Whats the nost bizzare local story from your city?

CONTENT WARNING: NSFW, NSFL:

A teenage boy stole his neighbours chicken, then raped and it died during the incident. Yes a chicken.

The neighbour reported it. There were 2 eye witnesses. Medical examination of the chicken confirmed it.

The boy was arrested, confessed and tried. At this point this was national news.

In his defense the dude said, and I kid you not, the chicken was asking for it.

This is one of those news stories that I think about from time to time and wonder what happened to that dude.

Happened in like 2018 I wanna say.

Big fight in a local downtown McDonald’s. Someone films a few seconds of it and a split second of the end of the video shows a guy pulling a raccoon out of his trench-coat. Makes the news worldwide.

My favorite from my time working in the news industry:

Neighbor puts toilets in their yard facing other neighbors house. That neighbor builds a fence so they don't have to look at the toilets. Original neighbor then hangs toilets from the tree so it is visible over the fence. Cue complaints to get toilets removed by city/county.

I believe the original dispute had to do with tearing out a shared bush and parking on lawn, but I don't recall the details.

Construction workers were digging foundations at a local work site and found a Soviet T-34 tank burried in the ground.

Important context:

• My town is not in Russia or the former USSR.
• My town is not in Europe either.
• Our military doesn't even operate Soviet equipment.
• My town is also not next to a border with a country who might have operated Soviet equipment when it was also not so friendly with my country.

There are some plausible theories, but to this day nobody really knows how it got here or why it got burried.

Ohh and the real kicker: the street this all happened on is named after an indigenous tank, so the news headlines all basically said "Tank found on Tank street!"

A schizophrenic man killed his parents and fled on a cross country pursuit from the police at the advice of his dog.

Some folks were killed in a molasses flood, others were injured... the streets in the area would reek of molasses for decades after on hot summer days.

A guy brazenly snuck into an army barracks, stole an Armored Personnel Carrier and then went on a bit of a rampage through the city. Crashing into a police station, law courts and Police HQ.

The media called it a tank rampage, because they didn't know the difference between an APC and a tank.

The story is all but forgotten now, I never hear anyone talk about this incident. And the killdozer story in Colorado pretty much trumps it anyway.

Corrupt sheriff was brought down by a University student.. Whitley county is the only one that doesn't send drugs for disposal to a central statewide disposal facility. Nobody can prove corruptions until two students start digging. Cops get mad and start threatening them. Money laundering, theft, extortion, threats are all uncovered. Lexigton police finally bust the guy for 18 year sentence. Not a single blip in the national news. I often wonder if there's more justice stories out there that we never hear because it isn't useful as a component of a larger narrative.

In Berlin, in 2004, a letfist local newspaper Taz initiated a move to rename part of a street their office is located at in remembrance of Rudi-Dutschke. He was a prominent socialist activist in the 60s, even survived assassination but unfortunately died a couple of years later.

Another newspaper, Axel-Springer has their headquarters on the same street. The same company did play significant role in dissing the student movement Rudi-Dutschke was part of and some believe they are indirectly responsible for the assassination.

What ensued was a long legal battle, where the court had to decide whether the street could be renamed. Taz won the court case and in 2008 the street got its new name.

In 2009, Taz installed a sculpture displaying well-known editors of Bild (owned by Axel Springer), the most sold tabloid in Europe. Their chief editor Kai Diekmann (sic) sports an oversized dick that goes up to the roof of the building. Of course Bild tried to sue, but they lost and the sculpture is there to be enjoyed to this day.

In Germany, you can have fun, but it must be blessed by the court.

In Bonn (Germany), where I lived for a few years, there was an incident not too long ago where a homeless person carried a severed head in a bag, in broad daylight, to the district court and put it in front of the entrance, then sat down across from it.

Well it's more of a family story. My grandfather was around 13 during the war (ww2). We're from a wetland area and he told me he and his friend used to hide from nazis by jumping next to the plank (lined up planks were used as roads), into the water, and breathing through a reed.

Fun fact: Everybody including kids had boats, and sleighs for the winter. Everything happened over water.

Eventually he ended up having to work for them without pay. He had to bike hours every day to get to this landing strip he had to work on for them.

No airplane ever took off there. The allies bombed the living daylights out of it! He also told me he saw dog fighting in the sky and how exciting that was.

Today it's a nature reserve! The countless bomb craters have water in them, and are teeming with life. So I like to think he helped improve the local biodiversity 😁

A monster from the woods kept massacring farmers' livestock so the Governor led an expedition to kill it. He was so thoroughly terrified by the experience that he ran out of the forest. The monster was never found.

Well I live in Philadelphia, and just in the decade I’ve been here, I’ve seen some shit.

The unsolved Hitchbot murder, and then a local radio station’s attempt to repair our good name before the Pope arrived.

The dumpster pools in Kensington.

“Do attend.”

When the Eagles won the Super Bowl and chaos ensued. I can’t find any source on this in particular, but my gf and I agree we heard on the police scanners that a giraffe had been freed from the zoo and was running down Girard.

Drumline Elmo, who has become as big a celebrity in the city as Gritty.

Gritty, who is a national hero in our eyes.

All of which doesn’t even factor in the everyday life crazy. This place is wild, and I’m all for it.

This place is about half an hour from me.