John Henry Patterson

They were nearly 10 feet long, weighing 500 pounds, and they were deliberately hunting humans.

The accounts from Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson read like a survival horror movie.

They really do.

Night after night, you're trying to sleep in a canvas tent, listening to the darkness, knowing these predators are out there.

Absolutely fascinating.

Tell our friends about Colonel John Patterson.

Yeah.

This is a really extraordinary story.

He lectures.

People are always fascinated by his lectures, but his book now, his brand-new book is called The Lions of Zion: Biblical Natural History and the Significance of Israel.

There is more to the story of Colonel John Patterson.

When we come back, we're gonna hear the rest of the story, but if you wanna just have a starting point on who this man is, you can watch the movie, The Ghost and the Darkness.

Jabotinsky came to the 30th as a sergeant, having enlisted as a private months before the battalions existed.

The commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson.

He'd also led the Mule Corps at Gallipoli.

Before that, he built a railway through East Africa and shot the two lions that kept trying to eat his men building it.

They weren't hunters.

What was causing such a traumatic and horrible, horrible nightmare in these camps of the railroad workers? Well, The man who actually was the foreman, the builder, the engineer of this railroad, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, started to get upset.

And where he actually started to get upset, I'm sure after that first person died.

But after seeing this started to happen over and over again, he took matters into his own hands.

Was there more lions? We don't know.

Did they stop because they began to see the retribution that was coming? We don't know.

How many were killed by the man-eaters of Savo? Well, Lieutenant Patterson claims a whopping 135 men were attacked or killed or went missing from this period of attack.

But later on, researchers and scientific analysis of the human remains was able to trace about 35 individual people that had remains from these attacks.

And they did it night after night.

The main engineer on the project, a British man named John Patterson, claims 135 men were killed and eaten.

Later, that number was lowered to 28.

Here's where the numbers get kind of dicey.