Maldives Election Trouble: Cursed Coconuts

Residents of the Maldives elect a president tomorrow, and the final week of the campaign has brought the world's weirdest election worry: coconuts cursed with black-magic spells. Police confiscated a coconut inscribed with suspicious-looking symbols that had been found near a polling station on Kaafu Atoll, reports the Australian. They brought in a "white magic" practitioner who deemed it a fake. After that, a woman on another island found a batch of suspicious coconuts and turned them into police.

Turns out, her husband had received them from a black-magic practitioner and was supposed to deliver them to certain locations, but he didn't tell her and left them lying on the bed. So what's going on? "During elections black magic is used to gain votes and make people ill,” a self-described exorcist explains to the local Minivan News. “The black magic will attack them mentally, by demanding the individual think a certain way even if they would normally know something is bad." (More strange stuff stories.)