Legends 66: Devour

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Speaker 1 Julien and Marguerite were close for a brother and sister. One might say, too close.
As children, they were inseparable.

Speaker 1 At first, their parents didn't think anything of it, but as the years passed by, the siblings' bond only grew more intimate. Eventually, their family began to worry.

Speaker 1 No one could quite put their finger on it, but something about the way that Julien and Marguerite interacted with one another seemed unnatural.

Speaker 1 In an effort to separate them, Julian was shipped off to school. Then, at only 14 years old, Marguerite was married to a 32-year-old nobleman.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, Marguerite's new husband soon began to abuse her.

Speaker 1 After just two years of marriage, she fled from her husband's estate, returning home in the hopes that her family would sympathize with her plight. No one did, though.

Speaker 1 No one, except, of course, for Julian.

Speaker 1 People began to whisper about the brother and sister's unusual relationship. Rumors spread.
At one point, the servants even found them sleeping in the same bed. So, they ran away.

Speaker 1 For several months, the brother and sister lived as man and wife. And yes, their lifestyle included all of the aspects of a standard marriage.
It seems they were happy together, but it couldn't last.

Speaker 1 In 1603, Julian and Marguerite were caught and tried for adultery and incest, both of which were punishable by death at the time.

Speaker 1 The siblings were convicted, and in December of that same year, they were beheaded. Today, you can still find their grave in Paris.
Their tomb reads, Here lie the brother and sister.

Speaker 1 You who pass by, do not inquire as to the cause of their death, but go and pray to God for their souls.

Speaker 1 Folklore often sends us a message, usually wrapped up in drama or wonder or the downright chilling.

Speaker 1 And if the tale of Julienne and Marguerite tell us anything, it's that taboos are off limits for a reason. More often than not, something dark lies in wait for those who cross the line.

Speaker 1 And by giving in to that taboo hunger, you run the risk of being devoured by it. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends.

Speaker 1 Long ago, the world was inhabited by man-eating monsters. Today, the only monsters left are us.

Speaker 1 The Danesan nation of indigenous peoples believed that once giant animals roamed the earth. These weren't mindless, soulless beasts.
Instead, they were smart, scarily so.

Speaker 1 They hunted humans the same way that humans might hunt a rabbit with strategy and skill. And once they had one of us in their clutches, they ate us.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, Thankfully, many generations ago, a hero trapped these animals under the earth. But this prison isn't foolproof.
It has a back door. Kind of.

Speaker 1 It's a little complicated, so bear with me here. Every faith has its own distinct rituals.
For the Danaza peoples, their religion requires that their children go on a vision quest.

Speaker 1 They spend time outdoors, alone, until they are chosen by an animal spirit who will accompany them throughout the rest of their life. Sometimes it's also called an animal friend.

Speaker 1 According to anthropologist Robin Riddington, who spent decades studying the Daneza peoples, I quote, in a moment of transformation, the child enters a visionary state in which he or she enters into the animal's world.

Speaker 1 Each animal has a song that is emblematic of its power. As the animal sings its song to the child, the animal's way of being becomes the child's way of being.

Speaker 1 Then, after they're chosen by an animal, it's said that each child receives what they call a medicine bundle, which essentially contains a collection of items that relate to their new spiritual power.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing. These children aren't connecting with fluffy bunnies and raccoons.

Speaker 1 It's a little more dangerous than that, because it actually involves coming in contact with the spirits of those original man-eating animals. These monsters may be trapped, but their power remains.

Speaker 1 In fact, their power is necessary. They are the entities that give every hunter the ability to hunt.
They teach them how to find their prey and how to consume it.

Speaker 1 They may eat humans, but they also keep humans fed.

Speaker 1 Even though the spirits of the man-eating animals are jailed deep beneath the earth, there are certain things that can, for lack of a better term, make them stronger.

Speaker 1 Not strong enough to break out of their prison, mind you, but still strong enough to cause havoc on the surface above. The older someone is, the stronger their spiritual power will become.

Speaker 1 The Daneza peoples believe that when you're around someone who is very powerful, you have to be be careful not to commit any taboos that might set them off.

Speaker 1 Some general taboos exist, like messing with someone's medicine bundle. But usually these taboos are often related to the specific man-eating animal that they are connected to.

Speaker 1 For example, exposing a member of the Daneza tribe to flash photography could risk giving too much power to the giant eagle, whose eyes flash like lightning.

Speaker 1 Or playing stringed instruments could summon the giant spider-man who attracts curious prey to his web by swinging silk threads around it until it makes a great roaring noise.

