Episode 73 – Death and Pumpkins – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 73 Show Notes

Source: African Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’re going to take a break from Odysseus’ epic journey into death and destruction for a different tale of death and destruction in our annual Halloween special. You’ll discover that elephants are scarier than you thought, that pumpkins make good but dangerous hiding places, and that stomachs are very dark inside. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll see that even the trees can be deadly. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 73, “Death and Pumpkins”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
Spooky season is upon us once more, so I thought we could use a break from our epic for something a little more seasonally appropriate, which is why I’m bringing you a story about pumpkins. Once again, we’re dipping into the amazing collection of stories from Alexander McCall Smith from Zimbabwe and Botswana called The Girl Who Married a Lion for this story.
Once upon a time, there was a small farm. It was situated on good fields next to the river, making it an idyllic location. Even when other parts of the surrounding area were being baked to flaking dust by the gruelling sun, this land was always lush and fertile thanks to the river. On this wonderful patch of land lived a woman, her mother and father, and her five sons. The boys’ father had gone into town one day and never come back, abandoning her to raise the boys alone. Five boys were a lot for any person to handle, and there were definitely days when the poor mother would stare at the horizon and wish that she would see that good-for-nothing asshole appear on the horizon and explain that he had been kidnapped by bandits, but made his daring escape across the desert with nothing but the shinbone of a dead prisoner or some other impossible story to explain his sudden, long absence, but mostly she tried to remind herself of how lucky she was to live in such a marvelous place with mostly good if rambunctious boys and two caring parents to help her out.
Now as fertile as these fields were, they were almost ideally suited for growing pumpkins. Nothing else grew very well at all (for reasons that are never explained), but pumpkins grew like fucking tribbles, so pumpkins is what they grew and thus pumpkins is also what they ate. Every day. For every meal. They had long ago learned that, if you planted pumpkin seeds here, with almost no help from human hands, you would have verdant vines sprawling across the ground in a matter of months. Give them a few more months, and those vines would be sporting huge golden pumpkins ripening in the sun. Their flesh was always sweet and tender and crisp, and there was always plenty to fill even the hungriest of bellies (and growing kids have the hungriest of bellies).
The family probably supplemented their diet with food traded to others around them in exchange for some of their abundant, succulent pumpkins, but pumpkins were definitely the staple of their diet. It worked out well for them as the five boys all grew up tall and strong and brave, and were more than happy to pitch in and help their mother out with the farm. Even with gourds that grew this easily, there was always much work to be done, and more hands made much lighter work of it all.
Word soon spread of this tight-knit little family and their marvelous pumpkins. People would walk miles and miles to come to the farm and buy any spare pumpkins the family had and, after they took them home and ate them, they wouldn’t be able to shut up about how delectable those pumpkins had been. Everyone wanted to get their hands on them, making the crop in high demand all around the neighboring countryside.
This boom in demand gave the family the drive and the supplies to plant ever more and more pumpkins in a wider and wider swath of the surrounding fields until eventually, they were able to sell fully half of what they grew as pure profit and keep the rest to eat themselves. It was a happy life, and they were a happy family.
One day, one of the younger boys by the name of Sipho went out early in the morning to fetch water from the river. The pumpkins were thirsty, and now that they were growing so many, it took a lot more water to keep them happy and healthy and growing abundantly. Sipho never reached the river – he made it only as far as the fields before turning back and running desperately for his mother, screaming about what he had seen out in the fields. He told her about the devastation in a voice broken with sobs and she was soon racing for the fields to see for herself. When she got there, it was just as Sipho had said. She dropped to her knees in the dust and wailed her anguish to the sky; “Our pumpkins! Who has eaten all of our pumpkins?”
For, you see, the entire field of plump, nearly-ripe pumpkins had been demolished. Everywhere, pumpkins had been savagely ripped from the vines and devoured. Scattered remnants and half-eaten gourds lay everywhere, rotting in the rising sun and already buzzing with flies. Others had been crushed where they stood, smashed to a pulp with the seeds squished out to dry out in the sun. It was a devastating sight. To the poor woman’s eyes, it looked as though someone had massacred her beloved pumpkins and left their orange blood splashed on every stone, their corpses unburied and rotting and wasted.
There was nothing to be done except clear out the shattered husks of future food and try to replant and to salvage what could be saved. It was late in the season, but there should be time to get another crop in, though the resulting pumpkins would not be as lush or massive as they could have been. The entire family was soon gathered out in the fields to pitch in, including her father, clearing out smashed pumpkin corpses, planting new seeds, desperately tending to damaged but salvageable gourds, and repairing the fences that had been smashed to kindling by the thieves in the night.
