Meet Biddy, Michigan’s Headless Chicken Who Lived For 18 DAYS

Everyone is familiar with the phrase, "You look like a chicken running around with its head cut off", or something similar. When someone says this to you, they're saying that you look crazy or that you're doing way too much and need to relax.

But the phrase isn't just an oddity that has been passed down by generations, it is a phenomenon that really happens. Chickens really can run around after their heads are cut off. However, they don't typically live after that...except in rare cases like a chicken named Biddy in Michigan's Upper Peninsula who lived for an insane 18 days.

👇THE UPPER PENINSULA'S MUST-VISIT LOCATIONS👇

Biddy the Headless Chicken

Now, if you're thinking "How do you live without a head?", you're asking the right question. That is what made Biddy's situation so interesting.  Here's how this all happened:

On November 12th, 1904, Herbert V. Hughes, owner of the Belvidere Hotel in Sault Ste. Marie, was *cough* preparing the chickens for dinner and passing the now headless chickens along to one of the maids when she screamed from the other room.

To everyone's shock, the black Minorca hen was walking around the room. When chickens do this it usually only lasts for a few moments, but the headless hen was defying all expectations and refused to drop. So, instead of putting the chicken down, Hughes realized he could feed the headless hen using a syringe to directly inject food into the hen's exposed esophagus.

Biddy apparently continued walking, stretching, flapping her wings, and like normal. How I have no idea - but the enigma of this hen brought spectators to observe the feat of nature. Sadly (?), Biddy died on November 30th, a shocking 18 days after she was supposed to.

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How the hen functioned with no brain is beyond me, but the entire endeavor was documented in Reader's Digest in 1931.

How A Chicken Moves Post-Decapitation

When a chicken's head gets cut off, it may be losing its brain, but it still has plenty of the nervous system intact. So when the chicken loses its head, the other nerves responsible for body movement continue to function, causing spasms and other body movement.