9 Times Real-Life Beasts Stalked (and ate!) Humans

Let’s face it. Us humans like to think we’re top of the food chain…until we find ourselves out in the wild and we’re reminded that we’re not. The trailer for Beast starring Idris Elba reminded me of that recently. It also made me think of a couple of posts I’ve written lately about real-life beasts who have stalked and eaten humans, such as the three man-eating lions at the Field Museum or the Beast of Gevaudan from The Cursed movie.

It was actually while researching the stories about the Tsavo lions, the Mfuwe man-eating lion, and the Beast of Gevaudan that led me to a Wikipedia page about man-eaters. It included a list of 27 man-eating animal attacks with recorded death tolls of three or more people. However, in total it listed 30 incidents because it included three other accounts where the death tolls were uncertain, including the USS Indianapolis shark attacks.

Which, let’s just cover that one really fast. A Japanese submarine targeted the cruiser in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945. Two torpedoes hit and sank it. It’s estimated that 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 890 were stranded in open water with limited life rafts. Those who didn’t die of exposure, dehydration, or saltwater poisoning fell victim to shark attacks. It’s estimated that as many as 150 died that way, and if that were the case, it would rank among the top 10 worst man-eater attacks.

And you might think that sharks, in general, would top the list for the most times beasts have stalked and eaten humans. They don’t. Big cats do.

Of the nine accounts with the highest death tolls of over 100 or more victims, seven are due to big cat attacks (one tiger and five leopards). The other two are from a crocodile and possibly a wolf, but it also could’ve been a carnivorous marsupial. (That’s the Beast of Gevaudan, whose species was never 100% positively confirmed.) Let’s check out some of the most prolific incidents of real-life beasts stalking and eating humans.

3 Times Real-Life Beasts Killed More Than 300 People

1. Champawat Tiger: 436 victims

The Champawat Tigress holds the Guinness World Book of Records for the most fatalities from a tiger attack. She stalked humans from 1902-1907 in the Champawat district of India before Colonel Jim Corbett killed her in 1907. (We’ll see his name again on this list a couple of more times.)

2. Panar Leopard: 400 victims

This was another attack that happened in India, this time in the Panar region of the Almora district. Col. Jim Corbett heard about this man-eater while hunting the Champawat tiger and set out to kill it too in 1910.

3. Gustave the Burundi Crocodile: 300+ victims

Gustave is the stuff of horror movies and, in fact, inspired an action-adventure horror movie called Primeval. He definitely makes the saltwater croc in Lake Placid look tame. (But possibly inspired that movie too?)

Gustave was a large male Nile crocodile who stalked his prey on the banks of the Ruzizi River and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika, an African Great Lake and the second oldest freshwater lake in the world. Four scars, three from bullets, and a wound on his right shoulder blade, were how people identified the croc, who was estimated to be as long as 18 feet and weighing in at over 2,000 pounds. If those measurements proved to be true, that would make him three times the size of other crocs in Burundi.

But since no one had ever captured him, those measurements are unverified. The attempt to catch him, and herpetologist Patrica Faye’s study of him, was the subject of the PBS documentary, Capturing the Killer Croc, though.

There haven’t been any recent Gustave sightings. According to Wikipedia, an article in Travel Africa Magazine reported the croc was dead.

6 Times Real-Life Beasts Killed 100 People or More

1. The Central Provinces Leopard: 150 victims

The “Devilish Cunning Panther,” as this leopard was known, terrorized villages in the Central Provinces of British India in the early 20th century before it was finally killed.

2. The Tsavo Lions: 135 victims

A lot of people who have only seen the trailer for Beast are wondering if it’s a remake of The Ghost and the Darkness. I can see why. It evokes similar vibes to the movie about two lions who killed railroad workers in Kenya in 1898.

While the characters in Beast are stalked by a man-eating lion, it looks like it’s only one and not two working together in a pair. It’s also set in the present day and doesn’t involve the building of a railroad. But the Tsavo lions were quite fearsome and cunning in their hunting techniques, and their story is the one that most people are most familiar with.

