5 Nasty Surprises People Discovered in Bed
You might think of your bed as your happy place, but this is a spot fraught with danger. Maybe you’ll wake up to terror, or maybe you’ll fall asleep to disaster. Or maybe, as with the following stories, you’ll discover something shocking that doesn’t require you to sleep at all. And we’re not talking about mild annoyances, like bedbugs or an errant turd. We mean something truly chilling, like...
A Meteorite That Missed You By Inches
Earlier this week, if you were in the right spot, you experienced a brief spell of darkness when the moon came between us and the sun. You might have felt awe and wonder, but the birds around you felt confused terror. Celestial events are strange and scary. For example, sometimes a rock will fall from space and hit you.
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Sure, you might think it’s “irrational” to fear meteorite strikes. Only one person in recorded history has ever been struck by a meteorite, and even she escaped with just a mean bruise. That happened 70 years ago. A couple years ago, another woman narrowly escaped a strike of her own. This 2.8-pound rock smashed through her roof and hit her bed, with freakish precision.
That meteorite barely missed the head of this Canadian woman, who found herself covered in debris from the breached roof. That 1954 meteorite also smashed its way through someone’s roof. And one year before the 2021 strike, a meteorite went through the roof of a coffin-maker in Indonesia. For your own safety, we recommend moving to an apartment building, with at least three buffer floors between you and the sky.
A Bunch of Pigs Eating Your Sheets
In 1841, a French diplomat was spending some time in Austin, Texas. His name was Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, and the inn where he was staying didn’t meet his expectations. The problem was a drove of pigs, which broke their way into the stables and attacked de Saligny’s horses and corn. He might have swallowed that insult, but the pigs next penetrated the hotel itself, reached his room and ate all the linens on his bed.
De Saligny ordered a servant to slaughter the pigs. The innkeeper, Richard Bullock, wasn’t a huge fan of this move, so he gave the servant a beatdown, Texas-style. De Saligny wasn't a huge fan of that move, so he reached out to the Texas government, asking them to punish Bullock. No one in the government liked him, so they refused. De Saligny now exercised his authority to break off diplomatic relations between France and Texas.
France undid this move eventually, but for a while, this dispute was known as the Pig War. That’s not to be mistaken for the other Pig War that broke out between America and Britain the following decade. There are a lot of pigs out there, and statistically, they’re bound to spark multiple wars.
A 111-Year-Old Dead Man
In 2010, Tokyo officials decided it was time to pay a visit to Sogen Kato. Records said he was the nation’s oldest person, and they had a special holiday called Respect for the Aged Day for saying high to these old-timers. When they reached his room, they discovered him dead in his bed. This is actually something you expect to happen now and again when it’s your job to check in on centenarians, but the issue here was they discovered he’d been dead and in that bed for 32 years.
Earlier, the city had contacted Kato’s family about meeting him, and the Katos kept making excuses. So, these officials who came to his room weren’t merely a bunch of smiling volunteers with balloons but a group of police officers who broke their way in. They found the man’s body in a mummified state. They also reported that the body was wearing “underwear and pajamas,” which is just a weird way of describing anyone’s state of dress. They could have just said “pajamas.” We would have assumed he had underwear on as well.
He’d died in 1978, and his family figured they’d keep the news to themselves, enabling them to go on collecting his pension for the next several decades. His daughter received a suspended sentence as a punishment, along with having to return the ill-gotten gains, which totaled some $120,000.
The Japanese have a reputation for longevity, but number munchers now had to concede the average was being thrown off by a bunch of geriatrics like Kato who weren’t really alive at all. Scouts now went out to track down the country’s many centenarians. They hoped to find around 270,000. They failed to find 230,000 of them. Either these missing old folk had all died and remained on the books, or they’re hiding together and waiting to attack.
Your Mom Having Sex With David Bowie
Countless people have suffered the trauma of walking in on their mom having sex with David Bowie. The threat of this happening on any given day has dropped only slightly since the man’s death eight years ago. It’s happened to the best of us, and in the early 1970s, it happened to Slash.
Slash’s mother, Ola Hudson, designed costumes, which gave her a professional connection with Bowie. Inevitably, this turned into sex, as Slash discovered when he walked in on them naked one day. Well, he didn’t actually discover they were having sex from this sight, as he was eight years old and didn’t understand what he was seeing. That much was a blessing.
To this day, Slash wears sunglasses to shield his eyes. We also have to imagine he spent the rest of his life deeply resenting Bowie, an assumption totally undermined by his own later comments (“I liked David a lot,” says Slash), and by the following 1989 pic of them looking like friends.
Your Own Doom
You can obviously die in your sleep, but your bed can also kill you through other means. Consider, for example, what happens if you own a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed is one of those beds that fold up into the wall, leading to all kinds of slapstick shenanigans. If you’re in one of these and it flies up and goes vertical, that might give you a scare. Still, you probably imagine you could push the thing back down while behind it and get out of there. Right?
In 1983, 72-year-old Abigail Lawson was lying in a Murphy bed in Liverpool. It suddenly folded up into the wall on its own accord. She got trapped there, upside-down, and she never got out. Not only did she die there — her body remained there for five years before her family found her.
At the time of her death, she and her daughter had been fighting over selling the house, so the family took her disappearance as her cutting ties with them. At least, that’s the story. It’s remarkable that the body was able to stay there so long without anyone finding out what happened or ever needing to open the place up to take care of things. Maybe the family had a good reason for keeping mum about grandma walling herself off. Maybe they wanted to go on collecting her pension.
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