Hello everyone. Welcome to Scary Interesting and welcome to another Collection of Horrible Fates.
The stories you're about to hear are strange and disturbing even for this series.
So as always, viewer discretion is advised.
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Ever since I made the video about the Pannikin Plains Cave in the Australian Outback,
I've been thinking more and more about the swaths of uninhabited land on the continent.
In Canada, we have sort of a similar situation.
A large portion of the Canadian North is uninhabited, simply because it's essentially inhospitable.
It's a dry desert tundra that's just cold instead of hot like the Australian Outback.
Now, in thinking about this, I started to wonder about the crocodile populations in Australia
and how far their range extended.
It seemed unlikely that they could survive in the desert,
but maybe they would line the coast the entire way around.
I was surprised to learn that they actually only inhabit the northern edge of the continent.
But in that area, there are as many as 100,000 saltwater crocodiles
and a further 100,000 freshwater crocodiles.
Most rivers in the north of the country have an average of five crocodiles for every kilometer of river,
but the Mary River has as many as 15 per kilometer.
The larger and more aggressive saltwater crocodiles are up to 7 meters or 23 feet long,
and despite it being sparsely populated in the north,
crocodiles kill one to two people annually in Australia on average.
Part of the reason for this is that crocodiles are incredibly patient and stealthy predators.
Supposedly, some campsites even strictly forbid camping in one spot for more than three days
because the crocodiles have been known to learn the patterns of campers, making them easier to hunt.
The same goes for filling up water in rivers.
Best practice is to always refill at a different spot each time so that crocodiles won't wait for you in the water.
Several years ago, a man named Charlie was living solo in the Australian Outback
on a property that he had spent building over the course of a decade.
This property was his own perfect hideaway in the water.
It was in a beautiful little bay, and it was completely isolated from the outside world.
It was so isolated, in fact, that he had to have a buddy come and pick him up
every four or five months so that he could go into the city to get supplies.
Before one of these supply runs, Charlie called his buddy and asked him if he could bring him a gun
or a crossbow, or some sort of weapon, because there was a massive crocodile
that was stalking him every day.
Every time he went fishing, the crocodile was there.
Anytime he was even within 20 meters of the water, day or night,
he could see the glimmering yellow eyes of the crocodile.
So a couple of months go by and Charlie arranges for his buddy to come in
so that the two of them can do a supply run like usual.
On the day that they arranged, his buddy pulled in just like he did every time,
but Charlie didn't come out to meet him.
So his buddy went looking for Charlie all over his property, but he couldn't find him anywhere.
Eventually, he walked back down to the water and found an open beer half-finished,
a knife, a fishing pole, and a fish net still in the water.
It looked as though Charlie had just been there doing some fishing.
But from that day onward, no one ever saw Charlie again.
It seems as though Charlie's fears may have been justified.
Throughout history, the amount of political power given to the Emperor of Japan
has varied from a ceremonial symbolic role to that of an actual imperial ruler.
For almost 800 years, other political figures were the de facto rulers until 1867
when there was a restoration of power to the emperor, giving him significant political power once again.
This would continue for another three generations of emperors
until two years following World War II when Emperor Shōwa was pressured into renouncing his divinity
and returning the emperor to a ceremonial status once again.
He would rule all the way from 1926 to January of 1989 when he passed away due to complications from cancer
which was the longest in Japanese history.
And he's likely to be the last Japanese emperor to hold significant political power as he did.
A state funeral was held for him on Friday, February 24th, 1989 following his death,
and workers across the country were given the day off to commemorate his reign.
This included a 23-year-old schoolteacher who taught in the village of Miyakoji near Fukushima.
In this small mountain village, the schoolteacher lived in a dorm during the week when she was teaching
and returned home on holidays and long weekends when she wasn't.
Following the long weekend, she returned to school and went about her business as usual,
and then on the evening of Tuesday the 28th, at around 5:00 PM,
the teacher finished up her work in the classroom
and briskly walked through the winter cold back to her dorm.
After arriving back at her dorm, she went to use the washroom,
which was just a single room attached to her room.
Now, although not common in the west, squat toilets are still prevalent worldwide,
especially in rural areas and non-developed countries.
These typically have an opening that you squat over with a septic tank underneath.
Then, there's another opening on the other side of the tank leading outside
that's accessible to be pumped out regularly just like a normal septic tank.
The toilet attached to her dorm happened to be one of these squatting toilets,
and when she went to use it this time, she happened to look down and saw a shoe at the bottom of the tank.
This immediately freaked her out because she was the only one to have access to that washroom,
so she went outside to check the pipe leading out of the tank.
When she opened the lid, she screamed and ran off to call someone for help
because there was a leg visible in the human waste in the septic tank.
One of her colleagues called the police and police quickly identified that it was a man
who was either deceased or unconscious.
Looking into the pipe, they could see that he was lying on his back,
his knees were up by his chest, he was shirtless, and he was hugging his neatly folded shirt.
He was also barefoot, but only one of his shoes was found inside the tank.
