What a Weird Week gets you caught up on the odd, interesting,
strange, fun, and weird news that happened this week. Ten stories in 15
minutes!
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Hi friends, I'm Scott and this is What a Weird Week, a look at the
odd, interesting, strange, fun and weird stories that made news this
week. See bottom of shownotes page for a transcript of the podcast
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These are the shownotes for Season 6, Ep 43 first published Fri Oct 17, 2025.
Thanks for rating and reviewing and also subscribing!
These are the shownotes for Season 6, Ep 43 first published Fri Oct 17, 2025.
Halloween Herm tries for World Record regarding all the Halloween stuff in his yard
Man grows large pumpkin. World reacts.
A lot of us are still scared of the dark. It's your fault, scary movies.
Home made license plate effort receives citation, and modest praise.
Diabolical cat ensures owner will order takeout by putting mouse in supper pot.
Runaway pumpkin terrorizes town.
Gorilla smashes the glass of its enclosure, people freak out.
Weird trick to remember childhood memories
Near death experiences are bad for your marriage.
Most Excellent Sea Turtle News!
https://www.popsci.com/environment/green-sea-turtles-not-endangered/
Rat Hole Research Revealed.
Transcript below.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
00:00
Mice and rats and evil cats. What a weird week. What a weird week.
00:12
This is like crazy boom here. Weird! Really weird, dude. Bigfoot peaked out of my trash. Well, I got a great joke for you. It was so wonderful. Weird stuff! Hi friends, I'm Scott and this is What a Weird Week. It's a show about the weird stuff that happened in the news. So we go back through the news, we pick out the weird ones, the odd ones, the fun stories, never the serious news. That's not what we do. And if you want to get our show notes or anything about our program, go to shownotes.page. Shownotes.page.
00:41
Here we go. Our episode dropping on Friday, October 17th, 2025. 10 is Halloween Herm in Kentucky. Halloween Herm has a lot of Halloween stuff in the yard and thinks it's world record worthy. Alexis Barton is there right in front of the home right now. Gotta say when they throw to Alexis, you can hear all the compressors in the background. There's a lot of inflatables, Halloween inflatables, and I guess the way they had to frame the shot or something, Alexis had to be there near all those compressors.
01:11
So right now I'm at this home on village green drive in cold Springs and you're right, Trisha. It's not as spooky yet, but you're about to see. You know what? It might be somebody mo it could be a neighbor mowing the lawn. This is one of a kind incredible today. I got to talk to the man behind it all Halloween Herm and he tells me not only is he trying to set that world record, but he's also trying to raise money for kids here in Kentucky.
01:36
Every year we aspire to get bigger and greater as we continue to tell our story and just try to spread joy. We will link to the video if you want to check that out or if you want to read the article, you can click show notes dot page. There's a backstory and it's a bittersweet, you know, sentimental reason why they go so all out for Halloween. And right now there is not a world record category for the most stuff in the yard for Halloween. That's what Halloween Herm wants. First, come on Guinness Book, make a category. And then second,
02:06
Come on Guinness book, give Halloween Herm the world record. And every year they do something for charity with it. So that's nice. Number nine is Brandon Dawson and his very large pumpkin, which won the 52nd annual world championship pumpkin way off. The pumpkin was 2,300 and some pounds. is coverage from local five news ABC.
02:33
I hope we don't get a copyright strike for playing the pumpkin song.
02:50
I love the crowd. I love the energy, the vibe. They're fantastic. People are jacked up for this giant pumpkin festival. But also I'm happy for Brandon. He came in second place last year. So this is kind of like redemption. I was in this position last year, but I lost by six pounds. This year was able to take the win. And that's really what the goal was this year was to was to win one of the best, if not the best pumpkin weigh-offs in the world. That's nine bucks a pound.
