The Appetite

Hey true weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category and that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks! Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

Feed me! You've been hungry, right? Haven't we all said about a gazillion times, I'm starving! Of course you're not, not really. It just feels that way. Then you have a little snack or a double bacon cheeseburger or whatever and it's all good. You're satisfied. You can get back to thinking of other things. Unless you can't.

Unless no amount of food can fill that aching emptiness. Because your hunger consumes you. And nothing can ever, ever be enough. Eating is all you can think about. Food! Food! Food! And there's nothing you won't put in your mouth. Food! Food! Food! True. Weird. Stuff. Gluttony. It's one of the seven deadly sins. The kind of behavior that, if you're not careful, might condemn you to an eternity of dog battling around a lake of fire.

If there's one thing humans love to scrutinize, criticize, judge, it's what other people put in their mouths. When it comes to food, we really are fascinated little voyeurs who love to watch. And we've been watching other humans unhinge their jaws and stuff their faces for centuries. You think Joey Chestnut pounding 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes is something?

You should have been there about 500 years ago when a guy named Nicholas Wood gobbled down an entire duck. Feathers and all. Can you imagine being born so hungry that nothing, no amount of food ever, ever filled you up? That was Tarrare's life. They say that when he ate, steam rose up from his body. That the only thing stranger than watching him feed was what they found at his autopsy.

Wait, slow down. Who is Tarrare? Or, as the people whispered, what was Tarrare? Tarrare was born near Lyon, France in 1772. Not great timing, what with northern and central Europe walloped by famine. Especially since this baby was always so hungry, just insatiable, ravenous. Hungry in a way that neither his parents nor anyone in his village had ever seen.

If there was a limit to how much this boy could eat, they never found it. The struggle to provide enough food became harder and harder until it could no longer be managed. By the time Tarrare hit his teens, that boy could eat almost a quarter of a Bullock at one sitting. All by himself. Now, let's say a mature Bullock weighs, on average, about 2,000 pounds.

And that equates to about 600 pounds of meat. That means, hard as it is to believe, that Tarrare could scarf down 150 pounds of beef in one go. And so, when it became clear that they could no longer afford to feed him, his parents sent him off to make his own way, somehow. Which sounds nuts, and cruel, and possibly even illegal.

To us, to the people of Tarrare's time, abandoning a sickly or troublesome kid was a pretty normal occurrence. The streets of London, for example, were choked with the poor, including children, who begged, and stole, and struggled to survive in the shadows. In Tarrare's France, it wasn't any different or any better. Besides, he was big enough now, his parents reasoned, old enough.

Nearly a man. If he couldn't restrain his appetite, then it was on him, now, to satisfy it. At first, the only way he survived was by falling in with a band of thieves. Eventually, though, he made the acquaintance of a traveling performer. A fraud and a charlatan, for sure, but one willing to let Tarrare warm up the crowds for him.

Tarrare's act was the one thing he did best. Eating. As ragged little crowds gathered around him, he swallowed anything and everything. One time, on stage, he defied the public to satiate him. And so, in a few minutes, ate an entire basket full of apples furnished by one of the spectators. He swallowed flints, and corks, and all that was presented to him.

Flints, corks, whole baskets of fruit, and most shockingly, live animals. This is the part where we warn you about something that's coming. No one ever complains when we tell a story about bringing their children to watch a public hanging. But eating a cat? That's another thing altogether. Tarrare is going to eat some stuff you'd rather he didn't.

He'd probably rather he didn't, too. But he did. It's what happened. The man wasn't trying to be evil. It was a very different time. And he was starving to the point that he could barely think straight. Which gets you to wondering, how does hunger even work? Like everything about the human body, it's a complicated little miracle of engineering.

The brain is always attentive to the digestive tract. When your stomach is empty, the vagus nerve cells call up to the brain. Yo, we got a situation here! The endocrine system plays a part, too, releasing hormones that just roar. Feed me! Feed me! Feed me! Then there are the gut-brain peptide hormones that send the signal.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Back away from the fork! I repeat, back away from the fork! We are full! At least, you know, that's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always go that way. Sometimes those wires get crossed, or the signals misfire. Or, you know, tacos. Homemade chocolate chip cookies. Pepperoni pizza. Ice cream. Sometimes we just tell our brains and guts to shut up, because whatever we're cramming into our pie hole is just so good.

Too good. We're just going to keep on eating until we make ourselves sick. Now, there are a handful of solid medical reasons why some people are always hungry, no matter what. Leptin resistance is one. Leptin is the hormone that calls up to the brain when the stomach is full. And if you develop a resistance to leptin, your brain doesn't get that message.

Or, maybe it's an overactive thyroid. Being hungry all the time is a symptom of hyperthyroidism. And then, there's always the dreaded tapeworm. Which, if your Gen X was right up there with quicksand, is something you needed to be ready to do battle with. Not only would a tapeworm cause you to eat and eat and eat, but it would steal all the nutrients from your food.

So, no matter how much you ate, you'd just keep wasting away. The only way to get rid of a tapeworm, according to my great-great-grandmother, who came to America from the old country, was to squat over a bowl of warm milk and wait for the foul thing to be coaxed out for a sip. Oh my God! Oh my God! The horror! I don't even know if that's true, by the way.

And I don't want to find out, because I already made the mistake today at looking at a picture of a tapeworm's face, and that was the end of my tapeworm research. It's nightmarish. Anyway, T.R. didn't have a tapeworm. What he did have was far, far worse. Also, please do not Google tapeworm face, unless you're a person who eats undercooked bacon or something, in which case, please Google it immediately, and then start cooking your damn food all the way through.

You're welcome. Poor T.R. He struggled to survive. Life on the streets was brutal. He just couldn't manage to get enough to eat. The hunger gnawed and gnawed at him. It was an impossible situation. In desperation, he joined the French army. Less out of patriotism than a near-frantic desire to be fed. The French had just embarked on the War of the First Coalition.

