Ziona Chana, a 66-year-old Indian with 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren, has topped Ripley’s Believe It or Not’s 11 strangest stories for 2011.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which boasts of being world authority on the “odd and bizarre,” commented that, “It’s a safe bet that Ziona Chana would not be impressed watching ‘19 Kids and Counting’ or ‘Sister Wives.’”
Chana married his first wife when he was 17 and claims to have wed 10 women in a single year. He lives with his family in a 4-storey, 100 room house in Baktawng village in Mizoram in Northeast India.
Ripley’s other bizarre stories from 2011 include:
• An Australian artist who had an ear transplanted on his arm;
• Renting the country of Liechtenstein for $70,000 a night;
• A Russian man who turned 29 female corpses into lifesize dolls;
• An Alabama company that turns cremated ashes into shotgun shells.