truth still stranger than fiction, film at 11

courtesy of SFGate: Florida Police Search For Naked Tickler

(07-22) 05:35 PDT New Smyrna Beach, Fla. (AP) --

Police are on the lookout for the naked tickler. Investigators said they believe one man could be responsible for a series of bizarre break-ins in which a naked man enters victims' rooms while they are sleeping and tries to tickle their feet.

The naked tickler struck again in New Smyrna Beach over the weekend.

Investigators have been working on five similar, unsolved cases since 2001. Most of the victims are women over age 60, said police Cmdr. Wade Kirby.

Kirby said no arrests have yet been made because they don't have a lot to go on.

New Smyrna Beach is 44 miles northeast of Orlando.

words fail.

in other weird news

the fascinating, strange, and sad story of Philip Schuth.

Often, he pictured himself dead, lying on an autopsy table.

"I just wanted to be alone," he says.

And in his loneliest moments, Philip Schuth would disappear into his basement and stare at that freezer.

Investigators say Schuth put his dead mother, 86-year-old Edith Margorie Schuth, in that freezer the day she died. An autopsy would show her kidneys and heart gave out. They say he filled it with ice, which during the next 4½ years hardened into a solid block.

[...]

Does he consider himself looney?

"I'd say I'm not exactly in the 90 percent average people," he says. "Not too many people would be willing to live in a house under the conditions I allegedly was living under, and would be constantly afraid that somebody was going to inflict physical injury upon them. I'd say that's strange, it's not clinically insane."