What Was The ‘Monkey Man’ Of Delhi?

In May 2001, the Delhi police announced a reward for the capture or the termination of a malevolent monkey-man miscreant who was waging a campaign of terror against the most impoverished regions of the Indian capital. I’m not sure if the Delhi police would have been into the idea of plastering ‘Wanted’ posters right across the city, but such a poster might have read something like this:

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE: Monkey Man! Sometimes answers to the names of Kala Bandar, Black Monkey, or The Face Scratcher. Proper little shit.

Responsible for hundreds of alleged assaults and at least two deaths in the space of just two weeks. Usually targets poor people under the veil of darkness as they sleep on the roofs of their houses. Has been known to leap from roof to roof in a single bound.

Half man half monkey. May be small and hairy with metal claws and glowing red eyes. But may also be a huge flying beast on roller skates wearing a motorcycle helmet and a utility belt.

May possess powers of invisibility, and has been known to turn into a small cat. We know all this sounds a bit far-fetched, and to be honest, we don’t actually believe that the Monkey Man of Delhi exists. But we’re keen to capture the little bugger anyway as he’s draining all the resources of the emergency services and it would be lovely to concentrate on something a bit more important like polishing our batons.

Approach with caution. We’d advise shooting on sight if you catch even the slightest glimpse of the hairy scoundrel. It’s also worth noting that water or light might temporarily diminish his potentially alien superpowers.

A reward of 50,000 rupees for any information leading to his capture, but just his evil monkey head would do, really. I think that’s about it, then. Cheerio!

Admittedly, that might all be a bit long to fit neatly onto a typical ‘Wanted’ poster. But I don’t think the length would have mattered in the grand scheme of things. The Monkey Man of Delhi was never officially identified or caught, and even today a mystery hangs over the manic mayhem machinated by a mischief-mongering monkey man with murderous motives. But who or what could really have been behind the hundreds of alleged rooftop attacks in Delhi during the month of May 2001 which left some survivors with genuine animal bites?

Was this creature who moved only in shadow the result of a secret laboratory experiment, a terrorist plot, an alien invasion, or the local population indulging in slightly over-generous servings of rum? Could it have been an animal escaped from the zoo, or just a human criminal who never quite learned how to use a razor? If he was never caught, then why did the hundreds of reported sightings fizzle out so quickly towards the end of May?

And could the Monkey Man have unwittingly evolved into something of a superhero and saviour for the poorest residents of Delhi? Not all heroes have the ability to use language to form complex functioning in groups.

Monkey See Monkey Do

It took a little while for Monkey Man to swing his way into Delhi. The very first reported sighting of him occurred on April 5th 2001 in Purana Vijay Nagar in the neighbouring city of Ghaziabad, when a citizen by the name of Anil Gopal complained that he’d been attacked by a creature which appeared to be half-man half-monkey whilst Anil was sleeping on his terrace in the early hours of the morning. A very similar account of a Monkey Man attack was reported in the same city just a couple of weeks later before the creature appeared to pack his bags and move to east Delhi where he seriously upped his game.

By May 14th, at least fifty fresh attacks were reported to Delhi police over the course of just a few nights, and many of the victims required treatment at hospital for bites and scratches and various other injuries. The Monkey Man only seemed interested in harassing the residents of the most poverty-stricken areas of the Indian capital where access to fresh water was limited, and frequent blackouts were imposed by the state-run power companies, plunging millions of people into complete darkness. And it was often during these extended power-cuts that the Monkey Man struck during the night, making it difficult for the victims to accurately identify what exactly was attacking them, as it wasn’t like they could just flick on a light switch and stare into the eyes of the simian intruder.

The victims would already have been in a pretty vulnerable state, as the Monkey Man usually targeted the many terrace and roof sleepers of Delhi. Such people weren’t sleeping outside for the hell of it. They were partly trying to get a bit of cool night air during the sweltering summer temperatures when they couldn’t just power up a fan, and partly choosing to take advantage of the natural light of the moon rather than lock themselves away in the darkness of their modest dwellings.

