All these stories about weirdness don’t come out of my imagination but from the pages of newspapers, wire services, police reports, and tipsters. One group of contributors has taken to calling itself the Army of the Strange. Some of the soldiers give themselves fantastical names ripped from the pages of vampire novels. Monikers such as Althan, Amdis, Ambrosia, and Alaric. […]
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“Help…Please…Get me out of here.” That’s the lettering on a yellow sheet of paper a maintenance worker saw in an apartment window in Naples, Florida. Was someone being held hostage? he wondered. Only one thing to do: Call 911! When Collier County Sheriff’s deputies arrived, they, too, were alarmed as they cautiously headed to the apartment door. One of the […]
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We now take a moment to offer congratulations to Vanity Fair magazine, the uncontested winner of the first annual Weird Florida Writing Award in the Breaking News category. Writer Yohana Desta scored the honor with this sentence in an online post earlier today: “The mysterious magnetic field that ensconces Florida in a never-ending loop of strangeness worked its magic again […]
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Maybe they’ll make a movie about this–Inside the Green Egg, or Deep Bunny, or Easter Bunny Does Bunnell. Bunnell? Yeah, it’s a town just north of Dayton Beach on Florida’s east coast and it’s making headlines for an arrest there this week. Police began receiving calls earlier this month from residents disturbed to find Easter eggs in their mailboxes stuffed […]
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We start off today’s report with news certain to bring a smile to your bandanna-covered face. In a town outside of Flint, Michigan, a woman named Kris Gibson spotted a black dog hanging around outside her fence. Her first instinct was to find the dog’s owner, so she took the puppy to a nearby animal clinic where an embedded microchip […]
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Alexander Strange is marooned in Key West waiting out the pandemic. Here’s his latest report. We start out this edition of The Strange Files with an uplifting little story, not the least bit weird other than the setting is the Florida Keys, the epicenter of strange in America. Tip of the hat to the amazing staff at the Miami Herald, […]
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With toilet paper stripped from grocery store shelves by hoarders, people are left to use alternatives that don’t always flush very well. Florida wastewater treatment plants are reporting that toilet paper alternatives are clogging the system, entangling pumps needed to move sewage—and sometimes breaking them. They caution: Baby wipes, tissues, napkins and paper towels should never be used. So what’s […]
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While we’re all on lockdown, avoiding contact with one another lest we spread or catch what some are calling the “invisible enemy,” I thought I would share this bit of science news about another unseen horror. Here’s the headline from the excellent blog Science Alert: Deadly Parasite Discovered in Chinese Family Shows You Should Never Eat Raw Centipedes We can […]
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It can be a challenge to take license with America’s 45th president. Literally. In Sweden, Marcus Saaf, admitting he “was drunk and thought it was fun” tried to apply for a vanity license plate reading TRUMP. Swedish authorities denied the application, saying it was “offensive.” The Swedish Transport Agency, which issues license plates, has a rule that prohibits political messages […]
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