Reddit user TheCheeryStranger asked:
"What 'Crazy' Person is history was right the whole time?"
Here's Reddit's ode to the "crazy" ones who were right all along - and the equally insane circumstances surrounding a lot of these stories.
Dingos And Racism
julia louis dreyfus seinfeld GIFGiphy"The 'dingo ate my baby' lady."
- 5kyl3r
"She was screwed over so hard because the government refused to believe dingos would eat people."
"Even when local aboriginal tribes flat out said they have seen dingos eat children the government went 'well no Australians have seen it, so it doesn’t happen.' ”
"Had the government not been so racist about aboriginal tribes, they might have found that baby's clothes years before and saved that family some suffering."
- Radthereptile
"It took the death of someone else for them to find the baby's jacket, which was near a dingo lair. And the couple didn't even recoup their legal fees!"
"When they were exonerated, they were awarded less than a quarter of what they spent."
"They were the punchline for jokes on so many shows, even the Simpsons! That poor family."
- shewy92
"Lindy Chamberlain."
"Her daughter, Azaria, was taken by a dingo when I was in late primary school (I'm Australian), and I vividly recall how she was horribly attacked and judged by the public."
"It destroyed her marriage, she spent time in prison for 'murdering' Azaria (and delivered a child whilst incarcerated, she was pregnant when found guilty)... not Australia's finest moment how it treated this grieving and traumatized mum."
- jmkul
Hemmingway
"Hemingway talked about the FBI following him prior to his suicide. They thought he was paranoid."
"Decades later some papers get released, turns out the FBI was following him."
- ArchieBellTitanUp
"If I recall correctly, when his wife sent him to have electroshock therapy, the doctor performing the process was actually a member of the FBI."
- Omegus_Blue
"I mean, near the end they were literally going in his house to move his sh*t around to gaslight him into madness."
- HazardMancer1
Germs
"Ignaz Semmelweis- he pioneered hand washing in a time where the medical professionals were in favour of the 'four humours' theory."
"He was essentially laughed out of the field of medicine and died in an institution."
- MatManatee
"He specifically tried to get doctors to stop performing autopsies and then jumping right to delivering babies without washing their hands."
"He even provided hard data to prove that it was harmful. They locked him in an asylum and beat him so badly he died 2 weeks later."
- Damn_Dog_Inappropes
"Ignaz Semmelweis was openly mocked for suggestions that doctors should wash their hands before assisting with a birth, as he noted that maternal death was significantly lower when midwives washed their hands."
"He died in an asylum after suffering a nervous breakdown, and was only vindicated decades after his death when Pasteur and his contemporaries work on germ theory gained traction over the prevailing “miasma” theory (diseases and infections were caused by bad air)."
- Royally-Forked-Up
No Love
Kurt Cobain Rage GIFGiphy"Courtney Love calling out Harvey Weinstein."
"When asked if she had any advice young actresses, she said: 'If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a party at the Four Seasons, don't go.' "
"She was immediately banned by the biggest Hollywood agencies…. A lot of them who today talk about being all about #metoo but helped Harvey Weinstein keep up his sexual predation back then."
- Vegetable-Double
"If Courtney Love, of all people, tells you to not go to a party, DO NOT F*CKING GO."
- Wet_Socks19
"Courtney was very lucky. She had money from her own music and Cobain's money that was still rolling in."
"It didn't matter that she was blacklisted and couldn't really get a real acting gig again, even though she did such a great job with 'The People vs Larry Flynt.' "
"She already had her own."
"I love when people have f*ck you money - but she would have spoken up even without it"
- jayforwork21
"Courtney Love was right about LOTS of things."
- Rimbosity
Fused Labia
"The lady who sued McDonald’s for hot coffee."
"Everyone treated her like some ridiculous entitled Karen, but she was 80 and the coffee was so hot the skin on her legs fused together and he was hospitalized. She wasn’t crazy at all."
- [Reddit]
"If I remember correctly it was her genitals that fused together, not her legs."
- rawgreenpepper
"As I've said before....you only need to know 2 words from that case to see it wasn't frivolous: 'fused labia.' "
- FlappyBoobs
"We did a case study on this."
"She suffered, if I remember, 3rd degree burns from that coffee. THIRD DEGREE. That should tell you that coffee is WAY hotter than it should be."
"The McDonalds had been fined NUMEROUS times for their coffee being way hotter than what policy dictated."
"That whole thing could have been avoided if McDonalds had done their jobs right. They deserved to get sued for their negligence."
- dsmbr17
"I did some law modules in college and the lecturer did an entire series on what he called 'being a complete bastard to make yourself more impressive as a corporate lawyer'."
"The point being that the legal team at McDonalds could have used any number of methods to defend the case, but they chose to deliberately defame this woman that their company maimed."
"Someone had to come up with the idea of dragging the press into it, and someone else had to sign off on it."
"He said that you can remain 100% within the law on technical terms and just because it's legally right doesn't make you any less of a monster for doing it."
"What McDonald's did while trying that case was technically legal, but they were monsters for it."
- Wind_Yer_Neck_In
Not My Son
"Lessie Dunbar."
"Her four year old son went missing and one day the cops 'found him' and brought him home. Except it wasn’t her son and everyone tried to gaslight her into believing it was."
"They also arrested her for 'trying to make the police look bad.' "
"Eventually she just decided it must be her son and the boy lived the rest of his life as Bobby Dunbar. Well she was right in the first place and no one knows what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar to this day."
- anniemanic
"Worse, actually."
"Julia Anderson, the ACTUAL mother of the little boy the police 'found' came forward saying 'wtf that’s my kid you took' and the Dunbars agreed w/ police that it was their son."
