Episode 189: Fragments

This is the story of the one.

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It was a development that any of us would be excited to see happen.

His hobby had become something more.

Antony had worked as a draper for most of his adult life, but in the late 1630s, he hit one of those smooth patches we dream of.

His business was successful, his community loved loved him, and the local government had even given him a fat, juicy contract.

So he took on a hobby.

Remember, Antony sold cloth by day, but in his spare time, he learned to grind glass discs into viewing lenses.

At first, it was a fun way for him to look at the quality of the threads in his merchandise, but hobbies rarely stay small, right?

Within a few years, he was looking deeper into everyday objects than just about anyone else in the world.

In 1674, he documented protozoa and bacteria.

Three years later, he had identified the spermatozoa from a variety of animals.

Soon, he became the first person to ever see red blood cells.

What really blew things up for him, no pun intended, I swear, was when he looked through his lens at droplets of water.

There, moving around in a substance that he had assumed was transparent and empty, were living creatures.

Excited, Antony called them animalcules, tiny animals, and hired an illustrator to draw them so that others could see them as well.

Today, Antony van Leeuwenhoek is considered by many to be the father of microbiology, but at a more basic level, his hobby demonstrated a universal truth.

There is so much left to explore, and if we dig deep enough, we might uncover something truly groundbreaking.

And sometimes, that discovery might lead to something else:

fear.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

The Himalayas are one of those places on the globe that people think they understand, but really don't.

Ask a few people, and most of them will give you the basic answer.

The Himalayas are a mountain range.

But there's so much more to them than that.

In fact, the Himalayas are really three mountain ranges, all running parallel to each other.

The Sivalik Hills are on the southern edge, and the lower Himalayas run along the north side.

And of course, right down their middle runs the biggest of them all, the Great Himalayas.

And together, they mark the spot where the Indian subcontinent ends and China begins.

Now, I've spent most of my life imagining the Himalayas as snow-covered wastelands.

I'm guessing a lot of other people have done the same.

It probably doesn't help that the name Himalaya is based on two Sanskrit words meaning snow and dwelling.

But in truth, the climate there ranges from vast tracts of snow and ice to subtropical regions and even desert.

And the mountains are home to an incredible variety of life.

Not only are there over 50 million people living in that region, but a huge variety of plants and animals not found anywhere else in the world.

From the snow leopard to the musk deer and everything in between.

There's so much to see there.

Which is why the mountains have drawn explorers for a very long time.

One of them was a man named James Prinseppo, born in England in 1799.

Being the 10th child born to his parents, life was probably already an uphill climb, but it was a job in India that finally pulled him out of the mundane and into the extraordinary.

Now, officially, he worked at the assay department at a mint in India.

testing and assessing the metals used to make coins.

But while he was there, far from home, James loved to explore.

So that's why, in 1832, he found himself traveling in the portion of the Himalayas that cut through Nepal.

In his account of that trip, he made mention of a number of amazing sights and experiences, but one stands out as more bizarre than the rest.

While in the mountains, he claimed to have seen something that was both human-like and otherworldly.

A few years later, another British man in Nepal, a guy named Brian Houghton Hodgson, recorded a similar experience.

He claimed that one day as he and his guides trekked through the snowy mountains, they all saw a creature in the distance that he described as a wild man.

His guides, though, used other words, some of which translated as demons.

It walked on two legs, he said, but was also covered in hair from head to toe.

And then a few decades later, the sightings transitioned into something better.

Physical proof.

Lawrence Waddell was a military surgeon who had served in the British Indian Army in the 1880s.

It was a posting that took him everywhere in the region from Tibet and China to Burma and beyond.

And then in 1889, he found something amazing.

He had been exploring Sikkim, a state in northeastern India that's home to a stretch of the Himalayas, including the world's third highest peak.

And it was while exploring the frigid slopes high up in the mountains where Waddell and his guides encountered something unbelievable in the snow.

