Weirdest person you've ever met

[Did a search, apparently this one has never been done before, tho if so I apologize]

Simple one this time: the weirdest person you’ve ever met. Could be a passing
stranger, casual acquaintance, or best friend. Tho now that I ask it, nobody for
me at least comes to immediate mind. My roommate loves to imitate Cornholio
(from Beavis & Butthead) at the slightest prompting from a TV show or movie, so
I guess he counts…

A guy I went to high school with, Danny. Big, nerdy-but-cool geek. Was into all kinds of uber-geek computer-y stuff, RPGs, and pot. He wore eyeglasses with purple lenses, and sometimes forgot to wear shoes to school. He had gorgeous handwriting, very tiny and ornamental but legible, and could duplicate this beautiful penmanship backwards (mirror image) with his left hand. He was prone to amusing non-sequitor commentary and minor pyromania.

I was very disappointed to learn that he grew up to work in a very boring assembly line job, but hope that his interests and personality outside work stayed as quirky as ever.

“Crazy Dave”- He shaved his head and stood about 6’5 but that has nothing to do with the weirdness, it just added an intimidating aspect. He was nucking futs- wrote poems about Treblinka and insisted on reading them aloud at book club meetings (regardless of what the book under discussion was), was convinced Y2K was a plot cooked up by Henry Kissinger to see bodies piled to the sky, and then was convinced that 9-11 was that same plot, and made a local barkeeper stock anthrax vaccine in the refrigerator. In spite of all this, most people regarded him as a “harmless eccentric”, including unfortunately people with the power to put him away. Finally they decided maybe those of us who were saying “CRAZY DAVE IS BARKING MAD!” were onto something when he decided he was masturbating too much and cut off his hand with a skillsaw.
The weird thing: he was extremely intelligent and extremely charming. Just nuts. An obit of sorts I wrote when Crazy Dave died (suicide).

Of the non-psychotic variety I’ll say Amadeus, a weeble shaped fellow with ABSOLUTELY NO AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NO social skills. He attended a college class a close friend of mine taught and developed a crush on her. If he ever sees her in public and we can’t run the other way (and we do- we aren’t even shy about it because he’s also impossible to offend) he’ll just suddenly materialize and be breathing loud behind you. He sounds like Truman Capote, which is odd since he’s obese and tall.

“Crazy Dave”- He shaved his head and stood about 6’5 but that has nothing to do with the weirdness, it just added an intimidating aspect. He was nucking futs- wrote poems about Treblinka and insisted on reading them aloud at book club meetings (regardless of what the book under discussion was), was convinced Y2K was a plot cooked up by Henry Kissinger to see bodies piled to the sky, and then was convinced that 9-11 was that same plot, and made a local barkeeper stock anthrax vaccine in the refrigerator. In spite of all this, most people regarded him as a “harmless eccentric”, including unfortunately people with the power to put him away. Finally they decided maybe those of us who were saying “CRAZY DAVE IS BARKING MAD!” were onto something when he decided he was masturbating too much and cut off his hand with a skillsaw.

The weird thing: he was extremely intelligent and extremely charming. Just monomanically nuts. He was also the subject of one of the strangest comments I ever heard, that being from a friend with a beautiful Italian accent who said, seriously, “He’s seemed so very despondent ever since he sawed off his hand for masturbating.”

An obit of sorts I wrote when Crazy Dave died (suicide in the parking lot of the police department after holding officers at gunpoint; I’m guessing this was with the hand he didn’t use to masturbate).

Of the non-psychotic variety I’ll say Amadeus, a weeble shaped fellow with ABSOLUTELY NO AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NO social skills. He attended a college class a close friend of mine taught and developed a crush on her. If he ever sees her in public and we can’t run the other way (and we do- we aren’t even shy about it because he’s also impossible to offend) he’ll just suddenly materialize and be breathing loud behind you. He sounds like Truman Capote, which is odd since he’s obese and tall.

{{Apologies- I thought I was editing the post instead of reposting- if you read the other one I added the details of CD’s death and the quote that made me spew latte when I heard it and may be why I still don’t like latte.}}

I live in Thailand. I encounter a new contender for that title almost every day.

The miner. He was a deaf mute homeless dude. His attire was 3 down parkas and probably 2 pairs of pants completely covered with grime, and this was during the summer. He wore a beanie and a dark machine shop face shield. He had the classic full unkempt beard. Rumor had it that he was arrested for walking down Old Town and busting out all the windows with a machete. I was walking up the sidewalk passing him and he jumped out in front of me with the classic Oooga Booga arms raised scary mutherfucker I’m gonna rip your face off. I bystepped him and hurried on my way. Fortunately, I hadn’t heard of any violence perpetrated by him.

