Florida rides a double-edged sword.

On one side people proclaim it’s a great place to vacation. On the other side are the people who live there who are completely aware of the fact that it’s just wet sand covering a giant Hellmouth.

Seriously…the sky tries to kill people with bolts of lightning, the ground tries to swallow anything that lives on it whole and the things that crawl around aren’t like things that crawl around anywhere else.

Case in point…

A fisherman off the coast caught the Face-Grabber’s cousin the other day.

It’s called a Mantis Shrimp…and the one that was caught (at night we’d like to add) is bigger than most (and probably a sign that something’s also happening in Florida’s water because…well…it’s Florida).

Imagine if you rolled a predator, one of Ridley Scott’s aliens, a mole person, a little bit of a Grim Reaper and a highly skilled ninja into a living animal and slathered it in ugly.

Ta-Da! Mantis Shrimp.

Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission posted a picture of a super-sized one of these nightmares on their Facebook page and it’s gone viral with good reason…it’s terrifying and it lives in the sand…under your feet.

Next time you think about exploring Florida because you’re bored of the theme parks?

Just…here watch this and imagine one of these about 7 times the size of the one in the video…and crawling up your leg.

You’ve been warned.

[FFWC Facebook]

Katha Sheehan, the owner of a Florida chicken rescue, was brought a chicken that had a corner of something portruding from its chest that was obviously not a feather.

Peeking out of, and embedded into, the chicken’s chest and packed behind some primitive stitch-work was the corner of the photograph above.

A local vet removed the photograph from the infected hole in the chicken’s chest after cutting through the makeshift stitch job. Not only was there the 4″x6″ photo…

Nope. Wouldn’t be a Florida story if that’s all there was…

There was also a sketch of a skull.

A nearby anthropology professor who’d been asked about the chicken because of the cult-like procedure stated:

“This is a magical ritual of Cuban origin, probably, with the name ‘Sarabanda,’ which is a deity from the Congo area that was probably used to affect the relationship of these three young people. To me it is alien, the idea of casting your sins on innocent animals.”

According to the vet that treated the chicken, who’s name is Trooper, is recovering very well.

[Anorak]

It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.

Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?

Brace yourselves, people…

Snails.

SNAILS!

And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!

Good luck, Florida.

[Huffington Post]

[ UPDATE: Giant Eye Mystery Solved! ]

Florida always seems like it’s sitting on some kind of undiscovered Hell-Mouth.

Between Bath-Salt Zombies, giant snakes slithering through your lawn, Night Creepers and lizards eating humans there’s just something…not…quite..right.

Which brings us to Pompano Beach..in Florida.

Some guy’s going for his morning stroll and spots something odd drifting around in the surf. Just like in any other horror film, the dude goes to investigate…and kicks it over…revealing at a huge eyeball staring right back at him.

“It was very fresh,” he said Thursday. “It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag.”

Police referred him to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who, frighteningly couldn’t identify what species the eye came from.

The Fish and Wildlife officers place the eyeball on ice and sent it to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute for analysis.

In the end who really cares about where the eyeball came from…the Fish and Game Commission people should be looking for the thing that ripped apart the thing with the giant eyeball.

[Sun Sentinel]

Imagine not being able to feel pain. Sounds great, right? Games of ‘Slug Bug’ or ‘Butt Ball’ would be much easier to handle, right? Stubbing your toe wouldn’t suck as much. Banging your head would never be an issue again. You’d feel like a freakin’ warrior because you don’t feel a damn thing.

Now for the downside…

What if you developed appendicitis or something else as internally life-threatening? You’d have no indication anything was wrong until it was seriously too late.

That’s the case with 12-year-old Ashlyn Blocker of Georgia. Ashlyn was born with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA), a extremely rare condition that kills most people born with it when they’re just toddlers. Babies born with CIPA might have something severely wrong, yet they won’t cry because they just don’t feel anything.

As an infant, Ashlyn had a huge corneal abrasion across her eye. Everyone was astonished that she wasn’t crying over what, to most people, would be a painfully excruciating sensation.

CIPA affects about 100 people in the United States every year.

Ashlyn is not letting anything stop her from doing what she wants. Described as a determined girl, she is currently working with doctors at the University of Florida to understand how our brains interpret pain. This tough little girl has also started a summer camp called ‘Camp Painless But Hopeful’ to help other families whose children suffer from CIPA.

[Daily Mail UK]

Because Florida isn’t already weird enough now that they’ve added bath salt-created, face-eating zombies to the list, a literacy teacher at Lealman and Asian Neighborhood Family Center in St. Petersburg has been jailed for performing what appears to be some kind of strange ritual involving seven children!

Just before sunrise on a Saturday morning, Danielle Harkins was with these seven children around a small fire near the St. Petersberg Pier. Harkins told the children their bodies needed to be rid of demons by cutting their skin open. Once they’d let the supposed demons out, they’d have to burn their wounds closed to prevent the demons from returning.

Police were tipped off when one of the teens sent a text message to a friend. That friend showed the message to the parents of the teen that sent it.

While none of the teens that attended the weird ritual are really opening up as to why they gathered that morning, some details have emerged. One teen suffered a cut on the neck from a broken bottle which had been cauterized by a heated key. Another teen suffered second-degree burns when the flame from a lighter Harkins was using to burn a hand-wound kept going out. Harkins then doused the teen’s hand in perfume and ignited it.

At this point no one knows the reasons behind the gathering or the bizarre ritual except for Harkins and the teens who were there.

[Miami Herald]

“Officers determined it was indeed a live, high-explosive military device. Explosives experts from Alachua County responded and identified the device as an M247 rocket with 2.3 pounds of composition B for the explosive.”

“Police also remind everyone not to approach any suspicious devices, and to call police immediately.”

Clearly, I am spending too much time indoors and need to get out and drive around this fine state more.

[WTSP]