World of the Bizarre

Mystery as someone tries to rename village after Winnie-the-Pooh

By T.K. Randall
September 15, 2024 ·  5 comments

Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet. Image Credit: Paul / CC BY 2.0 The peculiar mystery centered on Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire, a village that had long been associated with A.A. Milne's popular honey-eating bear and has even been the venue for the World Pooh Sticks Championships - a game played by Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends.

When villagers started receiving mysterious letters from someone who said that they were going to change the name of the village to "Pooh Village", however, things got a little bit weird.

The anonymous sender stated that there would be a "secret night-time guerrilla rebranding" of the entire place sometime toward the end of this year, a process that would involve - among other things - mounting large Winnie-the-Pooh logos "on entry arches over the road in and out of the village."

The sender suggested that this would turn the place into "the UK's answer to Disneyland"."I remain confident too that the villagers will be transformed from 'sticks stuck in the mud' to 'sticks freely floating upon the honeyed waters of progress'," they wrote.

Unsurprisingly, local residents were less than enthusiastic about having their home turned into a Winnie-the-Pooh theme park - especially without being consulted about it first.

The local council responded to the situation with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response of its own.

"We would not condone a 'guerrilla Pooh rebranding of the village' and the letter-writer must bear in mind that their proposals would need to [be] laid out in full and may 'Tigger' the need for consents first," officials wrote, while adding that the whole thing was a "great 'spoohf'".

As things stand, the identity of the individual responsible remains a complete mystery.

Source: BBC News | Comments (5)

Tags: England