Mollie Fancher didn’t exactly sleep through history, but she certainly reclined as it passed by.

The odd woman, known as the “Brooklyn Enigma,” reportedly suffered a pair of accidents in the 1860s while on the cusp of adulthood and repaired to her bedroom where she spent the rest of her life, saying that she could no longer walk. It’s not something you’d normally question, but doctors could never precisely figure out her condition, and Fancher became known for her strange claims that she could go years without solid food (a “fasting girl,” she was called) and that she was a clairvoyant. (It’s also possible she had multiple personalities.) Over the next 50 years (or 438,000 hours), some of which she shared with her parrot, Joe, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, streetcars and automobiles began replacing horses and the telephone was patented and proliferated. All the while, Fancher clung to her pillow.

One month before her death, she celebrated five decades of being bedridden with a party of sorts, as was recorded in an article the January 30, 1916 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.