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Elderly Men In Germany Escape Nursing Home To Attend World’s Largest Heavy Metal Festival
The men were “disoriented and dazed” when police found them, reportedly reluctant to leave the Wacken Open Air Festival.
What started out as a missing persons situation was revealed to be a sitcom-esque escape plot after two elderly men in Germany slipped out of their nursing home to attend a heavy metal musical festival last week.
The two men, whose identities have not been shared, went missing from the nursing home on Friday, prompting staff to alert police, who later found the two men at the Wacken Open Air festival, German outlet Deutsche Welle reports. The four-day event is the largest heavy metal music festival in the world, according to the outlet.
According to a police spokeswoman, when police found the men at around 3 a.m., they were “disoriented and dazed,” Deutsche Welle reports. The men were reluctant to leave, but were escorted home by police in a taxi and patrol car, the outlet also reported.
“They obviously liked the metal festival,” Merle Neufeld, a police spokeswoman, told German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, according to DW. “The care home quickly organized a return transport after police picked them up.”
The 29th run of the festival — which featured headlining acts like Judas Priest and Danzig — sold out this year, with 75,000 people expected to have been in attendance, Deutsche Welle reports.
In a possible nod to the story, the festival’s official Twitter account posted a tweet on Monday applauding elderly fans “because you're never too old too [sic] rock.”
[Photo: Fans celebrating the performance of the band Skindred during the Wacken Open Air festival on August 4, 2018 in Wacken, Germany. By Gina Wetzler/Getty Images]
