The county of Staffordshire, in central UK, is home to a mysterious and rather eerie attraction – an old oak tree with branches shackled in heavy metal chains tied to a creepy local legend.

The story of the Chained Oak near the village of Alton is the most famous legend in Staffordshire. It is said that one day during the 1830’s, as the Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to his home at Alton Towers estate a beggar woman stopped his carriage in the middle of the road and asked him if he could spare a coin or two. The earl cruelly dismissed her and urged the driver to move on, at which point the woman allegedly cursed him to lose a member of his family whenever a branch fell off a magnificent oak on the side of the road.

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Emil Egan was born and raised in Essex, United Kingdom and speaks no foreign language, but hearing her speak you could swear she is a Russian immigrant or tourist, because of her Eastern European accent. But the funny thing is that she sometimes sounds French, Italian or even Polish, depending on how tire she is.

31-year-old Emily’s life changed dramatically in January, when a mysterious condition left her unable to speak for two months. She had complained about headaches for two weeks before one day developing a deeper voice out of the blue. Her colleagues at a children’s home she was managing in Bournemouth then noticed that her speech had become slow and slurred, both indicators of a stroke. By the time she was rushed to the hospital Emily had lost her ability to speak completely, but after running some tests, doctors ruled out the strike, instead blaming her voice loss on some sort of brain injury.

After spending three weeks in the hospital, Emily Egan was still unable to speak and relied solely on basic sign language she had picked up at work and a text-to-speech app on her phone to communicate. Emily was discharged to a neurologist who encouraged her to go on a vacation in Thailand she and her partner Bradleigh had already booked, and to try and relax as much as possible. She did just that and a few days into the vacation, she started to speak again.

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A 45-year-old Englishman has sued the woman he went on a date with for refusing to inform him that she suffered from cold sores and thus knowingly infecting him with the herpes virus when he kissed her.

Martin Ashley Conway, from London, in the UK, claims he was left traumatized by the aftermath of a romantic date he went on last year. After meeting a woman who he knew as Jovanna Lovelace on dating website Meetup.com, Conway claims they went on a romantic date which also included a kiss. Only instead of being a sign of great things to come, the kiss turned out to be the beginning of a nightmare for our protagonist. Days after the couple’s night on the town, Martin started developing flu-like symptoms and mouth ulcers which made eating difficult and painful. After being referred to a hospital, the London-based fitness instructor was diagnosed with “the lifelong virus of herpes simplex virus” and prescribed medication.

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A disgruntled painter and decorator took revenge on the person who allegedly refused to pay him the sum they had a greed on by painting an angry graffiti message on the building he had painted.

People passing by the former North Star Club building in Bolsover, England last month were surprised to see a peculiar message painted in black over the cream exterior – “Want your house painting? Don’t be like Terry, pay the bill! Now you will!” It was the work of Dean Reeves, a local painter and decorator who claims that he was hired to paint the building, which is being converted into flats, for a fee, but that the client refused to pay him £500 ($645) of what he was owed. Sick of being asked to do jobs that he hadn’t initially agreed to in order to get paid, the 50-year-old painter decided to teach his client a lesson.

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A 30-year-old from Sheffield recently made news headlines in the UK for spending £425 to rent a billboard on the side of a busy road in Manchester in hopes of finding a date.

Mark Rofe has been single for a year now, and using online dating apps hasn’t really made a difference, so after joking with a friend at a pub that he’d be better off advertising himself on a billboard, he realized that wouldn’t actually be a bad idea. So he set up a website featuring a witty biography where he invites female visitors to apply for a date with him. The billboard has been up for a few days now, but he has already been contacted by 100 people. Sadly, 50 of them have been men.

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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 driver in West Yorkshire, UK, luckily escaped with only minor injuries after accidentally blowing up his car while in it, by trying to light a cigarette after spraying an excessive amount of air freshener.

Passers-by and residents on Fountain Street, in Halifax, were startled by a powerful explosion at around 3.30 p.m. on Saturday. Witnesses said the blast was “enormous”, damaging the windows of several businesses and shaking up entire homes. People took to Twitter to report the blast minutes after it occurred, and while some indicated that it was a car explosion, no one new why it had blown up. Few could have guessed, really, as it’s not every day that cars get blown up by excessive use of air freshener.

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If you’ve ever had to go to work with a splitting headache after an alcohol-fueled long night on the town, you can probably appreciate this company’s policy of giving employees “hangover days” off work to put themselves back together.

Let’s face, we all wish we could call in sick to work after having one, or five, too many drinks the night before, but for most of us that’s not an option. But the same cannot be said for the young people working at The Audit Lab, a digital marketing agency in the UK, where a specific hangover policy allows them to take time off to deal with the nausea, headache, and overall foul mood that hangovers come with. In a nutshell, this intriguing perk lets employees work from home if they are suffering from hangover, and as long as they don’t abuse the policy by taking time off to often, they can even schedule the days off in advance when they know they will end up wasted.

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A 35-year-old mother of three was on trial this week for allegedly pushing her ex-husband and her new boyfriend – both of whom desperately wanted to be with her – into fighting for her hand in “a latter-day medieval duel”.