No one doubted that the thieves would come back. They had grabbed and smashed seemingly at random, and healthy plants still stood scattered throughout the fields. As the sun began to set, the two eldest boys decided that they would stay awake that night to watch the fields and hopefully catch the assholes who had done so much damage. They found a good hiding spot nestled in some brush from which they could watch almost the entire farm. If anyone came back to get seconds of their decimated pumpkins, the two boys would be able to see it and stop it.
The sun soon set, dyeing the site of the great pumpkin massacre a bloody red. Sunset faded to twilight, then to full dark. The night was still and quiet, the silence broken only by the sound of insects and small creatures scuttling about their business. The two brothers grew drowsy as nothing continued to happen. They fought back sleep, but both were beginning to nod off as midnight approached.
The brothers were jolted wide awake. For a disoriented moment, they weren’t sure what had roused them so suddenly and thoroughly, but then they realized that the night was no longer silent. Gone were the quiet, normal sounds of night, replaced with the deep basso rumble of approaching thunder – only, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The rumble grew to a throbbing roar, punctuated with occasional ear-splitting crashes of something heavy being torn asunder. It grew deeper and louder and, as it neared, the two brothers could now hear the brassy call of a herd of elephants.
Now I know that when a lot of people hear ‘elephant’ they picture Disney’s Dumbo or something similar – a big, loveable clown who just wants to be friends. Most people never see them up close, and certainly never in an uncontrolled environment, so it’s easy for us to forget a very basic, important truth: elephants are BIG. African elephants can stand 13 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh up to 15,000 lbs. What’s more, they can fucking move, able to charge at up to 30 miles per hour. They are also very smart and, when provoked, capable of going on bloody rampages, leaving a trail of devastation and shattered bodies in their wake. And this wasn’t one elephant – it was dozens of them. Another fact that’s easy to forget – elephants eat a lot. Like a whole fucking lot. Herds of wild elephants are known to storm farms and villages to ransack them, eating everything edible that they can get their trunks on. The brothers were brave, but the sight of dozens of huge, ghost-pale elephants in the moonlight crashing like a living earthquake to destroy everything that the family had spent the day desperately trying to salvage was too much for them. They hid in their meager bush, shivering in terror as the massive beasts prowled the night, desperately hoping that one of them wouldn’t accidentally crush them to death without a second thought.
The herd spent much of the night eating most of the surviving pumpkins, smashing more of the fences, and generally raising hell all over the fields. When they finally left, the two weeping boys raced home to tell their mother the terrible news. They had no hope at all of stopping so many of the massive creatures, who would surely keep coming back until there was no food at all left to eat. The grandfather, who had seen much in his long life, leaned back against the wall with a deep sigh. Every line of his body said that he had given up hope completely. “There is nothing we can do. We can’t stop them, we can’t drive them off, and we’ll starve if we try to wait for them to go away on their own. I’ve seen it before, and there’s only one option – when the elephants move in, the people have to move out. Otherwise, we’ll all die, either by getting trampled by an angry beast as we try to protect our food or by starving as they eat everything for miles.”
The mother was aghast at this suggestion. “Move? But we can’t! These are the best fields for miles and miles, with good soil and good access to the river. Anywhere worth having is already taken. If we go anywhere else, we’ll surely starve, just a little more slowly.” “Then I guess those are the choices: starve quickly as the elephants eat all of the pumpkins or starve slowly as we toil uselessly in the dust to try and make something grow. Either way, all of us are doomed.”
Nobody said anything after that grim pronouncement. What was there to say? The grandfather was a wise man, and brave as well. He wasn’t one to give up easily, so this scourge of elephants must be as terrible as he said. The eldest boy wasn’t willing to give up without a fight however. All of his brothers looked up to him as the eldest, and he was a very clever boy besides. He had always been the one coming up with their games and scheme growing up, so if anyone could think of a way to save them all, it would be him. The boy thought long and hard, considering this thorny puzzle from every angle. As he poked and prodded at his thoughts, an idea began to form. He didn’t like it, not one bit, but he couldn’t see any other way.
The eldest boy stood up. Everyone looked up at him, faint hope glimmering in their eyes. If anyone could save them, surely it was him (although none of them could see how even he could possibly hope to best something as massive and terrible as elephants)! “I have an idea. I think I know how to save our pumpkins, but it’s extremely dangerous. I don’t like it, but I think it’s our only hope.” He took a deep breath. “Someone’s going to have to be bait. We find the biggest, juiciest pumpkin we have left, we hollow it out inside, and someone crawls into the pumpkin and hides. Then, we leave it out in the fields all alone at night. The boy inside will have to wait as the elephants come again to our fields. They won’t be able to resist a pumpkin so huge and tempting, and it will be the first one they go to eat.”
