The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books)

by Geoff Tibballs

  RINGO STARR LOSES HEAD IN TOPIARY ATTACK

  One of the life-sized topiary figures of the Beatles at Liverpool South Parkway station was vandalized in 2008 – just a few weeks after they were unveiled. While the rest of the Fab Four remained untouched, drummer Ringo Starr’s head was chopped off by an unknown assailant. The unscheduled hedge trimming was thought to be an act of revenge after Ringo had outraged some Liverpudlians by stating that there was nothing he missed about the city.

  PREGNANT ACTRESS SUES OVER NOT BEING CAST AS VIRGIN

  A British actress sued an opera company in 2001 after it rejected her for the part of a virgin on the grounds that she would have been heavily pregnant by the end of the show’s run. Bethany Halliday, 27, took exception to the decision by the D’Oyly Carte company not to cast her as a blushing teenage daughter in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at London’s Savoy Theatre. The company’s general manager, Ian Martin, said the idea of a pregnant woman playing the role was absurd. “We were casting for the ladies’ chorus, who all play the teenage virginal daughters of Major General Stanley and scream every time they see a man. It would not make sense to have a pregnant virginal daughter, and the heavily-corseted Victorian costumes would make it very difficult to disguise her pregnancy. What next? The Royal Shakespeare Company being forced to have a pregnant actress playing the female lead in Romeo and Juliet?” Ms Halliday lost her case.

  ELDERLY WOMAN STARTLED BY NUNS

  Some of the most frightening scenes in cinema history were caused by an elderly woman who fell asleep while watching The Sound of Music at a Birmingham picture palace in 1992. Waking with a start during the nuns’ chorus, she created chaos and confusion because she thought she had died and was being welcomed to heaven. “It took several minutes to convince her that she wasn’t dead,” sighed the harassed manager, before adding: “We don’t get many out-of-body experiences in Smethwick.”

  CALLER COMPLAINS ABOUT TIMING OF ECLIPSE

  A woman phoned a radio station in South Australia during the December 2002 solar eclipse to express her unhappiness with tourism authorities for organizing a solar eclipse on a weekday when most people were at work. She suggested that next time the eclipse should be held at a weekend.

  WOMAN IS MARRIED TO BERLIN WALL

  A woman with a fetish for inanimate objects says she has been married to the Berlin Wall since 1979. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, whose surname means Berlin Wall in German, claims she fell in love with the concrete structure when she first saw it on television at the age of seven. She then began collecting pictures of “him” and saving up for visits, on the sixth of which they tied the knot before a handful of guests. While she remains a virgin with humans, she insists that she has a full, loving relationship with the wall. “I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy,” she says. “The Great Wall of China’s attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier.” Thus she was mortified when most of the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. “What they did was awful,” she complains. “They mutilated my husband.” With her husband in pieces, she was so distressed that she has been unable to return to Berlin from her home in Liden, northern Sweden, and instead is said to have shifted her affections to a nearby garden fence.

  WEDDING GUEST ARRIVES A YEAR EARLY

  In 2007, Dave Barclay flew 4,000 miles from Canada to attend his friend’s wedding in Wales, only to discover that he was a year early. Barclay, who was working as a teacher in Toronto, paid $1,000 for his air ticket and had his suit cleaned specially for the occasion after his pal Dave Best had informed him by email earlier in the year that he was getting married on July 6. However when Barclay arrived in Cardiff and asked for directions to the venue, he was told that the wedding date was actually July 6, 2008. “My mates are loving it, aren’t they?” he sighed ruefully, before spotting a silver lining to the cloud. “At least it’s assured me of a mention in the speech next year.”

  BEST MAN WEARS BRIDE’S DRESS

  When Romanian bride Manuela Voicu went into labour at her 2002 wedding, the best man, Ion Vidican, put on her dress and stood in for her.

  CAKE TRADITION ENDS IN BRAWL

  Tracy and John O’Donnell of Westport, Connecticut, brawled on their wedding day in 1994 following a row over the traditional insertion of a piece of wedding cake into the bride’s mouth. Tracy saw red because she thought her new husband was pushing the cake into her mouth too forcefully.

