- 5 months ago
Documentary, True Monsters History s Most Mythic Cannibals S1 E2
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00:00Killer creatures.
00:02People are getting slain.
00:03Body parts are getting chopped off.
00:05And ravenous cannibals.
00:07These stories are confirmed.
00:09They're not made up.
00:10Are predators with a penchant for flesh
00:13hunting people in the Pennsylvania woods?
00:15Luckily, we don't die.
00:17What really stalks Little Red Riding Hood?
00:20Danger lurks in the form of bad men.
00:23And which is more terrifying?
00:25Banshees out for blood?
00:27The Tar River Banshee, it places a curse upon you.
00:30Or zombies?
00:32Some say walk among us.
00:34The Buddha Zombie is frightening because
00:36we know that the chemistry for it actually works.
00:38There's no adventure if you don't go into the forest.
00:41And is it terrifying? Yes.
00:43And can you be consumed? Yes.
00:45It's into the belly of the beast
00:47to find the surprising truth
00:49behind history's most legendary cannibals and killers
00:53right now.
00:57Man-eating-man is the ultimate tool.
01:00It's the ultimate tool.
01:01It's the ultimate tool.
01:02It's the ultimate tool.
01:09It's the ultimate tool.
01:11It is anasonous toddler.
01:17Big and a τονzver poses.
01:20Man-eating man is the ultimate taboo, and our first taste comes from 16th century Scotland
01:33in a tale that churns the stomach.
01:36It's the story of an inbred clan of cannibals tormenting the countryside.
01:43Could they have actually existed?
01:47Turns out the clues are hidden in the history of the times.
01:54There weren't so much wild beasts in the road, but there were highwaymen, and there were raiders.
02:00You weren't safe.
02:04Sorny Bean and his family survived by ambushing people, stealing from them, and worse than that, killing them and eating them.
02:17They supposedly lived in a cave that was covered up by the ocean at high tide, so people couldn't find them.
02:36The Sorny Bean clan were just probably the worst thing that could happen to you.
02:47Thieves and robbers were common threats.
02:51Around the time of Sorny Bean, the exploits of another legendary highway robber began to emerge.
02:59His name was Robin Hood.
03:01But while Robin Hood's mission was to steal from the rich and give to the poor,
03:06Sorny Bean's goal was simply to devour you.
03:12For more than two decades, they remained a secretive operation.
03:17That was until the final ambush, where they made a tactical error.
03:21They had a botched robbery murder.
03:24The guy got away.
03:25He alerted the authorities.
03:26They got a posse together of about 400 people, and they started searching the areas.
03:31And eventually somebody said, hey, that weird cave over there, you know, we think we haven't searched that yet.
03:35Let's go in there and look at it.
03:38When they got in there, they found remains of bones that had been gnawed on.
03:43They were not refrigerators, but they would pickle the meat.
03:46By that time, the original Sorny Bean clan, which was two people, a husband and wife,
03:51had expanded to a bunch of children.
03:53They wound up with 45 people.
03:55They were essentially this big, incestuous, cannibalistic clan.
04:00So how do you get an entire clan to participate in something like cannibalism and murder?
04:06It's really actually not that complicated.
04:09Really, you need one person who may be a sort of a sociopath, and then he gets somebody else to follow him.
04:16All of them were eventually caught, and I believe most of them were executed.
04:20Sorny Bean was taken and executed in a very gruesome way.
04:26He had his genitals cut off, and he had to have his hands and legs cut off, and he basically slowly bled to death.
04:33At least, that's what the legend says.
04:36But is Sorny Bean fact or fiction?
04:39Maybe a little bit of both.
04:42While there's no evidence a man named Sorny Bean actually existed, the legend was based on real events.
04:51It really was used as a tactic by the British to make the Scots look less than human.
04:57In 1745, a Scottish group called the Jacobites demanded their exiled leader, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, regain the British throne.
05:08The stories were published at the time of the Jacobite rebellions, which in history was a period of great unrest, where the Scots were basically attempting in a very bloody coup to separate from England.
05:22The English labeled them cannibals to relegate the Scots to barbarians.
