The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (59 page)

Associated Press writer Chris Kahn reported in September 2007 that six people had died from a braineating amoeba detected in Lake Havasu, a man-made lake on the border of Colorado and Arizona. The amoeba,
Naegleria fowleri
, had killed twenty-three people in the United States between 1995 and 2004.

The amoeba thrives in warm waters, and infectious levels have been detected in lakes, hot springs, and even dirty swimming pools. When infected water gets into the body through the nose, the amoeba is able to travel up the olfactory nerve to the brain, destroying tissue along the way. Once within the brain, it begins to feed on brain cells.

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

State-of-the-art medicine in prehistoric times was designed to keep alien demon spirits from infecting the body. Preventive medicine included magic, charms,
incantations, and talismans. If, despite preventive measures, demons entered a patient's body, prehistoric medical personnel drove out the malicious spirits by inducing violent vomiting. If that didn't work, making the body inhospitable to the spirit was the next step; caregivers would begin a regimen of beating, torturing, and starving the patient. For especially resistant demons, a hole drilled into the patient's head was prescribed to encourage the demon to escape.

SAINTLY WOMAN

Apollonia is the patron saint of toothache sufferers.

That's because in A.D. 249, the Romans tortured her by pulling out all her teeth in an attempt to get her to forsake Christianity. She didn't and saved the Romans the task of burning her at the stake by jumping into the fire of her own accord. Her teeth and jaws are now on display at churches throughout Europe.

NEVERENDING HICCUPS

In January 2007, Jennifer Mee, a fifteen-year-old from Florida, got the hiccups. For more than three weeks, she continued to hiccup, close to fifty times a
minute, despite trying many home remedies and consulting doctors. She held her breath; she put sugar under her tongue. She breathed into a paper bag and tried drinking out of the wrong side of a glass. She had blood tests and an MRI. Nothing worked—not even various people's attempts to scare the hiccups out of her. Why the hiccups began and what they were a symptom of could not be determined.

HIDDEN LIMBS

In 2007, in Maiden, North Carolina, a man bought a smoker at a police auction of abandoned items from a storage facility. When he opened up the smoker, he discovered what he thought was wood wrapped up in paper. The bundle instead turned out to be a human leg that had been amputated at just above the knee. Police contacted the owners of the storage facility. It turned out that the owner's son had had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg for “religious reasons.” She and her son drove some thirty-five miles to retrieve it from the man who had bought the smoker.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S TEETH

Contrary to popular myth, George Washington didn't have wooden teeth. He had four sets of dentures made from a mix of hippopotamus bone, elephant ivory, and the teeth from cows and dead people. None of them worked well, and the discomfort of his dentures is one reason he looks so sour in his portraits.

“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.” —HENRY MILLER

MAGGOT ACT