These 10 Weird News Stories From 2024 Still Make Us Scratch Our Heads – Patch

January 8, 2025 ndowd

One of the weirdest news stories of 2024 was at the same time ingenious. A woman in Michigan needed a home, so she not only lived inside a sign for about a year but also made it cozy and comfortable.

A banana taped to the wall at the tony Sotheby’s auction house in New York City had curious, ahem, “a-peel,” people in Chicago became inexplicably attached to a hole in the concrete that looked like a rat, and in New Jersey and the Northeast, people reached near hysteria over drone sightings estimated at 140 a night in some places.
Here, in no particular order, are some of the weirdest stories of 2024 from the Patch archives:
Nicknamed “the rooftop ninja,” a Michigan woman who lived in a sign for a year gets points for her ingenuity. Think of all the people who looked up at the roof peak displaying the Family Fare grocery sign in Midland and never once thought, “Hmm, a person could set up housekeeping in that sign.”
The unidentified 34-year-old did just that, getting up and into the squatty “A-frame” and then out again without being noticed for about a year before she was discovered. She’d made the sign a cozy home with flooring, a small desk, a pantry for food and even a houseplant. She reportedly had a car and a job.
Contractors working at the store discovered the rooftop ninja and called police. They let her go without charges.
A story that unfolded in November at the tony Sotheby’s auction house in New York City may inspire creatives dreaming of a seven-figure sale to grab a roll of duct tape and a piece of fruit. Bananas are now famously taken after one affixed to the wall with the silvery gray do-it-all tape sold for $6.2 million, but a binful of produce awaits their genius spark.
For the $6.2 million he spent to acquire this single banana, Justin Sun, founder of cryptocurrency platform TRON, could have bought about 31 million of them. Sun’s purchase includes more than a single, perishable banana. Along with it, he purchased a certificate of authority to duct tape a banana to the wall anytime he wants and call it “Comedian.”
To understand the a-peel, slip back in time to five years ago. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” was a baffling phenomenon when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach. Was it a joke? Or a cheeky commentary on art collectors who will buy anything if it has an artist’s name behind it, even a piece that will attract hordes of tiny fruit flies the longer it hangs on the wall? Another artist ate it before that could happen.
Subsequent editions of the conceptual art have sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to gallery owners.
Sun said the piece “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.” He said he planned to eat it “as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture,” Sun said.
A spate of mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey and the Northeast, some the size of a car, baffled residents for weeks as the year closed out, and although many public officials maintained there appeared to be no danger to the public, residents demanded answers and even an operation to shoot them down.
Officials in New Jersey estimated anywhere from four to 180 reports of drone sightings per night.
“We know nothing,” Matt Murello, the mayor of Washington Township in Morris County, a hotspot for drone sightings, said after a meeting of local officials in December. “At this point I think I would feel better if these were aliens.”
Drone sightings started in mid-November. They were seen alone and traveling in clusters. Adding to residents’ apprehension, some have been spotted near critical infrastructure such as water reservoirs, power transmission lines, rail stations, and law enforcement facilities.
Members of Congress demanded an investigation, including a New Jersey representative who asked the Defense Department to investigate the large number of drones coming onshore from the Atlantic Ocean and drones that followed a Coast Guard boat off Ocean County. Another New Jersey congressman said drones should be shot down, raised new questions about the “mothership theory” and said the Pentagon is treating the public “like we are stupid.”
The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies investigated, and the Federal Aviation issued flight restrictions for drones over Donald Trump’s National Golf Club in Bedminster and Pictinny Arsenal Military Base in Rockaway. Firefighters in New Jersey have gotten guidance on what to do if they find a downed drone.
The mystery and intrigue spread to other states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York. On the West Coast, Californians also reported seeing more drones.
Update: As the new year gets under way, drone activity hasn’t completely stopped, but sightings have decreased. Some authorities have downplayed the sightings and attributed them to misidentification of other aircraft, Investigations remain active.
Mattel’s quality assurance team had one job: Check the URL on packaging for the toy maker’s “Wicked” dolls to make sure it doesn’t take children and other users to the adult site, Wicked Pictures, which produces parody porn movies.
Instead of taking people to the official “Wicked” movie site, the URL took them to the landing page of an adult-only site with a decidedly different definition of “wicked.”
“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this,” Mattel said, advising consumers who have already purchased the dolls to discard the packaging or cover the link to the porn site.
A trip to Disneyland wasn’t exactly a trip to the “Happiest Place on Earth” for some visitors, who found a popular ride smeared with bone chips and ashes — the cremains of someone who apparently loved the place a lot.
