Eccentric People

Fresh off the Press

The Postman Who Mail-Ordered a Palace

He was a rural French postie who spent 33 years carting pebbles on his rounds and turned them into a proper palace that still makes architects blush.Read More

Diogenes Lived In A Jar And Told Alexander To Move

He abandoned sofas, installed himself in a single enormous pithos, and famously told Alexander to 'stand out of my sun' with the kind of decorum only an ancient eccentric could muster.Read More

The North Pond Hermit Who Outsourced Society

He spent twenty-seven years in a Maine woodlot, surviving on what he nicked, a radio, and a principled disdain for small talk.Read More

Rasputin: The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Dying

They fed him poison, shot him, and the autopsy still blamed the river-Rasputin's end is the kind of messy legend even Moscow couldn't tidy up.Read More

The Man Who Married Kittens (Victorian Taxidermy Chaos)

A Victorian taxidermist staged full-blown kitten weddings and schools out of stuffed animals and kept them in a tiny museum that people queued for like it was the weirdest cinema.Read More

Tycho's Drunk Moose, Proper Classic

This bloke built an observatory, got a metal nose from a duel and kept a pet moose that downed beer and fell down the stairs - you couldn't make it up.Read More

The Man Who Moved House To A Pillar And Stayed

Simeon Stylites spent decades living on a tiny column in Syria and somehow made it look like a lifestyle brand for saints.Read More

The Bloke Who Ate a Plane (Seriously)

Michael Lotito munched bicycles, TVs and even a Cessna 150 - and no, he was not dieting.Read More

Byron Kept A Bear At College, Naturally

Before Instagram, Lord Byron solved 'no dogs' rules by bringing a tame bear to Trinity and pretending it was perfectly normal.Read More

Tesla and the White Pigeon: An Unromantic Romance

The great inventor secretly fed and nursed city pigeons for years and admitted he loved one particular white pigeon 'as a man loves a woman'-which is either poignant or the most efficient emotional engineering I have yet encountered.Read More
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