Hello everyone and welcome to Scary Interesting.
Although there are some among us that enjoy solitude more than others,
humans are undoubtedly social animals.
Occasionally, however, by some unfortunate circumstance,
people have found themselves cut off from the rest of humanity for long periods of time in extreme isolation
that no one would choose if not for the fact that it was forced upon them.
So today's video is going to feature three horrible fates that are directly related to the extreme isolation of the people in each story.
The final story has an incredible twist that is both horrifying and hard to wrap your mind around.
With all of that said, viewer discretion is advised.
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Following Uganda's independence from the United Kingdom in 1962,
a man named Milton Obote was elected as president.
Unfortunately, under his rule, the country experienced a decline in the standard of living,
corruption, factional violence, and the persecution of various distinct ethnic groups.
Sensing the tension among opposing groups,
Obote arranged for a purge of the opposition while he was out of the country.
But by then, it was too late.
Obote was overthrown in a military coup that put the infamous and brutal despot Idi Amin into power.
Several years later, following the overthrow of Idi Amin at the end of his brutal reign,
the Ugandan people engaged in the civil war from 1980 to 1986
that would prove to be even more deadly for the Ugandan people.
It's estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed in the subsequent turmoil.
Sometime during the 1980s, right in the middle of the conflict,
John Ssebunnya was born in the small town of Kabongo.
Not much is known about his childhood, other than the fact that his father was violent and aggressive
and participated in the armed conflict of the civil war as part of the rebel forces.
When John was about three years old, his father brutally murdered his mother in front of him.
It's unclear whether John ran off during the attack out of fear, or was abandoned by his father following the attack
but what is known is that John was not seen again for a long time.
About three years later, a woman was in the area looking for firewood when she came across a small pack of monkeys.
As she was watching them, she noticed that there seemed to be something wrong with one of them because it had no tail.
When she looked closer, she was shocked to realize that it was actually an oddly hairy child
that had long hair covering his face and body.
Following her discovery, she immediately went back to tell the people of her village
and then a group of them returned to where John was spotted to rescue him.
But when they found him and tried to take him, he and the monkeys attacked the village people,
throwing stones and sticks and tried to scare them away.
They eventually did manage to rescue John and bring him back to the village
where he was found to be in really poor condition, suffering from extreme malnutrition.
Even the food that they fed to him wasn't tolerated by his body initially
and resulted in severe stomach issues for several days.
They also found that he was infected by tapeworms that were several feet in length.
John was soon adopted by the director of an orphanage who spent the next couple of years teaching John to walk and talk again.
When he was finally old enough and fluent enough, he was finally able to explain to them what had happened to him.
After John found himself alone in the jungle, a colony of Green monkeys found him and gave him bananas and sweet potatoes.
Over time, he learned their gestures and sounds and even their mannerisms.
For a time after he was found, he avoided direct eye contact and greeted people sideways, which is characteristic for non-human primates.
And although the monkeys probably saved his life, it's likely that he wouldn't have survived much longer in the wild
based on the condition that he was in when he was found.
His body was covered in scars and scratches,
his knees were white and rough from walking on them, and the malnutrition would've eventually been fatal.
The hair that had grown all of his body didn't grow back after it was shaved
and this is actually a common characteristic of feral children.
Despite everything, John did make an exceptional recovery.
His delayed development did lead to some permanent mental and physical impairments,
but that didn't stop him from eventually competing in the Special Olympics as the captain of Uganda's soccer team.
He now lives not far from his childhood home in Uganda.
Off of the coast of Southern California in the Pacific Ocean is an eight-island archipelago known as the Channel Islands.
These islands are actually an extension of the mountain ranges that run inland from the coast, surrounding the Greater Los Angeles area.
With a total area of only 346 square miles (896 sq km) between all eight of them,
several unique plants and animals endemic to the islands are not found anywhere else in North America.
Today, five of these islands are part of the Channel Islands National Park.
Two are controlled by the us Navy and the final is more developed and has significant human habitation.
Before European settlement in the 1800s,
these islands were inhabited by the Chumash and Tongva Native Americans who descended from the original populations
that arrived over 13,000 years ago.
This migration is thought to be one of the earliest in North American history.
In the early 1800, a girl was born in one of the Channel Islands known as San Nicolas and was part of the indigenous tribe known as the Nicoleños.
At the time of her birth, each island was inhabited by a different native group with its own distinct language and culture.
And all of the different groups engaged in trade by boat to acquire resources that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
San Nicolas in particular is a small barren island with few natural resources to sustain a population.
At only 22 square miles (57 sq km), it doesn't have any trees, it has just three species of endemic land vertebrates
and not many other plants either.
Despite that, at the time of the girl's birth, there was a population of around 300 Nicoleños living on the island.
These people were sustained by the large population of birds
and rich seal and otter populations that frequented the island.
Sometime between the years of 1811 and 1812,
Native Alaskan and Russian otter hunters visited the islang, looking to profit off of the sea otters on the island.
