BEFORE you press play on that video (we’re sure some of you just went for it anyway) put down whatever it is you’re eating.
This is a ribbon worm called a Gorgonorhynchus. When it senses nearby prey it launches what looks like a root out of its face. Anything caught in those flinchingly terrifying ‘roots’ get hauled into the worm’s belly.
These adorable little worms live in the ocean…
It’s summer.
Good luck out there.
Ripped right out of hundreds of science fiction, comic book and horror stories comes news that a Russian man has decided to be a medical guinea pig or possibly a pioneer….
By having his head removed and attached to another body.
Suffering from a severe case of spinal muscular atrophy, Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man has volunteered to become the first person to go through the process of a head transplant.
Last December, in a TedTalk, Italian neuroscientist Sergio Canavero claimed it’s possible and he was the guy to do it.
Spiridonov says he’s really got nothing to lose as his condition and quality of life deteriorate:
“I’m very interested in technology, and anything progressive that might change people’s lives for the better. Doing this isn’t only an excellent opportunity for me, but will also create a scientific basis for future generations, no matter what the actual outcome of the surgery is. This technology is similar to the first man to walk in space. This is because in the future it will help thousands of people who are in an even more deplorable state than I am.”
The cost and time to transplant Spiridonov’s head onto it’s new body? 11 million dollars and 36 hours of surgery.
Other doctors in the field are calling this a fantasy and a horrible idea that should never even be considered.
We’ll know in 2017 after 36 hours of surgery…
In the broken-English words of Dr. Canavero during the opening of his TedTALK:
“Are you sitting tight? I’m about to give you one hell of a ride.”
Valley of Dolls from Fritz Schumann on Vimeo.
There’s something unsettling about a small village in Nagaro, Japan. The village, located about 90 minutes from anything resembling civilization is like something out of a Twilight Zone episode.
Over 350 motionless dolls resembling people no longer living populate the small village.
Created by Ayano Tsukimi, the dolls were something that she just started doing one day.
Now the entire town is populated by dolls in various places and enacting the daily activities of the once bustling little village.
While Tsukimi’s intentions are innocently endearing, there’s something quietly frightening about walking into the now deserted school (where it looks like everyone just got up and walked out mid-day leaving EVERYTHING behind and where it was when they walked) and finding students with button eyes and stitched mouths blankly staring ahead at their just-as-creepy teacher waiting for a lesson that is never going to happen…
Unless they all freeze when the sun comes out and wait for the night to continue their ‘lesson’…
Latoya Ammons owns a house in Gary, Indiana where she lives with her three children since 2011. Things were going well until 2012 when it all started getting a little Amityville-like.
Large black flies started appearing in the house, her kids were levitating above their beds or being thrown through the house by unseen demonic forces. All the trappings of some bizarre supernatural joke where a priest, a psychic and the Department of Child Services walked into a house…
DCS (Department of Child Services) filed a report stating that they had witnessed some of the bizarre events firsthand:
“Medical staff reported that while the children were at their primary doctor’s office the medical staff reported they observed (one of the children) be lifted and thrown into the wall with nobody touching him.”
Then this instance that was witnessed by a psychiatric counselor and the DCS worker:
“Child became aggressive and then walked up the wall as if he was walking on the floor and did a flip over the grandmother.”
The situation escalated when two clairvoyants, an exorcism-performing priest and the local police department got involved. The three children were growling at times, photos taken by officers were allegedly showing faces and apparitions and shadowy figures were harming the children.
According to some of the people helping Ammons with her situation, 200 demons were believed to inhabit the house and Ammons believed it was all coming from under the stairs. During one of their many stops at the house, officers checked under the stairs. The concrete floor was broken and revealed the dirt underneath but nothing telling or eerie was found.
A more detailed account of the bizarre, made-for-Hollywood story can be read over on the IndyStar’s site where, after reading the actual police, DCS and even the Catholic priest’s report, you’ll have just have to make up your own mind on this very strange case.
And while you’re at it? Take a look at that photo of the house again. It was taken by one of the police officers after responding to a call from Ammons. Notice anything…maybe watching you?
[IndyStar]
USA Today has posted a story about a mysterious priest who appeared at the site of a car crash where firefighters were having a difficult time removing a girl from the wreckage.
After the priest told firefighters not to worry and that she’d be okay, the girl was freed from her twisted vehicle. Multiple witnesses reported seeing and even speaking with the priest…then they all reported that he seemed to just vanish.
Those involved in the story, including the news crew are continuing to search for the priest so that they can thank him for…uh…being a creepy rubbernecker?
Let’s just hope it’s not Preacher Kane…
Who hasn’t made fun of old, out-of-sync kung fu movies or Godzilla movies?
