E. Reid Ross - Bizarre World: A Collection of the World’s Creepiest, Strangest, and Sometimes Most Hilarious Traditions

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Spitting on newborn babies to keep away evil spirits?

Sucking down a glass of bats blood for health?

Showing up at your neighbors door with a horse skull and expecting to be let in, no questions asked?

Totally strange, right?

Sure, people take their own customs for granted, but those customs can look pretty bizarre when viewed from a distance. But the truth is, the world is bubbling over with weird customs, rituals, festivals, and overall general weirdness. And in these pages, youll find plenty of weird to go around, including:

Camel wrestling in Turkey

A roadkill-cooking contest in the United States

Teeth sharpening in the Mentawai Islands

Turning deceased relatives into jewelry in South Korea

Stuffing ferrets down your pants in England

Thankfully, some of these customs only happened in the distant past, but some of them are still going on today, even if theyre not quite as extreme as they used to be (and some of them are pretty damn extreme!). But if you read about enough of this bizarre stuff, you may get some insight into why in the world anyone participates in these things. Or maybe youll just sit in slack-jawed wonder, amazed at the things people do (and did) to themselves and others in the name of tradition.

Who knows? Maybe youll even find a ritual you want to add to your own life! (Though it might be good to avoid the Philippine practice of hanging up coffins containing your dead relatives around town. In most parts of the world people tend to frown on that sort of thing.)

Anyway, lets get started on our bizarre journey. Warning: Great strangeness ahead!

Okay, sure, in every society on earth, you can safely bet there are customs and superstitions to keep babies healthy and safe from harm. Harmless little rituals that dont do any lasting damage to an infants self-esteem. Except in the case of Greece. Where they spit right in their fat little faces.

Hawking a loogie directly into a newborns innocent mug is just one of the ways Greek people incorporate casual spitting in their daily lives. Not that it always involves an actual hunk of phlegm. Some Greeks just make a ftou sound. If you hear someone going, ftou, ftou, ftou, dont worry; theyre just warding off the evil eye (with the three spits representing the Holy Trinity). Fishermen have been known to ftou onto their nets to help them catch more fish. Not the kind of fish that get regularly invited to fancy dinner parties, well assume.

Greeks also believe that when you sneeze it means that someone, somewhere, is thinking about you. If you ask someone for three random numbers, add them together and match the result to the corresponding letter of the alphabet: It will be the first initial of whoevers doing the thinking.

But back to the baby spitting thing. What its supposed to accomplish is to keep the devil at bay, because we all know that what the ruler of a realm filled with sulfur, brimstone, and everlasting torment hates most is a little saliva. If you have trouble believing that people would do such a thing to an innocent child, just watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding again. Look for the scene where the main character, Toula, explains to her husband-to-be that her family is not, in fact, insane but is spewing onto a young member of the brood to keep it free from Satans clutches.

Surprisingly, Greece isnt the only place where spitting on wee folk is considered normal:

In Bulgaria, not only do you spit on the kid; after the deed is done you must exclaim, May the chickens poop on you! to make the baby seem less appetizing to dark forces.

The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania spit at one another in greeting, and newborns get a faceful at birth.

Infants get the same treatment in Mauritania, as Wolof tribal elders will spit into kids ears and rub it all over their heads like a slimy salve. This is supposed to convey blessings, as saliva is believed to hold the power of words. As their saying goes, Like honey in water, speech, good or bad, dissolves in saliva which retains part of its power.

The Igbo tribe of Nigeria believes that oration skills can be passed on by an elder chewing some alligator pepper, spitting the results onto a finger, and then sticking that finger into a babys mouth. Yum!

A Sneeze of Great Portent

The Ancient Greeks thought sneezes were signs of prophecy. In 401 B.C.E ., the Athenian general Xenophon delivered an inspiring speech to his men, encouraging them to fight despite being completely surrounded by Persians. At the conclusion one of the soldiers let loose with a sneeze. It was considered such a good omen that everyone immediately bowed down.

The origins of the Greek habit of launching saliva projectiles at unsuspecting tots likely have roots in pre-Christian religion. Compared to some of their other customs, it seems downright boring. For instance, in Greek Christmas folklore hideous, deformed goblins called kallikantzaroi spend most of the year underground, sawing away at the World Tree in an effort to destroy the earth. But when December 25 rolls around, right before the Tree is about to collapse, theyre allowed to venture up to the surface. There, they forget all about their global destruction plans and spend the day playing pranks on humans. Presumably you can keep safe through an adequate amount of spitting. Other early holdovers include a fear of Tuesday (not Friday) the thirteenth and a superstition about shoes: Leaving them lying around sole-side up after taking them off could lead to a grave case of bad luck. Maybe even death. Theres also a belief that when you and someone else say the same thing at the same time, its a bad omen. When that happens its believed youll both have an uncontrollable urge to fight, so to prevent a violent incident the parties must say, piase kokkino , meaning touch red. The two then must find something red to touch to make everything hunky-dory (possibly wine, which could easily make a fight go away). And, go figure, spitting on one another might even help de-escalate the situation.