Excessive Eaters of the 18th Century
For some unfathomable reason the 18th century threw up a formidable clutch of prodigious eaters, and scholars have supplied many trustworthy accounts of these great polyphagi. For instance, Rev. Lysons, a habitué of London’s low life, [who visited] squalid, back-street monster-shows and collecting information about al he saw there, recorded in 1788 that “The Duke of Bedford [had] betted 1000 guineas with Lord Barrymore, that he does not eat a live Cat! It is said his Lordship grounds his chances upon having already made the experiment upon a Kitten.” The unusual bet attracted considerable public attention and several articles appeared under the headline ‘Cat Eating’. One authority on blood sports pointed out that it was “not without precedents in the annals of sporting.” He had himself witnessed an Irishman devouring five fox cubs for a bet of £50, whilst another said he had seen a Yorkshire shepherd eat a live cat to win a bet of two guineas.
A few entrepreneurial gluttons managed to transform the art of bizarre consumption into a profitable sideshow act, eating all manner foods for the entertainment of live audiences. Thomas Eclin, for example, performed such wonders in London in the mid-1700s. His feats included eating dogs and cats and leaping head first into the Thames when the weather was freezing cold. The 1770s saw the rise of ‘The Stone Eater’, who would invite doubters to his shows to witness him grind stones and pebbles between his powerful jaws, whilst claiming that his intestinal tract had become used to minerals as the principal source of nourishment after he was shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for 13 years.
Perhaps the most celebrated gluttons, however, are Charles Domery and Tarrare. Domery served with the Prussian Army in the War of the First Coalition, however, upon finding the rations were insufficient to satisfy his appetite he defected to the French Army in return for food. He is recorded as having eaten 174 cats in a year, and although he disliked vegetables, would eat 5 pounds of grass each day if he could not find other food. He once also attempted to eat the severed leg of a crewmember hit by cannon fire, before it was wrestled from him.
When Domery’s ship was captured and imprisoned by the British he remained hungry despite being put on ten times the rations of other inmates. He was subsequently experimented on: throughout a day he was fed a raw cow’s udder, which was eaten without hesitation; 4.6kg of raw beef; 24 large tallow candles; and four large bottles of porter. During the course of the experiment he did not defecate, urinate or vomit, his pulse remained regular and he did not change temperature.
Similarly, Tarrare was a French showman and soldier able to eat vast amounts. He was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes; swallowing corks, stones, live animals and whole apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.
He also found military rations unable to satisfy his appetite, and would eat food from gutters and refuse heaps. Suffering from exhaustion through hunger, he was hospitalised and became the subject of experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed an eel whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was of normal size and appearance. His army general decided to put Tarrare to use as a courier, swallowing documents and transporting them over enemy lines, however, Tarrare was captured upon his first mission and subjected to a horrific beating and mock execution.
Returning to the hospital following this, Tarrare was caught several times attempting to eat the bodies in the hospital mortuary. After some time, a toddler disappeared, and Tarrare was immediately suspected and banished from the hospital. After his death Tarrare’s body was found to be filled with pus; his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers, and filled most of his abdominal cavity. The cause of their appetites is not known and there have been no modern documented cases of polyphagia as extreme as Domery’s and Tarrare’s.
[Sources: Fortean Times | Charles Domery | Tarrare]
![Corpse Road
In medieval Britain, corpse roads provided a practical means for transporting corpses from remote communities to cemeteries in larger towns, that had burial rights. Concomitant expansion of church building throughout the UK during the late medieval period inevitably encroached on the territories of existing mother churches or minsters. Demands for autonomy from outlying settlements made minster officials feel that their authority was waning, as were their revenues, so they instituted corpse roads connecting outlying locations and their mother churches that alone held burial rights.
For some parishioners, this decision meant that corpses had to be transported long distances, sometimes through difficult terrain: usually a corpse had to be carried unless the departed was a wealthy individual. Many of the corpse roads have long disappeared, while the original purposes of those that still survive as footpaths have been largely forgotten, especially if features such as coffin stones, on which the coffin was placed while the parishioners rested, or crosses no longer exist.
Such corpse roads have developed a great deal of associated folklore. The essence of spirit lore is that spirits, that is, spirits of the dead, phantasms of the living, wraiths, or fairies move through the physical landscape along special routes. Such routes are conceived of as being straight and by the same token, convoluted or non-linear features hinder spirit movement.
