Bizarre people can be found everywhere. Some get more recognition than others, to the point of internet celebrity, others not so much. Here is a list of ten people with bizarre history to tell, which you seldom hear or read about.
These are Top 10 Strange People with Bizarre History:
10. Roy Sullivan
Roy Sullivan was a former park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia who died at age of 71 on 1983 from self-inflicted gunshot wound, reportedly rejected in love.
Until here nothing is unusual, rare or bizarre about Sullivan’s life, but here’s the thing: he holds the Guiness World Record as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being in his history. The first of these strikes occurred in 1942, then resumed in 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and the last one came on 1977. This case is more bizarre if we consider that the odds of being struck by lightning are of 4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Sullivan himself recalled that the first time he was struck by lightning not in 1942 but much earlier. When he was a child, he was helping his father to cut wheat in a field, but because he could not prove the fact later, he never claimed it.
9. Norton I
Joshua Norton was a citizen from San Francisco, CA. who in 1859 proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States of America and protector of Mexico.
In July 1860 he dissolved the United States of America and in 1861 he forbade the Congress from meeting in Washington Norton was also accompanied by dogs, one of them name Lazarus, dead in 1863 and Bummer died two years later.
In January 1867, a civic tumult occurred when a Patrol Special Officer arrested His Majesty for involuntary treatment of a mental disorder. Police Chiefreleased the Emperor and apologized to him.
In 1869 Norton abolished both Democratic and Republican parties. In 1872 he ordered that a suspension bridge be built as soon as possible between Oakland and San Francisco. May be he was crazy but he had good ideas once in a while.
The 1870 U.S. census shows Norton as 50 years old and his occupation was listed as Emperor Besides all this he also collected taxes, attended sessions of governmentand sold his own currency.
8. Adam Rainer
Rainer is the only person recorded history to have been both a dwarf and a giant. He was born in Austria. In 1917 he was tested to join the army, but he was too short to join. During these tests his height was measured at 4 feet 6.3 inches at 18 years and 4 feet 8.3 inches at 19 years of age.
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Then, likely as a result of a pituitary tumor, he had a dramatic growth. On 1930 Adam Rainer was operated andfew months after the operation he was measured again. His standing height was 6 feet 9.1 inches but his spinal curvature was more severe, indicating that he was still growing and the operation to halt his growth had failed.
When he died in 1950 he had reached a height of 7 ft 8 in. His feet measured 13.1 inches, his hands 9.4 inches and he weighed 241 pounds. Indeed, he was a little giant.
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7. Lina Medina
In 1939 a poor country man in Peru brought her 5 year old daughter to the Hospital in the city, she had grown a strange tumor since months ago. The superstition of the place suggested the evil god of the region had made a long snake grow inside her; that’s why her parents treated her with shamans first. But since they could not find cure, they decided to see a real doctor.
Gonzalo Lozada was the doctor who attend her and performed a cesarean. The doctor examined her with X Rays and found out the little girl was pregnant. The doctor called the authorities and her father was imprisoned under the charge of child abuse but released soon after due to lack of evidence. 75 years after, the name of father remains unknown.
That little girl’s name is Lina Medina and on May 14th, 1939, she became at age of five years, sever months and 21 days, the youngest mother in history. Her kid was named after the doctor who attended her and died at age of 40 to a bone marrow disease.
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Lina still lives in a small town in Peru called Chicago Chico (Little Chicago).
6. Julia Pastrana
Famous naturalist Charles Darwin said that she was a “remarkably fine woman”. She suffered a genetic disorder called hypertrichosisterminalis, due to that her face and body were covered with straight black hair. Her ears and nose were unusually large, and her teeth were irregular. The latter condition was caused by a rare disease called gingival hyperplasia.
Julia was born in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1834. Later, Theodore Lent, discovered her in United States and convinced her to marry him. Lent toured her on freakshows through USA and Europe. She was dubbed the “Ugliest woman on the world”.But despite that, she had a sweet singing voice, have good taste for music and dance and spoke three languages.
Julia became pregnant of Lent at 25 years old. The child was born hairy like her mother but died few hours later. Due to labor complications of the pregnancy Julia died 5 days later.
Her husband’s greed did not end there. He made Julia and her kid’s bodies to be embalmed and dress them elegantly to show them in a tour through Europe. The bodies went through different owners until 2013 when she finally was buried in Sinaloa.
5. Carl Tanzler
Tanzler was around his fifties when he moved to USA, starting to work in Florida, in the Marine Hospital.On 1930, a 22 years old Cuban woman came to the Hospital to be treated. Her name was Helena Hoyos and he fell desperately in love with her.
Carl confessed her his love but as far as we’re aware of, she never corresponded his love. Desperate to save her from death (she had tuberculosis), he attempted to treat and cure Hoyos with a variety of medicines and x-ray. Despite Tanzler’s best efforts, Hoyos died at her parents’ home on October, 1931.
One evening in April, 1933, Tanzler removed her body from the mausoleum and transporting it to his home. He attached the corpse’s bones together with wire and fitted the face with glass eyes. As the skin decomposed, he replaced it with silk cloth soaked in wax. As the hair fell out of the scalp, Tanzler fashioned a wig from Hoyos’s hair and dressed her emains in stockings, jewelry, and gloves. Tanzler also used copious amounts of perfumeand preserving agents, to mask the odor and the effects of the corpse’s decomposition.