But what if you woke up one day and that’s how you actually saw/heard the world?
That’s currently how only one person ever known to science now hears/sees the world.
After surgery for a heart problem, the guy, simply known as PH started noticing something odd:
“I was staying with my daughter and they like to have the television on in their house. I turned to my daughter and said ‘you ought to get a decent telly, one where the sound and programme are synchronised’. I gave a little chuckle. But they said ‘there’s nothing wrong with the TV I told my daughter her living room TV was out of sync. Then I noticed the kitchen telly was also dubbed badly. Suddenly I noticed that her voice was out of sync too. It wasn’t the TV, it was me.”
While there is a TON of medical terminology that we could throw around here to explain in detail what’s going on, we’ll simplify it.
PH actually hears people BEFORE he sees their lips move! Not only that but PH also realized that it’s not just other people he’s looking at as they speak..it’s his own words too! PH hears the words he’s saying BEFORE he feels his jaw move!
Since light and sound move at different speeds from the point of origin our brain is set up to process them so that they all sync. While no one’s really sure how the brain makes all this work, scientists are even more confused now that PH and his unique situation has entered the playing field.
Scientists are continuing to study what’s happened to PH because he’s the only person in the world to ever have this happen…
Unless it’s triggered in all of us while we watch late-night kung fu and Godzilla movies.
Last time we checked Brazil seemed like a place where men really wouldn’t be hard up to find a female companion.
We were wrong. Very, very wrong.
How wrong? Just…just keep reading.
There’s a bidding war going on in Brazil right now over a woman. For some she’s the perfect woman. For most of us she’s just plain weird and the ridiculous bidding war over her is even weirder.
Her name is Valentina.
Valentina is, disturbingly enough, the most desirable woman in Brazil right now and the man with the most padded wallet will get the chance to deflower her.
The current going price for Valentina’s virginity right now? $105,000 and climbing.
Wondering what her parents and family might be thinking of all of this craziness? Doesn’t matter.
Valentina isn’t real. She’s a life-like sex doll created by the acme of all sex-doll companies, Real Doll. The company has recently opened a manufacturing plant in Brazil and Valentina is the first doll created there. Now her ‘virginity’ is on the auction block.
The winner of the auction will also receive all-expenses-paid travel to and from São Paulo, a free night’s stay in the Presidential Suite of a fancy hotel, and a complimentary candlelight dinner with French Champagne to share with Valentina.
They’ll even throw in some sexy lingerie as Valentina’s gift to you, and a digital camera “to shoot and then show your friends.”
Not only is this a bidding war for an inanimate woman’s viginity…it also seems like an opportunity to see who the richest, most desperate Brazillian man is who’s got such bad game that he’s willing to shell out a small fortune for a woman who won’t say no to even his worst pitch.
[Gawker]
BAM!
You’re chillin’ at home in front of the television.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
You hear some kind of resonating thud from outside. You assume it’s thunder or a neighbor and his anvil.
BAM!
You’re about to be REAL wrong!
BAM! BAM! BAM!
You hear this crazy sound coming from your roof so you go to investigate.
What do you find?
Were you a resident of a small neighborhood in Florida (yep…the streak continues), you might’ve uttered a “Aww….Hell no!” at 21 year-old Gregory Matthew Bruni who would’ve been standing on your roof…marching around on it…naked…BAM!..BAM!…BAM!…
That’s what a resident witnessed upon investigating a loud, thundering sound outside…a naked guy bounding around on his roof.
Once Bruni was discovered as the cause of the disturbance and the jig was up, he fly-tackled the owner of the home who’d come outside to investigate the source of the noise.
After leaping from the roof and onto the homeowner, Bruni ran inside the house screaming. In what can only be described as a tantrum, Bruni ran to the large screen television in the living room and pulled it over onto the floor. Bruni then happened upon the family’s vacuum cleaner and, in the weirdest display of a five-year-old not getting the ice cream he’d wanted, Bruni emptied the vacuum cleaner’s contents back onto the floor it had apparently just cleaned. The homeowner’s wife, who was aware things were gettin’ a little crazy, fired three warning shots with a revolver as Bruni finished undoing what the vacuum had done. In a panic Bruni hit the floor…
He didn’t just hit the floor….that would’ve been too easy (and not quite worthy of being ‘Florida-weird’).
He began amorously rubbing himself against the floor.
Once he felt his relationship with the floor had reached its climax, Bruni ran into the handgun-sporting wife’s closet and rubbed her clothing all over his face.
