#traditions

Brenda Willison, a town crier in Newmarket, Suffolk, England, now holds two Guinness World Records titles: loudest town crier (female) and loudest shout by an individual (female), Guinness World Records announced. On Sept. 9 she cried "oyez" at 105.9 dB (C-weighted), which Guinness compares to standing next to a snowblower or a blasting car horn. She said she had a cold and expects she can get louder.

She has been a town crier since 1987, when the Peterborough paper advertised for one. Unknown to her, her daughter wrote in that if Willison shouted "chips" outside one café at the country park where she worked, people could hear it at the other, a mile and a half away. Since then, Guinness says, she has cried at Buckingham Palace for the Queen Mother's 100th birthday and Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, and at the bridge over the River Kwai in 1995.

A sculpture of La Catrina, the elegant skeleton of Day of the Dead imagery, standing in Mexico City's main square is now the Guinness World Records holder as the tallest Catrina monument, Popular Science reports. At nearly 110 feet, roughly 11 stories, the steel-and-fiberglass figure tops the 92.3-foot Catrina built in Puerto Vallarta in 2023.

About 140 people assembled it. Her purple dress is more than 88 feet long, and the ofrenda (memorial altar) around her is surrounded by an estimated 70,000 marigold plants grown in the Xochimilco borough. Day of the Dead is observed on Nov. 1 and 2.