Correction (8/9): Some elements of Deutsche Welle‘s story were originally misreported due to a miscommunication from local police. The men were actually in their late 50s, and had escaped from a mental health facility, not a nursing home, according to the Associated Press. They were found outside the festival at a bus stop.
On Friday night, two seniors disappeared from a nursing home in Germany without a trace, setting off a panic at their assisted-living center. It reported the elderly men missing, and the cops scrambled to track them down—ultimately finding them at 3 AM, “disoriented and dazed” at, of all places, the world’s biggest metal fest.
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According to Deutsche Welle, the hardcore geriatrics somehow wound up at Wacken Open Air, a gnarly, four-day fest featuring sets from bands like Judas Priest, Danzig, Dying Fetus, and Cannibal Corpse. The cops found them wandering around in a sea of more than 70,000 people, lost somewhere between the “Wasteland” stage and the “Metal Market” on this gigantic campground:
There’s still no word on how they managed to break out of their nursing home, make it all the way to the festival, and somehow finagle their way inside. Tickets to Wacken were completely sold out, which means the duo couldn’t have just walked up and bought a pair. Maybe they’d already gotten them, and this whole escape was months in the making—or, you know, maybe security just slipped up a bit.
You’d think the two escapees might be terrified by ear-piercing music, columns of hellish flame shooting from huge stages, and an army of metal heads moshing all around them, but according to DW, they were “reluctant to leave” when the cops showed up. The police drove them out of the fest—ruining their chance to catch Soen’s set at the “Headbangers” stage—and got them in a cab, which took them back to their nursing home.
“They obviously liked the metal festival,” a police spokeswoman told German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk.
It’s a bummer the aging metalheads got ripped away from Wacken before the fun was really over, but if they played their cards right, they got to see some pretty incredible stuff. Friday night featured sets from Hardbone, Dirt-A-GoGo, Clawfinger—the list goes on for fucking ever—and a little bit of live-band karaoke, which looked fun as all hell.
The details around the romp are still a little fuzzy, but the story has all the makings for a film— Robert De Niro’s next grandpa comedy, perhaps? If a friendly game of tag is a good enough story to get optioned, these seniors’ great head-banging escape should get the movie treatment, too.
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