a huge bear issuing from underneath the Jewel Room door.
“He thrust at it with his bayonet, which, going right through it, stuck in the doorway, whereupon he dropped in a fit, and was carried senseless to the guard-room. When on the morrow Mr. Swifte saw the soldier in the guard-room, his fellow-sentinel was also there, and the latter testified to having seen his comrade, before the alarm, quiet and active, and in full possession of his faculties. He was now, so Mr. Swifte added, changed almost beyond recognition, and died the following day.
Back in 1860, a huge, bearlike figure was spotted in London’s Tower of London.
“Mr. George Offer, in referring to this incident, alludes to queer noises having been heard at the time the figure appeared. Presuming that the sentinel was not the victim of an hallucination, the question arises as to the kind of spirit that he saw. The bear, judging by cases that have been told me, is by no means an uncommon occult phenomenon. The difficulty is how to classify it, since, upon no question appertaining to the psychic, can one dogmatize. To quote from a clever poem that appeared in the January number of the Occult Review, to pretend one knows anything definite about the immaterial world is all ‘swank.’
“At the most we—Parsons, Priests, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, Psychical Research Professors—at the most can only speculate. Nothing—nothing whatsoever, beyond the bare fact that there are phenomena, unaccountable by physical laws, has as yet been discovered. All the time and energy and space that have been devoted by scientists to the investigation of spiritualism and to making tests in automatic writing are, in my opinion—and, I believe, I speak for the man in the street——hopelessly futile.
“No one, who has ever really experienced spontaneous ghostly manifestations, could for one moment believe in the genuineness of the phenomena produced at séances. They have never deceived me, and I am of the opinion spirits cannot be convoked to order, either through a so-called medium falling into a so-called trance, through table-turning, automatic writing, or anything else. If a spirit comes, it will come either voluntarily, or in obedience to some Unknown Power—and certainly neither to satisfy the curiosity of a crowd of sensation-loving men and women, nor to be analyzed by some cold, calculating, presumptuous Professor of Physics whose proper sphere is the laboratory.
“But to proceed. The phenomenon of the big bear, provided again it was really objective, may have been the phantasm of some prehistoric creature whose bones lie interred beneath the Tower; for we know the Valley of the Thames was infested with giant reptiles and quadrupeds of all kinds (I incline to this theory); or it may have been a Vice-Elemental, or—the phantasm of a human being who lived a purely animal life, and whose spirit would naturally take the form most closely resembling it.”
MAN-EATING PLANTS
The idea that there could be monstrous, man-eating beasts of an unknown nature, lurking in the wilder parts of our planet, is not at all implausible. But, what about man-eating plants and trees? As incredible as it may sound, there is no shortage of reports of flesh-eating flora. In 1878, a German explorer named Carl Liche traveled to the island of Madagascar, where he witnessed nothing less than a human sacrifice to a tree! The horrific details were laid out in a letter penned by Liche himself and sent to the South Australian Register in 1881. According to Liche, the unfortunate victim was a woman of the Mkodo tribe, who was tied to the terrible tree, seemingly as a gift to it. Liche said:
An 1887 illustration of the man-eating tree described by Carl Liche.
“The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.”
Researcher Brent Swancer says of the flesh-devouring tree that it “was described as being around 8 feet in height, and having an appearance reminiscent of a pineapple, with eight long, pointed leaves that hung down from its top to the ground. The trunk of the tree was topped with a sort of receptacle that contained a thick liquid said to have soporific qualities that drugged potential prey and was believed to be highly addictive. Surrounding this receptacle were long, hairy tendrils with six white palpi resembling tentacles. The tree possessed white, transparent leaves that reminded Liche of the quivering mouthparts of an insect.”
Moving on, the American Weekly, on January 4, 1925, included in its pages an article titled “Escaped from the Embrace of the Man-Eating Tree.” It described an encounter in the Philippines, in which a man—referred to only as Bryant from Mississippi—and his native guide came across a truly unusual tree, around thirty-five feet in height and roughly ninety feet in diameter. Rather ominously, the tree stunk of rotting flesh, and a human skull could be seen at its base. It was the curious dimensions—which gave it something of a bulbous shape—that first caught the attention of the man; it wasn’t long at all before something else grabbed his attention—as in literally. As the man stood and stared at the tree, he realized to his horror that it was reaching out to him. The American Weekly said of what happened next:
As the man stood and stared at the tree, he realized to his horror that it was reaching out to him.
“The whole thing had changed shape and was horribly alive and alert. The dull, heavy leaves had sprung from their compact formation and were coming at him from all directions, advancing on the ends of long vine-like stems which stretched across like the necks of innumerable geese and, now that the old man had stopped his screaming, the air was full of hissing sounds. The leaves did not move straight at their target, but with a graceful, side-to-side sway, like a cobra about to strike. From the far side, the distant leaves were peeping and swaying on their journey around the trunk and even the tree top was bending down to join in the attack. The bending of the trunk was spasmodic and accompanied by sharp cracks.
“The effect of this advancing and swaying mass of green objects was hypnotic, like the charm movements of a snake. Bryant could not move, though the nearest leaf was within an inch of his face. He could see that it was armed with sharp spines on which a liquid was forming. He saw the heavy leaf curve like a green-mittened hand, and as it brushed his eyebrows in passing he got the smell of it—the same animal smell that hung in the surrounding air. Another instant and the thing would have had his eyes in its sticky, prickly grasp, but either his weakness or the brown man’s strength threw them both on their backs. The charm was broken. They crawled out of the circle of death and lay panting in the grass while the malignant plant, cracking and hissing, yearned and stretched and thrashed to get at them.”
Despite the incredible nature of the story, it’s important to note that it was written for the American Weekly by a very credible source: a botanist and naturalist named Willard Nelson Clute, who was the author of numerous books, including The Useful Plants of the World and A Dictionary of American Plant Names. Who knows? Perhaps the deadly, people-eating plant of the Philippines still exists, still luring the unwary into its deadly embrace.
Finally,