05:28The history of relationships between Scotland and the kingdom has been fractious for centuries, and this reputation of these ferocious, almost inhuman, barbaric Scots coming down and raiding our civilized society.
05:47Well, we have to do something.
05:49The first thing we do is make sure everybody understands that even though they look like us, they're not like us.
05:54Why?
05:55Because they're barbarians.
05:56They eat you.
05:59The English use Sorny as a derogatory name for the Scots, and it's stuck.
06:05To this day, if you look up the word Sorny in a British dictionary, you'll find that it means fool, simpleton, and Scotsman.
06:14If you can see a group of people that you really want to demonize or make outcasts, turn a whole population against them, all you have to do is make them monstrous and not human.
06:27The Jacobites never did shake their association with an alleged clan of barbaric cannibals, though they likely never ate a soul.
06:36Yet even though the Jacobites faded into history, the legend of Sorny Bean lives on to this day, and maybe even inspires modern-day cannibal tales.
06:47Like the 2006 remake of the 1970s thriller, The Hills Have Eyes, about a family stalked by man-eating mutants in a government testing ground.
06:59It's a story that captures our very real fears of being eaten.
07:04The really strong myths are the ones that exist across time, and they get told and retold.
07:12We're still telling the stories of the Sorny Bean clan to this day, because they're about as vile a taboo as you can possibly imagine.
07:20So, if you happen to be a horror filmmaker, it can be a source of great inspiration.
07:25What it's this, what it's happening, for the first generation, is that a fire-time power he знает?
07:30Or, why do you do that?
07:32It will lead a copper and a fire-time power he знает.
07:35If you have to be a savior and the village of the suspend.
07:37The film is the only one who is left.
07:40The film is the only one who is left.
07:42In the film is the only one who is left.
07:44What is the only one who is left.
07:45The film is left.
07:46To be the first, it's saved or the crafted.
07:48The film is left.
07:49The film is left.
07:50The film is left.
07:51The film is left.
07:53The story of Little Red Riding Hood is a classic French fairy tale first printed in the 17th century.
08:06Little Red Riding Hood goes into the woods to her grandmother's house to bring her, you know, wine and bread.
08:13And she encounters the wolf, and the wolf, you know, persuades her to go into the forest and collect flowers.
08:19She collects all these flowers, and then she goes to her grandmother's house.
08:22While she was collecting the flowers, the wolf, you know, went to grandma's house and ate her up.
08:28And then the wolf put on her clothes, get into bed, and then when Little Red Riding Hood arrives,
08:34the wolf invites, you know, Little Red into the bed and eats Little Red Riding Hood.
08:39The huntsman comes by and cuts the wolf open and rescues her out of the wolf belly.
08:46This may be the Red Riding Hood story we're most familiar with,
08:50but it turns out there's far more to the fairy tale first known as La Petite Chaperone Rouge,
08:56things that can be uncomfortable to talk about.
09:01There's the version you hear today and the original version,
09:04and if you get unedited Grimm's fairy tales, you get it pretty quickly.
09:10It's a very simple tale of Little Red Riding Hood protecting her virginity.
09:14In the 17th century, if a young girl went into the woods by herself, she was taking a chance.
09:22Her mother tells her, don't stray from the path.
09:25You could fall and break the bottle.
09:27Breaking the bottle could be symbolic of virginity.
09:31Grimm's fairy tales, if you read the original versions, they're not for kids.
09:37They're full of sex and violence.
09:40Little Red Riding Hood is an incredibly violent and sex-filled story in its original form.
09:46The story of Red Riding Hood is ultimately a cautionary tale,
09:51a warning to young and naive girls of the dangers of the woods and of wayward men.
09:59Both things were big problems in post-medieval Europe
10:02when the fairy tale made its way into popular culture.
10:07If you ever see the Black Forest, I think you'll understand exactly why
10:11they come up with these incredibly grim tales.
10:15It is completely dark ground, dark woods.
10:18Any horseback rider or outsider who came by was from an upper-class family
10:27would probably rape her.
10:30In medieval Europe, rape was a systemic problem.
