30 Bizarre Facts Stranger Than Fiction – Part 2

Every five years artist Mark Quinn makes a bust of his head using his own frozen blood. Each cast takes 10 pints of blood which is collected from his body over a period of five months before being frozen. There is one specimen on permanent refrigerated display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

All it really takes is one freak accident at some point in the manufacturing process and you may end up with teeth in your food. Human teeth have been found in canned food, sausages, and ice creams. An Australian man nearly choked on a gold tooth in his Mars bar. One man sued Kraft Foods in 2006 for making him physically and mentally ill. He said his symptoms started when he bit into a large rodent tooth that was in hiding in his Planter’s peanuts.

A trichobezoar is a medical term for a damp wad of undigested hair, moistened by bile and other digestive fluids also known as a hairball. Though uncommon in humans, hairballs have been reported and often associated with trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling). In 2014, a teenage girl in Kyrgyzstan had to undergo a surgery to remove a 9-pound hairball from her stomach. She had a nasty habit of picking up hair from the carpet and eating it. In another case, in 2012, doctors in India removed a hairball weighing nearly four pounds from the stomach of a 19-year-old girl.

Japan is home to the world’s only parasite museum. It houses one of the most extreme parasites ever discovered by medical science, the longest tapeworm. The 8.8-meter (28 ft) Diphyllobothrium nihonkaiense was removed from the stomach of a Japanese man who complained of stomach pains after eating trout. Alongside the display, is a piece of rope with an identical length and girth so that visitors can have tactile aid to see just how terrifyingly long it is.

In 2008, a man named Kory McFarren called on the authorities in Wichita, Kansas stating there was “something wrong” with his girlfriend. When the authorities arrived, they were horrified to find 35-year-old Pam Babcock who had been sitting on her boyfriend’s toilet for over two years. Her skin had grown around the seat. Paramedics were forced to remove the seat which was surgically removed at the hospital. Though her boyfriend maintained that due to her tough childhood, she felt safe in the bathroom and never left, he was sentenced to 6 months of probation for waiting so long to seek help.

British physiologist Joseph Barcroft known for his studies on blood oxygenation never hesitated to use himself as a test subject. He once gassed himself to an atmosphere of poisonous hydrogen cyanide for a full 10 minutes and survived. The dog with him lasted only 95 seconds before dying. To find the minimum oxygen level needed to survive, he lived in an oxygen level found at 4,900 meters for a week, causing his whole body to turn blue. He once locked himself in a refrigerated chamber to test the effects of freezing. He chose to stay until he became unconscious and had to be rescued. He discovered that at a certain point close to lethal hypothermia, the human body begins to feel warm rather than freezing cold.

The Al Ubaid archeological site in Iraq has yielded numerous objects from a pre-Sumerian time called the Ubaid period (5900–4000 B.C.). Some of the objects found here depict strange, lizard-like humanoid figures in unique, unceremonious poses that seem to indicate they were not gods. These statues have been drawn into stories and theories of reptilian aliens that used to roam the earth. Although this seems unlikely, their true nature remains a mystery.

To solve a century-old puzzle of how roundworm infection transmitted from one host to another, 19th-century Italian doctor Giovanni Grassi self-ingested the roundworm eggs. He obtained the eggs from a human corpse, which was heavily infected with roundworms. After a month, he experienced stomach discomfort and found fresh eggs in his feces. He thus proved that the roundworm transmitted through the fecal matter of humans and was also the first person to demonstrate the direct life cycle of the roundworm.

The foot powder brand Pulvapies ran an ad during a 1967 Ecuadoran Mayoral election saying “Vote for any candidate, but if you want well-being and hygiene, vote for Pulvapues.” It was a harmless, relatively clever little tie-in to election season, and they could not have possibly thought anyone would take it seriously. The foot powder ended up winning the popular vote.

In 2002, a pair of 73-year-old twins were killed in road accidents in Finland. They were killed separately, within two hours of each other. The first twin was hit by a lorry and killed while he was cycling along the road. Two hours later, his brother died in exactly the same way. To make matters even more odd, police had not yet informed the second twin of his brother’s death.