In 1882, New Yorker Joseph Richardson found himself with a plot of land that was only 5 feet wide, at Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street. He offered to sell it for $5,000, but the buyer offered only $1,000. Richardson called him a tightwad and vowed to put up an apartment building of his own.

He managed to fit eight three-room suites into the four-story structure. (“Everybody is not fat,” he said, “and there will be room enough for people who are not circus or museum folk.”) The dining tables were 18 inches wide, and only one resident at a time could use the stairs. Even visitors found it an ordeal: One summer day in the 1890s, reporter Deacon Terry of the American became wedged in a stairway while trying to reach Richardson on the roof; he was finally forced to slip out of his clothes and interviewed the landlord in his underwear.

Nonetheless, the building stood for 33 years. It was torn down in 1915.

An illusion, of sorts. Step back from the screen.

Henry Welby, an eccentric character, confined himself in an obscure house in London, where he remained unseen by any one until his death, a period of 44 years. He died in 1636.

— Bizarre Notes & Queries, April 1886

Newly arrived in Fresno, Calif., in 1906, Baldasare Forestiere found the soil would not support an orchard like his father’s in Sicily — there was a layer of hardpan below the surface. But after two years digging tunnels as a laborer in Boston and New York, he had become handy with a pick and shovel, and he soon dug out a skylighted room 10 feet underground, in which an orange tree flourished.

So he kept digging. In time, he added a kitchen, a pantry, a living room, a reading room, two bedrooms, and a tree-filled courtyard that included a bathtub that he could fill with water warmed by the sun.

Forty years later, Forestiere had built a multi-level underground complex that covered 10 acres and included 100 rooms and passageways, including a chapel, a hothouse, a winery, and a “fish-viewing room” whose glass-covered skylight opened onto the bottom of a pond. He estimated the whole thing cost only $300. When he died in 1946, he was adding a 3,500-square-foot ballroom.