The Monkey Man and the Face Slasher — Spine chilling Indian Urban Legends
Tags: Nonfiction, Fear, India, History, Horror

The Monkey Man and the Face Slasher — Spine chilling Indian Urban Legends

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Ah! the month of December, finally we can bid goodbye to the horror that 2020 was and hope for a better 2021. Growing up, I always cherished winter school vacations. The holidays were not too long and the north Indian cold prevented any unnecessary travel. So I could curl myself in blankets, eat all the tasty food all day while reading thrillers and ghost stories. Now years later, once again spending winter break at home, I thought of some chilling urban legends that interestingly all emerged around the turn of the millennia (when we hit c. 2000). If you lived in northern India during those times you would have heard of these. All involved an entity scaring people off and the hysteria that followed left a few dead. Were they real? Who knows!

The tale of the Monkey Man!

Is this the monkey man? Giphy

Around the year 2000, a strange fear gripped the national capital. An entity termed Monkey Man or Kala Bandar (Black Monkey) in Hindi was terrorizing the locals. As the legend goes, an entity, described variously as a monkey with sharp claws, glaring eyes to a short man or a cat-like creature caused immense hysteria. It even claimed the life of a pregnant woman who fell down the stairs trying to escape when the entity was rumored to be nearby. Some even postulated that it was a ploy to let the power companies ensure electricity at night.

Monkey man drawings. Source — Wikipedia.

Due to the summer heat, many slept on roof-tops and were easy targets for the so-called entity. Was something ever found? No! But, we did have a Bollywood movie with the monkey man as the backdrop.

Monkey Man plot line in the movie Delhi 6

Here is the news piece from decades ago, an interesting read today!

The Face Slasher

Face hugger. MakeaGIF

This one seemed to be right out of the movie Alien. For the uninitiated, the “alien: in Alien was a face-hugging creature that laid eggs in humans. Like the movie monster, the urban legend entity would attack and slash the faces of folks in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP) at night. Just like the monkey man incidence, this one too had varying tales. While some claimed it to be a feline-like entity that would leave nail marks on the faces, others had more sci-fi explanations. Rumors flew that a robotic, flying doll controlled by strange individuals or an almost extra-terrestrial entity with glowing red eyes was scratching folks.

A local scientist claimed it was a large bug that lived in ponds. The drought that year had led to the drying up of ponds and hence the bug was flying to habitations. Now, I don’t know if it was really a bug but I distinctly recall a large flying insect the size of a mouse with huge pincers appeared at my house one night during those days. While I was figuratively wetting my pants, my brave dad captured it in a box and released it outside. Was that the face slasher?

Pakanna — the kidney thief

This was a story from the late 90s — 1999 or around then. I used to visit our rural house every summer. I recall the fear that people had of Pakanna or the kidney thief. The stories on this one were a bit more uniform. It was a gang of crooks who would kidnap kids and steal one of their kidneys to sell on the black market. In those days of the summer heat, the neighborhoods would be deserted in the afternoon. It was so hot that most stayed home. I still recall walking home from a friend's place during one deserted afternoon, braving the Pakanna phobia. While nothing happened, just the uneasy feeling of walking by myself on a deserted afternoon was sufficient to not try it again at least for that summer. And this story may be grounded a bit more in reality. There have been cases of illicit kidney theft in India across the years.

If you are one to notice patterns in these stories, they are all around the late 90s or early 2000 and involve mass hysteria during the summer. And even in days before cell phone and mass messaging, the rumor mills were strong enough to have mainstream media and the police take note.