOKER
Mrs Dorothy Johnson's two year old great-grandson offered her a jelly sweet
before taking off his hat to show her his new, extremely short haircut. She
found this so hilarious that she burst into uncontrolled laughter - and
choked to death on the sweet.

HOTEL JINX
Ibrahim Sezgin, a merchant from Bursa, stayed one night at a hotel in
Canakkale, Turkey, and died in the bath. Police could find no suspicious
circumstances and said it was death from natural causes. Nobody wanted the
room so the hotel owners and staff all used the bath to prove there was
nothing wrong. A week later, sales rep Bekir Aksoy stayed in the room and
was found dead in the bath. Again, there were no suspicious circumstances,
but the room was sealed as a precaution.

A REAL TURKEY
Edward Hammond, 27, was shot dead in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during an
argument over the proper way to season a roast turkey.

DROWNING BY NUMBERS
Nine pupils and a Seventh Day Adventist cleric drowned on their way to a
rally on an island in Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The church said it was just
an accident, but police had a different version after interviewing
witnesses. They said that the 10 victims had tried to prove their faith by
walking on the water, and drowned in the process.

A STICKY END
A 23-year-old sweet factory worker in Marseilles, France, was crushed to
death when 5,000 pounds of marshmallows fell on him.

DEADLY DENTURES
Off-duty bus-conductor Abdul Fadli Talib fell asleep on the back seat of a
bus as it travelled from Kuala Lumpur to Seremban in Western Malaysia. The
bus arrived at its destination, but he didn't, having died after swallowing
his dentures while asleep.

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER
David Wayne Godin drowned near Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, as he was returning
from his bachelor stag party, when his vehicle plunged into a lake.
Attached to Godin's leg, courtesy of his friends at the party, was an
authentic ball and chain.

DIRTY LARRY
Larry Kennedy, 16, was ridiculed at school in Gary, Indiana, for body
odour. Eventually he shot himself with his father's gun because his family
would not let him take a bath. The family had stopped bathing 15 years
earlier after his infant sister died in the bath.

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS...
A Chinese mother of four daughters who evaded state birth control teams
enforcing a 'one-child only' policy while repeatedly trying to bear a son,
died of rage after hearing her fifth child was also a female.

VENGEANCE IS MINE...
Salimu Hatibu, convicted of stealing from a church, fled from a court in
north-eastern Tanzania, plunged into a river, and was eaten by a crocodile.
His body was not recovered.

GIVE AND TAKE
In Hong Kong, 65-year-old Chan Wai-fong decided to offer up thanks to the
gods for her daughter-in-law's lucky escape from a road accident. As she
was praying outside the apartment block where her son lived, she was killed
by a falling bag of cement.

UNGRATEFUL SO-AND-SO
In the Philippines, neighbours who saved the life of Gerardo Gregorio as he
attempted suicide were dismayed that he showed little sign of gratitude. In
fact he was so upset that he hacked three of them to death with a machete
and wounded three more before being cut down himself.

REVENGE OF THE TREE
Brendon Connell was clearing land behind his home in Berrien County,
Georgia, with a bulldozer. The tree he was trying to dig out fell on the
bulldozer and killed him.

SCIENTISTS ROCKED
Scientists in Antarctica are puzzled by a piece of Moon rock found on top
of the Beardmore Glacier, 400 miles from the Sout Pole. A couple of inches
long, it is covered with a bubbly green crust, while inside lie peppery
grains. It might have been thrown here when an asteroid struck the Moon
thousands of years ago.

ZAPPED
The International Astronomical Union has decided that Asteroid 3834 will be
known as "Zappafrank" after musician Frank Zappa, who died in 1993. The
name reversal avoided confusion with another asteroid called Frank. All
four Beatles, Mike Oldfield, Eric Clapton and Jean-Michel Jarre already
have asteroids named after them.

WEATHERMAN'S WOES
Indian weatherman Cibonco Mala forecast sun and it snowed, while his
warning of frost preceded a heatwave. TV chiefs pulled the plug on his New
Delhi forecast when he began crying on screen. He went into hiding after
death threats.