Our friend and accountant. Who is a perfectly good accountant. Who also unscrews the light in his refrigerator so the snipers won’t get him at night. He’s flat out strange, but a lovely guy, and knows his tax deductions!

Cheers,
G

Clarence (not his real name) was a coworker of mine many years ago, in NYC. He was a proofreader (most of whom are a little weird anyway). Clarence was in his 50s at the time and had a spherical body, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and he wore his belt very high. He also wore a toupee that was like a little bird nest sitting atop his head. The toupee had a part in it, and the part could be aligned in any direction; apparently he just grabbed it in the morning and plopped it on his head.

Clarence always wore a white dress shirt that was frayed at the collar and sleeves, and had yellow stains at the armpits and food stains down the front. He often came to work with mismatched shoes and/or socks. By the way, he was paid fairly well.

Clarence had many social phobias, and had a hard time going into stores to buy things, so he bought everything through mail-order (This was before the internet). One time, a company sent him a pair of shoes that were 2 sizes too short. So he cut the ends off with the paper cutter at work, and wore these “open-toe” shoes for years.

Clarence had no hair on the top of his forarms, like most men do. But he had hair on the bottom.

Clarence had never married, never dated, and had no friends of hobbies. He lived in a tiny furnished room, and his elderly mother came on the subway from Brooklyn every Sunday, to bring him a week’s worth of food. I don’t think he would have been capable of finding food to eat if it weren’t for her.

Yeshua 666 Israel. He’s this weird Satanist guy in Tucson who roams around ranting about stuff, appears on local cable access television, and likes to pour “blood” on his children and parade them around town chained together. I didn’t actually meet him, but someone did invite him to speak at my high school and so I saw him on campus (it was a student who invited him to speak, as part of some project… I think he was thrown off campus though.)

I Googled his name to see if other people had talked about him and found this blog which mentions some of the notorious Tucson crazies. The blog mentions “Speedo Man”, who my friends and I always refered to as “Melanoma Man”… he was this bald, tan-to-the-point-of-being-crispy guy who would ride around town, slowly, on his one-speed oooold bike, with a huge grin on his face, wearing nothing but a tiny Speedo. I never saw him wear anything else, and never saw him with any other facial expression. I think it’s safe to say that he had some mental problems. I heard a few years ago that he’d died. The blog says he died of skin cancer, which wouldn’t surprise me, but also wouldn’t surprise me if it was just an assumption/rumor.

The local Winter Park bum John is pretty strange. He has the classic trucker look down cold. Huge black sunglasses, scraggly full brown beard, jean jacket and rumped khakis. Smokes and has a deep yet friendly voice.

He’s friendly, intelligent, and talks to everyone who will give him the time of the day. “Hey John,” is the proper way to address him, at which point he will toast you with his coffee cup. If you stay at that point, he will begin chatting with you. He’s exceedingly intelligent and obviously has a classical education, because he makes constant references in his rambling to philosophers and other obscure things. He told me the other day “I have the spirit of Demosthenes,” which I took as a compliment. The only problem with him is that half the time he makes sense and half the time he goes completely nutso about w/e is on his mind.

In all fairness, he cant really be called a bum. He spends easily 2K on food and drinking during an average week. The locals theorize he is the black sheep of the Maytag family, and they pay him to live in Park Ave because he’s harmless and good for business.

It’s a pity that Clarence was born before the Internet had taken off. He probably could have been quite content with with a telecommuting job, some dating/webcam services, and online ordering. Truly, a man before his time.

Waaaaay back in elementary school, we had an art teacher named Mr. Hettle. He was extremely weird. This was almost 30 years ago, so I don’t remember a lot, but I remember he used to say that aliens had landed in his yard.

He also said that barcodes would become the actual price tag, and they would be electronic and constantly going up. So the faster you got to the front of the store, the less you would pay.

I have a couple. The first one I didn’t really meet.
He just made me sit through a green light, dumbfounded.
I was in LA as a travel nurse. It was my first week and I was on my way to work, at Hollywood Presbyterian. I was stopped waiting for the light, when a man (I assume it was a man) with a full, black beard, shoulder length hair, wearing a black and white polka dot full shirted dress (think Donna Reed) with a matching picture hat and black work boots. He was dragging a black plastic garbage bag. (It looked heavy enough to have a body in it, but it could have been his belongings.)

He stopped in front of my car, looked me in the eye, pulled a live pigeon from somewhere and bit it’s head off! :eek: He dropped the body on my car hood and disappeared into the crowd.
I sat stunned through the green light. I didn’t even hear the horns honking. It was just down the street from the main headquarters of Scientology. I don’t know if there was a connection.

