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Chapter 1. Reports of living woolly mammoth monsters

Chapter 2. The Kalanoro, Madagascar’s mysterious monster

Chapter 3. The Kappa, an earthquake-predicting monster

Chapter 2. The Kalanoro, Madagascar’s mysterious monster

The world is rife with legends and alleged sightings of hairy ape-men. The United States has the skunk ape in the southeast, the Sasquatch in the northwest and the Menehune in Hawaii. Ireland has Leprechauns and Nepal the Yeti. Not to be left out of the worldwide menagerie of hairy wild men, the island of Madagascar that lies off the southeastern tip of the African continent has its mysterious Kalanoro.

The indigenous peoples of Madagascar are a mixture of over a dozen tribes with overlapping cultures and a bubbling brew of spicy histories. Many are superstitious and still practice customs that raise the eyebrows of Westerners not steeped in the ancient lore of this African nation.

Madagascar lies off the southeast coast of Africa

Among the diverse peoples of Madagascar, none pays as much obeisance to a rich panoply of gods and spirits as the Betsimisaraka (translation: “the numberless inseparables)” who live along the east coast of the island. To the Betsimisaraka, mermaids, spirits, signs and omens, and little men with long hair that dwell in the wild forests and steal food from villagers at night, are a daily part of their life.

Small, but ubiquitous creatures

The Kalanoro are diminutive creatures said to be no more than two-feet high. Natives claim these little men can be found throughout the island.

Other tribes in other areas of the island agree the Kalanoro exist but they call them by different names such as Kotoky or Vazimba. The Antakarana and Tsimihety peoples claim the Kalanoro in their region mostly dwell deep inside caverns.

According to the people of Madagascar the Kalanoro have lived on the island for more than two thousand years. When humans migrated to the island the first encounters occurred.

Sketch from eyewitness sighting of a Kalanoro

Encounters with Kalanoro are rare. They tend to hide deep in Madagascar’s verdant rain forests. Witnesses who have happened upon these little men agree that the Kalanoro have very long fingernails and a reddish cast to their furtive eyes. Many claim that the Kalanoro have feet that are reversed.

If you wish to track one of those little men, they assert, you must remember to follow their tracks backwards. Successful trackers have testified they have followed footprints to areas with evidence of Kalanoro meals. The remains of meals are sometimes found by forest trees or among rocks along riverbanks. Raw seafood, vegetables and grain are said to make up the diet of the elusive Kalanoro.

An unworldly Madagascar forest

Eyewitnesses do exist. According to Travel Africa Magazine, “Eloi saw his first Kalanoro in a rice paddy behind his village and describes it as ‘a little man, less than a meter tall, with hair all over his body and long fingernails.’”

They can apparently be lured by the irresistible smell of frying pistachio nuts, but attempts to catch them are usually unsuccessful because their feet point backwards and hunters invariably track them in the wrong direction.

Reported capture of a Kalanoro

In 1889, however, a capture was reported to the Royal Geographical Society and, in 1924, Chase Salmon Osborn described a Kalanoro sighting that he assumed “must have been a honeymoon couple because they were making love by a campfire. Despite their human traits and telepathic abilities, Kalanoro are considered animals.”

The tale of the British Royal Geographical Society capturing a Kalanoro in 1889 is ubiquitous throughout the island. A check of the Society’s archives, however, reveals no such specimen was ever seen let alone caught.

Kalanoro are seen in mountainous regions

Most of the Kalanoro are said to have great magical powers. Like Sampson, the Kalanoro’s long hair endows them with almost supernatural strength. Supposedly their powers are transferable for some mosies (herbalists) in Madagascar claim that potions of magical powders impregnated with ground Kalanoro hair provides the user with great mystical powers.

Madagscar mosies also act as mediums. Many work with the spirits of the Kalanoro whom they claim have great healing powers. The Kalanoro are thought to be spirits of nature. Those who seek the Kalanoro mediums do so because they think they have become cursed by inadvertently trespassing into a region that is sacred to the Kalanoro.

Sometimes Kalanoro are spotted near lakes

In a 1964 article, the author Bacil Kirtley asserted that the Kalanoro were dwarfish creatures. He compared them to the European legends of elves and trolls that stole food, replaced human children with their own children and generally caused mischief and mayhem.

The natives of Madagascar roundly reject that description.

Josh Gates hunted the Kalanoro

Strangely, like UFOs, sightings of Kalanoro come in waves

Run-ins with the Kalanoro, although rare, seem to come in waves. This passage recounts some contemporary encounters: “How recent are the encounters with these hairy, three-toed Kalanoro with their hooked fingers and aggressive habits? Professor Joe Hobbs of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Department of Geography, studied them, while he was with the local tribes in the Ankarana Special Reserve, Madagascar, during the late 1990s.

“On May 15, 2000, when Hobbs wrote his report, he talked of how the people of the village of Ambalakedi consider Andoboara Cave ‘sacred because on three separate occasions, most recently just two years ago, grief-stricken parents whose children had wandered into the forest had recovered them alive here’ after food was left out for the Kalanoro in exchange for their children’s return.”

Like the island of Papua New Guinea, Madagascar’s mysterious and bizarre wildlife is a veritable feast for researchers and cryptozoologists. The island teams with creatures ranging from giant hissing cockroaches to screaming lizards. Thousands of other creatures are thought to be uncategorized. Among these are man-eating plants and antelopes, the Bibyolona ( a kind of miniature Centaur), and of course the Kalanoro.

Whether the Kalanoro are truly an offshoot of Man yet to be confirmed, or simply an island myth built over several millennia, the fact remains that it’s curious that so many diverse cultures spread across so many different lands all have legends of little people.

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