“And here’s where it gets dangerous. The boy inside the pumpkin will have to let himself be eaten by the elephant. With luck, he won’t be crushed by accident, or discovered by the beast and gored on its wicked tusks or trampled underfoot. Once he’s inside the elephant’s stomach, he’ll have to crawl through its guts and stab it in the heart from the inside before he suffocates or gets digested. If the elephant (who will probably be the leader, since they would surely let the herd leader eat the best pumpkin) suddenly dropped dead after eating in our fields, it will probably scare them away forever. I don’t know if the boy inside will survive though – elephants are heavy, and he could be crushed to death when the massive beast topples over dead. Even if not, it will be extremely difficult to try and escape from the inside of the great beast. This may well be a suicide mission. I am sorry. If anyone has a better idea, I’m all ears.”
No one did. Everyone agreed that, as dangerous as this plan was, it was their only real option. Everyone turned to the youngest son, who was also the smallest of them by a fair margin. Even a truly massive pumpkin would be a tight squeeze for a small person, and he was the only one who might be able to fit. It would have to be him taking the deadly risk of allowing himself to be eaten alive. Sipho didn’t much care for the idea, but everyone else had agreed to it and he knew that refusing just meant dying a little more slowly. If he failed, everyone else would soon join him in death. Reluctantly, the young boy agreed to be the bait.
Everyone else went out into the fields to search for a pumpkin large enough to suit their needs, leaving Sipho and his mother alone in the home. She cooked her brave boy a sumptuous meal (with only some pumpkin since that was probably not his favorite food at the moment for obvious reasons) in thanks for the risk he was about to take. Once he was done, she covered his body in grease to hopefully help him slide into the pumpkin and then down the elephant’s throat a little more easily. She hugged her son tight, then gave him a necklace of small charms that she had kept with her for years, since they had always brought her good luck.
Soon enough, the rest of the family came back with the biggest pumpkin any of them had seen that year. It was more than big enough for Sipho to crawl inside, and it looked golden-ripe and succulent, sure to draw the elephant leader’s eye. It would do perfectly. They hauled the gourd out to the fields and set it on a flat rock to work. They carved a hole in the side and began to scoop out the sticky innards with big wooden spoons, carting off the pumpkin flesh in a cooking pot. Once it was empty, they helped Sipho squirm into the hole, careful not to damage the pumpkin in the process, and replaced the missing piece.
The sun was starting to set; it would be dark soon. They carried the massive pumpkin, hiding the small child inside, out into the fields to a place where the elephants would be sure to see it when they came back to ravage the crops once more. One by one, the family said goodbye to the young boy with whispered encouragements and left. The eldest brother was last. “Don’t be afraid, Sipho. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan.” They both knew that he was lying, but Sipho appreciated the gesture. Then he too left, leaving Sipho all alone in the cramped, claustrophobic darkness to wait for the elephants to come and gobble him up.
It was hot inside the pumpkin, and even as big as it was, it was cramped and small inside. His muscles ached with the strain of staying still in such a tiny space, but Sipho was afraid to move. If the elephants came and saw the pumpkin shaking, it might make them suspicious enough to leave it alone or worse, to trample it in defence. So he lay there, listening to the harsh sound of his own breathing, trying to fight back the panic that was rising in his mind with nothing else to occupy it. Sipho was brave like all his brothers, and he stayed still as the darkness deepened into pitch blackness.
Hours passed. At some point, Sipho began to hear a quiet rumbling, though he couldn’t be sure if it was coming from outside the pumpkin or just his own pounding heartbeat. When the pumpkin began to tremble with the force of the approaching tons and tons of hungry elephant, he was sure. The time had come. The tremble grew to a shake and then a violent quake, and still the sound grew louder. Sipho hadn’t realized just how loud a herd of elephants could be, especially from such a vulnerable spot. Finally, when he was certain that the pumpkin would shake itself to pieces from the quaking, it stopped. They were here.
There was a whuffling sound, which Sipho realized was the elephant sniffing the pumpkin with its trunk. He hoped that he’d been marinating in pumpkin juice for long enough to smell like pumpkin, or this might all be for nothing. The sound stopped, and then his world was pulled out from under him. He tumbled around in the infinite blackness of the tiny space unable to tell up from down and it was only when he stopped for a moment that Sipho realized the pumpkin must have passed the sniff test. He had been picked up was about to be eaten. Sipho took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited.