3. Leopard of Rudraprayag: 125+ victims

Even though the Panar Leopard killed more people, this is one of India’s more famous leopard attacks. Maybe because it’s so terrifying?

For eight years, from 1918 to 1926, the leopard hunted humans in the Rudraprayag district of India. According to Wikipedia, it “would break down doors, leap through windows, claw through the mud or thatch walls of huts and drag the occupants out before devouring them.”

Yikes.

As you can imagine, villagers in the areas the leopard roamed wanted this beast taken care of. And guess who did it, after other hunters had failed? Our friend Col. Jim Corbett again. It took him 10 weeks to do it.

He even wrote several books about hunting real-life beasts who ate people, including Man-Eaters of Kumaon (which may be his most popular book) and a book about this expedition, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.

4. Beast of Gevaudan, 113 victims

Many mysteries surround the attacks that plagued those living in south-central France from 1764 to 1767. Was it one beast or more than one? Was it a giant wolf or maybe even a thylacine, a.k.a. a Tasmanian tiger or wolf?

Based on some of the drawings from the era, I’m wondering if it wasn’t a thylacine, which are now extinct. They’re neither wolf nor tiger like their nicknames might suggest, though. They did have dog-like shaped heads and resembled a large canine, but they were carnivorous marsupials. Could one have been imported from Australia or Tasmania, escaped, and found a home and hunting ground in France?

Possibly. Or it was a very hungry wolf. We’ll never know, just that it’s legend has endured and continues to inspire horror stories to this day, most recently in the movie The Cursed.

5. Leopard of Golis Range, 100 victims

In the late 1800s, a leopard hunted and killed at least 100 people in the Golis Mountains in British Somaliland.

6. Leopard of Kahani, 100 victims

For three years, between 1857 and 1860, a leopard terrorized people living in villages in the Seoni district of India. The weird thing about this man-eating beast is that it rarely ate its victims. Rather, it seemed “to consume blood rather than flesh, and most bodies showed few injuries other than telltale bite marks to the throat.” Did that conjure images of a vampire cat to your mind too?

Other Times Real-Life Beasts Stalked and Killed People

India seems to be the leader when it comes to places with the most real-life beasts eating people. In addition to the incidents listed above, there were also these:

• Wolves of Uttar Pradesh, 60+ victims
• The Tigers of Chowgarh, 50+ victims
• Leopard of Gummalapur, 42 victims
• Leopard of Mulher Valley, 30+ victims
• Wolves of Ashta, 17 victims
• Wolves of Hazaribagh, 13 victims
• Sloth bear of Mysore, 12 victims
• Leopard of the Yellagiri Hills, 3 victims
• Stray dog attacks, number of victims uncertain

In addition to the Tsavo lion attacks in Kenya above, the continent of Africa weighs in with the next highest number of real-life beasts stalking and killing humans, including:

• Chiengi lion, 90+ victims
• Osama lion, 50+ victims
• Port St-John Shark Attacks, 11 victims (since 2001, so this number could continue to rise)
• Mfuwe man-eating lion, 6 victims

Surprisingly, France has a couple of other beast attacks in its history, all of which also involve wolves:

• Wolves of Paris, 40 victims
• Beast of Sarlat, 18 victims
• Wolf of Soissons, 4 victims

Two wolf attacks that claimed 22 victims each were the Kirov wolf attacks in Russia that spanned 10 years, from 1944-1954, and the Wolves of Turku attacks in Finland from 1880-1881. The even more terrible thing about the Finland attacks was that the victims were all children.

But what about the United States? Have there been any man-eating beast stalker incidents here? Yes. One. The real-life Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 that inspired the movie Jaws.

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Check-In

Are you surprised by how many real-life beasts have stalked and eaten people, or are you surprised it’s not more?

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champawat_Tiger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_of_Rudraprayag

https://www.iflscience.com/gustave-the-notorious-giant-crocodile-rumored-to-have-killed-over-300-people-60113

https://historyofyesterday.com/the-child-eating-wolves-of-turku-454352b552f3