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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Don’t call it a manhunt. It’s a chicken hunt. Police in Walker, Louisiana are scratching around for a pesky fowl who has been harassing bank patrons. The bird has chased customers attempting to use the bank’s ATM and has even tried to invade cars using the drive-through facilities. The “aggressive chicken” is still on the loose, but police have issued […]
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The number of coronavirus cases and fatalities in Florida is at its peak, so what better time to drop restrictions on social distancing and open the beaches back up? What? You don’t see the logic in that? You think we should wait until the number of active cases declines so fewer people are exposed to the deadly communicable disease? Ha! […]
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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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It’s refreshing to learn that even in the midst of a deadly pandemic where thousands are dying and millions are containing themselves in self-isolation, that some men have not abandoned their sense of priorities. Men who understand what’s truly important, who are willing, ready and able to stand up and be counted, to throw themselves in harm’s way on behalf […]
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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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