The craziest story a friend ever told you that may have been true . . .

In My Humble Opinion
1

“May have been true” in the sense that you had no way of verifying it, but it was not physically impossible, and could have happened as they said it did. This is my submission:

When I worked out west I got to know a guy named Al who sold ads for a publication housed in the same building where I worked. We’d spend time shooting the shit, and he told me how when he was around 19 years old 20 years earlier living in Florida he was friends with a guy he later learned was a big-time drug dealer. This dealer friend asked Al and another guy to drive a car of the dealer’s from Florida to Detroit and “drop it off.” (Al acknowledged was young and stupid, and had no idea what may have been going on. The dealer was in prison at the time, but Al had no idea how big-time this guy was; he thought he was in jail for having pot or something minor.)
So Al and his buddy go get the car and take off. Everything is uneventful until they are in northern Ohio, and pulled over on the highway for some reason. The cop runs their plates and asks to search their car. They refuse. A shit-storm ensues. A detective shows up, and all but demands to search the car. They keep saying no (where they got this much spine as teenagers is what makes me wonder if this is a tall tale). The detective tells them he can get a warrant to search the car; they respond by asking how long that will take, as they’ve already been detained for HOURS. The detective then gets in their face and says they can go, but if they go one mph over the speed limit they will pull them over and throw them in jail. They drive off, and a squad car follows them all the way to the state line.
They arrive at a restaurant in Detroit where they’re supposed to drop the car off totally freaked out. They call a contact phone number they’ve been given and tell the guy who answers they’re leaving the car there with the keys inside. Before they can even walk off the lot a big sedan roars up and two guys get out. One orders them to stay where they are and “DON’T FUCKING MOVE.” The other guy gets into the car and does something in the back seat, then gives the first guy a thumbs up. The first guy says “thanks” to Al and his friend, and gives them $5,000. In cash. They take a bus home.

So, while I found this tale incredible, I have to admit it COULD have happened. Any other submissions?

2

I thought a cop could search your car for pretty much any reason he cared to come up with. From the story, it certainly sounds like the cops had some reason they were so interested in the car - is it not possible for the cops just to come up with something and search it?

3

I once had a coworker who had such great weekends (flying, sky diving, riding very fast motorcycles, trips to Vegas, etc.) that we all lived vicariously through him on Mondays.
He had a great store of stories, most of which I believe are true. The only one I found a little hard to believe was his tale of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
He was at a club, on the 2nd floor balcony. The streets below were full of the usual parties and crowds. He had a cup of beer in his hand. A limo appeared, making its way slowly down the street through the crowd. A friend of his said, “Hey, I bet you can’t throw your beer and hit the sunroof of that limo!”
So of course, he tossed the contents of his cup in through the open sunroof.
Cops saw the flying beer, stormed into the club and up onto the balcony. They arrested him on the spot, as he was the only person standing there with an empty cup.
He said the gumbo in jail was actually really good, and they only held him overnight.

4

Nowhere near as scary as the first story -
Mark is walking in the Arlington-Notre Dame neighbourhood in Winnipeg. The area is down at the heels, but not a massive death trap like North Main. As he passes an alley, a homeless fellow of indeterminate age says “Pssst - Buddy. C’mere.”
Mark steps into the alley, curiosity peaked. The homeless guy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a dirty scrap of paper cut from the news. It shows an article about Venus with a blurry photo of the planet. The guy points to the photo and says “Leavin’ Thursday - wanna come?” Mark stammers his way through a polite refusal “No, I can’t, really - I’ve got exams that week and I really don’t want to miss out a full year.” The homeless guy gives him a funny look, re-folds the newspaper cutting and tut tuts, saying “Too bad - coulda used you.” Mark continues on his way, and the guy fades into the surroundings.
To this day, Mark regrets not going with this fellow at least until he got to see whatever it was that this guy had built or borrowed or whatever that he thought would take him to Venus.
The other weird thing was that Mark never saw this guy again, despite the fact that his girlfriend lived around there and he ended up moving to that neighbourhood about a month later.

