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Transcript of the flight

Mayday Documentary

Wiki links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705

Suicide hotline: 800-273-8255

Loose episode transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to Nightmare now! The show where we cover all the mortifying mysteries of this material plane and more. Again I’m thrilled people are checking out my little show so if you’re new we’re glad to have you! I got some feedback about screaming to much about analytics, noted, but I’m pretty logical and data oriented so all the listener graphs and location stuff is super interesting to me. For all you guys and gals that have reached out to be guests on future episodes, I’m super excited to have you and it’s gonna be a blast, but none of that can happen until I get a new computer. This laptop has a nasty habit of disconnecting from the microphone and keyboard. Man if you guys got to hear how much cursing I have to cut out just from technology issues alone this podcast would be rated NC-17 for sure. With all that said in hopefully less than a minute versus ten minutes of life updates and show new so let’s jump into the topic tonight. 

Imagine if you will. You’ve ordered a product from amazon or some other online seller. You excitedly go to the seller website and get a fedex code to track your nightmare now merch. Man I should’ve delayed this episode until next year when everyone will be buying T shirts, It would have made it much more impactful. Like B Witched says though, cest la vie, I’m locked in now. Much to your abject horror, you see your package is delayed. You begin to fly off the handle because your stickers aren’t getting there until next tuesday. What lies behind that little red box that says shipping delay. Today we’re gonna take a look at one extreme, and completely true shipping delay that happened almost 28 years ago almost to the day. Today we’re learning about the ill fated federal express flight 705. This is a wild story that a lot of people don’t know about, especially if you’re my age or younger and you weren’t watching the news in 1994. 

If you don’t know anything about this story, strap in, keep your belt buckled and strap in for some f**king turbulence, it’s gonna get bumpy. It was april 7th 1994. It was a cool morning in Memphis Tennessee, just under sixty degrees, and the skies were clear, UNTIL THEY WERE FILLED WITH BLOOD. Captain Dave Sanders, first officer Jim tucker, and flight engineer Andy Peterson were doing their pre flight checks for a routine fedex flight to San Jose, California, to drop off some mail or CD’s of Ace of Base’s the sign, the number one song for that day. I love checking out what the #1 song of days is to put stuff culturally in perspective. So while this HORRIFIC DISASTER is taking place in the sky, you have some jerkoff in jnco jeans and frosted tips jamming out to I saw the sign in his s**tty saturn S series on the ground below.

The crew has a last minute hop on, basically fedex airline employees could hitch a free ride on a plane going where they needed to go. This is before 9/11 so nobody really gave a crap about airport security yet, despite a litany of hijackings in the seventies and eighties. But even then nobody expected that sort of thing from an employee, disgruntled or otherwise.  And Auburn Calloway, He was f**king disgruntled. Can you be gruntled? Is that just satisfied? Words are weird. Auburn Calloway had it all, and subsequently lost it all. He was a stanford graduate and a top navy pilot, and one of the first black men to ever do so. He had a wife and kids and by all accounts a promising career ahead of him. He transitioned out of the navy and went on to be a commercial pilot, and after that a flight engineer with fedex. Something he presumably saw as a slight downgrade each time, over these years his marriage crumbled and they split up. At the time of the incident Calloway was going to have to appear in an investigation for discrepancies in his flight time logs and likely lose his job. He was still sending money to his family and I guess he just saw the writing on the wall that, if this investigation went through, his professional career would be pretty much over. He’s going through his stuff, he hates his job and then he finds his way out. To secure his family’s future, to end his pain, to get back at the company he hates, all at once. His life insurance policy, weighing in at a hefty two and a half million dollars if he dies in an airline accident. Adjusted for today's economy that’s north of four and a half million dollars. Over the next few days he plans his attack, planning to be on flight 705 as the engineer with a man and much smaller woman pilot crew. In a stroke of luck for the original crew he was a part of, they were 1 minute over their allowable flight time. With just a little more of a headwind on their last flight the events of april 7th could have become one of the worst disasters in airline history. 

Determined to follow through on the plan despite not being able to be on the crew, he takes the jumpseat I was talking about earlier. He wires over all the liquid money he can to his ex wife, packs his guitar case, leaves his will on his bed, and takes off for not a do or die scenario, but a do AND die plot of a f**king action movie. 

Flash back to the actual crew boarding and doing their pre flight checks, The breaker on the cockpit voice recorder is tripped, that supplies power that lets it, well record voice in the cockpit. No awards for creativity but these things need to be straightforward. Calloway had gotten on early and popped this out, hoping it was missed in the pre-flight check, making it so there would be no audio evidence in the event of a crash. Luckily Andy Peterson caught it, twice. Yeah calloway snuck in and unplugged the breaker a second time and Peterson saw it again. Presumably acted like a skyrim guard, said it must be nothing and watched it for five seconds, satisfied it didn’t pop out and went back to the checklist. If Calloway tried that again, my understanding was that it would ground the plane, so he wasn’t gonna press his luck on that front. 

Instead he would wait for takeoff to make his move. You can find the transcript of the whole flight, I’ll link it in the show notes, but at the beginning you have the usual cleared for takeoff stuff and the crew shooting the s**t together, seeing where each other lives ect. They see Calloway come into the cockpit, expecting him to just chat with them for a little bit of the flight and that’s when it hits them. Wham! Calloway had come in from the other room after opening his guitar case, he wasn’t here to play free bird, in the case he had four hammers, a knife and a f**king speargun. He comes in with two of the hammers and whacks Jim tucker so hard it smashes a baseball sized hole his skull and sends bone shards into his brain. He’s completely stunned out for the next 45 seconds or so. He can’t move or really react but he’s still conscious.  Calloway is raining down attacks like he’s got the hammer in smash bros and whacks Peterson so hard his skull also fractures and seperates his temporal artery so he starts bleeding out right there and continues to do so for the rest of the quote “flight”. There’s a great documentary about this whole thing that’s available on youtube that includes a dramatization and everything. That's actually where I got most of the info for this show, but it shows all of this stuff going down. Check that out in the show notes. While Tucker is still dazed, Sanders and Peterson jump up to try and take control of the situation, Calloway runs back into the galley to grab his spear gun and screams that it’s a real gun and not to try anything fun or I’ll kill all of you!” 

Even though the crew is already beaten and bloody, Peterson the engineer grabs the spear and tries to wrench control of it. It’s at this point tucker, still trapped in his seat starts to regain at least some of his movement but he’s still effectively paralyzed on his right side and completely disoriented. Tucker uses the only thing he can to fight back, confined to the seat himself, he uses the plane. He inches his one working arm up to flight controls and puts the plane into a climb. Keep in mind this isn’t a small snappy jet or a maneuverable biplane or something like that. This plane is a DC-10, almost 200 feet long and with a hundred sixty foot wingspan. If it were outfitted for passengers rather than mail it could seat almost 300 people. It’s not designed for any airshow antics. When the plane climbs suddenly it throws Calloway, Sanders and Peterson dozens of feet back into the wall in the galley of the plane. 

Now s**t gets even crazier, The crew is fighting Calloway, it’s two on one but the odds aren’t really in their favor, I don’t think that I mentioned that Calloway is a f**king martial arts expert as well. The dude is basically a bond villain. Sanders and Peterson both are already beat the hell up and bleeding out after getting smashed with hammers. They really don’t stand much of a chance against the relatively unharmed Calloway. He intended to beat the crew to death with the hammers rather than just shoot everyone to make their injuries more consistent with a plane crash, for when authorities investigate the wreckage. Jim Tucker is still in the copilot’s seat and can’t really turn his head to look back there but he hears the brutal scuffle between the other three, he has no idea who’s winning or who’s even alive. Peterson and sanders are shouting for him to just put it on autopilot and get back there but he still can’t move out of his seat. He does the only thing he can and starts rolling the plane like he’s trying to get to the secret path in starfox 64. The plane is flying sideways now and everyone back there gets thrown into another wall. They’re all scrambling for the hammers and speargun. Then tucker rolls the plane back the other to a hundred and forty degrees, for the geometry challenged, plane go up people fall back, plane go to one side people fall to that side, plane go all the way back to the other side and almost upside down people get thrown and pinned against the ceiling like they’re in the hallway from inception except with more blood and hammers. After that Tucker slams the plane into a dive that sticks everyone to the back wall like they’re on a gravitron. They’re all thrashing around back there trying to gain control of the hammers. Everyone including Calloway had taken some heavy hits from the hammers back there. It looks like a hallway on the ishimura from dead space.

All three of them are covered in blood, the seats are ripped up, there’s papers and jackets and s**t flying around everywhere, there’s bloody foot and hand prints on the f**king ceiling and at this point nobody is clearly winning the brawl. When Tucker puts the plane into the dive there’s yet another problem. The plane is rapidly heading towards the ground, but far more rapidly than it should be, the planes aren’t supposed to go over 695 kilometers per hour but this thing is headed towards the ground at over 860 kilometers per hour. He realizes that the throttle on the plane is still on full power after takeoff. The wing elevators are shaking and close to coming off, the massive jet is almost supersonic but he’s only got one working hand so he has to let go of the yoke in order to get at the throttle and kill the engines. After this, coming out of the dive he manages to level the plane without the tail and elevators and stuff completely ripping off the fuselage and he’s finally able to start radioing in to air traffic controllers. All this happens within about a MINUTE of calloway first attack with the hammer. It’s extremely rapid and there’s a million things that could have gone wrong. 

So he radios in and asks for armed intervention and ambulances with permission to land back at memphis. While he’s talking he flip flops the plane back and forth with a roll. After Peterson and Sanders seem to get the upper hand they yell at Tucker to throw that B***h on autopilot and get back here and help. That’s crazy I just imagine him going back there, struggling very much to do so because he’s effectively parlyzed on one side of his body and he gets back there and everyone just stops being a cloud of dust with fists and feet coming out of it like its some old school cartoon and they’re just like if you’re back here then who’s flying the plane? Turns out nobody was, the f**king gyros hadn’t stabilized after all that crazy aerobatics so he’s just like screw it and I guess ghost rides the whip? Like just kicks it in neutral and hopes the autopilot takes over. When Tucker gets back there he finds the other two have pinned and disarmed Calloway and they agree to have Dave Sanders land the plane because he’s the captain and that’s protocol. The whole thing seems pretty damn far from protocol but I’m not a pilot. Sanders hands Tucker the spear and they keep Calloway pinned down while Peterson is still, severely bleeding from his head and kinda flopped on Calloway to help keep him down. 

Sanders gets back in the pilot's seat and on the radio, the air traffic controllers just heard radio silence during this exchange so they thought the hijacker took over or something. Tucker can barely feel the spear in his hand and says if you move I’ll kill ya. Kind of a nice poetic moment in the chaos since that’s what Calloway said only moments before when he first pulled out the speargun in the cockpit. 

Complicating things further, Sanders doesn’t have his GLASSES on and his eyes are full of blood so they almost miss the turn for the airport and in all the commotion. Calloway chooses right then to start fighting again and almost gets back to his feet until Peterson slams him with the hammer multiple times in the head and he drops. Air traffic control is like you’re all set up with a swat team and an ambulance, do you have the situation under control? And I love this, Sanders, over the sound of screaming and hammers and airplane warning beeps is just like “we appear to have it under control.” Calloway is trying to push people’s eyes out, he’s biting, he’s fighting like an animal and screaming. Sanders throws on the autopilot again and goes back fully intending to kill calloway. The other two tell him it’s under control, but in doing the auto pilot he approaches the airport too fast. 

 

I don’t know how many ways I can say they’re not out of the woods yet, here’s another complication, but here’s another one. The plane is too heavy to land on the smaller runway they’ve been allocated since because physics. As simply put as I can, it has too much fuel, fuel that would normally be used up on the way to San Jose. No comment on whether or not it can melt steel. Because it’s too heavy and the approach is too fast it will take brakes applied over a longer runway to bring the plane to a stop, they can’t use that runway. If all three crew members were in the cockpit in a scenario like this the flight engineer could dump the fuel to make it weigh less. 

Obviously it’s only Sanders, the other two are guarding and subduing Calloway. OF COURSE, the fuel dump switch is all the way on the other side of the cockpit and he can't step away from the steering controls. Because of this and the speed they need to hit another runway at ninety degrees to the first one. He needs to take a ninety degree turn and then pull it around, BACK 180 degrees and level it out to hit the new runway. Miraculously Sanders is able to pull off this maneuver and land the plane quote “safely”.

