Beaufort County had its share of weird and wacky stories in 2008

From bison roaming the streets of Bluffton to a man waking up to a raccoon in his bed to a woman driving a car without brakes while sitting on a cinder block, 2008 has been a sometimes strange year in southern Beaufort County.

Here are our picks for the most, well, unusual stories of the past year.

The cuddle

What some residents thought would be a cute baby raccoon turned out to be a costly cuddle.

In May, an Okatie family found a 3-week-old raccoon while visiting Wexford Plantation on Hilton Head Island.

They adopted the wild animal, held it, kissed it and fed it by putting their fingers in its mouth. They passed it around to 36 of their friends and relatives in Beaufort County and Georgia.

Of those exposed to the animal, 24 required rabies shots to prevent them from contracting the fatal, slow-moving disease. The other 12 did not need treatment because they did not touch the animal or come in contact with its saliva, which is how the disease spreads.

Twenty pets owned by those exposed to the disease also were evaluated for possible exposure, and 16 of those -- two dogs and 14 cats -- were quarantined for 45 days.

The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control investigated the incident to determine who could be infected. With shots totaling about $1,000 per person, the agency spent about $43,000 in vaccinations and personnel time.

The stampede

Six bison calves escaped from the Graves family farm in greater Bluffton on May 23, roaming through a largely suburban area before authorities shot and killed the animals.

Nine riders on horseback, the Bluffton Police Department, Beaufort County Animal Control, a helicopter belonging to a local construction company and the state Department of Natural Resources spent 10 hours trying to corral the spooked bison.

Authorities also tried tranquilizing the animals, but said the bison were too worked up to be sedated.

The animals spent the day roaming the nearby Island West golf course, the Woodbridge neighborhood, and the parking lot of the Berkeley Place shopping center, where they were ultimately killed.

The bison were buried on the Graves farm on U.S. 278.

The kitty

A Bluffton official was fined about $820 and suspended from work for two weeks for shooting and killing a kitten near his Verdier Cove Road home April 15.

Frank Hodge, director of the Department of Building Safety, was cited for malicious injury to an animal and discharging a firearm within town limits.

Mud Pie and owner Amy Longley had been sharing a ham sandwich on Longley's porch when her phone rang. The 7-month-old kitten started chasing a butterfly across the lawn when she went inside.

Minutes later, Longley said she heard three gunshots.

She crossed the street and found her kitten dead.

Neighbors told her that Hodge, 62, shot Mud Pie because he thought the animal was sick. Longley said Mud Pie had not been sick.

The cinder block

A few basic rules to determine if your car is road-worthy emerge from this cautionary tale.

Does it have a brake pedal?

Does it have a driver's seat?

For a 51-year-old Hilton Head Island woman, the answer to both questions was "no," but she decided to give the stripped-down Nissan a whirl anyhow.

She climbed onto the cinder block where the driver's seat should have been and began backing out of her Oleander Street home's driveway June 2.

As she got closer to the street, she went to apply the brakes, but found out the car had none, and didn't even have a brake pedal for that matter. So the woman jumped out, ran around back and tried to stop the car by pushing against it.

She ended up pinned against a palmetto tree.

Luckily, a sheriff's deputy happened to drive by a few minutes later and called for an ambulance.

The raccoon

This victim of this weird story involving a raccoon was lucky he didn't have a heart attack.

A 93-year-old resident of The Cypress on Hilton Head Island awoke Jan. 17 to find a raccoon had broken into his house and was now in bed with him.

"I was eyeball to eyeball with it," recalled Keith Ryan. "It was so close I could feel his whiskers on my face."

He pulled his blankets tighter so only his face was exposed. Ryan moved, and the masked bedfellow swatted his face.

When he flicked on a light, Ryan was amazed to see that the intruder was not a cat -- as he initially thought -- but was instead quite a bold raccoon. The animal swayed back and forth a few times and then scampered out the rickety screen door it had somehow managed to open.

A caretaker took Ryan, who had blood running down his face, to the emergency room. He was given a series of rabies shots.

"It was such odd, abnormal behavior," Ryan said of his attacker. "It was unbalanced -- It was goofy."

"I wasn't scared until later," he continued, "when I realized how close I came to being destroyed. I'm a survivor."

The lobster game

We've all seen the games at amusement parks and restaurants, where stuffed novelties can sometimes be lifted off with what has to be the most delicate, odds-stacked-against-you metal claw ever designed.

Replace those cheap stuffed animals with live Maine lobsters in a temperature-controlled aquarium and the simple carnival game became a late-night obsession for some Hilton Head Island bar-goers, who plunked down $3 a try.

The Lobster Game craze hit the island and Bluffton last spring, much to the chagrin of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Most establishments would cook up the winnings right before your eyes, or let you take "Pinchy" home for dinner or as a pet, or whatever.

At least one local bar pulled the game soon after getting it.

Some bar patrons had become so skilled at grabbing the squirming crustaceans that they could pilfer out three at a time.

Two Island Packet reporters, one of whom grew up on a New Jersey boardwalk, were not that adept.

It took them $40 and a couple whiskey drinks to score what had to be the most docile creature in the tank, which would have retailed for about $30 at Hudson's.

But then again, ordering one off the menu sort of defeats the thrill of the catch.

The machete

Motorists were shocked on June 14 when a white Ford Explorer sped past with three men inside, one of whom waved a machete out the window.

A deputy caught up to the vehicle on Marshland Road.

The three men were charged with having open containers of alcohol in the vehicle.

No word on what the heck they were doing with the machete. Alcohol does strange things to people.

The fork

As if a man stabbing his supposedly cheating wife with a fork wasn't gross enough, this owner of a Bluffton Mexican restaurant took things a step further.

The 34-year-old licked the fork clean and put it back in the silverware drawer. Yuck.

Police were unable to determine which one had been used.

The incident occurred Feb. 4 at Plantation Point Apartments, 897 Fording Island Road, when the man tried to stab his wife in the heart after an argument about infidelity.

He missed, instead stabbing her in the arm.

The man pleaded guilty June 10 and was sentenced to time served.

The oxymoron

No one's sure how they got here, but the waters off Hilton Head Island have become a home-away-from-home for some colossal-sized shrimp, weighing up to a half pound.

About seven Asian tiger shrimp were found by shrimp trawlers this year in the Hilton Head and Charleston areas. The species is native to southeast Asia, the Philippines and Australia. State biologists think they might have escaped from a farm in the Caribbean when tropical storms and hurricanes blew through the area. One will soon be on display at the Bluffton Oyster Company.