WOULD-BE SUICIDE FAINTS BEFORE SHE CAN JUMP
A depressed Turkish woman who decided to end it all by jumping from a cliff was spared by the heatwave which swept through the country in 2000. Hulya Kirklar stood on top of the cliff near Antalya in temperatures of 111 degrees Fahrenheit for three hours ready to hurl herself to her death while police pleaded with her not to jump. But she was finally overcome by the extreme heat and fainted, collapsing on the edge of the precipice. When she came to, her first words were: “Aren’t I dead?”
HOPELESS HITMAN SUFFERS HEART ATTACK
In an apparent attempt to kill her, a gunman dressed all in black and wearing a black wig and false moustache reportedly fired a number of shots at Rita Quam in Edwards, Colorado, in 1997. Each shot missed, and when his gun then jammed, he tried beating her on the head with large rocks. Quam managed to survive the assault, and when a deputy arrived, the assailant collapsed, wheezing in the thin mountain air, and his disguise fell off. Then he had a heart attack and died. His intended victim recognized him as Arthur Smith, a retired Chicago police officer.
WIDOW HAS HUSBAND’S ASHES SEWN INTO BREAST IMPLANTS
Sandi Canesco, a young Sydney widow, had the ashes of her late husband sewn into her breast implants in 2003. After husband Dustin was killed in a car accident, she took the unusual measure so that he would always remain close to her heart.
HUSBAND WHO LIVED IN TREE FALLS TO HIS DEATH
Convinced that his wife was being unfaithful, a 35-year-old man in Madhya Pradesh, India, vowed to live in a tree for the rest of his life. He stayed up there for eight months in 1997 before suddenly falling to his death.
PRIEST AND MISTRESS APPEAR NAKED IN FRONT OF COFFIN
A Romanian funeral procession turned to farce in 2001 when a priest and his mistress were thrown naked out of a house in front of the coffin. Less than three weeks after marrying a young couple in the village of Independenta, the 35-year-old Orthodox priest began an affair with the bride. However when her husband came home unexpectedly and caught them in the act, he threw them out the front door without their clothes and straight into the path of a passing funeral procession.
MAN CHOKES TO DEATH ON LIVE FISH
A 45-year-old man from Viburnum, Missouri, was drinking with his fishing buddies when he choked to death after trying to swallow a live, five-inch-long perch. According to one of the friends, the man’s last words were: “Hey, watch this!”
WOMAN TURNS UP AT OWN FUNERAL
A 20-year-old Argentine woman who went missing following a New Year’s party in 2006 turned up at her own funeral after her mother wrongly declared her dead. Angela Saraiva had only been gone for 20 hours but her anxious mother mistakenly identified a dead body as being that of her daughter and the funeral was in full swing by the time Angela resurfaced.
WALLET RETRIEVED AT A PRICE
A Milwaukee family literally found themselves out of pocket in 1996. A few days after his burial, relatives of Robert Senz demanded that the funeral home dig up the body because the deceased’s wallet was missing. Sure enough, the wallet containing $64 was found in his pocket. Seven months later the funeral home sent the family a reburial bill for $2,149.
LAST TANGO IN LISBON
Portuguese dance teacher Alberto Fargo tangoed to his death straight out of a fifth-floor Lisbon window in 1998. Police said Fargo was showing his dance class how to keep their heads high by looking at the ceiling, as a result of which he had failed to notice that the window was open.
MAN REACHES 100 FAILED SUICIDE ATTEMPTS LANDMARK
In 2006, Mr Shi, a middle-aged man from Ningho, China, was rescued from hanging himself on a tree – at least the 100th time that he had been saved from committing suicide over the previous three years. His troubles had begun in 2003 when his wife divorced him and he decided that without her, life was meaningless.
HUNGRY BURGLAR COOKS DINNER AND SELF
Breaking into a restaurant and cooking himself a meal, a burglar accidentally set fire to the building and himself. Police said 57-year-old Robert H. Davis broke into the Gilleylen Dairy Bar in Amory, Georgia, but while attempting to cook with the restaurant’s equipment he caused a blaze in which he sustained fatal burns.