10:34But until Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas used the Roman word raptus,
10:40which means carrying off by force, to describe the violent deflowering of a virgin,
10:46rape didn't even have a name.
10:49If a maiden like Red Riding Hood was raped,
10:53she would have faced prosecution, virginity tests, and shame.
11:00Danger lurks, right?
11:01And it lurks in the form of creatures, bad men,
11:06men who are sort of part animal.
11:09You know, so in the case of Little Red Riding Hood,
11:11you have this wolf, but this wolf who basically presents as a man.
11:15In the end, the story of Little Red Riding Hood
11:18isn't the story of one little girl.
11:21It's the story of thousands of young girls from all around the world,
11:26each facing their own dark woods full of mysterious predators.
11:31So the moral of the story is,
11:33if you're a woman, don't talk to strangers.
11:35Don't let them, you know, take you off your path.
11:37And then, God forbid, don't get into bed with them.
11:40Ha ha ha.
11:41Ha ha ha.
11:44Ha ha ha ha.
11:46Ha ha ha ha.
12:02Bluebeard is definitely a story that one didn't tell to children
12:30and perhaps should wait to tell to children even now.
12:36It's a tale about a mysterious duke who had a bluebeard and was frightening.
12:43He has been married six times.
12:46Everybody knows that this guy has married all these women
12:51and no one knows what happened to these women.
12:53But that doesn't stop one last woman from taking a chance on him.
12:57At one point soon after they're married, he says,
13:00I've got to go on a trip and while I'm gone,
13:02I'm going to give you the keys to the entire castle.
13:07And this one golden key that I'm giving you,
13:11it opens this door here, but you're never to use it while I'm gone.
13:15She, of course, could not stop fixating about that final key.
13:31She finally goes in there and sees hanging from the walls
13:51six women with their throats cut or hanging, mutilated.
13:55She's horrified and drops the key into the blood on the floor.
14:01All of a sudden, he's coming home early.
14:12She hears him.
14:13She picks up the key, cleans it off as fast as she can.
14:15She goes back upstairs.
14:17And he catches her coming up in sort of a panic.
14:20And he's like, hey, what's up?
14:21And she was all like, nothing.
14:26Bluebeard is just furious.
14:29He's about to slice off her head.
14:33Three brothers come storming in.
14:35And, of course, they kill him.
14:36A lot of people experiencing and reading the old fairy tales
14:47are shocked by how gruesome they are.
14:49There is blood all over the place.
14:51People are getting slain.
14:52Body parts are getting chopped off.
14:54These are brutal, brutal things.
14:57Bluebeard was one of the most graphic tales of horror
15:01collected in France by the Grimm Brothers
15:03and published in 1697.
15:06But where did this horror story come from?
15:11Turns out, it may have been based on a real murder.
15:15There were many serial killers during the period
15:18that these stories came from and were collected.
15:21And they generally were people of the aristocracy, dukes, kings.
15:25One of the possibilities for the basis of Bluebeard
15:30is Connemore the Accursed, who was Lord of Brittany,
15:34but from the 6th century.
15:36He actually was a figure who was reputed to have had three wives
15:41who disappeared.
15:42And when he married his fourth wife, she found a forbidden chamber.
15:49And inside that chamber were the remains of the three wives
15:52who had preceded her.
15:54Over time, people have likened the Bluebeard tale
15:57to more modern murderers.
15:59And perhaps no homicidal maniac is as strikingly similar
16:04as H.H. Holmes, a 19th century serial killer in Illinois
16:10who used the Chicago World's Fair to attract women
16:14to his hotel of horrors.
16:16He built what is called the murder castle in Chicago
16:20at the same time as the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
16:24This was the place that the majority of his victims met their demise.
16:29The bottom floor was a pharmacy.
16:31On the second floor was an actual hotel.
16:34And on the third floor was a labyrinth of torture rooms.
16:40Like, there were literally chutes where, you know,
16:43they could fall down a chute into a vat of acid.
16:46And that was one of the reasons why they don't even know
16:47how many victims he had,
16:48because they met their fate in the acid pit or an incinerator.
16:52Most historians say that there were close to 200.
16:55In many ways, H.H. Holmes is America's version of Bluebeard.
