A 61-year-old postal worker from the Japanese city of Yokohama was recently arrested for hoarding around 24,000 pieces of mail that he had failed to deliver since back in 2003.

Officials at Japan Post, the government-owned mail service, noticed there was something peculiar about the unnamed postal worker’s activity last year, and he was let go. However, the cache of hidden mail was discovered later, because it was located in his home, “which is beyond the confines of an internal inspection”. The 61-year-old admitted to failing to deliver the tens of thousands of letters and parcels, claiming that doing his job “was too much bother”. But he didn’t want his younger colleagues to think he was less capable than them, so he just hid the mail at home.

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Vernon Kruger, a 52-year-old man from Dullstroom, a small town in South Africa, hasn’t set foot on the ground in 73 days, ever since he climbed into his “home in the sky”, a small barrel at the top of a 25-meter-tall pole.

The first time Kruger climbed into his now famous barrel was 22 years ago, as a dare. He was on a an exotic island, during a vacation, when one of his friends said ‘why don’t you break the record for sitting in a tree?’. It was a joke  at first, than it became a dare, so Vernon started looking into it. He learned that an Indonesian man had already broken the record by sitting in a tree for 28 days, but instead of letting it go, his friends suggested he try pole sitting instead. The record stood at 54 days at the time, so the South African set up his own pole and stood on it for 64 days. That was in 1997, and since no one managed to break his world record since, he decided to do it himself.

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The fluffy pillows of Norwegian artist Håkon Anton Fagerås look perfect for smashing your face into after a long, hard day, but I wouldn’t recommend it, since they are carved out of white marble.

For thousands of years, blocks of marble have been carved into awe-inspiring artworks by some of the most talented sculptors in human history. It is perhaps the most used material in the history of art, and for good reason. There is a certain elegance, even a delicateness to it, qualities that help artists use it to express the nuances of human emotion, despite its rigid nature. These properties of marble inspired Håkon Anton Fagerås to sculpt the rock into something that would embody its qualities perfectly.

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A Houston woman recently took to social media to complain about her daughter’s Elsa doll, which not only starts singing on its own even when switched off, but has also returned after being thrown away multiple times.

Emily Madonia recalls that the problematic Elsa doll became a part of her family’s life on Christmas 2013, as a gift for her daughter. It recited several lines from the Disney animation blockbuster “Frozen”, as well as the iconic song “Let It Go” when a small button was pushed on her necklace. Everything was fine for two years, but in 2015, she started alternating between English and Spanish, when before she had only recited lines in English. Then it started singing and speaking randomly, even when her switch was turned off, but the family brushed it off as some sort of glitch or wiring problem. But things got really weird lat December, when Emily decided to throw the doll out with the trash, and it somehow kept coming back…

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Most people think that cats are nature’s ultimate rat catchers, but they’re actually a lot less efficient in catching and killing rodents than dogs.

Rats are known to breed at an alarming rate, and in the English countryside it’s easy for farms to be overrun by disease-spreading rodents. When rats become too much for farmers to handle, it’s up to small companies like Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack to come in and clean up with the help of some small but exceptionally skilled rodent hunters. Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack specialises in training dog breeds that genetically designed to catch rats; they travel all around the UK helping farmers clean up their rat infested properties in a matter of hours. Their most successful endeavour yet occurred earlier this month, when a pack of eight dogs managed to kill no less than 730 rats in only seven hours.

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A Japanese student recently uploaded a picture of a small fish he had caught to Twitter, where it quickly went viral because of the creature’s likeness to a painting.

Featuring unusually large eyes, and blue-ish scales of various shapes and sizes, the unusually-looking fish instantly caught people’s attention. Taking a good look at it, it’s easy to see why people started referring to it as “Picasso Fish”, and sharing the picture on various social networks. Eventually, the photo was picked up by Japan’s Fuji Television, which consulted experts about the creature and learned that it was actually a rather common deep-sea fish with a rather striking appearance.

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Getting cold feet is not as unusual as some people might think, but breaking the news to one’s fiancee that they no longer want to marry them can be tough, so some people come up with the most ridiculous scenarios…

A young man from Shanghai, China, who was due to marry his girlfriend this year, suddenly realized he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her, so he devised a plan to make sure he didn’t have to. The man, surnamed Chen, could have just told his partner that he had had a change of heart, but he couldn’t break himself to do that, so he came up with a strategy that he hoped would make the girl break up with him – he became a petty criminal and got himself arrested on purpose.

Social status and reputation are very important in Chinese society, so Chen thought to himself that his bride-to-be and her family would be so disappointed by the news that he had been arrested for theft that they would cancel the wedding arrangements on the spot, allowing him to walk away with a guilt-free conscious.

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Wearing pajamas in public may not be a thing in the Western world, but it’s actually pretty popular in some parts of China, including the ultra-developed city of Shanghai, so when authorities in Anhui province decided to publicly shame a number of locals on their social media account for walking on the streets in their sleeping outfits, they received some serious backlash.

