Barking Mad

Henrietta Howland Green was the meanest woman in the world. She inherited a $6 million fortune from her father ad became such a successful money lender that she kept a balance of over $31,400,000 in one bank alone. Yet she lived in a seedy Brooklyn apartment in which the heating remained switched off even in the depths of winter. She never bothered to wash and for lunch ate nothing more than a tin of dry oatmeal which she heated on a banks radiators. Her meanness extended to her family. Her son had to have his leg amputated because of her delay in finding a free medical clinic. When she died in 1916, she left an estate worth $95 million.