But this meant that the Monkey Man didn’t have to exert too much effort, as he wasn’t required to fiddle with locks or climb through windows. He would just bound from terrace to rooftop, seeking the easy prey who were sleeping outdoors with no immediate protection from a wild beast on the rampage.

The number of reported attacks in east Delhi would only soar to new heights over the next few days, but there was a big problem in getting a grip on a physical description. There were obviously bound to be a few discrepancies here and there, considering that none of his victims had the opportunity to take a photograph of the assailant or even just shine a lamp into his face. But even so, you might be forgiven for thinking that not everyone was talking about the same monster.

It was often described as a 4-foot creature with thick black hair, a dark face, and a prominent snout, but others felt that it looked more like a cat with fierce glowing eyes and long shiny metal claws. In most cases, it was described as being incredibly agile with the ability to leap from rooftop to rooftop like some monkey-fied version of Spring Heeled Jack. Yet others felt convinced that the creature looked more like a muscular 8-foot bear wearing an astronaut’s helmet.

And the descriptions just got crazier as the days passed. Some witnesses claimed that the creature resembled a masked monkey superhero with a utility belt housing three big buttons, one of which rendered the Monkey Man invisible. Some said that it could fire laser bolts from its eyes, some said that it sported a gleaming halo, whilst others reckoned that it got around town on either a skateboard or roller skates.

So this all narrows down the search quite a bit. We’re looking for an invisible eight-foot dwarf monkey space bear angel on a skateboard. Can’t be too many of them about. I don’t know what the police were pissing about at. Perhaps it might help if we dig a little deeper into some of the individual eye-witness accounts as reported extensively by the Indian media. Well, of course it won’t, but let’s do it anyway whilst we’re here.

35-year-old Arvind Nagar told the press: “A strange growling noise woke me at 1am. I could make out the hazy outline of a creature sitting on the roof. He leapt at me and ripped me with his steel claws.” Industrial worker Prakash Chand recalled: “I was sleeping on our terrace and woke up when I heard this strange growling sound. It was about 4 or 5 feet tall, very well built and whacked me hard on my arm.”

A rare example of the Monkey Man actually breaking inside a house was reported by Sudha Verma when she was thrown into a panic after hearing her sister-in-law Vimlesh crying out from an upstairs bedroom: “The monkey has come!” There was nothing much to be seen by the time Sudha had raced upstairs to investigate other than a shadow slipping silently out of view, but Vimlesh claimed that she had just seen a long monkey arm poking through a wrought-iron grate positioned above the bedroom door which had quickly retracted when her sister-in-law rushed upstairs to help.

One anonymous resident confidently told a reporter: “It was a monkey alright! And about four foot tall. But as soon as I grabbed it, it turned itself into a cat with tawny, glowing eyes!” He wasn’t the only one who had a go at tackling the creature. Mohammad Ishtiaq and his wife Kesar Bano had attempted to throw a bedsheet over the Monkey Man, but as Kesar noted: “It was just too fast for us. It leapt away into the darkness screaming ‘Hoo Hoo Hoo’ before we could even catch a glimpse.”

35-year-old shopkeeper Anim Keshri had a theory that the midnight prowler he witnessed was probably some kind of robot controlled by remote control, as he could think of no known living creature that could bound so effortlessly across the rooftops without even breaking into a sweat. Meanwhile, a young housemaid identified in the papers as Kumari was more specific than most in her description: “It has three buttons on its chest. One makes it turn into a monkey, the second gives it extra strength, the third makes it invisible. He touches a lock and it breaks, but he is afraid of the light.”

That final point is good to know. Actually the tips were coming in thick and fast for anyone unfortunate enough to be menaced by the Monkey Man, as he did appear to have just a couple of weaknesses. Whilst Superman can be brought down by Kryptonite, Wonder Woman can be brought down by her own Lasso of Truth, and The Fantastic Four can be brought down by any film studio attempting to make a half-decent movie from the franchise, it seems that the Monkey Man’s own Achilles heels were light and water. Some witnesses reported that light appeared to temporarily blind the creature, whilst throwing water at its chest proved to be quite effective in short-circuiting the cyborg’s motherboard heart.