Some large footprints in the snow, he wrote, led across our track and away up to the higher peaks.

These were alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows.

The belief in these creatures is universal amongst Tibetans.

And the name for those creatures was quickly given to him.

Pointing to the enormous footprints in the snow, one of his Sherpas told him what sort of monster had made them.

The Yeti.

Stories of large, hairy wild men are pretty much guaranteed wherever you look.

They seem to be as common as rainfall and birdsong.

No matter what new land you step into, there's a good chance you can track down stories about them.

Of course, most of us immediately conjure up images of the North American legends of Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

It's often described as a very tall, ape-like creature that walks on two legs like a human, but is covered in hair or fur from head to foot.

We've discussed some of these North American folktales here in the past, but Bigfoot might also be one of the most famous cryptids in the world, right up there with the Loch Ness monster and the chupacabra.

And there might be a reason why.

Halfway around the world in the Philippines, there are similar stories.

The Amamango has a familiar description too, an ape the size of a man who walks upright and is covered in hair.

The Amamango is described as violent and dangerous, and a multitude of attacks on people has been recorded over the centuries.

So much so, in fact, that local authorities have warned the general public to keep an eye out for it.

According to reports, the creature has been blamed for slaughtered livestock and even the disappearance of people.

In Russia, there is a creature known as the Chuchuna, which is said to live way out in the Siberian wilderness.

Taller than a human, covered in hair, and prone to violence.

It sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

The only difference I can see regarding this one is that it's occasionally described as having a tail.

In Japan, there are stories about the Hibagan.

This one is shorter than some of the others, maybe 5 feet in height, but is still said to be hairy and muscular.

Oddly, this creature's hands are often described as covered in pale or white hair, unlike the rest of its body.

One sighting in 1972 left people whispering about its deep glaring eyes, although no violent attacks were reported.

Another North American creature that's similar yet different to the more popular Bigfoot legend is the Nookluk from northwestern Canada.

A handful of sightings in the 1960s describe the creature as actually wearing clothing, although nothing more than a simple loincloth and rough boots.

Although it's said to be covered in hair, witnesses have also mentioned a long beard, giving the Nook Luk more of a wild man appearance than that of a wild beast.

And in China, we can find folklore regarding a creature known as the Yerin.

It's exactly what you might imagine, too, standing close to 10 feet tall, covered in fur, and hiding away from human civilization inside the wooded wilderness.

Amazingly, stories of a creature fitting the Yerin's description date back over 2,000 years, often highlighting its odd juxtaposition of human and animal characteristics.

and maybe because of their reported behavior, preying on humans, often attacking or kidnapping them, along with some of its more human-like features, a long beard and primitive weapons, it's no wonder that some historians have theorized that the stories are twisted versions of early encounters with Iron Age Europeans.

But few regions have begged for answers like the Himalayan mountains.

Maybe it's the thrill of reaching places few have gone before.

or perhaps it's the attraction some feel to new areas of exploration and discovery.

Whatever the reason, many of those who have ventured up those cold, snow-covered rocks have brushed up against physical evidence of the legendary Yeti.

And what they found is terrifying.

We've all heard of Beatlemania, right?

That moment in the 1960s when it seemed like every living person on Earth was under the spell of those four young musicians from England.

Well, a decade earlier, it was Yeti Mania.

All those earlier reports of explorers who had wandered up into the thin air of the Himalayas and encountered evidence of a mysterious creature had left the general public wanting more.

And for that, someone had to be brave enough to go get it.

In 1942, for example, two hikers in the mountains spotted movement in the distance.

Now, remember, up in the snow and pale blue sky, there's a lot of contrast, so it's easy to spot dark objects from a distance.

It's mostly bits of stone peeking out from gaps in the snow, but every now and then the objects move.

Well these two hikers spotted what they claimed was a human-like creature walking away from them about a quarter of a mile downmountain from where they stood.

They somehow were able to ballpark the creature's height at about eight feet tall and could even make out physical details like its dark hairy body and powerful build.