WINS BET, LOSES LIFE
Sylvester Briddell Jr, 26, of Selbyville, Delaware, was killed in 1997 after winning a bet with friends who said that he wouldn’t put a revolver loaded with four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.
RUSSIAN DIES AFTER VIAGRA-FUELLED ORGY
A Moscow mechanic died in 2009 after guzzling a bottle of Viagra pills to win a bet that he could maintain an erection throughout a 12-hour orgy. Sergey Tuganov, 28, had been bet the equivalent of $5,000 by two female colleagues that he would not be able to satisfy them non-stop for half a day. But just minutes after winning the wager, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
FISH SUFFOCATES SWIMMER
A 17-year-old boy died of suffocation while swimming in Cambodia in 2003 after a fish he caught jumped from his hands and lodged in his throat. Lim Vanthan caught an eight-inch kantrob fish, but it leaped into his mouth, where it stuck fast on account of the barbs running down its back.
SUICIDE PACT ENDS IN DISAPPOINTMENT
A Canadian couple’s suicide pact failed miserably because the weapon they used was nearly as old as they were. Harold Pinna, 89, and his 92-year-old wife decided to end it all with a .22 calibre pistol that hadn’t been fired in 60 years. Mr Pinna shot his wife in the head, but the rusty bullet ricocheted off a hair curler and she suffered only a mild scalp laceration. He then put the gun to his right ear and fired again, but the shot was so weak that the bullet lodged in his ear, whereupon the dazed couple decided to hand themselves over to the police.
WORKER RECEIVES NASTY SHOCK
A 23-year-old construction worker was electrocuted in New Berlinville, Pennsylvania, in 2008 when he ignored colleagues’ warnings and placed electric clips on his chest piercings.
BODY FALLS FROM HEARSE
When an undertaker pulled up outside a chapel of rest in Chatham, Kent, he was horrified to find the hearse doors open – and the body that he had been transporting lying in the road half a mile back. The driver was charged with having an insecure load.
THREE KILLED AFTER SAWING THROUGH BOMB
Stumbling across an old Vietnam War shell in 2009 near Ho Chi Minh City, a father, his teenage son and a friend decided to saw through it so that they could sell the metal. Alas in the course of the exercise the 105-milimetre artillery shell exploded, killing all three.
GUEST DROWNS AT LIFEGUARDS’ PARTY
In 1985, New Orleans lifeguards threw a party to celebrate a season without anybody drowning. As the party came to an end, one of the guests was found dead at the bottom of the pool.
MAN FOUND DEAD WITH TAMPONS UP HIS NOSE
A chronic snorer, Londoner Mark Gleeson tried to cure the problem in 1996 by stuffing two of his girlfriend’s tampons up his nose – one in each nostril. He suffocated as he slept.
TWO KILLED, ONE INJURED IN PIG SLAUGHTER
Two Hungarian farmers were killed and one was seriously injured while attempting to slaughter a pig with a homemade stun gun in 2001. When one of the men was electrocuted trying to stun the pig with the faulty equipment, the shock of his death caused the pig’s owner to suffer a fatal heart attack. Witnessing the carnage, a third man was injured when he pulled the stun gun plug from a socket to disable it. The pig survived.
WOMAN DRIVER HAS DEAD MOTHER AS PASSENGER
Eager to avoid undertaker’s fees for transporting a body 1,000 miles from Colorado to Oregon, a woman drove there with the corpse of her 91-year-old mother sitting beside her, dressed in a pair of pyjamas.
MAN ELECTROCUTED AFTER PEEING ON RAIL TRACK
A Polish tourist died in 2008 after being electrocuted when he urinated on a train track at a London station. The 41-year-old was killed after walking on to the track at Vauxhall, a station which had no public toilets at the time. The victim �
�� a teacher – had travelled to Britain to improve his English.
WOLF IMPRESSION WAS TOO LIFELIKE
A man renowned for his ability to mimic the cry of a wolf in order to lure other wolves out into the open for hunting was shot dead in Greece by fellow hunters who mistook him for the real thing.