They burst the doors and EMTs and SWAT are able to get onto the plane. They take everyone to a nearby hospital where they’re treated for their injuries. Investigators find a suicide note on the plane telling calloway’s family he loves them and he’s doing it for them and all that lunatic bulls**t but a plan seems to come into focus, with the overfueled jetliner, and the crew dead, Calloway could have flown the plane right into fedex headquarters to take half the company with him. A disaster the likes of which was unimaginable, except for maybe in that tom clancy book that predicted a plane crashing into the world trade center. remember, this is ‘94  nine eleven hadn’t happened yet, but that’s for another episode. 

Auburn Calloway was sentenced to life in prison for attempted air piracy. Jim Tucker, Andy Peterson and Dave Sanders were all awarded a gold medal for heroism but sadly none of them were deemed fit to fly after the incident due to the injuries they sustained. There’s interviews with all three of them in the doc, and they just wistfully look into the distance like, every time I see a plane I get sad and wonder where it’s going. s**t is heartbreaking. Everyone survived though yayyy! That’s probably why a lot of people haven’t heard of this hijacking story. That and a certain football player involved in a notable car chase just months later kind of eclipsed most of the news in 1994.

One thing I don’t get and I can’t find an answer to is why the hell calloway brought a suicide note with him while at the same time going through a complex plan to make it look accidental, disabling the recorder, killing everyone with hammers so they wouldn’t suspect foul play, crashing the plane, but then you just send the money to your ex wife, have an incriminating suicide note and spend a week prior to crashing a plane getting your affairs in order. I guess most of that is circumstantial evidence but what the heck man. 

That’s pretty much all I got for today everyone, Throw me a rating and review if you’ve got the time. Smashing the 5 star button builds muscle mass. I’d say sweet dreams, but we all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now. See ya next week!

Drums Along the Congo

Wiki links:

Mokele-mbembe

phantoms and monsters

Sound effect credits: 

https://freesound.org/people/IchBinJager/

https://freesound.org/people/jamesrodavidson/

https://freesound.org/people/nickerick03/

Loose Transcript:

Wooo hooo Welcome back everybody, to Nightmare Now, I’m your Host Erik Byrne and if this is your first night terror with us, welcome aboard, please keep arms and legs severed or otherwise, inside the podcast at all times. Today we’re getting into a subject near and dear to my heart, Cryptozoology, or is it palentology? Or just zoology? I guess it depends on the evidence we can pull together and a certain willingness to suspend disbelief. If you’re not willing to suspend disbelief, I’m glad you’re still listening. We’re gonna get into some more true historical stuff next week. Probably. Basically as I predicted would happen as a chronic procrastinator I have completely squandered the buffer I had by prerecording the first few episodes. I figured hey I’ll throw a few in the tank and it’ll give me a bit of time to really knock it out of the park and give me time to go on vacation or something later but I guess (F--k it we’ll do it live!) So here we are, merely a day or two ahead of airtime. My laptop is throwing up errors, my fan died, not any of you guys, just the little USB one that keeps me cool in the Airquotes “Studio”. It’s really just a glorified closet, and if you want to see a picture come say hi on our instagram page @nightmare.now it’ll be there. Speaking of which, with this being the first recording post launch I am flabbergasted with the amazing response I’ve gotten, I hit 100 Downloads within the first week, I have a bunch of people checking out the instagram and twitter and I get texts from a few listeners within hours of an episode releasing. Thanks mom! For links to all that social media bulls--t and how to get in touch with me check out the icons at nightmarenow.com and pretty please gimme those juicy 5 star ratings and reviews wherever you’re listening it helps out a ton.

With all that housekeeping out of the way finally we can lumber in to today’s topic. I’d cue the jurassic park theme here but the real nightmare would be john williams copyright claim on my show and nobody wants that.  Maybe I’ll pull a vanilla Ice in post and add a high hat cymbal to exonerate myself from any kind of intellectual property infringement. (insert track) That’s better. I’m gonna do my best movie trailer voice now. It’s amazing how annoying your voice sounds on a recording versus in the reverberations of your own skull, but it’s something I’ll just have to live with. Here we go: BWAAAA 

IN A WORLD. 

EXACTLY LIKE TODAY’S WORLD 

BECAUSE IT IS TODAYS WORLD 

BWAAAAA

THERE ARE SECRETS 

ANCIENT SECRETS 

BWAAAAA

LYING IN WAIT WAITING TO BE REVEALED. 

SECRETS 66 MILLION YEAR IN THE MAKING

(for copyright reasons) 

BWAAA

DEEP IN THE CONGOLESE JUNGLE,

IN THE DEPTHS OF LAKE TELE

A BEAST SLUMBERS 

BWAAA

THIS TUESDAY

MOKELE-MBEMBE 

RISES ONCE MORE 

(ROAR)

TO APPEAR ON A PODCAST

(BWAAA) 

That’s right folks we have a real treat set up for you today, we’re looking at Mokele-mbembe, the god beast and potential surviving dinosaur, or colony of dinosaurs deep in the jungle in the heart of Africa. Our main source today is the book drums along the congo where journalist and explorer rory nugent documents his own personal quest to get a glimpse at the beast itself. I’ll throw a link in the show notes if you want to check it out yourself, it’s not a long read and it’s a fun little swashbuckling on site adventure through the jungle.

Who, or what is mokele-mbembe though? There are accounts from westerners all the way back in 1776 when french missionaries found huge unexplainable footprints in the congo. Before you say anything, it’s bigger feet than bigfoot, he’s gonna get his own episode or two later. Later on mokele-mbembe was first reported widely in the western world in 1909  by a zoologist named Carl hagenbeck in his book beasts and men, soon after picked up by the washington post in 1910. I managed to find the news article actually, that’ll be in the notes but it describes the possibility of a half elephant half dragon monster. Later zoological expeditions heard terrifying thunderous sounds and roars in the region and still others found clawed footprints  larger than an elephants. Elephants are present in this region but they don’t have claws. 

Mokele-mbembe means “one who stops the flow of rivers” in the local language of lingala. The congo river basin and lake tele is certainly a more ancient, more primordial area of the planet. Featuring giant prehistoric ferns and temperatures that never really drop below seventy degrees and rarely come out of the high eighties. Fahrenheit for you non yanks, that’s 26 to 28 degrees celsius. I need to be conscious of my global audience now that we’re world wide, according to my analytics we’ve got listeners in france, india, sweden, the uk, new zealand, canada and here at home across the US. Thank you all! 

The humidity hovers around 85-100 percent, making it incredibly muggy all the time. Huge jungle trees stretch to form distinct layers of jungle in the canopy, mid canopy and the ground. As a biologist I found all this stuff super fascinating when rory covered it in drums along the congo, where you have, you know, a hundred square feet of jungle forest and effectively three or more different ecosystems the higher into the trees you go. Different amounts of sunlight, heat and whole separate sets of species populate each zone. In the interest of not making a three hour show just about jungle ecosystems I’ll refer to this stuff only where it’s relevant, or horrifying, as you’ll see later once we get into the jungle parasites and other dangers just to get out to lake tele to even try to find mokele mbembe, man that’s fun to say. 

So even before we get our boots wet in a neverending crocodile infested mire, get arrested by congolese authorities, get attacked by poisonous snakes or leopards, (for more about why big cats are scary check out episode one!) and become riddled with malaria, we have to know what we’re even looking for. Now, descriptions of mokele-mbembe have varied over time but the central concept is usually the same. He, or she I suppose, is effectively a sauropod dinosaur. For those of you who weren't as obsessed with paleontology as I was when I was a kid. And still am, let's be honest, sauropods are the big long neck dudes. Tons and tons of flesh and muscle in a lumbering body, a huge tail, and a head atop a ridiculously long neck. Little foot for my land before time fans out there. So mokele mebembe basically fits that description. A sauropod dinosaur ranging in size from a hippopotamus to a towering thirty five feet tall or so. After that general description we kind of have a pick and choose smorgasbord of trims and upgrade packages for it. Many accounts describe a single sharp tusk or horn, picture something like a narwhal for that. Among those accounts it uses the tusks to poke around and slice off it’s alleged favorite food, the malombo fruit. It’s kind of like a cross between a soft coconut and a lemon. They grow on vines. Other less herbivorous accounts depict mokele mbemebe spearing hippos, elephants, leopards, crocs  and especially people on its tooth and drowning them in its waters. Don’t piss it off I guess. 

Most descriptions agree that he’s a brownish, greyish or rusty color, but beyond that some say it’s scaly, some say slimy and still others say it has short slick fur like a seal. I don’t think anyone has been able to get close enough to touch it and live to tell the tale though. After that you start to get out to the more fringe descriptions, like a line of sharp spines along its spine. Along with spikes at the end of its muscular tail. The locals mention that it has deep blood red eyes too.

Mokele-Mbembe lives in and around lake tele, and also supposedly in underground caves in the region. Now I love this idea, I’m definitely going to do a future episode on the accounts of hollow parts deep within the earth supposedly housing mammoths and dinosaurs and other crazy s--t, it’s one of my favorite parts of esoteric crypto lore and I have some cool books on that stuff kicking around somewhere. Anyway, the lake, caves and perhaps most importantly the rivers is where mokele mbembe makes its home. It uses the rivers to get around, because they snake throughout the entire region and give access to it’s full territory and malombo fruits without it having to knock down a ton of trees and stomp through the forest. Skeptics would point to this as a convenient lack of evidence, but generally, f--k skeptics. Live a little. Or listen to the more accurately historically sourced episodes.  

Some people say it’s a physical, undeniable biological creature, a relic from the late jurassic period. Obviously it wouldn’t live that long and would have to breed or otherwise reproduce until now. The climate and jungle ecosystem could technically support such a creature, maybe not at the upper range of its size descriptions but certainly at a large elephant size. It wouldn’t have many if any natural predators and other animals have survived relatively unchanged for much longer and are taken for granted. Obviously we have the living fossil coelacanth, but think too about other animals. Sharks, alligators and crocodiles, other species of fish and lizards. Some stuff survives and justs gets smaller. The animal kingdom goes the same way as freakin ipods. You got the big prehistoric chunkers that could hold eight songs and eventually you get the ipod mini. Same applies to dinosaurs. It’s science. 

What’s the alternative though? To a living fossil? Local tribes and even more developed settlements in the area revere mokele-mbembe as a god-beast. A Spirit of the jungle and river. In a survey done in 1980, over half of the respondents there reported that they were christians, but even 90 percent of them reported seeing a witch doctor at least twice each year. This is a region dominated by ancient tradition and a lot of the voodoo stuff that us Americans attribute to Haiti and the Caribbean really originate here. I won’t dive too deep into that today because I’ve got a whole episode planned on haitian voodoo and the zombie phenomena there where I’ll go more in depth on all that craziness. Scopolamine is a helluva drug though I’ll give you that much as a little teaser. But anyway the people, in this region especially of the congo, believe that spirits control everything. There’s spirits for water, for air, for weather, for food, for guns, for love, for life, for the trees, for the sky, for the spring, for the animals, for families, you f--king name it. So many people consider mokele-mbembe to be either a spirit given form or some sort of spirit flesh hybrid. In a way we’re all spirit flesh hybrids aren’t we? This could explain certain lacking physical evidence even in the face of numerous eyewitness accounts.

There’s one part in the book we’re rory and his guide are talking about death and spirits and the like that really made me laugh where he’s talking to his guide, and the guide is upset because they receive news that a guy in a neighboring village has died. Turns out it’s worse that it’s the guides enemy than if it was his friend because now his family is gonna get cursed by the dead guys family and accused of spirit murder because they’ll think his family cursed the dead guy. Rory asked him if they did curse the dead guy and he’s just like “hell yeah we did, f--k that guy!” turns out the congolese justice system isn’t exactly the most efficient machine around so most people turn to spirits and voodoo curses in lieu of litigation. In short, even among the christian or undecided population of the congo, old traditions based around fetishes voodoo and witch doctors carry a hell of a lot of importance in peoples day to day lives.

