Could a virus do that?

that is the weirdest thing! I have no idea.

sounds like Word is trolling you hard.

Yet another reason I hate Word and very inconvenient for the press releases I was working on.

Virus maybe but Mac lowers odds and Google didn't come up with it having happened to others. Showed me how I can manually change it back per document but not how to reset the default.

looks like something messed with normal.dot (the template)