The mystery of the Monkey Man

There was a very curious crime wave recently in India... a number of victims presented to the hospital with scratches and bites - like they'd been attacked by something. When questioned by police, they all described the perpetrator as a "Monkey Man". A short, half-monkey, half-man, dressed in a monkey-sized police uniform, and he was causing havoc. ABC Journalist Ann Jones has been looking into this Monkey Man for her new series, "Nature's Most Wanted". Check it out here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/what-the-duck/natures-most-wanted/106620406 Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

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  G'day, Matt Bevan here. When I was a kid, my family and I were touring around Germany and we went to the side of a lovely little lake and there were swans around and we started feeding the animals, which turns out there's a reason they put those signs up. One of the swans came over and started to attack my mother. I mean, I had my camera on me, so we have some fantastic photos of this swan pecking at my mother's chest. But the problem is that there's no real legal recourse against animals when they assault you on the side of a lake in Germany. But there are

• 1:25Speaker 03

  a lot of weird examples of animals interacting in some way with the law. Having a rabbit as a pet in Queensland, for instance, could lead to an $83,000 fine. In Las Vegas, it's illegal to ride a camel on a public road. In Japan, it's illegal to publicly display a cat or dog after 10pm. So today we're going to take a look at another example of these animal crimes and that is the monkeys of India and the wave of crimes that they have committed. Dr Anne Jones has been investigating these monkey criminals for Nature's Most Wanted, a series from her podcast, What the Duck. Hi Anne.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Hello, I have been.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  I've been investigating all sorts of things and I take issue with something you said. Because there can be legal recourse. In fact, there was a bloke who was a beekeeper who took a bear to court for damages because the bear kept on breaking his beehive and he won. Not the bear, the bear didn't turn up to court, couldn't get a suit that fit.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Okay, now I have questions about this bear lawsuit. But yes, let's talk about monkeys in India. Now, a lot of people will have encountered monkeys at some point during their travels through parts of Asia. What can you tell us about the criminal monkeys of India?

• 2:51Speaker 04

  They're known to be cheeky, obviously, but they do all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't really expect of them. For example, they're responsible for the stoppages in the rollout of high-speed broadband.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  What?

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Because they keep on eating the fibre optic cables.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I wouldn't recommend that. They're made of glass, aren't they?

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, I think they're quite explorative and one of the ways in which they explore the world is with their mouth. But they also have done things like invade parliament and this is a really big issue. They've even breached the parliamentary building and got in to the members-only parts of the building to such an extent that they've had to do all sorts of crazy strategies to try and make sure that the macaques don't get in. And then you might have seen those videos on the internet where the langurs, now this is like a longer monkey, sort of like a more stretched, longer armed monkey than the macaque.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  A long monkey, okay, yep.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  They're the ones that, you probably would have seen a video where basically someone will be riding a bicycle along and then out of nowhere, they will just get like absolutely karate kicked in the back of the head by a monkey who then proceeds to just keep running and run away. So all sorts of things, including murder, Matt. Murder. They murdered, apparently, one of Delhi's deputy mayors. This is a while back. This is in 2007. Mr Bajwa was killed in a monkey incident when he tried to shoo them away from his balcony and while he was doing it, he stepped backwards and stepped off the balcony, falling to ultimately his death. So yeah,

• 4:35Speaker 04

  monkeys are up to all sorts of no good in India.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Surely that's not murder though? That's got to be monkey slaughter presumably.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, probably something like that, you know. They've also learnt how to steal stuff, not just anything and not just food. They've learnt to steal things of very high value, not to them, to humans, and then sell it back to the humans. So they'll take mobile phones, they'll take your glasses and then barter with you to give them back.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  The monkeys are ransoming things, okay.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  I know, right? Despite this, they are still revered and protected somewhat by the local Indian population.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Anne, I've had people giving us feedback on these episodes that I giggle too much.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  I was thinking, you know, maybe I could cut back on the giggling, but then now we've got monkey murders going. I don't think it's going to happen this week.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  You're not going to be able to with this.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so, so they're revered. So these monkeys aren't punished for their misdeeds and crimes?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  No, strangely not. Because when you think about when interactions of a violent sort especially happen with animals in Australia, there's often a retribution style response. So that might be the culling of the dingos or the culling of sharks. But in India, it's almost an entirely peaceful response, even against, say, for example, elephants. They have wild elephants there and the elephants will like literally break walls down of houses in the middle of the night and get in to drink their bootleg alcohol. And they still won't want to kill the elephants, even though the elephants might be trampling their family or,

