Meet Amou Haji, the world’s ‘Dirtiest Man’

Iranian hermit nicknamed the “world’s dirtiest man”. ‘Uncle Hajji’ (20 August 1928 – 23 October 2022), covered in soot and living in a cinder-block shack, was reported by local media not to have bathed with water or soap in more than 60 years.

Villagers said he had experienced “emotional setbacks in his youth” that led him to refuse to wash. In 2014, the Tehran Times reported that Haji would eat ate meat from dead animals he found (especially rotting porcupines), drank water from puddles and rusty oil cans, smoked animal dung using an old pipe, donned a war helmet to fend off the cold, and lived in a hole that he had dug himself.

He believed that cleanliness would make him ill. In 2022, villagers successfully gave Haji a bath, he died a few months later at the age of 94.