  WEDDING PARTY CANCELLED OVER BRIDE’S BEARD

  An Arab ambassador called off his imminent wedding celebrations and had his marriage contract annulled after he discovered that beneath her veil, his fiancée was cross-eyed and had a beard. The ambassador had only met his future bride a few times before the marriage was due to take place – and she had been wearing the niqab at all times. It was only after the marriage contract had been signed and shortly before the wedding party that he tried to kiss her and saw the optical impediment and facial hair. He immediately called off the celebration and filed for divorce claiming that he had been deceived by his mother-in-law who, he said, had shown his mother pictures of the bride’s sister instead of the bride.

  POLICE STOP BRIDE’S LIMO ON WAY TO CHURCH – TO GET NUMBER OF HIRE FIRM

  Already running late for her wedding ceremony at Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, in 2001, bride Cheryl Ann Brown was horrified when a police car ordered the 46-foot-long stretch limo that was taking her to the church to pull over to the side of the road. The 21-year-old said: “The policeman had his clipboard in his hand and the limo driver had to get out and then come back. I assumed he was getting his driving licence but it turned out the police just wanted the phone number of the car hire firm for a force function! I couldn’t believe it.”

  PUPPY LOVE: GHANAIAN WOMAN MARRIES DOG

  Emily Mabou, of Aburi, Ghana, married her dog because she believed it possessed qualities she had seen only in her late father. She said the dog was kind, faithful and treated her with respect, just like her father but unlike any of her previous boyfriends. However her family boycotted the ceremony, which was presided over by a traditional priest, because they felt the wedding was “a stupid step to combat her loneliness”.

  BRIDE CATCHES GROOM WITH BEST MAN

  A bride-to-be on the Greek island of Crete suffered a nervous breakdown on the night before her 2001 nuptials when she discovered the groom, wearing her wedding dress, in the arms of his best man. The ceremony was cancelled.

  BEST MAN WAS CARDBOARD CUT-OUT

  When racing car driver Andy Priaulx discovered that a hastily arranged event in Brazil clashed with his duties as best man at a wedding in Guernsey in 2007, he sent a life-sized cardboard cut-out of himself to the ceremony along with a pre-recorded speech. The six-foot-tall cut-out – created by a local sign-maker – stood next to the altar as Andy Richmond and Carlee Yates tied the knot. Carlee even danced with the cut-out at the reception.

  BRIDE WEDS DRUNKEN GROOM’S BROTHER INSTEAD

  A groom was so drunk when he turned up for his wedding at a village in India in 2007 that the teenage bride married his brother instead. After the groom “misbehaved with guests”, the bride’s family chased him away and promptly invited his sober brother to take his place.

  COUPLE MARRY IN PUBLIC TOILET

  When Jennifer Cannon and Doy Nichols of Lexington, Kentucky, decided to get married in New York they chose an unusual venue – a public toilet in Times Square. In keeping with the lavatory theme, the bride wore a dress made from glue, tape and toilet paper, the creation of Hanah Kim, winner of the coveted 2007 Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest.

  BRIDE SPOTS IMPOSTOR BY HIS LACK OF DROOL

  A wedding ceremony in Uganda was cancelled in 2002 when the bride suddenly realized that the man standing next to her was not the one she had agreed to marry. She spotted the difference because her original suitor drooled continually at the mouth. Apparently the bride’s parents had subsequently conspired to have her married off to
his older brother instead.

  TAIWANESE MAN MARRIES BARBIE DOLL

  A Taiwanese man tried to appease the restless spirit of his dead wife by marrying a Barbie doll. Chang Hsi-hsum, 46, married the 11-inch plastic doll during an elaborate ceremony at his local Buddhist temple in 1999. He believed the doll housed the spirit of his wife Tsai who had killed herself 20 years earlier because his family opposed their marriage.

  DOCTORS REMOVE GRAIN OF RICE FROM BRIDE’S EAR

  A bride who was showered with rice on the steps of a church after her wedding had to go to hospital to have one grain extracted from her ear. The reception at Lecco, Italy, was delayed for an hour until she returned from hospital.

