Dr. Franklin Ruehl's Top Weird Stories Of 2005

Dr. Franklin Ruehl is an investigator of the strange, paranormal, and TRUE!


Dr. Franklin Ruehl's Top Weird Stories Of 2005
drruehl@yahoo.com
January 15, 2006

- Terrible way to go! Motorcyclist in Custer, SD was following a truck loaded with Porta Potties when one fell off, hitting him and causing him to swerve into 3 cars, killing him!

- Far better way to go! Man in Portage,MI, bowled a perfect 300 game, then keeled over and died!

- 1st face transplant (in France) characterized by 2 unusual aspects aside from the surgery itself: the gal undergoing the operation had attempted suicide with an overdose of barbiturates (which may have provoked her pet Lab to maul her face as he frantically tried to wake her) while the donor had hanged herself to death!

- Man was caught shoplifting no fewer than 7 toothbrushes at a supermarket down in Ribeirao, Brazil ... the irony: he was toothless, explaining that he just wanted to know what it would feel like to need toothbrushes!

- While feeding milk to his pet king cobra, a Hindu priest in Jharkhand, India was bitten ... amazingly, the snake died and the priest survived!

- Diver stranded on a rock in New Zealand's Cook Strait refused to be winched up to a hovering rescue helicopter, admitting that he was terrified of heights ... a powerboat later provided him a safe ride home!

- A foot-long koi (a type of carp) came sliding down a Mansfield, England chimney, bounced off of the flames, and landed on the hearth, amazingly still alive ... a heron's beak mark on its back indicated that the bird scooped him out of a garden pond, then accidentally dropped him ... "Sooty" is now enjoying a new lease on life in a local pet shop!

- Doofuses of the week! Two morons separately died from swallowing lit firecrackers that exploded inside them during New Year's festivities in the Philippines (fortunately, they were not readers of "The Realm of Bizarre News")

- Tragic coincidence! 2 brothers perished in separate car accidents within 15 minutes of each other in Louisville, KY ... each had crashed into a tree! Their father, a deputy sheriff, was called to the scene of one accident, and unknowingly drove right past the site of the other misfortune!

- Shocking! Two Romanian priests, arguing about expenditures, began fighting each other inside the church in Constantia, with one hospitalized with a broken arm!

- A farmer in Oman lost his cellphone ... when he dialed its number, he heard it ringing inside the stomach of one of his favorite his cows who had swallowed it!

- Amazing gent whose neck was in traction and both arms in casts after a serious accident fled the Burwood Hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand, still wearing a traction "halo," possibly because he has a terrible fear of doctors and hospitals!

- Hermie, a tiny map turtle in Watertown, NY, had a deformed beak making it nearly impossible for him to eat, so 2 skillful veterinarians fitted him with special braces, enabling him to devour all the goodies his little heart desires!

- Toads in Hamburg, Germany have been literally exploding as a result of puffing themselves up to deter hungry crows who recently developed a taste for their livers ... they pluck out the livers in lightning-quick strikes which cause the inflated toads to burst!

- Kind dog owner in Point Lonsdale, Queensland, Australia, was taking some leftovers on a china plate out to his beloved pooch when he tripped and fell on a rock in the yard ... a broken shard pierced his neck, causing him to bleed to death (so, please, please, use a paper plate when delivering treats to your canine pal).

- Wimp burglar panicked and called the cops when he found the cadaver of an 89-year-old woman in the home he had entered in The Hague! (My advice: Get yourself some guts! I don't care if you buy them at a swap meet, make them in a lab, or grow them in a garden, but you get yourself some guts! It ain't the dead that give you trouble in this world ... it's the living that do!)

- Armed robbers stopped a money courier's vehicle in Gronau, Germany, forcing him off the road, but, in their haste, grabbed the first aid kit instead of the money satchel!

- Strange celestial object, EL61, discovered in the Kuiper Belt at the outer fringes of our solar system: it has a decided football shape, is approximately the size of Pluto, is orbited by 2 small moons, and may be playing host to bizarre hypothermophilic bioforms!

- Planet orbiting 3 stars! Jupiter-sized body is orbiting star HD188753, some 149 lt.years removed from earth. And, a double star is orbiting that primary star, also!

- Man's body was left on the side of a Pennsylvania road for 3 days because passersby mistook him for a dead deer since he was attired in tan clothing!

- Unfair! Gal is being fined $25 every time she walks her spaniel through the lobby of her condo in Long Beach CA, having already racked up $1600 in charges ... if she carried the 20-pound pooch, there would be no fine, but she cannot lift him because of being partially disabled! Unfair!