But whilst it might be considered a bit early in the script for mild scepticism – from the writer at least, I imagine Simon has already been dumping all over this nonsense for a good ten minutes – there are some eye-witness accounts which appear to be even less credible than others. Rekha Das, the wife of a rickshaw-puller, claimed to ‘The Indian Express’ that a monkey-faced creature as small as a cat flew through a tiny gap in her bedroom wall and bit her forehead and fingers, whilst her unfortunate husband got two of his teeth knocked out by a large metallic hand. Whilst Rekha’s bite marks and her husband’s injuries were confirmed by medical workers, the police were a little dubious over this one as the layout of the house meant that such a creature could only have gained access to the bedroom by literally flying up from the ground and then squeezing through a tiny gap in the wall before striking the husband with a giant metallic hand. Unless this was indeed the work of a shape-shifting winged cyborg cat monkey, it seemed probable that there may have been other explanations for the incident.

Meanwhile, a toymaker by the name of Vinod Kumar reported that he had been rudely interrupted whilst trying to take a slash in the privacy of his own home. Vinod has suffered scratches and bruises when a large helmeted figure with three-inch iron claws had assaulted him from behind during this vulnerable moment. Whilst the scratches and bruises were very much genuine, the doctor who examined Vinod Kumar later confirmed that the injuries had been inflicted long before the toymaker had claimed.

As for that guy who reckoned that the creature turned into a cat when he started to grapple with it? Call me a doubting Thomas, but I reckon he just saw a cat.

Shock The Monkey

Of course, you’re always gonna crackpots taking the piss or at least joining in the fun when a big story like this breaks, and it’s easy to pick apart a few isolated reports from people who just wanted to get their names in the papers. But it’s the sheer volume of reports and medical treatments which marks out this case as being particularly unusual. By May 25th 2001, the Delhi police had received almost four hundred reports from citizens who claimed to have been attacked by the Monkey Man, all within the space of less than two weeks. At the same time, hospitals and surgeries were buckling under the strain of dealing with an influx of patients suffering from animal bites and various other injuries sustained after an encounter with the creature of the night.

And not everyone survived their meeting with the Monkey Man. According to ‘The Times of India’, at least one man was killed around May 12th when an industrial worker jumped off the rooftop of his own house in the suburb of Noida whilst screaming that the Monkey Man had come for him. Some press reports claimed that a second man died under very similar circumstances at around the same date, although details are more than a little vague.

The most widely-reported death is that of a 27-year-old pregnant woman identified in the press as Suman who attempted to flee a rooftop attack from the Monkey Man but plunged headlong down a staircase in her bid to escape. Suman was rushed to the Guru Tegh Bahadur hospital in east Delhi, but died very shortly after arrival. Suman’s landlady claimed that several witnesses had heard the screams and screeches of the Monkey Man before the victim fell to her death.

But whilst Sub-Inspector Manvendra Singh from the New Ashok police station confirmed the death of a 27-year-old pregnant woman, he emphasised that she had died from a head injury, and that no bites or claw marks had been found on her body.

But all this was naturally causing concern for the Delhi police who were now under strict orders to shoot first and ask questions over a banana later. At one point, 3,000 police officers were placed on night patrol on the streets of east Delhi, often taking positions on rooftops and terraces, or shining their torches into every nook and cranny of the district in search of peculiar activity. The power companies were urged to calm down with the rolling blackouts to help the police in their search and offer more reassurance for the terrified residents, whilst some politicians were considering enlisting the help of military forces to help combat the menace.

That reward of 50,000 rupees was formally announced by the police for the capture of the Monkey Man later in the month – equivalent to just over $1,000 US dollars. But it was a surprising move, as the official line coming out of the police was that the Monkey Man didn’t actually exist, and that there must be a perfectly rational explanation for all this which didn’t involve monkey men hybrids on skateboards. Still, just to be on the safe side, they also came up with a couple of artist’s sketches of the creature that did not exist to assist any potential bounty hunters.

