This I Command!

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Verminus Rex

Despite our strict no-rats policy in the Hyper Kitchen (we live or die by the health code), this particular creature from European folklore is too grotesque to ignore.

Behold the ghastly Rat King, originating from medieval Europe. During that age, cities were astonishingly filthy places. No street was left uncovered with sewage and garbage. Naturally, rats thrived in such an environment. According to Dutch, Germanic, and Scandinavian folklore, rats occasionally got their tails inextricably tangled and mangled together. The collective rat tails fused to each other as they healed, creating a pack of rats that were physically joined and operated like a single organism. They were called Rat Kings. It seems highly unlikely that anyone had to flee from some frenzied glob of rabid rats, as the phenomena was never officially documented. Various mummified Rat Kings remain on display in museums, but the consensus is that they're just the product of some"creative taxidermy."


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Q: How do you sell an accordion album?
A: Gorillas are money in the bank.

"The Man Who Created Himself" or "I Have No Legs, but I Must Dream."

Burlington: a city of eight million stories. But who's responsible for this mecca of hemp-based products? As it's been four hundred years since the discovery of Lake Champlain by the French, the Hyper Kitchen thought it was high time someone solved this mystery. And, brother, this one has to be our strangest case yet. One for the file marked X, to be sure.

Eavesdropping in smoke-filled lowlife bars and viewing reel upon reel of microfiche down at the station, we made the explosive discovery that Burlington has its own creator deity. According to Abenaki mythology, shortly after the creation of the universe, a figure named Odzihozo (or "The Man Who Created Himself") roamed Vermont. As this was well before the invention of legs, he dragged his body around with his powerful arms, digging out the valley that eventually became Lake Champlain and the area that would go on to become Burlington. Odzihozo was so taken by his accidental creation that he transformed himself into an island rock so he could watch the valley for all of eternity. This landmark...or lake-mark, if you prefer, currently goes by the decidedly Anglo name of "Dunder Rock."



The are eight millions stories in this naked city, and this has been one of them. The only one, I'll wager, with a legless god.

From Hell it Came

First described in J.W. Buel's Land and Sea (1887), the Ya-Te-Yeo or "I See You" was said to be a man-eating tree that preyed upon the people of Central America. Normally it would ensnare birds and small mammals in its tendrils, but the monstrous plant would not hesitate to devour a human being if the unfortunate subject drew too close.

This is yet another reason for people to responsibly manage their woodlots. If everyone would consult their friendly forester, then abominations such as the Ya-Te-Yeo could be kept away from populated areas.

Great Moments from the Apocalypse!

The Chief Designer

On January 6th, 1966, in the USSR, a patient was brought in for surgery. The patient had been diagnosed with intestinal bleeding. A cancerous tumor was found and removed, but the patient's heart was weak. He never awoke.

The patient's name was Sergei Korolyov, and he was known as the Chief Designer. Had he lived, the Soviet Union might have planted their flag on the moon.

Born in Ukraine in 1907, Korolyov's parents separated when he three years old. His mother was determined that he receive a superlative education, so young Korolyov spent his lonely childhood studying away at Kiev. It was there that he displayed an aptitude for mathematics. In 1913, he saw an air-show which fostered a lasting interest in aviation. Later his mother married an electrical engineer, and Korolyov's academic pursuits were further encouraged. He kept on studying right through the Russian Revolution, and spent the 1920's designing and flying gliders.

Korolyov launched into the thirties by marrying and having a daughter with Xenia Vincentini, the lady he'd been dating for six years. Upon graduation, Korolyov's engineering skills made him highly sought after by the government and he found employment designing aircraft. He co-created a government-funded rocket development organization called the Jet Propulsion Research Group and created several early liquid-fueled rockets. With their success, the government became interested in the military potential of the rockets and expanded the scope and funding of the research group. Korolyov was appointed chief engineer. Life could hardly be any better.

In 1938, Korolyov was accused by his primary scientific rival, Valentin Glushko, of deliberately hindering progress at the institute. He was tortured into signing a confession and then sentenced to ten years at a prison camp. Korolyov tried desperately to reduce his sentence, but his appeals for leniency fell upon deaf ears. For months he labored at a gold mine in Kolyma, working in the most grueling conditions. Ultimately, his intellectual background resulted in his re-location to a camp specializing in scientific slave-labor. There, he and other captive scientists designed bombers and explosive rockets for the USSR's war against Nazi Germany. By this point, he had lost nearly all of his teeth due to his time in Kolyma.

Korolyov and his prison colleagues were discharged in 1944 and he went straight to work creating ballistic missiles and rocket engines for the military. It wasn't until the 1950's, when he officially joined the Communist Party, that the charges against him were dropped and he was finally exonerated. His time in the labor camps had left him a quiet, brooding man. He and Xenia divorced after he had an affair with another woman, whom he subsequently married. His relationship with military grew increasingly ugly, but his knowledge of aviation and propulsion made him invaluable to their Cold War efforts. He proved his worth with the devastating success of Sputnik and its dog-laden sequel Sputnik 2. The space race had officially begun.

With both America and Russia determined to master space, each nation became more ambitious. In 1961, the Vostok Space Program launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit, making him the first man in space. For an encore, Vostok 6 carried Valentina Tereshkova into orbit, making her the first woman in space. In 1965, the Alexei Leonov made the first space-walk. Probes were successfully launched to the moon, and space became increasingly populated with new Soviet satellites. All of these accomplishments were made possible by Korolyov, who directed the program with a taciturn and resolute manner. For security purposes, his name was never officially used and he was referred to as "the Chief Designer" or (in Cyrillic) "SP." The program achieved so much without the sophisticated computer equipment and greater resources of its American counterpart, and this spoke volumes about Korolyov's leadership.