I’ve also heard people describe the loch ness monster and other more dinosaurian cryptids as ghosts of dinosaurs so that’s a fun third option for the people playing along at home, I don’t really think that’s the case here but their guess is as good as mine.  Then of course there’s the possibility of it all being bullsh-t entirely but if that’s the case I’m out a show. Towards the end I’ll probably throw in some skeptical explanations just to be fair and balanced. For the purposes of the rest of the show however, I think we’ll be looking at it as if it truly is a lost dinosaur lineage, avoiding capture and death deep in the jungle for millions of years. 

I think now is as good a time as any to paraphrase rory nugent’s  trip through the congo, mostly because his book was the highest rated and available on kindle versus a lot of the more referenced texts on mokele-mbembe being out of print or prohibitively expensive. WHAT ARE THE PUBLISHING COMPANIES HIDING? THE PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW! So my man rory has listed himself as a journalist slash explorer, personally I would lead with explorer but that’s just me. He takes a couple of courses in jungle survival and spends a night in central park without getting mugged basically. After that it’s basically off to the races. Imagine a cutaway to to an indiana jones cutaway with the planes and the bum ba dumm dumm ba ba daaa, man I’m really trying to get sued by john williams today huh? So you see the plane flying across the atlantic, maybe the plane stops in france and then pops down to africa. Into the southwest region of the congo. He starts taking pictures of birds and s--t because he’s into that kind of thing and is immediately arrested  for being a capitalist spy. He’s apparently got a high enough charisma roll to talk himself out of it, if you’ll forgive the expression, I started a dnd game with a few friends so that stuff has been at the front of my mind. It helps because it’s another more creative energy keeping me sane while I slave away as a lab analyst. Why do you think I started this show anyway? 

So Rory gets arrested and basically for the remainder of his trip he is assigned chaperones for his time in the congo. Kind of like the pope episode a few weeks back I really don’t want to get into the politics of the Congo and why they’re worried about capitalist spies. Suffice to say that Russians, Cubans and the Chinese had a pretty big hand in the development of the present day congo. As far as I knew about the Congo before I started researching this episode was the sh--y Congo movie from 1995 with the gray cannibal apes, a cyborg gorilla and tim curry almost saying the N word. That movie and like twenty eight pages of joseph conrad’s heart of darkness. I’ll finish it someday. Luckily I learned a lot about the region and culture and potentially fake monsters dwelling within it. Again we’re a global show. 

Rory gets assigned a chaperone and there's a lot of great scene with this dude, Ambroise constantly busting his balls because truth be told he doesn’t want to be hanging around babysitting this dumb mundele, that’s the word for insincere whitey in lingala, all day long. He’s giving him s--t about how if he has to go into the jungle he gets overtime and stuff, and this expedition is gonna help finance his new refrigerator. He gets into all kinds of little adventures in the capital of the congo, brazzaville while he’s trying to secure a travel permit to get to the wild northern region where mokele-mbembe supposedly lives. And he completely confirms the westaboo trope. In every non american country there’s always a few people that base their whole identity on american culture, they do a great version of this in that show welcome to sweden. In fact there’s this whole subculture over in sweden called the raggare that go all out for 1950s americana. I really hope that they’ve committed heinous crimes or something so I have an excuse to cover them. 

Anyway rory meets all kinds of people obsessed with american movies from 20 years earlier and more importantly the huge sporting event that was the rumble in the jungle. A famous boxing match between george foreman and muhammad ali that ali won in a big upset in 1974 in zaire. Which eventually becomes the democratic republic of the congo. Some people were so obsessed that they had the entire radio broadcast memorized. The fact that rory had once shook hands with ali, was actually a huge help in securing those permits. Even still there were times when he had to wait in a sweltering office for nine hours only to have the secretary be like, ssss ahhh, the paperwork guy isn’t in today cest la vie huh? Eventually he acquires the permit and ships up north. Not before getting a blessing from a witch doctor near brazzaville. The witch doctor told him what to do and he said OO EE OOOH AAHHH AHH TING TANG WALLA WALLA BING BANG. not really, just as soon as anyone mentions a witch doctor some MKULTRA programming from the alvin and the chipmunks movie kicks in and that’s all I can think of, the old one not the weird uncanny valley cgi ones. He would’ve been better off with the s--tty gimmick song though because what really happened to get the witch doctor’s blessing was much worse. He had to strip down, and no it’s not brazzersville perverts, nobody was stuck in a washing machine. He had to strip down and the witch doctor screamed and spit in his face and dumped a fanta bottle of crocodile oil and honey all over him, again modern society and ancient tradition clashing with the fanta bottle, I love it. This concoction was an invitation to every winged insect within a mile to crawl around on him and suck up the honey and by extension any evil spirits. You know with a bunch of parasitic wasps crawling around my dick and balls I’d probably take my chances with the evil spirits. I guess it’s better than having robert liston operate on you. 

Unfortunately for ambroise and his fridge though they said f--k you and your overtime and sent him off with a dude named innocent. Him and innocent take a plane north to impfondo and fly over this city that I would love to do some more research on that’s just a bunch of barges lashed together and stacked on top of each other in the congo river. The pilot has a little extra fuel and flies them over lake tele so they get the aerial view before touching down on a tiny airfield in the jungle. From above tele is a serene black lake surrounded by a black mire with twisted and gnarled trees on all sides. Through the swamp weaves dozens of inlets and rivers and coves, all potentially housing the lost sauropod. They say they haven’t had anyone fly in in over six months because the airfield is only usable if it doesn't rain for three days, a rare occurrence in the jungle. They are effectively stuck there and locked in once they land and their pilot takes off. It’s a hundred and eighteen degrees when they touch down and from here on out it’s all on foot or by canoe. 

Rory has some pens and pencils and bubble gum to offer the children of the villages and the tribes and everyone one of them is just like f--k off, cash or nothing. I love that juxtaposition he encounters in all these villages. Like it’s still a primitive way of life but not untouched like out on sentinel island or anything like that. So there’s people fishing with spears and clutching voodoo fetishes but at the same time they’re wearing nike tracksuits and Rams Super bowl champions two thousand two hats, sorry tflo if you’re listening, at least you got yours this year! 

One of the biggest parts of the cargo they’re lugging around is literally crates of liquor and pounds of salt, because the traditional gift to a tribal chief is a handful of salt and a bottle of booze. He brings a whole crate of scotch to each village to get in with them and that leads into more than a few hangover style shenanigans where he wakes up suspended in a tree or in a pile of wriggling fish. But hey? When in rome right? They pick up a couple of jungle guides and other people on their quest whilst they go around placating all the surrounding village with booze and cigarettes. Eventually they hop in some canoes and hit the river towards lake tele, but not before being scammed five or six times by different villages.

In one of the first major outings on the canoes they run into a giant crocodile that they annoy with a thrown spear. After getting hit with a spear the croc takes a beeline at the canoe and innocent hits it in the neck with another spear at the last possible moment. If he hasn’t realized it by now, rory sees that the travel through the jungle aint gonna be a walk in central park. Of course they cook and eat the croc because at this point they need to hunt for food. Speaking from personal experience, alligator tastes like, well, it unironically tastes like chicken. Just a rubbery, greasy chicken. According to the book, the crocodile didn’t taste much different.

After this the book reminds me of a game of amazon trail. It was like the oregon trail but instead of dying of dysentery in a covered wagon, you got eaten by piranhas in a canoe. I know I know, the amazon is in south america and the congo is in africa but many of the same principles apply, give me a break ok? Eventually they hit a few random encounters with a poachers canoe and try to scare off a poacher by just blasting their ak-47 into the air. He’s apparently not around, it’s more tense in the story but it’s not really important to the mokelembembe plot. Later on down the river they see a jaguar lapping up water and  even see a pair of pygmies hiding in the water watching them, using reeds to breathe. That’s scary as f--k. They could just pop out and hit you with a blow dart and eat you. Maybe they wouldn’t eat you but nugent recalls tales he read in his youth about the yakas in this region that would kill and eat people traveling through this region. I’ve got a couple of episodes planned about cannibals, in fact I originally had an idea for a podcast about cannibals called to serve man, but f--k that would be depressing right? That tangent is basically just to illustrate how f--king scary it is to run into the more remote and warlike tribes out there in the jungle. It’s one thing to sit in a closet and make jokes and talk s--t but it’s another thing entirely to glide through the water in canoe, trying to remain silent as you see small humans watch you through yellowed eyes, under the river water like you’re in the f--king dead marshes in middle earth. Good lord that’s terrifying. 

Eventually he runs into a few brits doing their own expedition to lake tele for a geological survey and to see if they can find any new species or what have you and they’re led by this dude colonel rothermel, and I’m basically picturing rourke from disney’s atlantis, just some former military guy leading a bunch of nerds through a hostile environment. I know at least a few of my listeners will know exactly what I mean. The brits are one their way back from the lake and they pretty much laugh their asses off at the fact that rory and innocent are looking for mokele mbembe and offer to offload some of their equipment. Here rory talks about some other expeditions to lake tele throughout the last few hundred years. I think it’s worth doing the same The brits didn’t see s--t. Back in the eighties a guy named roy mackal went out there and got a picture of it… that got ruined by water. He was also some kind of young earth creationist, and his book was like thirty bucks so I wasn’t getting that. Later on another expedition that partially inspired rory’s came back and gave a presentation in new york, and much to everyone’s quote unquote surprise, their only pictures were also… ruined by water.  

At this point I’m like what the f--k, why are we reading this still but I’m here for the jungle adventure, I’m also locked in because I don’t have another topic prepped. And I believe god damn it! There’s dinosaurs out there! At least according to hundreds of schizo blogspot pages I came across, and they can’t all be wrong right? 

Finally they come to the last, sort of “civilized” village. And with a little help from scotch and salt they narrowly secure a vote to allow them into the deepest part of mokele mbembe’s sacred lair. One of my favorite parts of this exchange is when innocent translates what the village council says after the vote. He’s just like “They ask mokele-mbembe not to kill us and thank us for the booze.” right on. Rory asks the witch doctor in that village if mokele-mbembe might be a goddess rather than a god and he just laughs in his face and is like no way mudele!

The group of six gatherers their last bit of supplies and gets ready for weeks in the wilderness by foot and canoe. They sit through one coming of age ritual in a village and head off, with only one village saying that they should go home, the rest effectively sponsoring their quest. Here, and several other spots in the book, he talks about skin borers. Disturbingly matter of factly. These are parasites that burrow into your skin and get into the bloodstream. I’ll quote the book here holy f--k.

“These worms begin life no larger than a match head, but given the right conditions, they can grow to the size of a small snake within the leg, their growth arrested only by knee joints and ligaments. Eventually they eat through the calf and exit from the skin just below the knee.” 

He never gives a proper name for these parasites so I really couldn’t find anything more about them, skin borers just comes up with a bunch of wood boring beetles on google. Compared to parasites that eat your f--king knees, they’re well, boring. I’ve got a great book on parasites I’ll eventually do an episode on, sarah you don’t need to listen to that one, it’s fine, I understand. 

They continue on playing another few days of congo trail, avoiding death by malaria, and nile crocodiles and skin borers. The only food some nights is fried grubs like they’re in the f--king lion king, Slimy, yet satisfying. A lot of disney this episode huh? Other nights they’ve got monkey or crocodile, with one of the guides making sure to make a slurry of the brains for desert. He says it’s the only way to gain the creatures power and spirit. With that I feel entirely vindicated in trying to convince people that eating the eyes of the lobster is the only way to gain it’s grip strength for all these years. To my gym bro listeners, monkey brain protein shakes? Yes or no? Let me know at [email protected]! One thing that he goes out of his way to mention is identifying monkeys by their vibrant scrotums. I felt it was worth including because we’ve had a lot of scrotum talk on this show, why stop now?

Watching the monkey cook kind of gives me the impression of a cartoon where people are trapped on a deserted island and you envision your compatriots as succulent hams. Rory describes the monkey skin tightening over the fire and looking more humanlike and more tasty each minute. The jungle really can change a mofo. They eat all kinds of crazy s--t out in the jungle, monkeys, hogs, monkey’s hogs, snakes, Which I’ve also eaten and taste like greasy chicken, grubs, plants and more. They use dirt for seasoning, I might have to try that next time I do pulled pork.

