Today's story is a medical mystery that comes from the remote forests of Papua New Guinea. And let's just say the mystery illness is absolutely horrifying. I mean, the symptoms alone are straight nightmare fuel. But perhaps the worst part of this mystery disease is how it was determined that it was being spread, something that took a long time to figure out. But my goodness, the way this thing was being spread is just... You'll see. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange dark and mysterious Delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to dry clean the Like Buttons laundry, but instead of using starch, use super glue. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story. On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1953, a young woman named Ahn stood in the middle of a huge sugarcane grove in an isolated forest in Papua New Guinea. And around her were all her relatives and neighbors, and they were all there to mourn the loss of An's sister, whose name was Thon.

She had passed away three days earlier from a very mysterious illness that people in An's village called kuru. And in their language, the word kuru meant trembling. Now, keep in mind this particular mystery illness that was called kuru only affected the people in An and Tan's village. This is like a hyper-specific illness that only happened inside of this little forest to these people. But An and the rest of the people in her village had seen this happen over and over and over again every year. And so they knew what happened when you got Kuru because it was always the same. As soon as you began to tremble, that was the first sign, one year or so after that moment, you lose control of all the muscles in your body until you die. And so in Tan's case, so Ahn's sister, she had watched this happen exactly as it did for everybody else that ever got this illness. She started with the tremors, and then before long, she couldn't even stand up or walk around. Then finally, her sister lost control of the muscles in her throat, and so she couldn't eat despite being hungry. So ultimately, she died of starvation, which is like one of the worst ways to die.

It's incredibly slow and very, very painful. So ever since Tan's death, three days earlier, the village had been performing all these rituals and prayers in an attempt to assist Tan's spirit on its way into the afterlife. This type of very involved funeral was absolutely customary in An's culture. An and her family, and all of these villages were members of the Foray people who are native to Papua New Guinea, which is an island just north of Australia. In 1953, when this story is taking place, the Foray people numbered about 11,000 people. Remember, they live a very isolated forest. They are basically cut off from the world for the most part. But they were beginning to fear that they were going to go extinct because of Kuru. Every year, the Foray people lost 200 people to Kuru. For the most part, the victims were women, like disproportionately so, which made it even more likely that the Forreya people would go extinct because if you lose all the women, you can't have any more kids. In fact, by 1953, so many women had died from Kuru that by this point, there were three times as many men as there were women.

In fact, the leading cause of death for Forreya women was Kuru. But the Forreya people did not view Kuru as just an illness. They actually viewed it as a curse. In fact, that was completely accepted that that is exactly what it was. This is not like getting the cold. Somebody did this to you. Like a sorcerer somewhere, some unnamed sorcerer that's coming into the forest is targeting these women and cursing them with Kuru. The 4 A people put on these really elaborate funerals, mostly to ward off these dark magic sorcerers that were casting kuru spells. The 4 A people believed that if they just nailed the funeral procedure for somebody who has just died from kuru, the three day long, all these rituals and prayers they have to do, if the village is able to nail it perfectly, then the deceased who's passed away from Kuru, so in this case on Sister Tan, her spirit, as a result of this perfect funeral, would be able to rise up and actually seek revenge on the Sorcerer who killed the person. These funerals were basically like taking the dead, rising their spirit, and sending them off to go kill the sorcerer.

On and the rest of her villages, they went through this very elaborate process for Ahn's sister, Tan, and at the end of it, they did feel like they had really nailed it. So they felt confident that Tan's spirit was going to rise up and get her revenge. A few weeks after Aan's sister's funeral, Aan was standing over in open fire, and she was cooking some pork and sweet potatoes. As she went to flip the meat over, she reached her hand out, and she noticed her hand was trembling, which is the first sign of someone with kuru. Now, Aan told herself that, Oh, no, I don't have Kuru. It's just because I was working really hard today and I'm tired. That's all it is. But she knew deep down, she may have been cursed. Ahn did her best to hide her trembling hands. However, after about a month from that first time she noticed her hand shaking, she noticed she wasn't really able to stand up without losing her because her legs were starting to tremble. Finally, when she basically couldn't even stand up without assistance, this is again, only one month after that first tremble, she knew she had Kuru.

