When a woman returned to her old New York City apartment, she made a terrifyingly grisly
From cruel torture to desperate survival, these are the true stories of cannibalism
throughout history.
China's Cultural Revolution
During the 1960s, Mao Zedong kicked off China's Cultural Revolution in an attempt to secure
power.
The movement pitted citizen against citizen, and as many as 2 million people died.
And then in 1993, The New York Times reported on recently released documents detailing widespread
cannibalism, practiced as a way for revolutionaries to demonstrate their superiority over their
defeated enemies.
The contents of the documents included descriptions of students who killed, cooked, and ate authority
figures at their schools.
Participation in this butchery was seen as a way to demonstrate solidarity with the cause.
Bodies were reportedly strung up in government-funded cafeterias, with their flesh served to workers.
Reports suggest that at least 137 people were killed and eaten, while it's also estimated
that their flesh and organs were distributed to thousands of people.
These atrocities were brought to light largely by one person: writer and activist Zheng Yi,
who had already incurred the wrath of Chinese officials for his involvement in the Tiananmen
Square protests.
He used his access to Communist Party records to not only document what had happened, but
also to find and speak with those who had participated in the slaughter.
He wrote a book on his findings and began living in exile in the United States.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571
The story of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 served as the basis for the harrowing 1993
film Alive.
On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying an amateur rugby team from the South American country
crashed in an area of the Andes Mountains called the Valley of Tears.
The 16 survivors ultimately wouldn't be rescued until two days before Christmas.
One of those survivors was Roberto Canessa, who went on to become one of his country's
top pediatric cardiologists.
Just 19 years old, he was a medical student at the time, which meant he not only moved
the bodies of the dead, but also carved the flesh for eating.
As he recalled to National Geographic in 2016,
"I thought, if I were killed I would feel proud that my body could be used for others
to survive.
I feel that I shared a piece of my friends not only materially but spiritually, because
their will to live was transmitted to us through their flesh."
After the survivors were rescued, Canessa visited the families of every person who had
died in the accident.
None of them judged them for what they did to make it out alive.
In 1514, György Dózsa led an army of peasants in a revolt against the Hungarian nobility,
and he came close to winning it all.
As recounted in the book The History of Hungary and the Magyars, when he was finally captured,
he was mocked with the promise of a crown, which he got in red hot form right off the
smithy's forge.
Dózsa was also given a throne that was just as hot, although the text doesn't note whether
or not it was hot enough to cook the flesh that was sliced from his body while he was
still alive.
Those pieces were thrown to 14 other men who had been captured along with him.
As punishment for their decision to follow the rebel leader, they were ordered to eat
him.
Refusal to cannibalize their leader was punishable by death.
But it's entirely possible that the offer was easier than it sounded, as the men hadn't
been given food for the ten days leading up to the gruesome execution.
They were also reportedly commanded to dance while Dózsa was executed, beheaded, and quartered.
In 1819, Irishman Alexander Pearce was sent to Australia after a conviction for stealing
boots.
He was sentenced to a series of lashings and hard labor for a variety of crimes until finally
being sent to the Macquarie Harbour penal settlement.
While he was there, Pearce formed an unlikely alliance with seven other convicts.
The men escaped together and set off across hostile, unforgiving territory.
It's the sort of place that still has a dangerous reputation today, and for ill-equipped fugitives
in the early 19th century, it was deadly, especially considering the biggest threat
was traveling with them.
The group made it 15 days with no food before they drew straws to see which of them would
be killed and eaten first.
After the first round of cannibalism, one man took off on his own, and another died
of exhaustion.
One by one, the others were killed until only Pearce remained.
And since no one believed the story he told when he was captured again, he was sent back
to Macquarie, only to escape once more, this time in the company of a man named Thomas
Cox.
When Pearce was recaptured yet again, it was easier to believe his story about killing
and eating Cox, as bits of him were still in Pearce's pockets.
He was ultimately tried, found guilty, and hanged.
His skull is currently part of a collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology.
"Then he became a murderer, then finally ended up cannibalism, and getting hung."
Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick was inspired by an actual incident.
The real-life Captain Ahab was a man named Captain George Pollard Jr., whom Melville
met after the publication of his book.
Pollard and his whaleship Essex set sail in 1819 on a two-and-a-half year trip that was
almost immediately beset by misfortune.
The ship's troubles culminated in a November 1820 incident when a whale caught sight of
the ship and rammed it, smashing a massive hole in the side.
The 20 men on board split up into three boats, but they didn't head for the nearest set of
islands, as they were convinced that the natives were cannibals.
So instead, they headed out into the open ocean, where their provisions quickly ran
out and they continued to be harassed by the whales they'd set out to hunt.
First Mate Owen Chase would later describe what happened to the first man to die, as
he wrote,
"[We] separated limbs from his body, and cut all the flesh from the bones; after which,
we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again — sewed it up as decently
as we could, and committed it to the sea."
The days dragged on, and the men ate others as they died.
When there were no dead men left, they drew straws: Pollard's nephew drew short, and he
was executed and eaten.