Don't feel bad if you've never heard of it. It lasted about five and a half years and was your usual bloody mayhem in the name of restoring the French monarchy, because none of the European powers wanted to see that French revolutionaries succeed in establishing a republic. And that's because royalty, like today's billionaires, can never seem to get enough power and wealth, always at the expense of the people.

In fact, f*** the people was their attitude. In Latin, that would be pur populis, which makes it sound ever so much more noble, doesn't it? So, in 1792, T.R. goes off to war. It didn't take long for his superior officers to realize that their new recruit had certain needs, unlike anything they had ever seen before. They tried doubling and then tripling and finally quadrupling his daily rations.

It still wasn't enough. From an account that was later published in a book by a French author named Percy LeBaron and carried by press all around the world. At the commencement of the war, T.R. served all the young men in the company, did all their jobs for them, and ate up their rations they left for him in return. And that still wasn't enough.

T.R. pawed any garbage he could from the filthy gutters and wolfed it like a man who'd never seen a meal. He'd scrabble through trash heaps and dung piles in search of anything even remotely edible. And his definition of edible was probably very different from yours. You might gag at a dead rat or a rotting bird. These were all but delicacies for T.R. Bottomless pit, a hollow leg.

But for all of that, the enormous quantities that T.R. was tucking away didn't show up on his body. Not only was he scrawny, he was weak and increasingly so exhausted from hunger that he wound up needing to be hospitalized. The diagnosis? He was chronically underweight. Forget every joke you've ever heard about hospital food.

T.R. vacuumed up every morsel delivered to his room. Hospital staff very quickly learned what the army already knew. It wasn't enough. Nothing was enough. He devoured the food refused by other patients and all the scraps left about the kitchen. But his hunger could not be appeased. Doctors were as taken aback by the man as his army superiors had been.

How was it even possible, they marveled, for one person to eat so much yet still be all but wasting away? How in the world was he even able to digest some of what he'd crammed into his mouth? Because much of it wasn't even food by any definition. He got into the apothecary's room and there ate the poultices and everything else he could seize.

It was a stroke of luck for T.R. that he came to the attention of the doctors Percy and Courville. They were puzzled, fascinated, and curious about this young man with a bewildering appetite. The pair embarked on a series of experiments on T.R. They decided to try and establish just how much he could eat at a single meal.

Just keep shoveling the food his way while we take notes, they thought. Easy enough. They stopped when T.R. polished off every plate of a meal intended for 15 German laborers. Not because T.R. was satisfied, but because they couldn't believe what they were seeing. He inhaled two large meat pies, guzzled four gallons of milk, licked clean plate after greasy plate.

The repast included four large bowls of curdled milk and two enormous hard puddings. Ew, curdled milk. That got me too. Apparently, it was quite the thing then to mix curdled milk with sugar and some kind of alcohol or just eat it plain. And in that state, it was like, sort of like cottage cheese. Oh, ye who glorify the past, I hope your stomach is as strong as your nostalgia.

T.R., who had immediately fallen into a deep sleep after that meal, was only temporarily satiated. He took to sneaking out of the hospital any chance he got. He prowled the nearby streets, crouching behind the local butcher shops and devouring whatever bloody scraps had been tossed on the dung heap. He disputed with dogs and wolves for the most disgusting delicacies.

And when T.R. couldn't sneak out, he prowled the hospital's corridors in search of anything, anything at all that might serve as a snack. The servants of the hospital surprised him, catching him drinking the blood of patients who had been bled. So desperate was T.R. to satisfy this hunger that consumed his every waking thought that he was even caught sneaking into the hospital's morgue to eat the corpses.

Staff took pity on him, though, and led him back to his room. Disgusting as it was to eat the flesh of the dead, they reasoned that no real harm had been done, and they were determined to help T.R. Surely this mystery could be solved. They tried to cure him of this insatiable hunger by the use of acids, preparations of opium, and pills of tobacco, but nothing diminished his appetite and his gluttony.

People were starting to get scared. The plain fact is, T.R. wasn't helping his own reputation a bit by what he was witness gobbling down, like a bucket of live eels that he allegedly swallowed whole, one at a time, head first. Swallowing without chewing it, but we thought we perceived him crush its head between his teeth.

T.R. liked the flesh of serpents. He ate alive the largest snakes without leaving any part of them. Okay, so get ready now, okay? Brace for what's coming and try, try so hard to remember that T.R. wasn't a sadist or a psycho. He was maybe all of like 21 or 22 at this point, and he was being driven out of his mind by that endless, aching, gnawing hunger that clotted his guts and clouded his thoughts and drove him to the most extreme and unthinkable acts in a hopeless attempt to appease it.

Take me! Let a person imagine all the domestic and wild animals the most filthy and ravenous are capable of devouring, and they may form some idea of the appetite as well as the wants of T.R. Okay, here we go. Give me your hand. Give me your hand. This is rough, but it's going to be over really quick, I swear. Are you ready?

T.R. would eat dogs and cats. One day, in the presence of the physician of the army, he seized by the neck and paws a large living cat, tore open its belly with his teeth, sucked its blood and devoured it, leaving no part but a bare skeleton. Weirdly, what happened next might just have been at least one clue in the whole mystery of T.R.'s strange and monstrous condition.

Half an hour afterwards, T.R. threw up the hair of the cat, just as birds of prey and other carnivorous animals do. It's a wonder, in those superstitious times, that the people of T.R.'s home village didn't seize his mother and hang her for the crime of witchcraft, because it was looking more and more that T.R. might be as much beast as he was human.

What creature had the woman lain with to produce such foul offspring as this? This thing in the shape of a man who swallowed lizards and puppies and rotting refuse with the same gusto he brought to a bowl of stew. Out of the hospital now, but still an enlisted man, T.R. was once again the army's problem. He was still underweight, still constantly sweating, the skin on his cheeks sagged, and it was oddly wrinkly, which was bizarre.

