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Misers: We all know the type. They hoard their money and delight in their savings regardless of the human cost, or how incredibly rich they already may be. Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol is the most famous miser of all time; and while he may never have existed, plenty of other misers were all too real. And none of them changed their ways for the better after meeting three ghosts and/or plucky nephew
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Misers. We all know the type. They hoard their money and delight in their savings regardless of the human cost or how incredibly rich they already may be
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Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol is the most famous miser of all time
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And while he may never have existed, plenty of other misers were all too real
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And none of them changed their ways for the better after meeting three ghosts and or plucky nephews
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So, today we're going to take a look at some of the most infamous misers throughout history
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John Elwes, who lived from 1714 to 1789, was a member of Parliament in Great Britain
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and he was so incredibly trope-settingly cheap, he's widely believed to be one of the main
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inspirations for Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens mentions him by name in several of his novels
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and Elwes may even be the model for the drawings of the character that appeared in the first edition of A Christmas Carol
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What was the real Scrooge like? Well, he inherited his money and then did his darndest to hold on to it
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For example, he routinely went to bed at sundown to avoid buying candles
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He also dressed in filthy rags instead of buying new clothes, a practice that frequently caused people to confuse him with a beggar and give him coins in the street
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And whatever he was spending those coins on, it wasn't food. Reports told that Elwes saved cash by eating food so maggot-ridden
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it was said to walk around on his plate. Perhaps his most impressive cheapskate move was choosing to live in vacant rental properties he
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owned when his tenants moved out. With his elderly housekeeper in tow, Elwes would live
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in whichever empty property he could, moving two beds and two chairs each time
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and then staying there until the property was rented out. Daniel Dancer, who lived from 1716 to 1794, was another real-life miser who was mentioned
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in the works of Dickens and may have influenced the character of Scrooge
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Dancer inherited his father's estate in 1736 at the age of 20, and from that point on
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he basically just became a professional penny pinch. And he was good at it too
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For example, he never bathed or washed his clothes. He made his sister work as his housekeeper, and he saved on the grocery bill by forcing
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her to cook partially decomposed animals he found in the wild. And later in life, when she became ill, he cleverly saved some money by refusing to pay
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the doctor and just letting her die. Heck, Dancer was so inhumanly cheap, he even removed his beloved pet dog's teeth so there
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would be no chance it would eat his neighbor's livestock, thus heading off any possibility
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of a lawsuit. Sounds like a great guy, right? Englishman Thomas Cook who lived from 1726 to 1811 has occasionally been called the most
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contemptible miser who ever lived. There's obviously a lot of competition for that title
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so it may not technically be true, but Cook did manage to make a whole career out of being the
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worst person he could. How so, you ask? Well, he tricked his wife, a wealthy brewer's widow
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into marrying him and then inadvertently starved her to death because he was so stingy about spending
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on food. And then as a widower, Cook would always eat for free by visiting his friends at dinnertime
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and reminding them that his will was still a work in progress. He was even shockingly cheap when it
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came to his own medical care. When he was sick or injured, for example, he would dress in rags in
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hope that the doctor would take pity on him when it came time to assess the bill. He was worth over
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$700,000 when he died, which is the modern equivalent of about $22 million. And he did it
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basically without ever working a day in his life. Unless, of course, you count being cheap as a job
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A biography written just three years after his death hit the nail on the head when it said his
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life was checkered with as few good actions as ever fell to the share of any person who lived
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to so advanced an age. James Jemmy Wood lived from 1756 to 1836, during which time he became
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a wealthy banker, as well as a famous tightwad known throughout England as the Gloucester Miser
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It's hard to say how many of the stories about Jemmy are actually true. Suffice to say that when
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it comes to miserliness, the man is surrounded by legend. He was allegedly so cheap he would walk
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around the docks waiting for ships carrying coal to come in so he could snatch pieces that fell to
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the ground. That could be seen as frugal or even clever for a person of regular means. But for Wood
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to do it was like watching a rich person steal gas a cup at a time. Like many of the misers on this
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list, Wood wore ragged clothes and didn't like paying for transportation. A famous story even
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claims he once hitched a long-distance ride with a hearse, riding where the body would normally go
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Wood was so bad, the legends hold that people would routinely prank him by heating up coins
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and spreading them on the floor, knowing he would always try to pick them up
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Englishman John Camden Neald, who lived from 1780 to 1852, was a landlord and a notorious
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miser, famous for leaving all of his property to Queen Victoria, who happily accepted it
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Neild inherited his father's fortune and then spent the last 30 years of his life being a miserly little b**k about it
