[SPEAKER_00]: This episode contains content which some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listener discretion advised.
[SPEAKER_00]: But not every strange mystery gets a full episode on a study of strange, and that's why this summer, we're opening our strange files.
[SPEAKER_00]: A short series of unusual cases in mysteries we've considered, but haven't explored.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until now, I'm Michael Mayan tonight, the world's oldest man, Charlie Smith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Smith claimed to be America's last surviving former slave.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last surviving civil war veteran and the world's oldest man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He once partnered with Jesse James, he wrote alongside Billy the Kid, and he was at the Apollo 17 launch.
[SPEAKER_00]: He passed away 1979 at 137 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: His story came to the world's attention in 1973, first in the BBC documentary series, yesterday's witness.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time he was a young and spray 131, he was also featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not, and his story was dramatized in the PBS show Visions in 1978.
[SPEAKER_00]: Smith was a bit of a local character or local celebrity around the 1950s when his age first started drawing attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: His life story was often told like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was born in 1842 in Liberia, and when he was 12 he was kidnapped and put onto a slave ship to America.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story there is that someone tricked him onto the boat claiming that there were fritters on board for him to eat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Upon arriving in the states he was sold to a Texas farmer named Charlie Smith.
[SPEAKER_00]: The farmer treated the child very well and when the farmer died, Smith inherited his name.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would then join the Union Army during the Civil War and afterwards he migrated West, like a lot of Americans at the time looking for workland or new opportunities.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where Smith's life starts to look kind of like forest gump getting involved in all sorts of important historical moments or historical characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: He joined Jesse James Gang.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a gambler and rough and tumble old west towns.
[SPEAKER_00]: He met Billy the Kid and all of this before working in the circus.
[SPEAKER_00]: It married and started a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1950s, Smith was living in Bartow, Florida, a town I know very well, it's near my hometown of Winter Haven, Florida, and my dad had an office in Bartow when I was growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the cemetery where Charlie Smith is buried.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had never heard his story growing up, but while researching this case, I came across many people that are still around that knew him and all speak of him really highly.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1955, he applied for a job picking fruit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Bartow, as much of Central Florida was at the time, was pretty much the citrus capital of the U.S. And picking fruit was a very common job for many residents in the area.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he applied for that job, he claimed to be 108 years old in this sparked an investigation from the Social Security Office who claimed they just wanted to make sure that he was over 65.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's where things start to get interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because records like birth certificates were not well organized, maintained, and sometimes even issued it all up until the early 20th century.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you were born in the 19th century, there's a good chance you didn't have a birth certificate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And social security in their investigation had no reason to claim Smith was born at any other time, but 1847, which made him in 1955, considered to be one of the last if not the last surviving Civil War veteran.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside of picking fruit in his old age, he also ran a store, a candy cart, and would tour around telling his tale and sharing stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some accounts claim that he was invited to the launch of Apollo 11, while I can't confirm that it does appear that that's a little bit of a mix-up because he did attend the launch of Apollo 17.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he died in 1979 at 137 years old, his grave stone was marked with the phrase, the world's oldest man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's an announcement from the newspaper after his death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Smith, the colored former slave whose lifespan 13 decades is to be buried today in a small cemetery in this central Florida community in the heart of the citrus belt where he wants picked fruit.
[SPEAKER_00]: A telegram from Governor Bob Graham, who is in Europe, was to be read as part of the Eulogy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Smith's death as the end of an era, his cable said, with his death dies a storehouse of memories of a time that no one living remembers.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just a little problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Smith wasn't actually 137 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know his exact age, but he was most likely closer to 100 or 105, which meant he hadn't been a slave, he hadn't fought for the union, and he didn't know Jesse James.
[SPEAKER_00]: On August 4, 1997, Gene Calment of France passed away at 122 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Often cited as the oldest verified person to ever live, verified is the key word, because as much as Social Security had not pushed back on Smith's birth year, researchers in 1978 found other records.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1900, a census gave Smith the age of 21.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a marriage certificate in 1910 had his age as 35 and his birth location of Georgia, not Liberia, again making him closer to 100 years old when he died, which is still very impressive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Evidently, Smith loved to talk to people and loved to tell tall tales.
[SPEAKER_00]: His own accounts actually very wildly.
[SPEAKER_00]: As an example, when I mentioned that he knew Billy the Kid earlier, sometimes he would tell people that he was hunting Billy the Kid to capture him, sometimes he would tell people that he was Billy the Kid's partner.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to know nowadays about when or why Charlie Smith started telling people that he was born in 1847, but it's stuck, and people believed it, and he has remembered fondly, even after the truth was revealed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what is it about this story that people latch on to?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he's not the only person to do something like this, and it feels like we look at these folks with almost an admiration, even when we know they're not as old as they say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sylvester McGee died in 1971 and claimed to be 130 years old and was also considered to be America's last living former slaves.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are many similar reasons to doubt Sylvester McGee's age when he passed away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Parr was said to be 152 years old when he died in England in 1635.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived through 10 monarchs and was buried in Westminster Abbey by the order of King Charles I.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was said that a diet of cheese bread buttermilk and ale kept him living.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's often thought that his birth record was confused with his grandfather's and he actually died closer to the age of 70 but people took to his story.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he's also mentioned in Dracula.
[SPEAKER_00]: Zaro Haga was a Kurdish man who claimed to be around 160 when he died in 1934 in Istanbul.
[SPEAKER_00]: He claimed to have met Napoleon that he fought in many wars, including one when he was 100, and he had about 36 children in a similar path of Charlie Smith.
[SPEAKER_00]: He became a little bit of a celebrity late in life in two of the world to tell stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, his age was never officially confirmed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Javier Pereira was reportedly over 160 years old when he died in or around 1958.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was from Colombia and discovered in the 1950s and brought to tour the U.S. for Ripley's believe it or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: While records in Columbia were even harder to come by for this period of time, he was able to share realistic details of a long life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wars from early 19th century, and today he is still considered a legend in Columbia, even though it's highly doubted that he was as old as the claims.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many other longevity claimants whose ages are
[SPEAKER_00]: miraculous, but all doubted or debunked.
[SPEAKER_00]: But why do we keep wanting to believe someone has lived impossibly long?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it partly has to do with that life is short and we want to imagine that it's possible to live these incredibly long lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's also more complicated than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: People that have lived longer than normal lives are like living time missions.
[SPEAKER_00]: They connect us to previous eras.
[SPEAKER_00]: As an example, I feel a very vivid, direct connection with World War II, and a really specific way because of talking so much with my grandfather who fought in the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel a different connection, say to the Spanish-American War, the Civil War because I would
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Smith supposedly connected Florida in the 1970s to slavery, to the Civil War, to the 1840s, old Tom Parr linked Stuart England to the Middle Ages.
[SPEAKER_00]: and heavier parrera linked Columbia to the siege of Cartagena in 1815.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were to meet somebody today, that was Charlie Smith's supposed age when he died 137.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be a direct connection to the year the Eiffel Tower was built.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, as of this recording, the verified oldest living person in the world is Essel Katterham of the United Kingdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she was born in 1909 and she is 116 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me look at cases like Charlie Smith's.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mystery may not always be whether they're telling the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: But why we personally want to believe them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to Strange Files on a Study of Strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have experienced something strange, unusual, mysterious or scary, we want to hear about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Please email a study of strange at gmail.com and share your story and you might get to be on the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, thank you and stay strange.