Speaker 1 But despite those precautions, sometimes it happens. And once someone powerful has been exposed to a taboo that sets off their spirit animal, then they are no longer safe to be around.

Speaker 1 The first sign that someone is becoming too strong is that they start eating their own lips. If they succeed, then their lips turn to ice inside them, along with the rest of their organs.

Speaker 1 And once their bodies are frozen, there is no going back. When the spiritual power of the man-eating monster is strong enough, their vessels will transform into man-eaters as well.

Speaker 1 They become Weichuge, a cannibalistic creature that, once fully transformed, can never be saved. The only way to get rid of a Weichuge is to kill it.

Speaker 1 And the only way to kill it is to melt the ice inside it. One old Donizé folktale tells of a woman whose husband went missing from their camp.

Speaker 1 When a search party went out to look for him, they found huge Weichuge tracks in the snow. After following those tracks, they were confronted with a gruesome sight.

Speaker 1 Human blood and guts carpeted the forest floor. The Weichuge had sliced the missing husband open, and now he was spinning his victim over a fire on a spit.

Speaker 1 A struggle ensued, but the humans overwhelmed the creature in the end. One of the strongest men in the group managed to subdue the Weichuge and toss it into the fire.

Speaker 1 It took a full day for the flames to melt the ice inside its body, which means that it took a full day for it to die.

Speaker 1 There's always a chance that the accumulation of power, no matter how noble, will end in corruption. And corruption, of course, devours completely.

Speaker 1 The cannibalistic Weichuge may be a dramatic example of that concept, but it still works. Here's the thing though.

Speaker 1 When people are embraced within their community, then their village can help them keep that destructive power in check. Remember how we talked about exposure to taboos making animal spirits stronger?

Speaker 1 Well, it's pretty hard to avoid those taboos. Strangers could come into town and take flash photos of you without knowing.
A radio could suddenly be turned on in a restaurant.

Speaker 1 Or you could get into a fight with a friend and they could destroy your medicine bundle by accident.

Speaker 1 But the good news is that when someone was exposed to a taboo, their loved ones were usually able to step in. They would chase off the photographer or turn off the radio.

Speaker 1 In one instance, a man's granddaughter healed him by bringing his own medicine bundle to him as he descended into madness.

Speaker 1 All that is to say, there is power in vision quests and seeking out the divine, but there is also power in staying connected to our community.

Speaker 1 Because while power might eat your soul, your loved ones will always feed it again.

Speaker 1 Almost nobody lives along Hicks Road in San Jose, California. This long, winding road is practically empty.
There are only a handful of homes dotted across a dozen miles.

Speaker 1 I think it's fair to say that anyone who has a house here moved to this exact spot because they valued privacy.

Speaker 1 But if you ask the locals, you might just learn that Hicks Road is a bit more crowded than it initially appears.

Speaker 1 According to a San Jose urban legend, this street is actually home to to a colony of bloodthirsty recluses. As far as anyone knows, they aren't a family.
They have no blood ties to one another.

Speaker 1 In fact, they have nothing keeping them together aside from one key trait, albinism. For anyone who doesn't know, albinism is a genetic condition that prevents the body from producing melanin.

Speaker 1 That means that people with this specific condition have extremely pale skin and light hair. No big deal, right? Well, until recently, many people believed quite differently.

Speaker 1 As human beings, we are terrified of the unknown. Evolutionarily speaking, it's a survival instinct.
Anyone or anything unfamiliar could be violent or carry mysterious diseases.

Speaker 1 That's why we as a species are so tribal. We stick together and when that happens, it's very easy to demonize anything that's other than us.

Speaker 1 For most of human history, people have taken their fear of the other too far. For most, it evolved from reasonable caution to full-on prejudice.

Speaker 1 And that's what might have happened along Hicks Road with this urban legend. People were afraid of what they didn't understand.

Speaker 1 So, to deal with that fear, they made up a story about, and I'm quoting here, blood albinos.

Speaker 1 Now, depending on which version of the story you hear, this clan either lived in a colony of trailer homes or in a collection of little cottages.

Speaker 1 They're said to have paper-white skin and glowing red eyes. And for some reason, a few variations of the story see fit to mention that they have no toes.

Speaker 1 No one can really agree on who they are or what they do.

Speaker 1 Some might tell you that they are practicing Satanists who sacrifice their victims to the devil, while others say that they're escapees from an insane asylum.