WANDERING MOON
The Earth and the Moon have drifted apart by one metre since a mirror was
placed on the sea of Tranquillity by Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil
Armstrong in 1969. The mirror has been used as a cosmic tape-measure by
bouncing lasers off it. The Moon moves four centimetres further away each
year, due to friction from the tides.

JURASSIC BARK
David Noble, an officer of Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Service,
abseiled into an 1,800 foot gorge in Wollemi National Park and discovered a
genus of tree which was thought to have died out 150 million years ago. The
Wollemi pines have waxy foliage and a bark like bubbly brown chocolate.
"Wollemi" is an aboriginal word meaning "look around you", which is exactly
what Noble did to find the trees.

ONLY PRETENDING
Researchers believe that the disease which killed dozens of people in India
in 1994 was probably not the plague, but was caused by other bacteria that
mimic its symptoms.

WATCH THIS...
An excited announcement by an expert birdwatcher over CB radio led
'twitchers' flocking to his side in a field on the Isle of Scilly to watch
a nighthawk, a rare visitor from North America. Only when scores of
telescopes were focussed on the object of his attention was it realised
that it was, in fact, a cowpat.

NEAR MISS
An asteroid, 20 to 40 feet across, passed within 65,000 miles of Earth on 9
December 1994. If it had hit our atmosphere, it would probably have burned
up, unless it was among the one per cent of asteroids that are made of
nickel-iron, in which case it would have made a significant crater.

IT IS NOW...
After years of searching for an orchid thought to be extinct, botanists in
New Zealand found it lying flattened under a groundsheet when they took
down their tent.

EARTH'S BAR CODE
Infrared satellite pictures of the Nullarbor Plain in Australia have shown
a group of five parallel lines, 248 miles long, up to nine miles wide and
between 49 and 62 miles apart. The lines appear to be about two degrees
Celsius cooler than the surrounding plain, but there is no explanation for
them.

WHEELY INTERESTING
A shrimp-like creature, found only on the Pacific beaches of Panama and
seen by only a handful of people, invented wheeled transport millions of
years before the Sumerians did in about 3,000 BC. The one-inch- long
creature forms its body into a wheel and then rolls along as if it were a
hoop.

TROPICAL SCOTLAND
A builder who was knocking a hole in the wall of the Royal Museum of
Scotland in Edinburgh discovered fossils of a 336-million-year-old swamp
tree hidden in the stone. The lycopsid was a tree from the Carboniferous
period that grew to 115 feet tall.The museum was built from sandstone
quarried in West Lothian which, in Carboniferous times, was near the
equator and covered in tropical swamp.

TREES TUNE IN
In 1986, the US Navy installed a 60-mile wire antenna in a Michigan forest
to communicate with with submarines using extremely low frequency radio
waves. Forestry researchers have now discovered that the trunks of nearby
aspen and maple trees have grown 50 per cent thicker than those on a
control site 30 miles away, while red pines have grown 10 per cent taller.
It's thought the electromagnetic field helps the transport of nutrients.

SURPRISE SURPRISE
A notice pinned on the bulletin board at the University of Cincinnati
announced a series of lectures called 'Surprises in Obstetrics'. Scribbled
underneath was: "Mary had a little lamb".

ONE IN THE EYE
Julian Fabricus was seven years old when he fell over while chasing
butterflies in a field near Worcester, South Africa. When he returned home
his left eye was inflamed and smarting, but the doctor gave him some
eye-ointment, and the incident was soon forgotten. A year later Julian's
eye began to itch and his vision began to suffer. Surgeons removed a white
object from his cornea that turned out to be a flower seed which, after a
year in his eye, had sprouted and grown an eighth of an inch long, with two
little leaves. After the operation, Julian had perfect vision once more.

ON THE REBOUND
A court report appearing in a local Welsh paper said: "A disgruntled
customer hurled a rubber plant at a Swansea takeaway food business window,
but it bounced off."

GREEN SHEEP
After extensive flooding in 1977, several sheep in Gloucestershire began
growing their own lawns. Grass seeds had become lodged in their fleece and
started to sprout when the sheep became soaked. Before long they were
gambolling about sporting a fine crop of two-inch high grass.

