Lore 285: Oh My

This is the story of the one.

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There are many beautiful libraries in this world, but the Joanina Library in Coimbra, Portugal might be the most stunning of them all.

Featuring three stories of ornately painted ceilings, gilded archways, and bookcases made from exotic wood, this Baroque marvel has been in in operation since the mid-18th century.

Then, of course, there are the books themselves, 200,000 of them in fact, some even older than the library itself, all of which needed to be carefully preserved and maintained.

But the task?

Well, it's easier said than done.

Paper, leather, and paste aren't the hardiest of materials, after all.

There is temperature and humidity to worry about, not to mention metaling hands and the simple degradation that comes with time.

But the greatest threat to the Joanina's priceless volumes?

Well, that would be the bugs eager to turn this rare archive into a tasty midnight snack.

Yes, the Joanina was going to need top-rated exterminators.

And luckily, for nearly 300 years, they've known exactly who to call.

Two partners, known as the European Freetail and the Soprano Pipistrels.

And they just so happened to be two species of bats.

That's right.

Every night when the scholars filter out and towering stacks settle into darkness, hundreds upon hundreds of bats take over the library's hollow halls and swoop madly through the air, gobbling up every insect that might dare to threaten a book.

It's the perfect example of a symbiotic relationship.

In exchange for protecting the books, the bats get an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Not a bad deal, right?

It's one of those surprising yet not uncommon examples of humans and animals coexisting as we have throughout history.

But unfortunately, not all interspecies encounters are quite so beneficial.

Sometimes the beasts grow hungry for a meal that's a little more filling and go looking for something new.

Or should I say, someone?

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Culture changes fast.

Not to date myself here, but when I was a kid, a big day out involved buying a few packs of garbage pail kid stickers before stopping at the video rental store to pick up ET on VHS.

And that was just a few decades ago.

Multiply that by centuries or even millennia, and most of our hobbies, daily activities, and technology are nearly unrecognizable from those in the past.

And yet, certain things do endure, making music, for example, and telling stories, practicing religion and the use of language.

But believe it or not, there's one universal human action older than all of these that is still in practice today.

That is the art of hunting.

As it turns out, humans have been hunting animals for food since before Homo sapiens ever existed.

An early human ancestor called Homo erectus was developing hunting techniques a whopping 1.7 million years ago, and we haven't stopped since.

When art and storytelling finally did come about, hunting was one of the first subjects ever covered.

Ancient images of the hunt have been discovered on rocks and in caves in Europe, southern Africa, the Sahara Desert, and beyond.

You know those famous Paleolithic cave paintings of bulls in Altamira, Spain?

Yeah, those paintings were started 34,000 years ago.

The question, of course, is always why.

And sure, we know why early people hunted.

After all, everyone needed to eat.

But why record these hunting exploits?

Why was remembering past hunts so vital that it literally gave rise to the invention of art and storytelling?

Well, in the words of scholar James A.

Swan, hunt stories pass along the wisdom of hunting to future generations and energize people with the spirit of nature.

In other words, for the very first time in human history, written symbols and images were used to pass on knowledge, knowledge that could mean the very line between survival and starvation.

As humanity evolved, so too did the act of hunting.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans began to bring dogs along with the hunt.

The Mesopotamians began hunting on horseback.

Hunting tools evolved from crude stone implements to spears and bows and arrows, and now guns.

Also, the more agriculture developed, the more civilization could finally cultivate their own crops, allowing us to rely less and less on meat for survival.

Animal husbandry reduced the need for hunting even more.

Flash forward to today, and most of our meat comes from factory farms, leaving hunting primarily to hobbyists or people in remote regions of the world.

But still, the tradition endures.

It seems that hunting is part of our very blood.

And it's never just been practical.

All throughout hunting history, the practice has been entangled with folklore.

In mythologies all over the world, there are stories about gods whose job it is to oversee the hunt.

And oddly enough, most of them happen to be birds.

Take, for example, the Navajo Black God, a hunting spirit manifested into a crow.

For the native Koyakan people of Alaska, a raven oversees the hunt, while in South America, it's a condor.

Meanwhile, in parts of Africa, an eagle spirit hovers over the hunters, making sure that everything goes according to plan.

