The zombie chicken in real life! Headless Chicken that lived for 2 years after decapitated by its owner

According to Mike the chicken, losing your head is not that bad as it’s thought to be. You better believe it since this one of a kind rooster lived headless for two years and became world-famous for it.

Mike became “the Headless Chicken” on September 10th, 1945 after being decapitated by his owner, Lloyd Olsen from Fruita, Colorado, who wanted to cook him for dinner. During Mike’s attempted decapitation, Llyod hit all the wrong (or right) spots, leaving Mike headless but still alive.

Baffled, the owner had a change of heart and decided to nurse the rooster back to health. Mike shook off the upsetting incident and shortly after, started pecking around and grooming his feathers as if nothing had happened. Well, he couldn’t really do all those things because without a head the bird couldn’t eat, drink or see but that didn’t stop him from trying! After feeding him grains and quenching his thirst, Olsen took Mike to the University of Utah where flabbergasted scientists took a close look at the death-defying chicken. 

According to them, a blood clot prevented Mike from bleeding to death after Olsen’s ax had missed the jugular. As if by miracle, Mike was still left with his left ear and most of his brain stem intact which was enough to keep this feathered critter healthy for the following two years of his life. Apparently chicken’s reflexes lie in their brain stem which explains why Mike still attempted to peck and even sing – gurgle rather, despite his handicap. Olsen swore to take care of him for the rest of his life, feeding him milk and water with syringes. Mike was doing so well, he even gained weight determining Lloyd to call him a “robust chicken – a fine specimen of a chicken except for not having a head.”

The five-and-a-half month old rooster soon became famous. Nicknamed “The Headless Wonder Chicken,” he toured the country and people paid 25 cents to see his body wandering about with not a care in the world. At one point, Mike was earning $4,500 a month and was valued at $10,000 – more than any other chicken, that’s for sure. According to this website dedicated to him, “His fame and fortune would earn him recognition in Life and Time Magazines. It goes without saying there was a Guinness World Record in all this.” 

After two years, the fame got to him and Mike was found dead in his hotel room, having overdosed on illegal drugs. This is only half true as the “Wonder Chicken” did die in a hotel room in Arizona, but only because Olsen was unable to find the eyedropper used to clear Miracle Mike’s open esophagus. After the star’s sad death, Olsen claimed that he had sold the bird off, resulting in all kinds of hair-raising stories of Mike appearing on various shows around the country.

Mike and Olsen’s story inspired other people to behead their chicken in an attempt to create another living headless miracle. Some unlucky birds did survive but only for a short time. Mike’s story is unique and therefore his body was preserved in an institution in his hometown. He is also celebrated annually in his own “Mike the Headless Chicken Day,” which people celebrate by engaging in various fun activities such as “5K Run Like a Headless Chicken Race”, egg toss, “Pin the Head on the Chicken”, the “Chicken Cluck-Off”, and “Chicken Bingo,” where the chicken themselves choose the numbers by pooping on them.

Read More

Ceres, The Former Planet.

How many planets are there? If you were an astronomer about 175 years ago then you’d know the answer is 9 : Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Hang on – Ceres? Ceres is…

Ceres is an object in our solar system that lives in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of mars and Jupiter, which was classified as a planet 130 years before Pluto was a planet. Ceres was discovered on 1 January 1801 and for the next 50 years, it was classified as an
eighth planet in our solar system!

so what happened?

Many bodies started to be discovered in the region between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres just happened to be the first one we saw. William Hershel first called them asteroids (“star-like”) because “they resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them, even by very good telescopes.” planets, on the other hand, could be resolved at the time and features on some of their surfaces seen. Once it was realized that there existed an entire class of these objects, Ceres was no longer considered a planet, but designated officially as “1 Ceres” since it was the first asteroid discovered. A similar series of events recently caused the demise of Pluto’s status as a planet. astronomers started discovering many objects like Pluto that even had the same strange orbital quirks as Pluto. by the mid-2000s there were enough of these objects in the “kuiper belt” that mike brown argued, successfully, that Pluto should no longer be classified as a planet. In fact, he just wrote a book about his entire experience demoting Pluto called “why i killed Pluto, and why it had it coming.” 

Read More

This photo was taken in Disneyland on July 1955. It was said that it was the day Mickey and Minnie Mouse mascots were first introduced to the public. But they were far from adorable.

Allegedly, those gashes and rips in their faces were supposed to be “vents” which allowed the “actors inside” to breathe.

Whatever. They still looked scary as hell. Those children appeared to be enjoying though. I guess people were brave back then.

Read More

The witch market in Bolivia

Witches' Market of La Paz

The Witches' Market, also known as El Mercado de las Brujas and La Hechiceria, is a popular tourist attraction located in Cerro Cumbre, a mountain clearing in La Paz, Bolivia. Merchandise sold in The Witches' Market, run by local witch doctors known as yatiri, includes potions, dried frogs, medicinal plants like retama and armadillos used in Bolivian rituals. The yatiri can be easily identified by their black hats and coco pouches containing amulets, talismans and powders that ensure luck, beauty and fertility. Most famous of all the items sold in The Witches' Market are the dried llama foetuses. These llama foetuses are buried under the foundations of many Bolivian houses as a sacred offering to the goddess Pachamama.

Read More

GATEWAY OF THE MIND

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. 

An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. 

With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts. Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns. 

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death. 

Read More

BABY DOLL

In rural southern Illinois a toy company began selling "realistic" baby dolls to expectant mothers. But apparently after the mother had her child the toy baby would start crying. Eventually the "rocking motion" advertised to calm it down wouldn't work, and you couldn't get it to stop without shaking it. Eventually when it started crying the parent would have to beat it, and the beatings and thrashings would have to get harder and harder to get it to be quiet. 

The only thing that seemed to shut the baby doll up permanently was the bash its head against the wall to destroy whatever mechanism triggered the crying.

On more than one occasion though, neighbors called the authorities to report child abuse, and when the police arrived they found the bloody remains of infants smeared across the walls and the floor. In most cases the mother couldn't understand why the police were there, she just "got rid of the stupid doll" as she rocked a baby-shaped bundle in her arms. 

Read More

A unique grave in Indonesia

In the Tana Toraja land on an island in Indonesia the youngest deaths in the local community are placed in a special burial tree. The "baby trees" are the final resting places for infants. If the child dies before it has started teething, the mother will wrap a baby in a cloth and make a hole in the tree. The baby is placed in the tree, and then sealed off. As the tree heals it's believed that the baby is absorbed by the tree. It's actually quite beautiful.

Read More