A FAMOUS entertainer claimed cow manure in Patna gave him a miraculous cure for his wart-ridden hands.

He is now writing a book about his strange experience.

The magician, actor and musician, Rob Zackery, from Los Angeles stayed with his aunt and uncle in Patna when he came to visit in 1980.

He was riddled with 47 warts on his hands which his family had previously spent $800 trying to remove.

Then his Scottish aunt, Patricia, gave him some peculiar advice.

She told him: “You just dip your hands deep into the cow dung and let them soak them for a few moments. Let that dung set for 20 or so minutes and rinse it away. You’ll need to do this each day for a fortnight and those warts will vanish. I promise you, laddie”, Rob recalls.

Cumnock Chronicle:

After hearing this, he spent time every morning in a field at New Bridge at River Doon, and to his shock, the warts were gone for good by the time he headed back home to America.

In Rob’s book, Strange Cures, he explains: “Back home at the end of the summer something changed.

My dreaded warts, all of them, disappeared. Each day they became smaller and smaller until they vanished into my hands. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Within a week before starting junior high school, they were all gone. Aunt Nan’s witchy remedy worked.

Rob at around the time he visited Patna, aged 12

Rob’s story even made the Ayr Advertiser when word got out of his cure. He added: “For the first time since I can remember, I don’t need to stuff my hands into my pockets all the time. My good mother reported the news to our Scottish relatives. In late September, the first piece of mail ever addressed to me arrived in our mailbox. It was from our relatives in Patna, and contained an article about my wart victory in the Ayr Advertiser on September 11, 1980.”

The now 50-year-old is renowned globally for his success in the entertainment business, but the memory of his visit to Ayrshire has never left him as it plays a stand-out feature in Strange Cures - which depicts memoirs of a turbulent journey through Rob’s life.

Rob has since revisited Patna and the sight where cow poo changed his life.