Above is a photo snapped of a purported apparition at the Jenner Museum in Gloucester, England. It was taken by BBC journalist Chris Sandys. Edward Jenner is the man who pioneered the smallpox vaccine and the museum that bares his name has been claimed to be haunted for years.

It seems convenient that so much press attention has been given to the ghosts in the attic at Jenner Museum, especially because they have a new exhibition called ‘Ghosts in the Attic’: From Smallpox to MMR. But the proprietors of the museum swear that the title is metaphorical and they did not have a hand in any sort of publicity stunt.

We at Weirdthings believe the photo above could be of….anything.

What does your ass say about you? Just ask Australian psychic Sharina, who claims that a reading of your posterior is more effective at predicting your future life success than a more traditional reading of your palms. Watch as she deftly maneuvers her hands, fondling the butt cheeks of fortune seekers. So does the shape of one’s ass really predict the shape of things to come? Here at Weirdthings, we question the efficacy of backside reading to yield insights into personality and suspect that psychic bottom readers may be the ultimate bottom feeders.

Neanderthals were one of our closest genetic relatives. The debate over whether they were a sub species of humans or a different species all together still rages. Knowing our shared genetic heritage, archaeologists like to speculate about interaction between humans and neanderthals.

Did we interbreed? Did we co-exist peacefully? Did we trade and barter? Well according to Fernandon Rozzi of Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique instead of loving one of our closet relatives, we ate them. According to Live Science:

The evidence: a Neanderthal jawbone with marks similar to those left on bones of deer and other animals that Stone Age humans butchered, according to the Daily Mail.

“Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them,” Rozzi says.

Mmmmm….tasty ape man. It’s a tangled ancestral web we weave.

Local fisherman around Vietnam’s Lake Rung suspected changing weather patterns were the culprit when fish started dying off in large numbers last year. When they headed out last month to collect fish they caught around two tons of a strange, blob like, creature. The fish caught along side the blobs perished soon afterward. Touching the blobs brought itchiness and sore eyes Thanh Nien News reports:

“We didn’t know if they were animals or plants and began called them the “strange creature,” Xuan said.

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Penn Bullock Reports:

photo credit: King Chimp

It’s a scene straight out of a horror movie. A little boy tells his soccer mom that he saw a ghost last night in his room, and that the ghost also visited his little sister. The suburbs are safe, the mother thinks, and my son was having a bad dream. Two weeks later, at 2 a.m. she stumbles on a man next to her bed, lying on the floor, making not a peep. He’s wearing all black and escapes like a shadow “‘without saying a word.” There’s an unknown lurker in Fishers, Indiana, and he likes to visit children in their sleep. Does he sound like the boogeyman?

A similar drama transpired in New York City in 1927. Two little boys were playing in an apartment building hall. When their parents came to collect them, both boys had disappeared. One of them was found minutes later on the roof of the building. He told the adults that the other boy had been taken by “the boogeyman.” The boogeyman was Albert Fish, the most gruesome child rapist/serial killer in American history. Nobody believed the boy about the boogeyman until it was too late.

Here’s a question: would you rather find a real ghost or a black-clad intruder in your house?

We all remember the Montauk Monster that washed up along the shores of Long Island last year. The above video was taken in Southold, NY of Montauk Monster 2. The people over at Montauk-monster.com think the two are the same beast, what do you make of it?

Penn Bullock Reports:

No – that’s not a small, cooked, headless chicken, but a 25,000 year-old statuette just unearthed in Germany. Archeologists are calling it the earliest known example of human pornography. When we at Weirdthings took a closer look, we observed, without arousal, the “dramatically exaggerated breasts” as put in the delicate words of the archeologists. The curves on this female form suggest, for one, that thin hasn’t always been in. 25,000 years ago, man’s ideal woman had the body of a boulder, chicken wings for legs, protruding, basket-ball-sized breasts, and no head. Imagine the pressure on women back then to live up to the ideal.

Penn Bullock reports:

This May, Madonna tried to nab another African child from Malawi. She had already adopted one in 2006, a boy named David Banda.

