The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books)

by Geoff Tibballs

  Florida police said a 2010 car crash in Key West was the result of the driver attempting to shave her bikini line while the vehicle was moving. They said the 37-year-old woman, who was on her way to meet her boyfriend, was attempting to shave her pubic hair while her ex-husband held the steering wheel, only for her car to crash into the back of a pickup truck.

  MAN STYLES GIRLFRIEND’S HAIR WITH POWER DRILL

  When they arrived home from an evening out in Edmonton, Alberta, in 2004, Janine Rose asked her boyfriend, Shee Chung Theng, to give her a massage and comb her hair. Leaving the bedroom to get some food, the boyfriend said he watched a TV commercial for a hair-styling device . . . which apparently inspired him to fit a Barbie brush to an electric power drill. As a result Rose woke up screaming and bleeding when the tool tore out a clump of her hair. Admitting that using the drill for hair-styling was a “ridiculous” idea, Shee was ordered to undergo counselling, complete 70 hours of community service and was banned from handling power tools for nine months.

  MAN DESTROYS CAR WHILE TRYING TO WARM IT UP

  When his car failed to start in 2001, a 78-year-old German man lit a fire under it to thaw it out – but could then only watch as it burst into flames, reducing the vehicle to a charred ruin. He had ignited a pile of paper towels in a metal box and placed them directly beneath the engine and the fuel tank.

  SUSPECT IS RUN OVER BY HIDING PLACE

  A suspect who fled from Phoenix, Arizona, police after his car was pulled over in 2009 decided to hide under a nearby removals truck. Unfortunately while officers were searching for him, the truck driver returned and drove off, running over the suspect in the process.

  BAILIFF FLEES AMOROUS GRANNY

  A 6-foot 6-inch bailiff sent to raid a home over an outstanding credit card bill fled back to his office after being showered with kisses by a 58-year-old grandmother. When Sandra Hertzog opened the door of the family house in Tetge, Germany, and saw the bailiff, she threw her arms around him and tried to reach up to kiss him on the lips. The terrified bailiff eventually managed to free himself from her grasp and rushed back to his base to report the incident to his superior. Hertzog protested: “I wasn’t trying to scare him off. He just looked like such a hunk standing there I felt like giving him a kiss.”

  ACCUSED GOES TO COURT WITH CARDBOARD BOX ON HEAD

  Not wanting a potential witness to recognize his client, Justin Kalich, prior to a 2006 preliminary hearing on charges relating to the theft of a reel of wire, attorney Jeff Leonard suggested that Kalich wear a cardboard box on his head. Thus Kalich sat wearing a blue and white box with two eyeholes while waiting outside the office of District Judge James Albert at the courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. However, after a meeting with the judge, Kalich agreed to pay for the wire, and the charges were dropped. Explaining his idea, Leonard said: “I’m trying to think outside of the box, so to speak.”

  DRUNK COMPLAINS THAT BED IS TOO HARD

  Walking home after a heavy night’s drinking, one Grant Shittit, of Timaru, New Zealand, decided to sleep it off on what he thought was a nice soft bed of moss. He lay down in it right up to his neck, only to discover when it was too late that it was actually a trench full of cement. He was stuck fast for three days until spotted by a passing motorist who mistook him for a hedgehog.

  MAN TRIES TO DISGUISE HIMSELF AS FEMALE DUMMY

  When tax inspectors raided a Buenos Aires textile sweatshop in 1994, everyone ran for the exits except one man who had the bright idea of posing as a female mannequin. Hurriedly slipping on a dress, he stood motionless in the hope that nobody would see through his cunning disguise. He might have got away with it but for the fact that he was still wearing a pair of big scruffy sandals.

  SCHOOLBOY FAKES KIDNAPPING TO COVER FOR BAD REPORT

  Rather than bring home a bad school report, an 11-year-old boy concocted a story about having been kidnapped by a gunman. He claimed a stranger in a red car grabbed him as he left school in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2009 and forced him into the vehicle. The boy said he managed to jump out of the car, leaving behind his school bag which contained his report, and ran to his grandparents’ house. However police were suspicious that the boy had somehow been able to escape with his band instrument, but not his bag. The boy eventually confessed to making up the story to cover for his bad grades. The whereabouts of his school bag and report card remained uncertain.