He wasn't yet even 25 years old, right? In fact, the skin on his whole body hung in a strangely loose way, especially if it had been a while since his last meal. If we're being honest, T.R.'s appearance was as weird as his insatiable hunger. His mouth was wide, but abnormally so. They say he could fit a dozen apples or eggs in his mouth at one time with no problem.

Thin, almost non-existent lips framed his wrecked teeth. Stained, chipped, broken, decayed. Chomping on just about anything you could fit in that mouth had clearly taken a toll. The space between the jaws, when they were fully separated, measured about four inches. In this state, with his head inclined backwards, the mouth and esophagus formed a rectilinear canal into which a cylinder of a foot in circumference could be introduced without touching the palate.

A cylinder? A foot in circumference? A jaw opening of four inches? That's double what the average human jaw can manage. Listen, even the most polite person struggled not to gape and gag at the sight of T.R. We've talked a lot about how much T.R. ate and how terrible and gross-sounding a lot of it was. Please, I don't care how big a foodie you are, the flesh of dead bodies cooling on slabs in the morgue is just something we can all agree ate for dinner.

But what we haven't talked about is what it was like to watch T.R. eat. As he frantically chewed and gulped, his skin slowly began filling out. His belly became bigger and bigger, tighter and tighter. His eyes were bloodshot. His cheeks flushed red as his temperature soared. Because T.R. literally burned with fever as he fed.

And he stank almost all the time. But the stench that came off of him as he ate was so heavy and thick that witnesses say it was almost visible as a vapor arising from his body like steam. And on top of everything else, T.R. suffered from chronic, wretched diarrhea. Rivers of it that were said to be so unbearably rank that it defied description.

Now, the good news is, the army of the French Revolution wasn't a bit squeamish. Watching all of those aristocrats and nobles lose their heads to the guillotine had helped toughen them right up. When General Alexandre de Beauharnais studied T.R., he didn't see a freak or a monster or a bottomless pit. He saw an opportunity.

And so began T.R.'s brief career as a spy. General de Beauharnais was inspired by a little experiment Dr. Courville, the surgeon major at the hospital, had tried with T.R. Courville made him swallow a wooden case enclosing a sheet of white paper. T.R. avoided it the following day by the anus and the paper was uninjured.

Huzzah! De Beauharnais' plan was simple and played to T.R.'s one strength, his ability to eat nearly anything. T.R. would be employed as a military courier. Instead of carrying sensitive and secret documents on his person, he would swallow them. And then once he'd arrived at his destination, he would simply excrete the documents and hand them over.

And now it was time for a demonstration. The general had T.R. brought before him after devouring 30 pounds of raw liver and lights. Lights, I was confused by that too, but lights in this context means cleaned, chopped up pig lungs. T.R. successfully swallowed and passed the wooden case. But even so, General de Beauharnais had some doubts about T.R.'s mental strength.

Could the young soldier really pull this off? There was nothing for it but to try. T.R. again swallowed the wooden case. In which was placed a letter to a French colonel who was a prisoner to the enemy. And so T.R. set out on his very first spy mission. It was plenty dangerous, since he would have to cross into enemy territory.

How much training his superior officers bothered to give him before shoving him into the world of espionage isn't known. So I'm going to take a wild guess here and say, couldn't have been much. Disguised as a German peasant, poor T.R. was captured almost the instant his boots touched enemy soil. The Prussian forces scooped him right up.

They strip searched him and found nothing. They beat him almost to death and still he refused to talk. Then they staged a mock execution. Except T.R. didn't know that they weren't really going to kill him. They were just having fun. You know, boys will be boys and all that. The noose they looped around his neck. Ha ha ha ha, just for show.

Even then, T.R. maintained a stoic silence. And as for that wooden case he was hiding in his intestines, T.R. somehow held on to that thing for over 30 hours before he could finally clench no more and passed it. And then what happened? T.R. swallowed it again to conceal the knowledge of its contents from the enemy. The Prussians, not realizing that this simple French soldier was actually a spy who'd fished his secret out of a puddle of his own diarrhea and swallowed it right back down, they let T.R. go.

And who can judge them for being outsmarted like this? Who in their right mind would even suspect such a disgusting thing? That's one story. The other version has T.R. finally breaking down and confessing the whole crazy scheme to the Prussian commander, a general by the name of Zoegli. That version has T.R. chained to the camp latrine until he passed the box.

T.R. confessed that he was carrying top secret military orders. But here's what he didn't know. General de Beauharnais' misgivings about T.R.'s mental fortitude led him to hedge his bets when it came down to mission time. There was nothing in that letter that was enclosed in that box that was important or even a secret.

It was basically, hey, let me know if you get this. Anything interesting happening over there? T.R. was shocked to discover that his capture and that beating had all been for nothing. General Zoegli was furious to have been played like this. He had every intention of hanging the French spy for it, but apparently relented at the last moment and instead set T.R. free.

And no matter which version you believe, this seems extra mean for the French military to not have awarded T.R. some kind of honor, especially if he really did fish the box out of his own waist and re-swallow it. This experience soured T.R. on the army life. He returned to the hospital and begged Dr. Percy to cure him.

And Percy tried, this time placing T.R. on a strict diet of only soft-boiled eggs, which cured him of nothing other than maybe his will to live. Percy's colleagues were increasingly convinced that T.R. was simply mentally ill and there was nothing to be done but confine him to an asylum. Dr. Percy disagreed and persevered.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Percy tried and tried to get to the bottom of T.R.'s mysterious affliction. Absolutely nothing they tried made any difference at all. T.R.'s hospital stay abruptly ended though when he was accused of entering the pediatric ward to take and eat a 14-month-old child. That's where the hospital lost patience and chucked him back onto the streets.