Speaker 1 Some people even say that they're actually ghosts or maybe aliens. Some have said that they'll chase you off with cars, while others claim that they'll run after you on foot.

Speaker 1 Although, as they are allegedly missing their toes, I'm not sure if they'd be fast enough to pose much of a threat. It would seem that everyone can agree on one thing though.

Speaker 1 If they catch you, they will eat you. And according to some sources, if you write your enemy's name on a bridge on Hicks Road, they will hunt that person down and eat them too.

Speaker 1 Albinism with a side of cannibalism. That's certainly a new one.
And there's good reason for that. This urban legend is wholly unique because it isn't based on anything substantial.

Speaker 1 There is no real proof that such a cannibalistic clan has ever existed at all.

Speaker 1 We can trace the legend back to the 1960s or maybe the 1970s, but we can't say for sure how it came into existence in the first place. There are theories though.

Speaker 1 Some place blame on a very pale family of Swedes moving into the area. Of course, we don't know if pale Swedes ever did actually move to San Jose, but that's what some folks' best guess is.

Speaker 1 Another theory holds that these extremely white cannibals actually originated with the Holy City, a white supremacy compound in nearby Santa Clara.

Speaker 1 Locals frequently saw their posters around town declaring that, and I quote, our California belongs only to the white race man.

Speaker 1 Most of the Holy City compound burned down in a mysterious fire back in the 1950s, but in the following decade or two, it is completely possible that the imperfect memory of San Jose locals transformed evil white supremacists into, well, evil people with extremely white skin.

Speaker 1 Some people believe that this urban legend actually goes all the way to the top. They say that the United States government itself spread rumors about cannibals.

Speaker 1 Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the Air Force had an early warning defense system radar station on top of a nearby mountain.

Speaker 1 And allegedly, to keep curious trespassers away, they created stories about an evil colony that lived out in those hills.

Speaker 1 They're all great theories, but my personal favorite is tied to the history of of Hicks Road itself.

Speaker 1 You see, for decades, the land around Hicks Road was used for large-scale illegal marijuana farming.

Speaker 1 The drug cartels were naturally extremely protective of their cash crop and wary of unexpected visits from law enforcement.

Speaker 1 So, to keep people away, they made up stories about cannibals with white skin and glowing red eyes.

Speaker 1 We might never know where this particular urban legend actually comes from, but we do know with certainty that no matter how popular it is, there are no cannibals living off Hicks Road, pale-skinned or otherwise.

Speaker 1 Alexander was a lazy man. His family owned a tannery as well as a ditch-digging business.
Both offered Alexander Sawney Bean a pathway to gainful employment.

Speaker 1 It was smelly, messy employment, to be sure, but for someone of his ilk in the 16th century in Scotland, they were the best options he had. Even so, he rejected both of these jobs.

Speaker 1 It wasn't the dirtiness of the work that offended him. No, it was the fact that it was work at all.
He saw no reason to spend his days sweating just to eke out a meager living.

Speaker 1 He was destined for greater and less difficult things.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, he found a lover who could sympathize with his plight.

Speaker 1 After courting a local woman of ill repute named Black Agnes Douglas, Sonny decided that they were in perfect alignment with their mutual goal of squeezing as much as they could out of life for as little work as possible.

Speaker 1 And so, they got married. Together, Sonny Bean and Black Agnes left town, moving into a seaside cave in Ayrshire.

Speaker 1 Despite the lofty goals, I can't say that they lived like royalty out in their dank hovel.

Speaker 1 Quite the opposite, in fact, the cave extended back for over a mile, but at high high tide every day, the first thousand feet or so were flooded by seawater.

Speaker 1 So it was damp and uncomfortable as a home. But anything was better than having a job, right? Still, they had to provide for themselves somehow.
So eventually, Sony went to work as a highway bandit.

Speaker 1 Anytime an unlucky soul passed by their cave, Sawney would mug them and take them for all they were worth. And then to cover his tracks, he would also kill them.

Speaker 1 While living on the money they stole from their victims, Sony and Black Agnes went from just scraping by to actually thriving. In fact, they thrived so much that they expanded their family.

Speaker 1 Over the years, Agnes gave birth to not one, not two, but 14 children. And then those 14 children started having incestuous children of their own.

Speaker 1 Soon enough, there were a lot of hungry mouths to feed. So Sonny and the rest of his clan got creative.
And yes, I think you know where this is going. They all became cannibals.