  SIX WOMEN TRAPPED IN TOILET WHILE TRYING TO SAVE MONEY

  In an attempt to save money on toilet fees, six young women decided to squash themselves into the same public toilet in Hartlepool, England. Instead they became stuck there for nearly three hours before a passer-by heard their screams and alerted the fire brigade who freed them by cutting off the roof. A police spokesman said: “They were furious at being ignored but the sound of screams from public toilets in Hartlepool isn’t uncommon.”

  STUDENT STARTS FIRE TO MEET WOMEN

  A male student at the University of Central Florida decided that the best way to find true love was to set a couch on fire at the Academic Village Dorms. He told police he hoped he would be able to meet women as the building was evacuated.

  PRISON VISITOR GETS PISTOL STUCK IN RECTUM

  Visiting an inmate at the high-security La Picota prison in Bogota, Colombia, a woman concealed an automatic pistol in her rectum. But once inside the prison she realized to her dismay that the gun was stuck fast. Complaining of acute stomach pains and claiming that she was pregnant, she was taken to hospital where doctors eventually found the source of her discomfort. The gun was removed from its hiding place and she was charged with possessing an illegal weapon.

  ROMANIAN WIFE STRIPS OFF TO HELP HUSBAND

  After her husband Valeriu was kicked unconscious by a horse, 25-year-old Ana-Maria Botea stood by the side of the road near Galati, Romania, desperately trying to flag down passing motorists to fetch help. After three hours not one car had stopped so, as a last resort, she decided to strip off. Immediately two men stopped to take a closer look and agreed to take her husband to hospital. From his sickbed Valeriu said: “I’ve got the cleverest – and best-looking – wife in the world.”

  RIVER CAR WASH PROVES COSTLY

  When Stan Caddell wanted to wash his Chevrolet, he thought he would save money on a car wash by using the Mississippi River instead. So he carefully backed the car into a foot of water at Hannibal, Missouri, but no sooner had he climbed out to clean it than it floated away. Police eventually managed to retrieve the vehicle some distance downstream. An officer attending the incident confirmed that no action would be taken against Caddell because “you can’t ticket a guy for being stupid”.

  MAN HAS FEET CUT OFF IN INSIRANCE SCAM

  Saddled with heavy debts, Chung Kyu-chil hit on a novel way of solving his problems: he took out two dozen insurance policies that would pay him up to $1.7 million if he became disabled and then he hired someone to hack off his feet. The 51-year-old grocer from Seoul, South Korea, initially told police that he awoke in his shop on the morning of 11 December 1998 after a heavy drinking session and found his feet missing. Unsurprisingly the police were somewhat sceptical and when the recently purchased insurance policies came to light, Chung confessed that he had hired a taxi driver, Kim Kui-yong, to sever his feet at the ankles and that he had agreed to pay him $41,600 if the scam proved successful. The taxi driver said he had cut off Chung’s feet with an axe and dumped them in the Han River. Kim was arrested on assault charges but Chung escaped punishment because he never tried to collect the insurance.

  LOVESICK WOMAN CALLS 911 TO MEET “CUTE COP”

  After a sheriff’s deputy called at her home in Aloha, Oregon, to investigate a neighbour’s complaint, Lorna Dudash was so smitten that she rang 911 in the hope of getting a date with him. “He’s the cutest cop I’ve seen in a long time,” Dudash told the dispatcher. “I just want to know his name. I’m 45 years old and it doesn’t come very often that a good man comes to your doorstep. I know this is absolutely
not in any way, shape or form an emergency, but if you would give the officer my phone number and ask him to come back, would you mind?” The deputy did indeed return, but the only date Dudash got was a date in court as he arrested her for misusing the 911 system.

  HORTICULTURAL SHOW CHEAT CAUGHT OUT BY PRICE TAG

  An entrant in the North Otago, New Zealand, Horticultural Society’s 2002 summer flower and plant show was disqualified when the judges spotted that his winning plant still bore the flower shop’s price tag on the bottom of its pot.