One day rory goes off on his own to collect some butterflies and look at birds and he hears a huge roar and a bunch of small trees being knocked over. This is effectively the climax of the book so buckle the f--k up. He starts joggin through the muck and mire of the swamp around lake tele. After whatever monster is tearing through the trees. When he eventually catches up to it he sees a massive heaving grey and black creature grabbing at some fruit. It’s a f--king silverback gorilla. It looks at him inquisitively, perhaps sensing a primate kinship, and then roars, he gets the hell out of there and runs headfirst into a forest clearing where everything is freakishly quiet. Within seconds five pygmies surround him from the underbrush. Yellowed teeth and eyes glaring from behind armed, presumably poisoned crossbows, spears and blowguns. They’re only four and a half feet tall, one on one he might have a chance to whack one and get out but not surrounded. All his memories of stories of cannibals and mutilations come flooding back and he tries to reason with them by pointing to a bird he recognizes and flapping his arms. They hoot and holler at him. He slowly pulls out a harmonica and plays a s--y bit of piano man for them which they seem to like and hands off the harmonica to the one that seems to be the leader, who blows a few sour notes into it and smiles.

This likely saved his life, so follow up on at least one creative pursuit or two in your life. Get that charisma score up! While screwing around with the harmonica, they didn’t immediately murder him. He notices the leader has an infected cut on his foot and pulls out his medical kit to try to treat him on his knees. Immediately negotiations go sour when he tries this, the leader shrieks and kicks him in the throat. Rory backs up slowly and desperately tries to show them the bird sitting in the tree. I s-t you not this is how he escapes: he flaps his arms like a lunatic and points at the bird, they all finally look and he just takes off running. Literally LOOK OVER THERE! POCKET SAND! Jesus christ I hope he brought extra pants because I would be s--tting myself, running through the jungle hearing the whoops and shrieks get further and further behind you. They know the jungle but 3 foot legs can only carry you so f--king far. He’s still lost too! After tracking the gorilla he lost his way and wandered until nightfall. Forcing him to sleep alone in the jungle. I can’t believe he could even sleep. The next morning he awakes with a lungfish flopping against his face. That means water is nearby! He finally makes it back to his canoe and finds the rest of the group the next morning. 

With one more monkey brain protein shake they finally reach the shores of lake tele. After spending a little time on the shore they see something far off break the surface of the water. Like a periscope breaching the ocean. The group goes wild and they all fall to their knees, rory goes crazy too, offering them ten, then fifteen thousand francs to get him closer in the canoes. They ignore the offer and tell them to shut the f--k up and get on his knees, this is the moment. Innocent tells him the others are cursing him and to go for it so rory gets in one of the unoccupied canoes and shoves off towards the anomaly. He gets ten, twenty, thirty feet out when he hears an unmistakeable sound (CERCHICK) the rest of the group has their weapons trained on him and innocent. Rory snaps two blurry ( of course they’re blurry) photographs and comes back to shore. One of the guides, Gabriel, admonishes him. “God can approach man, but man NEVER approaches GOD. He would have killed us all.” After he got back to shore the whole group was just relaxed again. No mention about the fact that they were in a mexican f--king standoff five seconds ago. They all watched the beast about a half a mile away for seven minutes and thirty two seconds before it submerges again. I’ll put that picture in the shownotes. After that it’s basically denouement, de new maw? I honestly am less confident in that word than I am in all the local lingala words. 

Let’s unpack. First. I’m pissed nobody got speared by mokele mbembe’s tusk, so that was kind of a let down. Second I can’t get f--king oo ee ooo ahh ting tang wall walla bing bang out of my head. Maybe I’ll cover that in the parasite episode. Third. One of my favorite stories about mokele-mbembe I couldn’t find a good place to shoehorn in yet that I want to make sure I mention. So one of the BBC expeditions back in the seventies made a much more cordial contact with the pygmies. They showed them a book of animal pictures and they’re flipping through them and they’re like leopard, hippo, elephant, crocodile sure sure we see that s-t all the time, and then they show a picture of a moose and they’re like WHAT THE F--K IS THAT THING! Later on after showing a gorilla and a few other monkeys, they throw in an apatasaurus and they just are like matter of factly yeah that’s a gorilla that’s mokele-mbembe. I love that, they have no modern schooling, they can recognize all the animals in their region and a f--king dinosaur like it’s nothing and then they see a moose or bear and they think it’s the devil. They treat mokele-mbembe like a foregone conclusion. 

Sigh.. I guess I gotta cover the skeptical point of view. I’m fine cutting that off for a brief second to shill for a minute. I’m so grateful for all of you guys listening truly madly deeply. I’m living the dream and swearing on the radio, nobody tell my boss. We’re already starting to build a community across social media and s--t, but I’ve got some homework for you guys before next week. Last week I think I asked you to subscribe wherever you listen.This week I want you to throw me a 5 star rating wherever you’re listening. I work hard on the show! If you want to give me less than five stars I guess you can keep that to yourself or email me at [email protected] to tell me how to improve, I’m always looking for feedback! Next week I’m gonna ask you to share the show with your friends and family or something crazy.

Brr I just blacked out for thirty seconds, must have been the marketing persona taking over. Anyway, why might moklele-mbembe not be real slash alive. A lot of the arguments overlap with nessie, it’s very tough to keep a breeding population going for 65 million years, especially without turning up any bodies. But taking that apart, this is an animal with potential mystical powers so we can just that to any of the rest of the debunking the deboonkers points. Furthermore, many large animals are capable of burying there dead. Look no further than elephant graveyards, a wild phenomena on its own. Let alone in the jungle with potentially the fastest natural decomposition in the world. As for the breeding cycle I have no earthly idea. Dinosaurs lay eggs generally I guess, maybe in the caves? Another option is literally seeing an elephant in the water. From far off a trunk could be a neck and they’re a greyish brown color. Fair enough. They still don’t have claws like the found footprints. Lastly the stories of mokele-mbembe might have been unfairly signal boosted. Remember the pokemania of the 90’s or later on in twenty sixteen when pokemon go first came out? That was basically the late eighteen hundreds but for dinosaurs. Everyone and their grandma wanted to see dinosaurs. Because the first dinosaur bones had only recently been found. Maybe I’ll cover the bone wars, that’s a really interesting story in and of itself. 

Oh and one more thing, I couldn’t really fit this anywhere else, but there are tales from some of the tribes and villages that a few pygmies managed to spear and kill a dinosaur. Everyone that ate the meat died though. Kind of anticlimactic, kind of hilarious. 

Anyway, I’ll leave it up to you to decide if dinosaurs still walk the earth, at least until I cover the texas pteranodons. Heh. I’ve got a huge smile across my face. I love this s--t! Until next week, I’d say sweet dreams, but we all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now! 

Links:

Atlantic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders

Loose Transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now. I’m the host, Erik Byrne. Today’s episode is gonna be another short one, lets say truncated or even amputated. It opens up a whole topic of medical horror like a bonesaw to an artery. I’d love to do more episodes on the wider subject of the insane stuff humanity used to call medicine, but I’ll split that up and sprinkle it into the feed at large over time. I don’t want to spend too many episodes in a row on one particular topic. Maybe if I was doing this in seasons or something, but for right now I’m gonna jump all over time and space like I’ve got cosmic ADD. Maybe down the line I’ll curate collections of episodes on broader topics like medicine,  history or animals, but for that to happen I need to pump out more of that thick squidgy content. So without further ado I would like to jump right into the blood and guts of today’s episode. I give you the fastest knife in the west end, the slickest slicer south of the north sea, Robert liston!

Robert liston was a prolific surgeon in britain from around 1818 to his death in 1847. He was born in late october of 1794 to a minister and inventor in Scotland. He grew up fascinated with medicine and anatomy and after a rudimentary schooling as a boy went on to attend medical school in edinburgh (edin-bruh). He left for a while to study under this guy william blizard in London and eventually returned to edinburgh to teach anatomy there before becoming a surgeon and then kind of bounced between london and edinburgh throughout his life. He got canned in edinburgh and moved to london, came back then went back to london where he lived out the remainder of his days. He married a wine merchant’s daughter along the way who isn’t mentioned in most of the articles and the one’s she’s in don’t even really give her name. Give the ladies some coverage too c’mon! Given her absence in most of the literature here I, I don’t think there’s much relevance to me covering her either. Sorry mrs Liston, I’m sure he couldn’t have done it all without you. We’ll take a brief second to pour out a whiskey for the happy couple and make a note to find some strong women leads for future horror stories on the show. 

Back to old robert, that covers most of the biographical information of any relevance to the medical insanity we’re going to be jumping into today. I think he’d appreciate the brevity and cutting to the chase as you’ll soon find out. So during this time period of history, people had a Fairly good idea of how most of the human body worked and how to fix a lot of the medical issues people had. But it certainly was far from perfect. I mean even today we’re far from perfect. Reminds me of a time I tried to give blood like two years ago and they had to take the needle in and out 3 or four times because they weren’t getting any flow. After squeezing the stupid rod for ten minutes and not filling a drop of the blood bag, 2 nurses and a doctor later some tech figured out that they had crimped the wrong tube. They just gave me the coupon for the free whopper or whatever and told me to get out of there, so there’s kind of individual incompetence like that and societal incompetence like the fact that back then other surgeons thought you were a pussy if you washed your hands before or after a surgery. 

Most notably and most relevant at the time though was that speed of the operation was of the essence. The longer you went with an open body cavity or bleeding stump from an amputation, your chances of dying skyrocketed up. You lost more blood, you became more susceptible to infection, (although that wasn’t really well understood at the time), and you just have an overall lower chance of survival. Enter Robert Liston. He really, really leaned into the faster surgery good, slow methodical surgery bad. And now we’re getting into the reason this dude gets his own episode on my prestigious show. 

Picture this, your leg is green and sickly from some horrible 1800s infection probably just from stepping on a tomato that somebody stored their sewing needles in or something. Before antibiotics and other more modern inventions or discoveries it was just kinda like, that’s gotta go. And then it’s we let you keep your shrek leg and you’re guaranteed to die, or we chop that s**t off and you’ve got like a one in four chance of dying. Han solo was right when he said never tell me the odds I guess. 

Dr Liston’s whole schtick was that given a faster surgery you had a more likely chance to survive, why not take that to its logical conclusion and go for the speedrun records? Liston wasn’t called the fastest knife in the west end for nothing, he would perform an operation to amputate a limb, that means from the first slice, having the flesh cleaved away, the bone sawn through and the stump stitched back up in Twenty Eight seconds flat. I can barely imagine that. Most podcast ads are about thirty seconds so next time you’re listening to something that isn’t this show, take note when there’s an ad and imagine someone being strapped down with buckles, held down by assistants, have their hand sliced off and sawn through, all the while screaming and writhing, blood squirting everywhere while Liston is looking down on him with his knife literally in his mouth because he doesn’t have time to put it down to switch to the bone saw. Then stitched back up to become captain hook, and he yells at his assistant with a wild look in his eye “time! how fast was that?”  Seriously, every article on this guy is called some variation of “time me gentlemen! Time me” because that was his catch phrase before a surgery. He would show up and make sure people had their stopwatches out before he got started. Everyone just had those in 1800s england. Aside from all the blood and screaming, twas a silly place.

Liston may have been a cocky lunatic but he basically had every right to be. He was easily the fastest surgeon around and he had a far better mortality rate than most hospitals and other surgeons could claim at the time. I mentioned earlier his one in four surviving operations versus one in eight to ten averaged out elsewhere. Beyond the RBI he’s working with, liston was overall a pretty good guy, sure a bunch of people died under his knife, but who hasn’t gotten zapped playing the operation game once or twice. 

He would actually hang out outside of rival hospitals and when people got turned away because they were quote un quote “beyond helping” he would be like “look, no guarantees but your gonna die if you don’t get some kind of treatment and I’m right here with my liston knife and stopwatch if you want a chance to live… maybe…” Yes a liston knife, he invented himself a new kind of amputation knife to speed up the procedures. And he would just chop em up right there. Maybe he took them to an operating room, the literature is unclear. It’s funnier if you imagine he’s doing this in the parking lot of a rival hospital. Through getting victims, erm patients like this he probably saved a good deal of lives that didn’t have much of a shot at survival anyway. Pioneered isn't really the right term but, liston certainly championed, making people comfortable and assuring them stuff was okay, when it was most definitely not okay. He wasn’t always the most, let’s say “tactful” with this, in one example a guy was getting a foot amputated for frostbite but he got cold feet. Huh? Huh? Cold feet? Anyway he panics before the operation and locks himself in a bathroom. Liston tells him from the outside “it’s all gonna be fine mate”, and just hears back “noooo I’m not ready” He replies, “I am, you’re gonna be alright, but I got tea time in 3 and a half minutes!” He breaks down the door like he’s f**king jack torrance “EERS ROBBY” yanks him out and straps him down. Successfully performs the operation and the guy goes on to be a renowned boat captain. I don’t know if it was actually frostbite but the pun was too good to pass up. 