The first image is essentially just a crude depiction of a small, hairy monkey with long claws and a funky hairdo, whilst the second image appears to portray a cartoon biped cat wearing a cool uniform and a helmet. To nobody’s great surprise, these drawings didn’t really provide much help in identifying the suspect, and the reward was never claimed.

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey

Many residents of east Delhi were now afraid to leave their houses after dark. The vast majority were too scared to sleep outside on their roofs or terraces, whilst some resorted to barricading themselves in their own homes during the height of Monkey Man fever. Several of the braver citizens decided to take matters into their own hands, forming vigilance committees and wandering around the neighbourhoods day and night armed with tridents and bamboo poles and axes. This predictably led to a string of unfortunate consequences.

One van driver was dragged forcefully out of his vehicle and given a proper pounding after a local mob had concluded that he was the culprit, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. I wouldn’t have thought that a van would have been the most obvious choice of transport for a half-man half-monkey. Yet his vehicle was smashed to bits whilst the driver was later taken to hospital with multiple fractures.

A four-foot tall wandering mystic by the name of Jamir was also apprehended by angry men with pitchforks, partly on the grounds that he was guilty of “publicly performing mystical formulations involving hunks of goat meat”, but I suspect largely because he was quite short. The guy was badly beaten up by the mob who later handed him over to the police – but he was guilty of nothing more than being a bit of a spell-casting fruitcake. On an even more disturbing note, ‘The Hindustan Times’ reported that a young girl had been attacked in the streets, purely because somebody had decided that she looked like she was possessed by the spirit of the Monkey Man.

But despite the strong presence of the police and the lynch mobs, still the attacks continued throughout the middle of May. One guy reckoned that the monster had threatened to kill him in the Bhojpuri language, whilst another quite despondent victim revealed that the Monkey Man had stolen his new mobile phone. It sounds to me like the latter got off quite lightly.

It wasn’t all bad news, though. Well, it was mostly bad news. But on the plus side, Monkey Man attacks aside, the general crime rate in east Delhi dropped dramatically during the month of May.

Whereas a total of fifty non-monkey crimes were reported in the district during the first week of May alone, only a further six were reported for the rest of the entire month. I’d like to think that this was because the population had collectively made the decision to find strength in unity, putting aside their petty differences and bonding together to fight a new and terrible common foe. Of course it probably wasn’t.

It’s more likely that criminals just found it harder to go about their business, what with everyone on such high alert, thousands of police officers patrolling the area, and thousands of vigilantes roaming the streets in search of short wizards and little girls. Under these intense circumstances, how was an honest burglar meant to make a living?

It wouldn’t last. And that’s largely because by the end of May, the Monkey Man had completely disappeared without trace. Well, there were a couple of supposed sightings of a Monkey Man in the Indian city of Kanpur the following year, along with a couple of fresh sightings in New Delhi of something which now apparently resembled a monkey robot with flashing red and blue lights.

But nobody appeared to pay that much attention to those. On the whole, a sensational story which had dominated the Indian press for well over two weeks – as well as a brief burst of interest overseas - just seemed to evaporate. Reported sightings of the beast quickly dried up, and the number of patients bothering hospitals and surgeries with their complaints of Monkey Man bites dropped sharply to zero.

The monster pretty much vanished overnight and was largely forgotten by the rest of the world, almost as if it had never really existed at all. And it felt like such an unexpectedly sudden departure from a creature that didn’t bother leaving a goodbye note.

Maybe one of those groups of vigilantes had finally apprehended the real suspect but had kept quiet about it. Maybe it had tried to jump a rooftop too far and clumsily fallen to its death, although you’d think that a body of particular interest to zoologists would have been found. Or maybe it had just flown back to whatever planet it came from on its intergalactic space hopper.

But those two weeks of sheer panic, frenzied news headlines, hundreds of alleged assaults leading to very real wounds, and at least two connected deaths, were unlikely to have been forgotten too quickly by the residents of east Delhi. And yet with so many conflicting accounts of a creature that had the uncanny ability to be in several places at once, and with practically nothing in the way of evidence aside from the wounds of the victims, it’s not too surprising that the police never quite managed to identify a suspect, despite their best efforts in putting together drawings of a hairy monkey and a cat in a uniform.