Similarly, corpse roads would run in a straight line over mountains and valleys and through marshes. In towns, they would pass the houses closely or go right through them. The paths end or originate at a cemetery; therefore, such a path or road was believed to have the same characteristics as a cemetery, where spirits of the deceased thrive. As such, corpse roads became intrinsically associated with fairy roads and the supernatural entities which reside there.
[Image Source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/2deb4819d23fbe41774d7050af632966/tumblr_miuns6ssRl1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Excessive Eaters of the 18th Century
For some unfathomable reason the 18th century threw up a formidable clutch of prodigious eaters, and scholars have supplied many trustworthy accounts of these great polyphagi. For instance, Rev. Lysons, a habitué of London’s low life, [who visited] squalid, back-street monster-shows and collecting information about al he saw there, recorded in 1788 that “The Duke of Bedford [had] betted 1000 guineas with Lord Barrymore, that he does not eat a live Cat! It is said his Lordship grounds his chances upon having already made the experiment upon a Kitten.” The unusual bet attracted considerable public attention and several articles appeared under the headline ‘Cat Eating’. One authority on blood sports pointed out that it was “not without precedents in the annals of sporting.” He had himself witnessed an Irishman devouring five fox cubs for a bet of £50, whilst another said he had seen a Yorkshire shepherd eat a live cat to win a bet of two guineas.
A few entrepreneurial gluttons managed to transform the art of bizarre consumption into a profitable sideshow act, eating all manner foods for the entertainment of live audiences. Thomas Eclin, for example, performed such wonders in London in the mid-1700s. His feats included eating dogs and cats and leaping head first into the Thames when the weather was freezing cold. The 1770s saw the rise of ‘The Stone Eater’, who would invite doubters to his shows to witness him grind stones and pebbles between his powerful jaws, whilst claiming that his intestinal tract had become used to minerals as the principal source of nourishment after he was shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for 13 years.
Perhaps the most celebrated gluttons, however, are Charles Domery and Tarrare. Domery served with the Prussian Army in the War of the First Coalition, however, upon finding the rations were insufficient to satisfy his appetite he defected to the French Army in return for food. He is recorded as having eaten 174 cats in a year, and although he disliked vegetables, would eat 5 pounds of grass each day if he could not find other food. He once also attempted to eat the severed leg of a crewmember hit by cannon fire, before it was wrestled from him.
When Domery’s ship was captured and imprisoned by the British he remained hungry despite being put on ten times the rations of other inmates. He was subsequently experimented on: throughout a day he was fed a raw cow’s udder, which was eaten without hesitation; 4.6kg of raw beef; 24 large tallow candles; and four large bottles of porter. During the course of the experiment he did not defecate, urinate or vomit, his pulse remained regular and he did not change temperature.
Similarly, Tarrare was a French showman and soldier able to eat vast amounts. He was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes; swallowing corks, stones, live animals and whole apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.
He also found military rations unable to satisfy his appetite, and would eat food from gutters and refuse heaps. Suffering from exhaustion through hunger, he was hospitalised and became the subject of experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed an eel whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was of normal size and appearance. His army general decided to put Tarrare to use as a courier, swallowing documents and transporting them over enemy lines, however, Tarrare was captured upon his first mission and subjected to a horrific beating and mock execution.
Returning to the hospital following this, Tarrare was caught several times attempting to eat the bodies in the hospital mortuary. After some time, a toddler disappeared, and Tarrare was immediately suspected and banished from the hospital. After his death Tarrare’s body was found to be filled with pus; his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers, and filled most of his abdominal cavity. The cause of their appetites is not known and there have been no modern documented cases of polyphagia as extreme as Domery’s and Tarrare’s.
[Sources: Fortean Times | Charles Domery | Tarrare]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/cfb12158b75d6a32cb661e53eb102a8a/tumblr_miqtebropT1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![The Hollywood Freeway Chickens
A little more modern than my usual posts but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed reading a Wikipedia article as much as I have this one:
The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles, California. It is still not definitively known how they came to be there. Chickens underneath the Vineland off-ramp became local celebrities upon their arrival sometime around 1970. By 1976, the flock included about 50 chickens, which became known as “Minnie’s chickens”, named after Minnie Blumfield, an elderly retiree who fed them regularly.
When she became too frail to feed them, Actors and Others for Animals made arrangements to relocate the chickens. Nearly a hundred of the hens and roosters were relocated to a ranch, but not every member of the flock was apprehended, and those that remained spawned a new population. Subsequent removal efforts in the following years all had a similar outcome. In fact, the first colony at the Vineland ramp has spread and there is now a second colony, two miles away.
