There's something to be said about having the skill, drive, and tenacity to track something, even when it's incredibly difficult. Once upon a time, your ability to hunt and track could mean the difference between life and death. These days, it's less important for most of us, but there are also different ways a person can track and hunt a target. Sometimes, people will go beyond the bounds of reason to find what or who they're looking for.
10. Tiger tracks down poacher after being shot
It's easy to underestimate how vast Russia is and how diverse its wildlife can be. This is a land where you can find bears, wolves, and tigers in relatively close quarters, or at least you used to. The Siberian or Amur tiger has suffered great losses, but big cats still exist and are remarkable hunters. Ask Vladimir Markov if you have a Ouija board.
In 1997, Markov was poaching to make ends meet. Tigers were and remain big business for some people, who can earn up to $50,000 on a single kill. Based on what he could determine after the fact, Markov tracked down the tiger that had killed it and shot it. The tiger, wounded but certainly not dead, escaped. Markov took it to kill it.
In a remarkable yet horrifying twist, the tiger appears to have taken this very personally. It later tracked Markov to his home and destroyed his belongings, then waited outside for him to return. The timeline suggests this took place over a period of 12 to 48 hours, suggesting it wasn't just an impulsive act of following Markov home. The cat had planned it.
When Markov was later discovered, it was said that a tiger had dragged him into the forest and eaten him. His shoes were found with bone fragments sticking out. His head no longer had a face. An arm was missing, and his femur had been eaten clean.
9. Catwoman tracked down a real man in photographs
In one of the most bizarre catfishing stories, Emma Perrier met a man on Zoosk who turned out to be a scammer. The handsome young Italian she thought she was talking to was actually a much older British man pretending to be her. After months of being pressured and never agreeing to meet, she did a reverse image search and discovered his photos were of a Turkish model. And that's where things get weird.
Perrier, still confused, began stalking the model. She found his social media accounts and the agency he worked through. Her fake friend claimed it was really him; he just sometimes used a fake name. Eventually, he screwed up so badly that she caught him, and in response, she messaged the real man in the photos to warn him that his face was being used to scam women.
The model responded, and they video-chatted to discuss it. They then introduced themselves and got to know each other. Much later, they even met in person, as her fake year-long relationship had pushed her to get to know the real man and discover he was much better. The two fell in love.
8. Vitaly Kaloev tracked down the man he blamed for the death of his family.
Few tales of revenge are more brutal than that of a Russian man who lost his family and decided to make those responsible pay in blood. In 2002, Vitaly Kaloyev's wife and children were killed in a mid-air collision over Switzerland that claimed the lives of 71 people. By 2007, four air traffic control employees were found guilty of negligent homicide. The only noticeable absence was Peter Nielsen, the only employee actually working at the time of the accident.
Kaloyev tracked down Nilsen after his family's death. This was in 2004, almost two years after Nilsen left his job. During the trial, it was said that Kaloyev intended not to kill Nilsen, but to force him to look at photographs of his dead children and apologize. But Nilsen refused, which enraged Kaloyev, who grabbed a knife. After tracking him across Europe, he captured him and stabbed him to death on his lawn in front of his wife and children.
Kaloyev received only five years in prison for the murder, but more remarkably, he was greeted as a hero upon his return home.
7. Teddy Roosevelt hunted the men who stole his boat on an icy river.
The legend of Teddy Roosevelt is unlike any other president in history. The man was like a proto-Crocodile Dundee, known as a hunter, a fighter, and an all-around courageous, tough guy. There's a photo of him riding a moose. And while it's debatable how many of the stories about his tough-guy exploits are true, some certainly ring true, including one sordid tale about what happened when someone stole his boat.
As Roosevelt recounted, it was just as the ice on the Missouri River was beginning to melt in 1886 that three thieves stole his boat and made off with it. Roosevelt was a deputy sheriff at the time and, strongly suspecting he already knew who had taken the boat, began tracking it down. But how do you track a boat if someone has stolen it? You build a new one.
Roosevelt and two of his comrades literally built an entirely new boat, albeit a simple, flat-bottomed one, to track down the thieves and their stolen goods. It took a couple of days just to build the boat, and then another three days to track the men down the river. When they were finally caught, the river was still too dangerous due to broken ice to return with the prisoners in tow, so Roosevelt transported them overland to hand them over.
