Lord Byron, The Eccentric Yet Renowned Poet
While Lord Byron is best remembered as one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement today, he was infamous during his lifetime for his bizarre habits.
He began studying at Trinity College in 1805, and when the school forbade him from bringing his dogs to campus with him, he adopted a pet bear instead. He graduated in 1808 and traveled through Europe, and after his return to England three years later, he became a famed poet.
Public DomainAn 1813 portrait of Lord Byron by British painter Thomas Phillips.
Lord Byron decorated his family estate with macabre objects, such as flower pots made from his ancestors’ skulls. He even turned one into a drinking goblet.
In 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, but she left him barely a year later after accusing him of sodomy and incest with his half-sister — who may have birthed his child. Shortly thereafter, the poet was forced to flee his home country after lynching threats.
He settled in Italy, where he collected a menagerie of animals. When Percy Bysshe Shelley visited him around 1820, he wrote that he saw “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.”
Lord Byron inexplicably spent the final years of his life helping lead the Greek independence movement against the Ottoman Empire. He fell ill in Greece while planning a campaign in 1824 and died at age 36. The life of one of history’s strangest figures had come to an end, but his legacy continues to this day.
Hetty Green, The ‘Witch Of Wall Street’
Hetty Green was born into a wealthy Massachusetts whaling family in 1834. She later married rich, too, but the majority of her massive fortune came from her investment strategies.
She mostly purchased unpopular stocks at low prices and sat on them until she made a hefty profit. By 1885, 20 years after she started investing, Green had more than $26 million in the bank. And when she died in 1916, her net worth was as much as $200 million — more than $5 billion today.
Public DomainHetty Green, pictured here in 1897, was perhaps the most miserly millionaire in history.
Despite these riches, Hetty Green was outrageously miserly. She reportedly never used the heat or hot water in her home, wore a single dress until it was so threadbare that she was forced to buy a new one, and ate dry oatmeal that she heated on a radiator at her office.
Most shockingly, Green purportedly refused to pay for medical care when her son injured his leg as a teenager. He ultimately had to have the limb amputated.
She neglected her own health, too. In her later years, she developed a hernia and pressed it down herself rather than visiting the doctor.
Some of these stories may be exaggerated, but this “Witch of Wall Street” was certainly infamous for her penny-pinching tendencies.
Hetty Green died in 1916 at age 81, and soon after, Guinness World Records named her the “World’s Greatest Miser,” cementing her legacy as one of history’s weirdest people.