- Surprise! Japanese researchers have determined that monkeys, just like humans, have distinct accents based on where they live!

- Adding insult to injury! After being hit by a car in Washington,D.C., a man, 73, was ticketed for jaywalking, with the officer asserting that he was responsible for the accident ... the gentleman has subsequently died from his injuries!

- Archaeologists digging near Aleppo, Syria, have unearthed several titanic tombs that reportedly house the remains of giants from the Biblical era, including a legendary colossus, Muhammad the Tall One, who may have stood over 22 feet!

- Kind biologists in New Zealand carefully removed 600 5-foot-long Gippsland earthworms from the planned path of a new road, relocating them to safer digs ... these humongous crawlers, which can actually be heard moving underground, are extremely gentle and graceful!

- World's tallest building, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands 1,667 feet in height, apparently is causing earthquakes because its enormous weight (700,000 tons) is stressing the ground beneath it ... it may even have opened up an ancient faultline! And, other skyscrapers, dams, and even subterranean waste disposal sites around the globe may also be similarly engendering seismic activity!

- Beyond belief! For the 2nd time in 3 years, a man was struck in the head by a subway car while in New York City ... despite serious injuries, he has vowed to continue riding the subway! Good show!

- Unbelievable! Burrowing moles have uncovered an ancient 3rd century A.D. Roman villa in Cotswold, England!

- A farmer in Dunedin, New Zealand, faces animal cruelty charges for leaving his 600 sheep unshorn for 3 years ... the excessively woolly ovines can barely move around and have difficulty grazing (but, who shears them in the wild?)

- New York City wife, 87, stuffed her dead hubby in a suitcase, claiming she was eventually going to take him to Arizona to be buried ... neighbors alerted police after smelling the stench of death coming from their apartment (the possibility of homicide is being investigated).

- A physician in Stockbridge, Georgia was injecting cancer patients with commercial weed killer while billing their insurance companies for "low-dose" chemotherapy!

- Unfair! Dad fired for picking discarded chocolates from the trash at the store he worked at (Zellers of St.Hyacinthe, Quebec) ... he was going to give them to his 3 children for Christmas!

- Naughty! Naughty! Woman visiting the Melbourne Zoo reached inside a fence to pick a beautiful flower, but a resident lion promptly bit off the top of her middle right finger!

- Great idea! Mailmen in Germany are being given training in canine psychology, resulting in a marked decline in the number of dog bites they are suffering!

- According to an intriguing new Swiss study, playing the Australian didgeroo, a 4-foot-long wind instrument made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, cures snoring!

- Russia's Josef Stalin endeavored to create an invincible army of ape men ... secret labs in Georgia prove that this was an ongoing project in the 1920s, but apparently failed as the director, Dr. Ilia Ivanov, was arrested and sent to a labor camp in 1930!

- Poetic justice in action? A fleeing mugger at a South African zoo in Bloemfontein sought refuge in the tiger compound where 4 ferocious felines proceeded to rip him apart (but, having been fed, they did not bother to devour him)!

- Hamlet's castle is haunted! Staffers at a new restaurant in the 431-year-old Krongberg Castle in Denmark, the setting for Shakespeare's celebrated play, claim to have seen shadows floating enigmatically, windows and doors inexplicably flying open, and even the ghost of an old man walking!

- The outrage! Mice have invaded a shelter for stray kitties in Dundee, Scotland, even being so bold as to steal cat food set out for the homeless felines!

- Eek! Lice, yes lice, devastated Napoleon's army during his invasion of Russia ... new evidence from researchers at Marseille's Universite de la Mediteranee prove that louse-borne diseases such as typhus and trench fever killed off a high percentage of his troops!

- World's 1st mixed convent sits right in the heart of Rome, where 14 nuns and 3 friars live under the same roof!

- Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade will give away his 1500-acre estate in Somerset, England to the person with the DNA most closely matching his ... thus far, 5,000 folks named Slade have been tested, with a North Carolinian coming closest! How about you?

- Single gals have been leaving their undies at the tomb of a deceased rabbi, Yenothan Ben Uziel, in Amuka in northern Israel, hoping that their prayers for a marriage mate will be answered!

- The power of music to heal! A nurse played a harp in the OR as an 85-year-old woman was undergoing heart surgery at a hospital in Urbana, Illinois!

- A new study from Mainz, Germany reveals that honey bees can recogonize human faces despite their tiny brains!