With each success, the Soviet government demanded greater results from the program and with each failure, they demanded the program work harder. Korolyov had earlier suffered from an heart attack, and his condition drove him to work at a frenzied pace. The stress was demolishing his body. He later developed a gall-bladder problem and then an irregular heartbeat. His hearing was also degrading, thanks to years of ear-shattering rocket launches. Finally he died in 1966, just as he was masterminding the USSR's moon launch plans. Two years later, their famed cosmonaut Gagarin perished in a training exercise and then America delivered a death-blow with Apollo 11. The Soviet space program was defeated.

Korolyov was posthumously awarded a Lenin Prize in 1971, and has since had several Moon craters and even a town in Moscow named after him. Ironically, those that worked with him recall his gloomy fondness for saying "we will all vanish without a trace."




But don't take my word for it. You can read all about it in a book!

-A BBC entry on Korolyov
-Another biography of Korolyov (with pictures!)

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Beware...the Bunny Man!

May has almost withered away, and on today's menu is another ghastly installment of our Monster of the Month series. This month we descend into the delightful realm of urban legend. If the name "Bunny Man" doesn't exactly make your skin crawl, perhaps the following description will. Imagine driving along a winding road late one autumn night and seeing a man in your headlights. He's running towards you, and as your car draws nearer, you can see him more clearly. He's nearly six feet tall and about two-hundred pounds.

He's wearing a filthy white rabbit suit.

And he's carrying an axe.

Variations of the Bunny Man legend have been documented across Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. Similar to the notorious "Hook Hand" of campfire lore, the Bunny Man is said to be mythical killer who has been murdering teenagers for decades. Most versions of the story describe the Bunny Man as your garden-variety escaped psychopath, but a few accounts have a supernatural flavor and portray the Bunny Man as an evil ghost that returns every year around Halloween. Whatever the case, the Bunny Man's look remains consistent; a tall man in a grimy rabbit costume usually armed with a hatchet or axe.

How did such a freakish figure come about? Most urban legends have a tiny grain of truth, and the genesis of the Bunny Man lies in the town of Burke, in Fairfax County, Virginia. On October 22nd, 1970, Air Force cadet Bob Bennett and his fiancee, Dusty (who may or may not have been wearing a cowboy hat at the time) were driving back from a football game and pulled over to have a chat. It was around midnight. Suddenly they noticed a man in the rear-view mirror, clad in white. The man in white ran up and smashed their right window and mirror. Bennett wasted no time in speeding away from the scene, all while the man in white screamed "You're on private property and I have your tag number!" Bennett later described the man to the police as wearing a rabbit costume. Dusty's account differed slightly, saying that the man who attacked them wore white pointed hat and might have been in a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Nine days later, a construction site security guard named Paul Philips came to the police and said he encountered a man dressed as a rabbit. The man was in the process of vandalizing the half-constructed house and before running off, he shouted "All you people trespass around here! If you don't get out of here, I'm going to bust you on the head!" In the ensuing police investigation, fifty people called to say that they had seen the Bunny Man. The incidents were publicized in several newspapers and word spread quickly.

The identity of the bunny-suit lunatic has never been discovered, but his crimes spawned a larger-than-life bogeyman. There are those who say that the Bunny Man still lurks around a railway bridge in the town of Clifton, Virginia, and others report skinned rabbits dangling from trees every Halloween.


So, should you find yourself in Clifton, remember: stay on the roads, keep off the moors...and should you catch a glimpse of white fun-fur and tall, pointy ears...just run.

Would you like to know more?
-Read this splendid, elaborately researched account of the Bunny Man legend

You Are Who You Eat

Among its other features, the town of Thetford, Vermont, is home to Sawnee Bean Cemetery and Sawnee Bean Road. This is rather anomalous as Thetford is a very ordinary town, and Sawnee Bean was one of the most infamous killers in history.

Because of sheer brutality of his crimes, Alexander "Sawnee" (or "Sawney") Bean has entered the realm of folklore in much the same way as Jack the Ripper. It is difficult to determine which details of his life actually happened and which are fabrication. There are even those who postulate that Sawnee Bean is a mere bogeyman, and never existed to begin with. Assuming he was a real person, here are the details of his savage life.

Born in 16th century Scotland, Sawnee Bean demonstrated only misanthropy and malice. As a young man he departed to a cave near the ocean shore, bringing with him an equally monstrous wife. After a few years of robbing unlucky travelers, the Beans took to murdering and ultimately devouring the bodies of their victims. Later they had a few children, who joined in the family business of robbery and human-hunting when they became old enough.

Thanks to incest, the Bean clan soon blossomed to forty-eight troglodytic cannibals, and the now-crowded cave was strewn with bones. They had become too numerous to conceal their crimes from the outside world, and word spread of their man-eating ways. Finally, King James the First decided that he had enough of all this depravity and dispatched an army of four-hundred men to track down the Beans. The loathsome family was rounded up and taken to Edinburgh. The male Beans had their limbs cut off and were left to bleed to death. The women and children, after being forced to watch the previous executions, were burned at the stake. A happy tale, to be sure.


Presumably Thetford had a citizen with the unfortunate luck of sharing a name with this notorious figure, but perhaps the town decided for unknowable reasons to honor the Scottish cannibal. Could it be that Thetford is populated by Bean's man-eating descendants? It may be too terrible to imagine, but travelers are urged to keep their wits about them while passing through.







Would you like to know more?
-Mysterious Britain's entry on Sawney Bean
-Virtual Scotland's entry on Sawney Bean