xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In February, several patients at an unlicensed mental health facility in Columbus, Ga., told the local Ledger-Enquirer newspaper that they had recently worked security at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta during football games of the University of Georgia and the Atlanta Falcons. The facility, the Greater Grace Community Center, has recently been shut down, but the newspaper was able to verify much of the patients’ story. Among the facility’s patients are those diagnosed with anti-social personalities or bi-polar disorder or homicidal tendencies.
The Seattle Times reported in February that Edith Macefield, 84, living in a tiny, rundown, 106-year-old house in an industrial neighborhood, across from a chemical plant, had rejected a final buyout offer from developers amounting to nearly $750,000. “I don’t care about money,” she said. “It’s (been) my home (for 54 years now).” … “What would I do with that kind of money anyway?” The developer has purchased the rest of the block and will build around her tiny lot, boxing her in with walls 60 feet high.
Shania Twain Is Nothing But Trouble:
–Matt Brownlee, 33, with a long record as a drunk driver, was acquitted of criminal DUI charges in Ottawa, Ontario, after psychiatrists concluded that his latest accident was the result of a sincere belief that singer Shania Twain was helping him drive the car. (A 1996 brain injury might have given him a disorder in which he believes that celebrities communicate with him telepathically.)
–Following a hung jury in England’s Winchester Crown Court in April, Linda West faces retrial in the 2005 death of her husband, which she said was accidental, in that her gun slipped while she was energetically performing a Shania Twain number (“Man! I Feel Like a Woman”) in what she described as the couple’s sex game.
(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