- Ouch! Gal in Wrexham, Wales was suffering a terrible toothache, but could not afford a dentist, so she took a stiff drink and had a friend extract the offending tooth with a pair of pliers! Ouch!

- A fuel leak developed when a train hit a concrete chunk near Bath, England ... the ingenious train engineer plugged the leak with a wine bottle cork and proceeded to the next stop!

- Casey, a pampered female croc in Darwin, Australia, favors potatoes and gravy, cake, fried fish, and broiled steak, refusing to eat any raw meat whatsoever!

- Frenchman Angel Hays, a lifelong taphephobe, has purchased a special coffin appointed with an alarm to insure that he is not buried alive!

- Good show! During dispute with his wife, angry hubby in suburban Jerusalem extracted 3 million shekels (about $870,00) from his safe, spread them on the ground, and set fire to them! That will teach her a lesson!

- Eek! A Chinese cosmetics firm is utilizing the skin from executed criminals to manufacture a new line of beauty products being marketed in the UK!

- Gutless wonders! Not even one of New Delhi's 97 official rat catchers has snared even one rodent in the past 10 years! Gutless wonders!

- He should not have tempted fate! Aussie was having the phrase,"Last Rites," tattooed on his chest at a parlor in East Williamsburg, Victoria when he suddenly passed put, staggering into a glass counter and smashing his head through it, dying on the spot! Fate apparently moved its huge hand at seeing that challenging phrase!

- A distraught soccer fan down in Chile swallowed rat poison when his favorite team failed to qualify for the World Cup ... he was hospitalized and still alive at last report (I was tempted to do likewise when the Angels bested the Yankees in the baseball playoffs, but I don't have the guts this guy does)

- German architect in Berlin has filed a patent for a new cement made from dog poop ... with cement prices for conventional cement skyrocketing, I foresee the establishment of dog poop recycling centers, with folks fighting over poop on the streets!

- Retribution! Thai ice cream vendor slashed his dentist with a sword, breaking his left arm ... 3 years ago, that dentist carelessly extracted the peddler's healthy tooth instead of an infected one, engendering an infection that left his left arm useless!

- A village of killer wives exists in Nagyrev, Hungary, where some 140 hapless men have been poisoned since the 1920s!

- Spooky! The ghost of the late Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is haunting the Lenin Museum in his former home in Samara, Russia ... his apparition has been seen, his voice and footsteps heard, and the aroma of his favorite apple cake permeates the rooms!

- To honor his late mom, a football fan recently ran onto the field at Philadelphia during the Philadelphia Eagles' contest versus the Green Bay Packers, depositing her cremated ashes on the field! Truly a loyal son!

- Furious over a $30 parking ticket he received in Glendale, CA, a man proceeded to torch the city's official Xmas tree, causing $8,000 in damage ... for a starter, his bail has been set at $50,000, with fines and jail time probable!

- When reality imitates art: Amity Beach was the fictional site of the film "Jaws" ... at a real Amity Beach, down in Sydney ,Australia, a 21-year-old female swimmer was attacked by not one, but three, sharks who literally chewed her apart as she screamed for help (her companions thought she was joking).

- Pond scum appears to be a promising cure for Alzheimer's disease! Swiss researchers found that a substance derived from it, nostocarboline, neutralizes an enzyme that causes the brain disease!

- Oops! Geriatric thief, 70, robbed a post office in Kawagoe, Japan of $2,000 in coins, but stumbled and fell as he tried to make off with the heavy 22-pound bag, which split apart on the pavement!

- Turn about! A cabbie in Hollywood, CA shot a passenger who refused to pay his fare ... for some unfathomable reason, the company has suspended him!

- Ouch! Teen gal, 19, in Thailand had an itchy throat so she tried to scratch it with a toothbrush which she promptly swallowed, where it remained lodged remaining for 3 agonizing days until a surgeon extracted it (that is precisely why I always tie a string to my toothbrush before using it to scratch my throat)

- Finnegan, an orphaned squirrel who was nursed by a Seattle family's dog and lived indoors for the 1st 8 weeks of his life, has not forgotten his benefactors, periodically returning to cavort in their yard, even bringing along other squirrels!

- Great idea! Church in Pendleton, OR, is raising money selling toilet paper, yes, I said toilet paper ... of course, the brand is Angel Soft, and if you buy a case, it will be delivered at no extra charge!


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Dr. Franklin Ruehl's Top Weird Stories Of 2005