Margaret Howe Lovatt, The Woman Who Had A Sexual Relationship With A Dolphin
In 1964, neuroscientist John C. Lilly received funding from NASA and the U.S. Navy to determine if it was possible to communicate with extraterrestrials. He began by building a “Dolphinarium” on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to see if he could teach dolphins to mimic human language. Lilly employed a young woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt to help him — and her experiences at the Dolphinarium soon made her one of the world’s weirdest people.
Lovatt quickly bonded with an adolescent male dolphin named Peter, and she spent hours with him each day trying to get him to say phrases like “Hello, Margaret.” However, their relationship soon took a bizarre turn.
The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins/BBC/YouTubeMargaret Howe Lovatt training Peter the dolphin.
Peter was reaching sexual maturity, and he frequently interrupted their lessons with his “urges.” To relieve them, Lovatt initially transferred him to a pool with female dolphins, but the transportation process was lengthy and took away from her teaching time.
So, Lovatt started satisfying Peter herself.
“Peter liked to be with me,” Lovatt told The Guardian in 2014. “He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand… I allowed that. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn’t rough.”
“It would just become part of what was going on,” Lovatt continued, “like an itch — just get rid of it, scratch it and move on… It wasn’t sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer.”
By 1966, Lilly’s project had lost funding, and Peter was transferred to a facility in Miami. There, he was kept in dismal conditions and essentially died by suicide, refusing to come up for air.
Lovatt, meanwhile, got married, converted the Dolphinarium into a family home, and raised three children there.
The Weirdest People In History: Sawney Bean, The Scottish Cannibal
Sawney Bean was probably a mythical figure, but that doesn’t mean he’s not one of history’s weirdest people.
As the legend goes, Bean left home as a young man and settled in a cave on the west coast of Scotland with a woman named “Black Agnes,” who had been accused of witchcraft. Together, they had 14 children, who went on to have 32 kids of their own — with each other. Bean was the head of this incestuous clan.
Public DomainAn 18th-century illustration of Sawney Bean.
The large family survived by attacking travelers along lonely roads at night, bringing them back to the cave, and cannibalizing them. Over 25 years, Sawney Bean is said to have killed and consumed more than 1,000 victims.
Locals eventually grew suspicious, and after an intended target escaped one of the Bean family’s ambushes and alerted a magistrate, Scotland’s king launched a search party. Dogs quickly tracked down the cave, and the posse who entered was horrified to find the Bean clan surrounded by barrels full of pickled human remains.
Then, the clan was either arrested and executed in a grisly fashion or killed when the search party ignited gunpowder in the cave.
The veracity of this tale has long been debated, but anyone who potentially ate 1,000 human beings certainly deserves a spot on the list of the weirdest people in history.
After reading about some of the weirdest people in history, go inside 11 weird historical events. Then, read about the strange deaths of 16 historical figures.