Now, there was never any proof, none, that T.R. snatched up a toddler and ate it alive. You know people like to talk. How gossip spread so fast. The more lurid and awful, the better. T.R. fled the hospital and disappeared. Four years went by before Dr. Percy had any word of his strange patient. A hospital in Versailles reached out to Percy.

But Dr. Tessier had a patient there, a very sick man, possibly dying. And that man was adamant that Percy alone had the power to help him. Dr. Percy made the trip to Versailles. He was dismayed to find T.R. now even more emaciated, paler and weaker than he could have imagined. T.R. told Percy that he had accidentally eaten a fork made of gold and it had sickened him to the point where he could hardly walk.

But he was sure that Percy could remove the fork and make him well. Dr. Percy could tell, though, that even if the man had eaten a golden fork, the real problem was tuberculosis. A very advanced case of tuberculosis, a disease for which there was no effective treatment at the time and no cure. Barely a month later, T.R.'s body was wracked by bloody diarrhea and he succumbed.

Just 26 years old, T.R. was dead. His body and death was no less a gruesome mystery than it had been while alive. For starters, his corpse decayed at a rate that freaked out the surgeons in Versailles. They wanted no part of it and refused to dissect the body for an autopsy. But Dr. Tessier was on fire with curiosity.

He wanted to know. He had to know. First, was there a golden fork stuck inside the man? And second, how did his intestinal tract compare to that of other men? The autopsy? Well, when they opened his body, they found it nearly filled with pus. T.R.'s unthinkably wide esophagus was revealed, along with the odd configuration of the bones of his jaw.

Upon opening the dead man's jaws, the surgeons were astonished to see one giant canal that led directly from his mouth to his stomach. Yes, with his mouth opened wide, you could see straight into T.R.'s stomach, which was huge, distended, and pocked all over with festering ulcers. It took up nearly the entire abdominal cavity.

His liver was enormous, and so was his gallbladder. As for the golden fork? They dug, and they rummaged, and they hunted. But they never found it. And the hunt for it was grim, since T.R.'s intestines were putrefied. The stench was like everything that had ever rotted in hell had climbed inside the man and soured. Another thing they never found?

The cause of T.R.'s baffling appetite. Lots of theories have been floated. Some thought that maybe he was diabetic. That doesn't hold up, though, does it? Not really. Maybe he had a genetic disorder called Prader-Willi Syndrome. It's rare, and excessive hunger is a symptom. And some of T.R.'s other symptoms fit that as well, but only loosely.

His near-skeletal thinness, for example, argued against Prader-Willi. We still don't know what caused T.R.'s extreme hunger, much less the condition of his body, both in life and in death. To this day, it's a giant medical mystery, one that's been chalked up to something called polyphagia. That diagnosis comes closest, what with its combination of uncontrollable hunger with an insanely fast metabolism.

There are some who call T.R. a cannibal. Break into a hospital morgue just one time, and boom, now you're a creepy freak who eats people. But is that really fair? It's not like T.R. made a habit of eating human flesh. Oh, here I go again making excuses for a bad boy. But come on. Yeah, he ate some dead people meat. But he also ate corks and stones and any other thing he could manage to swallow.

His life was tragic. Tragic enough and sad enough and short enough that maybe we could drop the cannibal tag now and let him have at least a little bit of dignity. Food, glorious food! Hot, salty, gin and mustard! While we're in the mood, cold jelly and custard! Maybe you'll think of T.R. the next time you say, Man, I am so hungry I could eat a horse.

And then be glad that that's just a thing we say and not something you have to sneak out to the barn and do. Next time on True Weird Stuff. An elephant and a rhinoceros walk into the Vatican. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? But this isn't just any old elephant or rhino. This is a story about kings and popes and a taxidermy job so freaky and awful that it's a pure wonder it didn't start a war.

The king's rhinoceros on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. Sherry, as you're going through this story, I knew the story had an ending and I made a note to myself, please be a happy ending. Oh, but how could it be? Not only was this not a happy ending, it was a foul, disgusting ending.

Your descriptions of what he found inside him. Oh, man. It was like, how is he even a functional human being? That's how distorted and strange his autopsy results were. I want to say, because I know this is gruesome and horrible, but a pattern that I see over and over again just in my life is you show me an underdog and I will love that person like they have not been loved.

And Teilhard was an underdog. I mean, his life was... What moment of this man's life did he have any peace? It was all terrible. Somebody needs to love Teilhard, I'm going to love him. I was hoping that they were going to figure out what it was at the end and you were going to tell me, and he got married and had children.

As you're going through this, all I can think about is the time that those of you who I work with gave me an ice cream cake for my birthday. Now, there were only three pieces of cake eaten and it was put into a freezer and then I had to take it home. Well, you know, I'm living by myself and I've got an ice cream cake.

And I thought, well, I'll eat a little of it tonight. Then, you know, I guess I'll end up throwing it out. What am I going to do with it? So for dinner that night, I had an ice cream cake. For breakfast the next day, I had ice cream cake. For lunch the next day, I had ice cream cake. And there was a little leftover for dinner that night.

So as you're going through this, all I could think of was that is my own experience with eating in some sort of way that's really not normal. But this, the thing that's beyond with this, it wasn't just that he was sitting down and eating 10 pizzas. He's eating live animals! He was driven insane by his hunger. So since they never solved the medical mystery, there are a lot of things you can think about.

There's a connection between, you know, your brain and your gut, like we talked about, and these hormones like leptin and ghrelin that kind of signal when you're hungry and signal when you're satisfied. That was all broken in Teilhard. Like, none of those signaling, his endocrine system, like his glands, none of that was right.

