Killer Tree of the Cameroons

Apparently, 12 men had been found dead at the base of that tree within a period of 50 years, and for centuries the African tribesmen had treated that particular stretch of forest as taboo.

The origins of the legend were based on a tribal priest about 80 years earlier, a man named Ubo, who suddenly went berserk and started a campaign of terror in the region. Many people were waylaid by him and strangled to death for no reason at all.

At last the warriors set out to hunt the killer down. They trapped Ubo beneath the tree one evening during a thunderstorm. As they closed in for the kill, there was a flash of lightning. The tree was struck, and so was Ubo, who had been standing with his back to the trunk. When the tribesmen recovered his body, they found that both his hands had been sliced off at the wrists by the lightning. Yet the warriors couldn't find the missing hands anywhere.

It was soon after that, according to the missionary, that the tree started to gain the reputation of being a "strangler" tree.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Less than six months after the death of Mike Cura, a boy from the mission school staggered into Iloku to gasp out an incredible story to the police. The missionary had been killed by the tree—right before the boy's own eyes.

The boy had gone with the missionary to chop down the tree and destroy it once and for all. But they hadn't arrived there until late evening, and while the boy started a camp, the missionary approached the tree with an ax.

Even before the blade hit into the tree trunk, the boy heard the missionary scream in terror. He turned just in time to see thick branches wrapping themselves around the man's body.

The police inspector who went to investigate found the dead missionary hanging limply in a fork in the tree trunk. By then it was morning and the tree seemed nothing more than just a dead tree.

However, the inspector and his patrol had instructions to destroy it—which they did. With a loud groan, the mighty trunk crashed to the ground. Then it was chopped and sawed into logs that were piled in a heap to be burned.

Before this could happen, a strange and gruesome discovery was made. As one of the soldiers split a log, he found two human, skeleton hands trapped within the wood. Both hands had been severed at the wrists.