The other was a good friend (J) of my housekeeper (T). T invited hubby and I to a small get together at J’s.
J’s house had been condemned when she bought it. She paid very little for it. It had been built in the 1860s (very old for the Seattle area). It had been a hunting lodge for a wealthy railroad baron. It was three stories, plus a basement. So much of it was well worth saving. She and her friends brought it up to code (but, just barely)

She’d lived there for just over two years. Every flat surface was covered with her “treasures”, everything from pretty rocks from her driveway to priceless antique crystal.
Everything was covered with two years worth of dust. She took us to the basement that was so frightening I couldn’t stay. Things were stacked to the ceiling except for a narrow “trail” through to the back wall. Many of the stacks were unstable, I was terrified one would fall and trap us.
She told us that part of the condemnation was a rat problem. She said they had used a “poison gas” to kill them, something someone had given her. It turned out to be cynide. She still have several containers of it in the basement. Hubby can smell a few ppms and decided we needed to leave right away.
She also had a number of vague diseases, that no doctor had been able to properly diagnose. She was seeing a homeopath, although, from her discription, it was a broad use of the title. It seems he was just some guy who would cure her. Of everything, even things she didn’t know she had yet.

We did not become fast friends.

I would say a guy who is attending the same college as me takes the cake.

We’ll call this guy D.

D is very, very intellegent when it comes to everything about Japan: it’s history, culture, economics, anything. He’ll rattle off dates by heart as if it’s common knowledge. He’ll often hold a person hostage with his conversations on gothic lolita or the most recent company that got caught using expired ingredients. As soon as you say “Wow, that’s interesting, but I gotta g-”, he takes that as “Wow, that’s interesting, please talk to me for another half an hour about it because I have nowhere else that could possibly be more interesting than here.”

My friends and I believe that he must have some disorder running along Asberger’s, because he cannot hold a conversation. When he does hold a conversation, it’s only to one person, hunting down a person and holding them to his mercy- it reminds me of a lion taking down a zebra from it’s pack. His conversations are usually only about topics that are interesting to him, because he doesn’t know how to talk socially or shoot the breeze. He doesn’t know when to end conversations. His constant staring is creepy. The fact that he’s made me his main person to latch onto doesn’t make it any better. :frowning:

The fact that he’s extremely tall and gangly, wears sweatpants everyday, and is balding at a young age but is growing the rest of his hair long doesn’t exactly help his weirdness. He refuses to hang out with guys.

Well, truth be told, he knows everything about Japan *except * the language. I have no clue how he got into my class. He will not talk in Japanese, even to the teachers, unless he is forced. Weird thing is, this guy wants to live in Japan and write books in Japanese!

This guy would make a great college professor, just because of the sheer amount of knowledge he already contains. I feel sorry for him, but part of me doesn’t want him in my class this coming semester because of the creepy stalker/latching on thing he always does.

Never really met a person weird as him. I would go into more detail but I think it would turn into a rant. :stuck_out_tongue:

A decade or so before Dan Brown wrote “The DaVinci Code,” I was the only woman in an organization where I was surrounded by male chauvinists who just couldn’t adjust their world view to see a woman as an intellectual equal. A lovely exception to this was “Lester,” (not his real name). Lester never patronized me, and he discussed politics and economics with me as if I might actually understand what he was saying. He was a joy to work with and I respected him greatly.

One day the two of us ended up taking a 3-hour car trip alone together as part of a business activity. To my utter shock, he used me as a captive audience to spin the story (repeat, LONG before Dan Brown wrote his book) about Jesus marrying Mary Magadelene and having children, more or less as you can now read the tale in The Da Vinci Code. As I sat in the car in paralyzed astonishment, he told me with a straight face that he was a direct descendent of Jesus Christ. He seemed abso-effing-lutely serious, and gave tons of details about his ancestors in the 18th century hiding away in Scottish castles to escape people trying to assassinate JC’s descendants – and so on and so forth.

Since this guy had some power over me (he was on the board of directors for the organization I headed), I really didn’t know what to say, other than a weak “oh … that’s very interesting, Lester.”

Both of us moved away not long after that discomfiting episode, but Google is a wonderful tool so I have checked up on Lester to see whatever happened to him. Lester, who is career foreign service, is now US Ambassador to a hell-hole of a country, the kind of country that you are posted to at the beginning of your career if you are up and coming, so you can pay your dues and move up – or you are posted at the END of your career if you’ve washed out.

Guess which stage of his career Lester is at? Perhaps he told the wrong person about his “ancestry.”