An already knew that there was absolutely nothing anybody in her village could do to stop this from killing her. Kuru was a 100% death sentence. If you got Kuru, it's like the whole village just began prepping for your death because they had to be ready to do this big ritualistic funeral. And so imagine that. You have this mystery illness or curse or whatever you want to think it is, and you're just counting down the days until you die. But for Ahn, even though she had seen this happen so many times before and just knew there's nothing she could do, she couldn't stand the idea of having this horrible slow, painful death. And so she decided, You know what? I'm going to do something drastic that basically nobody else had done before who had Kuru. So for context, at this time, before a people had been totally isolated from other people in the world for thousands of years. They basically lived in this little part of Papua New Guinea in the forest, and nobody else contacted them. They were totally isolated. However, starting in the 1950s, some Australian colonists and researchers and police actually began making their way in and around the 4a people's area.

So they were making contact, albeit not necessarily direct contact. But the 4a people were seeing basically white people wandering around in and around their forest from time to time. It It's always very shocking when they would see these people because they dressed completely differently. They looked totally different. I mean, it's like two worlds totally colliding. And generally speaking, Anne and the rest of the people in her village, they did not like having these Australian people wondering around. But Anne is thinking, The people in my village, the 4A people, they have no solutions for me. So maybe these Australian people that have popped up, maybe they have some answers about what I can do to stop myself from dying from this horrible curse. Keep in mind, by going out and seeking help from these outsiders, it was like Anne would be breaking a huge custom. This is so taboo for the 4 A people, and very likely, even if she was able to find a solution from these outsiders, it's not clear if she would have been welcomed back into her village. This is a truly desperate measure she's taking, but she really felt like she had no choice.

Even as her body trembled from Kuru, Anne managed to stand up using a stick, and she began hobbling her way quietly and discreetly out of her village, something that she really never did. Eventually, after hobbling her way out of sight of the Foray people, she began making her way through the woods, and she eventually came to a clearing where there was this house. It was obvious this is not a house that the Foray people have built. This is somebody from the outside who's built something near where they were living. So Ahn wandered up to this house, not really sure what to do, but she went up and knocked on the door. A second later, it opened up. It's this Australian anthropologist named Ronald Burnt, who actually Anne had seen before. He had been coming through her village a couple of times, attempting to interview people to learn more about the Foray people. She knew that nobody wanted to talk to him, but she had seen him before. And so she was relieved. This is someone that I'm somewhat familiar with. And so as Ronald is staring back at her, and Ronald's pretty tall and skinny, he's got glasses on, he's dressed like a typical Australian in the 1950s, and he's looking at Anne, and Anne begins to try to tell him what's going on with her.

And as she began to talk, the words she was saying were coming out all garbled, and she realized that the Kuru curse was now affecting her throat, the muscles in her neck, and she was not able to speak. But as it happened, Ronald, who was very familiar with the Forreye people, he could tell, based on just the way she was acting and how desperate she looked, that very likely this woman was here because she believed she had Kuru. Ronald, who had learned about Kuru after studying the 4a people, he had done some research on it, and he believed it was entirely psychosomatic, that this was not an actual illness. Basically, he believed Kuru was acute hysteria, that these 4a people were just going crazy and convincing themselves that they had this illness. I guess that manifested their death a year later. Ronald interrupted An, who, again, is struggling to talk, and he was able to communicate to her in her language that, You do not have Kuru. You are hysterical. This is in your head, and you should go now. Then he shut the door on her. An had no idea what to do. She was embarrassed.

She was terrified that maybe somebody from her village had seen her come out here. Just trembling and feeling so alone and so scared, she turned around and just went back to her village. Nine months later, Ahn's condition had severely deteriorated. She basically was following exactly the process of every other person she had seen with Kuru. She had lost virtually all the control of her body. She could barely sip water. She was feeling absolutely horrible. I mean, she knew she was closing in on death, and she had not gone back out to try to get help from outsiders. That interaction with Ronald had destroyed her hope, and so she did go back and just was waiting to die, just like everybody else in her village did. But for An, the physical symptoms of Kuru that she was experiencing were undoubtedly terrible, but they were not as bad, at least to An, as the other side of Kuru. In addition to referring to this curse as Kuru, which meant trembling, sometimes foreay people would refer to this curse, this illness, as the laughing death. It's because during the terminal stage, so the end stage of Kuru, when you're just about to die, you just begin laughing.