BRANCHING OUT
40,000 people flocked to burn incense at a pine tree known as 'The Tree of
the Gods' in Jiangsu province, China, which rained a mysterious 'water'
from its leaves. A paralysed woman was able to walk after she drank the
water, and people claimed to have seen 32 Buddhas in the branches.
Eventually, local police cut down the tree and discovered that the
miraculous healing 'water' was actually the urine from millions of insects
living in the tree.

UP IN SMOKE
Tribesman Simphiwe Khosa was cleared by a court in Johannesburg of
possessing 80lb of marijuana after he told the judge it was for burning
during thunderstorms - to ward off lightning.

QUITE AN EARFUL
A six year old girl in southern Israel was taken to a doctor suffering from
severe earache. Examination in a Beersheba hospital revealed that a
tree-seedling had sprouted in her ear, and had even produced a tiny leaf.

BOOMING MELONS
The American Deep South has been hit by an outbreak of exploding melons -
in fields, stores, fridges and kitchens. Tom McElroy of Dadeville, Alabama,
took a ten-pounder home and left it in his kitchen. "Ten minutes later I
was dripping in juice and my place looked like a war zone," he said, after
the fruit went off rather more quickly than might be expected. Experts
think a bacterial disease is causing gas build-ups inside the melons.

COMING UP MUSHROOMS
A nun called Sister Stanislaus spent years trying to grow mushrooms at her
convent in Clwyd, Wales, but without success. Eventually she died aged 79,
and was buried in the grounds. Every autumn since then a healthy crop of
mushrooms has appeared on her grave, but nowhere else. "They are very
tasty," says the Abbess.

DANCING TREE
A small tree in Yunnan province, China, is said to 'dance' to music, the
trunk swaying in time with the rhythm and the leaves turning from side to
side. When the music ceases, the tree stops moving. Gentle conversation has
the same effect, but the tree ignores raucous voices and loud martial
music.

BEWILDERED BOTANISTS
New Zealand botanists had spent years searching for Corybas carseii, an
orchid that only flowers for two days a year, and which was thought to be
extinct. After four days searching for it in a peat bog, the demoralised
scientists paused for lunch...and found they were sitting on one.

TEMPORARY REPRIEVE
Mourners at the burial of Anna Bochinsky in Romania were astonished when
the "dead" woman jumped out of her coffin while it was being carried with
the lid open, as is the custom, from the cemetery chapel to the grave. She
ran into the road and was run over and killed by a car.

GRAVE-Y TRAIN
Three Romanians sat their uncle's corpse upright in a railway seat for the
300-mile journey from Bucharest to their family graveyard in Caransebes,
because they couldn't afford to rent a hearse. To avoid suspicion, they
sloshed alcohol over the body and told the conductor he was drunk. As the
train had no heat or lights, they got away with it.

A DOG NAMED LAZARUS
When Mary Bratcher from Artesia, New Mexico, backed a truck over her dog,
everyone agreed that Brownie was dead, and he was buried in a field. Only
her three-year-old son Toby insisted "Brownie not dead". The following
afternoon, when the family returned from a trip to a nearby town, they
found Brownie sitting on the doorstep. It wasn't certain whether Brownie
had dug himself out, or been helped by his mother, brothers and sisters,
but although injured he responded to treatment, and has been renamed
Lazarus.

DEAD DRUNK
Troy Smith, 17, passed out after consuming about 10 glasses of gin in New
Haven, Connecticut. His family called fire department paramedics 12 hours
later. Finding no signs of life, they pulled a blanket over his head.
Moments later he began to stir and was rushed to hospital, where he
regained consciousness five hours later.

GRAVE OFFENCE
Back in 1990, Diana Brook Smith received probation for manslaughter over
the death of Steven Barnhill, a passenger in her car when it overturned.
After dusk on Christmas Day 1993, Smith and her friend Daniel Justice dug
down about four feet trying to reach Barnhill's coffin in Kinsey, Alabama,
trying to prove that he was still alive. They were busted on Boxing Day for
grave-tampering and criminal mischief. Smith was jailed pending mental
evaluation, while Justice told the judge he still didn't know why he helped
her in the grave-opening.

HOTLINE TO HEAVEN
Visitors to Upper Nazareth cemetery in Israel who heard a phone ringing in
a grave weren't imagining things. The rings came from a mobile cellular
phone which one of the mourners had dropped into the open grave of Rabbi
Pinhas Miller during the funeral service. By the time the loss was
discovered, the grave was already covered, and rabbis decided not to dig it
up.