That is by far the wierdest person I have ever known. Because, you know, if people are wierd on an ongoing, expected basis, that’s one thing. But to go from totally normal to telling me such a demented story with no warning … well, that takes a special kind of derangement.

I used to live in Northampton, MA, which seems to have over its quota of weird. It’s a college town, with a large non-college population and a VA hospital near the center of town.

The weirdest person I ever actually met was my ex’s father, Brian. He was a guy who went off to Vietnam (Marine infantry) basically illiterate…came back with a hell of a lot of knowledge, artistic ability, and a thirst for more. And a thing for guns. When I met him, he and ex’s mom had separated and he was sleeping in a Honda Civic outside of town, sitting around town during the day and drawing these beautiful detailed pattern artworks. Friends used to wonder when he’d actually climb a tower and start firing - he was very friendly but very unstable.

Several years ago Brian hooked up with one of ex’s girlfriends, shaved his hair into a mohawk, got facial tattoos, and had a baby.

Ex’s mom is a modern dancer, trained in a direct line from Isadora Duncan. She’s very nice, but strange in her own way. Once we (ex and friends) were tripping, and we had to go home and take care of ex’s sister because Mom had kicked her ex-bf (not husband - after the breakup) right in the chest and got hauled off to jail. (She also once encouraged me and her son to try to smuggle drugs into the country on a cruise ship. We declined.)

People I never met but heard about:

The Minty Samoan: Large man of Asian extraction who was a long-time alcoholic who could not buy liquor at the package stores (no grocery store sales in MA). So he would drink Listerine. Apparently once treed my ex in the park.

Smokin’ Pete (and his Lucky Golden Shoe): A guy from the VA who would come into the town’s center and buy a lot of lottery tickets. And he would pee down his pants leg (thus the Golden Shoe).

There’s a book called Home Town (you can probably look it up on Amazon) that explains the the weird dynamic in that place. If you do look it up, I was also acquainted with the rich OCD guy who has a large profile in the book.

A guy I only know as Smith. Went to Vietnam as a fairly normal person, came back a little weird, did way too many drugs and his is now a lot weird. He is totally harmless but his looks scare a lot of people, because of this he has been branded a pedophile even though he has never been arrested for any crimes against children. The guy is a wizard when it comes to welding, he does beautiful work. He lives in an old bus converted to a motorhome and collects dragons figures. I haven’t seen him in a few years, I’m going to have to look him up and see how he’s doing.

Apparently it’s a (French, I’ve heard) legend; I’ve seen other books spun from it, years before that one.

Uhm… I have a degree in Theoretical Chemistry, what was the question? Oh, you’re serious? OK.

I’ve known quite a few strange people; the weirdest one is hard to explain. He was about 30 at the time, on disability. He didn’t have a car; we dropped him off several times, the place where he had us do it was a building with an uniformed doorman and he didn’t go in or even approach the door until we’d left (if he did). He was paranoid (per IANAShrink definition), schizophrenic (according to himself), convinced that They were out to get him, took it as a personal affront that I would not dump my bf at his say-so, and took more funny-coloured pills than anybody else I’ve known under the age of 70. His idea of convincing me that I needed “a strong man to protect you” was to corner me in my lab. Gee, that’s supposed to make me want to date you? I’m so sorry, it didn’t work!

Grad student I knew out in Salt Lake City. He swore that he ate only the protein powder, vitamins, and mineral mix that he made up, along with bread he baked himself (from frozen dough he bought in the store) for fiber. I;'m willing to believe this, because I’d been to his apartment, and there was no other food in his kitchen. at all. Most of the kitchebn was taken up by his mini-factory for making high-tech toys. He had a home-built vac-u-former for molding parts and a solder dip for making circuits, and he packaged the things he made in small pizza boxes with multicolored labels stuck on.

He brushed his teeth 9so he said) with fine industrial abrasive. In the winter he walked to the university without a coat. This one I can attest to.

He described a visit by Mormon missionaries, in which he arranged a series of gags , such as a painting done in wax paints with a heater runninmg behind it. During the course of the session, it slowly melted and ran on the wall behind him. Again, I don’t know if it really happened, but it could and should have,.

Emo Phillips.

Not the actual Emo Phillips, but a guy I met in China called Dave who looked and acted 100% like him, without the humor. And he banged on and on about himself, very slowly, in this weird high-low voice.

He also had some kind of hangup when you asked him where he was from.

Adopt Emo Phillips voice and mannerisms:

“Hi, my name’s Dave.”

  • “Hi Dave, where are you from?”

“… … … … … … …”

  • “Huh?”

“… … … … … … … … … …”

  • “What?”

“… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … newyork.”

Just bizarre. After about two ‘conversations’ with the guy, I spent a lot of time trying to avoid him.