03:17
We're going to give you a check for $21,114. Yeah, baby. I love that too. And a lot of the coverage, they talk about how big the pumpkin was, giant heavy pumpkin. They don't get into the fact they buy the pumpkin for nine bucks a pound. So he's waltzing out of there with like $20,000 and something. To me, that's pretty great too. I mean, it's nice that it's a large pumpkin, but a large check.
03:45
Also nice. Number eight is the study. This is another one for the spooky season. How three in 10 of us are scared of the dark as adults. We're still afraid of the dark and we blame scary movies. And number one reason we're scared of the dark, scary movies. That checks out for me. If I sleep with the lights on, it's because I watched a scary movie and it freaked me out. Or sometimes it's just like, I'm too exhausted to, I forgot to turn the light switch off and now I'm too exhausted. And it's at least five steps across the room.
04:15
You win this time light switch. Couple other things in the study will link to it. I mean, one of the things is one in 10 of us still sleep with a stuffed animal or something to comfort us as we're, you know, lying there wide awake with the lights on terrified. I'll stop there on that one, but there's more. If you want to read the whole list of stuff that we admit to, to strangers when they call us for these surveys, you can click show notes dot page. Number seven.
04:43
Number seven is homemade license plate effort receives citation and modest praise. This happened in California. An officer noticed something strange, something off about the license plate of this vehicle, pulls them over. Turns out it was a hand drawn facsimile. It was art, a nicely drawn fake license plate. And apparently apparently apparently I've never been on
05:07
television before. Apparently every time, grandpa just gives me a remote after we watch the Powerball. Apparently the vehicle owners lost the original plate and I'm going to assume that in the spirit of owning the problem, instead of depending on someone else to, you know, get a replacement plate for them, they were like, we can probably make our own plate. Save everyone time. We'll just slap on a new plate. We can do that. And the article says,
05:36
Authorities were kind of impressed. Full points for creativity. You know, the California license plate iconic anyway. It's a beautiful work of art. If you want to see what it looks like, click show notes dot page. Number six. Number six is the diabolical cat who did something evil or perhaps hilarious, but trigger warning. This story originated from an SPCA in California, but it started making headlines. The photos are so very
06:04
triggering it was all captured on security footage Wendy the cat in California is clearly seen in the footage Dropping a mouse in a boiling pot the owner left a pot boiling on the stove and Wendy got up on the counter went to the stove Dropped a mouse in the pot. So I don't know what was in the pot originally, but it became mouse stew afterwards
06:30
That one's kind of gross to me and I think Wendy the cat might be evil, but perhaps it's hilarious or I don't have a cat. I don't know. Is that some sort of gift? Was Wendy trying to be nice? Nothing worse than when somebody's trying to be nice and they give you a terrible gift and you don't know how to react. Suddenly you're the bad guy. give you this mouse out of the kindness of their heart and now you're the bad guy because you don't want to eat the mouse. Anyway, if you want to see the photos, click show notes.
06:57
dot page. Honorable mention, mention, mention. Thought I'd throw in an honorable mention right here. The headline is Runaway Pumpkin Terrorizes Town. Where did that come from? Dude, I was kind of like following it and it kept blowing away. And when I went to grab it over here, it took off. That is footage provided by the Parma Heights Police Department. Police in Ohio had to pursue
07:26
a runaway giant inflatable pumpkin which got away from its display and terrorized the town. Really, I'm gonna... The article doesn't get into how much terror, but I'm just going to assume there was a great amount of terror. Anyway, the culprit was apprehended. five is Denny the gorilla at San Diego Zoo and the scary thing that happened... Well, I found it scary. The people who saw it happened.
07:49
We're scared, I guess everything's okay. Cell phone video captured by a witness shows a 10 year old gorilla named Denny at the San Diego Zoo charging the glass. The impact startling people who saw it happen, but no one was more shocked than Katya Sutil. We were actually looking down at our cell phones, so we didn't notice that he had like taken a running start, jumped and then launched into the glass directly in front of my face. And then this giant
08:19
crack and I mean this crack propagated probably six feet. It was pretty big. The impact broke the first layer of a three layered glass panel. No one was injured. So just to recap, the gorilla Denny runs at the glass, cracks the glass, freaks everybody out. Denny is okay. People are okay. The glass has a big crack. I think it's gorilla glass that they use for the enclosure. I'm not even making that up. I read that somewhere. Number four.