• 6:14Speaker 04

  you know, macaques steal crops. This is directly impacting people's livelihood and they still don't want to kill the macaques. And this is partially religious, right? Because there's heaps of different religions, but across the different religions, animals in general are revered and they often are thought of as incarnations of gods, to the point, right, where in some areas where the monkey menace has become so great, the government would put out a call. They wanted people, they'll pay them to cull monkeys and they couldn't find anyone to do it. Or they say, bring monkeys to us and we'll sterilise them. And people were even reticent to do that. They

• 6:57Speaker 04

  just do not want to interfere with the monkeys. So there's all of these stories that are told that are in folklore and movies. There's this one that I found where apparently a child who was secreted away into a warehouse by a man who had not very pure intent was saved by macaques, right? And these ideas, these storylines are sort of in line with the heroes and the anti-heroes of religion and folklore.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  There's so much going on there. And to ask you about, we could be talking about the monkey invasion of the Indian parliament, we could be talking about the monkeys that apparently rescued a kidnapped child. But we're going to be talking about the monkey man of Delhi specifically. How did you come across the monkey man?

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Well, I was researching all of those stories. Like, a lot of those stories come from, you know, fairly dubious media sources or their internet, their viral videos and things like that. And my job is to try and put the science behind this, right? So I was tracking down research into monkey behaviour and monkeys in India, monkeys up to no good, trawling through academic journals. And I came across this report from a forensic pathologist about a monkey man. And I knew there was going to be something, something big.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  When I saw that this was, we're going to be talking about a monkey man, I assumed that this was like a man who owns lots of monkeys. But we're talking about a, like a human monkey hybrid? What are we talking about here? What's going on? Explain to me. Tell me more.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're talking about some sort of monkey-human hybrid, right? So what happened? We're way back in 2001.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  In the context of monkey-human hybrids, 2001 is not way back. Like 350,000 BC is sort of what I was expecting.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  No, no. And this is the thing. This is why this story is like interesting and why I've given you all of that background, right?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  So we're in East Delhi in India and essentially two people reported getting attacked at night by a monkey man. Now, they described this thing as being about four feet tall, dark and very hairy, right? So there was a couple of reports that it wasn't a monkey, but it was a monkey man, something that was bigger and stronger and more menacing.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Four feet tall is, look, I'm not a monkey expert, but that's pretty largish for a monkey?

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  That's a hefty unit of a monkey, yeah, a big lad.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  That's a big one. Like, we're talking, you know, up to your belly button-ish. So these reports started trickling in and over the next two months, there were more and more and more of these attacks being reported.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  What kind of injuries were people suffering in these attacks? There are going to be clues as to whether this is a monkey or a man, based on if this is, you know, people being injured with some sort of an implement or a tool, then it's more likely to be on the man side of the spectrum. But if it's, you know, scratch marks and bites, then that's closer to monkey. So what are we talking about here?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  We have lots of scratches, a lot of them to the face and the arms, right? And also the fact that people reported that every time they tried to reach out and grab the monkey, it disappeared.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  It disappeared?

• 10:30Speaker 04

  So they'd get scratched and it'd disappear, right? There were bruises, knocks, falls. The police were receiving something like 30 distress calls each night and the descriptions of this monkey man like start to intensify as well. Apparently at one point, it's like, he had red glowing eyes and he was wearing roller skates.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Okay, what?

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And he could, he could jump 20 metres and he was wearing a helmet. And actually, I've got a photo to send you. Well, it's a depiction.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  That a police artist drew of the monkey man, the identikit monkey man.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  A police sketch, okay, right.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  You ready for this?

• 11:08Speaker 03

  I don't think that I am, but I'll look at it. All right. Oh, okay. There's two pictures here. One of them on the left looks like a pretty rudimentary child's drawing of a monkey, saying the police say the creature is four foot six inches and wears only a dark coat of hair. But on the other side, we have eyewitnesses say it is five foot six, wears black and a sports helmet with shining red eyes. Okay, the other person just sort of looks like a tiny little bikie.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  The one that's wearing the helmet, I think, looks like a monkey version of a village people person. It's a bike cop, right, but from an American movie. So, look, it builds and builds. There's media reports, all of these rumours are going around. And then by, you know, a couple of months in, there were two deaths that were blamed on the monkey man. There was one person who jumped to his death after his neighbour raised an alarm about a monkey man attack. And he panicked and literally jumped off the roof. And a pregnant woman who apparently fell and died while rushing out in a panic.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Right, so they weren't specifically murdered by the monkey man, it was accidental.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  And I can't confirm those deaths either, you know, like it's one of those things where what we're piecing together is a whole heap of media reports, of which they get just increasingly apocryphal, you know.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  I quite enjoy reading Indian media because the sensationalism is extraordinary. And these stories will often have like a reasonably surprising death toll.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  How, how were you able to go about figuring out what to trust and what not to trust?