  BORED SOLDIER LIGHTS FIREWORK IN BUTT

  Bored with a Sunderland fireworks display in 2006, a 22-year-old soldier decided to liven things up by setting off a firework between his buttocks. He dropped his pants and slipped a powerful Black Cat Thunderbolt between the cheeks of his backside. A friend then set the firework alight and the soldier bent over as his butt exploded in a shower of sparks. The impromptu display resulted in the soldier ending up in hospital with a scorched colon and other injuries.

  MAN TRIES TO DEMOLISH HOUSE WITH PICKUP TRUCK

  Fuelled by an 18-pack of beer, Dave Anthony decided to use his pickup truck to help demolish a friend’s house in Kent, Washington State, in 2000. First, he knocked down the garage by ramming it with his truck. Buoyed by that success, he drove the truck onto the roof, whereupon the weakened structure started to buckle, leaving Anthony and his truck high and dry. A towing company was called out to bring the truck down but Anthony quickly sobered up when handed a bill for $695. When he couldn’t pay it, the towing company impounded his truck.

  UNIVERSITY THROWS OUT PRICELESS LIZARD POOP

  A university apologized to a graduate student after his unique collection of lizard excrement – collected over a period of seven years – was accidentally thrown away. Daniel Bennett had been studying the rare and reclusive butaan lizard in the Philippines and had built up a collection of faeces samples which were stored in England at Leeds University. But the 35-kilogram bag of precious poop was thrown out in 2009 during a clear-out. Bennett said: “To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work. Its loss has left me reeling and has altered the course of my life forever.”

  TRAPPED MOUSE BURNS DOWN HOUSE

  Perhaps to teach a mouse a lesson, Ranvir Singh, from the Manipuri district of India, caught it in a trap, tied a kerosene-soaked rag to its tail and set fire to the rag. The mouse proceeded to run around Singh’s house, setting everything on fire and destroying the property.

  WOMAN TRAPPED UNDER CAR WHILE LOOKING FOR KEYS

  A 91-year-old woman who crawled under her car to look for her keys was stuck beneath the vehicle for two days in 2008. Betty Borowski, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was only rescued when a mailman saw letters piling up on her doormat. Firefighters lifted the car and removed the pensioner, who was dehydrated and confused, having been pinned to the ground by the axle. “She was pretty wedged in there,” said the local police chief. “It looks like she crawled under headfirst.” Her keys were found in the car door.

  DRUNKEN WOMAN FAILS WRITTEN DRIVING TEST

  A Romanian woman was disqualified from her driving test after she failed a breathalyzer while taking the written section of the exam. Monika Cristescu, 20, from Arad, sank four gins to calm her nerves before the theory test, but when she started giggling loudly, shouting out the answers she was giving and telling the other candidates she was going to get every question right, a police officer walked over to her, immediately smelt alcohol and gave her a breath test. She was found to be double the drink-drive limit and was banned from taking the written paper until a date when she was sober. A police spokesman said: “Even though she was in a room and not actually on the road, she needed to learn that alcohol and driving don’t mix.”

  DROWNING MAN ALERTS RESCUERS BY WAVING WOODEN LEG

  A holidaymaker who fell into the sea from a small inflatable dinghy off the coast of Cornwall in 2009 was rescued by the crew of a passing boat after attracting their attention by waving his wooden leg.

  TEACHER LIVENS UP LESSON BY STRIPPING OFF

  Dana Gibson, 43, a substitute teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Maria, California, was teaching Spanish one day in 2001 when a student complained that the lesson was boring. So Gibson took off her shirt to reveal a sports bra and continued with the lesson. After being fired from her job, she commented: “It didn’t seem like a big deal, but maybe something’s totally wrong with me.”