So who or what exactly was the real Monkey Man?

The Missing Link

If you’d bothered to ask any of the victims for their opinions on the origins of the creature, many of them would have told you that it was clearly the reincarnation of the ancient Hindu deity Hanuman who is often depicted as half-man and half-monkey. In fact, it’s reported that several Hanuman temples in Delhi witnessed a huge surge in footfall during that month of May, possibly from visitors who felt the need to pray to the Hindu god of healing and worship, and politely request that he refrain from larking about on rooftops and nicking people’s mobile phones. But let’s park that theory for a while, or to be more honest, let’s just never come back to it, eh?

I raised an eyebrow or three when I heard the views of one unnamed senior police officer who was quoted in several different newspapers as saying that the whole drama had been meticulously orchestrated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in a bid to “monger mischief” and drain the resources and energy of the Delhi police who had been placed on high alert for a couple of weeks as they worked around the clock to catch a naughty monkey. But it’s difficult to see what exactly such a fiendish plot could have achieved in the long term aside from a big stack of police overtime, and I suspect that the Inter-Services Intelligence have more pressing matters to deal with than mongering monkey mischief in Delhi.

One of the more out-there theories involves a terrible old American black and white sci-movie called ‘Robot Monster’ from 1953. This 3D film directed by Phil Tucker tells the story of an alien cyborg who arrives on Planet Earth on a mission to destroy humanity. On the face of it, the monster – depicted as a big hairy monkey wearing a diving helmet - barely looks capable of doing anything as sophisticated as opening a packet of Corn Flakes.

It’s now widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, which of course means that it’s also gone on to inspire a devoted cult following. And this in turn apparently encouraged Phil Tucker Jr - the son of the original director – to propose a long-awaited sequel in 2001 which would be filmed in Delhi. So, whilst such a movie was never completed, the idea here is that Phil Tucker Jnr at least started filming ‘Robot Monster 2’ in Delhi in 2001, and that all the alleged sightings were actually of the headlining act in full costume.

It’s an interesting idea, but I never felt entirely convinced that the leading star of a movie would be allowed to run riot around the rooftops of Delhi in the middle of the night.

A mocked-up ‘Robot Monster 2’ movie poster has done the rounds online, featuring the words: “New Delhi attacked! Coming December 2001!” But the original source for all this appears to be a not-entirely-serious website called “Mr Blog’s Tepid Ride”. As far as I can make out, ‘Robot Monster 2’ was not only never completed, it was never even proposed in the first place. A shame, as it sounds as if it wouldn’t have been particularly hard to top the original.

So let’s turn our attention to slightly more realistic theories. There’s often been talk of the phantom attacker being either a weird alien hybrid or simply a human wearing a monkey mask, bouncy spring heels, and iron claws. But what if this creature which resembled a monkey was, wait for it…just a monkey?

I’ll admit that I’d be pretty amazed if I popped down to the Fudge Pantry in my local Cornish village and encountered a small group of mischievous wild monkeys on the way. The only monkeys I’ve ever seen in real life were either in a zoo or in the raucous crowd of a typical British football stadium. But it’s not such a massively unusual sight in many Indian cities, including Delhi.

I mean, it’s not like you’d typically expect to be jostling for space on the bus with an army of monkeys intent on bagging the best seats. But in a country bursting with literally millions of wild monkeys, it’s understandable that some of them mooch into the cities occasionally to have a bit of a laugh and smash some shit up.

One particularly ridiculous incident took place in 2000 in the city of Patna when a troop of monkeys appeared to embark upon a savage anti-smoking crusade. They were spotted marching around a busy office block in single file with a curious look of determination on their cheeky monkey faces. Workers going in and out of the offices were generally ignored by the monkeys, except for the employees who had just popped out for a crafty cigarette.

As soon as anyone dared to light up, the monkeys would charge at them, rip the cigarette from their mouth, slap the person around the face, and occasionally run off with the entire packet of cigarettes liberated from the employee’s jacket pocket. One state official glumly told the press: “No one dares to carry cigarettes in their pockets, let alone smoke. Everyone is afraid of getting accosted by the monkeys.”

