11 Bizarre News Stories From 2020 That We Still Don’t Understand

Published December 27, 2020

The Weird News Of Human Tongues Found In A Florida Crawlspace

Jars With Human Remains

RedditA contractor working under a house discovered human remains in these creepy jars.

This next piece of odd news comes out of Gainesville, Florida, where a routine home inspection rapidly transformed into a criminal investigation. In February, a contractor discovered gallon-sized jars of human remains in the crawlspace of a house he was working on. Police quickly began to work on solving the macabre mystery.

One of the creepiest parts of this strange news story, however, was that some of the jars were labeled with names like “Angela” and “Heather.” The mystery deepened as the jars were opened to reveal preserved human tongues.

And yet, this weird news story had a surprisingly normal conclusion. The woman who owned the house had once been married to a man named Ronald A. Baughman, an oral pathologist.

Baughman studied oral cell carcinoma in the human tongues of identical twins at the University of Florida in the 1970s and 1980s. Baughman used the crawlspace as a cool dark spot to store his research materials. And after the divorce, he had simply forgotten about them.

An ABC Action News segment on the shockingly odd news that turned out to be weirdly normal.

Baughman’s ex-wife didn’t know about the jars full of human tongues, which resulted in quite an awful surprise when she decided to renovate the house.

Despite the corroborated claims and evidence in the form of university records, police made sure to identify each set of remains to guarantee no foul play was involved. In the end, this wild tale was one of the strangest news stories of the year — and yet it had a fairly mundane conclusion.

author
Marco Margaritoff
author
A former staff writer for All That’s Interesting, Marco Margaritoff holds dual Bachelor's degrees from Pace University and a Master's in journalism from New York University. He has published work at People, VICE, Complex, and serves as a staff reporter at HuffPost.
editor
Austin Harvey
editor
A staff writer for All That's Interesting, Austin Harvey has also had work published with Discover Magazine, Giddy, and Lucid covering topics on mental health, sexual health, history, and sociology. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Point Park University.
Cite This Article
Margaritoff, Marco. "11 Bizarre News Stories From 2020 That We Still Don’t Understand." AllThatsInteresting.com, December 27, 2020, https://allthatsinteresting.com/odd-news-2020. Accessed April 19, 2024.