DEAD TO THE WORLD
A Los Angeles parking control officer who ticketed an illegally-parked
Cadillac got no excuses from the driver sitting stiffly behind the wheel.
He had to reach in the window right past the driver to put the $30 ticket
on the inside of the dashboard. It was only an hour after the parking
ticketer had left that it was realised that the driver was, in fact, dead,
having been shot in the head some 13 hours previously.

DIALING THE DEAD
A fad in Malaysia had phone-callers attempting to reach the spirits of the
dead by dialling 999998, 999444 and 999999. As all the numbers start with
999, not surprisingly the calls were routed directly to fire, police and
ambulance services. When the phone was answered, callers apparently
believed they had reached 'the other side' and began chanting incantations
or asking questions about heaven and hell.

GRAVE ERROR
Baffled historians wasted eight yeasrs trying to discover the identity of
the person buried at Evercreech Church, near Shepton Mallet, under a stone
marked, simply, "H.W.P." The Wessex Water Authority finally put them out of
their misery by revealing that it was a marker for the church's hot water
pipe.

BACK FROM THE DEAD
Sipho William Mdletche, 24, was declared dead after a car crash near
Vereeniging in South Africa and taken to a mortuary. There he spent two
days in a metal box, drifting in and out of consciousness. He slowly became
alert enough to realise he was trapped in the box and began screaming for
help. Fortunately, mortuary workers heard the commotion and freed him. But
there was still one problem. His girlfriend, who was injured in the same
crash, refused to believe him. She told nurses at the hospital where she
was recovering that he was a zombie returned from the dead to haunt her.

STAYING FRESH
Jose Ilagan was 86 when he died of an unknown illness in 1972. He was
embalmed and buried in the family crypt in Batangas, in the Philippines,
but when the crypt was opened again in 1978 to bury another family member,
his body was found to be perfectly preserved. His body was dressed in new
clothes and placed in a new coffin. Exactly the same thing was found in
1985 when the tomb was opened again. Eventually the crypt was re-opened in
January 1993, when Illagan's daughter complained of strange dreams. The
body still seemed fresh, and was taken to a church where crowds of people
came to see the 'miracle'. Sceptics maintained that the only reason the
body was preserved was that too much formalin had been injected into it
during embalming, but the family took it back to their house and built a
glass crypt for it.

KNEE-CAP RAIDERS
In Bago City, in the Philippines, a cemetery caretaker saw eight men arrive
one January evening in 1993. Frightened by their numbers, he didn't
interfere, but listened to hammering noises for the next three hours. Next
morning he found that 29 graves had been broken into, and the bodies were
strewn around with their knee-caps missing. The knee-caps were used by a
local cult to make talismans and healing concoctions. Police arrested the
cult members, among whom were three who had been charged with the same
offence two years earlier, but had been released after paying off the
relatives of the 85 dead people they'd relieved of their knee-caps.

IN THE COLD GROUND...
A Ugandan woman in Muwuggwe village, 75 miles west of Kampala, exhumes her
husband's corpse every morning and takes it home "to enjoy the sunshine". A
year after he died, her husband appeared to her in a dream saying that it
was chilly in the grave, and asking to be dug up for a "warming stint".
Each day at dawn, the woman and her children get the corpse out to sun for
several hours, before returning it to the grave.

NO COME-BACK
Rodrigo Maneja was the leader of a cult in the Philippines which believed
it could survive a nuclear war. He gathered hundreds of followers and
spectators to demonstrate he could return from death within four hours. His
brother-in-law poured petrol over him and ignited it, as Maneja cried out
"Elohim will protect me!" When four hours had passed and there was still no
sign of returning life, police took his charred remains to a funeral
parlour.

