Stephen Mabbutt was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), which is a rare condition where sounds inside the body become very loud.  Aside from hearing his own eyeballs roll in his head, he could hear his own heart beating and chewing food was a deafening experience.  Surgeons were able to repair the condition and the patient is doing fine.

“Eventually I could hear my heart beating and my eyes moving in their sockets. It was really distracting.”

Mr Mabbutt was referred to Martin Burton, a surgeon from the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital who helped establish the Cochrane Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders Group. A CT scan found perforations inside the semicircular canals inside Mr Mabbutt’s ear.

He was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), a rare condition discovered by American surgeon Lloyd B Minor in 1995, which is thought to only effect one in 500,000 a year in Britain.

The operation to cure the problem involved a 5cm (2in) incision behind the ear, making a channel through the bone to find the “balance organ” and using the patient’s own bone to create a seal around the defect, the BBC said.

[The Telegraph]

An 80-year-old South African man was reported dead by his family and taken to the morgue where the undertaker checked his vitals and verified the death. The body was then locked up in a morgue fridge for 21 hours when he suddenly woke up and started banging on the fridge door screaming to be let out. The morgue owner and employees first thoughts were “ghost” – even though everybody knows ghosts can just ooze right through walls. So they called the cops and once the cops came with guns, they bravely entered the morgue and luckily did not kill the man again.

The real kicker is how the morgue owner, Ayanda Maqolo, reacted to the poor old man screaming to freed. Especially after his employees seemed so sure it was a ghost:

“I couldn’t believe it!” Maqolo said. “I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn’t scared, so I called the police.”

After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.

“I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us,” Maqolo said.

[Gizmodo]

An Auckland, New Zealand railway tunnel project is on hold pending discussions that it will anger and destroy the home of Horotiu. When angered, these mythical creatures will attack humans, and in fact they are believed by some to be responsible for many road deaths.

But Horotiu, a mythical monster, put the NZ$2.6bn ($2.1bn) project in doubt after an indigenous Maori board protested that it will destroy grounds once patrolled by the taniwha (pronounced “tani-fa”).

Glenn Wilcox, a member of the Maori Statutory Board, which protects Maori interests, complained that the plan did not take into account the monster, which “was here first”.

Ranginui Walker, a respected Maori elder, said at the time: “You have to placate local demons, deities, taniwha.

Of course, the creature has now opened a Twitter account to make it easier to follow what is going on in his life.

[Center For Fortean Zoology Australia]

Heavy winds near Sydney are pushing these waterfalls right back up the cliff.

[Gizmodo]

About a million things are terrifying about this. A few feet to the side and poor Inocenta might have plunged into the sinkhole as she stepped out of bed. A few feet wider and it could have swallowed her whole bed. Or just the fact that in Guatemala, you could be walking down the street or eating at a nice restaurant one moment and find yourself devoured by the earth the next.

[Gizmodo]

1. Histoplasmosis – also known as Cave Disease or Spelunker’s Lung, is caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum and primarily affects the lungs. It is fatal if untreated, and hey, it grows in soil contaminated with bat droppings.
2. Rabies – Bats make up a quarter of the rabid animals reported to the CDC. Enough said.
3. Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever – Found in equatorial African caves, this cousin of Ebola incubates in fruit bats that live in caves and mines.
4. Leptospirosis – Also known as Rat Catcher’s Yellow, this is caused by infection with bacteria of the genus Leptospira which grows in water contaminated with the urine of bats and rats. Do not drink cave water.
5. Cave Fever – Also known as relapsing fever, this disease comes from getting bitten by infected ticks.

I think the real lesson here is that bats are filled with disease.

For a casual tourist, like the 500,000 annual visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, walking through a cave is essentially as safe as walking down the street. It is the sport cavers, those who crawl through muck and mud into little-explored crevices, that must protect themselves from things living on bats, rodents, ticks and other bugs, Igreja said.

Igreja surveys the classic and emerging cave-borne diseases in the June 10 Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. We’ve collected a gallery of the offending cave fauna, along with tips about how to keep sickness away next time you’re slithering among the stalagmites. Note: None of these diseases are exclusive to caves. Strange bugs can strike almost anywhere.

[Wired]

And by sea monster – I mean most likely a whale.

‘It’s like nothing we have ever seen, it almost looks pre-historic,’ he told the Sun.

Curled up by the foot of sand dunes was the 30ft-long body of the unidentified animal with head, tail and teeth all discernible.

Experts are now examining the pictures with one suggesting it could be the body of a whale.

A spokesman for the Natural History Museum said: ‘We have spoken to one of our mammals curators, and they have confirmed the animal is probably a long-finned pilot whale – Globicephala melas.