It might just be that the monkeys were less interested in promoting the harmful effects of tobacco smoking to human beings, and more interested in just stealing them to smoke for themselves.

But the situation only got worse from there, as the monkeys eventually felt brave enough to venture inside the office block, where they were witnessed spilling drinks, sitting on vacant chairs, and casually flipping through office documents. This kind of thing is particularly common in Delhi, where even the prime minister’s office was once reported to be overrun by wild monkeys on the loose. And some local doctors have claimed that it’s not uncommon to see monkeys wandering up and down the corridors of the hospitals, poking patients as they lie in their beds, and tinkering with blood transfusion drips.

Yet the director of the National Zoological gardens in Delhi was still not convinced that monkeys were responsible for the 2001 attacks. He stated: “It cannot be a monkey as suspected, because they do not have the height attributed to the attacker by eyewitnesses.” The Joint Commissioner of Delhi police Suresh Roy was in agreement that the situation couldn’t be pinned on monkeys, as he told the press: “We contacted Delhi zoo authorities and the experts say that no simian would ever attack without provocation.”

Both of those are pretty odd statements to make. Whilst the director of the National Zoological gardens was claiming that the heights don’t match up, that all depends on who exactly you talked to, as the various conflicting eyewitness accounts reckoned that the Monkey Man was anywhere from between four to eight feet tall. And I’m not sure if Joint Police Commissioner Suresh Roy got through to the right department when he thought he was speaking to experts, but whilst monkey attacks without provocation are relatively rare, they absolutely can happen.

In fact, there had already been frequent reports of random monkey attacks in Delhi long before 2001, and it’s not inconceivable that a number of the alleged Monkey Man attacks were indeed down to real monkeys. But the previous random monkey attacks were usually scattered and isolated incidents. It does seem highly improbable that a group of wild monkeys would have sustained a two-week campaign of terror involving hundreds of victims without ever being identified and caught by the thousands of police officers and vigilantes on the scent.

Monkey Business

So the next obvious answer is surely that the whole thing was just a hoax on some level. Either the Monkey Man himself was just some prankster with far too much time on his fake hairy hands, or the actual reports to the police were concocted by attention-seekers who hadn’t witnessed anything disturbing in the slightest.

Well, in fact it can be conclusively confirmed that plenty of people were indeed just acting the clown whilst the majority of the population were cowering under their bed sheets every night. One guy identified by the police as Dharmendar was arrested after he was caught in the act of burglary whilst wearing a cheap crap monkey mask. But it’s not like anyone felt like celebrating over the long-awaited capture of the Monkey Man.

It seemed pretty obvious that the small-time thief was a harmless dimwit who was telling the truth when he claimed to have adopted this cunning disguise to frighten away any accidental witnesses who might conclude that their lives were in imminent danger from the real Monkey Man. This itself was a bit of a silly strategy, considering the amount of people who were out on the streets actively hunting anything that vaguely resembled a monkey, but that’s just how Dharmendar rolled.

Several other people were caught messing about in the early hours of the morning making silly monkey noises and screams, whilst even a doctor landed himself in hot water after playing a prank on his neighbours. He thought it would be fun to cover an inflated surgical glove in brown hair dye and leave it for his neighbours to find, presumably to make them think that they had stumbled across the dismembered paw of the Monkey Man. I wouldn’t have thought that a doctor would even have had the time to pull such a stunt, considering that most local people who worked in the medical industry were so over-stretched during this period, but he probably wished that he hadn’t bothered as his little gag led to him getting arrested very shortly afterwards.

On top of all this, it turns out that all those hundreds of calls to the police may not have been entirely genuine, either. According to the Delhi police, the vast majority of the four hundred reports they received were eventually identified as prank calls. But that’s not to say that everyone who ever contacted the police or wandered into a hospital or surgery was just monkeying around.

Many of those reported injuries were very real. I mean, we shouldn’t overlook the deaths either, but it’s important to bear in mind that nobody was ever mauled to death by long iron claws. The two or three fatalities connected with the Monkey Man involved residents of a district very much paralysed with fear, falling to their deaths under the belief that the beast had come for them.