Speaker 1 After they robbed and murdered their victims, they chopped them up and they ate them.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they killed so many people in such quick succession that they had a surplus of leftover meat, and whenever this happened, they either pickled the remaining flesh or they threw unwanted body parts into the sea.

Speaker 1 All told, it's said that Sawney Bean's family ate over a thousand people. Naturally, the locals began to get suspicious.

Speaker 1 It would have been hard not to notice so many people going missing, or for that matter, to ignore so many human odds and ends washing up along the coastline.

Speaker 1 Even so, the cannibalistic family kept hidden for 25 years.

Speaker 1 It all came to a head in the early 1600s. The Bean family had ambushed two travelers, a man and a woman.

Speaker 1 Some of the Bean women pulled the female traveler off her horse and killed her, and then they cut her throat open and drank her blood before pulling her entrails out and eating them.

Speaker 1 When the other traveler saw his partner's terrible fate, he fought against the bean family as hard as he could.

Speaker 1 But even with adrenaline coursing through his veins, he couldn't take on dozens of starving cannibals by himself. So he fought a losing battle until suddenly he had backup.

Speaker 1 A large group of travelers unexpectedly came upon the horrific scene. Banding together, they fended off the beans and saved the traveler.

Speaker 1 The beans retreated, leaving a bloody crime scene in their wake. People had been suspicious for a while, but now they knew for sure there were cannibals out there attacking innocent people.

Speaker 1 So a manhunt was declared and it was put in motion by King James I himself. Over 400 people and a pack of bloodhounds searched the area.
Eventually the hounds picked up the scent of rotting flesh.

Speaker 1 But even though everyone knew what they were looking for, no one was actually prepared for what they saw. When the search party entered the Bean family cave, they were met with a horrific sight.

Speaker 1 Dozens of human limbs were hanging from the ceiling like meat in a butcher shop. Piles of bones were heaped in the corners as if they had been discarded there after being sucked dry.

Speaker 1 And there, scattered around the carnage, were glimmers of coins and jewels that the cannibals had looted from their victims' dead bodies.

Speaker 1 In the end, the 48 members of Sawney Bean's clan were not strong enough to resist the hundreds of people who came for them.

Speaker 1 King James marched the cannibals over 100 miles to Edinburgh, where they were sentenced to death without a trial. The men's arms and legs were cut off and they were left to bleed to death.

Speaker 1 The women were forced to watch and then they were burned alive.

Speaker 1 They seem to have always been the ultimate human monster, people who eat other people. They stand, across countless cultures and centuries, as a pariah and demon of their own making.

Speaker 1 Even today, it's a notion that gives most of us the chills. Looking back, it's not clear if Sony Bean started out on his journey with the intent to become a cannibal.

Speaker 1 Sure, he was an unsavory and violent character, but there's a big gap between highway robbery and consuming human flesh.

Speaker 1 Desperation to feed his family may have convinced him to make the jump, or maybe it was a long-held fascination that he had, up to that point, managed to keep Tampered down.

Speaker 1 Either way, it's clear that once he started, he couldn't stop. Cannibalism, in a sense, devoured his and his family's souls just as quickly as they devoured their victims.

Speaker 1 We will never know what Sonny Bean's original intentions were. Not because he was executed without a confession, but because he was never real to begin with.

Speaker 1 Despite the fact that King James was a character in this story, it's not a true historical account. There are no public records about a family of cannibals or a rash of mass disappearances.

Speaker 1 Even the king, a man so dramatic that he quite literally kicked off the Scottish witch trials, never wrote about this incident.

Speaker 1 The very first pamphlet about Sonny Bean wasn't published until the early 1700s, a full century after the events of the story. And that pamphlet was published in England.

Speaker 1 Sonny Bean's story didn't make it to his home country of Scotland until 1814.

Speaker 1 It's very likely that this tale wasn't just meant to be a fun horror story. It was meant to pull double duty as anti-Scottish propaganda.

Speaker 1 You see, the English believed the Scots to be backwards barbaric people, and in the 1700s, Jacobite Scots were staging rebellions against the crown, meaning that tensions between the two nations were especially high.

Speaker 1 So it's more than likely that the story of Sony Bean was invented to insult the, and I quote, uncivilized people of Scotland.

Speaker 1 After all, and this is going to sound eerily familiar to anyone alive today, the easiest way to remove sympathy for a suffering people is to paint them as a disgusting community.

Speaker 1 But despite the fact that most historians have now acknowledged that Sony Bean was a prejudiced, propagandistic product of its time, the story is still wildly popular.

