THE eccentric known as The Mole Man, who spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million Hackney house, has died without repaying the £350,000 of taxpayers’ money he owes the council for saving it from collapse. And town hall chiefs, who re-housed William Lyttle in a top-floor flat, have been landed with an even costlier repair bill after it was discovered the oddball pensioner had carried out some of his unorthodox “home improvements” there, too. The 79-year-old had knocked a huge, tunnel-shaped hole in the dividing wall of the living room and kitchen of the flat in St Lawrence Court on the De Beauvoir estate.
I used to live close to the William Lyttle’s incredible house, and would often peer over the fence onto the debris and vaulted tunnel entrances below. A psychiatrist friend of mine once examined Lyttle and declared him eccentric, but not insane. All sorts of rumours circulated about why he started digging, the most sinister, and improbable, being that he had buried his wife and children in the back yard, prompting him to dig obsessively for the rest of his days.
Full story at Hackney Gazette
Thanks Al Robertson!