It was resting up against his head almost directly underneath the opening of the toilet portion of the tank.
This meant that his line of sight was almost directly underneath the toilet opening.
If all of this wasn't already weird enough, police couldn't get him out without breaking the toilet
because the opening leading in from the washroom was just 8 inches (20.3 cm) across.
While the opening leading out was just a round pipe that measured 14 inches (35.6 cm) across.
Firefighters had to be called to excavate the pipe from the ground,
and then it even had to be cut open from there.
After they finally got him out, it was clear that the man was dead and the body was almost frozen solid.
The body then had to be washed thoroughly of waste twice before an autopsy could be performed.
Hopefully, this might give them some answers for what had happened to him.
Except the autopsy revealed that there were essentially no signs of injury other than a few small scratches.
His cause of death was determined to be hypothermia,
and he had been dead since approximately February 26th, which was on Sunday.
The man was also identified as a 26-year-old local man
who oversaw safety at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
In the town, this man was well respected, he emceed at weddings, he worked in youth programs -
none of it made any sense.
The last person to have seen him was his father on Friday when the man told his father
that he was going to run some errands and then he just never came back.
Given his status in the town and the weird circumstances under which he died,
people were outraged when the police ruled that the man was trying to peep on the school teacher
and had accidentally died of hypothermia in the process.
The man's father even went as far as to try to reenact a person squeezing through the 14-inch-wide septic pipe
but he found that it was impossible.
At the time, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry,
Japanese men of his age had an average shoulder width of around 16 inches (40.6 cm) across.
So the pipe was two inches (5.1 cm) narrower than the average shoulder width.
And not only was the pipe an impossible fit, it was filled with human waste.
Why would anyone willingly squeeze into something like that in the middle of winter?
There were eight inches of snow on the ground and the man was found shirtless and barefoot.
But as it turns out, the teacher and the man were actually well-acquainted.
The man was a good friend of her boyfriend, and so he had gotten to know the teacher as a result.
Not only that, but the teacher had recently been harassed by phone calls.
The man had even helped the couple set up a recording device that they could bring evidence to the police.
He even went as far as to give a statement to police to help in any way he could.
He also would've known her schedule as a result of their friendship.
People have speculated that it may have simply been a case of the man trying to peep on the teacher
and it accidentally resulted in his death.
His car was found on scene and the key was in the ignition with no other signs of foul play.
Although the pipe was small, the man may have been able to force himself in
by squishing his shoulders together.
This is reinforced by the fact that he had no other damage to his body,
which would've been the case if someone forcefully jammed him in.
It also would've been impossible for someone to have entered after him
and contorted his body into the position that was he found because of how small the septic tank was.
So the leading theory is that despite however respectable the man may have seemed,
he had actually tried to peep on the school teacher.
But then, by either falling asleep accidentally or going asleep intentionally,
he just never woke up due to the temperature inside of the septic tank.
The earliest European travel to the African continent started in the early 1400s
and expeditions would continue for centuries for various reasons.
Many of the expeditions were colonial in nature,
attempting to acquire new lands for Europe from the already established people.
Many were resource-oriented, taking advantage of the vast potential of the second-largest continent on Earth,
and some were ostensibly innocuous, looking to explore some of the most remote and isolated areas on Earth.
One of the last major expeditions to the African continent was the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition
that sought to bring aid to Governor Emin Pasha
after a revolt had pushed him and his forces to Wadelai near Lake Albert
which is modernday Northern Uganda.
The expedition would have some additional secondary goals to bring back significant amounts of ivory
and to make a route through what was then called the darkest parts of Africa,
which was a reference to some of the most challenging and unknown areas of the forest
of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Starting in late 1886, the plan was to sail to Cairo, Egypt,
then to Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania to hire porters.
Then, they would sail around the cape of South Africa up the west coast to the mouth of the Congo River.
The Congo River would then take them all the way to the continent's interior, just short of their destination.
This ambitious expedition was gonna be the largest and best-equipped of any previously undertaken.
They used a 28-foot (8.5 m) steel boat named the Advance that could be divided into 12 sections
and carried over land when they needed to make land crossings.
They brought the latest and greatest maxim guns to minimize any trouble that they would have with the natives
and the expedition lead, Henry Morton Stanley,
along with handpicking officers based on their skill and experience,
had already pioneered the first European trans-African crossing in 1876.
One of the officers he chose was James Sligo Jameson - grandson of the founder of Jameson Whiskey
who was a big game hunter, artist and traveler who had already traveled
to some parts of Africa before.
Most of the European company arrived in Zanzibar on February 22nd, 1887,
and spent three days loading supplies.
Then, they spent the next month sailing around the continent
and finally arrived in Banana at the mouth of the Congo on March 18th.
Steamers fared tons of equipment up the largest sections of the Congo,
and the first leg of the trip was fairly uneventful.
This would continue for about a month until the more difficult sections and the infamous Ituri Forest.
Now, to expand on the phrase "the darkest parts of Africa",
this was meant in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
After the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin in Central Africa
is the largest area of rainforest anywhere on Earth.