Furthermore, on being a great guy, he stood up for hygienic practices that were not yet commonplace at the time, for example washing your hands. He would argue with more senior surgeons about so-called experience, saying it didn’t matter as much how long you’ve been doing surgery, it was rather how many surgeries you had done that accumulated experience, something that I would tend to agree with. If any surgeons are listening let me know at [email protected] what you think, or fact check me or whatever you like. One more really interesting side note on liston is that he was also tangentially involved in catching a pair of serial killers operating in london in 1828, for more information on that take a gander at the Burke and Hare murders. This was a rabbit hole, maybe a hare hole I couldn’t really go down to deep on this episode but the gist of it was that in this era, corpses for surgical practice and medical study were extremely difficult to get ahold of, basically the only way to get one legally  (with a big airquotes around legally because even this was shady) was if the deceased was some guttersnipe or foundling with no familial ties, found dead. Or if you wanted to go the more nefarious route, paying a ghoul or graverobber for a fresh body right out of the cemetery. I’ll definitely cover all this grave robber stuff on a future episode because there’s a whole ghastly arms race of people getting better at stealing bodies and people making all kinds of ridiculous inventions to prevent it after they died, like a giant wrought iron cage around their coffin. 

Medical students and schools would have to pay for these bodies, and to these two guys burke and hare, it was good enough money that after a girl died in their motel and they sold the body they figured they could just cut out the grim reaping middle man and just kill people and sell the bodies for a great rate on account of the freshness. Maybe we’ll go more in depth on them in another episode but thats the basic gist of the case as far as relevant details to Liston.

So one day Liston was dealing with this dude, Robert Knox, who was another surgeon and pretty close to a sort of archetypal “rival” character to liston. He shows up at his office, or operating room or lab or whatever it is  and sees this girl that suspiciously got there within HOURS of her death, for experimentation. God what a f**king ghoulish time right? He paid Burke and Hare 8 pounds for her. Adjusted for inflation, that's like 930~ish british pounds or a little over twelve hundred us dollars. Liston thinks this whole thing is weird, and then Dr knox puts her naked body in this lewd display preserving her in whiskey for a long time, like months, before he’s set to do the autopsy. That seemed extremely disrespectful to the body of this woman, Mary Paterson, even for the time period. Liston sees all this still happening next time he comes by and just beats the everliving f**k out of knox, Liston was 6’2’’ and pretty jacked, I don’t know if I mentioned that yet. After he puts knox on his a** he take’s mary’s body and tells knox to f**k off, and gives her a proper burial. 

Later on the police would finally catch Burke and Hare by interrogating Knox, but not before they killed sixteen people for cash. Liston wasn’t all great all the time, however. He may have been the fastest surgeon around but that didn’t always lend itself to making him the most careful. I want to take a few minutes and go over some of his most famous screw ups. Some of the sources swear the veracity of these claims and some of them say they might be apocryphal, embellished or outright fake. It’s more fun if we take all this at face value because old Robert had himself a few big oopsies under his belt by the end of his career. 

One notable one that he didn’t technically f**k up, it’s just wild is this dude had a scrotal tumor that weighed like fifty pounds. He had to carry his nuts around in a wheelchair. I think I saw a TV show where that happened in modern times and the dude just wore an upside down hoodie as sweatpants. That’s definitely a nikola tesla “you will witness man made horrors beyond your comprehension” moment to have that on TV. Who would do a piece of exploitative media like that on horrific topics? Hmm…

Moving on. As far as I can tell the guy lived, I don’t know if he could spread his scrotum skin to turn into a flying squirrel at the point but I’m afraid to do any more research on that. 

Speaking of nuts there was another case where liston was amputating a leg and got quote “Overzealous” during the operation and in his attempt at breaking the land speed record of a knife went right through and lopped off the guy’s testicles too. In his defense he did manage to take the leg off in under two and a half minutes. I just don’t know if taking the testicles off counts as a bonus time or penalty time. I also can’t find word on whether or not that guy survived or not. Maybe he didn’t want to at that point. It’s not an easy time to be alive overall especially with one leg and no nuts. 

Another hilariously gruesome operation, and this time I’m using the term operation very loosely, was when Liston was brought, a young boy. The boy had a red pulsing mass on his neck and liston got into an argument with another surgeon about what to do. This is where his legendary confidence didn’t do him a whole lot of favors. While arguing about whether or not the growth was a run of the mill skin abscess or a more deadly carotid arterial aneurysm, Liston reportedly paused mid sentence, yelled POOH, Who ever has heard of an aneurysm in one so young as this!!” He then whipped a scalpel out of his pocket and sliced it. Arterial blood started shooting out immediately and the kid died very very soon after that. He was how do we say, “Dead wrong” 

Finally we reach his most famous case, which may be partially, or entirely fake, but again for the sake of EDUTAINMENT value here we’re gonna take it at face value. This is the only reason most people have ever heard of Liston. He was performing a routine, As routine as this slapdash bloody affair could get, amputation of a leg again. Presumably he was trying to beat his speed record. So he’s there, the patient is there tweaking out because he’s about to lose a leg, and he’s got a few assistants helping hold this mf down. Furthermore he has a couple of people watching, either to learn from him or just because I don’t know video games weren’t invented yet and watching people get sawed apart was the next best thing. There’s a reason they’re called operating theaters after all. Right? 

I wanted to narrate this like an old timey horse race or friggin UFC fight or something being like

He’s starting right from the word go, old knifey comes out of the gate swinging and starts sawing with reckless abandon timothy you ever see anything like this in all your broadcasting years? Oh there’s the blood, he’s splitting a bone and oh what’s this what’s this, Collateral! I’ve never seen anything like this! 

That gets old quick, anyway, he hacks through the leg and everything, and I mean everything, part of the table, and more importantly two of his assistants fingers. That’s gotta be a speed record at least for a triple amputation right? No he’s going for a bigger record. So while listons cleaving through multiple limbs like he’s doing a mortal kombat finisher he swings even wider afterward and rips the bonesaw through an onlookers coat. This is an old man and after seeing a leg and two fingies get tossed onto the ground the fear from thinking he’s been stabbed by the blade liston’s working like it’s a f**king black and decker turkey carver the old guy has a heart attack and dies right there on the floor. He didn’t even get so much as a nick, just straight up fear killed him. Scarecrow would be proud.  So he’s gone. Nothing they can do about the old fella, so they go back to look at the patient and the new assistant slash patient. Liston and the other assistants rush these guys to the hospital in to see what they can do but both the assistant and the original patient develop an infection from slicing through each other. And both of them succumb to those infections within days. It wasn’t uncommon what was uncommon was Liston performing the worlds first, and as far as I know only surgery with a three hundred percent mortality rate. That’s crazy I don’t care who you is. You try to fix one person and and end up killing three and still get a statue of yourself put up one hundred years later. Any statue people make of me will inevitably be torn down once the masses discover my vulgar podcast.

Liston’s career wasn’t all blood and gore however. In fact he was partially responsible for ending his own wild west brand of hibachi surgery. He ended up being the first person to do a public surgery with the aid of anesthetic. He even had to roast americans while he did it even though we invented it. He said something to the effect of “let’s see how these yankee shenanigans work lads” and did a surgery on a dude after blasting his nose full of chloroform. Reportedly the guy woke up after the chloroform, WITHOUT A LEG, and asked when the operation was gonna happen and he was scared because he wasn’t ready, boy did he get a rude awakening when they lifted the sheet for him.

That was a big hit, and from then on people have been using anesthetics so you don’t have to do a speedrun every time you do a surgery ever since. That was 1846. He died about a year later from ironically, an aneurysm and is remembered today through content hungry podcasts. That wraps up the story of robert liston, now it’s up to you to decide! Was he a lunatic murderer or a good doctor doing the best he could. I recorded this in advance as well but this is the last one. After this release things are hopefully week to week or at least every two weeks. I’ll have had a website built by now at nightmarenow.com. That’s where you’ll find the shownotes, pictures, blog posts, all the links to the sosh meeds and anything else you might want to find about the show. Again, I’m so glad you took the time to take a listen to my little project here and I can’t wait to grow this show and community together! Have a great week everyone!

Images

Wiki Links:

Cadaver synod

Pope Formosus

The Referenced article:

The Cadaver Synod: Strangest Trial in History
 

Loose transcript:

Hi everyone!  Welcome back to episode 2 of Nightmare now! The show where we make up the taglines as we go! We discuss all the horrible happenings of humanity and all the extreme eerieness of everything else.  I’m your host erik byrne but before we really get into the rotting guts of this episode I want to get a few clerical things out of the way real quick here:

First thanks for tuning in whether it’s your first or second episode welcome.

Episode 2 is a huge milestone, because according to some bulls*** statistic I read somewhere, 12% percent of all podcasts don’t even make it this far. So thanks for everyone’s support! All ten listeners of the first episode, you tha real ones. 

I want to be transparent up front here with my plans for the immediate future and long distance future for the show. Doing a big fully researched episode like the tiger one last week is a lot of work, but at the same time it’s my first go around here. I’ll get better, I promise. What that means, at least for now is, I can’t read multiple sources, write an outline and jokes, record, edit, promote, upload and do all that alone every single week. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to bring you all the spook every week but I’m thinking maybe a shorter episode every two weeks or something to keep it coming. I want to keep the quality high so these ones won’t necessarily need books and books of research to cover the full story in a satisfactory way. This episode is gonna be a little bit like that. We’ll see just how long it ends up being but honestly I couldn’t even find a book on this topic anyway, but it’s wild and right up our alley so without further ado I present to you all, the synod horrenda, known in english as the cadaver synod.

It was  january of  897 in Rome, and the vatican was winding up for what would prove to be maybe the second most embarrassing moment for the papacy, after you know, the rampant sex abuse but that’s for another show. The current pope stephen the sixth, or possibly the seventh?? Most of the sources I looked at didn’t seem to agree on this detail, like at all, look it up every other article or thing about it switches between them but for our purposes we’ll call him the sixth. Everyone in this story is dead so the only people I’ll offend with that are medieval scholars anyway, so sorry to you guys. 

So stephen the 6th was putting together a synod. We’re just gonna gloss over the fact that the whole time i was doing research for this I thought it was SAI NOD but apparently it’s sinnod. For those of you that don’t know what that is like I didn’t it’s basically a religious assembly, particularly in this context like a court trial. Stephen was effectively the prosecutor, the judge and the jury of this trial himself, which is a little corrupt but not too crazy in the annals of history. What sets it apart is the defendant. The previous pope, pope formosus. Are you seeing the problem here? As far as i know The new pope is not announced or elected or whatever, until the previous one has died. Pope formosus had died on april 4th 869. His corpse had been rotting in st peter's basilica for seven months. 

That really didn’t matter to stephen, who was presumably a little bit insane, so he ordered that the corpse of formosus be exhumed from its tomb dressed in his sunday best vestments and brought into the papal court to stand, well you know, sit trial. The rotting worm infested corpse was propped up onto a throne to just take all the verbal abuse thrown at it. There’s a painting of this that’s f***g incredible. Maybe I’ll make it the episode art or something, I’ll at least link it in the show notes. But it looks like ace attorney meets dawn of the dead meets a literal god damned iron maiden album art. It f***ing rules I want it on a T shirt. And this actually happened! 

Formosus is sitting there with no eyes and stretched, decayed, greying skin all propped up with the hat and everything while stephen is just giving him the phoenix wright OBJECTION point. 

So naturally formosus isn’t really very good at defending himself from the charges levied against him, being dead and mute. But he wasn’t completely helpless, they threw the skelepope a bone by having a young unnamed deacon sit behind the throne and answer as him in his defense, but this kid was obviously told to not do too well, the case was supposed to be a slam dunk after all. This is one of my favorite parts of the story even though it’s not super well documented. Unfortunately most of the documents regarding the cadaver synod were destroyed later on when people realized how fucking batshit insane it was and they were like maybe we leave this bit out of the lore for a while. But back to the young deacon, imagine you’re sitting behind this LITERALLY ROTTING IN FRONT OF A GIANT AUDIENCE CORPSE, and it’s getting  grilled about stuff like where were you on the night of march 27th and you just have to do your best jeff dunham and be like “I was dead your honor” 

Well how about the july the 13th?