In a so called attempt to discourage “uncivilized behavior”, Government officials in Suzhou City, Anhui province, recently released photos of seven people wearing pajamas in public, along with the offender’ surnames, headshots and redacted ID numbers. The seven citizens – six women and one man – were thus shamed for breaking the supposed local dress code. The pictures were originally posted on the local Government’s Weibo account, but were swiftly deleted after receiving criticism from citizens. Eventually, authorities were forced to issue a public apology, claiming the photos had been posted on its social media page after an “inadequate review process”.

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A Russian woman was allegedly unable to leave her kitchen for two days after her pet cat started behaving aggressively and tried to attack her whenever she tried to exit the room.

This is the kind of news story that sounds so crazy, it has to be fake! At least that’s what I thought when I first read the title, but then I noticed that it had originally been reported on the official website of the Rescue Service in the Russian city of Arkhangelsk, which actually rescued the woman from her own home. On Sunday, January 19, a local resident noticed a woman signaling for help in the window of a third floor apartment, at 9/6 Suvorov street. After catching the attention of the passer-by, the woman explained that her pet cat had started acting crazy two days before, and would try to attack her whenever she tried leaving the kitchen. Sick of waiting for the feline to calm down, she finally decided to ask for help.

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A Peruvian politician recently took to social media to ask people for his car keys back, after giving them away by mistake while handing out keychains on the campaign trail.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Jovino Huerta, a congressional candidate for the Peruvian district of Huánuco, repeatedly asked his supporters to help him retrieve the keys to his pickup truck, adding that it was a vital part of his effort to win a Congress seat as without it he can’t run a proper campaign. Huerta isn’t the first person to lose their car keys or plead with whoever found them to retrieve them, but it’s how he lost the keys that makes this story interesting…

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This story’s a little old, but for some reason it didn’t get much media attention in the States, and it just seemed like the kind of wacky news we like so much here on Oddity Central, so we decided to share it.

Tony Traconi, a U.S. paratrooper stationed in the Italian province of Padova, had a commendable but complex wish – for his first son to be born on Texas soil. But with just a month before his first child was due to come into the world, he was thousands of miles away from his home state, with no chance of getting home and back before the big day. But then an idea sprouted in his head: he would ask his parents to fill a Tupperware container with Texas dirt and ship it to him. The end goal – to hide it under his wife’s hospital bed, so his son would technically be born on Texas soil.

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An Ecuadorian man was allegedly caught red handed cheating on his partner with another woman, when the half-time kiss cam showed them kissing in the stands during a soccer match.

Last Saturday, Barcelona of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s very own Barcelona soccer club, made its traditional yearly presentation during a friendly match against rivals Delfin, one of last season’s revelations. It was a good game, but it was surprisingly overshadowed by something that occurred during the half-time break. The kiss-cam showed a young couple making out in the stands, but things got weird when the man saw himself on one of the jumbo screens. He immediately removed his arm from around the young lady, his smile went away instantly, and the two just started looking in opposite directions, like they didn’t know each other.

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When it comes to backing out of a wedding, faking your own kidnapping sounds like overkill, but that didn’t stop a Colombian man from using this technique to avoid attending his own wedding.

The unnamed 55-year-old man, from the Colombian town of Pitalito was scheduled to marry his fiancee, a local woman, in front of family and friends last weekend. As the big day grew closer, the man started getting cold feet and confessed to some of his closest buddies that he planned to break the engagement and pull out of the wedding. Only he didn’t know how to go about it, so his good friends came up with the idea of faking a kidnapping. What they didn’t plan for was for authorities to launch a full scale operation involving the police and the army.

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A tailoring shop in the Spanish city of Bilbao has sparked a heated debate online after it was reported that it started charging people 15 euros ($16.7) just for trying on clothes.

Camino Azula Pascual, co-owner of the Pascual Bilbao tailoring shop in downtown Bilbao, has been making custom men’s suits and tuxedos for 40 years, so she doesn’t even need a measuring tape anymore. As soon as someone walks through the door, she knows their measurements, and, if they’re in a hurry, she can even recommend something that would suit the special occasion perfectly. But this is a skill that she and her brother Carlos have  honed over four long decades, and wasting it all on people who don’t even want to buy anything is no longer acceptable. That’s why starting this year, Pascual Bilbao has implemented a 15 euro tax for everyone looking to try on suits in the shop.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week, you’ve probably seen one of the many videos of an adorable cocker spaniel with amazing eyes doing the rounds on social media. Her name is Winnie, and at only three-months-old she had already won hearts of millions around the world.

With over 211,000 followers on Instagram alone, it’s fair to say that Winnie the cocker spaniel is a true social media sensation, and it’s all thanks to her gorgeous eyes, of which people just seem to get enough of. Winnie’s gaze had been drawing attention ever since she was born, in October of 2019, but it really catapulted her to star status five days ago, when her owners posted a particularly adorable photo of her on her Instagram account and tagged it “I can read your mind… you think I’m adorable?” The beautiful pup has been conquering hearts ever since.

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