Conflict quickly arose between the hunters and the natives and the Nicoleños were massacred by the hunters.
The men were killed, the women were assaulted and the sea otter population was decimated
and the tribe was reduced to just dozens of people in a few short years.
By 1835, there were only around 20 Nicoleños left on the island.
That year, Catholic missionaries arrived on the island and convinced the remaining natives to leave the island and migrate to the mainland.
They promised them better living conditions, better food, and just generally better life than what they were living on the barren San Nicolas.
The natives agreed to go and so they were all brought onto the beach before boarding a ship.
While they were preparing to leave, a storm was approaching in the distance so everyone was hurried onto the ship.
Somehow, that same woman who was just a child when her people were massacred was missing from the group.
But before they could get out and search for her, the crew and captain pulled up the anchor to leave
because they didn't want the storm to smash the boat into the rocks along the coast of the island,
leaving the woman alone on the island indefinitely.
Following their migration, no efforts were made to retrieve the woman for almost 20 years.
Until finally, a Roman Catholic friar funded an expedition to retrieve her.
Unfortunately, that expedition was not able to locate the woman either, and so she remained isolated on the island of San Nicolas.
Years later, in 1853, the man initially paid to retrieve the woman communicated his efforts to a local trapper.
The trapper was enthralled by the man's story and decided to make his own trips to the island
to see if he could find the elusive woman.
Finally, on his third attempt in the fall of 1853,
one of his crewmen found human footprints on the beach.
After following the footprints, they found seal blubber that had been left out to dry
and then shortly after that, they found a woman hiding near the hut that she had lived in alone for almost 20 years.
The woman wore skirt made of cormorant feathers and the hut that she lived in was made of whale bones.
Despite the woman and the trappers not understanding each other, the woman seemed quite happy to have company.
The trappers spent the next couple of weeks on the island living with the woman
where she showed them her daily life.
She helped them hunt seals and wild ducks, she sang to them and sewed clothing
as she had done in complete isolation for the last 18 years.
When they were leaving, they managed to communicate with her enough to ask if she would join them back in Santa Barbara.
Not only was the woman willing, she actually seemed excited to go back with them.
When they arrived in port, she was ecstatic.
She was fascinated by the horses, the food and the clothing that she'd never seen before.
She went on to live with a trapper for a few weeks where he described her as roughly around the age of 50,
but still strong and active and almost continuously smiling.
When the people of the city came to visit her,
she was always happy to meet them and sang and dance them as seemed to be custom in her culture.
The only problem was that no one could understand her.
She was the last of her people that could be located, so the mystery of her circumstances could never be communicated.
The locals contacted some of the migrants from other islands that lived in the area,
but unfortunately, the dialect was too different as they weren't able to understand her either.
Then, tragically after only seven weeks on the mainland,
the woman died of dysentery that she had no immunity to fight.
Before her death, she was baptized with the Spanish name Juana Maria.
Unfortunately, her real name is not known, so Juan Maria is the name she's remembered by.
Now, this is the version of events that's circulated for years.
And there are many slight variations to the events that have been told.
However, a paper published in 2016 tells a slightly different and potentially even more tragic version of the woman's story.
Supposedly, the new evidence suggests the woman was actually able to communicate with three or four of the migrants
well enough to tell her story.
Apparently, the woman stayed on the island because she stayed behind to care for her young son.
The two of them lived on the island for years,
living as her people had done until one day, when the boy was out fishing, his boat capsized and he died in the water.
He might have drowned, or he might have been killed in a shark attack
but unfortunately, those details are just not known.
And so, as with her name, some of the pieces of her story are simply lost to time
along with the rest of her people and her culture.
One day, a boy was born in a medium-sized city of around 50,000 people.
The city he was born into was on the southern tip of a large island with gorgeous weather.
The summers were warm but not humid, and although the winters got cool,
they rarely dropped below freezing and got little to no snow.
When the boy was 17, he traveled to another country to work for a trading company
and then when he was 18, he listed in his country's infantry.
This was a great moment for him and his family, because his country had a strong honor culture that emphasized duty and loyalty.
While the boy was trained as an intelligence officer in the commando unit for his country,
a massive war had broken out that his country was a part of.
At 20 years old, the man was sent to another island nearby to help what the war effort.
When he arrived at the island, his orders were to do everything he could to sabotage the enemy
and hamper their attacks and defenses.
If that meant destroying airstrips, he would destroy airstrips.
If that meant destroying harbors, he would destroy harbors.
The one thing that he wouldn't do is surrender under any circumstances.
Both from a personal standpoint for the honor of his family and from a military standpoint,
he knew to take his own life before he ever thought of surrendering.
Not only was surrender extremely dishonorable, the enemy they were fighting was completely evil.
If you were caught, you'd be tortured, they'd trick you and lie to you and even extract information about your family
and then your family would be tortured as well.
Shortly after being deployed to the island, the man joined the rest of his countrymen's station there.
Unfortunately, the man he was with outranked him and gave him orders that prevented him from carrying out the missions as his command had intended.