"The actual parents couldn’t afford lawyers and it wasn’t proven until decades later after their grandchildren took DNA tests."
- CaedustheBaedus
"To make it even worse - multiple people confirmed in court the man with the little boy had him long before Bobby Dunbar disappeared and they still f*cking kidnapped that poor woman’s kid and gave him to the Dunbars."
"Just ridiculous."
"I’m honestly surprised Julia Anderson didn’t straight up murder the Dunbars and take her son back because I don't know if I could stop myself."
- emiiyaa
"When Lessie Dunbar told a cop that the child they brought her wasn't her son, the cop whispered to her to 'just take him and see how it feels.' "
- rachface636
"The boys real mother was an unmarried single mom working as a farmhand. She occasionally worked a farm run by the handyman and became friends with them."
"She'd left her son with them for a while because caring for a child while working farms was nearly impossible. She'd already had two other children die at that point, and was trying to put her last child somewhere a bit safer."
"When the police found the boy with the repairman and discovered that he wasn't his son, they assumed that it was the kidnapped child."
"The mother found out about the mix-up and came forward a couple of days later, but she was attacked by both the police and the press."
"One newspaper infamously said that, even if her claim was true, the fact that she was an unwed mother and already lost two children meant that she didn't 'deserve' to get her boy back. She was a 'sinful woman' and unfit to be a parent."
- codefyre
"The family was so committed to ignoring the evidence and deciding that this new child was Bobby Dunbar that decades later, his grandchildren took DNA tests to prove it. Their DNA didn’t match with their Dunbar cousins."
- CaedustheBaedus
People In The Jungle
watch board GIFGiphy"I don't know that guy's name but he basically from 1541-1542 travelled across South America - the first European to do so."
"While he was on his journey he said he saw millions of people and large cities with a lot of life in them in an area that, today, is the middle of the Amazon rainforest."
"He had told the stories of those cities when he got back to Europe. About a hundred years later when explorers visited the place there was nothing. No cities, no people, just jungle."
"So they thought he had made all that up."
"But modern technology has shown that there might have actually been a lot of cities there! And that those people died out with smallpox and all cities were covered by the jungle within the course of 50 years."
"So basically people thought he was crazy and made everything up, but modern science has proven that he was right all along."
- softredina
"You're talking about the Spanish expedition that went from Peru to the beginning of the Amazon and then floated down."
"They passed a thriving town about once a day - and they brought small pox and influenza with them."
"I think only four out of 30 Spaniards survived the trip. The diseases they already had, plus tropic disease and parasites, wrecked them just about as badly as the plagues they brought with them wrecked the civilization they went through."
"The population of the Americas dropped by at least 70% in the century after 1492."
- dieinafirenazi
"It seems impossible for a single boat of 30 people to be responsible for the near annihilation of an entire civilization of millions, but it actually happened."
- Forgive_My_Cowardice
"And the jungle took those cities back like the humans were never there at all. That's ... humbling."
- [Reddit]
"Vague"
"Sinead O'Connor jeopardizing/ruining her career by forcing a spotlight on the Catholic church protecting pedophile priests."
- enriqed
"You have to remember - she didn't explain or give a context."
"She just walked out, and attacked a beloved and respected Pope. And something seemed off about her when she did it - watch the video to see what I mean (I saw it when it happened.)"
"Yes - in hindsight, it's easy to understand why she seemed off; because she was about to do a huge and brave thing, that she knew was going to cause a lot of blowback."
"But at the time it seemed vague and random to a lot of people."
- Squigglepig52
"I will never understand how anyone thought that was vague."
"I was a 14 year old Protestant child when I saw her do that, and I thought her message was as clear as day. I recently rewatched it and I feel the same way."
- SonicBoris
"She tore up the picture after singing a Bob Marley song (War) with some changed lyrics. She literally mentions child abuse during the performance."
- sbrockLee
"THIS is the answer I came here for."
"No one stopped to even ask WTF. They just labeled her 'that psycho bald bitch' and her career got torched in five minutes with literally not one person stopping to ask 'wait, what?' until the story broke big a decade later."
- TheImageworks
Wacko Oprah Guy
"There was a wacko looking guy on Oprah who stopped his vanilla presentation to tell the audience that plastic causes cancer, stop using it to store food and water."
"Oprah cut to commercial and whisked him off the show."
"Dude was right. BPAs were outed that day, but it took another decade for that info to become public knowledge."
"I literally stopped watching her after she cut off plastic cancer guy. I subconsciously knew he was right."
- Firethorn101
Troy
"Heinrich Schliemann."
"He 100% believed that ancient Troy had really existed. So he armed himself with a copy of the Iliad, and actually managed to find and excavate the city."
"He'd told everyone and their sister that Troy was a real place for 40 years before he found it, and everyone thought he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."
"Not so much, it turns out."
- ChaoticForkingGood
"There is a fascinating and informative book called Finding the Walls of Troy by Susan Allen."
"It’s about how Schliemann stole the credit for finding Troy from Frank Calvert. And about Schliemann’s shameless self-promotion and lack of care excavating the city destroyed much of the archaeological evidence."
"There’s also a book called Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit that I have not read but purportedly also exposes him as an unscrupulous liar and distorter of history."
"That said, I’m really not sure if people thought he was crazy before Hisarlíc was discovered and he was right that Troy was indeed a historical city, so might still be a valid answer to this post. Just didn’t want to see him portrayed as some sort of archaeological hero."
- TheBlueFacedLeicestr
Did you know these stories?
Are there "crazy" people you want to add to the list?
Let's rant in the comments.
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