- If that's not creepy enough, Dickens was also obsessed
with sketches and imagery of the living eating the dead.
Yeah, ugh.
Authors are an interesting lot
and some are a wee bit more strange than others.
In fact, there actually are some famous authors
who are really strange.
Actually, a big shout out to my boy, Dan Norton.
He actually does the video editing here
for this channel here.
Pop up your picture there, Dan.
Dan actually had sent me this article by grunge.com
where they actually covered 11 famous authors
who were really particularly strange.
So I thought we'd just go ahead and take a look
at some of these strange authors.
We start it out with Bram Stoker,
actually, the author of Dracula.
He was the godfather of all things horror
and vampire writing.
So those that actually wrote Twilight
probably can thank Bram Stoker.
But any rate, he was a royal conspiracy theorist
and he had this belief that the Queen was in fact a man.
And he just judged it by the fact
that the Queen looked particularly masculine
and had a lot of makeup.
His belief was when the Queen was born,
the baby actually ended up dying.
And so rather than angering the King
or something to that matter,
they found the nearest boy child that could pass
as a girl and they were like, hey, here we go.
There's the Queen and she's okay.
He was really concerned as this article says
what's under the dress.
I can only imagine if Bran was actually that type
of a person making those type of claims these days.
Can you imagine if he was just tweeting out
the Queen is a man?
You can only imagine cancel culture would eat him up
and he's probably not gonna be the only one
on this list we're gonna mention
that cancel culture would just completely eat him up.
The Marquis de Sade, depravity, deviance
and a loving marriage.
He was pretty much the Fifty Shades of Gray author back
before obviously she had existed.
Yeah, he had some freaky stuff.
In fact, a lot of his existence was buried by the family
up until the 1940s and even France actually banned his work
all the way up to 1957.
It wasn't just his works that were freaky.
He had a lot of really weird kinks, including pretty much
kidnapping and torturing people.
And he would pay them off to give them hush money
and say, okay, you weren't here.
He imprisoned a prostitute and stomped on a crucifix
while yelling a combination of blasphemies
and orders to whip him.
Yeah, and he was the one doing the whipping.
Weird and he and his wife actually shared this same kink
and they actually had ended up kidnapping
and doing the same thing to a group of four women, one guy.
And yeah, they were definitely a strange lot.
Agatha Christie, now, she's world-renowned
for her mystery books.
She actually had a mysterious disappearance.
Now, this is something that I found very interesting
in that she had a random disappearance in 1926.
She went and laid her daughter down for the night,
kissed her, said good night, headed on out to her car
and never came back.
And this was like she's gone for awhile
and they even brought in some of her other author friends,
including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who we'll get to here in a minute, and Dorothy L Sayers
to help in the investigation.
And they brought in thousands of police officers to find her
and they finally go and they find her out in Harrogate.
And she had checked into a hotel somewhere
and she just had no recollection
of like, hey, I don't remember what's happening.
But when they went to check out the hotel registry,
she checked in under her husband's mistress' name.
Yeah, so her husband had a mistress.
She checked in under that name in that hotel
and was like, I don't know how I got here.
Well, later on down the line, she ends up getting divorced
from her husband.
Really, one of the probably the only ones on here
that are actually still alive, Ray Bradbury,
author of Fahrenheit 4, that's easy for me to say, 451
and The Martian Chronicles.
It's very interesting that this gentlemen
that actually wrote The Martian Chronicles,
something that's a bit more sci-fi laden, is a technophobe,
someone who just pretty much is just out and out against it.
He had actually had some scarring childhood trauma
to where he actually had witnessed
a very vicious car accident.
And it got him to where he was freaked out of cars.
So much so that he would almost always lean
in favor of flying in planes.
Now, I'm gonna say this that any opportunity that I see
that I'm gonna have to travel more than a few hours,
I typically go and take a plane.
So I'm not gonna completely hate him for that one.
He was actually asked in an interview about his hatred
for computers and the internet
after claiming computers were flimflam.
Yeah see, it's flimflam.
