Possessed students, cross-species sexual encounters and a girl with "emerald tears"; 2012 was a typically bizarre year in Indonesia as stories stocked with strange twists, trickster spirits and animal addictions grabbed headlines. Here is a selection of some of the oddest stories to come across the Jakarta Globe news desk in 2012.

Students show school spirit(s)

When 11 students burst into screaming fits during a study session at SMU 2 in Tanjungpinang, Riau Islands, the teachers weren't shocked.

By early October, these 11 students had routinely been possessed by spirits or, as one teacher put it, "a genie." The teachers just stopped class and took the students to a local mosque. "The voices coming out of the students were the voices of a genie," said teacher Edi Efendi, who claimed the spirits usually followed a strict schedule. "Usually possessions in this school happened after they happened in SMU 5 and SMU 4."

Edi said spirits first visited the school three years ago. Since then, spirit possession became as regular a fixture as science and social studies classes – or at least until Education and Culture Minister Mohammad Nuh decided to change the curriculum.

In West Jakarta, 20 students freaked out after they reportedly saw the ghost of an old man in the building's motorcycle parking lot. The elderly ghost was seemingly young in spirit as he ran amok in the school, scaring one student unconscious and possessing numerous others.

"There were more than 20 students suffering a mass possession," a gym teacher at SMP 229 in the Kebon Jeruk neighborhood told Antara news agency at the time. "At 11 a.m. recess, there was someone who shouted hysterically and cried. Others got panicked and were possessed."

In Bali, teachers called in a psychic after spirits allegedly possessed more than a dozen students for the third time.

In Mataram, Vice President Boediono's visit to a local Family Day celebration took a ghastly turn as students began to scream and faint in the hot sun. About 500 students were made to stand under the afternoon sun and perform traditional dances for the assembled crowd.

But when they began to yell and pass out, fearful local residents decided they had a mass spirit possession on their hands. Teachers panicked as students were taken to a nearby hospital to be treated for possession.

"They're just tired because they had to wait for too long [in the sun]," West Nusa Tenggara Health Agency head Ismail said at the time.

An orangutan with an addiction

If 2011 was the year of the smoking baby, 2012 was the year of the puffing orangutan as Solo's cigarette-packing great ape Tori smoked her way into the nation's heart.

Visitors to Solo's Taru Jurung zoo supported Tori's habit by throwing cigarettes into her pen. The 14-year-old orangutan began her habit by puffing away on discarded butts as she mimicked zoogoers.

By July, Tori had developed a habit and a hand gesture when she wanted another cigarette – two fingers in the air – said Daniek Hendarto, coordinator of the Center for Orangutan Protection.

Daniek worried that Tori's mate, Didik, would also become addicted if the orangutans were left in their existing habitat.

In late July, zoo staff moved Tori and Didik to an isolated island in the middle of a lake so she could kick the habit. Two months later, Tori had something else to hold in her hands: a fuzzy newborn baby named Jokowi.

Small crimes, big penalties

A Lombok man was jailed for theft after picking five small coconuts from a tree he reportedly planted on his family's property years ago. An illiterate farmer was detained after selling a single branch from a teak tree he found laying on the ground at a Central Java plantation.

A 15-year-old boy faced five years in prison after allegedly stealing a policeman's sandals worth Rp 30,000 ($3.30) in Central Sulawesi. The boy escaped jail time as the court found him guilty, but free to go.

Petty crimes still called for big punishment under Indonesia's outdated Criminal Code. The laws, which were passed in the 1960s, classified the theft of anything more expensive than Rp 250 a serious offense.

The Supreme Court changed the statute in February amid public outcry over a series of highly publicized cases of courts seemingly going after the young, the poor and the elderly. Under the new guidelines, the theft of anything less than Rp 2.5 million is considered a petty crime and doesn't require the defendant to be detained for months before a trial.

But change didn't come fast enough for 41-year-old Rosidi, who was arrested weeks before the law changed, for the theft of a piece of teak worth Rp 600,000. Rosidi faced 10 years in prison and Rp 10 billion in fines if convicted.

To put it into context, that's twice as long as the sentence handed down to former Democratic Party treasurer Muhammad Nazaruddin. Nazaruddin was found guilty of accepting Rp 4.6 billion in bribes and it's 10 times what Mindo Rosalina Manulang served before her release.

Chickens; a man mistaken for a monkey

A 16-year-old boy in Bali said a spirit magically turned a chicken into a beautiful woman one October day.

He had earlier been caught having sex with a dead chicken by local residents. Witnesses turned the boy over to police. Officers questioned him, but decided there was little they could do.

"He committed no crime; he only committed an ethics violation. We have decided to let the local residents handle the problem," Karangasem Police chief Comr. Putu Wijaya Arsa said.

Local residents said they had previously caught the boy having his way with their cattle. His parents suspected it was the work of an evil spirit and hired a psychic to cure their son.

The Bali office of the Child and Women's Protection Group (KPPA) took the boy to see a psychiatrist.

The boy made out better than the last man reportedly tricked by a spirit into having sex with livestock in Bali. In June of 2010, 18-year-old Ngurah Alit was caught standing stark naked behind a cow in the seaside village of Yeh Embang, in Jembrana.

Alit said a spirit made him think the cow was a beautiful woman. He was forced to marry the cow before it was pushed into the sea to drown in a local cleansing ritual.

In Malaysia, an alleged case of mistaken identity took a terrible turn when an Indonesian migrant worker was shot dead by his employer after the man mistook the worker for a pig-tailed macaque.

The 71-year-old employer reportedly saw a mango tree shaking near his home and opened fire, thinking a monkey was trying to steal his fruit. He fatally shot 39-year-old Kaniseus Leu, a palm oil plantation worker from East Nusa Tenggara.

The man was detained by police while workers' rights groups called on the Indonesian government to better protect migrant workers. "This is not funny at all, not a joke. This is about life," said Retno Dewi, head of the Indonesian Workers Association (ATKI). "The Indonesian government should be more strict and have better bargaining power for the welfare of migrant workers."

Bizarre 'tears' of Tina Agustina

A teenager from Bandung became a minor YouTube celebrity this year after posting videos of her strange claim to fame: emerald tears.

Tina Agustina claimed to have extracted 126 small polished gems from her eyes since September of 2011. She told doctors and reporters that she produced the tiny gems when she cried.

Doctors examined the girl and declared her perfectly normal. They sent her collection of gems to a geology lab for testing. The multi-colored gems appeared cut and polished when Tina removed them from her eyelids in numerous YouTube videos.

It is unknown what happened to Tina, but there hasn't been a new YouTube video posted in six months.

Odds and ends

There were a handful of stories that could have made it on this list if, sadly, they weren't all too common.

The House of Representatives earmarked Rp 12 billion for snack food in an early version of the budget.

Another toddler developed a cigarette addiction and then added a regular cup of coffee to his routine.

And the state railway company Kereta Api Indonesia picked a deadly solution for a dangerous problem when they installed rows of hanging concrete balls in an effort to deter roof riders.