There’s a lady who’s weird / all that glitters is weird / and she’s weirding a stairway / to weirrrrrd…
STAIRS: A woman in Queensland, Australia, called police in August 2009: An angry cow had climbed the stairs to her front door and was attempting to get into her house. Police went to the woman’s home and made the cow mooove along.
STAIRS: Naeema Screven of New York City was hurrying to get to her subway train in 2008 when she ran down an “up” staircase. A transit cop stopped her, pepper-sprayed her, put her in handcuffs, arrested her, and took her to jail. Screven sued the city for $3 million. The “Down the Up Staircase Case” is still pending.
STAIRS: An Italian man was headed to his 40th high school reunion in the city of Trieste when his car’s satellite navigation system told him to make a right turn. He did—right down a staircase. The car bounced down two flights of steps before finally coming to a halt. A special tow truck had to be brought in to pull the car back up to the road, and, 90 minutes later, the man finally made it to his reunion (with a really funny story to tell).
STAIRS: In 2009 an exercise promotion team sponsored by Volkswagen installed pressure sensors—to produce musical notes—on a staircase next to the escalator in a subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. They also painted the steps black and white to make them look like piano keys. Result: the number of people who used the musical stairs rather than the escalator increased by 66 percent. (And the number of “chopsticks” related homicides increased by 400 percent. Kidding.)
STAIRS: Chinese media reported in 2006 that an elderly couple was discovered living in a cave in a mountain range in south-central China. They’d lived there in almost complete seclusion for more than 50 years. The husband had carved a staircase into the mountainside, the story said, to make it easier for his wife to get up and down the mountain. There are more than 6,000 steps in it. It had taken him decades to construct.
Annual cost of untreated mental illness in the United States: more than $100 billion.