16:59These guys are on a whole other plane of sickness and darkness.
17:03They don't show any remorse.
17:04They don't care.
17:05That's the scary part about them.
17:07These crimes have been committed
17:08in much greater numbers in the past than today.
17:11Women often didn't have a choice as to who they would marry,
17:15so they were being introduced to the man for the first time.
17:18You know, he's called Bluebeard because his beard is blue,
17:20and everyone thought he was kind of strange-looking to begin with.
17:23And I think that back then, strangeness is bad,
17:30and in this case, evil.
17:31Perhaps the moral of the story could be as simple
17:34and perhaps disturbing as things that are strange can't be trusted.
17:39And I think that back then, strangeness is bad.
18:09Many people think zombies originated with George Romero's 1968 cult classic,
18:29Night of the Living Dead.
18:31But the first reference to zombies actually comes from Brazil,
18:41where in 1810, a historian coined the term.
18:47It made its way into Haiti, where zombies are made real.
18:52In our modern pop culture, we talk about zombies,
19:08but the real zombies are the ones from the Haitian beliefs,
19:11the voodoo or voodoo beliefs of a person
19:14who is either raised from the dead or enslaved
19:16using a combination of chemistry and sorcery.
19:19As one legend goes, a man named Clairvius Narcisse died
19:26and was buried on May 2, 1962,
19:30or so his family thought.
19:32He had been fed a poison
19:35that had made him fall into a death-like coma.
19:39He'd been buried, he'd been dug up,
19:42and then he'd been fed a series of narcotics
19:46that confused his mind so much
19:48that he was able to do what he was told
19:51but really lacked the initiative or will
19:54or orientation to do anything for himself.
19:58He'd worked for more than a decade
20:00in a sugar plantation
20:03as essentially slave labor.
20:06It wasn't until 18 years later
20:10that Narcisse stumbled into the L'Estere marketplace in Haiti
20:14with a heavy gait and vacant stare.
20:17It was there that his sister Angela Narcisse found him
20:21and his very real story came out.
20:25There are all sorts of stories in Haiti
20:27about people disappearing, you know, dying,
20:30showing up years later on their family's doorstep.
20:32These stories come up, you know, every 10, 15 years,
20:35and they're confirmed.
20:36They're not made up.
20:39In the case of Narcisse,
20:41a boker or Haitian witch doctor
20:43had given him a coma-inducing dose
20:46of tetraditoxin and buffotoxin,
20:49which are poisons from pufferfish and frogs
20:52that affect muscles and neurotransmitters in the brain.
20:59If I wanted to turn you into a voodoo zombie,
21:02what I would do is I would drug you.
21:04You would pass out.
21:05You would appear dead to the, you know,
21:07to the naked eye, to the untrained professional.
21:09They believed that the soul and the body
21:23separate when you die,
21:25but that the body can be reanimated.
21:27The voodoo zombie is frightening
21:29because we know that the chemistry for it actually works.
21:32The voodoo zombies, they terrify us
21:34because they're real things.
21:36It's part of our real world,
21:37so it's absolutely scary.
21:39Haitian voodoo zombies are real.
21:45American zombies, not so much.
21:48But there's something very real
21:51that even these zombies represent.
21:54The idea of an apocalyptic event we can't control.
21:59You look at The Walking Dead,
22:00and it's not about zombies
22:02as much as it is about people and survivors
22:05and what happens in situations of extreme conflict.
22:09How are those normal social roles going to break down,
22:12and who is going to emerge as a leader?
22:14Now, we think about the zombie that's created by infection.
22:19If we think about the new diseases
22:23that we've encountered in the past 30 years,
22:25AIDS and Ebola and flesh-eating bacteria,
22:30and the fact that now you can go from one part of the world to another
22:33very, very quickly,
22:34bringing whatever you have with you,
22:37the idea of infection becomes very, very prominent.
22:41Even though it's considered tongue-in-cheek,
22:44the CDC started running a zombie vlog to capitalize on the craze
22:50while getting out bona fide messages about emergency preparedness.