And then, of course, there's Artemis from Greek mythology, aka Diana to the Romans, goddess of nature, young women, childbirth, animals, healing, sudden death, archery, and yes, the hunt.

Look, she was a busy lady.

In one story about Artemis, her brother Apollo challenged her to an archery competition, betting that she couldn't strike a small black spot far off in the water.

Not one to turn down a contest, she accepted and struck the object with ease.

But when she went to collect her kill, she was horrified to discover that her brother had tricked her into murdering her own true love, Orion.

Grief-stricken, she honored her beloved by placing him into the skies as a constellation, along with his dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor, where they may joyfully hunt for the rest of eternity.

In most stories, hunters are portrayed as noble heroes, strong, capable warriors keeping the beasts at bay and the villagers' bellies full.

In fact, one historical politician became so obsessed with the heroic heroic image of the hunter that he wanted to embody it himself.

Commodus, emperor of Rome and contender for the most deranged evil guy to have ever existed, dressed up as a gladiator, climbed into the Colosseum, and proceeded to kill 100 bears in a single day.

After that, he decided he was the reincarnation of Hercules himself.

And sure, 100 bears is, well, a lot of bears.

But here's the thing, those bears were penned into the arena while Commodus shot them from the balcony overhead.

Not exactly an act of bravery.

And if Commodus teaches us anything, it's that not all hunters are heroes.

And in fact, in the most famous hunting lore of all, they might just be demons.

Here, imagine it's the dead of winter, the days have grown short, and you've just stepped outside bundled up against the cold.

Perhaps you're taking a chilly walk to work or just getting a bit of fresh air.

when suddenly you hear a ferocious rumbling coming from the sky.

Looking up, you see what makes your blood run cold.

It's a demonic hunter on horseback galloping across the clouds.

Behind him trails a frothing parade of lost souls rippling like a storm.

Black dogs and wolves yip at their feet and shadows swirl darkening the stars.

Some of their horses have six legs or eight with fire blazing in their eyes.

And then they all begin to chase you.

It's a terrifying image on its own, that hellish hunting party tearing through the midwinter sky, but what's even more terrifying is that seeing it is said to be an omen of impending doom.

Variants of the tale have been told all throughout Europe, but it was none other than Jacob Grimm who, noticing a pattern, coined a term for this motif.

He called it the wild hunt.

From generation to generation, humans have killed wild animals for food, rituals, sport, and spiritual practice.

We have become the ultimate apex predator.

In short, we've gotten a little cocky, cocky enough that sometimes nature decides to put us in our place.

Which begs the question, what happens when the hunter becomes the hunted?

In the Chinese folktale The Old Woman and the Tiger, a murderous tiger kills and eats a woman's son.

A ballad from the Black American South warns of a wild boar in these woods that eats men's bones and drinks their blood.

In a Congolese version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a child is devoured by a crocodile, while in India, the Khasi people tell tales of a giant man-eating python.

All across the world, All these stories speak to one universal fear, the very real threat of being devoured alive by wild animals.

We've talked in the past about the beast of Jevoudin, an enormous mysterious beast that terrorized 18th century France, killing 113 people over the course of just three years.

It would seem like a mere legend if it weren't horrifyingly true, but that's hyena-like menace is far from the only monster to manifest in the real world.

It was November of 1915 when farmers in a remote part of Hokkaido, Japan began to notice something strange.

First, crop supplies went missing, then herd animals began to disappear.

There was no doubt about it, a predator was on the prowl, and it was big.

On November 20th, the beast was officially spotted for the first time, and this thing was a sight to behold.

Towering at 9 feet tall, all 750 pounds of it were covered in dark golden fur.

Its curved, fang-like canines were as long as a woman's hand is wide, capable of biting down with 20,000 pounds of force, and its paws were tipped with long, rakish claws.

It was a bear, but not just any bear.

This was an Yursuri brown bear, also known as the black grizzly, one of the largest brown bears in the world.

A brown bear that's, in late November, should have been hibernating.

It wasn't long before a hunting party formed to take care of this bear burglar before things got out of hand.

They managed to track it down in the forest where they shot and wounded the creature.

Sure, they hadn't managed to kill it, but they figured injuring it would be good enough.