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In October, 1940, Elena’s body was eventually discovered. Tanzler was arrested and detained. He was psychiatrically examined, and found mentally competent but released. Separated from his obsession, Tanzler used a death mask to create a life-sized effigy of Hoyos, and lived with it until his death.
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4. Gottfried Knoche
He was a Germanwho studied in Freiburg University majoring in medicine in 1837. In 1840 he immigrated to Venezuela, establishing in La Guaira and worked attending the poor peoplesometimes for free and in 1854 he founded the Children Hospital of Caracas.
What made Knoche famous was a fascinating but secret scientific contribution that we could consider lost forever: he developed a potion that injected in the corpuses caused the instant mummification without need of subtract the organs.
In 1869 a soldier named Jose Pérez died of Pneumonia and his body was never claimed so doctor Knoche mummified and put him at the door of his office and later in the entrance of the family mausoleum, located in his ranch, to be the guardian and protect it from profaners.
Tomas Lander, a famous politician man of his time was mummified under his family request. They dressed the mummy up and sat him on at the entrance of their home. Its exhibition ended in 1884 when National Government ordered Lander Family to bury the mummy.
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Knochealso had fun mummifying dogs and cats and put them in strategic points of the ranch making them look fearsome and angry to serve as sentinels of the place.
Before dying,Knoche left prepared potions of the formula to be administrated to him and his relatives and once he passed in 1901 he was mummified but his remains got lost. However there is not any proof of Knoche’s own mummy.
3. Gloria Ramírez
Gloria had two children and was a housewife. She was born in 1963 and died in 1994. Due to the strange circumstances of her death, she was dubbed the toxic lady.
On an evening of 1994 she entered the emergency room of Riverside General Hospital suffering the effects of advanced cancer and tachycardia. A nurse tried to drew blood from her arm but an ammonia like smell coming out of the tube got her dizzy and later fainted. The nurse who replaced her noted that Gloria’s blood contained manila-colored particles. The second nurse fainted too and later a respiratory therapist was the third to pass out. All the emergency room patients were ordered to move to the parking lot. About 10 for 9 P.M, Ramirez was pronounced dead from kidney failure related to cancer.
Two months after Ramirez died, her body was released for an autopsy and burial. It was impossible to determinate a cause of her death since her heart was missing and most of her organs were contaminated with fecal matter. She was badly decomposed.
2. Li Ching Yuen
Wonderful, beautiful, mysterious and bizarre, all four valid adjectives that may describe China. The next person on our list comes from there, a man who seem taken out of an ancient book of fantasy, her name was Li Ching Yuen and he’s allegedly the man who lived the most, the amazing number is 197 or 256 years…
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However there is not a definitive proof of Yuen’s longevity and the record is not credited to him. Yuen himself claimed to be born in 1736 while disputed records suggest 1677. His real date of birth has not been possible to determinate.
By the time he was ten years old he had traveled throughout China gathering herbs. He continued to do so for the rest of his first 100 years. When asked for his secret, Li Ching-yuen gave it replied: “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.”
Some said he had buried 23 wives, when he died he was living with his 24th, a woman of 60, had descendants of eleven generations. The fingernails of his venerable right hand were six inches long.In 1930 Professor Wu Chung, from Chengtu University, found records that the Imperial Chinese Government had congratulated Li Ching in 1827 on his 150th birthday, making him a 256 year old.
1. Dorangel Vargas
San Cristóbal, Venezuela. The day is February 12th 1999. An officer of Civil Guard attended an emergency call. It was a macabre report: two boys found human bones in a park near a River. Police arrived and they also found the remains of other six people: hands, feet and heads.
Investigations around the place led to a poor little house inhabited by a man that neighbors though he was a crazy. They took the man to the police station where his first words were simply overwhelming: “Men’s meat taste better than women’s, females taste sweet, men taste better: they taste like barbecue, like ham. Women nah, eating them is like eating flowers”.
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That man was Dorangel Vargas, born in 1957 and currently imprisoned in a Venezuelan jail, not serving sentence but as prevention. He suffers of paranoid schizophrenia.
That year in a National televised interview he gave details of his murders. He was a very delicate and strict chef especially worried about nutritional contents of the human beings he ate. He said: “I never killed fat men, they have too much fat, too much cholesterol” and while cooking: “you have to wash and spice the meat really good, that way you avoid to catch diseases, I make a really good stew with tongues and use the eyes to make soup.”
And asked if he regretted what he did, he only said: “I do not regret of anything I did because I like human meat and I’m not the only one. Last December (1998), I killed my neighbor Manuel, everyone said he was a good person and I thougth: “well if he is such a good person, he must taste good too” so I killed him. After I did so I prepared “empanadas” (Venezuelan dish) and filled them with his meat and I shared them with people I know and everyone flattered the flavor of the stuffed. May be they think the worst about me now but I did it with the best intentions like church mandates: I shared my bread”.
Recently when a journalist asked him his plans when he left the jail he replies: “I just want to get out and eat people, that’s my thing.
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It is estimated that from 1995 to 1999 he killed and ate 40 people. He hunted in around the river, hit them with a tube and since he did not have a fridge to keep the meat fresh. He killed 2 people per week.
In prison when other prisoners have conduct problems they are threatened to be put in Dorangel’s cage, they immediately behave.
Written By: Alex Ulacio