It doesn't matter what you're thinking about. This is not an actual laugh. You're not thinking something's funny. It's like you could be weeping and totally depressed because you know you're going to die, but you keep hysterically laughing, which makes your whole body sore from constantly laughing over and over again. And Ahn was beginning to experience that. She would be weeping and laughing at the same time. And think about this, everybody Nobody else who's in the village, they know what this means. And so their preparations for her death are only getting more and more ramped up. They're getting ready for the big ritualistic funeral they're going to give to Ahn. And so Ahn, as she's hysterically laughing, is fully aware that everybody is just waiting for her to die. Then finally, just a few weeks after she had begun the laughing side of Kuru, An would pass away, almost exactly one year from when she first noticed the trembling in her hand when she was cooking over that fire. If you don't know this, late last year, we launched a brand new, strange, dark, and mysterious show called Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries. And so far, people love it.

It is a free weekly show where Each week, we explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies. Topics discussed on this show range from obscure diseases and freak occurrences to totally weird medical mishaps that sometimes result in big, amazing discoveries and other times result in just unimaginable suffering and death. So if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious, then you really ought to give Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries a try. To start listening, go look up and follow Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries on any podcast platform, and boom, you're in. You got yourself a new weekly show. But if you're super impatient like I am and you can't wait a whole week to get a new episode, well, with your prime membership, you can listen to an entire batch of eight episodes at once because we release them eight at a time on Amazon Music. Also on Amazon Music, there are no ads. If all this was not enough to sell you on maybe giving the show a try, well, then stick around at the end of this video, and I'll play you a sneak peek from our newest episode of Mr.

Balin's Medical mysteries. After An's death, more and more people just kept on getting Kuru. Over For the next seven years, it was like clockwork. 200 plus 4A people died from Kuru every year, and nobody had any idea how to stop it. It just became a part of their lives. Again, they kept getting closer and closer to being extinct. It was this really terrifying time. Seven years after Ahn's death, so in 1961, a medical anthropologist named Shirley Lindenbaum was sitting in her office at City University in New York, reading over old scientific articles. As she was just flipping through them, she noticed there was an article from an Australian anthropologist named Ronald Burnt, the same guy who had turned on away and told her, No, you don't have kuru. That's not real. It's psychosomatic. In this article, Ronald outlined these symptoms, these symptoms that the 4A people were exhibiting that obviously were not real. They had tremors, loss of muscle control, and huge mood swings. But Ronald was like, It's all in their head. It's not a real disease. But to Shirley, as she's reading this, she's thinking, Why Why has Ronald decided this has to be psychosomatic?

These symptoms seem like a real disease, like a neurological condition. Something must be attacking their brains, causing them to have these symptoms and then die. But when Shirley, just out of curiosity, began to do some additional research on the Kuru disease or whatever you want to call it, she discovered that there was basically no real research other than Ronald's about this weird illness. She decided, You know what? There's a gap in the research, and I'm going to fill I'm going to figure out what's going on with the Forre people and this weird thing called Kuru. The following summer, when Shirley finally had some time, she left New York and flew to Papua New Guinea, and she made her way into the forest to contact the Forre people. Eventually, she reached some of these small villages that contained Forre people. The Forre people, even if they didn't necessarily embrace Shirley, many of them were open to at least speaking to her and talking about their culture, their customs, their history, and of course, talking about Kuru, the this curse. Eventually, Shirley made her way into this one particular Forreys village where she actually saw a white man just walking around in this village.

So he really stood out. Immediately, Shirley walked up to this guy, and he introduced himself as Dr. Michael Albers, and he told Shirley he had been living in these villages with the Forre people for several months because he was studying kuru. He wanted to figure out what's actually causing it because he also felt very skeptical of the idea that this is just psychosomatic. That did not It seemed very plausible. Shirley and Dr. Albers were totally aligned, and they're like, Hey, let's swap notes and do this together. Shirley began telling Dr. Albers about what she had learned so far, and she said that when she showed up in Papua New Guinea, she believed what this was, what Kuru was, was a genetic brain disease, meaning it would be passed down from parent to child and so on and so forth. But she quickly discovered that after conducting research and talking to the Foray people in these villages, that that was not the case. This was not something that went from parent to child. Instead, Kuru appeared to spread amongst tight-knit social groups within these villages, which seemed to indicate this was actually a contagious disease, not a genetic one.

