If we travel around the globe, we explore various cultures and traditions having some very exceptional traits. Cultures signify the geography, recognition, lifestyles and much more. However, if we study regarding the cultures in the different parts of the world, we may meet countless weird things too. No doubt, variety prevails and yes, strangest things do happen in this planet. If you love reading creepy things, you will absolutely enjoy the list of jaw dropping cultures all around the earth.  Here is how it goes:

Rapunzel of modern time

There’s a tradition of no hair-cut in Huanglo village, Guangxi state, China for two thousand years. The women of Yao community have to abide by the ritual. They have permission to cut off hair only once in a lifetime at the age of 18. One woman has already recorded a seven-foot-long hair.

Eklavya from The Mahavarata?

Women of the Dani Tribe of Indonesia cut off (by compulsion) a segment of one of their fingers to express emotion to a family member’s death. They believe it will satisfy the ancestral ghosts.

Before being cut off, the fingers are tied with a string for thirty minutes to numb them. Once amputated, the new fingertips are burned to create new scar tissue.

Africa’s Female Genital Mutilation

The practice involves cutting a girl’s vagina to create a seal that narrows the opening, making it just wide enough to allow the passing of urine and menstrual blood. Infibulated girls often have their legs bound together for up to four weeks to allow the freshly fused tissue to heal.

In most cases cutting is done by a traditional practitioner without any anesthesia and little care for hygiene. Razors, knives, or scissors are used and they are rarely sterilized. The surgery takes place wherever it is convenient, from out in the open to a bathroom floor.

La Tomatina

This is the biggest tomato fight in the world. La Tomatina, the annual Tomato Throwing Festival, held in the Valencian town of Buñol, Spain. It is held on the last Wednesday of August, during the week of festivities of Buñol. The participants throw tomatoes and get involved in this tomato fight purely for fun.

Thaipusam Festival Piercings

In Tamil Nadu, they celebrate their devotion to the birth of Lord Murugan and his killing of Soorapadman, a revengeful spirit, with a lance. They do this with painful piercings all around the body, including the tongue. The rituals have become more dramatic, colorful, and bloody overtime, with large spears and hooks through the chest and face – some devotees even pull large wagons with ropes attached to their bloody backs.

Endocannibalism

The Yanomami tribe of Amazon rainforest, near the border of Venezuela and Brazil, consumes the flesh of its own member after their death.

They wrap the corpse in leaves and allow insects to pick at it. After 30 to 45 days, the bones are collected, crushed, and mixed into a banana soup to be consumed by all. After a year, the villagers devour the ashes, which are mixed with plantain soup. According to ritual, this helps ensure that the spirits of the dead find their way to heaven.

Some of them burned the body and the ash and bone powder is mix into a plantain soup. His people then drink the plantain soup consisting of the dead person’s ash and bone. They believe that by ingesting the remains of a love one, his spirit will live within them forever.

Hanging Coffins

You can witness the countless suspended artifacts and occult phenomena on the chillingly steep cliffs along Yangtze River, China. People of China, some known as Toraja follow this weird culture wherein they burry their family members and hang them over some cliffs after death. You can observe many suspended coffins from the bottom of the cliff. Coffins are generally hung 33 to 164 feet high and some even as high as 328 feet above the ground. It is still not known for sure how the coffins were placed at such great heights.

Bullet Ant Gloves

When a young boy become mature in the Satere-Mawe tribe, before he can become a man he need to prove himself. And for that he should insert both his hands into specially made gloves for 10 minutes containing an angry hive of the most painful stinging animal on earth, the bullet ant. The sting from these ants has been compared to a bullet hitting the flesh. After enduring the pain for 20 times they can become men.

Living with The Dead

The Toraja people of Indonesia practice a truly singular ritual of exhuming the corpses of their fellow villagers. But it doesn’t end there: The corpse is draped in special garments and paraded around the village. Even the bodies of children and bodies that are decades old are exhumed.

The ritual is mainly carried out in order to clean the corpses, their garments, and coffins, and to ceremonially return the corpses to their home village. That is, if someone died outside the village, the corpse will be taken to the spot of death, then walked back to the village, as an act of returning home.

Kanamara Matsuri

It is the festival of steel pennies which occur on the first Sunday of April every year. Japanese people celebrate fruitfulness by holding the giant wooden phallus. They raise that phallus into the air and then march across the city. They believed that this celebration brings about regenerative abilities on the local crops and also ensures the fertility for everyone.

Also Read: World’s Most Weird Rituals And Festivals: Part II