But his autopsy shows us that Teilhard wasn't just a regular person who was hungry for whatever reason. And this is why I'm shocked that his parents weren't hanged as witches. He wasn't constructed like a human being on the inside. I want you to think about his, how the foot diameter of his esophagus and how it led directly, you could look into his stomach, how much more powerful his jaws were because of the bone configuration.

He just wasn't built like you or me. And you could say, well, this was clearly something went terribly wrong, you know, in utero. Yeah, he had siblings. He came from a large family. Nobody else had any of these symptoms. Something went wrong when Teilhard was conceived and developing in the womb. And it was the kind of wrong that created this, but not so wrong that he, you know, didn't live to adulthood.

It's an incredible mystery. And all of the physical symptoms that he had, like he would burn this outrageously high fever when he ate. I mean, step back from this. You can't make any of this make sense, can you? No. The only thing that I was thinking is that a lot of times you find that a lot of these royal families that had all the inbreeding, they had all kinds of strange physical things that went with that.

And that was the thought that went through my mind, that perhaps there was some sort of genetic, you know, something like that that would have caused this sort of bizarre features that he had. And this bizarre proclivity for eating everything in sight. So that's what we don't know, right? Because Teilhard was born into a poor family.

And, you know, these are people that didn't have birth certificates. They didn't own land. There was no such thing as 23andMe. There were no, you know, pediatric geneticists back then who could look at Teilhard and try to sort it out. So we have no idea if, you know, this was a result of some inbreeding in his family.

And he doesn't fit the profile for any of the diseases that they tried to consider as a diagnosis. Right. And as far as the eating anything goes, I mean, you know, that gnawing feeling. I mean, have you ever really been hungry? We talk about, like, I'm starving when really we're just like four hours since our last meal.

Right. Right. Have you ever really been hungry? No. It makes you crazy. Starvation is a terrible way to die. I've never been starving. Let's put it that way. I have been, you know, obviously hungry. But I have never wanted for food. If you, I mean, like starvation is a very distinct condition and you're out of your mind because everything in your brain, your body, your gut, your central nervous system has a handful of biological imperatives.

Eat, reproduce. These are the things that your meat suit wants out of you. So Tarrare, even as he was gulping down a meat pie and four gallons of milk and 150 pounds of beef, his body was still telling him that he was just collapsing from that gnawing sense of hunger. And so in that frenzy to satisfy that, anything he'd get in his mouth, you know, the dead rat off the dung pile, the fistful of corks, anything that could make that gnawing emptiness go away.

I just, people like this, you know, they're like the sideshow freaks of humanity. But it just breaks my heart when I think about poor Tarrare, kicked out of his house because his parents could no longer afford to feed him, reduced to eating literal crap on the streets just to survive. Even the army didn't know what to do with him.

And then that spy mission, Max. So the only thing I could think of was the idea that he swallowed the box, passed it, and then had to swallow it again. And we thought what Andy Dufresne went through was really bad in the Shawshank Redemption. That was nothing compared to this. And I know you're thinking or hoping that when he passed that wooden box, that he took it over to the German army's restroom and he washed it in warm water with soap and maybe hit it with a little bit of hand sanitizer, you know.

Being in prison must have been hard because he didn't have access to any food. It was terrible. And I think because he was so young, like if you think about this, there are two versions of Tarrare's story as a spy behind enemy lines. They're both horrible, although only one of them has him fishing that wooden box out of his own diarrhea.

But both versions of Tarrare's story are horrific. He is a young soldier who has been given no real training for this kind of spy work. And he was such a sincere person. He radiated such goodness and a desperation for salvation that even the commander, General Zoegli, of the enemy encampment relented and could not live with himself to execute this kid and send him back.

I want you to think about who Tarrare was as a person that that happened. You know, there's so many things about this. One of them. Well, I'll tell you this much. When when you got into this thing where he's eating cats and everything else, I remember there was a part of this me where I went. Is this a fable for something else that Sherry is leading us down the path?

And then I remembered the name of the podcast is True Weird Stuff. So what I'm wondering if this is in the 18 1700s, 1700s, right? 1772 was the date you said. So is it possible that myth has gotten into this story as it's been told through the course of time? Is is that possible? Because sometimes sources were not as reliable.

Well, I think that there's definitely a little bit of, you know, the glory of war myth making in the two versions of Tarrare's experience behind enemy lines. But Dr. Percy and Dr. Courville were pretty high profile physicians in France at that time. And they, especially Dr. Percy, kind of like General Zoegli, took one look at Tarrare and they wanted to help.

I mean, you couldn't not want to help the guy. So all of the stuff that I've told you about Tarrare was documented at the time in medical journals in France and abroad. So this wasn't like, oh, there was this guy in our village that ate a cat once. Yeah, I see. These were, you know, when he went into the hospital for the first time, the French army had put him in the hospital because they were like, we've got to figure this out.

We can't afford to feed this soldier. So Tarrare's condition was documented both on the medical side and on the military side. And granted, you know, 1700s, 18th century French Revolution, we didn't have computers and things were not quite as crisp and efficient as they might have been. But the facts of this man's case are laid out for you by the doctors who treated him.

And I guess you could say that they were exaggerating or lying, which is certainly a choice. But do you really think that? So you wouldn't think that doctors would be exaggerating or lying, but maybe, maybe, you know, maybe a news publication might. I mean, that's a possibility. But if you're the doctors wouldn't have any reason to lie.

I mean, they were genuinely engaged in trying to find an answer and a cure for the guy. And he was kept in the hospital. He stayed in the hospital for a long time while they tried everything they knew, which back then, you know, wasn't much. I mean, there was that one reference to where, you know, he was caught drinking the blood of patients who'd had their blood let.

Blood letting was like a standard procedure. Well, we don't know what's wrong with you. Maybe if we take some of your blood out, that'll fix you. So I'm inclined to believe the write ups that the doctors left behind for us to find. I'm inclined to believe that. Now, you could say that some of the other stories about Tarrare, like his days as a street performer, you know, where for pennies he would eat whatever was thrown at him.

