You’d be forgiven sometimes for thinking that life was one long cycle of doom, gloom and disaster. And while it’s true that it’s very often the bad news that steals the headlines, it’s also the case that life is composed of light and shade. To round off the year, DAVID BARNETT delved into our files from 2010 to find the quirky, the odd, the strange and the downright bizarre stories that have made the news. A warning to the curious: In the following columns you will find the spooky and the unexplained, and for some reason, cats...

JANUARY We told you there would be cats, didn’t we? Our scene is a house in Commercial Street, Heckmondwike, where the resident, a woman, is blissfully unaware that a fire has broken out in the upstairs of the property… until her cat began to make, in her words, “strange noises”. You’ve seen Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, right? And Lassie? When animals make strange noises, always assume there’s something that needs your attention.

FEBRUARY Look, this one’s about a cat as well. Rocky, a much-beloved family pet belonging to a family living in Amberley Street, Bradford, went missing. His family had the presence of mind to contact an animal psychic in America who told them, over a telephone consultation, that Rocky was being held in a house with a red door and three steps leading up to it. Then Rocky turned up. He’d been in the shed all along. Still, nice to have a happy ending.

MARCH If you see a man around the environs of Shelf resting his head on a stick, don’t panic. It’s probably just Michael Addy, and he’s looking for water. Michael is a leakage technician with Yorkshire Water, and using a long wooden stick with a flat head, on which he rests his bonce, he can apparently pin-point the location of a leaking pipe up to 3ft underground.

APRIL Spring brought with it some much-welcomed renovation of Bradford City Centre, as part of the £1.6 million Heritage Streets Project. Part of that involved laying brand new stone setts to create a pleasing walkway along Tyrrel Street, Hustlergate and Bank Street, which was completed in April after a year’s worth of work. Not for long, though, as workmen almost immediately dug them all up again. The reason? An electricity company needed to get underneath to fix a cable. You couldn’t make it up.

MAY What gets a football club manager the boot? A string of losses? Dressing room dissent? How about singing a song? That’s the reason former Bradford City boss Chris Kamara gave for getting his cards at Valley Parade in his autobiography Mr Unbelievable. At an end-of-season bash he picked up the karaoke mic and regaled the guests with a version of George Gershwin’s Summertime… changing the words to relate to then-chairman Geoffrey Richmond. Ah.

JUNE Heard the one about the haunted pub? There were spirits behind the bar. Get it? Heard the one about the haunted social club in Haworth? There was a terrifying ghost of a five-year-old child from Victorian times roaming around after dark, probably the victim of some horrific 19th century murder or something. Hmm. Not laughing now, are we? Never fear, though, because here comes Keighley ghost-hunter Malcolm Hanson to investigate at the Parkside Social Club. But as one sceptic pointed out, the building wasn’t built until 1926, so why would a Victorian ghost be there? Beats me, Scooby.

JULY Nothing weird, strange or remotely humorous about the death of a 104-year-old lady. But Ivy Bean was perhaps missed more than most – she certainly received more tributes than any of the rest of us are likely to get, by virtue of the fact that Ivy, who died at Hillside Manor residential home in Barkerend, was known to be the world’s oldest user of social networking site Twitter. Tributes poured in from, among thousands of others, Stephen Fry, John Prescott and Girls Aloud.

AUGUST No cats here… the giant rats have scared them off! Or have they? A national tabloid splashed across its front page the “fact” that the Ravenscliffe estate in Bradford was plagued by giant rats, 2½ft long. Apparently, one Brandon Goddard, of Wakefield, had killed one of the monstrous rodents and posed happily with it for a picture. The residents of Ravenscliffe expressed puzzlement – they’d certainly not seen rats the size of cats. And why had Mr Goddard come all the way from Wakefield to kill our rats? We asked Mr Goddard to call us and clear it up. We’re still waiting.

SEPTEMBER According to a survey published this month, Yorkshire is a hot-spot for UFOs and alien visitations. Paranormal researcher Lionel Fanthorpe put out a survey of Britain’s spookiest places, and what kind of paranormal activity you can find in which areas of the country. The White Rose county scored highest for flying saucers and little green men.

OCTOBER There was a Halloween event at the St Ives estate in Harden, near Bingley, where a medieval monk rose from the dead (OK, he was an actor) to tell the 10,000-year history of the beauty spot, to tell stories about sightings of a “distressed lady”, a pale woman in old clothes, believed to be the ghost of Lady Blantyre, mother-in-law of famous landowner William Ferrand. No mother-in-law jokes at the back, please.

NOVEMBER Where’s your swimming pool? In the back garden? On the roof? What do you mean, you don’t have a swimming pool? Well, when you do get one, take a leaf from Garry Hudson’s book and do the proper Yorkshire thing with it – stick it in the cellar. Okay, so it’s not really a swimming pool. It’s a hydrotherapy pool. And it’s not really in his cellar – it’s in the basement of a Victorian butcher’s shop in the Aire Valley which Garry is transforming into an aqua clinic. But still – a pool in the cellar? Strange, that is.

DECEMBER And so to a nice Christmas ghost story to round off the year. Not quite the rattling chains of Marley’s ghost, but a ghostly orb which appeared at the reputedly-haunted Bolling Hall kitchen. Or it could just be a speck of dust illuminated by the flash? Chris Bristow took the snap, and he said: “We didn’t see or feel anything strange at the time, but when I got the pictures printed up, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Neither could we. Who’d have thought a major attraction like Bolling Hall could be so dusty? Only kidding. After our tour of the weird year from the Telegraph & Argus, we’re keeping an open mind. What about you?