The elephant thrust the pumpkin into its mouth, and Sipho felt the pumpkin begin to collapse around him. Everything was hot and humid and crushing as the elephant chewed the pumpkin just a little before swallowing it mostly intact. Sipho felt the beast’s massive teeth, capable of grinding his bones to jelly, scrape along his skin as he slid past, carried on a wave of smashed pumpkin. He slid down into its throat, and the pressure became intense, but it didn’t last long before he came to rest inside the close confines of the creature’s stomach.
His first impression was pain. Lucky for him, elephant stomachs are different than human ones, and he didn’t end up taking a bath in stomach acid, or this could have all been over very quickly. Even so, being eaten fucking hurt, and there wasn’t much air in here. If he didn’t get out soon, he never would. Sipho drew his knife and crawled out of the remnants of the pumpkin. He took a moment to visualize the beast and try to imagine where he was, then he took the knife in both hands and drove it with all of his strength into the elephant’s flesh. The sound inside was deafening as the creature roared in agony, and Sipho was knocked off his feet as the beast reared up in terror. He lost the knife in the chaos, so Sipho prayed that his strike had been true – he wouldn’t get another shot.
The world trembled as the creature came down from its hind legs and then kept going as its front legs buckled underneath it. Sipho had managed to hit the heart dead on, and the elephant leader crumbled to the earth and was still, blood pouring from its open mouth. The other elephants saw their leader suffer a quick, agonizing death at the apparent hands of the pumpkin, and they fled in terror never to return. Sipho had done it! He had saved his family! But what about Sipho?
The beast’s ribs had cracked when it fell, striking the young boy on the skull. It was a glancing blow, but powerful enough to leave him dazed and disoriented. In the total darkness, he crawled, shoving his hands into great mounds of undigested food, but he couldn’t find the small knife in the chaos. His air was running out, leaving Sipho light headed. He was tired. So very tired. Maybe he should sit down. For just a minute. He’d rest, then he’d look for the knife again. Yes, that sounded good… Alone in the dark, Sipho faded into unconsciousness.
He was falling, falling, falling. Was he dead? Was he a ghost now? He felt light, like he was floating… Then he heard his mother’s voice and Sipho realized that he was very much alive and being rescued. His family had been listening in the night and, when the elephant had bellowed its agony, they had come running. The brothers had hacked carefully through the dead beast’s thick, tough skin and pulled their youngest brother out of his would-be grave and back into the world. His mother wept with joy at his success and safe return. She kissed him, wiping away the fat, pieces of pumpkin, and bloody elephants innards from his face. The brothers carried Sipho home to a much-earned rest, and then they held a celebratory feast the next night. Everyone came from miles around to share roasted elephant. And pumpkin of course. You have to have pumpkin.
I love this particular tale, which is unlike any other story I’ve ever come across. It’s a surprisingly scary tale for a story featuring pumpkins and elephants as the main elements, but it’s hard not to feel a little of Sipho’s terror as he waits, alone in the dark, knowing that the best case scenario is that he’s about to be eaten alive. I thought this was a nice thematic fit for Halloween, but different enough from the current saga to feel like a nice little break. And now, with the pumpkin safely carved and roasted, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is the Crinoida Dajeena.
On April 28, 1874, the world first heard the news of the terrible danger lurking in the forests of Madagascar – an enormous, man-eating tree. The story broke in the New York World of a letter to Dr. Omelius Friedlowsky from his colleague, the eminent biologist Karl Leche, and was later picked up by other papers around the world, and was later made even more famous by the former governor of Michigan Chase Osborn, who published a book on the subject.
According to the letter, Leche was traveling through the wilds of Madagascar when he came into a region inhabited by the Mkodos tribe, which he described as being “inhospitable savages about whom little was known” because, you know, that wild 19th century racism. He initially ignored them (because more racism) but, as he and his party walked along, more and more members of the Mkodos tribe were emerging from the trees and falling silently in behind them. The ever larger numbers of possibly hostile tribesmen beginning to surround them as they walked through the jungle grew more and more troubling until they reached a place where a small stream wound through the forest. At its heart stood a bizarre, unnerving tree.
The tree was described as looking roughly like an eight foot tall pineapple, its bark a dark, dingy brown but thick and nearly as tough as iron. The top of the tree was at least two feet in diameter with eight massive leaves that hung down to the ground, each eleven or twelve feet long, thin and sharply tapering like an agave plant or a eucalyptus plant, tapering from two feet wide to three feet at the widest part before tapering to a wicked point. The leaves were curved sharply at the base, making almost a straw or funnel shape. The inner side of this funnel shape was thickly coated in thick, thorny hooks like the spines of a cactus.
