Iran hermit eschews showers for 60 years

Amou Haji is not your ordinary kind of hermit. The recluse looks like a Biblical Moses who fell down a chimney; ash and dirt are caked upon his thick beard. He occasionally wears a war helmet to fend off the bitterly cold winters.

Now he is being christened the world’s dirtiest man. In a surprisingly touching article published January 6 in the Tehran Times, Amou Haji declared that he hadn’t bathed in 60 years.

Aged 80, Amou Haji lives in Dejgah, a village in the southern Iranian province of Fars. He divides his time between a hole in the ground resembling a grave and an open brick shack built for him by compassionate neighbors.

His eccentric lifestyle is due to a series of emotional setbacks in his youth, he reports, and he has been a loner ever since.

Amou Haji’s favorite food is the rotten meat of dead animals. Porcupines in particular.

And as if he wasn’t unique enough, Amou Haji prefers to smoke animal feces out of a rusty pipe. Regular cigarettes clearly don’t pack as potent a punch, so when he puffs on regulars it must be multiple at a time.

The probably previous record-holder for the longest time between baths is a 67-year-old Indian man, Kailash Singh, who has not showered in over 39 years, but if Amou Haji’s tale is true he breezes past the rest of the pungent competition.