Bottomless Pit

Some folks refuse to do things the typical way, and along the way, they leave behind some curious tales.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Open up your high school yearbook and you
might find a section called senior Superlatives, where certain members
of the outgoing class are giving descriptive titles such as
class clown or most likely to succeed. Charles Dahmer wasn't

(00:50):
given a senior superlative upon graduating, but if he had,
it probably would have been something like most likely to
put in all you can eat buffet out of business.
Born in Poland in seventy eight, Charles grew up in
a house with eight other brothers, and all nine children
seemed to suffer from the same condition. They loved to eat. Actually,

(01:10):
love is the wrong word. Charles and his brothers had
to eat constantly. When he was thirteen, young Charles started
gaining a reputation for his unusual appetite, which involved eating
his parents out of house and home, and that's insatiable
hunger often caused him to make unwise decisions. Thirteen happened
to be the age at which Charles joined the Prussian Army,

(01:31):
which he quickly regretted. There was a food shortage at
the time, and even though he'd been granted extra rations,
the young soldier couldn't handle not being able to gorge
himself at a moment's notice. During one particular battle, Charles
traps to cross enemy lines and surrendered himself to the French.
The opposing commander was taken with the boy's tenacity and

(01:52):
offered him a melon. Charles wolfed it down immediately. Ryand
and all the French general then buttered him up with
even more delicious eats, all of which culminated in Charles
switching sides. He joined the French revolution Army, but even
their offer of double rations wasn't enough for him. While
stationed near Paris for a year, Charles allegedly ate over

(02:14):
seventy cats, and he didn't always kill them first, and
when he couldn't find any real food stray or otherwise,
he filled his belly with four to five pounds of
grass each day. But surprisingly, he wasn't a large person well,
not around the middle. As an adult, he was tall
for the time, measuring six ft three inches in height.

(02:35):
His hair was long and brown, and it framed a
pair of cool gray eyes, all which sat upon an
average sized body. Charles's eating habits only grew more atrocious
as he got older, though he wasn't known to cook
his meat. In fact, he often threw it up if
it was boiled or roasted first, and he didn't care
what kind of meat it was. He ate anything and everything.

(02:58):
While surfing aboard the French ship oh, Charles witnessed one
of his fellow sailors lose a leg to cannon fire.
He then picked up the leg and went to town
on it, ripping the flesh from the bone with his teeth,
chomping away like it was one of those Renaissance fair
turkey legs. Another crewmate saw what was happening and fought
Charles for the limb. He pried it from his hands

(03:20):
and tossed it overboard. When he was taken prisoner by
the British and sev Charles's captors were forced to feed
him more and more rations each day. He was eventually
eating enough for ten men on a daily basis. He
even ate the rats that crawled through his cell. The
head of the prison eventually saw what he was capable
of and placed him in the care of the Royal

(03:41):
Navy's doctors, who conducted experiments on Charles. They wanted to
see how much he could really put away. Everything kicked
off on September see Dr J. Johnston and his colleagues
began by feeding Charles four pounds of rock how utter,
at four o'clock in the morning. Several hours later, he

(04:01):
ate a dozen large tallow candles, five pounds of raw beef,
and then drank an entire bottle of Porter, all within
the span of just one hour. At lunchtime, he swallowed
another pound of tallow candles and five more pounds of beef,
all of which he washed down with three more bottles
of Porter. He ate like someone who had never known

(04:21):
what it was like to be full. Charles finished the
rest of the beer and candles just after six pm
and finally felt satiated. But the doctors weren't just shocked
by the amount of food he had consumed. Not once
did Charles vomits or go to the bathroom during the
entire ordeal. He even danced a bit before heading to
bed that night. So what caused this man to eat

(04:43):
an army's worth of food every day? His condition was
attributed to everything from hyper thyroidism to a damaged amygdala,
but the fact was that nobody knew exactly why one
person could devour everything in his path without any negative
side effect. Charles dum was the kind of guy who
could on ironically say I'm so hungry I could eat

(05:04):
a horse, and then do so right before your eyes.
If social media has taught us anything it's that people

(05:24):
will perform increasingly dangerous and stupid stunts as long as
others are watching. Jumping off the roof into a pool,
swallowing laundry detergent capsules, and dangling off high rise buildings
are just some of the idiotic things people have done
for nothing more than a little Internet cleft. But before
people were risking their lives for strangers online, they were

