There are some strange and incredible people who share this earth’s surface with us. In our increasingly globalized culture, it can be unsettling to be confronted with so many new forms of strangeness. It won’t be long until we’re arguing with our families over Thanksgiving dinner, and then Halloween will be knocking on our doors. Back in the day, Halloween marked the passage into winter and was considered a time when the boundary between the spiritual plane and our mortal one was at its weakest. To mark this otherworldly moment, check out the world’s weirdest and most unfathomable people below. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned freak show to get you into the mood for some Halloween hijinks. So while you are busy planning your ultimate Halloween attire, have a scroll through these crazy cats, and marvel at the many, mind-blowing forms of strangeness that this world has in store. From real-life zombies to people with superpowers to the man who might just convince you that the world is actually run by lizards from outer space, you won’t believe these folks are for real. Yet here we are.
The Most Unique People You Will Ever See In The Whole World
The real-life zombie who works with Lady Gaga and Jay Z
Rick Genest might be the most badass capitalization on the resurgence of interest in zombies in the past decade. The young Canadian from Montreal might regret his radical body transformation in the not so distant future. The young man has undergone extensive tattooing in order to resemble a zombie. For the time being, it seems to have been working out pretty well for him. With a global career as a sideshow performer, he has gained in celebrity. Upon being discovered by Lady Gaga’s fashion director, his extreme body modification has led to roles as an actor, model, and even at one point the face of Jay-Z's clothing label. So far, through his body modification, Genest has lived his dreams, and it’s taken him beyond the limits of what even he thought possible. Strange it may be, but you have to give it to the guy who stated “I thought long and hard about what I really wanted, what my passion was. And I decided I wanted to be a fucking zombie.”
The world’s smallest kid
Charlotte Garside is the world’s smallest child. She was born with an extremely rare form of dwarfism and holds the record for being the smallest human in the world. When she started school a few years back, she was just 68 cm tall and weighed nine pounds. In other words, at five years old, Charlotte was the size of a newborn or a teddy bear. Pictured here with a giant rabbit, the five-year-old Charlotte was apparently “shocked” by the rabbit’s size. She couldn’t hold him because he weighed so much more than her. Despite Charlotte’s diminutive size, her mother Emma says she is “not the sort of person who will fade into the background”, although Emma admitted that she was initially “worried that she [Charlotte] could get hurt”, she concluded, “she’s not as fragile as you might think”. Starting school was a major milestone for Charlotte, as doctors feared that she could have died before the age of one. Charlotte comes from Withernsea, England, and has now been attending regular school for five years.
The Thai man who hasn’t slept in thirty years
After coming down with a fever in 1973, 64-year-old Hai Ngoc says he has counted 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights. “I don’t know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I’m still healthy and can farm normally like others,” Ngoc says. To demonstrate his health, the elderly resident of the Que Trung commune in Thailand says he can carry two bags of 50kg fertilizer 4 kilometers and back every day. His wife said: “My husband used to sleep well, but these days, even liquor cannot put him down.” She said when Ngoc went to Da Nang for a medical examination, doctors gave him a clean bill of health, except a minor decline in liver function. Ngoc currently lives on his five-hectare farm at the foot of a mountain, and keeps busy with farming and taking care of pigs and chickens. Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, and used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds.
The man who never gets tired
There’s another extremely unusual man running around our planet who also never gets tired. Dean Karnazes’ muscles never get tired, allowing him to run forever. For most of us, our bodies derive energy from glucose, which also produces lactate. If the lactate buildup accumulates too much, our bodies produce lactic acid, causing our muscles to stop working properly. Dean’s body isn’t affected by the accumulation of lactate. This means that he never gets tired. He started running in high school and joined a track team. While the rest of the team could only do 15 laps, he did 105 before he was told to stop. Although he has since stopped running, scientists in Colorado investigated Dean’s remarkable endurance. They said the test would take maximum 15 minutes, but he kept going on a treadmill for over an hour. Because of this unique ability, Dean once ran 50 marathons in 50 days.