Others who ventured into the mountains sometimes returned with things they claimed were physical evidence of the creature's existence.

Even Hollywood superstar Jimmy Stewart got in on the Yeti Mania.

How so?

Well, it seems that he purchased a finger that someone claimed had come from one of the creatures.

And if the legend is true, he smuggled it out of Nepal by hiding it in his wife's luggage.

It's a legend about a legend, of course, so take it all with a grain of salt.

But the story of the finger, if you'll pardon the pun, certainly makes a point.

People had become obsessed with the Yeti.

But the most fascinating story of exploration and the Yeti, hands down, took place in 1951.

It centers on a mountaineer named Eric Shipton, who was an Englishman born in Sri Lanka back in 1907.

His father had passed away when Eric was a young boy, and he was sent back to London to finish his education and eventually discovered a love for the mountains on a family vacation to the Pyrenees, between Spain and France.

And that was a passion he quickly leaned into.

In 1929, at the age age of just 22, he climbed to the top of Nellian, one of the peaks of Mount Kenya.

Two years later, he scaled Komet, the second tallest mountain in India.

And then he set his sights on Everest.

Clearly, Eric Shipton was passionate about mountain climbing, and he was good at it.

For the next 20 years or so, he dominated Everest, participating in most of the expeditions there.

In 1951, though, he was joined by Edmund Hillary, a man who would return two years later with his partner and Sherpa Tenzing Norge, who would be the first people to ever reach the summit of Everest.

And Eric and Edmund witnessed something incredible on that 1951 climb.

According to Edmund, who wrote about the experience later, the pair had encountered a series of footprints that caught their attention, partly because it meant that there had been someone else in their vicinity fairly recently, but mostly because of their size, because these tracks were huge.

After following the trail for a way down the glacier, they started to notice other unusual clues.

There were a handful of large claw marks on the edge of the ice at the mouth of a crevasse.

It was the sort of gap in the glacier that would require rope and climbing gear to get across, and yet matching claw marks could be seen on the other side, as if whatever had made them had simply jumped across.

To document their find, one of them laid their ice axe down beside a footprint to give it a sense of scale, and then Eric took a series of photographs.

Today, if you poke around on the internet looking for stories of the Yeti, that photo is one of the most common that you'll see, a legendary clue in a centuries-long journey to uncover the truth at the center of the stories.

Edmund Hillary wrote about the size of the footprint in relation to his own large feet and made sure to point out the toe marks in the snow, as if whoever or whatever left the tracks had been walking through the snow barefoot.

And of course, coming from two well-respected explorers like Shipton and Hillary, the photos and story were gobbled up by an eager public.

Yeti mania continued for many years after that, all fueled by the hint of answers just out of reach.

Sightings became so frequent that the United States government got involved, issuing a Foreign Service dispatch through the State Department that instructed Americans how to behave and respond should they ever encounter a Yeti.

And of course, Edmund Hillary would return to the mountains there.

In fact, just a year later, in 1952, he found more evidence to back back up the legends.

While climbing across a series of glaciers, one of the guides who was with him pointed toward a dark object on the surface of the snow before picking it up.

Curious, Hillary held out his hand to take a look at it, and the Sherpa passed it over.

It was hair-a large clump of dark, long, bristle-like hair, the sort you might expect to pull off an animal.

Or, if you're inclined to believe the stories, off a yet-to-be-documented monster.

Some legends have a way of acting like appetizers.

They offer just enough to make your mouth water, but lack the substance to replace a full meal.

They tease us into expecting more, but leave us waiting and hoping.

Today, in the early 21st century, stories of the Yeti seem to be everywhere.

It's a character that has appeared in various pop culture moments, from Monsters Inc.

and Scooby-Doo to the classic 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special where it wasn't really mean and dangerous.

It just needed a tooth-pulled.

It might even be fun to know that the very first few episodes of this podcast back in 2015 were recorded on a microphone called, you guessed it, a Yeti.