Bruni continued acting like a raging Muppet until the homeowner that’d been fly-tackled was able to get a shotgun and keep Bruni cornered until deputies arrived and constrained him by finally nailing the guy with a taser.
Bruni is being charged with Criminal Mischief, Battery, Occupied Burglary and resisting without violence.
Authorities believe that Bruni had been taking some kind of drug at the time of the incident but aren’t sure what it may have been.
While they all try to find an answer to what Bruni may have been taking….we’ll just quietly gesture back to our posts during the ‘bath-salt-zombie’ craziness that took place early last year and wonder if it’s not quite over just yet.
Or is Bruni just an idiot who’s late to the game…
Poser.
[NBC2.Com]
Ever leave the house knowing you forgot…something?
We’re wondering what it was like when the guy who was supposed to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study realized that he’d forgotten to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study.
One week before Santa Claus was to descend on the world with a bag of awesomeness, 18 well-preserved human heads showed up at O’ Hare International Airport with no explanation….just a bunch of questions. It wasn’t until an employee from a crematorium came to pick up the heads that things became clear.
Tagged as ‘medical specimens’, the heads had originally shipped from the US to Rome for medical study and were coming back to the states to be cremated.
Brian Bell of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated:
“There’s no issue with the transportation of body parts for medical purposes. There’s nothing against the law that says you cannot ship them, provided you have the right documentation. Everybody here is ‘Oh my gosh, you got a box of heads’ and everybody thinks that it’s unheard of. It is a potentially legitimate medical shipment. We’ve seen it at various ports in the nation.”
You can leave all your ‘I’d-forget-my-head-if-it-wasn’t-attached jokes below.’
A while back we posted an article about a bakery that looked like a franchise from a Saw film where the creative pastry chef decided to create realistic-looking human body parts from, of all things, bread.
Not to be outdone by some pastry chef, the culinary magicians over at Conjurer’s Kitchen had recently been privately commissioned to provide nightmare fuel for anyone laying eyes on their latest creations…
Edible baby heads made from chocolate.
“A private commission (that’s all we can say), they are solid white chocolate baby heads, and the same size as the head of your average newborn baby. They also TERRIFY me! As I was tweeting earlier there is something SO disturbing about these heads but I just can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s as they have no body, or maybe it’s just as they are a baby’s head?!? Either way I am so proud to be heading up a movement which leads to the creation of amazing edible works of art just like these. We’ll be using them in a project very soon I am sure!!!”
They’re not allowed to let loose the information regarding who commissioned these awesomely amazing, yet disturbing, treats.
We’re pretty sure that we’re happier NOT knowing.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
And in true WeirdThings fashion here’s a story to enjoy while you’re waiting for your Turducken to golden its sweet self.
Most of you prefer white meat. Some of you prefer dark meat.
NYPD officer Gilberto Valle prefers something he’s coined ‘girl meat’. According to the prosecution in a bizarre case against Valle, he was going to sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and a plateful of said ‘girl meat’.
“I’m planning on getting some girl meat. This November, for Thanksgiving. It’s a long way off, but I’m getting the plan in motion now. She’s not a volunteer. She has to be abducted. I know where she lives. I will grab her from her house. I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus. Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”
We can hear everyone quietly putting down their forks and looking around awkwardly.
Valle is apparently part of a small subculture that prefers its meat right off the bone…the human bone. The ‘girl meat’ that Valle was refering to was just that…the meat of an abducted girl. Federal prosecutors produced the transcript of an online chat between Gilberto Valle and an alleged co-conspirator that revealed his plan to abduct a woman he knew and roast her alive and slowly over an open flame.
While his defense claims that Valle would never commit such an act and that his thoughts alone don’t deserve jail-time (he’s currently locked up in solitary confinement), an FBI expert from Quantico looked at the case and stated that he would definitely eventually act on his plans.
The judge handling the case has denied bail for the third time as of this posting and the court proceedings begin on January 22nd which could actually make CourtTV worth watching.
Now pass us those fava beans (we couldn’t resist)!
[NY Times]
Because some people just can’t get the job done while locked in a room by themselves with some fun magazines or just some mental photography, some genius in China has developed something to help those people out…
The lonely Chinese scientist who created this was probably suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and couldn’t even hold a tablet that was playing his favorite movies any longer without discomfort.
(Insert your sad-face pervy scientist emoticon here)
Now this once-sad scienstist has solved ALL of his problems! This thing even has adjustable controls and a built-in dvd player so you can watch your favorite ‘films’.
Like the krill in Finding Nemo, there’s nowhere for your little swimming future-yous to go but in the perpetually slurping maw of a robot that looks like the original Pong arcade game’s second-cousin from the hills.