Still dead. 

Amazing. But the real charges against formosus fall into a political sort of category, at least most historians seem to think so. So before we close out the trial of formosus, I know you’re on the edge of your seat wondering whether or not stephen is going to find him guilty. I’ll give you two guesses. But I think it’s important to give a little context to this whole affair. 

First off, basically everyone but stephen rightly thought this was totally gross and insane. This kind of thing was not common at the time, it was completely wild back then too. And not just the immediate surroundings of this macabre trial were crazy. This was a tumultuous time for the the papacy in general, so much so that it got a reputation as the quote “iron age of the papacy.”

Most of this hinged on the fact that more or less the pope was the only one that could crown a new holy roman emperor, and because of this and the power that it brought, the papacy didn’t always attract the most uh, scrupulous people to be involved with it. So basically all these families and factions vying to become emperor would try to make one of their supporters a pope, or have other high ranking members of the church killed or exiled to further their own ambitions. There’s a fabulous article about this by this guy, donald wilkes junior that really helped putting this episode together that goes into a lot of detail about this so called iron age. It’s all very game of thrones. I’ll link to that in the notes. So in the 8 years from eight ninety six to nine oh four there was nine popes compared to there being nine popes from 1900 to 2 thousand. With all this intrigue and murder the papal turnover was pretty damn high. Some were poisoned, some clubbed to death, others thrown in jail to rot, and others died in giant air quotes mysterious circumstances. Read that as probably also murdered. 

So it’s in the middle of this crazy violent century of the catholic church in rome that this ridiculous trial takes place. Historians suggest that the specific motivations for the synod most likely were due to a sort of rivalry between formosus and steven, where both people were sort of members of opposing factions vying for the emperorship. Is that the right word? Empire? Whatever. So stephen was in with the previous emperor guy the third of spoleto and formosus encouraged this other dude arnulf of corinthia to invade and usurp this other guy… guy. The third. So he does and formosus makes arnulf emperor. This made a number of people very upset for reasons that are honestly beyond the scope of my research today. Maybe we’ll go back and do a deep dive on the iron age here some other time.

So when formosus dies in april, holy crap I forgot about this part, steven wasn’t actually the next pope. It was this guy boniface, bony face? Bonifachy?   the sixth. He got in right after formosus died but he died 13 days later from the gout. So that happened. In and out, like I said, high turnover rates on the popes.

After that stephen takes over and he’s part of the opposing faction to formosus. And all that craziness sets the stage for the cadaver synod.

So we go back to the synod, we’ve got a rotting corpse on a throne, we’ve got stephen hurling insults and doing a whole inquisition on this body and we’ve got some teeenager hiding behind said throne and answering yes or no or denying any of these quote unquote charges as best as he can, which would make a f***g awesome alternate universe saturday night live sketch where they did all history. 

One thing we didn’t touch on yet though was the fact that this wasn’t a 2021 covid zoom trial. There was plenty of other people kicking around. There was a whole audience slash jury of people watching this shitshow take place and I can’t help but thinking about them like this: Imagine your boss shows up and wants to do some kind of stupid leadership, synergy, team building insert your own buzzword here exercise and you’re just like f***k it, its better than working right?

I imagine the whole thing was catered and stuff and what are you gonna do? Tell the pope he’s being a ridiculous a-hole? I feel like that’s a shortcut to being hanged for heresy. This is the perfect example of how I'm doing the “Night bite”  episodes differently. I don’t need to look that up. You’re not here for a citation for your medieval history PHD. Do they get hanged? Hung? Some other form of execution? Who knows? Who cares? This is nightmare now after dark, cite the main episodes, we’re playing it fast and loose here. Just like pope stephen was. So while he's grilling the body of formosus, not literally it didn’t get that crazy, they were catholics not cannibals. That’s for another episode. While he’s aggressively interrogating the body and the deacon is doing his best to defend this corpse from behind the throne, stephen shouts out the charges, violating the church canon by becoming pope in the first place, coveting the papacy and perjury. It’s unclear whether the perjury was in the trial after he was dead or in some other capacity but it’s even funnier to imagine it in that trial. Just stephen shouting down the deacon while he’s trying to do the shaggy, wasn’t me” bit from behind this body. And getting called out for lying under oath. 

Unfortunately any transcripts of the cadaver synod were destroyed so we don’t really know how long the trial lasted or what exactly was said but what we do know is mostly from testimony of people that were there and what they wrote elsewhere and from this long form twenty thousand line poem called the ring and the book. As for the length  You have to imagine it was at least a long afternoon ordeal. However long it took, the verdict was reached with very little deliberation. Guilty. Of all charges. Shocking right? And he put up such a good defense! One interesting part of the defense actually, might have been God himself appearing as a witness. Reportedly there was a minor earthquake in the middle of the trial as if to be like yo, cut this shit out or take it out of my house. I couldn’t find more than one source to corroborate that though so it might be bullshit. Who knows? Either way it didn’t help formosusus case at all; he was still found guilty.

On to the sentencing: if you thought the trial was grisly, get a load of this: becaues formosus was found guilty, and they couldn’t exactly give him the death penalty, they instead decided to strip him of all aspects of his papacy starting with his clothes and then the three fingers on his right hand, the ones that a pope uses to bestow blessings onto people. Next they invalidated every proclamation and act that he ever did as pope. Another funny bit of this was that one of formusus actions as pope was actually what made Stephen a bishop initially. By invalidating that does he invalidate his own papacy? Apparently not, and he just kinda glosses over that detail, much like I’m going to. At least I pointed it out right? And finally they dressed him up as a commoner and buried him in a grave for foreigners and heathens. But his troubles didn’t end there. Maybe they already had, you know, he was dead after all, so that brings up all sorts of afterlife questions that are beyond the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish here. But the corpse’s troubles didn’t end there. Almost immediately after he’s buried in this heathen cemetery, Stephen is like, screw that, he aint getting off that easy. So formusus is exhumed again, take a shot every time this guy gets dug up or buried and you’ll have a good buzz going by the end of the episode. So they exhume him from the foreigner cemetery and toss his body into the tiber river.

The tiber river was basically where they threw anyone and anything they wanted to get rid of permanently 

Shortly after that a monk pulled the body out of the river and presumably preserved it somehow. After this the corpse reportedly performed miracles. What’s interesting about that is not a single one of the sources I had could describe what those miracles were, they all just said exactly that “Reportedly performed miracles” unquote. We’re left to speculate, so how I interpret that is he gets pulled out of the river and just does the WB frog Hello muh baby hello my honey hello my ragtime gal, jig dance and then collapses into a waterlogged pile of bones barely hanging together. 

Flash back over to stephen, while formosus is off performing miracles on the banks of the tiber, stephen is facing down an angry mob at the vatican. Turns out a massive macabre show trial of a popular pope’s dead body wasn’t well received by the masses. A few months after the trial there was a revolt and Stephen was removed from his post, forced to wear the clothes of a peasant and then thrown in prison. As if that wasn’t bad enough, after spending a few months in prison, he was strangled to death by a cellmate. Again high turnover, iron age yada yada yada. Being pope aint easy like it is today. 

Here we are then. Formosus is long dead, Stephen is short dead. You’d think that’s where the story ends right? Wrong. One of the popes after Stephen the sixth was this dude Theodore the second and he was a formosus fan. He said the whole affair was, I’m paraphrasing here, an irredeemable f**show. OL theo 2 called his own synod that nullified the whole thing and reinstated formosus. The problem with that is that they had to get his body back from the monks and dress him up, bring it back to rebury it at saint peter's basilica… Again. Drink if you’re following along. The next pope John the ninth also agreed that the trial was a sham and doubly nullified it. Additionally they made it illegal to hold  trial against a corpse. A rule you would think would be unnecessary, but hey they’re their for a reason, just like making tying an alligator to a street sign is illegal in indiana someone has to f***k it up before they make it a rule. 

again you might think that the story ends there, and again you’d be wrong. After those two popes came this dude sergius the third. This guy was a real bastard. And he was not a formosus fan. He was actually at the proceedings of the cadaver synod and was one of the few people that was just like “hell yeah screw formosus, this rules.” So when he became pope he decreed that the synod was in fact legit and even went so far as to add an extra plaque on stephen’s tomb that said he was a rad dude and ahead of his time with the cadaver synod, and that formosus was a piece of s**t. History did not remember Sergius the third favorably. He was the only pope to order the murder of another pope and also he fathered an illegitimate son as pope. I’d like to reiterate here that I’m by no means an expert on catholic law or theology, but I’m pretty sure the pope isn’t supposed to be knocking chicks up. After sergius the third, people generally agree that the whole cadaver synod was an insane, illegal, ridiculous blemish on history and formosus basically did nothing wrong. 

And that, folks, is where this story ends. Formosus stands vindicated after being used as a macabre prop in one of the most ridiculous events of the time period. Stephen and Sergius lie in disgrace and the catholic church has other matters to attend to. 

I’m erik byrne, signing off for this week's nightmare now episode, I’ll see you next week! In the meantime check out my website, That at the time of recording isn’t set up haha, but at least i've got instagram at nightmare dot now. Twitter is coming soon and Hopefully I’ll have a way to link all of that by the time I get this uploaded. Thanks everyone for listening and if you’ve got it in your heart throw ya boi a like, subscribe and a review on apple podcasts or whatever. In the first few weeks of a show releasing is where all that makes a huge difference so every single one counts big time. Thanks again for listening, it means so much to me that you think my show is worth your time. Any questions or comments shoot me a line at 

[email protected]

.  Catch you next week! 

No Beast So Fierce

Maneaters of Kumaon

Images

World Wildlife fund

some cool tiger sense facts:

6x better night vision than us,0.2 to 65 kHz that can hear breathing, heartbeats or swallowing, Special whiskers to sense all kinds of stuff, Padded feet make them nearly silent while they walk. They’re like predator. Invisible silent and they’ll rip out your spine in one go.

Wiki links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumaon_division

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champawat

Champawat Tiger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupal,_Nepal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack

News:

https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-zoo-attack-sf-tiger-christmas-day/9072741/

Youtube links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0kzdu_wTM0&ab_channel=WildFilmsIndia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jac_K-XB5A&ab_channel=Unbelievablefacts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f9CsToZpeY&ab_channel=Animalogic

Music 

Special thanks for the intro and outro music

Freesound.org users

Claiber7901

videog

Loose Transcript: (full of typos, but that's okay!)

Welcome everyone to Nightmare Now the show where we’ll learn about all the horrors of our universe and psyche and hopefully have ourselves a laugh along the way. I’m your host Erik Byrne and on this episode we’re gonna take an in depth look at the true story of a killer. A serial killer operating on the fringes of society at the turn of the twentieth century. A killer that dismembered and ate her victims. A killer with a kill count not ten, not twenty, not dozens but hundreds of victims. A killer that was a Bengal tiger. The champawat tiger single handedly killed four hundred and thirty six people in northern India and Nepal in the early 1900s. 

My main source for this episode was the book No Beast So Fierce by Dane Hucklebridge. It’s a good read and if you like the story you’re about to hear check out the book in the show notes for a more in depth look. 

We’re gonna start out here with a stat sheet. I want you to see what a tiger is made of. If you have a house cat handy take a look at him right now imagine that but 60 times larger! This is the worlds largest living feline, and second in history overall only to the Smilodon or sabre tooth tiger. They can range from four, five hundred pounds all the way up to seven hundred pounds and extraordinary specimens tipping the scales at over eight hundred pounds. They range anywhere from ten to even thirteen feet long with their tails included. That is a very big kitty. 

Lets talk equipment. First of all musculature. On our housecat George you can see his clearly defined muscles and he’s only 11 pounds or so so when we ramp that up to six to seven hundred pound cat we’re talking serious strength. Even without claws a single swipe of a tigers massive paw could knock your head clean f***ing off your body and easily break bones. They have a jaw that can bite down with over a thousand psi which can crack through a water buffalo’s head. And wielded with that force are a set of 3 to 4 inch fangs. Big enough to slam into a brain or rip out a spine. On their front paws they have ten claws that are also about four inches long. 