Each case was tragic – including of course the death of a 27-year-old pregnant woman – but there was no evidence found of any genuine attack from a creature.

The injuries and scratch marks and bites inflicted on the many patients seeking medical treatment at the time are an entirely different kettle of insects, though. Some of the earliest press reports appeared to confirm that these injuries really were inflicted by something that wasn’t quite human. Joint Commissioner of Police Suresh Roy told Reuters news agency: “We have consulted doctors about the bites and they said they were by some animal. All the information we have is pointing towards an animal.

But we checked with the local zoo and they said no animal had escaped from there.”

But a deeper dive into the medical statistics paints a very different picture. For starters, respected rationalist Sanal Edamaruku of The Indian Rationalists Association took it upon himself to lead a team of researchers into the panicked region on a mission to track down alleged victims who claimed to have suffered physical wounds at the hands or paws of the monster. The team spoke to around forty different victims, all of whom claim to have been scratched or bitten by the Monkey Man.

But an examination of the wounds revealed nothing more than very minor scratches or cuts or rashes. It’s possible that some of them may indeed have been scratched or bitten by a stray cat or a rogue rodent, but Sanal Edamaruku concluded that most of the wounds were either knowingly or unknowingly self-inflicted. In other words, these people had either purposefully scratched themselves a little bit to give the false impression that they had been attacked, or they’d taken a bit of a stumble in the middle of the night during one of the frequent blackouts and later blamed it on that wretched Monkey Man.

A slightly more official investigation was undertaken a couple of years later by The Indian Journal of Medical Science when the publication was granted access to police records and local hospital records taken at the time of the attacks. The journal confirmed that the police had received a grand total of 397 reports of Monkey Man attacks between May 10th and May 25th, but only fifty-two patients ever required medical attention. The majority of those patients were young males living in the very poorest sections of east Delhi.

But a close examination of their injuries didn’t really yield anything that smelled like monkey. If a patient really had been bitten or clawed by a wild animal, the victim would likely have been left with some pretty nasty gashes on their inner forearms. But the overwhelming majority of patients were showing off very minor abrasions and lacerations on their outer forearms which could have been made with any blunt or pointed object.

So it would appear that just about everyone who received medical attention was either deliberately trying to hoodwink the medical teams with minor accidental or self-inflicted wounds, or they had somehow managed to convince themselves that an accidental injury really had been the result of a brutal attack from the midnight monkey monster. And that last point is important as we now address what has come to be the most widely accepted answer to all of this, even if I’m not wholly convinced of it myself: The Monkey Man of Delhi was simply one of the biggest cases of mass hysteria in modern times.

The police appeared to be of the opinion that much of it was down to poor, uneducated, superstitious, illiterate, and downright stupid people letting their imaginations run riot. That sounds like a pretty harsh assessment, but there may at least be some truth in how the Monkey Man myth only appeared to thrive under very specific socio-economic conditions. The beast wasn’t coming after wealthy people fast asleep in their four-poster beds.

Just about all of the attacks were based in the very poorest areas suffering from lack of access to water in the sweltering heat, regular blackouts, and overcrowding. These people were hot, bothered, thirsty, and often living in the dark, so perhaps not in the best frame of mind for rational thinking. Many of them may well have been clinging onto superstitious beliefs, and we know for certain that the most of them would have been deeply religious. and really did believe that the attacks may have been the work of the ancient Hindu deity Hanuman.

The Indian press wasn’t exactly helping matters with their daily front page reports which tended to focus squarely on the most ridiculous aspects of the story. The content of the reports featured little sensible analysis on how the attacker may have just been a human criminal or a lost monkey, or how he may not even have existed at all. Instead, they ran with the stories of how the eight-foot creature on a skateboard could shoot laser bolts from his eyes, turn himself invisible, and metamorphose into a cat, and how he had been directly responsible for at least two deaths. The fresh sightings of the beast became ever more frequent as the news reports became ever more wackier, stoking genuine fear across the whole population who were absorbing all this mad material.

