Exotic, amazing, and totally untrue tales from faraway lands come through many paths. Locals like to troll visitors with scary stories, like that of the snipe or drop bear. Returning travelers like to impress people by becoming brave witnesses to things they heard. Some storytellers have an agenda, like proving their superiority over uncivilized cultures. And news outlets sometimes prioritize a good story over the truth. Sometimes legends arise due to a combination of these factors. And that's how we got the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar.
On April 28, 1874, the New York World published an account of German botanist Karl Leche about a tree in Madagascar that resembled an eight-foot pineapple. The Mkodo tribe showed him a ceremony in which a woman was sacrificed to the tree by forcing her to drink its poison nectar, after which the tree's upper tendrils encased her. When Leche returned later, all that was left of the woman was her skull at the base of the tree.
The problems with the story are 1. there is no evidence of the existence of Karl Leche, 2. there is no Mkodo tribe in Madagascar, and 3. no one ever saw the tree after that. But the story spread like crazy, and stuck around. This happened after insectivorous plants were discovered. There was a 19th-century queen of Madagascar who eliminated her rivals and invading foreigners by forcing them to drink poison. And, perhaps most importantly, most readers knew very little about Madagascar. Read how the legend of the man-eating tree came about at American Strangeness. -via Strange Company
...one little hyphen can really make a huge difference, huh?