Mind you, David’s father didn’t approve of the adoption. Madonna waved him off as an illiterate primitive who couldn’t arbitrate over his son’s fate because he knew nothing. The father told the press: “These so-called human rights activists are harassing me every day, threatening me that I am not aware of what I am doing. They want me to support their court case, a thing I cannot do…” Madonna got his son anyway. Malawi courts tried to stop her, but she drove by them like a vir– juggernaut.

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Image Credit: AAP

The crocodile hood ornament these Papua New Guinea men are sporting on the front of their car was not a gift from Pimp-My-Polynesian Ride. It’s a killer 13 foot female crocodile that has been terrorizing their village in Madang Province. They lured the beast to its death in the Gum river with a piece of lamb on a giant hook.

Rumor has it that seven locals have been murdered by the reptile and the young men pictured utilized techniques their people had used for many croc hunting centuries to subdue the brute. They then sent DNA samples off for testing in Australia, hoping to prove that this was the croc who claimed the latest victim, a 17 year old girl.

Steve Irwin would be proud.

Also, a male rumored to be her mate is still at large….could they have caught….the wrong croc?

Alison Smith Reports:

The United States Food and Drug Administration, apparently bored to tears by microbial face paint contamination, took a stand against General Mills in a warning issued on 5 May 2009 for claims made by the #1 toddler finger food – Cheerios.

The FDA’s warning stated that the claims made by General Mills regarding the health benefits of eating Cheerios (specifically, that doing so lowers cholesterol and prevents heart disease) would qualify Cheerios as a drug. Ignoring all the fun drug slang phrases I can come up with for this (“Dude, I’m so Cheerioed”), let’s get to the heart of the issue here.

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This looks like just another car crash video until the dust starts to settle. Unbelievably we counted more than twenty people leaving that vehicle, leading us here at Weirdthings to speculate that the van was either full of clowns or was carrying a portal to another dimension.

Image Credit: j_naturalia_2

We know what you’re thinking, and no the Bird People have not decided to rise up against their human overlords….yet. The photo above depicts an individual fashioning the get up Plague Doctors wore when visiting patients during the Black Death in the 14th Century.

1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out by the plague and the costume definitely reflects the creepiness of the times. Plague Doctors wore the frightening get up to mitigate their chances of catching the highly infectious disease, think of it as an archaic hazmat suit.

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Image Credit: Visual Culture and BioScience

Penn Bullock reports:

In March 2008, a veterinarian identified a mysterious pig pathogen at two “swine production facilities” (the official euphemism for slaughterhouses) in Illinois. It contained “genes of both swine and avian influenza viruses.”

A government inspector from the USDA-ARS Virus and Prion Diseases of Livestock Research Unit (say that three times) wrote up the discovery in an esoteric trade journal, “Agricultural Research.” The report resurfaced inanely on a news aggregator, AllBusiness.com. It noted the nebulousness of the bird-swine flu and warned that it had the potential for a deadly pandemic. What it lacked was transmissibility to and between humans.

Exactly a year later, the so-called swine flu emerged at an unidentified pig farm in North America. Swine flu is a misnomer for this mongrel virus. According to the CDC, it’s actually a combo of swine, bird and human flues from Asia and North America.

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Preparing for the inevitable Terminator: Salvation robot apocalypse a five part series

We here at Weird Things aren’t just committed to telling you about all the weird things going on in your world, we’re here to do something about it! As every day brings us closer to the robot apocalypse envisioned in the Terminator saga, we’ve been preparing ourselves for a fighting chance. Our editors (actually just this one; the others looked at me funny when I suggested this) decided to design the ultimate weapon to use in the front lines of the man versus machine war.

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Check out this video of British graffiti artist Banksy’s latest New York exploit. The shop keeper actor is a great touch.

Here’s a link to the official site for the shop: Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grille

This is the highest quality video we could find to embed, for a higher quality video visit the BBC.

The Fiandaca family called firefighters to their home in Sicily yesterday as temperatures emanating from the floors of their home reached boiling point. According to Maria Fiandaca, the floors had been heating up all week and suddenly became too hot to handle, the surfaces were steaming.

Italian experts have so far been unable to explain the source causing the house to heat, though Sicily is home to continuously erupting Mt. Etna and plenty of volcanic and geothermal activity, though locals would prefer to think the hot floor has paranormal origins. Did someone smell sulfur?