After reading Christopher Frizzelle’s celebrated recent feature “Bleak House,” I was relatively certain of one thing: It was unlikely that I would ever read a more disturbing story involving the word tan.

Then came this report from SkyNews , about the British woman who rented a sunbed from the Staffordshire firm Supertan. After setting the timer for twelve minutes and positioning herself in the machine, the woman found herself pinned beneath the collapsed (and electrified) canopy, which delivered a shock strong enough to knock her unconscious—for the next two and half hours.

Eventually the woman roused herself enough to set off an alarm, after which she was rushed to the hospital with “65 percent burns” and a horribly swollen body. Full report on the world’s unluckiest tanner—and the plethora of charges brought against the proprietor of Supertan—here.