Other than the fact that this sounds like the first chapter of a magic realism novel, I’ve no real reason to disbelieve him…

5

Despite what you see on COPS, no they can’t. I take it you’ve never had a civics course?

6

This is a story that I only half believed for a few years, then I got proof that it had happened.

When I was twenty and lived in Maryland, I met a guy who was a reptile nut like me. We met through a mutual friend, and he got me a part-time job at the venom lab where he worked. We extracted venom from snakes, toads and spiders. One of the things we did while we were working was tell each other stories about our reptile hunting adventures.

My friend told me about a trip he made to Florida while he was in high school. While exploring in some woods near Cross City, Florida, he and his friends came upon an abandoned military or industrial building. The roof was mostly gone, but the poured concrete walls, at least 30 feet high were intact. The floor of the building was littered with roof material and other debris, so it looked like a good place to look for snakes and lizards. One of the guys was looking at the top of the walls and noticed what he believed to be part of a snake’s body sitting on top of the wall hanging over a little bit. Closer inspection with binoculars revealed it to be a Gulf Hammock rat snake, a locally common variety that was quite exotic and rare to these boys from Baltimore. How to get at it? These were city boys who had outfitted themselves for the Florida trip as though they were going to the jungles of South America. One of them had a machete. They went outside and chopped down a 40 foot pine tree with the machete. They then dragged the tree into the building, propped it against the wall, climbed to the top, and caught the snake.

When I first heard this story, it was about 5 years after it was supposed to have happened. My friend still had the snake, but I thought that the story of its capture may have been embellished a bit or entirely made up. Then, about 3 years after that, I went on a trip to Florida with my friend. He no longer had the topographic map he had used to find the building years ago. We went to a lot of places in Florida, and we planned to pass through the Gulf Hammock area near Cross City, but we really didn’t have a specific plan to find the scene of the story. My friend didn’t think we could find it, and I took that as further evidence that the story may have been untrue.

As it happened, while we were exploring near Cross City, looking for abandoned or little used roads into dense forests, we stumbled upon an old poured concrete building. My friend said it looked like the one, but might not be. We went in, and there in the corner, still leaned against the wall and reaching to the top, was a pine tree with a hacked-up bottom. We didn’t see any snakes up there, but I climbed to the top just to prove to myself that it could be done.

Those guys were certainly determined to capture that snake!

7

Ditto. The key point is they ASKED to look in the car. Most people (especially dumb criminals) think that when the cops ASK to look in their car they don’t really have the choice to say no, and the cops reinforce that impression by being pushy and aggressive about it. (Ever notice how in “Lae & Order” the officers just stroll right into peoples’ apartments? In real life they have absolutely no right to do such a thing.) But to search without your permission, they need probable cause. If they are asking permission, that means they DON’T HAVE probable cause. If a cop pulls you over and asks “Have you been drinking?” and you say “Yes,” well, you’ve just given him probable cause.
In my friend’s case, they probably didn’t have probable cause because neither he nor his friend had a record, and their car had not been reported stolen. The police knew who it belonged to, but that alone didn’t give them a right to search it. They tried to bluff their way into letting Al and his buddy give them permission to search, which works 99% of the time. That it didn’t this time must’ve pissed them off royally.

8

I’ve heard this one from my parents a zillion times.

One day my Dad came home from work, and told my Mom that he saw the strangest thing on the drive home. He was stuck in traffic on a residential street in Manhattan when all of a sudden a kangaroo hops over the stopped cars. KANGAROO??!?? Then a bunch of kids run by, chasing after the kangaroo and yelling “Suzy! Come back! Come back, Suzy!!”

My Mom, after a few :rolleyes:, smelled his breath, and decided that even though he hadn’t been drinking, this story was not to be believed. So she didn’t. Most emphatically did not believe in Suzy the Manhattan Kangaroo and the “Our Kangaroo Gang”.