Dusting the Anaheim, California, theme park with the cremains of loved ones seems to have become a thing, and Mickey and Minnie would like for everyone to just stop it. For the record, no one at Disney has ever said this is OK. California state law doesn’t, either.
The creepy discovery at the “Rise of the Resistance” was the latest in a string of cremains scatterings that include dustings on the “It’s a Small World,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and — this one gives us pause — “Haunted Mansion” attractions.
Ashes “won’t stay where you drop them” a park worker commenting on the creepy practice on a Reddit thread called “Ashes on Attractions.” Grandma — or whomever — will likely be “swept up and dumped,” the person said.
It was so hot in Death Valley National Park in July that a 42-year-old tourist from Belgium melted the skin off his feet after losing his flip-flops in sand dunes, park officials said.
The air temperature was 123 degrees Fahrenheit on July 20, but in heat that extreme, the sand can be much hotter, anywhere from 170 to 180 degrees and into the 200-degree range.
Unable to walk out of the dunes on his own due to extreme pain, the man and his family were assisted by other park visitors, who helped carry him to a parking lot, where park officials assessed his injuries. The punishing temperatures made the air too thin for a medical helicopter to safely land, so he was taken by ground ambulance to a higher elevation, where it was only 109 degrees. From there, he was flown to a hospital in Las Vegas for treatment.
A guy in Wisconsin sunk his teeth into McDonald’s signature Big Mac sandwich more than 50 years ago and hasn’t eaten anything since — well, much of anything.
Don Gorske, who was 70 when he broke his own record, promised his mother during the first seven years of his gastronomical romance with the sandwich that he’d eat one meal a day that didn’t have a Big Mac, and even she acquiesced, eventually telling him “If they haven’t killed you by now, go ahead.”
A Guinness World Record holder for eating more than 34,000 Big Macs during his lifetime, Gorske now limits his sandwiches to two a day and sometimes has a light snack at night. There have been times in the past that he’s eaten as many as nine a day.
Gorske walks about six miles a day, gets regular checkups, and his body hasn’t betrayed him. He’s not worried his record will be challenged and laughs at himself a bit. “Even if someone started now, I’ll be dead before they could match it,” Gorske once told Patch. “And they’re going to have to be obsessive-compulsive if they’re not going to eat anything else. ….”
Put whatever you’re drinking down, step away from the plate of food and consider this your “ew” warning: A restaurant in Georgia found itself doing damage control after an incident involving a funnel, a margarita and a woman’s buttocks.
What you imagine happened did. “Bottoms up” is all you need to know — except that what happened at the south Georgia restaurant did not stay at the restaurant. The couple, a man and woman, filmed their X-rated stunt, which took place right there in the restaurant. It blew up when it was leaked online.
The woman who took the anal shot wasn’t about to take the leak sitting down. She complained to police, who slapped her and the guy who operated the funnel, which turned out to be less effective than a glass, with misdemeanor public indecency charges. In a post on social media, restaurant staff were emphatic this is so not how they want the eatery to be known.
“We want to make it clear that such behavior is completely unacceptable and does not reflect our values and mission to provide a family-friendly dining experience,” the restaurant said.
A guy in Michigan had an “OMG moment” after realizing he had entrapped himself — in front of a judge presiding over a Zoom hearing on a charge of driving without a valid license.
“Are you driving?” the judge asked.
“Actually, I’m pulling into my doctor’s office,” the defendant replied. “So, um, just give me one second. I’m parking right now.”
The unamused judge tossed down his pen in apparent exasperation. After the guy’s public defender asked for a continuance, the judge retorted, “He doesn’t have a license. He’s suspended and he’s just driving. … I don’t even know why he would do that. So, defendant’s bond is revoked in this matter.”
That’s when the defendant rolled his head back and whispered, “Oh my god.”
Chicago artist and comedian Winslow Dumaine wasn’t sure he wanted to “be known as the rat hole guy,” yet he found himself at that moment.
Dumaine snapped a picture of a rat-shaped indentation on the sidewalk and correctly assessed its potential to trend on social media. (It is kind of perfect with its little claws and tail.) Couple the likeness of the impression to an actual rat with Chicago’s rather dependable place at the top of a pest control’s list of the nation’s rattiest cities, and Dumaine found the winning formula for internet success.
Still, he didn’t want his discovery — and how he happened on it and what others in the Roscoe Village neighborhood think of their local landmark is a story in itself — to define him.
“I will post about it if there is an update or something that happens in regards to it, but I don’t want to be the guy who is still telling the (Monica) Lewinsky jokes,” he told Patch. “Look, I wrote a book, I made a Tarot deck, I traveled the world selling my stickers, I’m making a card game. I’m such an insane, obnoxious multi-hyphenate that I can’t be the Rat Hole Guy.”
Strange, Unnerving Animal Stories From 2024: Hyper-sexual “zombie” cicadas, giant flying spiders, rodents that eat other rodents and a celibate stingray’s pregnancy made us wonder.