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To save on expenses, he kept his massive house sparsely furnished, even to the point of going without a bed for a stretch
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He also wouldn spring for an overcoat and the clothes he did have were in constant disrepair If he were just cheap with himself that nobody business but his own
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But he had tenants on his vast estates in Buckinghamshire, and he routinely refused to repair their homes when needed
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He even neglected a church on one of his properties, choosing to stuff the cracks in its walls with cotton rather than have them properly repaired
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The cheap remedy caused a mess whenever it rained, and we wouldn't be surprised if Camden charged them for the cleanup
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Wellington R. Burt was an American lumber baron who lived from 1831 to 1919
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and in the early 1900s, he was one of the wealthiest men in the U.S
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Unlike most of the other cheapos in this video, Burt wasn't particularly miserly in his day-to-day life
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That being said, he did famously include a spike clause in his will
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that kept all of his children and grandchildren from inheriting his $100 million fortune
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Huh, this guy doesn't sound so bad all of a sudden. That clause stipulated that no money would be doled out until 21 years after his last grandchild died
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His kids did get small annuities, and thanks to a legal loophole, they later got a $5 million chunk
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But the clause ultimately meant that only 12 of his many, many descendants ever received the bulk of his money, as he intended
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and even then, they didn't get it until 2011, which was 92 years after he died
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Why did Burt withhold his fortune? No one knows for sure, but most people assume he simply didn't like his family
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In case you were worried this list was going to be all dudes with three names
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we've got a miserly girl boss for you in Hetty Green, an American businesswoman who lived from 1834 to 1916
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Known alternatively as the Queen of Wall Street or the Witch of Wall Street
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depending on who you asked, she was likely the richest woman in the world when she died
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She got that way, of course, by being super cheap. Despite being insanely wealthy, for example
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she owned just one dress at a time, wore it until it fell apart
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and saved money on laundry detergent by only washing the hem. Gross
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She frequently tried to use free medical clinics under a false name
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instead of just paying for a doctor. She spent her life living in cheap apartments and rooming houses just to save money, and
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she was notorious for haggling with waiters when she could easily buy the entire restaurant
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That being said, like Jemmy Wood, many of the tales told about Green's miserly ways
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are difficult to separate from urban legend. One such story holds that her son's leg had to be amputated because she didn't want to
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pay a medical bill. And in truth, her son did lose a leg, but according to her biographer, she did seek
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treatment for his condition, and she did pay the bill. J Paul Getty who lived from 1892 to 1976 was a famous collector of art and antiquities as well as a billionaire oil man You probably wish you had a grandpa who was that rich
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but we promise you wouldn't want him to be J. Paul. We say that because Getty famously refused
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to pay a ransom to his grandson's kidnappers, even after they cut off the kid's ear and mailed it to
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a newspaper office. He eventually gave in and loaned his son the money to pay the, by then
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heavily discounted ransom. But notice we said loaned. Getty forced his son to pay back the
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ransom with interest. Getty later defended himself, saying that giving in to the initial
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demands would have placed his 14 other grandchildren at risk. But since that doesn't explain the whole
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pay-me-back-with-interest thing. Most people think he's full of it. After all, this is the
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same guy who installed a payphone in his mansion so his guests wouldn't rack up his phone bill
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Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, who lived from 1889 to 1974, was a billionaire Texas oil tycoon
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which we suppose is the only thing you can be with a name like that. Despite having more money than
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God. H.L. Hunt pinched pennies by cutting his own hair, driving himself to work in an old car
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bringing his lunch to work, and parking down the street from his office so he didn't have to pay
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the 50-cent parking fee. Worst of all, he was also known as a notoriously crappy tipper. Was so bad
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he became the inspiration for the character of J.R. Ewing on the television show Dallas
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an iconically evil businessman played by Larry Hagman. The character became a shorthand for
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crooked rich guys. Daniel K. Ludwig, who lived from 1897 to 1992, was an American shipping magnate
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known as the Invisible Billionaire. Sadly, it was just a reference to his famous reclusiveness
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and was not meant to be taken literally. He was a man of shipping, not experimental science
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Nonetheless, quite a few stories about his miserly ways emerged toward the end of his life
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For example, even when he was a sickly octogenarian, Ludwig chose to walk to work instead of hiring a driver
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He also always flew coach, drove a beat-up old jalopy, and wore the same plastic raincoat year after year
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That's kind of impressive, honestly. And that's basically how Columbo dressed, which might make it tempting to picture Ludwig as a warm, lovable Peter Falk type
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But we assure you, that wasn't the case. Ludwig was jealously protective of his fortune to an obsessive degree
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In fact, he once fired a tanker captain because the guy used a paperclip on a two-page letter
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which Ludwig argued was wasteful. One single paperclip. We're not saying Ludwig wouldn't have been on Columbo
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He just would have been the guy getting busted