Irishman’s account of man-eating lions, ‘the Ghost’ and ‘the Darkness’, in Africa

“I have a very vivid recollection of one particular night when the brutes seized a man from the railway station and brought him close to my camp to devour. I could plainly hear them crunching the bones, and the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days afterwards.”

This chilling account by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, an Irishman, tells the tale of how two African lions terrorised a railway project in Tsavo, part of British East Africa (now Kenya), more than a century ago, killing and eating dozens of workers.

Patterson, who eventually shot the Tsavo man-eaters in December 1898, estimated they had killed and eaten 135 people.