Certainly the bear would be too frightened of people after that to return to town, right?

Well, alas, the poor townspeople would soon learn how very wrong they were.

The first kill occurred on December 9th of 1915, when the bear entered the Oda's family home and killed a woman and child before dragging the woman's lifeless body into the trees.

The following day, it tore down the wall of the Mayoki family home, where it killed five more people, including a pregnant woman who the bear began to eat.

It survived a hailstorm of bullets to come back three days later to pillage nine more homes for food before vanishing again into the forest.

Finally, a hunting party of 60 men, including professional government sharpshooters, followed a trail of blood into the woods.

There, they found the bear resting beneath an oak tree where they shot and killed it, ending the reign of terror for good.

When the smoke cleared, the bear had killed seven people, injured three more, and destroyed a full two-thirds of the settlement.

But while you can kill a bear, you can't kill a story.

After its death, villagers began to whisper.

They said the bear had been possessed.

They referred to it as a demon bear proper and gave it the name Kasagake, which means diagonal slash from the shoulder.

They even celebrated its death with a blood ritual in which villagers opened the bear's body and licked its blood from its ribs.

For some, these stories would follow them for the rest of their lives.

The mayor's son, Okawa Harayoshi, was only six years old when he witnessed the attacks, but he swore an oath to kill 10 bears in honor of every victim taken by Kesegake.

Eventually, he not only succeeded, but exceeded his pledge.

By the time he reached the age of 62, he had killed 102 bears.

Meanwhile, 17 years prior to the bear attacks, the Tsavo region in southern Kenya faced a terror of its own.

It was the spring of 1898 and a new bridge for the Kenya-Uganda Railway was going up over the Tsavo River.

Railroad workers labored tirelessly throughout the day and retired to their tents near the worksite every night.

And like any big group of workers on the job, they passed around their fair share of rumors.

Gossip about the foreman maybe, or jokes about the quality of the food.

But there was one rumor that rippled through the camp faster than all the rest.

That of a pair of maneless lions that were dragging workers from their tents in the night and eating them.

At first, the head engineer on the project, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, wrote the whispers off as tall tales.

At least he did until he saw it happen with his own eyes.

At about midnight, Patterson would later write, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized a man by the throat.

The unfortunate fellow cried out, let go, and threw threw his arms up around the lion's neck.

The next moment, he was gone.

Soon after, the lions struck again.

Patterson recorded all the grisly details of the moment when the next body was found.

He wrote, The ground all around was covered with blood and morsels of flesh and bones, but the head had been left intact, save for the holes made by the lion's tusks on seizing him and lay a short distance away from the other remains, the eyes staring wide open with a startled, horrified look in them.

It was the most gruesome sight I had ever seen.

After that, the men put up fences, but the lions leapt over them.

They lit fires at night and clattered empty oil tins in hopes of scaring the creatures off, but the lions ignored them.

Watchmen would be guarding one camp and the lions would strategically attack another, never targeting the same camp two nights in a row.

Nothing was working.

No, what they needed was bait, human bait, and so Patterson himself volunteered as tribute.

He put his own body on the line, and then when the lions came for him, he shot them.

No one knows for sure exactly how many men were killed by the end of the horrific spree.

Some records list 28 deaths, but in Patterson's 1922 book, The Man-Eaters of Savo, he claims a harrowing 135 human lives were lost.

Today, if you want to see the Man-Eaters of Savo yourself, you can.

Their taxidermied bodies are on permanent display right in my home state of Illinois at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Oh, and by the way, that regional name Savo may have been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy because it turns out that the word has a rather foreshadowing translation.

It literally means the place of slaughter.

But if only two lions can do that kind of damage, what about an entire pride?

It was just after sunset when the man set off along the winding path home.

It had been another long, hard day working as a kitchen servant at a Swedish mission in the southern highlands of Tanzania, and he was eager to call it a night.

With only a hurricane lamp to light his way home, the man journeyed through the dark.

Jacaranda trees towered over him him and the night winds played in the branches.

Perhaps he thought of his soft bed waiting for him at home.

Maybe he took a breath, appreciating the beauty of the rustling forest.

And sure, I'm speculating here, but I like to imagine the man had one small moment of peace before what came next.