08:46
Number four is how to unlock your brain and remember stuff. And it's all science. This is wild to me, freaky. Maybe you have no trouble remembering stuff from when you were a little kid, but if you've forgotten things, they might not be forgotten. They might be locked in your brain. Here's how they unlocked people's brains. According to this writeup that we linked to, they were studying memory.
09:07
They had people watch a video of themselves, their face. So I'm there, I'm watching my own face. And as I watch my face morphs into a younger version of myself, so I'm seeing my face get younger and quote, people recalled more vivid childhood memories. That's all they did. They didn't take a drug or get hypnotized or I don't know, whatever other things. They watched a video of themselves getting younger.
09:33
They believe there's something about how we see ourselves when our brain sees ourself getting younger, something clicks and we're like, Oh yeah, I used to be younger. I remember that. And things get unlocked. I didn't explain it that well, but if you want to read the whole thing, show notes dot page, more research needed. I'll tell you what, if they follow up and this turns out to be true and they're like, yes, watching videos of younger you can unlock your brain.
10:02
That's going to be an easy one for most of us to do. We all have a million videos of ourselves and we love to watch ourselves on our devices. We're going to be smart like mental. Oh, number three, number three is new research into near death experiences. Now, if you don't believe in that stuff, please don't at me. There's more and more evidence that some people come back from this experience where they have clinically died and then are brought back to life or come back to life somehow.
10:32
they tell of an experience, you know, sometimes it's going towards the light. Sometimes it's seeing people from your past or feeling love, all those things. Sometimes it's a scary one. But anyway, this research isn't about proving if those experiences are real or anything like that. It's just what happens to people after they report having a near death experience. And one of the things ain't great. It ain't great.
10:58
People who report having a near death experience are more likely to have trouble in their marriage or relationship, sometimes in friendships and that, after they come back from the near death experience. One in five experiencers lose friends or marriages crumble. The article kind of gets into why. And one of the things they've noticed is that if you're a therapist or your doctor after a near death experience, if you talk to somebody and they validate your experience, they don't just say,
11:28
You're bonkers. If your experience is validated, you're more likely to have a better outcome as far as not losing your marriage or losing friends, that kind of stuff. Number two, big baby. So many people asked for a big baby update. So I thought I would do one. Here he is. What's that? That's you. This is how long he is against me. Now.
11:53
You say we're going to go for a walk? This is my son. He's 18 months old. He's just a big baby. Those TikTok videos getting a lot of views and now getting written up in articles because people think that's a Chloe Sappic. We link to Chloe's TikTok. People think the baby is AI, that it's all fake. It looks fake when you see it and you see so much AI slop nowadays that you're like, this can't be real and you move on, but it is real.
12:21
Chloe has a very big baby. Very big. If you don't have a chance to click the video, I'm just going to explain it. Big baby. It's cute. It'll make you smile. If you have a chance to click, we'll put a link in the show notes. Honorable mention. Some good news. The green sea turtle is no longer endangered. These are the turtles that can get up to 400 pounds at one point. While the quote is, they're splashing back from the brink of extinction. At one point it was touch and go.
12:51
as far as the green sea turtles. So seems like we're going in the right direction sometimes. There is some good news. one is rat hole revisited. So first, if you're unfamiliar with rat hole, it was a hole in the sidewalk, the shape of a rat in Chicago. At one point they tried to fill it in and people were like, no, don't fill in rat hole. People started taking photos with rat hole. It became a bit of a tourist destination and local lore. The rat hole, a rat.