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Weird Storys 1994

*1* In 1994 the Hubble telescope recorded three bright rings about
three-and-a-half light years across. One astronomer admitted it was the
most stupefying thing he had ever seen. The gargantuan hoola hoops are
close to the site of Supernova 1987a in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, about
170,000 light years away. The explosion observed seven years ago had been
expected to light up a sphere of gas shed by the star; but the centres of
the two big rings don't align with the site of the supernova. [FT78:7]

*2* The birth of a white buffalo (more properly North American bison) on a
farm near Janesville, Wisconsin, on 20 August was hailed by native
Americans as a major religious event. The white cow calf, named Miracle, is
seen as the long- awaited return of White Buffalo Calf Woman. "The legend
is that she would return and unify the nations of the four colours black,
red, yellow and white," a Sioux medicine man explained. [FT78:6]

*3* Thousands of small fish, looking like spotted perch, were found
flapping about on parking lots and roads in the Australian desert outback
on 22 February after a rain storm. The Liebelt family, owners of the
Dunmarra Wayside Inn, about 370 miles south of Darwin, were the main
witnesses. A few days later, on the morning of 28 February, thousands more
fish, slightly bigger, were found in puddles after about five inches of
rain overnight. In the previous six years, there had been three fish falls
in Dunmarra. [FT75:49]

*4* A study of infrared satellite pictures of the otherwise featureless
Nullarbor Plain in south central Australia showed a group of five parallel
lines, 248 miles long, up to nine miles wide and between 49 and 62 miles
apart. They appear to be about two degrees Celsius cooler than the
surrounding plain during daytime. The origin and nature of this planetary
bar code remains unknown. [FT78:49]

*5* Holy Spirit Fever, characterised by tears, fainting and speaking in
tongues, seems to have originated at the Vineyard church, near Toronto
airport on 20 January: for this reason it is called the 'Toronto Blessing'.
Such religious revivalism is not unusual in Charismatic, Evangelical or
Baptist groups. What is new in the present wave is an urge to "roar like a
lion" and to burst out laughing. The fever rapidly spread from Canada;
outbreaks have been noted in Cape Town, Bombay, Argentina and China. The
first English congregation to be affected was at Holy Trinity, Brompton; by
July, between 1,000 and 1,500 churches all over the country were affected,
although it seems to be tailing off now. [FT77:24-28]

*6* On 19 February, Gloria Ramirez, a cervical cancer sufferer, was rushed
to Riverside General Hospital in California with chest pains, breathing
difficulties and vomiting. An odd oily film was noted on the woman's body,
a blood sample appeared to contain white particles (also described as
crystals) and there was an ammonia-like smell. Dr Julie Gorchynski and four
nurses passed out. Ramirez died soon afterwards.

Gorchynski and a nurse were in intensive care for over a week with
breathing problems and muscular spasms. Gorchynski's blood was found to
contain particles similar to those in the Ramirez blood sample. Months
later, she was still very ill and underwent surgery to try and save her
knees because of poor blood circulation. Two autopsies on Ramirez failed to
pinpoint the cause of the miasma and she was buried on 20 April. The
official cause of death was kidney failure brought on by the cancer; the
particles and fumes remain unexplained. A late development, suggesting that
a rare chain reaction in Ramirez's body had created a chemical warfare
agent will be reported in FT79. [FT75:42]

*7* In May, an Australian expedition discovered a new species of tree
kangaroo (genus _Dendrolagus_) in the mountains of central Irian Jaya on
the island of Papua. The black-and- white marsupial looks more like a bear
or koala than a kangaroo. It spends most of its time on the ground in
stunted, mossy forest. The Moni tribe never kill it; they believe it to be
an ancestor, probably because it greets humans by whistling and holding up
its arms to show its white belly fur. [FT78:47]

*8* Mrs Margaret Bell, who kept bees in Leintwardine about seven miles from
her home in home in Ludlow, Wales, died in June. After her funeral,
mourners saw a swarm of hundreds of bees settle on the corner of Bell Lane,
directly opposite 42 Mill Street where she had lived for the previous 26
years. The bees stayed for about an hour before buzzing off over the
rooftops. There is a charming photograph of the bees clustered on the wall
above Mrs Bell's friends. According to country lore, you should always tell
the bees when someone has died so that they can pay their last respects.
[FT78:10]