Speaker 1 There are tours and sightseeing attractions in Edinburgh that are centered around Sonny Bean and his clan of cannibals.

Speaker 1 And beyond the capital city, he's been immortalized for the rest of the world in yet another way.

Speaker 1 While digging through the New York Library one day, a Hollywood director came across an article about Scotland's favorite cannibal family.

Speaker 1 In a later interview, he said, and I quote, I was so struck by how, on the one hand, you have this feral family that's killing people and eating them, but if you look at it, they weren't doing anything that much worse than civilization did when they caught them.

Speaker 1 And I just thought how the most civilized can be the most savage, and how the most savage can be the most civilized.

Speaker 1 Thoroughly inspired, this director went on to create one of the greatest horror films of our time: Wes Craven's masterpiece, The Hills Have Eyes.

Speaker 1 Stories of cannibalism always leave me without an appetite, and I have a feeling you can relate.

Speaker 1 But it's certainly powerful to see how an iconic taboo has been used as a weapon of fear by communities all across the globe. That said, if you're still hungry for more, I can deliver.

Speaker 1 My team and I have one more story to share with you, and trust me, you're going to devour it. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it

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Speaker 1 I think all of us at some point or another have felt like we were losing our heads. But for a select few women in Japan, that isn't a figure of speech, because some women are nukakubi.

Speaker 1 This folkloric monster isn't born, it's made, and it's only ever created when a woman is cursed to transform into one. Sometimes she is cursed because of her own bad behavior.

Speaker 1 Other times, the curse comes from her husband's misdeeds.

Speaker 1 The curse is generic and it can often be passed on to female offspring, which means that women are forced to bear the weight of their husbands or even their father's and grandfathers' sins.

Speaker 1 And what a weight it is. You see, the curse isn't exactly a walk in the park.
The word nukakubi can be translated to come loose neck, and that is exactly what happens.

Speaker 1 While they are sleeping, their heads disconnect from their necks, and then they go hunting. In the dead of night, these sentient heads fly around in search of victims they can sink their teeth into.

Speaker 1 They are best known for drinking blood, but they've also been known to bite people to death.

Speaker 1 When the woman finally awakens with her head once again intact, she goes on about her day with no memory of her nighttime activities.

Speaker 1 It can take years for people to learn that they are a nukakubi, or that they've been sharing a bed with one. Having a nukakubi in your household is usually considered to be extremely shameful.

Speaker 1 Some people have even gone so far as to sell their nukakubi relatives to brothels and circuses.

Speaker 1 In one folktale from Echizan, a young married woman cut her hair in penance once she realized that she was a nukakubi. Then, unable to bear the shame, she took her own life.

Speaker 1 One of the only ways to kill a nukakubi is to hide the headless body while the demon is out hunting. Without a body to connect to, the head will wither and die.

Speaker 1 Of course, this also means that the headless woman dies, so it's an imperfect method to say the least.

Speaker 1 Obviously though, not everyone is okay with sacrificing their wives and daughters just so that they can get rid of some bloodthirsty little flying head.

Speaker 1 And some people have been so desperate to save their family members from the curse that they found some very creative loopholes.

Speaker 1 According to one story, a man from Hitachi City was frantic to find a cure for his nukakubi wife.

Speaker 1 A peddler told him that if his wife ate the liver of a white dog, then she would be freed from the nightmare.

Speaker 1 Luckily, the man had a white dog at home, and since he loved his wife more than his dog, he killed it and grilled up some of his former pet's liver. And thankfully, his sacrifice was not made in vain.

Speaker 1 His wife's head stopped flying off of her body in the middle of the night, but he couldn't save his daughter. Even though the wife had been cured, the daughter still eventually inherited the curse.

Speaker 1 Interestingly enough, though, it manifested differently in her. Instead of biting human men, she flew around the city hunting white dogs.

Speaker 1 This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Cassandra De Alba. Today's episode topics were submitted by our listeners.

Speaker 1 If you have a local legend that you love and you want us to possibly mention on lore legends, email us at stories at lorepodcast.com. My team and I cannot wait to see what you send our way.

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Speaker 1 It is a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support the show and the people who make it.

Speaker 1 For more information about those ad-free options, head over to lorepodcast.com slash support. And of course, lore is much more than just a podcast.

Speaker 1 There's the book series available in bookstores and online and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

Speaker 1 And you can also follow the show on various platforms like Threads, Instagram, Blue Sky, and YouTube. Just search for lore podcast all one word and then click that follow button.

Speaker 1 And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.
And as always, thanks for listening.

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