When the amazing Venus flytrap was first brought to scientific attention during the 1760s, sceptical botanists initially refused to believe that this extraordinary plant could actually capture and consume insects, until they saw it happen. A century later, in 1878, Polish biologist Dr Omelius Fredlowski received a letter from German explorer Carle Liche who claimed to have seen a much bigger and deadlier carnivorous plant when visiting Madagascar: he asserted that he had watched in horror as local inhabitants sacrificed a living woman to this monstrous tree!
Liche likened the tree to a pineapple, but standing 2.5 meteres high and thick in proportion, with eight leaves hanging from its apex, each about 3.5 metres long and tapering to a sharp point. A clear treacly liquid with highly intoxicationg properties trickled into a pair of concave plates arranged one inside the other. These comprised the apex of the tree, and from beneath the rim of the bottom plate a series of hairy green 2.5-metre-long tendrils stretched out in every direction. Above these, six extremely think tentacle-like feelers, each over 1.5 metres long and white in colour, reared up to the sky, twisting and twirling incessantly like sinister serpents
Suddenly, after the people had offered up prayers to the tree, they encircled one of the women amongst them and forced her to climb its trunk. Once she had reached the apex, surrounded by its dancing feelers, she bent doen and drank the viscous fluid exuding there and became wild with hysterical frenzy. But when she tried to jump down, the tree instantly came to life, and with the merciless fury of straved serpents its feelers quivered over her head, then fastened themselves all around her, wrapping her within their ever-tightening folds.
Soon her screams were replaced with a gurgling moan, and slowly the tree's eight great leaves rose upwards until they too had forced themselves against her body, pressing closer and closer until a revolting fluid trickled down from between them, compsed of the scarlet blood and oozing viscera of the tree's victim mingled with its own creamy viscous intoxicant. The leaves retained their upright position for 10 days, after ehich, as discovered by Liche when he walked by one morning, they became prone once more, with the hairy green tendrils outstretched and the deadly feelers floating above. As a silent reminder of the horrors that had recently been perpetrated here, however, a white human skull lay at the base of the tree.
Predictably, many scientists are very sceptical about Liche's lurid account. Yet when Salmon Osborn, a former governor of MIchigan, visited Madagascar in the 1920s to seek this botanical horror, he learnt that the tree was apparently well known to the locals and missionaries there, and that for many centuries Mdagascar had been known as "the land of the man-eating tree". Even so, he never encountered it - but that is probably just as well!