What is that, 1020 verbiage?
Flimflam, I think I'm gonna start using that, flimflam.
But any rate, he went on to explain
that it doesn't give most people anything more
than they already have.
It's all meaningless.
An interviewer pointed out
you need computer and internet, don't you?
And he said this, "I have no time for that."
Ray's probably the least strange of this lot.
I mean, he just doesn't like technology.
So I don't know, Grunge probably threw him in.
I mean, he doesn't belong in the same category as some
of these folks that were just out there in left field.
And speaking of left field, Virginia Woolf
is actually an interesting one here.
And I was already speaking about cancel culture.
I would say that right away you could see the title
of this as Pacifism and Blackface.
I don't wanna make light of anybody that has any type
of a mental disorder and especially back in the day
when there was no appropriate treatments or medication
or any kind of guidance because back then, their treatment
for Virginia was extracting her teeth because they believed
that it would remove the infection, her mental illness.
But the most notable part of this was the fact
that she got together with a few friends,
they got dressed up in robes, beards and blackface.
They approached the Royal Navy and they essentially were
masquerading about as Abyssinian princes.
And they managed to get a 45-minute tour
of the pride of the British Navy, the HMS Dreadnought.
Now, you're probably saying, okay, what does that mean?
If we were to put it in today's standard according
to Grunge, that would be like them getting the chance
to use the Mars rover
because they were masquerading as princes.
So they managed to fool their way onto there
while using blackface, yeah.
Here's another one that I would say
not quite as offensive to me and I don't know.
I don't know that this is necessarily strange
being very much deeply entrenched in spiritualism
and sometimes something that might be
a bit more metaphysical.
I'd say there's stranger things out there,
but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
was considered the mad spiritualist.
Some of the spiritualism that his father was handing down
to him was essentially science.
And so I mean, obviously he was raised by this,
but it started to turn into more of a morbid curiosity
for the occult.
Fun fact, actually in this article, I did not know this,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was actually friends
with Harry Houdini and they actually got at odds
at one point or other because Doyle wanted
to convince the world famous magician and illusionist,
Houdini that, hey, this stuff's legit.
Let me take you to a seance
and I'm gonna have you talk to your mom.
And Houdini's like, okay, we'll give it a shot.
And when the person that was conducting the seance
started speaking in English, like he was his mother
speaking in English, he was like,
uh yeah, my mom didn't speak any English.
And after that specific incident, Houdini was like
screw this, Doyle, I'm outta here.
You can go ahead, take Sherlock Holmes
and all your other stuff
and stick it where the sun don't shine.
The funny thing that just made me chuckle a little bit
was that Doyle believed 100%
in the illusionist and the magician,
everything that he was doing was 100% legit,
not necessariLy a work craft.
And you know, hey, I understand.
Sometimes I really enjoy magic
and I'm not gonna hate him for that, but I do know
that it is a craft that requires lots of practice
to give the illusion that it is 100% real.
Charles Dickens, oh my gosh, yeah, The Tale of Two Cities,
the tale of two corpses in this specific instance.
You know, he had this really weird attraction to repulsion.
He for some reason liked to see corpses
and he became so obsessed with it
that he had these nightmares
and hallucinations about the dead.
And of course in this article it says
as if that's not creepy enough,
Dickens was also obsessed with sketches and imagery
of the living eating the dead.
Yeah, ugh.
I really can't add anything else to this.
Charles Dickens was a weird cat.
He was a great author obviously, but good Lord.
TS Eliot, cosmetics obsession.
Now, you know, I'm not gonna shame anybody
if they wanna wear makeup.
You see the likes of someone like say James Charles
is world-famous for putting on makeup and such
and he does it quite well obviously.
And there's a lot of men that will put makeup on
and that's not so weird to me.
I don't know, I guess, I don't put makeup myself,
obviously you can see, but for him, he took it
into a weird obsession to where TS Eliot would put on
just weird, it would almost make him look green,
almost like he was very corpseish
and maybe Charles Dickens probably would've been fascinated
with TS Eliot.