13:21
RAT-SHAPED HOLE Researchers have been looking into rat hole and they've discovered something shocking. It might not have been made by a rat. Perhaps it should be squirrel hole. That's kind of the takeaway. Rat hole probably not caused by a rat. And equally as shocking to me, somebody did a study on rat hole. I love that. uh Okay, we're going to wrap up there. Thank you for listening.
13:50
If you want to get our show notes or anything about our program, can go to shownotes.page. I appreciate if you tell a friend, you like, you subscribe, five stars, I don't know, those things. And we'll catch you next Friday with 10 more weird things from the news, the fun stories, and sometimes good news on What a Weird Week.
Mice and rats and evil cats. What a weird week. What a weird week.
00:12
This is like crazy boom here. Weird! Really weird, dude. Bigfoot peaked out of my trash. Well, I got a great joke for you. It was so wonderful. Weird stuff! Hi friends, I'm Scott and this is What a Weird Week. It's a show about the weird stuff that happened in the news. So we go back through the news, we pick out the weird ones, the odd ones, the fun stories, never the serious news. That's not what we do. And if you want to get our show notes or anything about our program, go to shownotes.page. Shownotes.page.
00:41
Here we go. Our episode dropping on Friday, October 17th, 2025. 10 is Halloween Herm in Kentucky. Halloween Herm has a lot of Halloween stuff in the yard and thinks it's world record worthy. Alexis Barton is there right in front of the home right now. Gotta say when they throw to Alexis, you can hear all the compressors in the background. There's a lot of inflatables, Halloween inflatables, and I guess the way they had to frame the shot or something, Alexis had to be there near all those compressors.
01:11
So right now I'm at this home on village green drive in cold Springs and you're right, Trisha. It's not as spooky yet, but you're about to see. You know what? It might be somebody mo it could be a neighbor mowing the lawn. This is one of a kind incredible today. I got to talk to the man behind it all Halloween Herm and he tells me not only is he trying to set that world record, but he's also trying to raise money for kids here in Kentucky.
01:36
Every year we aspire to get bigger and greater as we continue to tell our story and just try to spread joy. We will link to the video if you want to check that out or if you want to read the article, you can click show notes dot page. There's a backstory and it's a bittersweet, you know, sentimental reason why they go so all out for Halloween. And right now there is not a world record category for the most stuff in the yard for Halloween. That's what Halloween Herm wants. First, come on Guinness Book, make a category. And then second,
02:06
Come on Guinness book, give Halloween Herm the world record. And every year they do something for charity with it. So that's nice. Number nine is Brandon Dawson and his very large pumpkin, which won the 52nd annual world championship pumpkin way off. The pumpkin was 2,300 and some pounds. is coverage from local five news ABC.
02:33
I hope we don't get a copyright strike for playing the pumpkin song.
02:50
I love the crowd. I love the energy, the vibe. They're fantastic. People are jacked up for this giant pumpkin festival. But also I'm happy for Brandon. He came in second place last year. So this is kind of like redemption. I was in this position last year, but I lost by six pounds. This year was able to take the win. And that's really what the goal was this year was to was to win one of the best, if not the best pumpkin weigh-offs in the world. That's nine bucks a pound.
03:17
We're going to give you a check for $21,114. Yeah, baby. I love that too. And a lot of the coverage, they talk about how big the pumpkin was, giant heavy pumpkin. They don't get into the fact they buy the pumpkin for nine bucks a pound. So he's waltzing out of there with like $20,000 and something. To me, that's pretty great too. I mean, it's nice that it's a large pumpkin, but a large check.
03:45
Also nice. Number eight is the study. This is another one for the spooky season. How three in 10 of us are scared of the dark as adults. We're still afraid of the dark and we blame scary movies. And number one reason we're scared of the dark, scary movies. That checks out for me. If I sleep with the lights on, it's because I watched a scary movie and it freaked me out. Or sometimes it's just like, I'm too exhausted to, I forgot to turn the light switch off and now I'm too exhausted. And it's at least five steps across the room.