22:54The CDC, for years, had been sending out these e-mails
22:58about what to do in some sort of a health disaster,
23:02and nobody read those e-mails.
23:04Nobody.
23:04Then they put zombies in there.
23:06They built their entire e-mail around what to do in a zombie apocalypse.
23:0999% of the information was the same as all of their other mailers,
23:14but they put the word zombie in there,
23:15and they had so many hits that their server crashed again and again and again.
23:19I live in Los Angeles,
23:20and any expert will tell you there is going to be a giant earthquake.
23:23Well, that never inspired me to get an earthquake preparedness kit,
23:26but I do have a zombie preparedness kit,
23:28and it works great for earthquakes.
23:30I can't imagine a world without zombies.
23:31It captures so much of our contemporary fears.
23:35You know, they're the worst possible scenario
23:37of what is going to happen tomorrow.
24:07In 1781, at the height of the Revolutionary War,
24:32something had it in for a group of soldiers at the Tar River in North Carolina.
24:39At least, that's what the legends say.
24:42It's a story that begins with an American patron named Dave Warner.
24:48He's a mill owner in North Carolina.
25:02He is providing grain to the American troops.
25:06He's definitely a sort of bold and strong character.
25:10He's symbolic of the bold and courageous spirit of the American rebel.
25:17He's told one day that the British are coming,
25:29and he needs to get out because he's a patriot,
25:32and he says, no, I'm not leaving,
25:34and I would rather bang some British heads together than go.
25:38They ransack his mill.
25:40They take him down to the river,
25:42and they tell him they're going to drown him.
25:43And he says, if you kill me, the Tar River Banshee is going to kill you.
25:49And as he drowns, you hear this mournful Banshee wail.
25:59The curse that the Banshee places on the soldiers is that they, too, die.
26:13And so, of course, one by one, they get knocked off.
26:27The biggest thing about Banshees is that they are basically a harbinger of death.
26:31White hair, white clothing, white skin, very ghostly.
26:35A Banshee would sound like a howling, screaming, human animal.
26:43A sound that you wouldn't think a human could make.
26:46If you heard this, it meant that someone was going to die.
26:49I was curious to see if this was a story that was based on anything real.
26:53Certainly, the river Tar is real.
26:54Certainly, the fact that the British army came through there,
26:58there were some major battles that were fought along that river,
27:01and the river and the tar that was being created by the pitch pine foresting that was happening,
27:06was a big deal in the Revolutionary War, as well.
27:10I've not been able to find a David Warner who was a miller.
27:14That doesn't mean he didn't exist.
27:15He doesn't read, like in most fairy tales or myths, as the sort of everyman miller.
27:20He was a guy, and there's a very specific description.
27:23He's a big man with a big black beard.
27:26And so, there could very well have been someone named David Warner,
27:29and there could very well have been a moment where soldiers came across these food stores,
27:35and that there was a murder.
27:37It's more grounded and more real than a lot of stories like this.
27:41There are a number of stories that come out of the Revolution that are sort of patriotic stories.
27:47Look how wonderful the Americans are. Look how horrible the British are.
27:52The Tar River Banshee is part of this patriotic folklore.
27:56Banshees aren't typically part of American folklore, but are a big part of Scottish and Celtic legends.
28:04The word comes from Banshee, which translates to Banshee.
28:09In Celtic culture, when someone died, women would keen, they would cry, they would wail.
28:13It was a part of the mourning process.
28:15There is debate among historians as to whether the Banshee led to the practice of Keening,
28:21or whether Keening created the Banshee legend.
28:24Nobody seems to know which came first.
28:26They would sing these songs, and the more heart-rending they were,
28:31the more of the people coming would feel compelled to weep.
28:34If you were an important family, you had your own Banshee.
28:36It was sort of a mark of some weird sort of approval.
28:39Somewhere along the line, Banshees evolved from just being associated with death to predicting it or leveling it as a punishment,
28:48as in the case of the Tar River Banshee.
28:51This legend of the Banshee moved into this story and became this device by which these bad guys died.
28:59They were the architects of their own death, which is very different than the older traditions of the Banshee, who were just a warning.