  POLICE HALT CEREMONY TO QUIZ COUPLE

  A wedding service in Glauchau, Germany, was interrupted when police officers insisted on quizzing the happy couple about items that had been stolen from them the night before. Constanze and Rocco Zahn had reported the theft of a laptop and wedding presents from the groom’s stag party but none of the guests had expected two over-zealous officers to take statements from the victims during their actual wedding ceremony. “Everyone thought Rocco was in trouble with the police when the officers waltzed into the ceremony and led him away,” said one of the guests. “After all, the stag party was quite a wild one. But when we found out they were just taking statements, all the guests started booing and the officers left pretty quickly. There’s a time and a place for these things.”

  “GROOM RUNS OVER BRIDE ON HONEYMOON”

  A groom was accused by police of deliberately driving his car at his bride – while they were still on honeymoon. After a quickie wedding in Las Vegas in 2007, the newlyweds were driving near Salt Lake City, Utah, when they apparently started fighting in the car. Police said the bride got out of the car and started to walk away, whereupon the groom allegedly drove off the road and rammed her with the car, pushing her into a snow bank. A police source said the couple were “well known to the sheriff ’s office”.

  WOMAN MARRIES DOLPHIN

  In a modest ceremony at Dolphin Reef in the Israeli port of Eilat, 41-year-old Briton Sharon Tendler married Cindy, a 35-year-old male bottlenosed dolphin, in 2006. Finally taking the plunge after 15 years of courtship, Tendler, who wore a white dress, a veil and had pink flowers in her hair, got down on one knee and gave Cindy a kiss – and a piece of herring. Although acknowledging that the wedding had no legal status, she said the ceremony reflected her true feelings for the animal. “It’s not a perverted thing,” she insisted. “I do love this dolphin. He’s the love of my life.”

  GROOM WAS ALSO FATHER OF THE BRIDE

  When a Los Angeles businessman learned that his fiancée had been conceived via artificial insemination, he was alarmed to discover that the sperm bank was the same one to which he had donated in his student days. So he obtained a court injunction to inspect the bank’s records and found that he was, in fact, the father of his bride-to-be and 806 other children. The wedding was called off.

  WEDDING GUESTS SHOOT DOWN AIRPLANE

  Guests celebrating a wedding in a Serbian village in 2004 fired guns in the air in accordance with national custom and accidentally shot down a light airplane.

  EXPOSED BRIDE CAUSES PRIEST TO HALT WEDDING

  A priest in Turin, Italy, called a halt to a wedding in 2001 because the bride was showing too much cleavage. He refused to allow her into the church and asked the wedding party to disperse quietly. While the bride’s mother saw no problem with the dress, the local church authority supported the priest’s stance and emphasized the need for appropriate attire at religious ceremonies. Rather than risk incurring the wrath of another priest, the couple later decided to get married in a civil ceremony instead.

  MAN ANNOUNCES INTENTION TO MARRY PILLOW

  A Nigerian man who said he couldn’t get a girlfriend because of his bad stutter, announced plans to marry his pillow. Twenty-six-year-old Lagos labourer Okeke Ikechukwu lamented: “Since I am a stutterer, ladies have always laughed at me whenever I try to talk to them. I have needs, and so I have taken to sleeping with my pillow in my arms ever since I was 16. I have grown to fall in love with it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life with it. Unlike a woman, it will cost me little or nothing to maintain. I think it will make the ideal mate for me.”

  GROOM SHOOTS BRIDE DEAD BY MISTAKE

  Mistaking his fiancée for an intruder, a 62-year-old Florida man shot her dead on the eve of their wedding. He grabbed his gun and fired at a figure in the dark hallway of his home, thinking his live-in partner was still in bed. A relative said: “They loved each other. It was quite apparent.”