The men in Chase's boat were rescued after 89 days, while Pollard and one other survivor
were rescued a week after that.
"Three months in an open boat!"
"I mean, that's an entire summer."
"Yeah right."
In 1989, Daniel Rakowitz was looking for a new roommate in New York City.
As local squatter Jerry the Peddler recalled to The Village Voice,
"He was a classic nut.
He had all the symptoms: he had sudden fits of rage, he had delusions of grandeur, he
didn't like touching people, he had fantasy followers."
The new roommate ended up being a Swiss dancer named Monika Beerle.
Later, Rakowitz's former roommate Sylvia stopped by to get some of her things.
As Sylvia recounted to The Village Voice,
"I went to the kitchen.
And on the stove there was a pot.
And in the pot was Monika's head.
She was all burnt up, and her eyes were closed."
The rest of Beerle's remains were in the bathtub.
Rakowitz told Sylvia that he'd had no choice, and admitted that he'd eaten at least part
of her brain.
There were also other pieces of flesh that he'd stored in the freezer.
Even worse was that Rakowitz was known for collecting donations of food and cooking massive
meals for the homeless living in Tompkins Square, which is why it started circulating
that he'd slipped some human meat into the meals.
He was ultimately found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, and in 2004, another
jury determined that he was "mentally ill but not dangerous."
Upon the discovery of 15,000-year-old remains in Gough's Cave in Somerset, England in the
1980s, it was quickly determined that the bones belonged to individuals whose bodies
had been butchered and then eaten.
But it took a few more decades to unlock more of the secrets these ancient ancestors had
taken to the grave.
It wasn't until 2017 that analysts were able to show that some of the distinctive cut marks
weren't practical, but decorative.
That led researchers to conclude that this ancient group of hunter-gatherers had formal
rituals around their cannibalism.
A large percentage of the bones also featured bite marks, and over the years since the initial
discovery, more remains have been found.
In 2011, The Guardian reported on the discovery of three cups made from human skulls, including
one that came from a child who was about three years old.
There's another school of thinking that suggests that this cannibalism had a practical side
as well.
The bones have been dated to the last ice age, and the fact that they were butchered
using the same techniques revealed by patterns on animal bones has led to the conclusion
that regardless of the motives, cannibalism helped humans survive during that era.
"We recognize cut marks, percussion damage, and even- even tooth mark."
When European explorers started enslaving their way through the New World, their justifications
for doing so included rumors that the Indigenous peoples practiced cannibalism.
And therefore, the thinking went, they needed a firm European influence to change their
ways.
It's worth nothing, then, that the first recorded instance of cannibalism in the New World happened
among the Spanish explorers under Alvar Cabeza de Vaca.
Cabeza de Vaca's men traveled from Florida and ended up in what's now Galveston, Texas.
They called it the Island of Doom.
Five of the men became separated from the others, and they eventually resorted to eating
each other.
As Cabeza de Vaca wrote,
"The Indians were so shocked at this cannibalism that, if they had seen it sometime earlier,
they surely would have killed every one of us."
If the natives had done that, they might have lived.
The Spanish explorers carried diseases with them, and about half of the Indigenous people
who helped them survive this ordeal died themselves.
It's an oft-told tale that America was founded by people who were brave, adventure-seeking,
and unbelievably tough.
But somewhat lesser-known is how some of them resorted to cannibalism.
When the English first settled Jamestown in the Colony of Virginia in 1607, they were
woefully ill-prepared for life in the New World.
Starvation came quickly, and it wasn't long before they resorted to desperate measures.
George Percy was one settler who lived there during the period known as the Starving Time,
and he wrote in his journal about the practice of digging up corpses to eat.
His wasn't the only account of cannibalism in Jamestown, but it wasn't until an archaeological
dig in 1994 that actual physical evidence of the practice was discovered.
In 2013, National Geographic reported on the discovery of the remains of a 14-year-old
girl that were recovered from a trash pit dated to the Starving Time.
Researchers named her "Jane," and her skull and leg bones show distinct marks associated
with the butchering of animals for food.
They were able to determine that her face, tongue, and brain had been eaten.
It was also clear that the cut marks were hesitant, which indicates that they were made
by someone who didn't want to do what they were doing, but had no choice.
"Nothing to eat, so the monster of hunger is loose."
The idea of a Northwest Passage was a tantalizing one, and in 1845, Sir John Franklin and his
crew of 128 men on two ships set out to find it.
But then nobody saw any of them ever again.
The ships carried food that was meant to last up to seven years, as the crew fully expected
to be stuck along the way.
But by the spring of 1848, 24 people had died, and survivors decided to start walking to
safety.
The problem was that it was about 1,000 miles to the nearest trading post, with hardly any
food sources along the way.
In the years since, remains from the crew have been found, and a close study of the
bones confirmed that some bore evidence of cannibalism.
Specifically, they showed signs of something called "pot polishing," which happens when
bones are broken and boiled to extract the last of the marrow.
The findings support eyewitness accounts from Inuit travelers who reported seeing piles
of broken human bones that were boiled long after the meat was gone.