5 New Year’s Celebrations From Around the World That Went Thoroughly Wrong

Be careful how you choose to ring in the new year. A get-together with friends will probably go fine, but some holiday parties go horribly. Maybe your merrymaking will bring on disaster. Or maybe you’ll do nothing wrong, but disaster will strike nevertheless. Let’s hope your New Year’s goes better than any of the following awful ones from around the world. 

1. The Bullet That Wasn’t Noticed
2. The Bullet That Was Noticed
3. The Big Crush
4. The Missing Cat
5. The Hotel Blast

The Bullet That Wasn’t Noticed

In 2010, a man in Germany discovered a painful swelling on his head. It had to be something like a cyst, he figured, and he put off having it examined, but he eventually did visit a doctor. The hospital discovered that the sore spot surrounded an embedded 5.6 mm bullet. 

The 35-year-old man had not suffered any recent gunshot injury. Forced to explain the bullet, he now recalled having hurt his head on New Year’s Eve five years earlier. At the time, he had considered this to be just a blow to the skull, and he hadn’t tried hard to investigate what had happened, as he’d been very drunk.

The hospital notified police, as is standard with all gun injuries, and police believed his account. Evidently, this was not a story he’d made up to cover up some crime. It does not appear that someone pointed a gun right at the man and fired, but it is possible that someone fired a gun in the air in celebration, and one bullet stuck itself in this patient’s skull as it came down. 

Perhaps he got off lucky. In Puerto Rico, New Year’s Eve celebratory gunfire kills an estimated two people every year. 

The Bullet That Was Noticed

Reynaldo Dagsa, a councilman for a suburb close to Manila, spent most of the evening of New Year’s Eve 2010 sleeping. He told his family to wake him up right before midnight, so they could all experience the big moment together. Dagsa took a photo of his wife, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. 

The media went on to publish this photo. In addition to the three family members, the picture shows a man pointing a gun at the camera because an assassin used this opportunity to shoot Dagsa dead. The rest of the family didn’t hear the gunshot over all the sounds of firecrackers going off. They just saw Dagsa fall down, and they rushed him to a hospital, where doctors failed to revive him. 

Thanks to the photo, police identified the shooter as Arnel Buenaflor, a member of a gang who opposed Dagsa’s crimefighting efforts. Buenaflor went into hiding, but a further twist of fate let them quickly find him. His girlfriend accidentally dropped her phone while the two fled town on a bus, and when police found it, they realized roughly where the two were headed. 

Buenaflor received a sentence of life without parole and lost a new appeal late last year. 

The Big Crush

If you find yourself outside in a big crowd on New Year’s, you might feel a few pangs of claustrophobia. What would happen, you might wonder, if everyone around you starts stampeding and you have no way of getting out? Take comfort in knowing that open spaces, like city squares, let crowds maneuver quite freely. The real danger comes when these crowds funnel through a choke point. Doorways are one choke point. Stairs are another.

In Shanghai, the top spot for bringing in the new year is the Bund, a waterfront area that offers a great view of the city’s skyline. Chen Yi Square, a part of the Bund, has a set of stairs that takes people to a slightly higher level of the Bund. On New Year’s Eve 2014, the crowd fell forward over each other on these stairs, crushing 36 people to death. 

Over 300,000 people gathered on the Bund, but they likely would have been fine but for those stairs. Going down stairs like this creates what is known as an arch phenomenon, in which a descending crowd applies a large force on a few key people who buckle after receiving just a small amount of surface stress. 

As it happened, city organizers had actually anticipated the risk of a crowd gathering there that year, so they’d moved the official New Year’s celebration elsewhere. Unfortunately, they did not announce this till December 30, so most people who’d been planning to come to the Bund went right ahead and did so.

The Missing Cat

London resident Marna Gilligan threw a New Year’s party in 2008. Also present was her cat, named Moon Unit. By the end of the party, Moon Unit was no longer present. It had vanished, and years now went by without Gilligan hearing from it again.

Eight years after that party, an animal shelter phoned Gilligan to say that they had found Moon Unit, and they had obtained her contact info from a microchip Gilligan had implanted under the cat’s skin. This would be an unusual development under any circumstances, but it was particularly strange because this shelter was Aide et de Défense des Animaux en Détresse, a facility located in Paris. To get to Paris, Moon Unit must have boarded a boat, taken a plane, or hunted down the narrow tunnel connecting the two countries. 

You might assume that some human picked the cat up in Britain and took it to the European continent before abandoning it. If that did happen, they must have smuggled it illegally. Border crossings examine all animals, and since Moon Unit had a microchip, Gilligan would have received an alert had Moon Unit been taken through any crossing through legitimate means. 

Were this a story about a dog, we could end with a video of the overjoyed pet reuniting with its master, but Moon Unit is a cat, so no such footage is available. 

The Hotel Blast

The Dutch have a New Year’s tradition called carbidschieten, involving homemade explosives. You pour water into a steel milk can, and then you add calcium carbide, a gray compound used to manufacture other chemicals. The reaction creates acetylene. Since you have closed the can, and the reaction creates pressurized gas, the lid soon blasts off with great force, and a ball of flame shoots out.

As you can imagine, this is a tradition best practiced outdoors. But even staging this outdoors and ensuring the lid hits no one isn’t enough to prevent all mishaps. A group of 10 men in the northern town of Joure set off some of these carbide cannons on New Year’s Eve 2010, and these cannons went off too early. The resulting explosions broke nearly every window in the nearby Hotel Anne-Klare.

Police interviewed the men, then let them go, and when the hotel owners asked to be put in contact with the culprits afterward, police refused. So, it fell on generous members of the public to compensate the hotel for what they had suffered. A fundraiser raised €2,170 for the hotel owners.

A second concurrent fundraiser raised €24,000 for the men who set off the cannons. Celebration is important, agreed the public, and it must be encouraged. 

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