A few months later my Dad came home from work, and my Mom has his favorite dinner ready. She is dressed up, and is being very nice to him. Respectful, friendly and deferential - suspiciously so.

“OK,” asks my Dad, “what’s going on?”

Well it seems that afternoon my Mom was watching the Mike Douglas Show (the story’s from the mid-to-late 1960s). Mike guests included a young couple who trained animals for TV shows and commercials. They keep the animals in their Manhattan apartment, and train the animals to get used to the noise and crowds of the set by taking them around the neighborhood to walk and play with the neighborhood kids. The had dogs, cats, birds, lizards, etc. They had a real scare with Suzy the kangaroo a few weeks ago. She got spooked by something, jumped over some traffic and almost got away. Luckily the kids managed to catch her and get her home safe.

Yes - it really happened! :eek:

So when my Dad told my Mom he saw a kid get run down by a rabbit[sup]1[/sup], she HAD to believe him.

[sup]1[/sup]Allegedly, the kid was riding a bike slowly, when the rabbit ran into the bike’s wheels. This stopped the bike, and the kid fell over. Then the rabbit got away. Probably beaming “Please don’t eat me!!” thoughts at everything the whole time.

9

That is 100% believable. I went to college in New Orleans and lived there year round for 4 years. It has a reputation for being lawless and it is in a way as long as you just get drunk in the streets and don’t bother anyone. You can be piss drunk on the streets, probably snort coke in open sight and even be mostly nude and nobody will say anything.

However, at least pre-Katrina, the New Orleans police were known as the best crowd control police in the world as the city swells to 3x its normal size and most of the newcomers were high or drunk most of the time. the things that the police absolutely crackdown on instantly are any sort of vandalism or disruptions in the parades. They will break out the batons, issue a beat down if you press the issue, and send you off to these massive holding cells that the have specifically for Mardi Gras. The judicial system simply can’t handle the number of people that get arrested every day during the Mardi Gras season. Throwing beer into a limo is bad, bad, bad as is climbing light poles or peeing on someones house. They absolutely do not tolerate that and they have to beat back the crowds either on foot or horseback 24 hours a day. Unlike most places in the U.S., this is way less than far from rare and happens basically continuously 24/7 making for tense police controls where the ratio may be 1000 to 1.

I worked in a very nice hotel and, during Mardi Gras, we got to do things to people that would be a TV expose and lawsuit in other places. We physically removed (as in picked people up against their will including 60 year old ladies) an average of 10 times a day. It wasn’t to be mean. We just had to maintain complete control of the place 24/7 and that is hard when you have 300 hundred people blasted out of their mind trying to steal everything and take over parts of the hotel so that they could have sex with someone they met an hour ago.

If you have never been to Mardi Gras, it will be hard for you to imagine. It has norms and standards in both directions but everyone from the police to the bar bouncers do not hesitate to get physical or arrest just because that is the only way it would work without a drunken zombie mob destroying the whole city.

10

This point is nicely shown in The Maltese Falcon, the scene about halfway through where detectives Dundy and Polhaus are trying to get into Spade’s apartment (also containing for the moment O’Shaughnessy and Cairo) but he won’t budge. “Not without a warrant.”

Then there’s the sound of a scuffle from within and Cairo screams, “Help!!”

“I guess we’re going in,” Dundy says and Spade let’s them – the scream gave the cops probable cause.

To get back on topic, a co-worker years ago told me how he had a job scamming magazine subscriptions. He’d call in the middle of the day all excited about free subscriptions (with a small handling fee that came to more than a paid subscription would) and nip over to try to get the (usually) housewife to sign up before hubby came home. After six months, he quit because his conscience was bothering him. The first week on his new job and he gets home. “Guess what! We’re gonna get some free magazines!” his wife tells him. He hadn’t told her anything about the former job.

