Too Strange Not to Be True

My last post mentioned drug and alcohol addictions. This story relates to that theme. If I had stayed up all night I could never have invented this. I checked it on the "urban legends" sites for its veracity and as I did not find it there it seems to be true. Here goes.

A southern Florida resident named Nathan had his house burglarized recently. Thieves ignored his wide screen plasma TV, his VCR, and even left his Rolex watch. What they did take, however, was a generic white cardboard box filled with a grayish-white powder. (That's the way the police report described it.) A spokesman for the Fort Lauderdale police said that it looked similar to high grade cocaine and they probably thought they had hit the big time. Later, Nathan stood in front of numerous TV cameras and pleaded with the burglars: "Please return the cremated remains of my sister, Gertrude. She died three years ago."

The next morning, the bullet-riddled corpse of a local drug dealer known as Hoochie Pevens was found on Nathan's doorstep. The cardboard box was there too, with about half of Gertrude's ashes still remaining inside it. Scotch taped to the box was this note which said: "Hoochie sold us the bogus blow, so we wasted Hoochie. Sorry we snorted your sister. No hard feelings. Have a nice day."

Emma Ertle's Mother

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. That saying is true regarding Emma Ertle and her mother Magnolia. Magnolia was just as eccentric in her youth as her daughter is now. Magnolia, like Emma, had bright red curly hair and big blue eyes. As a young woman, Magnolia spent time in the big city of Houston going to secretarial school and flirting with many interested males. She lived in a cheap apartment at the time. One night she apparently saw something amiss in a lighted window in an apartment across the street. She called the Houston police. "Please come quickly!" she pleaded. "There's a man being indecent across the street." When a policeman showed up, he asked Magnolia to show him where the man was. Magnolia pointed across the street to a lighted window above hers. "I don't see anything," the cop said. "Oh, you can't see him from there," Magnolia explained. "You have to stand on this chair."