Clicking play on that video above will either bring laughter, what some like to call ‘cringy-I-smelled-poop’ face or a look of awe and wonder and possibilities to your precious little faces.
The director of the urology department at Zhengzhou Central Hospital said the machine was being used by infertility patients who are finding it difficult to retrieve sperm the old fashioned way.
A website which is selling the machine for $2,800 promoting it stating ‘it can give patients very comfortable feeling.’
Is this the end of prostitution? As newer versions of this machine hit the market, will the older ones find their way into dark alleys and those fun-smelling booths in the back of porn shops or will they start showing up in brothels to replace human workers as the recession keeps taking a chunk from EVERYONE’S budget?
Only time and enough oddly satisfied customers will tell.
The bikini debuted in 1946. It’s gone through a lot of variations. There’s been a monokini, microkini, tankini, trikini, pubikini (yes…it’s a real thing) and the mankini. But only occasionally has the phrase ‘nightmare fuel’ ever been associated with the bikini…until now.
Because Chinese culture prefers white, porcelein-like skin to the tan-loving people of the west, women on beaches in China are now sporting what’s been dubbed the ‘facekini’.
It’s basically a fancy name for ski mask worn by anyone up to no good who’d rather have their face NOT show up on YouTube or the local news while getting their hooligan on or doing some burglaring.
Seeing people sporting these on the beach is a lot like David Lynch is shooting an episode of American Horror Story…with the exception that this is real.
Nothing quite like checking out a woman from behind on the beach only to have her turn around sporting one of these things on her face.
Cue the ‘stabby shower music’ from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho!
[Reuters]
We’ve seen a LOT of weird things before in the medical field. But THIS? This is a whole new level.
Back in 2009 a woman by the name of Shanyna Isom had an asthma attack. No biggie, right? Wrong. Isom experienced an allergic reaction to the steriods used to treat the asthma attack.
The result? A reaction like a d-lister from the Xavier Institute…she’s growing fingernails where she would normally grow hair.
No…really…fingernails are sprouting from her body.
Johns Hopkins University doctors are baffled at the condition. There’s no precedent for what’s happening to Isom. She began growing skin cells at 12 times the rate of a normal person and each follicle began producing a fingernail!
Doctors seem to have the bizarre disorder under control and are working to figure out how to fix whatever strange effect the steroid treatment created which caused this entire mess to start in the first place.
[I09]
A lot of couples like to get those fun, old-timey pictures taken together. Others like to get romantic looking, holding-hands-in-front-of-a-landscape picture.
Then there are the pictures that Haruhiko Kawaguchi are taking of couples which are about as far from cute and ‘awww’-inspiring as you can imagine.
Using a plastic bag and a vacuum, Kawaguchi shoves the loving couple into the large, clear plastic bag, seals it shut and then uses the vacuum to suck all the air from the bag effectively shrink-wrapping the couple like a bag of meat. For about 20 seconds, the couple have to endure the pressure, their ears popping and a lack of oxygen. Kawaguchi steps up on a box, snaps a couple pictures and then opens the bag to let air back into the lungs of his subjects.
Haruhiko (who prefers to be called ‘Hal’) has snapped over 80 couples for this, his latest project called ‘Flesh Love’. The process hasn’t been without incident. Men tend to panic more than women. One guy peed himself. ‘Hal’ now uses a lubricant to cover his subject’s skin since the tightening bag causes friction when the plastic bag begins to press against the skin.
Think we’ll just stick to old-timey photos or really bad self-made, mirror-shot profile pictures.
Because death and urns with your loved one’s ashes aren’t surrounded by enough creepy stories, a fun company called Cremation Solutions has decided to knock the creep factor over the wall. How?
By using a 3D printer to create an amazingly creepy look-alike head of your loved one that contains said loved ones ashes.
No…really…This isn’t a fun, faux site put up as a joke. This is legit, kids. You can now sit home and stare lovingly at the lifeless eyes of a remains-stuffed replica head of your loved one. These things make great conversation pieces too!
Guest: “That’s interesting. Are you into cosmetology?”
You: “No. That’s my ex-wife.”
Fun, right?
Before you get excited and click that Paypal button, there are some things to consider. The head doesn’t come with hair. It can either be added digitally (we’re not really sure what that means…but we’re guessing it’ll end up a lot like putting hair on those little Lego figures) or you can purchase a wig. We’re also not sure about the following line:
The full sized personal urn can hold all the ashes of an adult. For holding just a portion of the ashes, we recommend the keepsake sized personal urns.
Does that mean mini versions of your loved ones are available? We’re not sure.
We’re also not sure we want to know.
Wait…did that thing just wink?
[Cremation Solutions]