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The World’s Loneliest Man Has Died.

Niall Leah
4 min readSep 2, 2022

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The sole survivor of an unspeakable crime who spent 26 years alone in a hostile world.

PARALAXIS (Shutterstock image: Purchased for standard usage.)

The man thought to be the loneliest person in the world was found dead on the 24th of August, 2022. He was found lying peacefully in a hammock surrounded by flowers. It’s like he had sat down waiting for death, and it had found him. Considering the tragic story of this man’s life. Death was no stranger after all.

Who was he?

The world’s loneliest man had no name. He would have had one once, but it wasn’t known to anyone but himself. That’s if even he still remembered it. He wouldn’t have heard it spoken aloud for 26 years.

To the broader world, he was known as The man of the hole. He lived half of his life surviving alone in the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, a large area of rainforest in Brazil. His name came about from his practice of digging deep holes in his many encampments. He was believed to do this either to trap animals, protect himself, or for some spiritual reason; maybe it was all three.

I first learned about this sad story when he was filmed in July 2018, chopping wood. Below is one of the few videos of the man of the hole.

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Niall Leah
Niall Leah

Written by Niall Leah

An ex-pat from the UK living in Chengdu, China. I satisfy my endless curiosity about the incredible journey of humanity by reading, traveling, and writing.

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