[Cryptomundo]

“They are believed to be a type of mayfly that is now extinct, but their appearance is perplexing as the adult wing shape is more like that of a dragonfly while the legs resemble those of a praying mantis.

Meanwhile, the larva looks like a freshwater shrimp with large antennae and multiple legs, and probably lived as ambush predators in river beds, partly buried in the mud.”

[The Epoch Times]

71-year-old stonecutter / bamboo weaver Chen Dejun drinks gasoline. And he isn’t dead. Apparently, he drinks it because it helps his chest pains from emphysema. Doctors theorize that he must have developed an immunity to gasoline.

71-year-old stonecutter and bamboo weaver Chen Dejun has been guzzling the stuff for half his life to quell his chest pains. But he hasn’t died.

Can we just break that down for a second? Dejun says he drinks about 3 to 3.5 liters of kerosene and/or gasoline a month. Over 42 years, that means he’s sucked down around 1.5 tons of fuel in his lifetime. That’s about 535.5 gallons, enough to fill up a Corvette almost 30 times, according to calculations by Jalopnik’s editor Ray Wert.

[Gizmodo]

That is not a ghost owl. Apparently an owl hit a window so hard that it left a perfect owl print behind. Authorities state the owl survived but that the experience was “uncomfortable”.

“This would have been very uncomfortable for the bird but thankfully it looks like it survived as Mr and Mrs Arnold couldn’t find it anywhere close by. Sadly, many birds aren’t so lucky.”

[BBC]

Residents near Gainesville, GA have reported loud booms and streaks across the sky. Dobbins Air Force Base said they do not know anything about it, but they are looking into the issue.

AccessNorthGa.com received calls between 10:00 and 11:00, the first about 10:40 from the McEver Road/Browns Bridge Road area. The caller said it shook her house and wondered if it might have been a sonic boom, caused by a jet breaking the sound barrier.

A second caller, a few minutes later, said he was sitting by his pool on Mountain View Road, which is off McEver, and saw a “streak across the sky,” followed by the loud noise, leading to some speculation that it was a sonic boom caused by a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere.

Lt. Col. James Wilson, a spokesman for Dobbins Air Reserve Base, said the noise was probably not caused by a plane approaching or leaving the base, which is in Marietta. He said the Dobbins flight schedule does not indicate any aircraft would have been passing through the area at that time.

[AccessNorthGA]

[Deadspin]

Bolungarvik, Iceland is under attack by unexplained dirt and rocks that is raining from the sky. While government officials are looking for a rational explanation, the locals are convinced that a recent project that used dynamite on the land has thrown nature, and the elves out of balance. The townspeople are trying to appease the elves with songs and prayers.

The town of Bolungarvik has been experiencing a rash of unexplained rocks and dirt that rain from the sky, bombarding the town and scaring its residents. Although the local government believes a rational explanation can be attributed to the falling debris, locals believe that supernatural forces are behind the attacks. Elves and “hidden folks” are to blame.

Recent construction of a new avalanche defence barrier required the dynamiting of local land, something said to be a big no-no in the land of elves. In the folklore, any disruption to the harmony of nature must be balanced out and carried out respectfully. I know that in Iceland, some people believe in the powers of ley lines and they are said to be used by elves, gnomes and fairies. Obstruction to these lines or paths could bring havoc to a person’s life.

[GhostTheory]

[GhostTheory]

Lots of odd creatures come from the sea, and add to the list a one-eyed bull shark fetus that was removed from the body of its captured mother recently off La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez.

A brief story about the shark is on the Pisces Sportfishing blog. Pete Thomas Outdoors shared the top image with two shark experts in California and both were skeptical at first, suggesting it was some kind of hoax.

One of them jokingly identified the species as a “Cycloptomus” because of a single eye — if it is, in fact, an actual eye — located just above the mouth.

But Tracy Ehrenberg, general manager at Pisces Sportfishing, has been in touch with renowned shark expert Felipe Galvan, who has seen the shark and has even produced a paper on the discovery.

[Pete Thomas Outdoors]

Fisherman found a 23-foot long, dead squid floating about 12 miles off the Florida coast near Port Salerno. The fisherman hauled it ashore and donated the body to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“We pulled up… thought it was something to fish on, a pallet or something like that. We looked at it, all three of us were like ‘holy mackerel,’ ” recalled Benz.

It turned out to be a 23-foot long giant squid.  It’s a rare find in our waters.  The main part of the body was about 11-feet long, but with its two long tentacles, it barely fit in the 23-foot boat Benz was riding in.  But he knew they had to bring it ashore.

“Nobody believes a fisherman,” said Benz.  “It didn’t seem it had been dead long, the tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in.

[WPTV]