In 1874, the New York World published an astonishing article. Attributed to one Karl Leche, purportedly a German botanist of some renown, the paper told of a horror lurking on the remote island of Madagascar. It was not the island’s brutal politics (embodied by the late Queen Ranavalona, dubbed the “African Caligula” for her conquests of ethnic rivals, persecution of Christians and resistance towards European colonization) or eccentric animal life (from the ring-tailed lemur to the freaked-out aye aye) that caught then World‘s attention, but something wilder.

Leche, the article related, had traveled in Madagascar with a small party of colleagues and porters when they encountered the Mkodos, “a tribe of inhospitable savages of whom little was known.” The Mkodos led Leche and his party down a long road to “the most singular of trees.” Massive, shaped like “an inverted pineapple,” it oozed a “soporific and intoxicating” liquid. But Leche’s attention focused upon the very unnatural white palpi surrounding it: “Thin as reeds, and frail as quills apparently, they were yet five or six feet tall, and were so constantly and vigorously in motion, with such a subtle, sinuous, silent throbbing against the air, that they made me shudder in spite of myself with their suggestion of serpent flayed, yet dancing on their tails.”

In case this weren’t astonishing enough, Mkodos were happy to demonstrate for their European visitors the true wonders of this tree. They found a young woman and forced her at spear-point to climb the tree, drinking the liquid oozing from the trunk. The terrified woman obliged, only for the tendrils to wrap around her. As she screamed, the tendrils squeezed tighter and tighter until she strangled to death, then lowered her body into its gooey center. The resultant mixture of blood and plant sap was then consumed by the Mkodos, inspiring a “grotesque and indescribably hideous orgie.” Thus Dr. Leche discovered the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar.

One wonders if even readers of the World took this story seriously. During the Civil War, the World gained a reputation as a leading Copperhead newspaper, publishing vehement screeds in defense of slavery and attacking Abraham Lincoln. This peaked with the publication of a pamphlet, puportedly written by the Republican leadership but conjured by the World‘s staff, calling for enforced miscegenation of Black and White Americans. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, to see them peddling a tale of savage natives feeding a screaming maiden to a ravenous plant, apparently for the delectation of some curious Europeans. Especially in an era where newspapers habitually ran wild hoaxes about moon-bats, floods of horse manure and all manner of malarkey.

And while most hoaxes quickly faded, the Man-Eating Tree took on a life of its own. With a few months of the original article, The Garden Magazine ran a short feature excerpting from the World’s article as an astonishing scientific discovery. Other newspapers, periodicals and even a few specialist publications around the world repeated the story as fact, with one even offering a $10,000 reward for proof of the tree’s existence. Perhaps it didn’t seem too difficult, in the era of dramatic (and often dramatized) narratives of African exploration, and in a world where Venus fly traps, pitcher plants and other carnivorous plants do exist, for some credulous readers to accept it as, if not concrete fact, then at least a chilling possibility.

More discerning publications did assume it was a hoax. In 1888, fourteen years after its original publication, the periodical Current Literature published a short notice identifying the story as the work of Edward Spencer, a freelance journalist who occasionally contributed pieces to the World. Spencer, the article asserted, was “a master of the horrible” whose writings were remarkable “for their appearance of truth, the extraordinary imagination displayed, and for their somber tone.” Another researcher determined that the Carl Leche cited in the article never existed; he, too, was the work of fiction. And the Mkoda tribe? To no one’s surprise, they did not exist either.

But Current Literature wasn’t read as widely as the New York World, which became a mass circulation paper under the aegis of Joseph Pulitzer in the 1880s. So a succession of hapless explorers and travel writers ventured into Madagascar, by now a French colony, in search of the dread plant. American travel writer Frank Vincent, after a fruitless search in the 1890s, asserted that the plant was “purest Munchausenism.” Anthropologist Ralph Linton and British scientist de la Motte Hurst organized unsuccessful expeditions in search of the plant, finding only secondhand accounts that the tree lurked elsewhere on the island. Even as reputable a source as Chase Salmon Osborn, a journalist, political reformer and briefly Governor of Michigan (1911-1913), published a book entitled The Man-eating Tree of Madagascar in 1924. Though Osborn, at least, admitted that “it is enough for my purpose if its story focuses your interest upon one of the least known spots of the world.”

Perhaps the best testament to the hoax’s impact was a succession of literature it inspired. Other, even less credible reports filtered out about the “Vampire Vine of Nicaragua,” which supposedly sucked the blood from its victims, or legend of the Yataveo (I see you) plant which supposedly terrorized South America; no one, it appears, took these tales seriously. Ron Sullivan and Joe Eaton note that, fallacious though it was, the Madagascar story “seems to have been the progenitor of a whole literary dynasty of sinister plants: H.G. Wells’ Strange Orchid (it stupefied its victims with perfume and sucked their blood with its tendrils); John Wyndham‘s peripatetic Triffids; the Widow’s Weed in Gus Arriola‘s “Gordo” comic strip; and, not least, Audrey II of “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Today one’s hard-pressed to find anyone who actually believes in the Man-Eating Tree, aside from especially crankish cryptozoologists like Roy P. Mackal. But the story still slithers half-remembered in our subconscious, a reflection of cultural fears about “Darkest Africa” and a representation of Nature turned upside down. How many horror movies, shows and cartoons still feature characters gobbled by vicious plants? And how many of us remained fascinated by their less fearsome, but much more real cousins like the Madagascar pitcher plant? Either way, next time you’re munching on a salad, reflect that it might be eating you.