Anybody home? A forensic pathologist looks down a horse.   Paranormajournalist: A round-up of crazy stories that have caught the eye of Barney Flock. This month: the curious tale of a stupid dead old lady called Alice.

Stranger things have happened.

Alice Hooper, an elderly woman of 86, was found dead last week in an armchair in her house in Oxford. Nothing strange there, old people die all the time and in all sorts of places. But what IS strange here is the cause of Ms Hooper's timely demise.

The autopsy on Ms Hooper revealed that the cause of her death was Horsely Chokington, or - in layman's terms - choking on a horse.

When her distraught neighbour Theodore found her, Ms Hooper had, in Ted's own words, "blown up like a fucking balloon, [she] was all swollen up all over her tummy like a fat man." Ted also states that her mouth was full of "queer hair-like material" - material that turned out in fact to be tufty horse-mane hairs.

There is more to this story than initially meets the eye however, and it doesn't stop there.

Further investigation with scalpels found out that the equine remains which filled Alice from lips to arse contained a secret of their own. Yes! An autopsy was performed on the horse and it was found to contain a cow inside it. Forensical smart-arses don't know how Ms Hooper swallowed a cow. They then examined the digested bovine corpse only to discover a partially chewed goat, which experts believe must have preceded the other two animals down the late Ms Hooper's throat.

A pattern was forming by now and the scientists were not surprised to find a dead dog (Labrador, black) within the goat. The dog's insides were the final resting place of a tabby cat, which itself was full - but of what? They soon learned it was full of bird, a female canary to be precise, with a spider inside her. The spider was examined carefully using tweezers and a strong magnifying glass, and boffins discovered a dead fly in its stomach.

It is thought Ms Hooper swallowed the fly two weeks ago, and in a state of confused elderly panic ate the succeeding beasts in a deranged, futile and ultimately fatal attempt to get rid of it.

It is still not clear why she swallowed the fly.