I'm sure there's a lot of myth making and exaggeration in some of those tales. But the details of his autopsy, that's taken directly from the report on his autopsy. Well, it was disgusting, I can tell you that. As autopsies go, I would say this is more disgusting than the regular autopsy. His body was so sick inside when they got in there.

Everything was infected and inflamed. And Tarrare, you know, had he not died of tuberculosis at age 26, what kind of bet you want to place on his longevity? Yeah, probably not. Not great. Although he certainly wasn't going to be taken out by food poisoning. I think we can all agree with that. That wasn't going to be what got him.

I don't know, Max. I mean, this guy is an icon in medical history because they were never able to solve the mystery. But I think what you're saying is this is so awful that to think of a human being living like this, you'd rather it was a lie. Yeah. Yeah. Speaks well of you, I have to say. Thank you, Sherry. Yeah, I mean, you know, you're not a dick.

A dick would be like, yeah, and I bet he smelled. No, you want this to be make-believe so that you don't have to imagine someone whose life was this. It's truly a sad story. I mean, it just, it is. And then, of course, when you got to the tuberculosis, I went, this poor son of a bitch. Yeah, this poor guy. But aren't you surprised?

You know, I mean, I can get an upset stomach from food that's, you know, I don't know, came from a strange restaurant. I don't know. I mean, the idea that none of this killed him. It is. It is shocking. But the thing, and I think this is why T.R. was kind of a one-off. Whatever happened to him that he was born this way, like for the rest of us, if you open your mouth, I cannot see inside your stomach.

We're not, we're not built this way. His jaw was two inches. I mean, he literally could probably have put a watermelon into his mouth. It was so much bigger than your jaw, and you're a big guy. You're like six foot two. You're a big guy. Yeah. On the inside, he was not like regular people. And I think maybe that's why he could eat what he ate.

But then on the other hand, his body was filled with pus. His stomach was pockmarked with festering ulcers. His intestines were in a state of putrefaction. Maybe all that stuff did make him sick. But he was so hungry all the damn time that he just continued to eat anyway. I'm surprised he made it to age 26, to be honest.

I mean, when you said that, I was like, I don't know. But it seems like, you know, based on what you're telling, it was a keto friendly diet that he had for the most part, except, you know, I'm not sure where corks. Well, they're not eclairs, you know, so you can see that. Yeah, there's no sugar. So there is that. So I was thinking to myself, well, you know, that's why he was so thin.

He was maintaining the keto diet. Here's what I think about Tarrare and why. Yeah, I agree. This is gross. And I'm a crazy cat lady. You think I want to see people eating cats while they're alive? No, of course I don't. But here's what I think about Tarrare. Like most people, you have to set aside psychopaths, narcissists.

You know, you have to set those people and just think about the average human being born at any time or place. A thousand years ago, 50 years ago, the average person just wants a couple of things out of life if we're being honest. We want to be loved. We want to feel connected. We want to do something that has meaning.

You know, you don't want to feel like you just pissed your life away doing nothing. And your dreams are pretty simple. You know, I want to grow up and find love and maybe have a family of my own. Maybe, you know, do this work that appeals to me. Whatever it is. Enjoy the warmth of the sun on your back. Simple stuff. Tarrare had none of that ever.

None. He never knew that. He was just like you or anybody else who was born a human being, craving all of these things that he could not have. With this screaming, bottomless hunger that would drive a person completely insane. And through all of that, he tried. He did. When his family said, we can't feed you, he left.

He found a way to survive on the streets. He joined the army. He cooperated with his commanding officers. He cooperated with the doctors who tried to help him. He did something, whether he swallowed the box back out of his own diarrhea or not, that boy did something noble. He did. For the French Revolution. When he went behind enemy lines, scared out of his mind and hungry as could be.

So I look at Tarrare and I'm like, yeah, it's disgusting and gross. And he smelled and he was revolting in rivers of rank diarrhea and he's eating a dead rat and a human corpse or whatever. But I'm like, you know what? He was just like you. He just wanted love and connection. I love the fact that you went through all of this.

I can I can feel for this guy. I don't think he had any malice. I really do. I mean, you can really see why I have I'm on my third marriage. Like when it comes to a bad boy, I'm like, oh, oh, everyone's got a story. What's yours? What is it? When you see the red flags, you just paint them green. That's all you. Oh, oh, no.

When I see the red flags, I stand up a little straighter. Here's something I can fix. So, yeah, I guess even you could have fixed this. I couldn't even I couldn't fix this. I guess, you know, I was thinking about our podcast, Max Stewart stuff and something we didn't. Something we didn't mean to have happen has happened because of who we are as people, the people who make this show.

So when we started this podcast, we were like, yeah, we want to tell all these like stories that are true, that are kind of bizarre, strange or whatever. But if you look, we're very close to our one hundredth episode. Maybe is this our one hundredth episode? Sherry, I think the first two offerings we had with this were like trailers and coming soon.

We'll have this. So I say next. I want to say that next week is actually our one hundredth episode. You know, we're not planning any big parties. Oh, no, no. We just can't believe that we've managed to pull this off a hundred times. So what I was going to say is like what we started doing, what we thought we were going to do, because of who you are and because of who I am.

This is a podcast that is as much about empathy as it is about weird stuff. It is. I want you to think about you give me a man with a festering lake of rank diarrhea. I'm going to find some humanity in there to love. Bank robbers, stagecoach robbers, crazy people. Do we not usually at the end of it come around to, well, what are you going to do?

They were doing their best. Do we not? I mean, because because at the core of it, we say it's true weird stuff, but there's human beings on all of these stories. Now, we've dealt with some pretty wretched human beings. We've dealt with some people who were really seriously awful human beings. But then we've had in the same story, there's the human beings that you felt that you could connect to.

