Nobody likes claiming on his or her auto insurance. The questions that the assessors ask can be extremely difficult to answer, especially as you’re usually worked up after an accident anyway. However, as the insurers themselves say, as long as you tell the truth and are claiming for an event that is covered by your car insurance
then you’ll soon receive your payout.

When you consider the telling the truth bit of that previous sentence, it makes you wonder whether the following claimants are actually being completely honest or whether they just have an overactive imagination.

Here are the 12 weirdest auto insurance claims ever:

1. “A deer head-butted the windshield of my car. I think it was being enticed by the disability badge I had on display” – This occurred in a rural area by all accounts. In those areas, a deer going head first into the windshield of a car is nothing out the ordinary in itself, but the badge comment might have been going a little too far. After all, would a coloured dot on the front of a car moving at 50mph mesmerise you?
2. “A frozen squirrel fell off a branch of the tree overhead and came crashing through the windshield onto my passenger seat” – I’ll be that the driver had the shock of his life, but I’d love to know whether he meant literally frozen or just really cold. Maybe the squirrel was trying to warm himself up…



3. “I parked beside a hedge in a local country lane to go fishing, but when I returned to my car I found that two horses had chewed it” – This is one of the more ludicrous excuses but it does leave a lot of questions open. For example, chewed what exactly? Are there big ole horse teeth marks all over the car? From where I’m standing my car doesn’t look very appetising so I doubt very much any animal would want to eat it.
4. “A pheasant jumped over the hood of my car and flew into the windshield. This caused me to lose control of the car, mount the kerb and flip over” – This would scare the life out of me. The attack of the pheasants can’t be a pleasant experience, but they tend to run under the wheels rather than flying up onto the hood. It can’t have been very humorous for the guy sat in the driver’s seat, but I would have loved to have seen his face.
5. “I was waiting at the traffic lights when a wasp went down my right trouser leg. It made me put my foot on the accelerator and smash into the car in front” – A painful experience no doubt, but how did the wasp manage to get down the trouser leg in the first place? Surely it would have flown up it? Either way, if I were driving the end result would have been the same.
6. “I drove round a cure in the road when my door flew open and a frozen kebab launched itself out of it. The kebab then hit and damaged a passing car” This has to be the weirdest excuse for claiming on auto insurance ever. How a kebab managed to fly I don’t know, but figuring out what happened must have been extremely confusing.
7. “I couldn’t put my foot on the brake because my credit cards were wedged under it” – How did the credit cards get there in the first place? I could just imagine the panic, and the looks on the insurer’s face when he read that one.



8. “My car was hit by a sofa when I was driving home last night” – Err, what? A sofa? More details are needed. Was anyone driving the sofa? Was it watching where it was going? More importantly, was it insured?
9. “The car in front barked suddenly and I went right into the back of it” – This is obviously a misspelling, but I’d be willing to bet that it would have caused plenty of laughs in the auto insurance office. Cars barking… whatever next?
10. “My wife just ran into the door of the garage, causing it to buckle” – I hope she was in the car before she ran into the garage door because if she wasn’t then a straight jacket would probably be in order.
11. “A cow fell off the cliff and crashed right onto the top of our van, which was on the highway” – This is just plain scary. Cows falling off cliffs and straight onto a car? That’s more than enough to put me off driving in the shadow of cliffs for the rest of my days. I bet onlookers couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
12. “I hit a lamp-post because it was obscured by human beings” – I’m not sure what I’d be more worried about if I was a claims adjuster – the fact that he’d hit the lamppost or the fact that it was obscured by humans and he might have meant to hit one of them. Surely the lamppost wasn’t in the middle of the road so he must have mounted the kerb. At least nobody was hurt in the end.