• 12:54Speaker 04

  I don't know that anyone can tell that, actually.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  But I think that what we can do is I can tell you what the pathologists found and things like that.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  But before we even get there, we've got to talk about what the police did.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Apart from drawing cute little cartoons.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Apart from the drawing of the cute cartoons, they apparently set up a register for these monkey attacks to be listed. And apparently took on 3,000 men, recruited them to try and find this monkey man. And then as things escalated, right, a reward was offered for information. And it was heaps, it was like 50,000 rupee, which is like 750 bucks, like it's a lot of money. And then the government also offered compensation if you were a victim of the monkey man, right?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  That seems like a terrible idea.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  So, well, it's human behavioural complexity, right? Because it adds more information to people's idea of what is happening, right? And so there were people who are monkey experts saying, these are not animal attacks. They wouldn't enter a house without provocation, blah, blah, blah.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  They also wouldn't wear a helmet.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  The police, though, were like, no, dentists said that the bite marks are definitely a monkey man, right? That the bite marks belonged to some animal and not a human being.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, right, okay.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Lots of conflicting information. And I like that they went to a human dentist, like not someone who can actually identify monkey denture. But anyway, there's another bit that's important to this, and that is the context of what was happening in Delhi in general in this time.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  What year was this? This is 2001?

• 14:33Speaker 04

  2001, and it was late in summer and it was a huge heatwave. We're talking almost 40 degrees, sometimes above 40 degrees, for days and days and days on end in a really densely populated city. So the reports of the monkey man attacks often came from lower socio-economic areas, which were high density and also had poor access to things like electricity. So they don't necessarily have their windows closed. And they don't have their conditioning, so sometimes they would go upstairs and sleep on the roof at night,

• 15:17Speaker 04

  therefore exposing themselves to potential monkey man attacks, right?

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Everybody knows the roof, that's where the monkey man gets you.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  And the other thing is, is that power grid was completely overloaded in this heat. And there were widespread power outages, right? And there were 65 different places that this monkey man apparently turned up at. And there were 350 reports of monkey man sightings. There were only 60-ish injuries. And almost all of them were about, like you've already identified, tripping, falling, running away.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Running from the monkey man, yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Oh, there was some vigilante action, because there always is, right? As soon as there's some sort of story like this. And there were some very proud locals who said they caught the monkey man. And when the police arrived, they'd actually caught a dog. And there was a particularly hairy man who was riding his motorbike home from work. And he got besieged by a group of people who thought that he was the monkey man, you know. So it was one of these situations where it had a life of its own.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm ready for the solution here. What is this? What is this, this monkey man?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  So I spoke with the forensic pathologist, Professor Verma. And he was actually on duty at one of the hospitals in one of these east Delhi areas. And he found that as the injuries were coming in from these attacks, that they were almost all self-inflicted, they were a result of panic and not attack. And there was a pattern. They were mostly young men, they always happened at night. And they sort of grouped around the times when the power cut out. So the young men take the risk, sleep on the roof, it's boiling hot, they're restless, they've got a fan going.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  The power cuts out and they get up and stumble around and brain themselves on the stairs as they're going down. So there'd be like single scratches, not clawing from a monkey, you know. Like if you get an animal attack, it's a very messy sort of thing. It's not neat. It's not like one little fingey having a scratch on you, right? And then on top of that, they noticed that when they were talking to the victims about the attacks, they were sort of more excited in their mental state than they were traumatised. So this essentially came down to a mass psychosis.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Are you saying that there was no monkey man?

