BIOGRAPHY AND WIKIPEDIA: World dirtiest man, Amou Haji, confirmed dead

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that The ‘World’s dirtiest man’ Amou Haji who last showered 65 years ago and lived on a diet of raw animal meat and a pack of cigarettes a day. passed away at 94. He believed soap & water would make him sick. 

An Iranian man, Amou Haji, nicknamed the “dirtiest man in the world” for not taking a shower for decades has died at the age of 94, state media reported on Tuesday.

Haji, who did not wash for more than half a century and was single, died on Sunday in the village of Dejgah in the southern province of Fars, IRNA news agency reported.

Haji had avoided showering over fears of “getting sick”, the agency quoted a local official as saying.

But “for the first time a few months ago, villagers had taken him to a bathroom to wash,” IRNA reported.

A short documentary film titled “The Strange Life of Amou Haji” was made about his life in 2013, according to Iranian media outlets.

In 2014, the Tehran Times reported that Haji would eat roadkill, smoke a pipe filled with animal excrement, and believed that cleanliness would make him ill. Photos showed him smoking multiple cigarettes at once.

But a few months ago, villagers had persuaded him to wash for the first time, Irna reported.

After Haji’s death, the unofficial record could go to an Indian man who also had not bathed for much of his life.

In 2009 the Hindustan Times reported that Kailash “Kalau” Singh, from a village outside the holy city of Varanasi, had not washed for more than 30 years in an attempt to help end “all the problems confronting the nation”.

He would reject water in favour of what he called a “fire bath”. “Every evening as villagers gather, Kalau … lights a bonfire, smokes marijuana and stands on a leg praying to Lord Shiva,” the paper said.

Pictures showed the ascetic sitting in the dirt, his skin and rags black with filth.

Among the lore surrounding him it was claimed that he ate roadkill – preferring rotten porcupine meat – and drank five litres of water a day collected from puddles in a rusty pail.

Despite this unorthodox lifestyle, his constitution remained robust until recently, with reports earlier this year that a team of doctors from Tehran had examined him and found him to be in good health.