Karma, he thinks but asks is the guy has shown up yet. He hadn’t and just then the doorbell rang. He chased the guy off with a growl, then sat his wife down and told her what’s what.

11

I had a friend who grew up to be an inveterate liar. He wanted to be a producer, and inflated his Hollywood experiences. He would lie about big things and little things. I came to believe that half of what he said was unbelievable, and he was lying about the other half.

So after not hearing from him for many months I tells me this story about how he was asleep in bed in a house some ‘friends’ were ‘letting him use’. A couple of guys broke in and beat the crap out of him, and locked him in a closet where he nearly died before being discovered three days later by his girlfriend.

:dubious: Yeah, right. (<== A double-positive making a negative.)

Well, I googled his name and the city where he was living. Amazingly, I found a newspaper article describing his ‘torture’ (word used in the article) that actually confirmed what he’d said.

12

Told to me by my mother:

After my maternal grandmother died, my mother misplaced the gold watch that used to belong to her (that is, gran’s watch) - she was distraught by this and searched everywhere, but could not find it. She read her horoscope, part of which said “The gold watch is inside the cushion cover” - she looked inside the cushion covers on the sofa, and found the watch.

Possible explanations:
-Weird coincidence (is that phrase ever used idiomatically just to mean ‘good things are where you’re least likely to look’?)
-She’s lying to me
-She’s deluded
-Someone played an elaborate hoax on her

13

I don’t see any reason not to assume that one. Some horoscopes do include ridiculously specific information like that: just by random chance, one of them will be right, at some time, for someone. Which is presumably why they do it.

Everyone knows a chance in a million turns up nine times out of ten.

Your lucky colour is green, and your lucky fish is herring.

14

It worked for Uri Geller, so maybe…

15

We were sitting around the camp fire, a bunch of men (well, little more than boys, but we thought we were men) drinking beer and busting each other’s stones.

One guy was from an area known locally as being redneck and jokes were told about them having sex with sheep. (XXXX County, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.)

One of the guys there - a friend had brought him so he was new to the group - started telling us how best to perform this act. He said to take the sheep to a cold stream and place its front feet in the water. The sheep apparently then tries to back out. He also described in vivid detail how it felt…

I was never sure if he was having us on or not.

16

I have never attempted sex with barnyard animals, but I have handled a lot of sheep, and good luck trying to “place their front feet” anywhere.

My crazy story, one of many, comes from my Archie Bunker great uncle who fought in the Korean War. He tells a story about him and a bunch of buddies taking a tank for a joyride, robbing a bank, and throwing the cash to people as they tanked their way down the street. May or may not be true, but it’s a great story!

17

Yeah, but if you do it that way, you can’t kiss them.

18

Aren’t herrings supposed to be red? Or are those only the misdirecting ones? Perhaps herrings with good directions are green.

19

Growing up with a slew of uncles who, at family get-togethers, would spend hours telling stories and reminiscing, I heard a lot of whoppers. Most of them were at least plausible, but unconvincing in detail or demeanor, or more damning in my mind, too convincing in detail. Most of these stories veered heavily into the profane, if not into the outright pornographic. I’ve got a few I could share – I’ll start with this one:

I remember my uncle Walt telling a story about him and a buddy picking up a young hooker at a motel in Nevada. The buddy happened to have a briefcase full of porno magazines and a camera, and he managed to convince the hooker that he was a professional photographer. Thus began a night filled with debauch, all with photographic proof, except that they ran out of film after 4 rolls. My uncle described, at length, the variety of contortions and acts they put the poor working girl through. In the morning, they took the girl to breakfast, then lammed it – leaving her with the check, and no payment for the nights services.

My uncle’s character was such that the story was believable, but the situation seemed improbable, at the least. A few years later, uncle Walt was storing some personal effects at our place, and I was snooping through them. I came across a shoebox full of very interesting photos – about 4 rolls worth.

20

Your uncle sounds like the most horrible person you’re likely to meet in your life.