  BRIDE’S BOUQUET BRINGS BAD LUCK

  The traditional throwing of a bride’s bouquet for luck nearly ended in tragedy at a 2009 Italian wedding when the flowers caused a plane to crash. Following the ceremony near Plombino, Tuscany, the bride and groom had arranged for a small plane to fly overhead and for a passenger to throw the bouquet to a line of female guests. However the flowers became caught in the aircraft’s rear rotor, causing the plane to catch fire, explode and crash to the ground. The passenger who threw the bouquet suffered two broken legs.

  MAN FORGOT HE WAS MARRIED

  An Australian man learned in 2008 that his marriage was invalid because he had forgotten that he had married someone else in a drunken haze 30 years earlier. The 67-year-old vaguely remembered meeting a “nice” blonde woman in Arizona in 1978 during shore leave from his job as a cook on an oil rig but had no idea that they had married. It was only when he was shown his signature on the Arizona marriage licence that the truth hit him. The news was broken to him by US immigration authorities when he applied to live in Hawaii with the person he thought was his wife. He said that she was very understanding about being temporarily relegated to girlfriend status.

  SISTER-IN-LAW DOUSES BRIDE WITH BLACK PAINT

  On her way to church in 2008, bride Nancy Rose stopped off to use the washroom at a coffee shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But as she returned to the car park she saw her sister-in-law, Michelle King, screaming and running towards her limousine with a can of black spray paint. King, who was married to Rose’s brother, proceeded to douse the bride’s gown and veil in sooty black paint before wrestling with the limo driver while the rest of the wedding party looked on in disbelief. As the driver tried to restrain her, King’s tube top fell down, exposing her breasts but giving her a chance to flee. The animosity between the two women is said to have stemmed from a dispute at King’s wedding the previous year over a bridesmaid’s dress to be worn by Rose’s young daughter.

  GUESTS SMASH PRICELESS TEA SET IN TOAST ERROR

  Like all proud fathers, Grigory Romanov, mayor of Leningrad, wanted only the very best for his daughter’s 1980 wedding. To this end he persuaded the director of the city’s Hermitage Museum to lend him Catherine the Great’s irreplaceable, 200-year-old china tea set especially for the occasion. All went well until late in the proceedings one guest rose to his feet and accidentally dropped a cup. Thinking that this was a toast, the other guests interpreted it as a traditional gesture of good luck, whereupon they all stood up and hurled the entire service into the fireplace.

  STAND-IN BRIDE IS SHORT CHANGED

  When a 22-year-old Romanian man was jilted days before his wedding in 1998, his parents, anxious to spare their son’s embarrassment and not wanting to see the money they had spent on the nuptials go to waste, decided to rent a bride for the day. So an old childhood friend named Mariana stepped in, dutifully rehearsing her lines and practising the ceremony with the groom whose family promised that in return for her trouble she would receive $100. Under Romanian tradition wedding guests donate money to help pay for the cost of the event but only two-thirds of the invited guests turned up on this occasion and some, surprised by the replacement bride, did not give generously. As a result, Mariana received just $3 – $97 short of the sum she was promised. To add to her woes, the groom took a shine to her and declared that he wanted the marria
ge to last.

  BRIDE FINALLY SAYS “YES” AFTER 8,500 PROPOSALS

  Following 8,500 proposals and 24 years of candlelit meals, Britain’s Beverley Redman finally agreed to marry her partner Keith in 2000. Keith had tried to persuade her with romantic notes, dinners and trips to Ibiza but she had repeatedly turned him down. “I was frightened of committing myself,” she said.

  GROOM GETS COLD FEET, SETS WEDDING HOTEL ON FIRE

  Unable to decide whether to stay with his wife or marry his girlfriend, a Japanese man tried to buy himself some time by setting fire to the hotel where the wedding was to take place. Tatsuhiko Kawata had been married to his wife since 1994 but had also been seeing another woman for three years and had promised to marry her in October 2008 at a hotel in the mountain resort of Hokuto. However on the eve of the ceremony, the still-married Kawata sought to delay events by spilling seven litres of petrol in the hotel and setting it on fire, causing minor damage and forcing several guests to evacuate the premises. Sentencing him to five years in jail, the judge described Kawata as “egoistic and short-sighted.”