(05:45):
doing it for strangers in real life, and one particular
activity seemed to capture the world by storm during the
nineteenth and early twenty century, walking backward Among the earliest
attempts at long distance backward walking was in a stunt
performed by Englishman Darby Stevens in eighteen seventeen he made
a bet for fifty guineas that in twenty days he

(06:06):
would walk five hundred miles apologies if the song is
now stuck in your head. He was aided by a
six hundred foot long rope that he held onto whenever necessary,
but no one today knows whether he actually completed the trip.
Daniel Crisp decided to try his luck the following day.
He showed up at the same spot, but didn't use
the rope. He managed to leisurely stroll two hundred and

(06:30):
eighty miles backward in just a week. The press was
less than enthused by the effort, with one paper writing
that walking backward and I quote is encouraged for the
very worst purposes, and the public disgust will be still
more excited when we state that it was meant to
continue these vicious scenes throughout the whole of the summer.

(06:52):
Several years later, another gentleman named John Townsend pulled off
a number of backward walking feats. Townsend, who hailed from England,
started with a distance of twenty one miles in just
six hours and forty five minutes. He followed it up
with a second walk measuring thirty eight miles, which he
completed in twelve hours. In eighteen twenty three towns in
traversed seventy three miles in just twenty four hours across Bristol,

(07:17):
followed by a record breaking seventy four miles a few
months later. During one busy period that year, he also
managed to walk backwards sixty four miles every day for
nearly two weeks and frequent listeners to this podcast may
remember Plenty Wingo, who walked around the world between April
of nineteen thirty one and October of nineteen thirty two.

(07:38):
He became a minor celebrity, publishing a book about his
travels and earning himself a spot on Johnny Carson's Tonight
Show in the nineteen seventies. But before Plenty there was
Patrick Harmon. He was born in Ohio in eighteen sixty
five and got into backward walking around nineteen fifteen after
moving to Seattle, Washington with a friend. They had been
through a lot, and we're planning to start their lives over.

(08:01):
Harmon settled into his new life in Washington by exploring
the woods and mountains around his home. Backward it became
a regular hobby for him to walk the various local
trains in reverse. However, in August of that year, he
was nearly fifty years old, and Harmon kicked off the
walk of his life. And of course, it all happened
because of a bet, a big one too. His goal

(08:23):
was to walk backward from San Francisco across the country
to New York City. If he made it in two
hundred and sixty days, he would win a whopping twenty
thousand dollars. Harmon ventured out with his friend William Beltazor,
who walked ahead of him facing forward. Beltazor made sure
that there was nothing in his buddy's path that might
trip him up or cause him injury. Four days into

(08:46):
his journey, Harmon reached California, the official starting point for
his trip. Fifty three days later, he arrived in Salt
Lake City, Utah, covering an average of twenty two miles
per day. Harmon was in fine shape by this point
and attributed his success to the muscles that he had
built up in his ankles. By December, he reached Nebraska,
then Iowa, where he suffered frostbite on his nose and

(09:09):
one of his ears and yet still he kept ongoing,
and for better or worse, his performance inspired others to
follow in his footsteps, so to speak, including two boys
in Iowa. One of those boys, a young man named
Sam Quitno, bet a hundred dollars that he could walk
a mile and fifteen minutes backward. He even put up
the money to show how serious he was. Others got

(09:31):
in on the wager, and after a little bit, Sam
jetted off. Spectators followed him in cars and trucks to
keep track of his movements. He won with the final
time of fourteen minutes at thirty seven seconds. Meanwhile, Harmon
headed off to Chicago, where a movie company made a
film about his arrival in February of nineteen sixteen, and finally,
on May, three months later, Harmon had completed his trip

(09:55):
to New York City. One paper described how he triumphantly
climbed the steps of city Hall, all backward, of course,
and met with the mayor to honor his victory. And
although he told everyone that he had made it in
only two hundred and thirty nine days, the whole twenty
one days under the deadline, he had actually finished his
cross country trek in two hundred and ninety one days,

(10:15):
Harmon eventually returned to Seattle, where he went back to
his old job as a railroad worker. The twenty dollars
that he'd been promised never materialized, and it was believed
that the wager hadn't ever truly existed. Patrick Harman, whose
real name was revealed to be Patrick O'Rourke, seemingly didn't
do it for the money. He simply did it because

(10:37):
he could. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award

(10:59):
winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious. Yeah,