And the Ituri Forest is so dense and the trees are so tall and thick
that light hardly reaches the forest floor.
This means that not only is it literally dark in the daytime, travel is incredibly difficult through that area,
and it just wasn't well understood or mapped by outside observers until relatively recently.
In addition to all of that, the people who are indigenous to these areas
have lived there since the dawn of humanity.
There are hundreds of ethnic groups that represent the greatest genetic diversity anywhere on Earth,
far from the homogenous grouping typically associated with skin color.
All of these diverse groups have their own distinct language and culture.
And on May 11th, 1888, James Jameson came into contact with one of these native groups.
The expedition was camped in the village of Lokandu along the river
and that day, Jameson and some others took a long walk along the outskirts of the village.
The area was fairly hilly, and in between sections of the forest, there were small clearings
where you could see streams running through the hills.
After exploring a little bit, they walked through some of the rows of houses to
the old chief's house to talk with him.
As they spoke to him, a band of four drummers arrived.
They each had three pedestal-shaped side drums that they played,
and their heads and their upper bodies were covered in a thick layer of white clay.
They also each wore a cornette of white feathers on their head and a waistband of fresh palm leaves
covering their upper thighs.
Following the drummers were three more individuals - one man and two women.
The women sang and the man held a spear in one hand.
The individuals were followed by another six men and six women who all clapped
and sang and danced in unison, creating a small performance for the chief.
Finally, a couple was led in. A man wearing a long white Arabic dress
with a headdress of red parrot feathers, and a woman who wore bright, colorful clothing.
The chief then gave them a gun and explained to Jameson that these were slaves of the Wacusu tribe.
They had been away for the last two months making medicine
because lots of their people had been dying recently.
Before the ceremony was over, Tippu Tip, a notorious ivory and slave trader
came in and spoke with Jameson as well.
He went on to explain that the Wacusu people have a sinister reputation.
He had previously fought alongside them, and after killing many enemy soldiers one evening,
the bodies were nowhere to be found the following morning.
They had disappeared because the Wacusu were supposedly terrible cannibals.
And just two Wacusu could eat a grown man in a single night.
Tippu Tip learned this the following day after he had sent someone to grab water from the nearby well.
The water that was brought back was all oily and tasted terrible,
so he went to the well to investigate and found a thick layer of yellow fat covering the water.
The Wacusu had taken the meat from all of the dead enemies
and brought it to the well to wash before they ate it, leaving behind much of the fat.
From that point onward, he had the Wacusu camp downstream of him.
Now, Jameson, being a non-native, was skeptical of this story.
These were always chalked up to nothing more than travelers' tales, or in other words, lies.
Tippu Tip then told Jameson to give him a bit of cloth and see.
Jameson, thinking this was just a ruse to get money out of him,
sent his assistant to get six handkerchiefs and gave them to Tippu.
What happened next would be the most horrifying thing Jameson would see in his entire life.
After the handkerchiefs were exchanged, a man came leading a girl by the wrist
who looked to be about 10 years old.
Before Jameson could even react. The man stabbed her twice in the chest
and she fell face-first onto the ground.
Three more of the Wacusu then descended on her and quickly dismembered her in front of the entire group.
Finally, once her head was removed and there was nothing left of her,
the men each took a share of the meat and walked down to the river to wash it.
Jameson just sat there horrified, not realizing until the moment that she was stabbed
that this was not a joke, and that the rumors were in fact true.
Even more horrifying was that no one in the group seemed to be the least bit disturbed
by what they had witnessed. This was clearly not a surprise to anyone living in that area.
Following the incident, Jameson would write about it in his personal journal,
and the entire event comprised just two pages in a 455-page book.
The girl was supposedly a slave from a nearby village
and the handkerchiefs had served as payment for her for the Wacusu to do with as they wanted.
Much of their interactions were mediated by a translator,
and so it seemed as though the interaction was not clearly understood by both parties.
And as far as I can tell, there is no mention of the event beyond those two pages,
which in itself is an odd thing to think about.
From June onward, the expedition had an incredibly difficult time moving through the Ituri Forest.
The crossing was expected to take just two months, but took almost six instead.
They were shot at with poison arrows by the local Pygmy populations,
and lack of food was a consistent problem.
By the time they arrived at Lake Albert, only 169 of 389 who had started the crossing
were still with the group due to a combination of disease and desertion.
In fact, somewhere along that crossing, Jameson himself died from typhoid at just 31 years old.
What was left of the expedition finally reached the eastern shores
almost two years after the journey began in January of 1889.
Upon arriving back in Great Britain,
the expedition initially received public acclaim for its accomplishments.
It wasn't until later on that the true cost of the expedition was learned.
Not only had so many of its company died in the process,
but they had also introduced several foreign diseases to the continent that would rage for a decade afterward.
These factors would ultimately lead to this expedition being the last of its kind
that was not government-run or purely for scientific purposes.
If you made it this far, I just want to thank you watching.
My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting.
This is part eight 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.