29:05But what's a Celtic Banshee doing in a North Carolina legend at all?
29:10The Banshee probably traveled along with the large number of Scottish immigrants that settled in the state in colonial times and beyond.
29:191.5 million Scots have immigrated to America, and in 2000, North Carolina had more people of Scottish descent living there than in Scotland.
29:32I think the most interesting thing that I pull from the Tar River story and what it says about us is that we pull from old things that have meaning to us,
29:41that have this sort of deep ancestral memory, and we recast them so they fit where we are.
29:47The Tar River Banshee, I think, scares people because the Banshee doesn't actually physically do anything to you.
29:54It places a curse upon you.
29:56It screams at you, and once that happens, you're kind of stuck, and there's nothing you can do about it.
30:02There's nothing you can do about it.
30:03There's nothing you can do about it.
30:04There's nothing you can do about it.
30:09There's nothing you can do about it.
30:10There's nothing you can do about it.
30:11There is nothing you can do about it.
30:13No!
30:26I don't remember, not the T runs.
30:27But again, the T. dogs are' happy.
30:28I think the T. dogs brains win, and they can do these things in a passing way.
30:31faudolutony would fast to make you do about it.
30:37Kuchisaki Ono is a vengeful ghost that haunts Japan and goes after children in particular.
30:58She will ask them a question and if you get the answer right then you're safe.
31:04The trouble is, there is no right answer.
31:08In the late 1970s and early 1980s, stories start appearing of children who are on their
31:15way home from school and they're stopped by a woman who's wearing a surgical mask.
31:23And in America that would tell us something is wrong, but in Japan that's not uncommon
31:29at all.
31:30If you catch a cold as a courtesy to everybody else, you wear a mask until your cold is gone.
31:36So that in itself is no cause for alarm.
31:39But in the case of Kuchisaki Ono, it should be.
31:44Her eyes, her nose, her hair, her stature, all look attractive.
31:53And she will ask you the question, am I pretty?
31:57And she will ask you the question, am I pretty sure?
32:06And she will ask you the question, am I pretty sure?
32:10If you say no, she's carrying a pair of scissors and with these scissors, she will kill you.
32:21If you say yes, she will remove the surgical mask to reveal that somewhere along the line,
32:27somebody has slit her mouth clear up to the ears.
32:32If you try to escape, you're still out of luck because no matter which way you turn, she will
32:37appear in front of you again and repeat the challenge.
32:40Once she's revealed this disfigurement, she will ask you a second time, do you think I'm
32:44pretty?
32:45And if in fear you say yes, you still can't escape.
32:53She's carrying scissors and she will snip both of your cheeks open so that you will like her.
32:59Even though people have reported modern day sightings of Kuchisaki Ono in Japan and South
33:04Korea, the origins of the legend date back to sometime between the 9th and the 12th century.
33:12As the legend goes, Kuchisaki's samurai husband is the one who sliced in her trademark smile
33:18after he discovered her cheating on him.
33:22Like Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
33:23His lips have actually been cut back into this hideous grin.
33:27A person who's permanently smiling whether they want to or not is bloodthirsty and dangerous.
33:34Writers of fiction seem to really attach to this type of disfigurement.
33:39Victor Hugo wrote a novel called The Man Who Laughs in which the main character as a child
33:45had his face cut into a permanent smile.
33:48This was made into a movie in the 1920s that apparently inspired the writers of the film.
33:52The Batman series to come up with the Joker.
33:57As for whether or not Kuchisaki is a real threat in modern day Japan, it depends on whom you ask.
34:04In 1999, a poll in Japan revealed 99% of the nation's kids were familiar with the legend and many of them were afraid.
34:15These stories start popping up all over Japan and people are taking it kind of seriously and there are actually police patrols out looking for the split mouth woman.
34:27Whether they are people who are playing some kind of macabre prank or not, it's hard to say.
34:33But there are sightings of her.
34:35Researchers discovered a coroner's report in 2007 of an accident that had happened in the 1970s.
34:41The victim, her mouth had been severed in much the same way as Kuchisaki Ona.
34:46Just prior to the accident, she was reportedly chasing children.
