30 Bizarre Facts Stranger Than Fiction – Part 2

On the day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he told his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, that he had dreamt that he walked into the East Room of the White House to find a covered corpse guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a crowd of mourners. Lincoln asked one of the soldiers who had died and the soldier replied, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.” Some historians have cast doubt on Lamon’s account, which was first published in the 1880s, nearly 20 years after the assassination. Even if Lamon’s story isn’t true, Lincoln’s cabinet recalled that, on the morning of his assassination, the president told them he’d dreamed of sailing across an unknown body of water at great speed.

One of Hollywood’s greatest silent movie actors, Rudolph Valentino, bought a ring from a shop keeper who was hesitant to sell the alleged “cursed ring.” When he showed it to his friend, his friend said he saw a vision of a pale and deathly Valentino. Valentino’s next few movies flopped and he died 6 years later of a perforated ulcer. His girlfriend Pola Negri became ill after wearing the ring and her career never recovered. When Valentino’s biopic was filmed, the actor who was hired to play Valentino wore the ring and he died in a shooting incident a few days later. Gangster Joe Casino bought this ring and refused to wear it until the curse had faded. A few years later when he wore the ring, he was dead within a week due to a motoring accident.

The tongue-eating louse is a parasite that enters a fish through the gills and attaches itself to the fish's tongue. After severing the blood vessels in the fish's tongue, the tongue just falls off. It then attaches itself to the stub of what was once its tongue and becomes the fish’s new tongue. Fish companies do look for these parasites, but sometimes they slip through the control system. A Belfast man had the shock of his life when preparing his dinner. When he was cleaning a fish, its mouth opened and the disgusting looking tongue-eating louse popped out like the tongue of the monster from Alien.

The Akodessewa Fetish Market in West Africa has everything you will ever need for your voodoo rituals. Voodoo practitioners believe any problems can be remedied using these items. The market is lined with shops showcasing piles of heads, tails, skins, and limbs of various animals. Locals who run out of options visit these markets in search of solutions. If you’re not into getting skull powder rubbed into your flesh, the sellers will surely get under your skin and make you buy at least a souvenir.

Set up in the 1950s, Dounreay nuclear research facilities were ordered to be decommissioned by the UK Government in 2005. One of the facilities was an experimental chemical plant built to recycle plutonium liquor. Cleaning the pipes and vessels in the facility proved to be a costly affair and an immense health hazard. At their wits' end, they tested household cleaner Cillit Bang and were surprised to find that it worked faster and did a better job than the expensive cleaner they were using. The contamination levels of each component also dropped significantly after being cleaned with Cillit Bang.

In 2013, a woman in Brazil confessed to trying to kill her husband by putting poison in her vagina and urging him to have oral sex with her. Her husband refused to grant her a divorce and she figured that the next best option was to get rid of him permanently. He became suspicious when he noticed an unusual odor emanating from her private parts. Fearing she was unwell, he took her to hospital. Medical tests revealed she had doused her vagina with enough poison to kill both her husband and herself.

In the '90s, Marilyn Manson is rumored to have created a film titled “Groupie” and it allegedly shows a fan being tortured by Marilyn and Twiggy (Jeordie White). The footage is said to have been captured on a handheld camcorder and the video apparently involves torture, weapons, and bloodshed. Officially, only Manson, Tony Ciulla, and Andy Dick have seen the film and Andy Dick said the film made him feel uncomfortable. A small clip of the video is said to exist at the end of Manson's documentary ‘Dead to the World.’

In 2012, a 2-year-old Boy in Brazil named Kelvin Santos was pronounced dead after a bout of pneumonia. He was placed in an airtight body bag for 3 hours. When the family gathered for an open casket later that day, Kelvin’s aunt noted that he appeared to move before he sat up and asked his father for water. The family thought they were getting a second chance, but the boy’s body immediately fell back into the casket and he couldn’t be revived in spite of being taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead a second time.

Due to the non-availability of proper access to sanitary facilities in the heavily populated slums of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, one of the most commonly used methods of waste disposal is the “flying toilet”. A flying toilet is little more than a plastic bag that is defecated in and then hurled away in ditches or on the roadside or as far as possible. During rains water contaminated with excrement can enter residences; some children even swim in it and such close contact leads to fears of diseases such as diarrhea, skin disorders, typhoid fever, and malaria.

A Californian woman bit the bullet in 2004 and we mean literally, in fact, she bit two. When she was eating a hot dog from a local Costco, she suddenly found chewing metal in her mouth. Closer inspection revealed a 9mm bullet inside the hotdog. She was lucky as bullets can sometimes explode from such an impact. When she later visited the doctor for stomach pain, x-rays revealed another 9mm bullet in her stomach which she swallowed without noticing. It later passed out the usual way. A police investigation was unable to solve how two bullets got into hotdogs. Even the Costco CEO said the incident is “regrettable, but difficult to understand.”