But while the legend has grown, many of the pieces of evidence that people have collected have lost their power.

Jimmy Stewart's Yeti finger was tested in 2011 and determined to be human, not a monster.

And many of the hair samples found have been narrowed down to a rare but known-to-science species of bear.

It seems that if the goal is to find definitive proof, we're going to have to keep searching and hoping.

One last story you might find interesting.

Back in 1921, an early explorer named Charles Howard Burry led an expedition up the slopes of Mount Everest.

They wouldn't reach the summit, of course, but it was one of the early attempts at the north face of the mountain.

And during the climb, Burry and his companions came across some enormous footprints in the snow.

When they spotted them, One of Burry's guides pointed to the tracks and told him that they belonged to a creature called the Meto Kengmi, a name that translated into English as the Man-Bear Snowman.

Burry saw other clues on that climb as well, including what he claimed to be the creature itself moving quickly through the snow high above them in the region above the 17,000-foot elevation.

So, naturally, when he descended the mountain, he was eager to talk about his experience, and one man who wanted to hear about it was a journalist named Henry Newman.

But this Newman, it turns out, was pretty bad at translating things, and his pass at the creature's name, the Meto Kengmi, gave him a weird English term, the filthy snowman, which didn't seem to roll off the tongue.

And as a journalist, Newman was interested in giving his readers something more substantial to sink their teeth into.

So he swapped out filthy for another word, and in doing so, he gave pop culture exactly what they needed: the word

abominable.

The Yeti represents a holy grail for many lovers of monsters, mysteries, and putting the historical pieces together to find a bigger truth.

And as many people have shown over the years, that tension between doubting the stories and believing them to be true has proven very attractive.

And it's not the only example.

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Some of the most unusual stories about mysterious creatures came to us through the earliest explorers in ancient history.

It seems like the world was one big danger zone and there were dozens of monsters that needed avoiding wherever you went.

For example, there was the Scotalis, a snake that was covered in the most reflective, iridescent scales known to man.

They were so shiny, in fact, that they used it to their advantage, blinding other animals and even humans, so that they could slither up and bite them.

Then there was the creature known as the Cynocephalus, literally the dog-faced people.

They were believed to only give birth to twins and represented the complex tug-of-war between civility and animal behavior.

There were other fantastical creatures creatures too, ones like the manticore, a lion with the tail of a scorpion and the head of a human, or my personal favorite, the Bonacon, a sort of bull-like animal that had unusual horns and the ability to spray fiery feces from its back end.

I think you get the idea.

Which is why it's not surprising to read about a Greek explorer named Hanno the Navigator and his trip to the African continent in the 5th century BC.

Because while he was there, he reportedly encountered an incredible monster, right there in flesh and blood.

And the stories that followed set a lot of people talking about what it could be.

During his visit, Hanno describes seeing a beast that was nearly as large as a person, but covered in fur with massive shoulders and dark, deep-set eyes.

His reports about it were frightening enough to be passed along to others down through the centuries.

And those stories seem to be confirmed in the last decade of the 16th century when an English traveler named Andrew Battell had his own encounter.

It seems seems that during his time in the southwest of Africa, he would frequently see similar creatures enter his camp in the morning, most likely looking for food.

The weirdest part of Battelle's description, though, was that these creatures were so human-like that he was a little annoyed that they didn't offer to help out around the camp.

And yet despite that, they were also so alien and bizarre that he had to tell others about them.

Finally, in 1847, better clues started coming to light.

That's when an American physician named Thomas Savage, along with a naturalist named Jeffries Wyman, came into possession of some bones of this mysterious creature and finally put the puzzle together, locking it in as an official animal with a genus and species.

But all those centuries of rumors and reports might have been prevented if Hanno the navigator had just listened to his indigenous guides, who told him exactly what the creature was called.

Their name for it?

The gorilla.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Allie Steed and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make an executive produce produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

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And as always, thanks for listening.