Xxxnews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Steven Newell was hospitalized in London, Ontario, in June after his large plastic swimming pool, which he had just placed on his second-floor balcony and then filled with water, caused the balcony to collapse and plunge to the ground. The pool, 8 feet in diameter and filled with water as it was to a height of 20 inches, would require about 640 gallons, weighing more than 2 1/2 tons. Newell had relocated the pool to the balcony in order to avoid the safety requirement of building a fence around it.
Lawyers for horror novelist Stephen King acknowledged in June that King had been sued once again by Anne Hiltner, who now claims that the obsessed, psychotic nurse in the movie “Misery” must have been based on her. She had earlier claimed that a psychic character from King’s TV show “Kingdom Hospital” was based on her and sued him before that for allegedly breaking into her home and stealing manuscripts.
News of the Weird has often mentioned cases of bestiality, but the death of a 45-year-old man in Enumclaw, Wash., in July was extraordinary. The death was reported in the local media as having occurred after “sex with a horse,” but bestiality usually involves the human as the penetrator. In this case, though, the man died of acute peritonitis from a perforated colon, indicating that the horse was the penetrator. Investigators reportedly also seized videotapes of the activity, which took place at a nondescript farm that was apparently known in Internet bestiality chat rooms to be a covert haven for sex with livestock. (Washington is one of 17 states without a specific anti-bestiality law, and authorities said that the act was probably not a crime, in that the state’s animal-cruelty law would require showing that the horse suffered.)
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