At the apex of this cone-shaped trunk was a strange, flat object that looked like a smaller plate sitting on top of a larger one. Where it sat seemed as though it should have been a flower of some sort, but it looked to Leche to be more of a receptacle than anything else. The protuberance oozed a thick, clear liquid that filled the shallow plate, filling the air with a drowsy-sweet smell similar to honeysuckle on a summer breeze. The intoxicating aroma filled the senses, leaving the mind fuzzy and sleepy. Long, hairy green tendrils stretched down from the underside of the lotus plate, each seven or eight feet long and stiff as iron rods. Above all of this stood a mass of six thin white quills quivering and twisting in what the letter called “a subtle, sinuous, silent throbbing against the air that…made me shudder in spite of myself with their suggestion of serpents flayed, yet dancing on their tails.”
The Europeans stared in horrified wonder at this bizarre plant, but the tribesmen reacted by chanting “Tepe! Tepe! Tepe!” in a mesmerizing tempo. As far as he could tell, the word was their name for the tree. The chanting grew steadily in volume and speed until, in a sudden rush, one of the tribeswomen was forced to the center of the group. The rest of the tribe drew their javelins, leaving the terrified woman at the heart of a bristling hedgehog of deadly weapons. She made a motion to try and leave, but encountered the impassable wall of death surrounding her. Only one direction was left open for her: directly towards the monstrous tree.
With torturous slowness, the woman approached the trunk. She hesitated, and pinpricks of blood appeared on her skin as the javelin points pressed gently but firmly into her flesh. She drew a ragged breath and then began to climb. The javelins followed her up the tree, forcing her to climb higher and higher until she reached the bowl at the top of the tree. The chant changed. Now, the Mkodos men called out “Tsik! Tsik!” which translates to “Drink! Drink!”
Another shuddering breath, and then the woman lowered herself down to drink the thick, sweet fluid from the plate-like structure. The tree reacted instantly. The slender tendrils quivered with instinct or perhaps some demonic intelligence and then struck, seizing her arms and chest and holding her fast. At that, she began to scream in agony and terror. At least, she did until one of the tendrils found her throat and began to squeeze. Her scream became a moan, then a gurgle, then silence. More and more tendrils whipped around until the found flesh and began to squeeze. Dr. Leche could hear a sound that might have been the tendrils creaking with strain and might have been bones snapping. Before long, the thick fluid, mixed now with the woman’s lifeblood and unidentifiable chunks of flesh and viscera, overflowed from the bowl and ran down the trunk in thick rivulettes.
Their chant rose to an ecstatic crescendo, and the Mkodo tribesmen rushed forward and began to lap at the awful concoction that, only moments ago, had been one of their own people. Leche and his team watched in horror as they drank deeply of the human sacrifice to this impossible tree. The leaves stayed in their rigid, upright position for ten days before collapsing to hang towards the earth again. At the foot of the tree, he saw a skull, stripped of all flesh – the only reminder of the sacrificed woman. He spent three more weeks observing these strange, terrible trees, finding a number of smaller specimens scattered through the forest (one of which he watched capture and devour an unlucky lemur). He named the carnivorous plant Crinoida Dajeena after a fossil known as the crinoid lilystone or St. Cuthbert’s beads and a respected physician named Bhawoo Dajee.
It’s a strange, terrifying tale that seems straight out of a horror story and there’s a reason for that – the entire thing turned out to be a hoax. 14 years later in 1888, in the second issue of the Current Literature, the entire story was reprinted with an explanation – the whole thing had been made up by reporter Edmund Spencer, who had died two years previously. The Devil Tree of Madagascar was a myth, a monstrous version of the very real Venus fly trap. This announcement went almost entirely unnoticed however, and stories about the tree continued through the 1890s (though none mentioned Spencer as the author). By the 20th century, stories of the tree weren’t even crediting the New York World as the source of the tale, leading to enormous confusion as later researchers tried to track down the source. It wasn’t until science author Willy Ley published Salamanders and Other Wonders in 1955 that the story of the man-eating tree of Madagascar was finally put to rest, providing evidence that the Mkodo tribe, Karl Leche, and the tree itself did not and never had existed and was all part of the feverish and fairly racist imagination of a fiction writer. Still, if you ever see a strange tree with grasping tendrils offering you hypnotic sap, maybe steer clear just in case. Happy Halloween, everyone!
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, it’s back to ancient Greece to set sail with Odysseus once more. You’ll see that magical voices in mysterious palaces are a mixed bag, that sometimes you just have to fuck your way out of trouble, and that you don’t want to end up on the wrong end of a magic wand. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll learn that some mythological monsters are very, very real. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.