Like the Elmer McCurdy, the dead outlaw. Like, how much did we love him? Tarrare, how much do we love him? The lady stagecoach robber, how much did we love her? Now, even like one of the early episodes we did was Mother Daughter Grave Robbers. Oh, yes. I felt nothing for those two biatches, but the suffering and the pain we felt for the families that were affected.

Like that one haunted us for a while. It did. It seriously did. Even like one of the episodes we did that was really fun was about that legendary shark, the sea demon. That's right. My heart was broken for the sailors that he ate. But also, you know, there was a part of me, daughter of criminals that I am, that was like, oh, they killed the shark.

I wanted the shark to retire. Did you like me at the beginning of the story? Oh, please tell me it has a happy ending. Oh, please tell me it has a happy ending. You know what I was thinking about the other day? I was thinking about the guy down in South America who had the UFO come and get him while he was changing the tire.

Oh, I loved him. I loved him, and he was a guy that went and told the truth, and they verified, yes, you are indeed telling the truth. And he was mocked and laughed at and unemployed and lost his marriage and all of those things. Everything. His own parents were like, oh, please go. Flat Tire Lonely Road is the name of that episode.

Look how much we loved him. Because somebody these are people that somebody's got to love a little bit or at least feel some compassion and humanity for. Like, Max, I might literally drop dead of shock if I watched a man shit out a box and then put it in his mouth and swallow it. I don't know that I would survive that spectacle.

You just hope he washed it off first. You just. But I need you to. I need you to be put on your big boy britches. He's in a German military encampment in an active war zone, and he's a prisoner. Do you think he had the ability to wash it off? Because listen up. If they saw him release that box from his intestines, they'd have taken it.

He had no time. If he was going to complete his mission and serve his nation. He had to get that box and get it back in. Are you seeing the problem here? Yeah. And are you seeing why I'm so disappointed with the French army for not giving him some kind of commendation? Yeah, especially since it turns out that it wasn't all that important of a mission after all.

You're just jerking them around. If you're a prisoner behind enemy lines and you have contraband that you swallowed and it comes out, you got to get it. You got to swallow it again. No time. No time to waste. And they are dead. Now, that said, if you're used to eating a corpse's foot and a dead rat. OK, maybe not so bad.

I wonder, did he ever eat for pleasure? Did anybody go? You know, they are. I'd like to make your favorite meal tonight. What would you like if he had? No, I don't. I don't think there was any pleasure. I think there was just this frantic. When you start, when a person is in starvation mode, everything in the body is focused on getting food, getting calories, everything.

And you're at the bottom of the Maslow's Pyramid, the hierarchy of needs. You're at that survival place where you literally feel like you will die if you do not get something in your stomach. All the time. That doesn't leave room for pleasure, I don't think. There was nothing in Teilhard's story that made you believe that.

But what was in Teilhard's story from the beginning to the very end was he must have been. He was a person that inspired kindness and a desire on the part of others to help. So what kind of person would that be? It would be a person who you genuinely felt deserved everything. He was clearly a humble and straightforward human being that a lot of people wanted to help and couldn't.

And I think that when his story gets told, the focus is always on. And it pisses me off. I don't think he should be identified as a cannibal, for example. If you Google this guy, you'll see the cannibal that ate everything. Yeah, he went into the Morgan area. He wouldn't go to the Chinese buffet because even he doesn't want that sweet and sour chicken crap that they have there.

Well, he's concerned how long it's been sitting out. How many kids have sneezed on it? I mean, do you think he's a cannibal? Because I'm saying no, I don't think he's a cannibal. No, I don't think that. No. And it's just easy. You know, it's so easy to sit around and be a bunch of podcast bros and snark it up. And, oh, I bet the foot tasted good.

Well, me, Jim, I'd have eaten the ass. You know, that kind of thing. But where's the humanity? Where's your humanity? I love when you when you do broadcast, you do podcast bro imitations. Oh, podcast bros. I podcast bros kill me. They're all sitting around a table, yucking it up. I'll tell you what. Before I ate a foot, I'd eat my own foot.

The ass is where all the meat is. Not me. I'm going for the thigh. I'm a thigh man. Oh, I'm a breast man. Oh, Lord, help us all. Yeah. So there you go. That is the story of T.R., the man with the bottomless stomach. Here's what we learned. Medical science still can't explain certain things. We don't. Even if they thought it was polyphagia.

Even that. Right. The fact that he was just emaciated. That's the closest thing that comes to it. That his metabolism was just insane. Now, I just want you to know I spelled that out phonetically so I could throw it into the conversation at some point. Polyphagia. Polyphagia. I went, let me put this down phonetically and then I can throw it into the conversation.

And Sherry will go, wow, he really was listening. He knows polyphagia. You know what pica is, right? Yes, of course. Pica is really common. Pica is people eating dirt. Dirt and chalk and starch and cotton balls. Pica is really, really common. We've had people call the show who have pica. I remember one person called the show and they snack on a bar of soap.

Was it lava soap? It was a specific brand. Something like that. I'll never forget. I went to the store. Remember when we said you can buy it in a grocery store? I was at a grocery store in Georgia. It was a Winn-Dixie and bought white dirt. Yeah, white dirt. They sell in the produce department. Because so many people crave it.

And it's filled with minerals and all sorts of stuff. Listen, better to eat a handful of white dirt than a can of Pringles, right? I mean, if you were going to really be picking for your best self. So pica is really common. Polyphagia, less common. Yeah. I have a little niece who has Angelman syndrome, which is a rare genetic disorder.

It's a seizure disorder. When she was going through diagnosis, they were also looking at her for Prader-Willi. Because there are certain signs that kind of tip you off toward a diagnosis. I know a family that had a child with Prader-Willi. And it was very similar to Tarrare in that this bottomless hunger that can't be satiated.

