Category: WEEKLY WEIRD NEWS

You never know where you’re going to find the weirdos. Generally speaking, those with Ed Gein-ish tastes for digging up corpses and decorating their home with them don’t hold PHDs in Celtic Studies and are thought of as well-respected authors and academics. However, such is the case with Russia’s Anatoly Moskvin, who was discovered with the bodies and pieces of bodies from perhaps as many as 29 corpses in his house.

Police found inside his home, among stacks of books and other brick-a-brac, a gruesome and distressingly adorable collection of graveyard remains. Anatoly had many of the all-female corpses mummified, dressed in cutesy, frilly doll dresses, and some even had implanted recording devices. “When we were transferring one of the mummies, it startled us by starting to play the song, ‘Bear enjoys his honey.’ It took us some time to figure out that the mechanism inside reacts to touching,” said one policeman. All the corpses had their faces covered or painted and one even had the head of a stuffed animal.

In an interview with a journalist years back, Anatoly had said he became fascinated with cemeteries as a teenager. “When I was a pioneer in 1979, by pure accident, I took part in an occult ceremony that took place in a cemetery. I have been strongly drawn to these places ever since,” he said, adding that he had visited 752 cemeteries.

Thankfully, he doesn’t appear to have stole bodies from all of them, but according to police, for the past 15 years at least, he had been making late night raids to claim both the bodies, pieces of bodies, and clothing from the bodies of women aged 12 to 30. Along with the ‘dolls’ police found piles of gravestone plaques, bones, skulls and a foot dressed in a lacy stocking.

It hasn’t been made clear yet how the police identified Anatoly; one story has it that his visiting parents found him decorating a doll and turned him in, but apparently the evidence is pretty overwhelming. I mean, even if you were to go with the ‘someone broke into my apartment and put all these here’ defense, police still found his fingerprints and footprints all over the desecrated graves. Anatoly stands to serve from a fine to 3 years in prison for each of the more than a dozen charges currently leveled against him. At least we can be glad he never graduated, the way our own infamous Ed Gein did, to killing to get fresher bodies. That we know of…

Cities in India can be pretty crowded places. There’s not always a lot of room to expand your business, even if it’s doing well, so sometimes you’ve just got to incorporate previously existing structures into your theme. Such was the case for Krishan Kutti Nair whose business, The New Lucky Restaurant, in Ahmedabad, India, started out as a tea stall outside of a Muslim cemetery. The business was doing so great, it started to encroach on, then circle, and eventually be part of the gravesite.

The customers certainly don’t seem to mind, as morning through night they come in for their milk tea and buttery rolls, and neither does Kirshan, who wipes the graves down every morning and puts fresh flowers by them. ”The graveyard is good luck. Our business is better because of it”.

North Brother Island is 2o acres of overgrown woods floating in New York’s East River, between The Bronx and Riker’s Island. Completely uninhabited and designated as a bird sanctuary, the island nonetheless attracts plenty of curious folks because of its lurid history. Not only home to a juvenile detention facility in the 50’s, and the site of a steamship which sank in 1904 killing 1,000 people, but famously the site of Riverside Hospital. which housed victims of extremely contagious diseases, notably Typhoid Mary herself. The creepy mouldering buildings still stand, begging daring visitors to peek inside.

But this isn’t why I’ve called your attention to the site.

A kayaker steered his boat close to shore for some pictures, and he came across this: a flickering TV.

“As I paddled around the southern edge something caught my eye… maybe nothing special but to me it stood out as a unique art installation at the edge of the water. It is simply an old television and a chair set up. Were these objects found on the island? Who will get to see this in such a remote location? Who is the artist and what is their message?”

Apparently a grand piano washed ashore recently as well and is now resting under the Brooklyn Bridge and the ever-guerrila-art-concious New Yorkers are wondering if both oddities are the work of a anonymous artist. Or is it the old dude from Poltergeist setting up shop?

For God’s sake, keep Carol Anne away from the island!