And the funny thing is when Virginia Woolf, okay
yeah, you remember blackface Virginia Woolf,
the one with the mental illness,
she was actually a friend with TS Eliot,
she was like that's weird.
Okay, so when someone that actually has
some weird type ticks looks over at you
and goes that's weird, you know you got some issues here.
And so it wasn't necessarily the fact
that he was putting on makeup.
It was just that it looked odd.
It was like whoo!
And he did it purposely so.
It wasn't like they had to have a confrontation with him
and sit down and be like, dude, you really need
to learn how to do that right.
No, he was like, I want to look this way.
I like to look like I'm plagued with depression and issues.
Truman Capote had maniacal superstitions.
He had some hang-up with the number 13
and it was almost like 13th month
and if he was walking 13 steps,
he would take a leap and hop.
I'm not gonna...
This is another one of those ones
that yeah, it might be strange to us,
but it's very possible that he had OCD.
He had a mental illness that got him
to hang up on things like this.
And there was other things for instance if he was smoking
and he would see that there was two cigarette butts
inside the ashtray, he'd have to empty it out first
before he would put in it 'cause he never wanted
to have three cigarette butts inside an ashtray.
It was just the number was always off to him
and I don't know, that seems rather clean
rather than obsessed.
I can't fault him on that one.
So maniacal superstitions, again,
I'm not gonna fault this guy for that.
Philip K Dick of visions of ancient Rome.
Now, Philip K Dick is world-famous
for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
otherwise known as Blade Runner,
probably one of my more favorite movies from my childhood
with Harrison Ford.
He actually went and got some dental surgery in 1974
and when he was recovering,
he started seeing these weird flashes of light
and it morphed into visions of abstract paintings
and engineering blueprints.
And he was convinced the pink light he was seeing
was allowing him to see cosmic truth
and it was the world around him was ancient Rome.
Yeah, so he was pretty much trippin' out,
like he's, oh man, I'm trippin' balls.
Oh, wow, Spartacus, what's going on, man?
And during this time, what is referred to
as he called his divine madness,
he'd actually written a book 8,000 pages long.
Now think about that, 8,000 pages.
I want you to look probably
at some of the most prolific authors
and probably with the exception
of someone like, say, Stephen King,
who probably spent decades putting together a back catalog
of 8,000 pages or more.
I mean, it could be more than that,
but it took him a long time probably.
This guy goes and writes an entire 8,000-page book
during his divine madness.
So that right there is pretty strange.
And to round out this list is PL Travers.
Now, I didn't know who this was initially.
This actually was the original author
of the children's book and movie
as some of you are familiar with
with Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins.
And that's another great one from my childhood.
I just love it.
I can even think of Spoonful of Sugar right now.
And she was an odd person,
had a different type of an upbringing.
But the part that actually is the most interesting
was that she really was like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
believed a lot in the metaphysical
and the spiritual type stuff
and she relied a lot on some mystics, gurus, sages
and arcane philosophies.
When she went to adopt, she found someone
that actually had twins, but because she was actually told
by this specific astrologer
that she could only have one twin, not both of them,
she could only have one twin, she actually had to pick one.
The problem is that since these twins were separated,
she never told her child about, hey, you've got a twin
until just one day at 17 years old.
(knocks)
Hey, what's going on, how's it going?
You look like me, that's crazy.
Are we twins?
And yeah, the boys were pretty devastated
especially because of this lifelong separation
and being lied to the entire time.
And eventually they became alcoholics and died young.
Yeah, that's how grunge.com finishes out this piece.
What do you think about some
of these strange authors, these 11 ones?
Have you ever heard of anything stranger than some of these
and I'd like to know what your take is on some of them.
And speaking of authors, actually I did a video once
about the 10 famous authors who were self-published
that they published their own work.
Actually it's in this very next video right here.
You can take a look at that.
You're gonna find it very fascinating.
And the number one spot, you are not going to believe.
And it's actually one of the authors
I briefly mentioned in this.
So I'll see you in this next one.
Yeah see, it's flimflam.