These people had a chain with a padlock on it around the refrigerator. And they had multiple padlocks on the pantry door. Because if they didn't keep this child away from food, he would eat himself to death. That's a thing. There are people listening to this right now who are like, yeah, I know what that is. It's rare, but it's not unheard of.

So they initially thought that maybe modern science, because Prader-Willi wasn't known back then. But modern science is like, maybe this Tarrare dude had Prader-Willi. But the thing that argued against that diagnosis was how emaciated he was. Because people with Prader-Willi, they eat and they keep the weight on. And can become dangerously overweight.

Which triggers a whole other cascade of medical complications. There is one thing I was thinking about with this guy. So what goes in must come out. Did that ever play a part in any of this? Did anybody talk about that other than the wooden box? What I'm thinking is the volume of what he was putting in. Okay, let me find it in the episode.

Because I realized that at the time that I must have said this, you were clearly curled up in a ball and rocking your head onto the floor. Sherry, there were points along the line. The autopsy especially. Give me a second because I'm going to tell you exactly about his output. Here we go. He stank almost all the time.

But the stench that came off of him as he ate was so heavy and thick. That witnesses say it was almost visible as a vapor arising from his body like steam. And on top of everything else. Tarrare suffered from chronic wretched diarrhea. Rivers of it. That were said to be so unbearably rank. That it's a high description. That's the output that you were asking about.

Yeah, I know. I do remember you saying that. But some of these things were so. That he was eating. I don't know how he would. Things like cork. Well, I mean, if you chew it a bit, you could pass the cork. I guess. We have a listener on our regular show. As God is my witness, I'm not going to name her name. Because I do not have her permission to name her name.

But she recently had to have some sort of orthopedic surgery on her knee. And they ask you all these questions before you have surgery. Because if you're going to have general anesthesia, you can't have loose stuff in your mouth. Like dentures, right? Or retainers or anything like that. Well, she had a bridge in her mouth.

Which is basically, if you know what a dental bridge is, it's a rectangular implant. That basically has anchors to a tooth on either side of a missing tooth. And then replaces what's missing with a fake tooth. Are you following me? A bridge is a pretty good sized thing. Maybe not quite two inches. Maybe an inch and a half.

Thereabouts. Well, she had a bridge in her mouth. And they're anchored in permanently by your dentist. And she didn't really think much of it. And they didn't ask her, hey, do you have a bridge? They asked stuff like, do you have any dental appliances? And she didn't think of the bridge as a dental appliance. Anyway, when you're under general anesthesia, you're not just asleep.

They put stuff in your mouth for breathing, right? You're getting all this additional support while you're under anesthesia. So while they were operating on her knee, they knocked her bridge out and she swallowed it. While she was under. Oh! And she sent me a picture of the x-ray. And I'll be damned. I'll be damned if it isn't like there's your stomach and there's your teeth.

And they said to her, you're going to need to pass this. So this literally just happened like last month. That's worse than the golden fork. So if you've ever seen a bridge when it isn't in someone's mouth, there's some metal. There's like a little armature, I think is what they call it, that the whole thing is built on.

And she had to pass that. And my girl is a dainty lady. So she's recovering from this orthosurgery, which is difficult enough. But she's got to pass this bridge. And that means every time she makes the boom booms, they have to search and make sure, was the bridge in it? And the bridge, by the way, looks like three teeth.

Looks like three boulders, okay? So not only is she post-op, but she's got to deal with that. And as you might imagine, it could be a little uncomfortable to pass. But she did all is well. She passed it, didn't tear up her insides, which it might have, right? And I know you're wondering, well, then what happened? Well, because she doesn't have our insurance, Max, she wasn't required to rinse it off and have it reinstalled.

They went ahead and made her a new one. Oh, isn't that nice? That was going to be the next question. Around these parts, this would be Tony Garcia. I mean, sure, a little, you know, soak it in some rubbing alcohol would be fine. Hit it with some Clorox, it'll be good. Just put it back in your mouth. So... The story of Tarrare wasn't disgusting enough.

This is someone, I'm going to tell you when we're not recording this person's name, and you're going to be like, oh, my God, not her. That did not happen to her. It did, it happened to her. So to your point about what Tarrare was passing, I need to remind you that his stomach was pockmarked with festering ulcers and his intestines were a hot mess of pus and putrefaction, which tells you that some of what he ate ripped it up on its way out.

And you asked, mister, so you can't hide from the truth. So there's no woman on the sidelines going, yeah, I know all this, but he was brave. He had to carry that wooden box. Oh, that's, I'm over here. I'm the one going, you know, it sounds super disgusting and sad, but he was kind of a hero who didn't get a medal. Y'all be good to each other.

You don't know what another person is battling. You really don't. You could be looking at someone and going, I don't even like the sight of you. Not realizing that that person is thinking, is today the day I poop out my own teeth? But you don't know what battles people are fighting. Y'all don't need to be dicks because you just don't know the struggle that other people are in.

You would have just said, I'm sorry, cut me open, doc. I know it's an operation. It's just go in and cut me open and take it out. Well, her suffering is not in vain because there's not one person who heard that, that didn't file it away like, oh, hey, if I ever have to have anesthesia, I'm going to make sure we talk about whatever is in my mouth.

So she has done humanity a service. Her sacrifice was not for nothing. And on the next True Weird Stuff, oh, this is such a fun story. Such a fun story. I'm going to tell you a story about a king and his very exotic pets. And what happened to those pets? One was an elephant, one was a rhinoceros. And what happened to those pets?

And this is a story that includes an exotic voyage on the spice trade and one of the worst taxidermy jobs ever completed by human hands. It's epic. The king's rhinoceros. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to talk to your anesthesiologist about your teeth. And if you're about to say I'm starving, think of poor Tarrare and what he endured.

Bye-bye, weirdos. See you next time. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Seaton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.