• 17:41Speaker 04

  There was no monkey man. This was a contagion of mental illness, right? So it was exacerbated by the heat and exacerbated by all of these social factors on top of what the government did. Because it was legitimised when the government set up a thing and said, yeah, report your attacks and we're going to put them on a register. Give us information and we're going to pay you. On top of that, when they said they were going to reward people who had been attacked, there were lots of bogus attacks that happened where people would smack themselves in the face and turn up at the hospital, hoping that they would get money, right? Because we're talking about people who need the money.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  So the government, the police, the media, all fed into this idea that this monkey man was true.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  But something must have started it.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  So it started with these two interactions, of which I have no further detail than what we can tell from the media. And what the media did immediately was go on about this monkey man. So it wasn't a monkey attack. What it possibly was, was some sort of interaction with a monkey on a rooftop in the dark, where, you know, the person then, in the heat and all of the worry, it just exacerbated outwards from there. But there were literally like hundreds and thousands of people who were affected by this monkey man idea.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  And there's also that thing with the spreading of it where, say, if you hear your neighbour saying, well, I saw the monkey man, you don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen the bloody monkey man, right? So you're gonna be like, yeah, oh yeah, I've seen the monkey man as well. It's an odd one, but not the only case of this sort of psychological contagion occurring.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Hmm. So what in this scenario, you know, you've got obviously mass panic. You've got lots of people thinking that there's a mythological creature accosting people on the rooftops at night time. What ended this psychosis? Was it just that it cooled down? Their brain just started working again in the, in the regular temperatures?

• 19:52Speaker 04

  I don't know that it ever cools down that much in Delhi, not by my standards anyway. But no, I think that what happened was when the forensic pathologists sort of got involved and they were actually able to say, well, actually this isn't even an animal, right? It doesn't have the right incisors to be a monkey. It doesn't have the right scratch marks to be a monkey man. And they came out and said, no, actually, this is not true. And the police had to release a statement. And as soon as those statements were released to the public, it dissipated.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Interesting. I mean, that's possibly an artefact of a simpler time when the police could say that something doesn't exist and people would believe it instead of going, oh, so the monkey man's got to you too?

• 20:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  The police are on the monkey man's payroll now. They're covering up the existence of the monkey man.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and you know how the internet is these days with the way that the websites work and they scrape from each other and the stories get bigger and bigger and bigger. There's a lot of things that are really very obviously untrue about this story that are out there. But you don't even need those untrue elements for this to be an absolutely wacky story, right? And you know that we are not immune to this sort of thing happening in Australia.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Monkey man attack.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Monkey man attack. No, you know that in 2005 at Melbourne Airport, 57 customs and security staff fell ill with mysterious sorts of symptoms, dizziness, nausea. They shut down the airport for eight hours. There were like 14,000 passengers that got stranded and millions of dollars in business costs went down the gurgle, right? And that's in Australia, that was at Melbourne Airport.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Oh, and they weren't really sick, is what we're saying.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  No, it was mass contagion again. So it was, you know, one person felt ill. And then all of a sudden, other people were smelling paint fumes and feeling dizzy and things like that. And it just sort of rolled on like that.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  It's interesting also the concept of seeing animals that obviously aren't there. You know, obviously the most famous example of this is the Loch Ness monster. But in so many different parts of the world, there is a mythological story about a, oh yes, that's right. The panther that lives at the base of the Blue Mountains, you know, everybody who lives in Penrith will eventually see the panther. I mean, it's sort of, to a certain extent, I think people just sort of want to believe in something fascinating and mysterious hiding in the reeds.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  When it's actually hiding in your head.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yes, when it's actually hiding in your head, yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  You know, the Sasquatch, apparently, I can't remember which state it was, but apparently it is illegal to murder a Sasquatch. And it actually is a felony.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Right. So if you see the Sasquatch.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Because it's an endangered creature. I think that's the argument, right?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I imagine it is, yeah. So you can't kill Bigfoot.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  You'd get really famous, but you'd also go to jail.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, Australia is of course the source of so many of these things. When Europeans landed in Australia, they started sending back reports to Europe of all these animals that everyone just assumed were fictional.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  And eventually they had to bring them back and go, look, it really does look like this.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  It does exist.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  What do you think this story says about human fear of animals?

• 22:59Speaker 04

  I think we're very used to a cushy life and we're very used to being the top of the food chain. And when animals attack, that is something that brings out a layer of fear that, you know, we possibly didn't know that we had. All you need to do is see the reaction to interactions with sharks. Or even the several historical and also recent interactions with dingoes to see how people react to this. It's visceral.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  What a great story. What a fascinating little insight into human foibles. Thanks so much for telling us.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Ah, my pleasure.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Anne Jones is the host of the podcast What the Duck. This is just one story from the series Nature's Most Wanted. To hear, you can follow What the Duck on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll catch you on Thursday.