Fantastically Wrong: The Murderous Plant That Grows From the Blood of Hanged Men

[icymist]

The root of the mandrake plant was once thought to scream when pulled from the ground, rendering agonizing death to all those without wax in their ears. Well, extra wax, I mean—like, a lot of it. Simply not swabbing your ears won’t save you from anything, much less a homicidal plant. Wikimedia

As a child, no villain was to me more savage than the zucchini. My mother grew the scoundrels in the backyard, and whether she was deliberately scheming to improve her yields, or the climate just happened to have been ideal those years, season after season they got bigger and bigger. They grew so large and numerous that I eventually had to leave home—mostly because I went to college, but the zucchini certainly didn’t help.

I realize now that I had been quite lucky in my tanglings with zucchini, for in the Mediterranean there grows a far more murderous plant called the mandrake. Its roots can look bizarrely like a human body, and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form. It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.

Yet there is a way to safely uproot a mandrake—safely, that is, if you aren’t a dog with a bastard of an owner. If you really, really want one, the myths say to tie a hungry hound’s leash or even its tail to the plant. Back away, plug your ears with wax (a folkloric echo, by the way, of Odysseus ordering his crew to do the same as they passed the devious Sirens), and reveal a treat. The overzealous dog will sprint and consequently uproot the mandrake, but will immediately keel over in searing pain as its quarry lies there screaming.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-mandrake/