In September 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado, took an axe to a young rooster he was planning to eat for dinner. He chopped off the head. The chicken lived. The chicken kept walking. The chicken kept walking for the next eighteen months.

The farmer's name was Lloyd Olsen. The chicken's name was Mike. Mike was a five-month-old Wyandotte rooster. Olsen had been chopping the heads off chickens in the same backyard for years. He swung the axe. He picked up the head. He dropped the body in a sack. The body got up. The body walked over to its perch. The body tucked itself in, headless, for the night. Olsen decided not to eat it.

In the morning, Mike was still alive. Olsen took him to the University of Utah. The scientists examined him and worked it out. The axe had cleanly removed Mike's beak, comb, and most of the skull. But it had missed one ear. It had missed the jugular vein. It had missed the brainstem, which controls every motor function a chicken needs to do anything except eat and see. A small blood clot had sealed the wound. Mike could not eat. He could not see. But he could walk. He could perch. He could preen. He could attempt to crow, which produced a sad gurgling noise. Lloyd Olsen began feeding him with an eyedropper of milk and ground grain, and clearing his throat of mucus with a small syringe.

A travelling sideshow promoter named Hope Wade heard about Mike. He insured the chicken for ten thousand dollars and took the Olsens on tour. People paid twenty-five cents apiece to look at Miracle Mike, the Headless Wonder. Life magazine ran a photograph in the October twenty-second 1945 issue. At the peak of his fame, Mike earned the Olsens four thousand five hundred dollars a month, which is about sixty-five thousand dollars today. He toured Long Beach, Phoenix, and the American southeast for eighteen months.

On the seventeenth of March, 1947, the Olsens woke up in a Phoenix motel room to the sound of Mike choking. They had left the syringe at the previous night's sideshow. They could not clear his throat. They watched him suffocate. He was buried at the side of an Arizona highway, location now unknown. Every third weekend in May, the town of Fruita, Colorado, holds a festival in his name. They have been holding it since 1999.

I do one of these a day. Dead serious. Subscribe.