04:15
You win this time light switch. Couple other things in the study will link to it. I mean, one of the things is one in 10 of us still sleep with a stuffed animal or something to comfort us as we're, you know, lying there wide awake with the lights on terrified. I'll stop there on that one, but there's more. If you want to read the whole list of stuff that we admit to, to strangers when they call us for these surveys, you can click show notes dot page. Number seven.
04:43
Number seven is homemade license plate effort receives citation and modest praise. This happened in California. An officer noticed something strange, something off about the license plate of this vehicle, pulls them over. Turns out it was a hand drawn facsimile. It was art, a nicely drawn fake license plate. And apparently apparently apparently I've never been on
05:07
television before. Apparently every time, grandpa just gives me a remote after we watch the Powerball. Apparently the vehicle owners lost the original plate and I'm going to assume that in the spirit of owning the problem, instead of depending on someone else to, you know, get a replacement plate for them, they were like, we can probably make our own plate. Save everyone time. We'll just slap on a new plate. We can do that. And the article says,
05:36
Authorities were kind of impressed. Full points for creativity. You know, the California license plate iconic anyway. It's a beautiful work of art. If you want to see what it looks like, click show notes dot page. Number six. Number six is the diabolical cat who did something evil or perhaps hilarious, but trigger warning. This story originated from an SPCA in California, but it started making headlines. The photos are so very
06:04
triggering it was all captured on security footage Wendy the cat in California is clearly seen in the footage Dropping a mouse in a boiling pot the owner left a pot boiling on the stove and Wendy got up on the counter went to the stove Dropped a mouse in the pot. So I don't know what was in the pot originally, but it became mouse stew afterwards
06:30
That one's kind of gross to me and I think Wendy the cat might be evil, but perhaps it's hilarious or I don't have a cat. I don't know. Is that some sort of gift? Was Wendy trying to be nice? Nothing worse than when somebody's trying to be nice and they give you a terrible gift and you don't know how to react. Suddenly you're the bad guy. give you this mouse out of the kindness of their heart and now you're the bad guy because you don't want to eat the mouse. Anyway, if you want to see the photos, click show notes.
06:57
dot page. Honorable mention, mention, mention. Thought I'd throw in an honorable mention right here. The headline is Runaway Pumpkin Terrorizes Town. Where did that come from? Dude, I was kind of like following it and it kept blowing away. And when I went to grab it over here, it took off. That is footage provided by the Parma Heights Police Department. Police in Ohio had to pursue
07:26
a runaway giant inflatable pumpkin which got away from its display and terrorized the town. Really, I'm gonna... The article doesn't get into how much terror, but I'm just going to assume there was a great amount of terror. Anyway, the culprit was apprehended. five is Denny the gorilla at San Diego Zoo and the scary thing that happened... Well, I found it scary. The people who saw it happened.
07:49
We're scared, I guess everything's okay. Cell phone video captured by a witness shows a 10 year old gorilla named Denny at the San Diego Zoo charging the glass. The impact startling people who saw it happen, but no one was more shocked than Katya Sutil. We were actually looking down at our cell phones, so we didn't notice that he had like taken a running start, jumped and then launched into the glass directly in front of my face. And then this giant
08:19
crack and I mean this crack propagated probably six feet. It was pretty big. The impact broke the first layer of a three layered glass panel. No one was injured. So just to recap, the gorilla Denny runs at the glass, cracks the glass, freaks everybody out. Denny is okay. People are okay. The glass has a big crack. I think it's gorilla glass that they use for the enclosure. I'm not even making that up. I read that somewhere. Number four.
08:46
Number four is how to unlock your brain and remember stuff. And it's all science. This is wild to me, freaky. Maybe you have no trouble remembering stuff from when you were a little kid, but if you've forgotten things, they might not be forgotten. They might be locked in your brain. Here's how they unlocked people's brains. According to this writeup that we linked to, they were studying memory.
