Bottomless Pit

class clown or most likely to succeed. Charles Dahmer wasn't 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 a horse, and then do so right before your eyes.

If social media has taught us anything it's that people 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 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

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

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. 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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,