She told Dr. Albers that now her working theory was that Kuru was actually a contagious type of encephalitis, which is inflammation of the brain. But Shirley also said to Dr. Albers that that did not explain why so many victims of Kuru were female. Shirley also said to Dr. Albers that, I've been around loads of people with Kuru, and I don't have it. So how can it be contagious? Dr. Albers agreed with everything Shirley was saying, and in fact, had come to a similar conclusion himself, which meant he also had the same questions, why only women and why wasn't he getting it? But he told Shirley that when he began trying to answer this question, he discovered that actually, in addition to lots of women getting kuru, also lots of kids got kuru. Not necessarily parent to child, but also children in these villages seem to be slightly more susceptible to getting kuru than men. In fact, Dr. Albers told Shirley that right now there was a 12-year-old boy who was in the final stage of kuru, so the laughing stage, the terminal stage. Because this boy's parents knew their son was going to die, they were so desperate and grief-stricken that when Dr.

Albers came by and offered to do an autopsy on their son when he passed to try to learn more, the parents agreed, even though that meant totally breaking 4A custom. So this was like major taboo decision. But again, the 4A people are getting more and more desperate as they go closer and closer to the brink of extinction from Kuru. A few days later, Dr. Alpers found Shirley, and he told her that the 12-year-old boy had passed away, and so now it was time to conduct the autopsy. And so he led Shirley to a clearing in the woods that was far away from the eyes of the villagers, and there was a makeshift autopsy table with this boy's body on it. And while Shirley really could not to watch this actually happen, she did go over after Dr. Albers had opened up the boy's skull, revealing his brain. He yelled to her, Hey, you have to come over here and look at this. Shirley walked over and she looked down. Even though she had not seen a human brain before right in front of her, she knew right away there's something terribly wrong with that brain.

His brain was completely shriveled up and covered in holes, as if a worm had drilled through his brain. Shirley and Dr. Albers immediately knew this brain has to be sent off for further testing because something's happening here that's not psychosomatic. This is a real disease that is killing these people. About a year later, Shirley was back home in New York in her office when she received a letter from a research team at the United States National Institutes of Health, or NIH for short. The NIH is one of the largest medical research facilities in the world. It was where Shirley and Dr. Albers had sent off that boy's brain for further study. By getting this letter, Shirley knew she was going to get information about whatever they discovered in this boy's brain. So she ripped it open and pulled out the report and began reading. The researchers said they had spent the last year studying this brain tissue While they still didn't really understand how Kuru even happened and what caused it, was it a virus or an infection? They didn't know, but they had discovered something about how Kuru spread. During one of their experiments, the NIH researchers had injected some tissue from this boy's brain into a chimpanze, and very quickly, that chimpanzee developed kuru.

This told the researchers that, yes, kuru was contagious, and it spread through infected brain tissue. But how one person's infected brain got into another person's brain was the big mystery. But at least they had found something. But as Shirley read this, because she had done all that research when she went into the forest of Papua New Guinea and spoke to all these 4A people, she had learned a lot about what they did on a day-to-day basis and what their various customs and rituals were. She actually knew exactly how something like this could happen, something that only the 4A people were doing. During her research in Papua New Guinea, Shirley had learned that 4 A people believe all humans have five distinct souls. There was that one soul that 4 A people believe they could basically summon up out of a deceased person that would then go avenge that person's death. So about how all those people who died from Kuru, they believed that was a curse from some sorcerer. And so a big part of that funeral process was to call out that soul to go avenge their death, go find the sorcerer and kill them.

But that was just one soul. There were four others. Of these four others, there was one called the quila, which was the most dangerous. Quila meant flesh in the 4a people's language. This soul was like a manifestation of death and decay because that's what our flesh does. It just gradually dies all the time. They looked at the flesh as being a really bad thing. They believed after someone died, their flesh needed to be stored properly. Otherwise, it would pollute the air and cause more death and decay for other people that were still alive. The safest place, according to the 4a people, for the quila to be stored, so human flesh, was inside of a woman's body. The reason for this is 4a people believe women's bodies are much more resilient than and so if anybody could withstand holding quilla inside of them, it would be the women. But there was a very specific process that the 4a women had to follow in order to put this quilla inside of themselves. And multiple 4a women had explained this totally bizarre process to Shirley when she was out there talking to the people in the village. The way it worked is a few days after a 4a member has passed away, this huge feast is prepared.