*9* A worrying trend in Romania, first noticed in March, was prisoners
hammering nails into their skulls with metal tea cups to avoid hard labour
and get into hospital. "Today I operated on my 17th case. He is 23 years
old and it was difficult to take the nail out. It was rusty and completely
embedded. They only choose the rusty ones and they put excrement on them,"
said Dr Florin Vesa, head of the Galati county hospital in eastern Romania.
A local paper in Galati in August said 13 inmates in the local jail had
nails in their heads. [FT79]

*10* Heol Fanog House in the quaintly-named Welsh village of St David's
Without, has plagued its occupants since they moved in five years ago.
Self-employed artist Bill Rich, his wife Liz and three young children, have
endured smells of sulphur and church incense, shadowy figures and ghostly
footsteps ... and horrendously large electricity bills. They reckon about
L3,000 worth of electricity has been somehow consumed by the house (or
whatever), which problem continues even when the family is away and all the
appliances are off.

The Riches called in the medium Eddie Burks, who said he found the highest
concentration of evil he had ever come across, which was feeding off
electricity for its own power. It was also taking 'energy' from the family
who report being tired and listless. The electricity board tested the meter
twice and found it to be working correctly with no abnormal fluctuation.


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The Fortean Times "Book of Weird Sex" will appear during September, so here
are some tasters

KARL WATKINS, 20, appeared at Hereford Crown Court in February 1993 on five
counts of outraging public decency: in particular, making love to
pavements. Watkins claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, but he was
fingered many times as the man found face down on the paving stones with
his pants round his ankles. One boy told of seeing Watkins's bare backside
moving up and down, while a mother said she was shocked to see a group of
children gathered round him. He also attempted to mount an underpass. How
he passed the time during his 18 month jail sentence is far from clear.

Watkins was back in court in April 1995, on charges of simulating sex with
black plastic dustbin bags in front of teenage schoolgirls. He revealed a
nine-year fetish with the plastic sacks, centred on the "feel and touch of
the bin liners". He went out at night to spend his time in rubbish piles,
and had been found in wheelie bins, and even in the back of dust-carts. His
ultimate sexual fantasy was to be in a dust-cart when the bin bags were
crushed. Convicted of outraging public decency, he was put on three years'
probation and ordered to seek psychiatric help.

AT DOBBIGAN, in Yuro County, California, a cult known as the Church of the
ABC of Abraham erected a rather startling monument in May 1995. The cult is
led by one Caligula Croesus Spurtyn which, astonishingly, is his original
name and appears on his birth certificate, and its monument, made of
Sicilian marble and dappled with veins of Corsican jasper, is a 244-foot
high, 57 foot circumference replica of Spurtyn's penis. The replica is also
topped by an eternal flame which, one rather suspects, is probably not
present in the original. Shortly after the unveiling, a Mexican restaurant
owned by the cult was shut down when it was discovered that one of the
condiments used there was Spurtyn's semen.

THE COLONIAL INHABITANTS of New York were amazed in 1702 to see their
governor, Lord Cornbury, open the state assembly on behalf of Queen Anne,
wearing a hooped skirt and head-dress and carrying a fan. "You stupid
people," he told those who gasped. "I represent a woman and I ought to do
so as faithfully as I can." Soon afterwards he adopted women's dress at all
times, at which point he was sent back to England, probably to the great
relief of all concerned.

IN SEPTEMBER and October 1986, Timothy Adrian Ward, 32, exposed himself to
women horseriders near his home in Middlesbrough. At the time he wore a
full-length rubber wet-suit, a gas mask, and had two hot water bottles
dangling on a piece of string round his neck. When he was arrested at
Thornton-le-Beans, near Northallerton, police found wet- suit, gas mask,
hot water bottles, rubber gauntlets, two pairs of wellingtons, a pair of
cut-off waders and a yellow rubber coat in his car. He was prosecuted in
court, fined L250 and had his gas mask confiscated.

A LOS ANGELES BUSINESSMAN, identified only as Arnold G., proposed to his
girlfriend Carol in 1984 and asked her parents for their consent. After the
engagement had been announced, Carol's father took Arnold aside and told
him his daughter was born by artificial insemination because he was
unlikely to father a child. He named the sperm bank, which turned out to be
one that Arnold had donated to as a student. Arnold obtained a court
injunction to inspect the records and found that he was the father of his
bride-to-be, and 806 other children. The wedding was called off.