WITCHDOCTOR’S BULLETPROOF POTION NEEDS NEW RECIPE
A Ghanaian man was shot dead by a fellow villager in 2001 while testing a magic spell designed to make him bulletproof. Aleobiga Aberima, 23, and some 15 other men from Lambu village had asked a local witchdoctor to make them invincible to bullets. After smearing his body with a concoction of prescribed herbs every day for two weeks, Aberima nobly volunteered to test the spell’s effectiveness by agreeing to be shot. Accordingly, one of the group fetched a rifle and aimed it at Aberima who died instantly from a single gunshot wound. The others promptly rounded on the witchdoctor, handing out a severe beating and presumably demanding their money back.
INVENTOR BURIED IN TUBE OF PRINGLES
The man who invented the Pringles tube was so proud of its ingenious design that he was buried in one. Before his death in 2008, Fredric J. Baur asked that part of his ashes be placed in a Pringles tube and interred in a grave in his home city of Cincinnati, Ohio.
BUNGEE JUMPER FATALLY MISCALCULATES LENGTH OF CORD
Eager to participate in the bungee jumping craze that was sweeping the US in 1997, 22-year-old fast-food worker Eric Barcia decided to make his own apparatus. Having constructed a cord by taping straps together, he wrapped one end of the cord around his foot and tied the other end to a railroad trestle on a bridge near Springfield, Virginia. He then jumped from the bridge but was killed after hitting the pavement 70 feet below at full speed. A police spokesman explained: “The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground.” Barcia’s grandmother was mystified, pointing out: “He was very smart in school.”
COUPLE LURED BY FUNERAL FOOD
An elderly New Zealand couple attended strangers’ funerals five times a week over a period of 17 years purely for the free food and drink.
ENGLAND FANS STRANDED IN ONE-WAY STREET
Two English soccer fans who travelled to Cologne, Germany, for a match in 2006 lost their car after thinking they had parked it on a road called “One-Way Street”. So as not to forget where they had left their vehicle, the pair looked for a street sign and wrote down “Einbahn Strasse” in the belief that it was the name of the road . . . blissfully unaware that it means “One-Way Street” in German. It was only when they returned to the area after the match that they discovered that every other street in the inner city had a sign saying “Einbahn Strasse”. With the help of German police, they managed to track down their car several hours later.
CALLERS GET SEX LINE INSTEAD OF GOLF LINE
Callers to a freephone number advertising a US golf tournament in 2001 were surprised to hear a sultry female voice telling them they had “come to the right place for nasty talk with big-busted girls”. A one-digit error published in 100,000 brochures for the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, California, led callers to a sex line instead of the golf line.
REFEREE SENDS OFF WHISTLING PARROT
The referee of an important soccer cup tie was forced to send off a parrot after it caused chaos and confusion by repeatedly imitating his whistle. Accompanied by his owner Irene Kerrigan, the green parrot named Me-Tu sat in his cage watching from the touchline as Hatfield Town played Hertford Heath in the quarter-final of the Hertfordshire Senior Centenary Trophy in 2009 before 150 spectators. Me-Tu behaved himself for the first half but ten minutes after the restart, he began distracting the players by whistling just like referee Gary Bailey. After numerous stoppages, the match was halted and Mr Bailey told the woman and parrot to leave the pitch-side. Afterwards he said: “I’ve never known anything like it in my football career. It was a big game and there were quite a lot of people there. This woman was standing right by the touchline and suddenly unveiled a big cage with this big green parrot in it. I didn’t mind at first, but then every time I blew my whistle, the bird made exactly the same sound. The players all stopped, so I had to ask her to move the parrot. It was bizarre. Looking back, I should have made far more of it and got out my red card to show to the parrot.”
FORGOT TO TAKE OFF SHIRT BEFORE IRONING IT
Atlanta Braves’ baseball team pitcher John Smoltz scalded himself in the act of ironing a shirt – while he was wearing it.
FOOTBALLER SACKED FOR PLAYING WITH HIMSELF
A Turkish soccer club sacked its French star Pascal Nourma after he put his hands down his shorts to celebrate scoring a goal. He said the gesture was a “private sign of joy”.