Because that's when a nine-foot-long, 550-pound monster sprung out of the dark woods.

Back at base, the missionaries heard an animalistic scream roaring through the trees.

They tore after it, but by the time they made their way to the poor kitchen hand, there was very little left of him.

The man-eaters of Najambe had struck again.

But for context, let's rewind.

It was in 1932 when the rumors began to spread.

Villagers whispered of friends and family vanishing without a trace.

Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, gone in a blink.

or worse, found disemboweled in their own backyards.

The culprit?

None other than a pride of killer lions.

Now, I want to be clear here, lions don't usually eat people.

A lion's typical diet consists of wild game like antelope, pigs, buffalo, zebras, and things like that.

But sometime around 1932, one pride got a little taste of, let's just say, a rarer cut of meat.

And whoever their first victim was, they must have been pretty tasty because once the big cats tried it, they couldn't get enough.

That's right, the man-eaters and the jambe, as they came to be called, was a pride that ate exclusively humans.

No pigs, no zebras, just people.

There were even accounts of lions charging into herds of livestock, snatching a herdsman off the back of a bull, and running back out again without so much as a glance at the cattle.

And at this point, you might be wondering, how many of us would a lion need to eat to sustain itself per year?

Well, don't worry, I've got you covered.

For bear survival, eating nothing but human adults, a single lion needs to eat 50 people each year.

To be in prime healthy condition though, that number goes up to 150.

Then multiply that by the roughly 15 lions of the Ninja Pride, and well, math can sometimes be scary.

Hunting across a 1500 square mile territory there in Tanzania, these lions ushered in a reign of terror unlike any seen before or since.

They snacked on people like popcorn, and they were smart too.

While most lions are nocturnal, these ones ones hunted by day when townsfolk would most likely be out and about.

The Pride would also split up to orchestrate multiple attacks at once and traveled up to 20 miles each night so they could ambush a new unsuspecting town at dawn.

And if you think staying home with your door locked might keep you safe, think again, because when the area went into full-blown lion-induced lockdown, the man-eaters began leaping onto thatched rooftops, tearing their way through and dropping down onto their victims from above.

And there was apparently one body part that the lions seemed to enjoy the most.

They were always careful to crack open a victim's skull and lick out the brain.

Kill after kill, village after village, one thing became glaringly clear to the people of Najambe.

These were no ordinary lions.

No, not ordinary at all.

In fact, they might be the result of witchcraft.

And to be honest, they may have been onto something here.

You see, around the same time that the lions began their rampage, head tribal leader and legendary witch doctor Matamula Manjera was accused of corruption and stripped of his position.

And he wasn't exactly happy about that.

Legends emerged claiming that Matamula and his assistants were secretly herding lions from village to village, targeting the witch doctor's enemies.

Some said the killings would continue until Matamula was reinstated in the tribe.

Soon enough, villagers began plying Matamula with gifts, hoping to protect protect themselves or even sway him into sending his lions after their enemies.

Now, if you've ever heard the phrase, like herding cats, this might not seem like a plausible explanation, but that's only because you're missing one small detail.

You see, the villagers didn't believe that they were dealing with cats at all, but Simba Yamtu, or as you and I might call them, were lions.

According to legend, Simba Yamtu were either corpses or living people with the ability to shapeshift into animals.

And this second option was a problem because it meant that lions could be anyone.

For all the townspeople knew, their best friend or sister or husband could be one of those flesh-eating monsters in disguise.

People became terrified to speak about the lions for fear that one of the were lions was among them and, if insulted, would seek revenge.

Just imagine how utterly terrifying this period of time must have been for them.

Not only were they literally being hunted by a pack of ravenous beasts, but in their darkest hour, they couldn't even turn to their own family for solace, just in case that they too were part of the danger.

Nothing and no one was safe.

In fact, most of the stories that we have from this era come not from the locals but from the white missionaries, who, because they didn't share the same superstitions, were willing to talk openly about what was going on.

The age of the man-eaters continued for not one, not two, but 15 years.

In the course of that time, new members of the the Pride were born and their mothers taught them to feast on human flesh, ensuring the tradition would continue from generation to generation.