  CROOKED LAWYER IS NAMED WORLD’S UNLUCKIEST MAN

  A British lawyer laid claim to the title of the world’s unluckiest man after going on a spectacularly ill-fated gambling spree with tens of thousands of dollars stolen from a client. Edward Bentley, who practised as a solicitor in Yarm, Cleveland, ran up debts of over $45,000 when a stock market investment crashed. His solution was to steal around $100,000 from an account in the hope of breaking the bank in Monte Carlo with a single bet on the roulette wheel, but on arrival in Monaco he found that the casino’s maximum stake on that kind of bet was $16,000. Undeterred, he flew back to London and decided to try his luck on the horses instead. He put $15,000 on a horse that was considered a certainty to win a race at Ayr at odds of 3-1. It fell. Sure his luck would change, he gambled the remaining money on the stock market by predicting a fall in futures prices. Instead they went up, leaving him with just $1,500 from his original stake. In desperation, he decided to take his own life and drove to Nottingham where he tried to gas himself in his car. The engine cut out. So he bought another second-hand car and drove to Scarborough, North Yorkshire, but his second attempt to kill himself was halted after police stopped him during a routine vehicle check. Bentley’s only stroke of good fortune was finding a lenient judge who gave him a 15-month suspended sentence for theft. His own lawyer described the whole sorry saga as “more like a scene from a Peter Sellers farce”.

  DRIVER STOPS SOFA GETTING WET BUT CAUSES PILE-UP

  A woman who suddenly drove her flat-bed truck under a bridge to protect her sofa when it started raining caused 24 vehicles behind her to crash. The woman swerved violently to get the truck under the overpass in Atlanta, Georgia, and planned to stay there until it stopped raining, but her action caused eight separate accidents which left 11 people with minor injuries. The woman’s truck wasn’t hit.

  SEXUAL GRATIFICATION ENDS IN PAIN

  A 51-year-old man from Long Branch, New Jersey, decided to seek sexual pleasure with his vacuum cleaner in 1998. However he didn’t realize that the suction on the hand-held cleaner was created by a blade whirling just beneath the hose attachment and seconds after inserting himself into the vacuum, his pleasure was cut short when the blade lopped off a half-inch tip of his penis. He staggered to the phone and called the police but told them he had been stabbed in his sleep. When they pointed out the blood on the vacuum cleaner, he claimed not to remember the incident.

  MAN THROWS SAVINGS OUT WITH GARBAGE

  Worried that burglars might target his house while he and his wife were away on a 2007 business trip, a Mr Cui of Qingdao, China, decided to hide his savings of over $6,000 in the kitchen garbage bin for safe keeping. However on their return he forgot all about the secret stash and instinctively threw away the garbage because the bin was full. It was another two days before he suddenly remembered about the money – but by then it was too late; the garbage had been taken away. “Our last hope was the city garbage treatment centre,” he wailed, “but the landfill was so vast that we knew our money was lost forever.”

  BURNING PASSION ENDS IN REJECTION

  To prove his love for his girlfriend, 20-year-old Hannes Pisek made a giant heart out of 220 candles on the floor of his apartment in Hoenigsberg, Austria, in 2006. He then lit them and went to collect his sweetheart from work. But his hopes of a romantic evening were dashed when the flat caught fire in his absence. He not only lost his home but also his girlfriend who promptly dumped him and moved back in with her parents.

  LAST
CIGARETTE FOILS SUICIDE BID

  Intending to commit suicide in his trailer home, a man in Tucson, Arizona, turned on the gas and settled down to die. Then, in a moment of impulse, he decided to light one last cigarette, and in doing so caused an explosion which saw him hospitalized with serious burns but still alive.

  MAN MICROWAVES HIS OWN HAND

  Believing he bore “the mark of the beast” – the number 666 – on one of his hands, a man cut off the offending hand with a circular saw, then cooked it in a microwave oven and called the police. The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when sheriff’s deputies arrived at his home in Hayden, Idaho, although Capt. Ben Wolfinger said of the hand: “It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputies arrived.”

  FARMER USED LIVE BOMB AS ANVIL

  A live Second World War missile was destroyed in a controlled explosion by an army bomb squad in 2008 after a Romanian farmer was spotted using it as an anvil. The man had discovered the 122-millimetre calibre missile in his garden a few months earlier and had been using it for sharpening hoes and scythes.

  WOMAN BITES DOG TO SAVE PET

  A woman from Minneapolis, Minnesota, bit a pit bull terrier on the nose to save her pet labrador. Amy Rice first tried to prise the pit bull’s jaws from her beloved Ella’s throat and when that failed she bit the pit bull on the nose. “I broke the skin and had pit bull blood in my mouth,” she said. “I knew what happened, and I knew that it wasn’t good.”