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3 Ridiculously Stupid and Disgusting Things That Were Once Wildly Popular

History has seen people embrace some truly bizarre activities

Andrew Martin
5 min readOct 21, 2021

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The mannequin challenge, the ice bucket challenge and performing elaborate (and not so elaborate) dances on social media platforms like TikTok are all popular fads enjoyed by people in recent years. For whatever reason, humanity has long had an affinity for identifying odd behaviors or actions that have caught on like wildfire, if only for a short period of time. Here are three of the strangest and most disgusting fads from the past that were strangely once all the rage.

Phone Booth Stuffing: The act of having as many people as possible stuff themselves inside one telephone booth sounds uncomfortable and very unnecessary, yet it used to have people lining up. Originating abroad, the craze swept into the United States in the spring of 1959 and captured the attention of younger people who wanted to test the limits of mass and space.

A record was set in 1959 in South Africa, when 25 people somehow crammed themselves into a booth. The size of the stuffees ranged from people who were 5'4” to 6'2”. A highlight of this beacon of human accomplishment was that the booth’s phone rang in the middle of the arranging of flesh, but predictably it was so crowded that nobody was…

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Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin

Written by Andrew Martin

Dabbler in soccer, history, investing & writing. Master’s degree in baseball history. Passionate about history, diversity, culture, sports, film and investing .

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