Avenida Iztacalco 9 in Mexico City was one of the most searched addresses on Google Maps this week, after photos of a creepy, doll-covered house located there went viral on social media.

It all started with a short TikTok video shared by user Fernando Mata, who runs a segment called “Weird Things on Google Maps”, where he gradually zooms in on strange things found on the popular platform. In episode three of his series, he featured Avenida Iztacalco 9, an address in Mexico City where a creepy-looking building is supposedly located. With dozens of old and dismembered dolls hanging on its facade and on the fence around the building, it’s not hard to understand why warnings like “Do not search for Avenida Iztacalco 9 on Google Maps before going to bed!” went viral on Twitter and Facebook.

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The Covid-19 pandemic is a problem that even Batman would have a tough time solving, but this Mexican version of the caped crusader is doing his best to help.

Authorities in the Mexican city of Monterrey have received assistance from a very unlikely source in their efforts to keep people in their homes as part of a social distancing plan to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. A real-life Batman wearing the iconic costume of DC’s superhero and driving a custom version of the Batmobile has been patrolling the city streets and asking people to stay at home. The unidentified man has been spending his days blasting a pre-recorded message from his Batmobile, encouraging people to minimize physical interaction.

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It’s not uncommon for Mexican parents to give their children unique, extravagant names, but even by these standards, the name Zero Zero Three stood out like a sore thumb, making its bearer an overnight internet celebrity.

It all started when Casera Pizza, a well-known pizzeria based in Merida, the capital of Mexico’s Yucatan State, announced a contest for weird names, with the winner eligible to benefit from of its enticing promotions. People named Vercingetoriz, Nivea, or Bahtzibadi all made the final list, but none could hope to win against a young man named “Cero Cero Tres”, Spanish for ‘Zero Zero Three”. He won the coveted prize – two large pepperoni pizzas for just 49 pesos – and became an instant online sensation.

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Tirer of her husband’s drinking habit, a Mexican woman decided to make him think he had become allergic to booze by lacing his beers with natural laxatives like castor oil and plum extract.

After consulting various internet pages and forums, Michel N., a young woman from Sinaloa, devised a plan to make her husband, José Brayan, quit drinking. She managed to get a hold on a mixture of castor oil and plum extract and started putting a few drops of it into his beer bottles, to achieve a mild, gradual laxative effect. José later told police that he found it a bit strange when his wife offered to pop open his beer and bring it to him whenever he needed one, but he simply “let himself be loved and pampered”.

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Every February, on the day before Lent, the small Mexican town of San Juan de la Vega honors its namesake saint with a loud tradition that has come to be known as the Festival of Exploding Hammers.

The origins of this bombastic festival are shrouded in mystery. According to one local story, Juan de la Vega, a wealthy miner and rancher, was aided by San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist) to recover gold stolen by bandits and residents came up with the exploding hammers to loudly commemorate their victory over the outlaws. Another story claims that “San Juanito” the patron saint of the town, was an outlaw himself, a sort of Mexican Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and that the today’s celebration is a reenactment of the fight between San Juanito and the local dons. Whatever the real origin may be, the explosive tradition is so popular in San Juan de la Vega that locals will risk life and limb to keep it going.

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A friendly New Year’s Eve soccer match between teams representing two rival cartels in a Mexican prison turned into a bloodbath after a controversial tackle escalated into a gun fight.

For over a decade, Cieneguillas, a medium-security prison in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, has been home to hundreds of dangerous criminals representing no less than six of Mexico’s main drug cartels. In an attempt to relieve the pressure of the rivalries between these criminal organizations, the prison leadership authorized a soccer game between teams representing Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, on New Year’s Eve, but what was meant to be a friendly celebration abruptly turned into a deadly shootout, and not the penalty kind…

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The mayor of a town in Mexico has come under fire from members of his community for deploying cutouts of himself at events that he can’t physically be present at.

Moisés Aguilar Torres, the mayor Pichuclaco, a town in the Mexican state of Chiapas, managed to outrage his constituents by sending a cutout of himself to a local health services event that he didn’t bother attending. Photos of actual attendees posing for pictures with Torres’ cardboard cutout have been doing the rounds on Mexican social media for days, sparking both criticism and hilarious comments.

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Shocking photos of a popular beach in the Mexican state of Oaxaca sinking into the Ocean have been doing the rounds on social media, leaving people scratching their heads in disbelief. It turns out the sinking is being caused by a phenomenon known as “mar de fondo”, or “swell”.