A SWEDISH TAXI DRIVER was jailed in October 1994 for leaving the meter
running while he had sex with a woman customer and billing her for L5,600.
The 34-year-old driver said the bill included 25 occasions of "sexual
coitus", charges for trips, hotel and telephone costs, as well as a 25 per
cent sales tax. The court decided that he was exploiting the 49-year-old
woman, convicted him of usury, sentenced him to three years' jail, and
ordered him to pay her back.

UTE WINTER, 29, was the wife of a football club president in Mainz,
Germany. Her husband Klaus was obsessed with the club, raising funds for a
new clubhouse and personally mixing cement for it at the weekends, leaving
blonde Ute to her own devices. One day she took a fancy to one of his
players... and before long she had slept with the whole of the first team,
all the reserves, and had started into the over-40s old-boys eleven,
bringing her score up to 28, all footballers, by the end of the 1985
season.

The first sign of trouble came when Klaus arrived home and discovered Ute
in bed with his star striker. He decided to forgive his wife to avoid a
scandal, but later found her with the outside-left in a back room at the
clubhouse; the goalkeeper in a car; and the inside-right in his own living
room. Klaus decided that was enough, at which point friends told him Ute's
full-time score. He was granted a divorce.

AN OPTICIAN appeared in court at Brasschaat, Belgium, in March 1995, and
his lawyer Henri Janssens admitted that the charge was technically true:
before prescribing contact lenses, his client did frequently ask women to
strip naked and dance around his consulting room while he played the
accordion. However, Janssens claimed that there were mitigating
circumstances: his client had qualified in England where, he assured him,
such techniques were commonplace. The optician was later acquitted.

WEDDING GUESTS got something of a surprise when they sat down to watch a
video of the reception in Sussex in 1994. The man shooting the reception
pictures had borrowed the video camera from Derek Jeffrey, 59, who had
forgotten to erase the footage on the tape. As the wedding video came to an
end, the guests were shocked as the screen flickered and filled with a
pornographic 10-minute movie of Jeffrey committing acts of bestiality with
his neighbour's dog. He was seen lying on a bed, naked but for his socks,
with a Staffordshire bull terrier called Ronnie.

Brought to court, Jeffrey said that he made the film after he and three
friends had watched a video called Animal Farm showing women having sex
with animals. Besides admitting to being drunk at the time, he said that he
made the video to prove such pornographic movies used trick photography,
and that no sex had actually taken place with the dog. The jury failed to
believe him, and he received a six-month suspended sentence.

IN VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia, an intruder entered a woman's unlocked
apartment in 1981 while she was asleep. He then forcibly covered her face
and clothed body with chocolate and vanilla cake frosting. He reportedly
told his victim that she should have known this would happen if she left
her doors unlocked.

TWO ARMED MEN boarded a Los Angeles bus in 1982, made the male driver take
the wheel and took his woman companion to a back seat. One of the gunmen
gave her an unidentified white tablet, telling her: "If you wake up you
won't be able to identify us afterwards." Then he stripped her, tied her
up, and smothered her naked body in tartar sauce.

RATHER WORSE was Steve Symons, 21, of March, Cambridge. When he saw a girl
he fancied, he cut the brake pipes on her car, causing 11 young ladies to
have narrow escapes in 1988. He had an obsessive sexual fantasy about women
being unable to stop their cars. When arrested, he told police that he was
a virgin and didn't have a clue about women. He was also found to have a
bag full of bicycle pedal rubbers that he'd stolen.

FIREFIGHTERS were called to a house in Knoxville, Tennessee, in April 1995
when neighbours smelled something burning. There they found the nude body
of a 16-year-old boy and called in police. Confronted with posters of
heavy-metal rock groups and a cow's heart attached to the boy's genitals,
they at first thought they were dealing with a ritual murder. However, they
then found several underground pornographic magazines under the boy's bed,
one of which, Ovid Now, described a 'sex-toy' that could be made from the
fresh heart of a cow, a simple electrical circuit and some batteries. The
dead heart is made to beat, and then used sexually in a perversion which is
apparently gaining popularity in the rural South. The trouble was, the boy
had wired up the heart and plugged it into the wall-socket. He died of
electrocution, and the electricity had then cooked his remains.