The Russian girl with X-ray vision
A Russian girl named Natalya Demkina reputedly has the power to see inside people’s bodies. From a young age, Demkina gained a following of “patients” who would visit her apartment to have her look inside them and diagnose their illnesses. International interest in her case came from Dr, Ray Hyman, who flew her to New York City to run some tests. One of these exams involved six patients who had various conditions. Five had conditions, like a removed appendix or a metal plate in the skull after a brain tumor, and one control patient had no medical conditions. They gave Demkina six cards with all the different conditions on them and then sent the patients in one by one. She got four of them right, which sounds pretty impressive (even though she claims to be able to see down to a cellular level). Interestingly though, she mixed up the metal-plated skull and the appendix, which are pretty bad mistakes for someone who can allegedly see inside of people. Maybe X-men is best confined to the cinema.
The real-life Spiderman
Frenchman, Alain Robert, is known as the “real life Spiderman” for his habit of scaling famous landmarks without the aid of climbing ropes or safety equipment of any kind. The urban climber is also called the “human spider”, and regularly scales skyscrapers with nothing but a pair of climbing shoes and a bag of chalk. Robert rocked up at his chosen challenge at dawn since he rarely obtained permission from the authorities for his death-defying climbs. Consequently, he has been arrested multiple times, leading him to seek permission and sponsorship for his climbs in recent years. His training in rock climbing and technique enable him to utilize the small protrusions in walls and windows (like ledges and frames) to gain purchase. Many of his climbs offer him no opportunity for rest, lasting several hours. Robert has climbed the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, and Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
The woman with the largest top size in the world
German model Beshine (born Mayra Hills) has the largest fake top size in the world. Her eye-popping chest contains ten liters of saline solution and weighs nine kilograms each. That’s roughly equivalent to the weight of a toddler, tire car, or four full-size rainbow trout (in case you think in fish). According to her website, Mills’ chest amount to more than half of her total body weight. Those are some water balloons. Her bra size is an absurd 32Z. The world’s largest natural chest is a comparatively negligible 48V. Once a diminutive A-cup, the 31-year-old took things to the other extreme with her shocking procedure. In her official blog, she claims “Beshine loves having the biggest t**s in the universe and welcomes you with her record-breaking and ever growing [size]”, adding “it is always an adventure to be in public with such [a big chest]”. Asked what began this unusual journey, she says “the boobie greed monster in me never stopped being greedy and hungry…I follow my inner voice and I currently have not reached my goal. My fans know what that means.”
The WWII soldier who never came out of hiding
Shoichi Yokoi was a soldier conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941. He was sent to Guam shortly thereafter. When American forces reconquered the island in 1944, Yokoi went into hiding. There he stayed for the duration of the war, living in utmost seclusion in a remote area of the island. Even after the war ended, Yokoi remained in hiding, sequestered in his jungle home without contact with the outside world. On January 24, 1972, some 28 years after the end of the Second World War, Yokoi was discovered in a remote section of Guam by two of the island’s inhabitants. For all that time, he had been hiding in an underground jungle cave, fearing to come out of hiding even after he came across some leaflets announcing that World War II had ended. “It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive”, he said upon his return to Japan, carrying his rusted rifle at his side.
The Indian man whose twin brother was in his stomach
All his life, Sanju Bhagat of Nagpur, India, had been self-conscious about his belly. His stomach was once so swollen that he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe. When a tumor caused Bhagat to undergo an operation, it became apparent that his stomach was more than a cosmetic issue. Operating on Bhagat, doctors discovered limbs, hair, and other body parts in his stomach. Although it initially seemed like some bizarre C-section, it was, in fact, the mutated body of Bhagat’s twin brother that doctors removed from his body. One of the world’s most bizarre medical conditions is fetus in fetu. This abnormality is extremely rare and occurs when a fetus becomes trapped inside his twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even after the birth of the child through forming an umbilical chord-like structure that leeches the twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it could actually harm the host.
The man who marshaled an undead army
Lal Bihari was born into a farming family in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1961. When he tried to apply for a bank loan in 1976, he found out that as far as the authorities were concerned, he was officially dead. His uncle had bribed a government official to register him as dead in order to gain ownership of Bihari’s land. Bihari has since founded the Association of the Dead and discovered more than a hundred other unfortunate people in a similar position. He and many other members of the association were in danger of being killed for real, by those who had appropriated their property. Now, the association has grown to more than twenty thousand legally dead members, hailing from all over India. By 2004, they had managed to declare four of their members alive. In the same year, the zombie hero returned from the dead to run for a seat in the local parliament.
