12 News Stories So Strange You Won’t Believe Such Things Can Happen
4 The Sand Palace’
When Hurricane Michael flattened almost every house in Mexico beach in Florida, one house remained standing and that was The Sand Palace. The three story four-bedroom, four-bathroom home standing on stilts is owned by Lebron Lackey and Russel King and wasn’t exactly lucky. It was designed to do that. The walls of the Sand Palace are made of poured concrete on top of 40-foot pilings. Rebar is all through the walls. Steel cables go from the girders above the pilings through the roof and continue down the other side of the back wall. The house does not have a balcony and neither does it have many windows, features that are required of hurricane houses. To reinforce the house and make it even more hurricane resistant, they added more than 3,000 hurricane clips to keep the roof intact to withstand winds of 250 miles per hour.
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3 Going Nuts
Chris and Holly Persic from Pittsburgh appeared to be targets of the animal kingdom. Last October, an hour after Chris’s car broke down, his wife called to say her own car’s engine was emitting a burning smell. She discovered more than 200 walnuts within the bonnet when she opened it. For the winter, a resourceful neighbourhood squirrel squad has been hoarding nuts. For good measure, they had also chewed through a wiring in Chris’s truck. Chris ultimately fixed his wiring, but Holly got to enjoy the aroma of roasted almonds for a while.
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2 Double Alimony
A single mother in the Brazilian state of Goiás went to court in March to get a deadbeat father to pay child support. She ultimately received more than she anticipated. DNA testing revealed that the child’s DNA matched that of a pair of identical twins, each of whom denied paternity. But, Judge Felipe Luis Peruca’s decision that both men pay up and be named as the child’s parent defeated the twins’ attempts to avoid accountability, giving the child two dads for the price of one.
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1 Reincarnation
Joanna Pollock, age 11, and Jacqueline Pollock, age 6, were two young English sisters who tragically perished in an automobile accident in 1957. Their mother gave birth to twins, Gillian and Jennifer, a year later. When the twins were old enough to speak, they started recognising and asking for toys that belonged to their deceased sisters, pointing out places that only their deceased sisters would recognise (like a school they’d gone to), and occasionally becoming frightened when they see idling cars (“That car is coming to get us!” they reportedly shrieked on one occasion).
These occurrences decreased in frequency after the twins turned five, and they went on to enjoy regular lives. But the Pollock Sisters’ tale eventually reached Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918–2007), a psychologist who specialised in reincarnation. Dr. Stevenson authored a book detailing 14 examples that, in his opinion, were true after researching thousands of alleged cases, including that of the Pollock Sisters.
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