"Ya-Te-Veo": The Scary Human-Eating Tree In Madagascar

Madagascar is home to many unusual creatures, like satanic leaf-tailed geckos, aye-ayes, giant jumping rats, and leaf bug nymphs. But for many years, the strangest form of life on the island was believed to be a tree that ate people.

Since the nineteenth century, the narrative of the human-eating tree in Madagascar has kept on overwhelming the domain of African customary narrating, with neighborhood and unfamiliar creators making differing accounts about the tree.

It is said that the individuals of Mkodo in antiquated Madagascar used to perform human forfeits by compelling one of their own to move to the pinnacle of the tree, which contained a remedy liquid.

The slim parts of the tree would then snatch the casualty by the neck and arms and choke them to death. The withdrawal of the branches made the remedy liquid stream down the storage compartment, blending in with the blood and overflowing guts of the person in question.

The Mkodos would then drink the liquid and play out an incredible and unspeakably grim blow out. This amazing meat eating tree was privately alluded to as “Ya-Te-Veo,” signifying “I see you.”

WATCH: The Man – Eating Tree (history)

First revealed in 1881 by a German wayfarer named Carl Liche, it was supposed to be a hallowed and much-dreaded plant utilized in penance ceremonies by the local Mkodo clan.

The explorer claimed his observation was cut short by natives shrieking wildly around the tree. But the interruption gave him the opportunity to witness an eating ritual.

Leche wrote that the tribe surrounded a woman and, using javelins, forced her to climb to the top of the tree, where she became dinner:

“The slender, delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then, as if by instinct with demoniac intelligence, fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms.

Then, while her awful screams. and yet more awful laughter, rose wilder, to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling mean, the tendrils, one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening, with the cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.”

Leche was horrified at the sacrifice. “May I never see such a sight again!” he wrote. Still, he continued to make notes and found a smaller tree that caught and ate a lemur.

Liche’s description of the tree;

If you can imagine a pineapple, eight feet high and thick in proportion, resting upon its base, and denuded of leaves, you will have a good idea of the trunk of the tree, … From the apex of this truncated cone (at least two feet in diameter) eight leaves hung sheer to the ground, like doors slung back on their hinges.

These leaves, which were joined at the top of the tree at regular intervals, were about eleven or twelve feet long, and shaped very much like the American agave or century plant.

They were two feet through the thickest part and three feet wide, tapering to a sharp point that looked like a cow’s horn, very convex on the outer surface and on the inner surface, slightly concave.

This concave face was thickly set with very strong thorny hooks, like those upon the head of the cone. These leaves, hanging thus limp and lifeless, dead green in color, had in appearance the massive strength of oak fibre. The apex of the cone was a round, white, concave figure, like a small plate set within a smaller one.

This was not a flower, but a receptacle, and there exuded into it a clear, treacly liquid, honey-sweet, and possessed of violent intoxicating soporific properties.

From underneath the rim, so to speak, of the undermost plate, a series of long, hairy, green tendrils stretched in every direction towards the horizon.

These were about seven or eight feet long each and tapered from four inches to a half inch in diameter, yet they stretched out stiffly as iron rods.

Above these, from between the upper and under cup, six white, almost transparent, palpi reared themselves, towards the sky, twirling and twisting with a marvelous incessant motion, yet constantly reaching upward.

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 serpents flayed, yet dancing on their tails.”