Asta Juskauskiene, a care worker living in London, UK, has been accused of being a “manipulative and controlling figure” who pushed two men fighting for her affection to settle their differences through violence. A court recently heard that the woman’s ex-husband, 42-year-old Giedruis Juskauskas, was found bleeding in the streets and was later pronounced dead as a result of suffering multiple stab wounds in a bloody street brawl with Juskauskiene’s new boyfriend, a 25-year-old ex con named Mantas Kvedaras. The Lithuanian national admitted to the killing, but the prosecution says they have ample evidence that he and Giedruis were egged on by their common love-interest.

According to prosecutors, Asta Juskauskiene divorced her Giedruis, against his wishes, six months before his brutal killing. They had a five-year-old daughter together and were reportedly still intimate even after the divorce, so he was a constant presence at her home. The man also provided financial support for their daughter and according to prosecutors he still claimed Asta as his own. His ex-wife had other plans, though.

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Ian Hemmens, an 81-year-old former burger van worker from West Sussex, in England, was recently sentenced to nine months behind bars for aiding an alleged drug dealer flee the country while allegedly working as his getaway driver.

Life as a pensioner can get pretty boring and lonely, so much so that some people will do anything for a chance to chat with another human being, even act as an accomplice in serious crimes. Ian Hemmens’ layer recently told a Portsmouth Crown Court that his client was prepared to act as a driver for drug dealers Mahamud Sami and Akeem Adebayo, because it simply gave him the chance to talk to someone. The criminals in turn were glad to have him, because a man of his age, with his unassuming physique, was less likely to draw cops’ attention. Despite hearing the explanation for Hemmens’ involvement with the known criminals, Judge Roger Hetherington convicted the 81-year-old to nine months in prison.

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Part extreme reality TV show, part social experiment, “Meat the Family” follows four meat-eating families for three weeks as they interact with the animal that they enjoy eating most. At the end they are forced to make a choice between going vegan or eating their pet.

The premise of Meat the Family is that the three participating families have to treat the animal that most frequently appears on their plates like a pet for three weeks, and then decided whether it goes to an animal sanctuary or into their bellies. Deciding whether the animal lives or dies is one thing, but having to choose between going vegetarian or eating the animal you got to know for three weeks is just crazy. Over the course of the show, the four UK families will have to spend time with their pet, taking it for walks and playing with it, but also travel around their country to learn about animal welfare, farming and production, food processing, as well as the impact that eating animals has on the environment.

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A 71-year-old man in the UK reportedly spent almost 30,000 pounds ($37,000) fighting a 100-pound speeding fine over several years, but in the end sill lost the case.

Retired engineer Richard Keedwell’s troubles began in November of 2016, when during a day trip to Worcester, he was clocked by police doing 35mph in a 30mph zone. Only he didn’t agree, and recalls having his day ruined by the notice of intended prosecution (NIP) he got in the mail a few days later. He was convinced he couldn’t have been speeding, so he put down “no case to answer” on the document where he was supposed to write how he pleaded to the charges. Furthermore, he hired a video and electronics expert to prove that there must have been something wrong with the police speed camera. Little did he know this was the beginning of a long and expensive legal battle.

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Valerie Sanders, a 58-year-old woman from the UK, spent 17 hours in jail after being charged with “controlling behavior” after allegedly nagging her husband to clean the house instead of his car.

Valerie’s troubles with the law began in April of 2018, when during a routine check at her husband Michael’s workplace Jobcentre UK staff noticed he was in a bad mood. After asking him about it, they learned it was because his wife was constantly asking him to clean and polish the family home and complaining that he spent too much time at the gym and cleaning his car. Apparently, this qualified as “coercive or controlling behavior”, an offense punishable by law, so police turned up at the Sanders residence in Catterick, arrested Valerie and threw her in jail for 17 hours. She was charged with controlling behavior and was forced to fight a legal battle for over a year.

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An elderly couple in the UK claimed that they were held hostage by a pair of seagulls nesting on the roof of their Lancashire home. Every time they tried to leave the birds would become aggressive and attack them.

Roy and Brenda Pickard’s story sounds like a real life version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Birds”. The elderly couple were held hostage in their own home by a pair of adult Herring Gulls after the birds’  chicks slipped on the roof of the house and landed onto the canopy directly above the front door. Every time Roy tried opening the front door, he was confronted by two angry squawking adult seagulls. One time, when he decided to take his chances and go outside, the 71-year-old was hit so hard on the back of the head that he had to be taken to the hospital for help. Local authorities have installed a gazebo outside the couple’s home, which should offer some protection, but that’s the best they can do for now.

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Dozens of shoppers at a Lidl supermarket in Gloucestershire, UK, recently reported mysterious anomalies with their car alarms and central locking systems which left them unable to leave the parking lot.

There’s something fishy going on in the parking lot of a Lidl supermarket in Kingswood, a suburb on the eastern side of Bristol City, but nobody knows what’s causing it. Last month several articles in the media reported cases of shoppers being unable to lock and unlock their cars or disable their alarm systems, and dozens of other people shared similar experiences in the comments section and on social media. At first, most of the “victims” of this bizarre phenomenon though the batteries of their car alarm keys had died, but the symptoms persisted even after changing the batteries. Some think it might have something to do with the Internet-based traffic cameras installed in the car park, which may be blocking systems, but the supermarket chain claims that’s very unlikely.

A Lidl spokesperson told The Mirror that the internet-based cameras don’t transmit a signal that could interfere with that of an alarm key, but admitted that they have no idea what’s causing so many of them to malfunction in this particular location.

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