But thankfully, all things, good or bad, come to an end eventually.

And in 1946, after over a decade of failed attempts, game warden George Rushby successfully tracked the pack and killed one of the lionesses.

Clearly, her diet had been kind to her.

Her coat, it said, was glossy and her teeth pristine.

From there, Rushby and his men spent days hunting down the rest of the pride until every last member had been slain.

The reign of the man-eaters had finally been brought to an end.

We tend to think of ourselves as separate from nature, above it even, immune to the doubts and dangers that animals face in the wild.

But when something like the Ninjambe man-eaters come along, it's a reminder of where we truly stand.

That is, right here on planet Earth, just like every other creature.

And it can be frightening, yes, the notion that we might not be as far removed from the food chain as we thought.

But in all these stories, there's something vital that we have yet to discuss.

Why these attacks happened in the first place.

After all, lions don't typically hunt humans, neither do bears or tigers or any of the other ravenous beasts that we've mentioned today.

Well, as it turns out, every single one of those killer animals had one thing in common.

Their habitats had all been threatened by us.

In the case of Kasagake the bear, colonists in Hokkaido had overfished the region so greedily the bears had little left to eat.

And the lions of Tsavo, well, over the previous century, 90% of African lions' natural habitat had been destroyed to make room for, that's right, human beings.

And in Nunjambe, you could blame a vengeful witch doctor.

But there is another explanation.

Because right before the attack started, the local government attempted to mitigate a cattle plague by deliberately killing off a large number of the region's prey animals.

In other words, when we take away animals' food, what do they have left to eat?

But us.

Oh, and speaking of Kesegake, that brown bear in Japan, you know how I said the villagers held a post-mortem blood ritual, licking the bear's blood from its lips?

Yeah, apparently this wasn't their first taste of the stuff.

For hundreds of years before Kesagake's wrath befell the region, the indigenous Ainu people there in Hokkaido had practiced a tradition called Iomante, or the sending of the bear.

First, they would find a newborn cub, then they would kill its mother and take the cub back to the village to raise it as their own.

At least until a year later when the cub would be lashed to a post in the town center and slaughtered.

The bear's throat would be slit and the villagers would drink its warm flowing blood.

I'll leave you with the words of one of the witnesses of Kesegake's death rite.

When the nights began, the families were in a frenzy.

Their behavior was becoming hardly different from that of the bears.

History often has a way of shattering our assumptions.

Looking back, perhaps the line between man and beast isn't so clear after all.

I hope you've enjoyed today's journey of the lions and tigers and bears of this world.

As history shows, the most dangerous creatures aren't always the ones with claws and teeth.

A predator hunts with patience, with instinct, and with a sharp edge of hunger, human and animal alike.

But when the balance shifts, when the hunter becomes the hunted, it stirs something ancient within us, a primal fear inherited from millennia of kill-or-be-killed survival.

And I have one last story for you in which that fear itself becomes a weapon.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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All of us know the story.

After the deaths of over 2,400 Americans in 1941's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S.

government scrambled to retaliate against the Japanese.

But pretty quickly, they realized that there was a bit of a problem.

No matter how badly they were beaten down, the Japanese soldiers just would not quit.

Rather than surrender, the Japanese would fight to the death.

And it was because of this that the U.S.

came to a realization, battering these troops physically would not be enough.

They had to find a way to also destroy their morale.

And thus, in 1942, the OSS was formed, a precursor to what would eventually become the CIA.

And this group was tasked with dreaming up strategic ways to destabilize the Axis powers through psychological means, or, as you might know it today, psyops.

These guys started tossing out all sorts of ideas onto the table, from making propaganda pamphlets to distributing misinformation to broadcasting demoralizing news segments in enemy territory.

But not all the ideas were quite so, let's just say, practical.

Take the exploding pancake mix codenamed Aunt Jemima, or a perfume spray designed to smell like human excrement.

But the wildest idea of them all had to be a little project called Operation Fantasia.

It all started when OSS founder William Donovan told his team to out-fox the Axis enemies.

And, well, one scientist by the name of Edgar Salinger took that order very, very literally.

Salinger had spent his early years as a businessman in Tokyo, and while there, he had picked up a bit of the local folklore, specifically legends of the kitsune, a mischievous Japanese spirit that took the form of a fox.

