Month: November 2017

Nags Head – Your Mama told you not to believe everything you see on TV, but that didn’t stop her from believing everything she sees on Facebook. You’ve seen them. Fantastically realistic photos popping up in your feed. Aliens, mermaids, tidal waves, you name it. You will never know what will pop up.

The artist behind it all is none other than local photographer Randy Snap.

“I started making these as a way to practice my Photoshop skills. I got so good at it, I thought I would share them with my Facebook friends. I had no idea people would start taking these so seriously,” said Snap.

“Y’all is this real?” said 48 year old mother of three, Wanda Creef, on Snap’s latest photoshop post.

“Oh mah gawd I can’t believe they having a dragon attack right now in Frisco!” said a gullible attorney from Corova.

“My great aunt Sarah from Illinois called me to make sure we was okay after seeing this photo. How is there still an island when the waves are this big?” Asked another confused local in the Facebook group.

“My great grandpappy Daniels always told me Mermaids were real! Now I have proof. Thanks for posting this and doing us all a service,” said a Wanchese man who calls the New York Times “Fake News.”

 

Dare County – A spike in vehicle breaking and entering crimes has plagued residents of Dare County for over three months now. By last official estimates 45% of vehicles in Dare County have been broken into. The thieves have managed to defeat all forms of security including car alarms, motion sensor lights and door locks. Now some residents are turning to a popular 90’s era anti-theft device that proved to be effective as it was controversial: the Trunk Monkey.

First developed by the Suburban Auto Group in 1999, the Trunk Monkey was offered as a special security feature in certain Ford and Chevrolet models. The monkey, a highly trained mixed martial arts chimpanzee, could be deployed by the driver at the push of a button or set to automatically deploy if the vehicle was broken into. Trunk Monkeys had a 99.7% successful deterrence and apprehension rate, but were discontinued after an accidental deployment resulted in injuries to a Portland City Meter Reader and a multimillion dollar settlement.

Fast forward to early November, 2017. Nags Head resident John Tidwell’s Ford Escape had been broken into three times in as many weeks. Fed up with the missing change and cigarettes, Mr. Tidwell went online to shop for security devices and discovered several Trunk Monkey systems for sale on e-Bay. He took a chance and ordered one. He reports being “very impressed” by the results.

“The first night I found some scraps of clothes and blood by the driver’s door and bloody footprints leading away from my yard,” Mr. Tidwell reported. “A couple nights later there was a finger and part of somebody’s ear. Needless to say, nothing was missing from my car.”

News of Mr. Tidwell’s success spread quickly and soon all of his neighbors had acquired their own Trunk Monkeys. Currently over 61 Trunk Monkey systems are deployed in Dare County and that number continues to rise. Mr. Tidwell’s brother-in-law, Michael Garland, a Kitty Hawk resident said Trunk Monkey use isn’t  just limited to vehicle security.

“Oh yeah, they’re pretty clever,” Mr. Garland reported. “I taught mine to kick the shit out of any dog that tries to crap on my lawn.”

Kill Devil Hills – The last recorded customer visited the Kill Devil Hills K-Mart in 1987. Rumor has it a band of loyal employees held out for years in the sporting good section, slowly regressing to a pre-anthropocene state of existence as their food supplies dwindled. The group was supposedly captured by the Smithsonian’s famed Seal Team – 7 and relocated to Nags Head Woods to allow them to continue to live unmolested by modern civilization in their primitive state.

Since then, Mother Nature has moved in and set up shop. Sounds of honking horns and announcements of “blue light specials” have been replaced by the bellow of wildebeests and the lonely cry of the African Fish-Eagle. The ugly gray walls of the store have been covered by vibrant bow tie vines and Herald’s trumpets. A family of Gambian pouched rats have taken up residence in the former shoe section and a lion pride has staked its territory in ruins of the gardening center.

“A remarkable cross section of flora and fauna has made the old KMart its new home,” said local animal expert and former KDH Animal Control Officer Jack Hannah. “I believe they were initially released by irresponsible owners who forgot to lock their pets’ cages.”

With the lease on the KMart property ending in 2018, the Kill Devil Hills Board of Wise Masters must now determine what happens next. The liberal wing of the board has proposed turning it into a permanent animal sanctuary and allowing Corolla Wild Horse Tours to expand operations into the area. The more conservative minded board members would like to bulldoze everything, turn the lions into rugs and build 28 new McMansions on the lot.

A public forum on the fate of the former K-Mart property will be held on December 29th.

NAGS HEAD – Mystery is no stranger to the Jockey’s Ridge in Nags Head. For centuries, scientists and archaeologists have probed inside the largest sand dune on the east coast. But until now none had stumbled upon a 100 foot long space hidden under its sandy surface.

Jockey’s Ridge contains a number of well documented artifacts, from the lost Putt Putt golf course to an antebellum version of the Nags Head Hotel. The shifting sands sometimes give passer-bys a glimpse of these artifacts from the past.

But what has remained hidden, and what researchers at the Outer Bank History Center feverishly hope lays within the mysterious chamber is essentially the Holy Grail of all Outer Banks archeology: the lost grave of Virginia Dare.

“Wouldn’t that be fantastic?” mused Brent Evans, lead historian at OBHC. “Finding Virginia Dare’s final resting place would fill hundreds of blank pages in our local history.”

When pressed for what those questions were, Evans pointed toward the window and shouted “Benghazi squirrel!” and dashed from the room.

Archaeologists plan to begin excavation on Monday to reach the chamber but they will have to work quickly: the sale of Jockey’s Ridge to local developer Saga Construction was recently approved by Dpt. of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Construction of a new subdivision is slated to begin January 1st.