34:50Whether she is the spirit Kuchisaki Ona or whether she's some macabre copycat, no one really knows.
34:56No one really knows.
35:22I am by myself.
35:24This is the road that's taken me to Ghost Mountain.
35:30Haycock Mountain, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
35:34To residents of Bucks County, Haycock Mountain is a very pleasant sounding place.
35:40But it goes by the name Ghost Mountain because creepy things go on there.
35:45So, apparently the story with Ghost Mountain is there's this house on this one road, Spring House Lane or something.
35:52And it's a glass house and apparently cannibals used to live in there.
35:58So, we will see.
36:00If the idea is that there's this race of people up there in the woods, these albino cannibals.
36:04I mean, just the image is spooky and they might be up there, they might not.
36:08This might be true or it might not be true.
36:10Let's go explore and see.
36:12The legend of the Ghost Mountain cannibals goes back at least to the 1960s.
36:18As the story goes, a band of inbred albino cannibals lie and wait for people who come looking for them or looking for trouble.
36:28Hopefully, we don't die.
36:34It's like a teen rite of passage.
36:36You go up the mountain, you go into the woods and all around are potential dangers.
36:42These monstrous creatures are hiding in the woods.
36:46They might come out from the trees with a shotgun.
36:50If you're lucky, all they'll do is shoot rocks off at your car.
36:53If you're not lucky, they'll go into your car, they'll drag you out, they'll butcher you, they'll eat you.
36:58And then they'll dispose of your remains so that they'll never be found.
37:03I can't help it, you know, as much as I say, like, the ghost don't bother you and so forth.
37:09You still never know who's out here.
37:14Whether or not people think this is just another urban legend,
37:18things that are part of the story are very real,
37:22like a chain driveway and an old covered bridge.
37:27In September of 2012, in nearby Hawley,
37:32a man named Richard Cimino reportedly broke into a house
37:36and chased a woman outside while gnawing on her head.
37:42The reality of being eaten by one of our own,
37:45I think that really strikes a nerve with humans.
37:47Essentially, it means that the person standing next to you
37:51could be a predator in waiting in disguise.
37:55Eating other people is one of those taboos.
37:59We find it so gross, so grotesque, that if you want to scare somebody,
38:04the word cannibal is a really great way of doing it.
38:08Do you guys see anything?
38:10No.
38:11Anything?
38:12See how dark it is when my light's off?
38:13Oh, Lord.
38:14Okay.
38:15Whoa.
38:17It's like we turned the lights back on or something right in front of us.
38:21These episodes that deal with man-eating and cannibalism,
38:31what makes them so terrifying to us is the fact that on some level we know this has happened.
38:38There's evidence of humans eating humans.
38:42A person having a nice dinner is very normal and natural.
38:46If that nice dinner is another person, you're changing the story into something supremely horrifying.
38:52To be killed is bad, but death is, you know, we know that's in the cards.
38:58But to be killed and eaten, that's to be, like, dominated.
39:04That's to be, like, subsumed, you know, like literally consumed, taken over by something else.
39:11Stories of savage behavior in the mountains stem from perceived reality.
39:17That people living in the backwoods are less civilized.
39:22It's a city-country divide that has existed since colonial times,
39:27and is now inspired pop culture with movies like Deliverance and stories like that of the ghost mountain cannibals.
39:36There's no adventure if you don't go into the forest.
39:38And is it terrifying?
39:39Yes.
39:40Yes.
39:41And can you be consumed?
39:42Yes.
39:43I have a minute left of battery time, so you could die at a time.
39:53I think the hunt for the cannibals of Ghost Mountain are a part of this wider human urge to find the unknown.
40:00We are somehow drawn.
40:02We create these creatures.
40:03We create scary movies.
40:04We tell each other scary stories.
40:06We go into places where we've never gone before.
40:09We risk danger.
40:10And it's partly to get that thrill again that makes us know we're alive.
40:14We are dead.
40:15We try.
40:16We're dead.
40:18We're dead.
40:19We're dead.
40:20We may die.
40:21We'll be dead.
40:22We will be dead.
40:23We will be dead.
40:24No, we're alive.
40:25You
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