That musculature isn’t just there to knock heads off, it’s built for speed and finesse too. Capable of short bursts of forty miles per hour speed and the demonstrated ability to leap thirty feet through the air to pounce. They are fantastic swimmers and comfortable on land and in the water. 

They are very smart hunters and adaptable when it comes to their prey. They’ll cripple larger prey by the legs and drive others towards the water where they are far easier to take down. They’re solitary animals generally but the cubs stay with the mother for about 2 years learning all these and other ways to kill. There have even been some recorded incidents of tigers mimicking the sounds of other animals to lure them out. Like predator. The predator comparison becomes more apt when we take into account its spine ripping behavior and spectacular stealth ability. When it wants to be seen and heard though, you’ll know. A tiger can roar at a hundred fourteen decibels which is like being next to 25 lawnmowers going at once. 

They’ll eat pretty much anything they want. A tigers diet includes but is presumably not limited to

fish, turtles, badger, rabbit, mice, bears, wolves, sandar deer, water buffalo, crocs, pythons, seals, even elephants, rhinos, leopards and of course, the reason we’re talking about them today. Humans. We’ll get into how the eat a little bit later but suffice to say for now that it isn’t pretty.

Tigers are basically perfect killers, like sharks in the water they’re predatory evolution perfected. But even still they don’t usually go after humans. They like bigger meatier game but when certain factors coalesce you have an unmistakable recipe for a man eater. We talked about the tigers' equipment earlier. teeth and claws, jaws and paws. These are all integral parts of it’s hunting kit. When there’s an injury the tiger has to adapt, maybe it can’t crush a buffalo’s neck so easily anymore. Maybe it can't keep up with a fleet footed deer quite as well anymore. 

A national park in india did a fantastic study of tiger attacks on humans in their area from nineteen seventy nine to two thousand six. Some of the conclusions were that sixty six percent of the tiger victims were kind of stooped down with their backs turned. They never see it coming, but perhaps more importantly, I scrooched down human in tall grass looks a heck of a lot more like normal prey than one walking around and making all kinds of noise. 

Even more incriminating was that most of the tigers that were actually able to be examined displayed injuries to their teeth or paws and in the cases of tigers that actually scooped people right out of their villages. Every single one was impaired like this.  And of all the attacks over all, 90% of them occurred in areas where prey density has fallen and the habitats were degraded. 

Looking at all this a clear pattern emerges. It’s hard to foist a term like motive onto an animal versus a human but lets make the case. These man eaters at the time of their first kill are acting out of desperation. They’re hungry, their habitat is being encroached on, and they’re unable to get their normal prey. They take a shot at a clumsy primate that’s on their turf, and even to an injured tiger, humans are no match. That’s when it clicks. We’re made of meat. We’re readily available. We’re weak and we’re slow. When a tiger realizes all this after grabbing a farmer by the throat and dragging him into the jungle screaming without so much as a struggle, a very very dangerous animal is born. And of those dangerous animals, there was none so dangerous as the champawat tiger. 

She was born sometime in 1899 or 1900 in Nepal. We can imagine that she had a relatively normal childhood? Cubhood? What do you call it? I guess it’s not important. But at some point she was injured by a hunter or a poacher’s bullet. That shot was the catalyst for the better part of five hundred deaths. 

When a tiger attacks a human usually they don’t have a chance. You’re just scrooching down to cut some grass or take a piss or something than in less than a second you hear that tremendous roar and you have 40 cumulative inches of claws entering your back before those vicegrip jaws clamp down on your neck and it’s over. And that’s before even taking into account the sheer force that six hundred pounds of muscle moving at highway speed will do just on impact alone. If by the grace of god someone can survive the split second impact like getting hit by some f***ed up mad max knife car intelligent enough to hit from behind and go for the throat, all the tiger has to do is shake it’s big head and tear those claws through you and you’re f***.

If you don’t believe me just do a quick google images of tiger attack autopsy. The hole that one fang can put in a human neck is nightmare fuel. In the book Hucklebridge sources a number of different well documented tiger attacks in all sorts of scenarios. There’s tigers that swim out and rip people out of a boat, tear people from trees, literally burst through walls of peoples huts to drag them away screaming like a god damn pitcher of orange flavored, bloodthirsty cool aid man. And a particularly brutal one where two young children watch their father get pounced and dragged away into the jungle, recounting the story having grown up fatherless. 

Speaking of growing up fatherless I think it’s time we looked at the other side of the arena, The hero, so to speak of this story: Edward James Corbett. This dude was a legend. We’ll get to know him a little better over the course of the show but let’s start with the basics He went by Jim Corbett, which is how I’ll mostly be referring to him for the rest of the show. Jim was born the eighth child of sixteen of Christopher William and Mary jane Corbett in Nainital, in northern India, July of 1975. If I’m messing up the pronunciation of any of these places in India and Nepal bear with me. His parents had come over from Britain years before and lived in India for some time. The book goes into a lot of great detail about his family history and the larger scope of British presence in India during that time, but that’s kind of beyond the scope of this show for now, so if you’re interested check out the book. 

The short version is that britain was going all over the world to kind of make everywhere like britain. Obviously this model doesn’t work for ever and is usually met with some resistance. Violent or otherwise. So the british indian relationships are often tenuous. With all that being said. Growing up as a white kid in the jungle you’re gonna take the hand your dealt. Corbett did just that, going to school in the colony and town they were at and at the same time going out and befriending the locals to learn more about the amazing natural world around him. In this unique upbringing he became kind of a missing link between the two cultures where he could rub elbows and play cricket with the rich brits and the next day go out for a hunt with a village elder in the jungle. 

At six years old his father died of a heart attack so growing up with those connections to local men became even more important to forming the man he would become. His mentor gave him his first weapon and taught him everything he knew about tigers and other wildlife of the jungle. At the time he first heard of the champawat tiger, he was working at a train station likely sometime in 1903. A british friend of his told him of rumors of a single tiger snatching people away in nearby nepal. I’ll throw a map in the show notes that gives a pretty good estimation about jim and the tigers movements over those few years. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of great records about the tigress herself in her early days in nepal. Most of the historical records point towards the cat killing two hundred people before being driven out of the country. Bounty hunters were called in, part of the nepalese army, absolutely eveything they had available they threw at her and she evaded or killed and ate all of it. The sources we do have about the tiger leaving nepal are mostly conjecture. But historically tiger hunts were accomplished by a huge amount of noise, guns, elephants and screams driving the tiger into a suitable killzone. The champawat tigress managed to escape all that and finally arrived in india. 

Now is as good a time as any to talk about the math at work here. An adult tiger needs one hundred twenty five to a hundred thirty five pounds of meat per week to survive. By all accounts the champawat tiger was killing a person a week for eight or nine years. A person in india and nepal is gonna about fit that quota. We can figure one person a week for a year is fifty two people a year, multiplying that by eight years and we get four hundred and sixteen, and by nine years we get four hundred and sixty eight. The math works out well enough with the corroborating sources that the kill count was somewhere close to two hundred in nepal and continued at that pace for for another four, four and half years in the kumaon area of india just west of it’s previous territory in nepal.

In 1907 Corbett is contacted by another hunter about a tiger that needs to be put down. of  course, it’s the champawat. He’s surprised that it’s still going after he puts together that shwe was the one he heard about back in 1903. When he hears that everything locals or british have thrown at this tiger had failed he agrees to take the job. But with a couple of fun caveats. This bit is straight out of a movie. I’m paraphrasing but he says, I’ll take the job but first you need to recall every other hunter or soldier already contracted to go after her, and get rid of the bounty on her head. I’m not doing this for the money, I’m not doing this for the skin, I’m not doing it to be a poacher I’m doing it because it’s my duty for the colony. 

At the time you were a tiger for two main reasons. You were either a british pansy looking for yucks or an indian poacher looking for bucks. So their was the desire for getting a fur pelt from them and what really kicked everything into high gear was bounty hunting. During the british expansion in india tigers were seen as a pretty big problem. Both symbolically as the tiger represented the untamed natural india compared to a civilised british colony and also literally due of course to 700 pound cats eating people and livestock. When turning in a single tiger you could get the equivalent of months and months of pay as a lower class indian it’s no wonder why tiger hunting skyrocketed.  Over eighty thousand tigers were killed in 50 years. With both the locals and europeans taking shots at tigers wherever they could, you ended up with a lot of very angry very dangerous wounded cats. 

So another thing that’s important to consider here is the gun culture in india at the time, I’m not sure that’s the right word but lets roll with it. I don’t really have time to dig to deep in to the colonial politics of the time, I’m not an expert so if you’re interested pick up the book. The short version is that the british show up in india, try to domesticate it and make it more like a proper english colony. The problem with this is people usually don’t take kindly to subjugation, revolutions ensue and are subsequently put down, a big one in 1857. After this the brits basically go on a gun grabbing rampage and so functionally nobody has weapons and those that do are generally rusty pieces of s***. Anything beyond the rusty piece of s*** tier is prohibitvely expensive and also illegal.

Corbett has just begun thinking about how he’s gonna bag the tigress when a man breathlessly runs into the village saying that the tiger has killed another person in pali, 60 kilometers away.  He gathers up the six or seven kumaonis  that he’s recruited, packs up his gun and supplies and starts the trek towards pali. The hunt had begun.

The group takes off towards pali. And they are hooffing it big time. they carry their gear because keep in mind cars are a long way off at this point. The model T doesn’t come out until the next year and rural india wasn’t exactly first on the list to get them. So they’re hiking at 30 kilometers a day to make it to pali in two days. For us americans that about thirty seven thirty eight miles total and about nineteen miles per day.

When they finally arrive they’re surprised to find it a ghost town. There is nobody in the square or on the street and they call out basically just to scream if anyone is there. And then the smell kicks in. the whole village smells like p*** and s***. A few of the villagers cautiously emerge from their homes. The whole village has been locked down and everyone has been inside for days. People are literally staying inside their houses s*** their pants with fear. They’re too afraid to even go out to dump the human waste or gather more food. So on top of those unsanitary conditions they’re also beginning to starve. A few villagers explain that the demon tiger is here and it has been for a few days. At night they cower from it’s roars in the jungle. All this makes everything all to real to corbett. If he didn’t know it wasn’t an ordinary tiger before he sure did now. 

He asks to see the kill site but nobody in town is willing to go anywhere near that accursed place. Corbett needs to see the tracks and other markings from the tiger to get a better picture of the size of her. Again we’re hit with the distrust of whites in india. Even when corbett can speak the language and grew up there nobody is willing to risk going out to the kill site. Corbett takes the message and decides he needs to earn their trust. The first night he goes out alone and sits next to a tree, trying to keep watch all night. Corbett writes down in his own book just how terrified he was sitting out there alone. He says he saw dozens of tigers behind the trees, tricks of the light. His teeth chatter from the terror and the cold and eventually he falls asleep hunkered down under this tree. To him it’s a miracle he survives the night. The tiger  was still without a doubt nearby, possibly even watching him that night. To me it’s a miracle he survived the night too, especially considering the nighttime capabilities of a Bengal tiger. Their eyes have night vision six times more sensitive than our own, and their radar like ears can pick up the faintest sounds like a breath or even a heartbeat. Couple those with their bigass padded paws that make them nearly silent as they walk, he wouldn’t have stood a chance if she was hungry. 

While the village were impressed with his bravery or stupidity they still refused to take him to the kill site.  He takes off into the bush with a few of his crew for a little while until he finds a few goorahl deer sitting up on a ridge. That's good eatin. He readies his rifle and fires, bam the deer falls down the hill, but the shot scared out two more . BAM BAM he hits both of those at two hundred yards like he’s putting together a call of duty montage. All three animals fall and he brings them back to the village. Finally, when given food a villager agrees to take him to the site, and explains what happened. They were all out in the field and the girl climbed up into the tree and got ripped out of it with such force that the skin from her hands still clung to the bark. They followed the trail of dried blood and eventually made it to a clearing. This place looked worse than carries prom night, there was blood everywhere but no tiger, and even more disturbing, No body, at least not intact. Just a few scraps of flesh and bones that would have fit in a restaurant to go box. F***. Looking over the pawprints corbett judges the tiger to be female, around 12 years old. This tracks well with everything we already know about her time in nepal and across kumaon. 