A SHY STUDENT, identified only as 'George', was erotically obsessed with
his Austin Metro. The 20-year-old lived at home with his strictly religious
parents and had no sexual experience of women at all. He began to fantasize
about other Metros he'd seen, but his own was special and photos of it
adorned his bedroom. Its front reminded him of a smiling child, and its
rear end aroused him. He would seek out quiet places where the two of them
could be alone, and then he'd crouch down by its smoking exhaust pipe and
masturbate. He was described as "confused but happy". His doctors
prescribed a course of "orgasmic reconditioning".

DR STRANGELOVE was the name police gave to Professor Tom Lippert, the man
with the electric sex-machine. Like something out of a mad-scientist
B-movie, the 25-year-old business lecturer at a Minnesota college had built
the machine in the basement laboratory of his New Ulm home in 1975,
assisted by 21-year-old Harold Tenneson. The next step was to find a
guinea-pig.

Blonde student Susan Cochrane, 21, advertised for a lift home and accepted
an offer by phone. Lippert and Tenneson picked her up, produced a revolver,
forced her to drink a bottle of whisky, then drove her, bound and gagged,
to the professor's home. Lippert, of course, was a man of honour who'd
never force his attentions on a woman; but he was quite prepared to use his
electric love-machine to make her fall in love with him.

The men carried Susan down into the professor's basement, donned white
coats and assembled an array of apparatus. They wrapped her in a sheet and
strapped her to a board, after which Lippert spent an hour explaining his
passion, before she was unstrapped and shut in a box full of electric
wiring. Lippert pulled the switch, but nothing happened: he'd forgotten to
plug in the machine. This was fortunate, as he then realised that the
voltage was too high, and his victim would have been killed.

Even so, Lippert kept Susan prisoner under threat of death for a month,
warning her that if she tried to escape her family would suffer. She was
allowed to phone to tell them she was all right, which she was, as Lippert
hadn't touched her. The nearest he got was one night in a storm, when he
made her sleep with him; but then he simply lay for hours beside her with
his clothes on.

Finally, Lippert and Tenneson found a low-voltage generator, strapped Susan
in the box again, and threw the switch. She felt a faint tingling, but no
love for the professor. And before the men could try the experiment again,
the FBI turned up, having traced Susan's phone-calls to her worried family.
She was released unharmed, while Lippert and Tenneson were taken to jail to
face kidnapping charges.

A SOCCER-MAD WIFE in Austria became obsessed with her country's World Cup
football star Hans Krankl in 1978. Named only as Annemarie, the 30-year-old
woman built an altar in her bedroom before his life-size portrait, put
fresh flowers in front of it every day and lit two candles, before adoring
him in the nude. When she refused to make love with her 40-year-old husband
Erwin unless he prayed as well, he sued for, and was granted, a divorce.

RATHER MORE BIZARRE was the 1992 case of the unnamed 32-year-old woman with
a long history of paranoid schizophrenia. She became convinced that Donald
Duck had told her of his love for her via her neighbour's satellite dish.
She was eventually found sitting in the satellite dish masturbating, under
the impression that the cartoon duck was making love to her.

PANIC SWEPT THROUGH LAGOS, the capital of Nigeria, in October and November
1990. Men going about their usual business were stopping to look anxiously
into their pants or feel their crotch, and keeping an eye out for
mysterious strangers who were said to be roaming the bustling streets and
markets. The strangers were thought to be evil wizards who could instantly
dematerialize a man's private parts, usually after shaking hands or some
other slight bodily contact when they asked for directions. The missing
items were said to turn up in a thriving witchcraft market, where they sold
for hundreds of pounds.

Within a week of the rumours starting, the nation was in the grip of
hysteria. A riot broke out in Enugu when a man boarding a bus shouted that
his penis had vanished. The man in front of him was dragged off the bus and
beaten. Fearing a lynching, a policeman fired warning shots, but only made
matters worse by killing the bus driver and badly injuring a woman and her
child. During this period, four suspected sorcerers were beaten to death,
and stories circulated that women's breasts were being stolen too. Yet
although dozens of suspected organ thieves were attacked, no one was
actually found to have lost his tackle, nor did any of the missing goods
actually turn up in the markets.