Swells rarely occur at popular seaside destination, which only makes the repeated sinking of the beach at Puerto Escondito, in Oaxaca, that much more peculiar. Swells, also known as surface gravity waves, are created by storms thousands of miles away from the beaches on which they break, and are not influenced by local winds. They cause a rise in sea level, but are different than high tide, eating away at the sand they it, and causing large stretches of beach to simply sink into the ocean. This is what happened at Puerto Escondito last week, but the really strange part is that the exact same thing occurred in the same place, in May of last year.

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A Mexican teacher has come under fire for making high-school students wear cardboard boxes on their heads to block their peripheral vision and prevent them from copying on an exam.

Luis Juárez Texis, the director of Campus 01 “El Sabinal” at the College of Bachelors, in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, has been accused of humiliating and breaking the basic human rights of his students, after a photo of him overseeing an exam where the students wore cardboard boxes on their heads went viral online. The students’ parents shared the photo on social media and issued a public statement asking educational authorities in Mexico to dismiss Texis.

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Politicians always make promises they can’t keep during electoral campaigns, but voters hardly ever hold them responsible for lying. Well, residents in a small Mexican town recently decided to teach their mayor a lesson for failing to fulfil his campaign promises by parading him in women’s clothes for four straight days.

Javier Sebastián Jiménez Santiz won the mayoral race in the town of Huixtán on promises of improving the local water system, but failed to live up to the expectations of his constituents. Lat last month, after getting sick of his excuses and promises, locals stormed into the mayor’s office and dressed up Santiz and municipal trustee Luis Ton in women’s clothing. Mayor Santiz had to wear a long dark skirt and white blouse with ruffles and flowery embroidery, while Ton was given a bright pink dress with white polka dots.

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As part of an unusual social experiment, a Mexican mayor disguised himself as a disabled person in need of assistance to test the attitude of local public servants first-hand.

After receiving a number of complaints from disabled and other socially disadvantaged people about the treatment they received from social workers, Carlos Tena, the mayor of Cuauhtémoc, a town in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, didn’t know who to believe, the alleged victims or his co-workers. So he devised a plan to test the attitude of local social workers himself. Tena spent two months putting together a believable disguise and then visited public servants at both the Mayor’s Office and Social Services posing as a disabled man in need of help.

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Armed robberies have become so common in Mexico City that people have started buying fake smartphones to hand over to trigger-happy criminals who would rather shoot them than leave empty-handed.

Walking on the street or getting on public transportation in Mexico City have become increasingly risky affairs. According to recently released data, there were an average of 70 violent reported muggings in the Mexican capital in the first four months of 2019. Around two thirds of these crimes targeted pedestrians, while the rest were evenly committed against public transportation passengers and motorists stuck in traffic jams or waiting at traffic lights. The incidence of such crimes has been steadily increasing in the city, but it has gotten so bad that people are now buying fake smartphones to hand over to muggers instead of their real ones.

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Last weekend, a series of photos that seemed to show a very young boy getting married to an adult woman went viral on Mexican social media. There was speculation of arranged marriage and child trafficking, but the true story turned out to be more tragic, and at the same time heartwarming, than everyone thought.

Mexican media recently reported that the protagonists of the viral photos did indeed get married during a two-day celebration in their native town of Xaltianguis, Acapulco. However, although the groom looks like a primary school student, he is actually a 19-year-old man named Jonathan who suffers from a rare disorder that stems his growth and makes him look much younger than his years. Despite his condition, Jonathan managed to find the love, and last weekend he and his fiancee tied the knot in front of family and friends.

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On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.

Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son’s one-month anniversary with his wife, when a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates. He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.

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Colombian singer Maluma is one of the world’s most popular reggaeton stars, but while millions of people love listening to his hits, one jailed Mexican official claims he has been driven crazy by Maluma’s music after police “tortured” him by playing loud reggaeton non-stop for 10 days straight.

Gilberto Aguirre Garza, the former director of the Attorney General’s Office in the Mexican state of Veracruz, was jailed in April for his alleged involvement in the concealment and alteration of evidence relating to the mass burial of 13 human bodies. On January 19, 2016, the remains of 19 victims of enforced disappearance allegedly perpetrated by public servants of the Public Security Secretariat of the State were discovered in a place called La Barranca de La Aurora. However, prosecutors claimed that Garza instructed personnel under his command to report the finding of only 6 bodies, a charge that he has always denied. The jailed official’s lawyer recently told reporters that, in an effort to force his client to admit to the crime and denounce other public servants, the current Verracruz Governor and the state’s Attorney General have been subjecting Garza to music torture.

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