We get into the feeding habit of the tigers here: So these tigers can basically scoop anything by the neck and just take off. That’s how it can snatch people so damn easily. They can drag 500 lb water buffalo around so they can pick up an indian woman like they’re playing fetch. The average indian woman today is 5 feet tall and weighs 120 pounds. 

 tigers scoop their prey and find a nice secluded location to basically gorge themselves for a few days. Once it’s in a suitable locale they’ll just start chomping and ripping away at the meat starting with the butt. They’ll eat for an hour or so, then just lounge till they’re hungry again. Is this the right script? Is that my saturday plans or a tiger? They will repeat this cycle until everything edible is consumed. The place is basically gonna look like the set of the thing, just a few shards of bone left and a lotta blood. They have sandpaper-like tounges to strip away flesh, several types of teeth to help tear apart meat and consume everything. A starving tiger can eat a cow in 4 days so estimating the time to eat a person is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 days. When they are done they just leave behind this crime scene and go somewhere else to hunt for the next meal. When they take off like this they can become difficult to track over such a huge territory

Tigers in their territory move on a constant patrol while they hunt. After the whole process I just described takes place and the tiger moves to a new location it repeats. Realizing this the village people werent able to track it perse but were able to sort of tell when it was in the area. Mostly because one of them would get carried off screaming. When this occurred, the whole village would lock down until the tiger moved to a new locale.

This certainly contributed to the tigresses colossal kill count was that there's a hugely delayed response  when the tiger attacks someone. Nobody really has guns due to some uprisings against british takeover of indian most notably the one in 1857  So they have to send some dude over on foot to a place with british govt, and getting the wheels of government moving in order to even to dispute a goddamn parking ticket is nearly impossible so setting up a bounty and hiring a hunter contractor to go after it will take like a week. By the time the hunter gets over there there’s nothing left but splotches of blood and little bits of bone and the tiger is 30 miles away to do it again. If you thought herding cats was hard imagine trying to do it with  govt assistance and the cats are 700 pound killing machines. 

Back to our story: When they bring home what’s left of this girl, they ask around to see where the tiger is now or where it might be headed. Nobody really knows but the consensus is it’s going back to champawat village. The tiger operates in a huge swath of land all around kumaon, kumaon itself is about the size of wyoming and the champawat tiger was responsible for 95% of the tiger fatalities in the region during that time.  but the nexus of the deaths and sightings is right in champawat.

They pack up and get ready to hike up to champawat. 

Jim Corbett arrives in champawat on may 9th 1907 with his kumaoni buddies plus one or two extra guys from pali brave enough to try to end the reign of terror. 

In corbetts memoir he makes an interesting note about the tashlidar, who from what I can understand is some sort of village elder/ caretaker like figure. This isn’t a local indian politics podcast. Sue me. He makes a note about how the guy was gonna spend the night at his bungalow and just says screw it and walks home last minute. I’ve done my fair share of long walks home at night but this is in a time and place where any average dude is afraid to walk the streets without a group of at least four people just in case one of them gets attacked and carried off. This dude just peaces out and walks 4 miles home alone in the dark. 

He spends the night basically having nightmares of getting ripped apart by a tiger and barely sleeps a wink. After all the research I did on tigers I cant say I blame him. But he’s actually going after the most notorious one in history. I’m sitting in a closet just making jokes about it. 

When corbett wakes up he’s chatting with his squad of  six or seven  guys trying to assess where  the tiger might strike next and what their move should be, he’s doing the 1907 version of where we dropping boys?” and as if on cue this dude runs down the road screaming that the tiger has grabbed another girl. Victim 436. 

When he gets to the site of the attack he does a quick interview about how it went down and he's surprised to find that the tiger snatched this girl up in broad daylight, in a field, surrounded by a dozen other people. It was very good at what it did. 

A little bit more about tiger stealth, A tiger is able to conceal itself in knee high grass, approach almost without sound and jump out with ludicrous speed. They are well camouflaged, you might think orange isn’t a great camo color, but look at hunters. They wear bright orange tree camo. Prey animals dont see it. And animals that do, like us would even have trouble picking out the orange from light filtering through the trees. 

Corbett tells the villagers to stay inside and wait for him to get back. starts tracking after the tiger from the site of the attack and finds a swath of destruction in its wake. There’s hair, clothing and blood leading into the treeline. Partway along the course of this blood trail he hears fast footsteps behind him and goes and whirls around thinking he’s about to be desert and almost shoots a villagers head off. We have a unique scenario here where we can kind of hear corbetts internal monologue in a way because he recorded his thoughts on the hunt in his books. I’ve got some juicy bits from maneaters of kumaon in just a minute.

Luckily he doesn’t unload his weapon on this poor bastard and the guy explains hes here to help because he is one of the only guys in town that actually has a gun. Imagine you’re on the trail of this legendary tiger and something comes crashing through the bush behind you without warning. I would have gunned him down accidentally and been thrown in indian prison.  The problem is this dude is an oaf. He’s loud and doesn’t know much about hunting so he’s more of a liability. He makes the guy climb to the top of a tree and just sit there until he gets back. He can’t send him back because then the guy would have to go back alone. That’s just a little part of the story that’s so f***ing funny to me

After leaving the guy up on top of the tree he finds the tigers feeding zone and hoo boy it’s a doozy. From his own words:

“Splinters of bone were scattered round the deep pugmarks into which discolored water was slowly seeping , and at the edge of the pool was an object which had puzzled me as i came down the watercourse, and which I now found was part of a human leg. In all the subsequent years I have hunted maneaters I have not seen anything as pitiful as that young comely leg -- bitten off a little below the knee as clean as though severed by the stroke of an axe. Out of which warm blood was trickling.”

Jesus. For the record pugmarks are the tiger tracks. While he kneels down to inspect the carnage he hears a growl  in a split second whips around and fires off both barrels of his weapon. This is it. The tiger is f***ing here. In his haste he misses both shots but the gunblast sound alone is enough to give the tiger momentary pause. It dashes off the collision course, drops the body of the girl and lets out a colossal roar. 

The tiger roars and just takes off with the body in her teeth. And jim just follows right after it even though he’s only got one bullet left. But a person isn’t gonna keep pace with a tiger under pretty much any circumstance and after a few hours the trail goes cold. And night begins to fall. If you’re taking your chances with a single bullet with a murder tiger from hell you’re brave, if you’re doing it at night you’re stupid.

He goes back to grab the villager off his tree that he’s STILL SITTING on. While the stooge comes down off the tree he looks out at the valley. Jim knows that almost being the tigers next meal and hopelessly trying to keep up with it through the undergrowth is not a winning strategy and would end either with him being ripped apart by the tiger or losing it in the night as it goes off to its next victim which could be dozens of miles away. It has to be here. And it has to be tomorrow. 

In the movie of this I direct once that fat podcast money comes, this where I put the heist scene where they show everyone laying down the blueprints and also cut to each part of it as it’s being planned. I can't remember if that's an oceans 11 thing or usual suspects or what, I guess it’s not important.  I’ll fix the movie trivia when we do our bank robberies episode. But this is where corbett gets his crew together. All he has to do is convince a bunch of people that are already so f***ing scared they won’t even leave their house to take a s*** when the tiger is around, to join him in a hunt, the likes of which they have never done before. Not to mention the fact that they are in an area that has had its fair share of horrors come directly from britain to help out jim corbett the whitey. Easy right?

He asks his guide in the town to help rally the troops so to speak, and heads to bed. The next morning he sets up hoping to get a few hundred people to help bring down the beast. This is beowulfs assault on grendels lair, this is going after smaug, this is ahabs white whale, this is f***ing legendary.

 Annd nobody show up then at ten am his buddy from the village shows up with the oaf from the other day. It’s a nice gesture but it’s not enough to slay the beast by any stretch. Twenty minutes pass and two or three more show up, then a few more,  five here three more there. And by noon almost 300 people show up. Many of them with illegal guns, the elders in the village hinted that nobody would care about the guns JUST THIS ONCE.

So they’ve put together this literal ragtag army of farmers and craftsman wielding old guns, sticks, makeshift spears, wood axes, basically anything they can pick up. Corbett meets one lunatic with a hammer that had two sons and his wife eaten by this thing. This was a les mis style moment where the people rise to fight against natures tyranny. 

I want to take a quick second to reiterate that this is a 100% true story. It’s unbelievable.

 The tiger is somewher down in a nearby gorge feeding on that poor four hundred and thirty sixth victim. There’s only one way out of the gorge short of climbing the ridges on 3 sides. The team lines up equidistantly all along the top of the ridge. And corbett and his buddy from town hide alone at the mouth of the gorge with his gun ready. All was set up for corbett to give his signal for everyone around the ridge to just start making a f***load of noise from all 3 sides, throw rocks and cause disturbances to flush her out into where corbett was waiting. 

There was one problem. You guys remember that scen in lord of the rings where the one eyed dude accidentally shoots an orc too early and f***s up the whole seige? That happens, the people on the ridge get antsy and someone blasts off a gun prematurely and everyone else follows suit. The problem is corbett and his buddy aren’t in place. 

He has to run 500 feet to get to his planned position and the tiger comes careening out of the forest like a f***ing bat outta hell. There’s no time and theres just a split second of realization likely from the tiger and corbett both that only one of them is getting out of this alive. But he hesitates!

His buddy doesn’t and takes a shot with his piece of s*** shotgun and misses wide. The panic messes up corbetts shot as well.  It’s just enough to throw the tiger off though and she runs BACK into the gorge. They messed up their one chance. 

… 

The people up on the ridge however, well out of sight of any of this behind the trees here the gunshot and they all assume corbett shot the tiger. THey shoot off their guns into the air and start cheering. THis second wave of sound is enough to give the operation a second chance. The tigress runs back out from the gorge where corbett is waiting. Corbett sees the tiger fly out of the gorge and raises his rifle and fires off a shot that actually hits her back flank. She twist in a rage and agony and turns to face him and charge. He fires again and hits her in the shoulder. 

I assume after that he s*** his pants. 

Jim corbett carries a double barrel rifle. He’s got no bullets left. He’s got a VERY F****** ANGRY maneating tiger and she isn’t down for the count yet. He has one shot insane chance at survival. He has to run to his buddy from the village and get HIS gun. He makes the breathless dash and in doing so the tiger finally sees what all the searing pain she's experiencing is from. Zeroed in on corbett she charges. His partner from the village must have his eyes go wide from shock as it dawns on him what jim is doing. Corbett is gesturing for him to THROW his gun to him while he runs by! 

He tosses the old shotgun into the air, disarming himself and that gun must have hung in the air for what seemed an eternity in that split second. Corbett catches the shotgun and whirls around with the tiger twenty feet from him ready to leap, moving at forty miles per hour. 

He raises the shotgun and 

The champawat tiger is dead at his feet. 

Upon investigation of the body they could see the cause. The cause of all the mayhem and carnage, of all the literally ripped apart families, all the fear, all of it. The tigress’s teeth were wrecked long ago one fang taken clean off and another broken in half. She was unable to hunt her usual prey.  It was some unknowing hunter that had done this to her and set her on this path. Nature isn’t evil.

In the village people celebrated, they were free from the grip of fear. 

There’s a substantial epilogue to this story though. The champawat tiger may have been the first super maneater in 1900s india but she would be far from the last. THe conditions of habitat destruction, colonial encroachment, industrialization, poaching and all that werent going anywhere anytime soon and many more tigers and leopards claimed many more lives, some estimates put the toll close to a million people over the last five hundred years or so.

Jim corbett went on to hunt a few more of these notable maneaters including  a leopard that had at least one hundred and twenty nine confirmed kills. He went on to publish his memoirs and several other books about his time in the indian jungle and those all sold fantastically well. In his later years he dedicated himself to tiger conservation founding a national park to preserve them that now bears his name. 

In 1907 there was an estimated 100 thousand tigers in the wild and now there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand in the wild. Fur trade in china ( We’ll get into china don’t worry) and other countries, poaching and tigers losing ninety percent of their habitat presents a bleak picture but not an impossible one. Many governments have put together a pact to try to double tiger populations by 2022. 

If you want to help out tiger conservation, first, don’t kill them. Secondly I’ll put in some links to the world wildlife fund in the show notes