In 1945 a farmer in Colorado went to kill a chicken for dinner. He botched the job, not quite killing the chicken, leaving the brain stem intact. Basically, the chicken had no head. Quickly named 'Mike', the chicken continued to live for the next 18 months!
As you can imagine, in 1945 a headless chicken was a rare sight (remember, there was no TV then!). So the farmer went on tour. He was featured in Time and Life magazines. At the height of his side show career, Mike the Headless Chicken made it's owner $4800 in one month.
Mike died one night, he choked to death. I can't say I blame him.
They now have "Mike's Festival" every third weekend in May. That would have been last weekend! I missed it! If you are ever in Fruita, Colorado, make sure to see it and leave a comment here. See Mike's website here. He even has a Facebook page.
Others tried to make their own headless chicken (can you blame them?) but nobody could make one that would last more than 2 days. Yuck.
More details are at Wikipedia. I got the picture from there also.
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