The Man Who Hasn't Bathed for Almost 70 Years Looks for Love

Amou HajiCredit- IRNA1934

Amou Haji shocked the world when it was reported that the eighty-year-old Iranian bachelor was looking for love. Amou hasn’t washed or showered for over six decades. Not only did he have an aversion to cleanliness, but he also hated eating clean food and drink. He ate roadkill for food; his favorite dish was a rotten porcupine. In addition, Amou smoked animal feces from a pipe whenever he wanted to sit and relax.

Amou’s hatred for anything we consider clean is because he believes being clean would make him sick. Nonetheless, Amou’s love and companionship comes with the condition that the right woman would have to accept his unconventional lifestyle. It includes sleeping in holes he dug in the ground or, when he felt like it, sleeping in an open brick shack that the locals built for him.

Amou is now 88 years old and hasn’t washed since the days of the Eisenhower administration. His fear of cleanliness stems from an emotional trauma he suffered in his youth. Amou fell in love with a woman as a young man, but when she rejected him, he entirely withdrew from society. Nevertheless, whenever concerned locals try to bring him food or even force him to bathe, he finds a way to escape.

While it may be shocking to imagine how someone could live so long in such a dirty state, 17th-century Europeans also believed that washing themselves or even taking a bath brought ill health. As a result, cleanliness was shunned, and even the powerful French King Louis the fourteenth was so afraid of washing himself that in his entire 76 years of existence, the king only bathed three times. Even More shocking is that other sources claim contrary to the three baths, the king never had a bath in his entire life.

Amou Haji's pipe that he smokes, filled with animal feces instead of tobaccoIRNA

Despite his appalling hygiene, Amou shocked the medical community when a team of doctors led by professor Gholamreza Molavi convinced Amou to let them do a medical check-up on him. The baffled doctors found that he had no disease-causing bacteria or parasites. Doctors then surmised that he must have developed an exceptionally strong immune system over time due to drinking foul water from untreated puddles using unclean rusty cans, and consuming contaminated rotten meat.

Although it’s interesting that Amou has lived a long healthy life despite his unconventional and unhealthy lifestyle, the streets haven’t been kind to him. The abuse and harassment he was subjected to daily by the bad apples of society became so bad that the local governor had to appeal to people to leave him alone.