6. An Arizona man became Santa Claus for a little girl in Mexico.
How far would you go to make a complete stranger's dreams come true? In 2018, Randy Heiss was traveling in Arizona when he discovered an old hot air balloon with a note attached. The note was a numbered list written in Spanish. Heiss's wife was able to translate it, and they realized it was written to Santa by a little girl from Mexico. It was her Christmas list.
All Heiss had was the little girl's name. He posted the list online, figuring it likely came from Nogales, Mexico, about 20 miles away, and contacted a local radio station. It took them an hour to get a lead.
The radio station contacted the family, and Heiss and his wife arranged to meet at the station some time later. They arrived with all the gifts on the girl's list.
5. The author traveled 500 miles to find the person who gave him a bad review of his book.
One thing any novelist must get used to is less-than-favorable reviews. Every writer, from Dickens to Shakespeare, Stephen King, and George R.R. Martin, now has online reviews that will drag them through the mud. No one likes everything. A writer must accept this in stride. Richard Britten didn't.
Brittain, then 28, posted the book on Wattpad. An 18-year-old woman reviewed it and wasn't very happy with it, calling it amateurish. In response, Brittain first wrote an entire blog about it and then stalked the woman on Facebook. That was extreme, but his next step was to track her down at her real-life workplace, 500 miles away, drive there, and hit her over the head with a wine bottle. He never even spoke to her. He was later sentenced to 30 months in prison.
4. 50 years later, Eric Lomax tracked down the Japanese soldier who tortured him
The story of Eric Lomax is one that most people find hard to believe, and it spans decades. During World War II, Lomax, a British Army officer, was captured by the Japanese. Takashi Nagase was a translator working for the soldiers who tortured Lomax and forced him and others to build a railway between Bangkok and Rangoon.
In 1995, the two men met again for the first time since the war. Torturer and victim met in Scotland after Lomax tracked him down. He had spent years dealing with his anger and trauma over what had happened to him, but when he met Nagase, he forgave the man for what he had done.
3. A 101-year-old message in a bottle was traced to the sender's grandson.
A message in a bottle is a concept most of us are familiar with, even if we've never seen one in real life. People occasionally find them at sea, but it's a relatively new phenomenon, especially these days. However, perhaps the most dramatic message-in-a-bottle story occurred in 2014, when a fisherman found a 101-year-old message floating in a beer bottle.
With the help of the National Maritime Museum, the message, written in German, was traced to the granddaughter of the sender, Richard Platz. The granddaughter never met her grandfather; he died in 1946 at the age of 54.
2. A man tracked down the person who killed him in a video game.
How do you approach games? Do you keep your cool and play methodically? Do you grit your teeth and curse at the screen when something goes wrong? Do you fly into a rage and threaten other players? Or do you do like Julien Barraud and spend months tracking down the person who killed you—in the game, mind you—only to stab them in real life?
Barro played in Counter-Strike , When another player named Mikhail stabbed his character. He was so enraged that he tracked the man's whereabouts and discovered he lived just a few miles away. The plot unfolded over six months, six months after he was killed in the game, and he went to the man's house with a kitchen knife and knocked on the door.
Mikhail opened the door, and Barro immediately stabbed him in the chest. He just missed the man's heart. Barro was later arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.
1. The writer spent a whole year looking for an ugly naked guy friends
If you were a fan of 90s sitcoms, you'll remember something called «"Friends"» . It ran for 10 seasons and is still considered one of the best sitcoms of all time. It also introduced a host of unusual supporting characters, including the infamous Ugly Naked Guy.
«The "Ugly Naked Guy" was a running gag on the show, referring to a man the actors could see from the windows or balcony of one apartment—a man across the street who was always naked and, well, ugly. We never saw him on screen, at least not fully, but in a couple of episodes we saw him from the side or from behind, so his face was never revealed. But years later, a writer for the Huffington Post wanted to know who this guy was. And it turns out the answer was very vague.
No one remembered who the Ugly Naked Guy was. The actor most often credited for playing the character denied it was him. The show's casting agency had no information, and even the man who created "Friends" couldn't remember.
It took the screenwriter a full year to track down the real deal after receiving a tip from a producer, and then return to the casting agency. The real actor, John Haugen, was simply a random addition they needed to fill a void.