4 News Stories Going on Right Now That Sound Like Horror Movies
The news always sounds pretty horrific, what with all the “wars” and the “disasters” and the voters who inexplicably seem set on supporting “candidates.” Let’s take your mind off all that with some stories you likely missed. Unfortunately, instead of offering any relief, these alternative stories will terrify you even more.
The Man Arrested for Cutting Off His Body Parts
In 2019, Marius Gustavson hired someone to cut off part of his nipple. This raises several questions. The foremost is: How big was this guy’s nipple that he’d pay someone to cut off just part of it? But nipple-gate was overshadowed by Gustavson’s other move that year — he hired a kid to come freeze his leg using a pail of ice. With his leg permanently damaged, Gustavson could visit a hospital, which chopped the limb off for him.
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The next step was cutting off his penis. He hired another partner for this, Damien Byrnes, who cut the member off with a vegetable knife while quipping, “Well, that’s one off the bucket list. I never expected that one.” While a smaller amputation in terms of mass, the penis operation was the greatest one in terms of thrills. Audience thills were the goal: Gustavson filmed these various operations to sell the footage on his pay-per-view website.
Bleeding heavily, Gustavson called emergency services. “I tried to do some surgery on my cock,” he told them. After stitching him up, the hospital referred him for psychiatric treatment, which didn’tt stick. The reason the police later became involved wasn’t that the hospital called them, so never fear going to doctors when you need help. It was because Byrnes, who cut the penis off, called the cops after failing to receive the promised payment for his services.
When describing this whole saga, some British publications fixate on the £600 per month in disability payments that Gustavson has received. Those payments are not the significant part of this story, weren’t his motive and weren’t why he was in court last week and is awaiting sentencing. Instead, Gustavson (along with his associates) has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bodily harm. Normally, we do not need such a charge to discourage people from committing bodily harm against themselves, but some people are not normal.
Something Eating Away at a Colorado Funeral Home
The police in this next story were tipped off when someone called them about an “abhorrent smell.” The smell’s source was a Colorado funeral home, and when investigators came by with a warrant, they found bodies. They found so many bodies, just stacked on top of each other. The funeral home owners, who were in court last week for a hearing over the matter, had piled up over a hundred bodies, and police found a vast colony of maggots eating their way through the pile.
The Return to Nature Funeral Home advertised “green” funeral services, which meant they did not embalm bodies and instead cremated them “naturally.” This explains why they went years without buying any embalming chemicals. As for why they went years without sending any bodies to a crematorium, well, it turns out that cremation is expensive. The House of One Hundred Corpses saved lots of money by simply chucking the bodies in the pile and then giving clients fake ashes.
Text messages reveal the owners conspiring about a longer-term solution for the corpses. “Options: A, build a new machine ASAP,” wrote co-owner Jon to wife Carie, cryptically. “B, dig a big hole and use lye. Where? C, dig a small hole and build a large fire. Where? D, I go to prison, which is probably going to happen.” Even the short-term solution was quite difficult. Another text has him saying, “I want to take a shower as soon as I get back because while I was making the transfer, I got people juice on me. Want the double cheeseburger.”
Colorado does not inspect funeral homes. Asked to comment, the National Funeral Directors Association noted that inspections might not have prevented any of this, but they could have caught the crime sooner. “You catch it at six or eight bodies,” said a spokesperson, “and not at 115.”
Zombie Deer Disease
A disease, previously known but newly strong, has made its way to Yellowstone. It’s called Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), and it changes the brains of deer. The deer assumes a blank stare (so different from the intent “deer-in-the-headlights” stare we all know), drools and stumbles around. Then it dies because there is no treatment or cure.
The disease is caused by a prion, an infectious agent scarier than microbes. Bacteria are alive, which mean you can kill them. Viruses are arguably not alive, but they can’t exist for long when separated from a host’s cells. Prions? Prions persist. Prions land on the ground and remain there, infectious, for years. Disinfect the ground, and it’ll still be there, strong as ever. Incinerate the ground, with a thousand-degree flame? It’ll shrug that off, too. Even radiation won’t stop a prion, so there goes plan A of nuking the area.
Bad as the disease is for deer, the real fear is that it may jump to humans, much like that other famous prion disorder, Mad Cow Disease. Hunters are being warned not to eat deer. They are also being warned not to feed deer, which is a common practice.
As with so many situations, this all may be improved by the introduction of wolves. Wolves are immune to CWD, and wolves are good at picking off lethargic deer. Let us hope wolves will feast and protect us from this budding zombie menace.
The 1,000-Degree Home
Prions shrug off temperatures of a thousand degrees. You know who can’t do that? Old people. That brings us to our final chilling tale, out of South Carolina. Joan Littlejohn and Glennwood Fowler, both in their 80s, found that their heater wasn’t warming their home to their expectations. Family members came by and responded by “fiddling” with the heater, which pushed the heater past its normal limits.
Then, this month, police visited the residence as part of a wellness check. They had to enter the place through a bedroom window. The whole home was hot, so hot that candles had melted and fallen to the floor. The police made their way to the heater, and news coverage quotes the police report as saying the heater was over 1,000 degrees. Based on our knowledge of heaters, and the absence of any flame here, we’re tempted to amend that to, “No, not literally 1,000 degrees. But it was so hot that someone on the scene described it as a 1,000 degrees, which makes it pretty hot.”
Next, the police took the temperatures of Littlejohn and Fowler. These came to 107 Fahrenheit. To understand the significance of this, you need to know this wasn’t necessarily their temperature but the highest temperature the officers’ body thermometers could register. Also, you need to know that Littlejohn and Fowler were both dead at the time, and while humans are supposed to be rather less than 107 degrees, corpses are supposed to be much less than 107 degrees.
This was not foul play, say police, just an accident. So, as you take precautions to shield yourself from this furious winter, avoid extreme measures. And hug your grandparents the next time you see them. Just, don’t hug them too warmly.
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