A discarded hospital robe indicated he might be naked and the emergency department was quickly evacuated and patients relocated to other wards and hospitals.
A starkers Watkins was spotted by authorities some time later and several officers were needed to bring him down.
The following month, a South Canterbury man was left red-faced when he become trapped in a clothes dryer while trying to retrieve clothes.
Dave Chapman, 42, had been drinking with friends at a house near Timaru on June 18 when he went to the dryer to find a pair of undies.
With his lower half naked, he manoeuvred his head, shoulders and arms into the dryer while searching for the underwear, and became stuck.
A panicking Mr Chapman was in an agitated state by the time an ambulance, a police officer, and two fire trucks arrived - a situation made worse by the fact he was exposing his nether regions to the world.
"I don't know what flaming possessed me to get in it. I was trying to find these undies when everything just got stuck," he was reported as saying.
Said firefighter Rooy Hoogenraad: "We do entrapments ... This would be one of the more unusual entrapments."
Other people got different body parts stuck in places, leading to more headlines.
In September, an Auckland teen learned the hard way when he had to be freed from a vending machine after trying to prise out a can of Coca-Cola.
Emergency services used tools to extract the 15-year-old, who was found with his whole arm stuck up the vending machine at Glen Eden's Genesis Training Centre.
Food also featured highly in the year's news.
In May, the much-hyped and controversial Double Down burger went on sale here.
Thousands tucked into the bunless 600-calorie burger made up of two pieces of fried chicken wrapped around bacon, cheese and sauce; 16,000 were snapped up by noon on launch day, and more than double that by 4pm.
The company promoted the anticipated burger through social media sites and its sales helped push up Restaurant Brands' shares.
While thousands flocked to taste-test the $7.90 burger, health-food advocates lamented the newest addition to the fast-food market.
Around the country there was plenty more weirdness to go around.
On the West Coast, Department of Conservation staff struggled to come to terms with the death of 800 rare giant snails.
The snails were accidentally frozen to death after a technical glitch at their coolroom in Hokitika, where they were being kept after being relocated from Stockton Plateau to make way for coal mining.
DoC technical support manager John Lyall said the deaths were very upsetting for staff who have been caring for them.
Further afield, in the US state of Massachusetts, Frank and Louie - a feline with two mouths, two noses and three eyes - turned 12, making it the world's oldest living two-faced cat. The milestone will be recorded in the 2012 edition of Guinness World Records, Reuters reported.
Frank and Louie share one brain so their faces are understood to work in unison.
And even before Michael Jackson's doctor was found guilty of manslaughter, items including the bed the singer died on were being prepared for auction, the Guardian reported.
The personal items were from the California house where the King of Pop and his children lived before he died in 2009, and include paintings, a mirror and a queen-sized bed.
