Top 10 drinking myths, legends and ancient rituals

A bear walks into a tavern

Apparently in 1891 a Russian man met his end at the hands of a drunken bear. The story goes that a man living in the Russian town of Vilna (now Vilnius), was offered a bear to keep as a pet by an unnamed individual who told him it was tame but had a taste for vodka. The man bizarrely accepted the gift taking the bear home.

One day the bear barged its way into a tavern and supposedly started glugging down a keg of vodka. The tavern owner tried to object, but the boozed-up bear mauled the innkeeper to death, before doing the same to his two sons and a daughter.

Villagers are said to have found the drunken animal asleep in a pool of blood and alcohol, at which point it was shot.