What if, Salinger proposed, we could exploit the Japanese's superstitions to our own advantage?

And thus, Operation Fantasia began.

The idea was simple.

Step 1.

Create a bunch of fake kitsune.

Step 2.

Sprinkle them around Japan.

Step 3.

Wait for the Japanese to see them, at which point their superstitious nature would cause them to interpret the creatures as portents of doom and thus destroy Japanese morale.

Step 4.

Win the war.

And hey, what could go wrong, right?

Well, the original idea called for making fox-shaped balloons, although they eventually decided to use real foxes instead.

That is, real foxes spray-painted with spooky glow-in-the-dark paint.

The United States Radium Corporation even provided the specially made radium-laced paint for the project.

Now, this paint had a habit of sliding right off of the fox fur, so veterinarians at the Central Park Zoo were tasked with figuring out how to get the stuff to stick.

After running numerous tests on raccoons, they finally succeeded.

All systems go.

The next roadblock was figuring out how to actually deliver the foxes to Japan.

Given the fact that Japan is an island, it was assumed that the foxes would have to be dropped in the water and swim ashore.

But this raised two questions.

Could the foxes even swim?

And second, would the glowing paint wash off in the water?

To answer these questions, the OSS did the only reasonable thing.

That is, they dropped a bunch of foxes painted with radioactive paint into the Chesapeake Bay.

Luckily, they did swim to shore, but most of the paint indeed ended up washing away.

It seems like having them swim to land might not be the best move.

On top of this, they decided that paint alone wouldn't be dramatic enough to make regular foxes look like menacing evil spirits.

And so they brought in another group of experts to make the foxes look even more demented.

These experts?

Why, that would be taxidermists.

According to an article in the Arizona Daily Star from August 19th of 1946, and I quote, the taxidermists went to work and stuffed and mounted several deceased foxes, minus their rump and hind legs, so the remainder could be strapped upright on the backs of the live foxes in such a manner that they appeared to be running along on their hind legs.

And it wasn't just fox parts they strapped onto these poor creatures.

Oh no, they also used human skulls.

In the words of Salinger himself, We have made a stuffed fox with a human skull affixed to its head, equipped with a simple mechanical device for raising and lowering the jaw so as to simulate the opening and closing of the mouth of the skull.

Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up.

And as the cherry on top, the OSS planned to enlist the help of Japanese citizens with Allied sympathies to pretend to be possessed by these bonafide kitsune, uttering and I quote, strange chants to make the whole charade more realistic.

And finally, the project was ready.

There was only one thing left to do before sending the deranged fox taxidermy human skull monstrosities over to Japan.

It was time to test how these things actually affected civilians.

One fine day in 1943, 30 freshly painted foxes were shipped to Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., and then they were set loose to terrorize the American public.

According to the National Park Police, and I quote, horrified citizens, shocked by the sudden sight of the leaping ghost-like animals, fled from the dark recesses of the park with the screaming jeamies.

It was official.

The foxes were freaky enough to go to Japan.

Operation Fantasia's time had come at last.

And then, just as the long-awaited plan was about to be set in motion, the U.S.

sent something else to Japan that rendered the whole scheme obsolete.

I'm referring, of course, to the atomic bomb, the one that vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The war ended without the Operation Fantasia Foxes ever touching Japanese soil.

And that may be for the best.

Because the thing is, it never really would have worked.

Why?

Well, because the entire premise the project was based on, Japanese citizens' rampant superstitiousness and gullibility, was rooted in nothing else but baseless racism.

Scholar Vince Houghton may have said it best.

The entire plan, he wrote, was based on the perceived sense of cultural superiority that was utter nonsense.

American contempt for Japanese society blinded us to the fact that this was the nation that had kicked our butts at Pearl Harbor using ideas and technology we hadn't even thought of yet.

We would never have tried this against the Germans.

The Germans were urbane, they were cosmopolitan, they were European, they were white.

The Japanese were Asian, they were superstitious, they were gullible, they were primitive.

They would be easy to dupe.

Sadly, he concluded, We learned the truth the hard way.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jennerose Nethercott, research by Jamie Vargas, and music by Chad Lawson.

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