A possible revival for the famed Dodo bird, an accidental cremation that sparked a lawsuit, and an unsettling evacuation during a ghost tour were among the strange, unusual, and enlightening stories to cross our desk this week.
Ghostly activity and haunted locations were hot topics in the news this past week with several stories featuring spooky spirits and the places they're said to dwell. In England, a woman lamented that, after she moved in with her boyfriend, she began being harassed by an apparition that was in love with him. A ghost tour at the infamous Waverly Hills Sanatorium had to be halted due to a tornado warning which necessitated the guests taking shelter in the site's 'body chute.' Meanwhile, a similarly haunted hospital went up for sale in Minnesota and a paranormal researcher in the United Kingdom cautioned that an apparent downturn in ghost sightings seems to suggest that spirits may be 'dying out' as their energy depletes over time.
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Extinct creatures found their way into the headlines this past week via two very different discoveries. First, work at a construction site in Iowa came to a sudden stop when it was noticed that a rather sizeable woolly mammoth tooth had been unearthed during an excavation. The find was particularly fortuitous as the engineer overseeing the project happened to have a lifelong interest in dinosaurs and ancient creatures, which is what led him to recognize the massive molar before it crumbled into dust. Later in the week, a prominent evolutionary biologist announced that researchers had discovered a lost dodo bird specimen which provided a fantastic DNA sample that allowed them to map the genome of the long extinct animal.
One of the weirder lawsuits we've seen in a while wound up in the news this week by way of a very odd legal dispute between an Arkansas funeral home and a family that had enlisted them to bury their loved one. According to the suit, Harold Lee's final wishes were to be laid to rest alongside his late parents at a cemetery and he was insistent that he not be cremated because he believed he was to be taken to heaven during the rapture. Alas, a mishap at the funeral home resulted in those desires being dashed as his remains were cremated by accident. As one might imagine, this did not sit too well with his family, which led to the lawsuit for unspecified damages brought about by the traumatic turn of events.
For more strange and unusual stories from the past week, check out the Coast to Coast AM website.