Shortly after that, the enemy invaded the island with a brutal attack
and all but the man and three of his countrymen had either died or surrendered.
With all of their deaths, the man was now the highest-ranking officer and ordered the others into the hills of the island to regroup and find cover.
For the next little while, the four of them lived in the mountains and carried out special operations,
sabotaging the enemy in any way they could.
They attacked storehouses, they engaged in shootouts with the local forces
and just generally caused chaos wherever they went.
About a year after they arrived in the island, one of the soldiers had just killed a cow for food
and happened on a leaflet that seemed to say that their country had surrendered to the enemy forces.
More specifically, the leaflet read, "War ended August 15th. Come down from the mountains."
The four soldiers studied the leaflet closely and concluded that it had to be an enemy trick.
Not only were they dealing with a cunning and subversive enemy,
their homelands definitely would not have surrendered under any circumstances.
Reinforcing this idea was the fact that they still had been fired on by the local population.
This wouldn't have happened if the war had been over like the leaflet said.
So the men carried on as they had been, helping out with the war effort as they could.
And then at the end of the year, leaflets were dropped by a plane into the mountains.
These leaflets had generals in their country's army, compelling the remaining forces to come out of hiding
and even had a surrender order printed on them.
This only further cemented the idea that this was an enemy trick in the soldier's minds
so they ignored them entirely and continued their fight.
Four years later, after spending five years total running and hiding and living in the dense mountain forest of the island,
one of the soldiers finally couldn't take it anymore.
He left the other three and surrendered to the enemy forces.
The others had no idea what horrible fate had befallen their countrymen
and not only that, he could have been divulging information about their whereabouts.
This made the soldiers even more cautious and forced them further into the mountains on their mission.
Three years after that, the enemy even dropped letters and pictures of the men's families from planes, again, urging them to surrender.
But by this point in the war, the men distrusted anything and everything that they found.
A year after the letters and pictures were dropped, the battles with the locals got increasingly tense.
One of the soldiers was even shot and injured badly in a shootout, and it took him months to recover fully.
Not long after that incident, that same soldier was shot and killed in another firefight with the local forces,
bringing the remaining group to just two men.
Just the man and one other soldier.
Despite that, the soldiers continued running and fighting as they had been,
unwavering in their resolve.
And they would do this for another 18 years, living off the land in what they could steal from the local forces.
Until one day, another one of the soldiers was killed.
As the two of them burned down a rice field,
they were fired on by the local forces and two bullets killed the man's final remaining soldier,
leaving him to continue fighting the war alone.
The man continued fighting for another two years, alone in the forest, in the mountains,
until one day, he was greeted by another one of his countrymen.
The countryman seemed to be some sort of hippie-type and over the next little while, the two of them became friends.
And eventually, the hippie asked the man why he wouldn't come down from the mountains.
The man replied that he was waiting for a superior officer to come and give him his next orders.
With that the, hippie man said okay and then left the man to continue fighting his war.
About a month later, the man received another visitor.
Incredibly, it was the man's commanding officer -- Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.
The commanding officer greeted Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda
and informed him that the war was over and he was officially relieved of duty.
Hiroo Onoda was born on March 19th, 1922 in Kamekawa Village, Japan.
At 18, he enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army.
And at 20, as part of the ongoing operations in the Pacific Theater in World War II,
he was sent to Lubang island in the Philippines.
The year after, that in 1945,
the Japanese surrendered to the allied forces following the dropping of the atomic bombs.
The leaflet the soldiers found was real.
The leaflets dropped from the planes were real.
The letters and pictures of their families were real.
The enemies they were fighting were the peaceful local people of Lubang.
In 1974, 30 years after Onoda was deployed,
the hippie who had come to find him was a Japanese explorer and adventure who had heard rumors of soldiers
who continued to fight decades later.
Onoda had voluntarily fought in World War II for the Japanese Imperial Army for 30 years --
29 years after the war officially ended.
When he finally surrendered, he turned over his sword, a functioning rifle,
500 rounds of ammunition,
several hand grenades, and a dagger given to him by his own mother
30 years earlier that he could have used to kill himself if he was captured.
Incredibly, Onoda was not the last member of the Japanese Imperial Army to surrender.
At the end of the same year that Onoda surrendered,
another man was arrested in Indonesia, who was another holdout who had been fighting for over three decades.
There are at least 12 known cases of Japanese holdouts that surrendered or were relieved
years after the official end of World War II.
Each of them either doubted the reports that were sent out or were simply cut off from communication with the rest of the world.
Contributing to their circumstances was the immensely powerful honor culture
and military propaganda unique to the Japanese during that time period.
In the years, following Onoda returned to Japan and wrote a book called No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War.
He went on to live part-time in Brazil, where he took up cattle farming with his older brother
and he finally passed away in 2014 at the age of 91.
If you made it this far, I just want to thank you for watching.
My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting.
This is part seven of my Collection of Horrible Fate series, so you may wanna check out the other videos in the series.
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Once again, thank you so much for watching and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.