09:07
They had people watch a video of themselves, their face. So I'm there, I'm watching my own face. And as I watch my face morphs into a younger version of myself, so I'm seeing my face get younger and quote, people recalled more vivid childhood memories. That's all they did. They didn't take a drug or get hypnotized or I don't know, whatever other things. They watched a video of themselves getting younger.
09:33
They believe there's something about how we see ourselves when our brain sees ourself getting younger, something clicks and we're like, Oh yeah, I used to be younger. I remember that. And things get unlocked. I didn't explain it that well, but if you want to read the whole thing, show notes dot page, more research needed. I'll tell you what, if they follow up and this turns out to be true and they're like, yes, watching videos of younger you can unlock your brain.
10:02
That's going to be an easy one for most of us to do. We all have a million videos of ourselves and we love to watch ourselves on our devices. We're going to be smart like mental. Oh, number three, number three is new research into near death experiences. Now, if you don't believe in that stuff, please don't at me. There's more and more evidence that some people come back from this experience where they have clinically died and then are brought back to life or come back to life somehow.
10:32
they tell of an experience, you know, sometimes it's going towards the light. Sometimes it's seeing people from your past or feeling love, all those things. Sometimes it's a scary one. But anyway, this research isn't about proving if those experiences are real or anything like that. It's just what happens to people after they report having a near death experience. And one of the things ain't great. It ain't great.
10:58
People who report having a near death experience are more likely to have trouble in their marriage or relationship, sometimes in friendships and that, after they come back from the near death experience. One in five experiencers lose friends or marriages crumble. The article kind of gets into why. And one of the things they've noticed is that if you're a therapist or your doctor after a near death experience, if you talk to somebody and they validate your experience, they don't just say,
11:28
You're bonkers. If your experience is validated, you're more likely to have a better outcome as far as not losing your marriage or losing friends, that kind of stuff. Number two, big baby. So many people asked for a big baby update. So I thought I would do one. Here he is. What's that? That's you. This is how long he is against me. Now.
11:53
You say we're going to go for a walk? This is my son. He's 18 months old. He's just a big baby. Those TikTok videos getting a lot of views and now getting written up in articles because people think that's a Chloe Sappic. We link to Chloe's TikTok. People think the baby is AI, that it's all fake. It looks fake when you see it and you see so much AI slop nowadays that you're like, this can't be real and you move on, but it is real.
12:21
Chloe has a very big baby. Very big. If you don't have a chance to click the video, I'm just going to explain it. Big baby. It's cute. It'll make you smile. If you have a chance to click, we'll put a link in the show notes. Honorable mention. Some good news. The green sea turtle is no longer endangered. These are the turtles that can get up to 400 pounds at one point. While the quote is, they're splashing back from the brink of extinction. At one point it was touch and go.
12:51
as far as the green sea turtles. So seems like we're going in the right direction sometimes. There is some good news. one is rat hole revisited. So first, if you're unfamiliar with rat hole, it was a hole in the sidewalk, the shape of a rat in Chicago. At one point they tried to fill it in and people were like, no, don't fill in rat hole. People started taking photos with rat hole. It became a bit of a tourist destination and local lore. The rat hole, a rat.
13:21
RAT-SHAPED HOLE Researchers have been looking into rat hole and they've discovered something shocking. It might not have been made by a rat. Perhaps it should be squirrel hole. That's kind of the takeaway. Rat hole probably not caused by a rat. And equally as shocking to me, somebody did a study on rat hole. I love that. uh Okay, we're going to wrap up there. Thank you for listening.
13:50
If you want to get our show notes or anything about our program, can go to shownotes.page. I appreciate if you tell a friend, you like, you subscribe, five stars, I don't know, those things. And we'll catch you next Friday with 10 more weird things from the news, the fun stories, and sometimes good news on What a Weird Week.