Except the feast only consists of the quila. Basically, the person who is dead is chopped up and prepared by the women, like their entire body gets consumed. Now, keep in mind, anybody hearing about this who's not a member of the 4a people would be like, Oh, my God, that's horrible. But to 4a people, this ritualistic cannibalism was actually an act of love. The idea was by having these women consume the kweela, consuming the dead person, you're protecting the living because you don't want the kweela out and about polluting the air, and you are respecting the dead. But remember, kuru got spread through infected brain tissue. It just so happened that during these funeral feasts, when they were consuming the kweela, the brain of the deceased person was an absolute delicacy. The brain was reserved for close female relatives of the deceased person. During Ahn's sister's funeral, so when Tan passed, what do you think Ahn ate? She ate Thon's brain. Then also, critically, Shirley had learned that a lot of these women who were given the brain this delicacy during these funerals, they would often sneak little pieces of the brain and hand it out to kids as a little treat.

They would take the brain and eat it. Nobody knew. That's why the kids were also getting kuru. A few years after this incredible discovery by Shirley about how kuru was being passed along, the Australian colonial government banned the practice of ritualistic cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. Basically, they were telling the 4a people to stop Stop eating the dead. It's what's killing you. The 4a people who were very desperate to stop being killed by Kuru, they took to it, stopped eating each other, and so Kuru was virtually eradicated, and the 4a population, instead of sliding towards this extinction actually began to grow really fast. And today, the total population has at least doubled. And also, just to close this out, one final note is it took until 1990 to actually figure out what was going on inside of these people's bodies when they had Kuru. Because back in the '60s, when they figured out how not to get Kuru, nobody understood what was even happening. It was just like, Don't eat other people and you'll be okay, but that's all they knew. And while the process in the human body that caused Kuru remained a mystery for many decades after Shirley's big discovery, in the 1990s, researchers did finally figure out what's actually going on.

Basically, somebody with Kuru has these proteins in their brain called prions that fold wrong into the shape and then cannot function properly. This loss of protein function rapidly kills brain cells, which in turn, shribbles up the brain and causes all those holes all over it. Okay, here is the clip from our newest episode of Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries. Enjoy.

A 40-year-old man stood next to his teenage daughter in a hospital room, clutching her hand as she laid there unconscious on a girney. A flurry of doctors and nurses moved all around them, securing an oxygen mask over the girl's nose and jabbing her arms with needles. The father couldn't believe this was really happening. Just an hour ago, he'd come home to find his daughter passed out on the floor of the kitchen. Her face and neck were totally beat red. He didn't know what had happened, but his best guess was that maybe she had accidentally overheated the oven while making food. And then when she opened up the oven door, a rush of heat came out and it burned her. He didn't know what else could make her look so sunburned on such a cloudy December day. A nurse put her arms on the father's shoulders and told him he needed to step aside. So the father squeezed his daughter's hand one more time, then let the nurse guide him out of the hospital room. The nurse told the father that his daughter's kidneys were failing. They were going to rush her to the intensive care unit for emergency dialysis.

The father blanked, trying to process what the nurse had just told him. He didn't understand how his daughter's burned skin could lead to kidney failure. People died from that. He watched helplessly as the medical team wheeled his daughter's girney out of the room and down the hallway. And as they disappeared through a set of double doors, it hit him that he might have just seen his little girl alive for the last time. The father prayed that her doctors could figure out what was wrong with her before it was too late.

So that's going to do it. If you enjoyed today's story, well, guess what? We just released a new binge of more Medical mysteries on Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries, which is a podcast under the Balin Studio's umbrella. All you got to do is go look up Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries on any platform. It's free. There's loads of episodes you can listen to right now that sound an awful lot like this one. So go check it out. Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries. Until next time. Thank you so much. See you. Wait, don't go anywhere. If you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious videos, click here.