Beginning in the 1990s, twenty years after the colony’s arrival, various individuals started coming forward claiming to know the mystery of their origin. Among them:
In 1990, Jeff Stein of Granada Hills, California claimed that in 1968, when his wife Janet and her twin sister were 12, they learned that a nearby school that raised animals was closing and that its resident chickens would be killed. The twins scooped them up and succeeded in hiding them at home until the roosters started waking up every morning at 5 a.m. The chickens couldn’t stay, so the girls hiked through a field to an open area near the freeway and deposited two pillowcases full of them there.
In 1992, a North Hollywood man who would give only his first name (“Michael”) claimed that as a child he and his brother put their pet chickens under the freeway after neighbors repeatedly complained about them. “We were afraid to confess after (their numbers) got out of hand because we thought the city would bill us”, he said.
The widely believed, but never verified explanation about an overturned poultry truck on the freeway resurfaced in 2000 when Joe Silbert of Laguna Hills, California claimed to be the driver of the legendary vehicle, saying, “I tried to avoid a lady who cut in front of me and I turned over. I was taking anywhere from 500 to 1,000 chickens back from the Valley to a slaughterhouse in L.A. They were all hens. We never picked up roosters. These were hens that had stopped laying. They would eat but not produce, so they were costing farmers money. Anyway, I had a crate of eggs on the seat beside me, and when I turned over, my head fell into the crate. But I wasn’t hurt. I started chasing one chicken and it was on the TV news that night.” A colony of hens no longer laying eggs would naturally not be able to renew itself, making this explanation rather dubious.
Nevertheless, there was at least one witness to the overturned poultry truck explanation. A driver on the way to work in Glendale was proceeding south on the 5 Freeway when she spotted three cars off to the side of the road that had been involved in a multiple rear-end collision. Blood and feathers were all over the freeway. On the overpass right above the accident site was a truck loaded with poultry cages, and each cage contained multiple chickens. Below, on the freeway, a smashed poultry cage was off to one side, and chickens could be seen walking around in the freeway meridian.
[Image Source]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c4dc7550d1f099d6e658f9620bece4ea/tumblr_mijke00es31rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Cemetery Gun
In the 18th and 19th centuries, grave-robbing was a serious problem in Great Britain and the United States. Because surgeons and medical students could only legally dissect executed criminals or people who had donated their bodies to science (not a popular option at the time), a trade in illegally procured corpses sprang up. This cemetery gun, held in the Museum of Mourning Art at the Arlington Cemetery of Drexel Hill, Pa., was one dramatic strategy used to thwart so-called “resurrection men.”
The gun, which the museum dates to 1710, is mounted on a mechanism that allows it to spin freely. Cemetery keepers set up the flintlock weapon at the foot of a grave, with three tripwires strung in an arc around its position. A prospective grave-robber, stumbling over the tripwire in the dark, would trigger the weapon—much to his own misfortune.
Grave-robbers evolved to meet this challenge. Some would send women posing as widows, carrying children and dressed in black, to case the gravesites during the day and report the locations of cemetery guns and other defenses. Cemetery keepers, in turn, learned to wait to set the guns up after dark, thereby preserving the element of surprise.
Because the guns were rented by the week and were prohibitively expensive to buy, the poorer people most likely to end up beneath the anatomist’s knife—historian Michael Sappol writes that these included “black people, criminals, prostitutes, the Irish, ‘freaks,’ manual laborers, indigents, and Indians”—probably wouldn’t have benefited from this form of protection.
[The website that this is from also has a Tumblr, so go follow them!]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b9e272d0b587cb4ec35719e6f4811488/tumblr_mi8dhtNMb51rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Sin-Eater
Up until the late 19th century various villages throughout England maintained a curious ilk of beggar known as a sin-eater. These men would be summoned, naturally by the lure of a handsome pay cheque, to eat bread, partake of alcohol and recite ritual over a fresh corpse, in the belief that by these means the sin-eater would take into his body the sins of those who had died without chance to repent. The sin-eater would receive his pay and the deceased would enjoy an easy ascension to the heavens.
An account of Richard Munslow (d.1906)[1], the last sin-eater of England, reads thus:
By eating bread and drinking ale, and by making a short speech at the graveside, the sin-eater took upon themselves the sins of the deceased. The speech was written as: “I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen.
In Funeral Customs (1926) Bertram S. Puckle tells of a Welsh sin-eater in 1825 who, “Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean … cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures … he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.”[2]
Unapproved of by the church the practice faded out towards the end of the 19th century.
[Image Source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/004fc3e3f2bc79a9e7ef54d326281c8d/tumblr_mhnz2vOjNH1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