GREYHOUND WORE CONTACT LENSES
A British woman who owned a short-sighted greyhound that kept finishing second in races because it needed another dog to follow turned it into a winner by having the animal fitted with contact lenses. The Manchester eye specialist who fitted the lenses said: “The greyhound was severely short-sighted and always came second because it followed the dog in front. With the lenses, it could see the hare and began to win.” The owner didn’t want the dog’s name revealed because she feared bookmakers would slash its odds in future races.
PLAYER TRANSFERRED FOR SAUSAGES
A Romanian soccer player was transferred in 2006 for a fee of 15 kilos of pork sausages. After signing defender Marius Cioara from UT Arad, Fourth Division club Regal Hornia revealed: “We gave up the team’s sausage allowance for a week to secure him.” But the day after details of the deal were leaked to the media, Cioara dramatically announced that he was quitting football and going to work on a farm in Spain because he was fed up with the sausage taunts. Regal Hornia said they were asking for the return of their sausage meat.
SPIDER NIGHTMARE SIDELINES BASEBALL STAR
Toronto Blue Jays’ baseball player Glenallen Hill sustained serious cuts after falling out of bed and crashing into a glass table . . . while having a nightmare about his body being covered in spiders.
ATHLETE STUMBLES OVER POTTED PLANT
Sweden’s Svante Rasmusson seemed assured of the gold medal in the modern pentathlon at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics when he pulled clear in the final event, the 4,000 metres cross country. But just 20 yards from the finish he stumbled over a potted plant, placed there by the organizers to brighten up the course, and by the time he had got to his feet he had been passed by Italy’s Daniele Masala.
SOCCER PLAYERS PUT CONDOMS ON THEIR FEET
In 2008, it was revealed that impoverished soccer players in Cape Town, South Africa, were putting condoms on their feet to help their socks stay up during matches. Bandilo Nginingini, a 20-year-old player for Young Cosmos FC, admitted that he regularly went to a shop to buy four condoms before weekend matches. He said: “I wish that we could get proper soccer kit support so that we can stop this and let the condoms be used for their real purpose.”
SENT OFF FOR FLIRTING WITH REFEREE
An East German junior soccer player was sent off for flirting with the referee. The official, 20-year-old Marita Rall, ordered him off when he tried to arrange a date with her while the match was in progress.
ROOFTOP PROTEST ALERTS EX-WIFE
When Ronald Stach staged a 14-day sit-in on the roof of a Baltimore, Maryland, bar in 2007 to protest about the dismal performance of the Baltimore Ravens football team, he inadvertently opened a can of worms. For the publicity he attracted alerted his former wife to his whereabouts and enabled her to renew her long campaign for $40,000 in child support. Shortly afterwards a second woman came forward, claiming Stach also owed her $12,000 in back child support.
DEAD PLAYER IS BOOKED FOR DIVING
A footballer booked for diving by a no-nonsense referee had in fact dropped dead of a heart attack. Goran Tunjic, a 32-year-old defender playing for the Croatian side Mladost, collapsed and fell to the ground after being tackled during a 2010 match against Hrvatski Sokola.
The referee, who had warned the teams before kick-off that he would not tolerate any playacting, promptly marched across the pitch to the prone player and waved a yellow card at him. He quickly realized his error and summoned medical help but it proved to no avail.
BOYS’ TEAM HIT BY OWN GULL
The outcome of a boys’ soccer match in Manchester in 1999 was changed when a wayward shot was deflected into the net off a seagull. Stalybridge Celtic Colts were only leading Hollingsworth Juniors 2-1 when their 13-year-old striker Danny Worthington tried a hopeful shot from 25 yards. The ball was sailing way over the crossbar until it hit the passing seagull on the head, spun over the Hollingsworth goalkeeper and into the net. Hollingsworth were so demoralized by the freak goal that they went on to lose 7-1.
OLYMPIC LUGER BREAKS TOOTH ON MEDAL
David Moeller, Germany’s silver medallist in the luge at the 2010 Winter Olympics, had to make an unscheduled trip to the dentist after breaking his front tooth while taking a celebratory bite into the medal. He said: “The photographers wanted us to bite into our medals at the presentation ceremony, and a corner of my front tooth broke off.”
The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books) Page 19