The Delhi police could also initially have handled the situation better and worked harder on calming down the terrified residents. Whilst they officially declared that they did not believe the suspect was an alien monkey hybrid, they were also telling the press that some of the victims had clearly been attacked by an animal, whilst putting up a reward for the capture of a creature that resembled either a monkey or a cat man. And as the thousands of police officers scouted the streets at night in search of an eight-foot monkey or an invisible cat, it seems that the fictional beast became responsible for everything in the eyes of the panicked population.

If an intruder broke into your home, it was the Monkey Man. If you tripped over and fell in your own home, you’d been attacked by the Monkey Man. Every slightly unusual noise in the distance was the howl of the Monkey Man.

The Monkey Man was everywhere even though he was nowhere.

And so the conclusion reached by most is that the Monkey Man phenomenon was nothing more than a collective delusion in a poverty-stricken region living in fear of religion and superstition, which was fuelled by sensationalist press coverage and insensitive handling by the police. I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but I don’t think it tells the whole story. I find it unlikely that the saga just materialised out of nowhere based on absolutely nothing at all.

Some of the earliest alleged attacks may well have been from real monkeys, whilst others may have been from human criminal intruders, and somehow these separate incidents conflated to form the myth of the Monkey Man. We’ve already established that the majority of later reports were simply hoax calls from people pissing about. These pranksters certainly weren’t buying into the collective delusion or praying for an end to the vengeance of a half-man half monkey deity.

They were just having a bit of a chuckle at the expense of the police.

And whilst many victims may indeed have convinced themselves that a perfectly innocent injury had been inflicted by the Monkey Man, I’m sure there were others who just wanted to feel involved in the story and were knowingly blaming previous minor injuries on the claws of the beast. Any domestic dispute or shaving cut or accident in the kitchen could now arouse attention and awe from neighbours who were led to believe that you had seen the monster close-up and survived to tell the tale. But I also reckon that some people were playing a far shrewder game which yielded some quite impressive results.

These people were being deprived of access to fresh water, whilst the frequent blackouts were depriving them of light. And what were the two supposed weaknesses of the Monkey Man? Well, blow me down with a feather, they just happened to be water and light.

During the peak of the drama, the power stations had been encouraged to keep the electric running, whilst more efforts were made to distribute fresh water to the locals, and a bigger police presence on the streets helped everyone feel a lot safer as the general crime rates plummeted.

I’m not sure if we can really call the fictional hybrid a superhero, bearing in mind that at least two people died whilst attempting to escape his clutches. But I’ll say one thing about the Monkey Man. He certainly helped to improve social services, cut down on crime, and keep the lights on, even if only for a limited time. And this may have been down to residents who knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to make that telephone call to the police.

Monkey Gone to Heaven

The departure of Monkey Man from Delhi may have seemed remarkably sudden for a case largely dismissed as a collective delusion. It’s as if one day everyone was suffering from mass hysteria, and the following day everyone was cured. The police may have actually played a part in his somewhat abrupt disappearance as they finally managed to get a better grip on the situation.

They were now getting more than a little pissed off with all the prank calls, and began making it clear that anyone caught providing them with misleading information would be instantly thrown in the slammer for their trouble. At around the same time, the Indian press finally began to lose interest in the story. And these two events appeared to lead to an immediate full-stop to the saga, even if there was no real conclusion as such.

The pranksters stopped making their calls as they didn’t fancy the thought of getting locked up for the punchline, whilst the wave of terror that had struck east Delhi seemed to immediately subside when everyone stopped reading about it in the newspapers.

The press and the police may have played instrumental parts in fanning the flames of the myth, but to be fair, they also played instrumental parts in swiftly destroying the myth that the press in particular had helped to create. The Monkey Man may have been born from a melting pot of imagination, fear, hysteria, tomfoolery, isolated genuine attacks, and just a dollop of cunning strategy, but he died from an overnight loss of attention. We may never see his like again.

But considering what a terrific job he made of briefly improving the lives of the poorest people in the region – albeit whilst still remembering the people who lost their lives fleeing in terror - maybe it’s time for Delhi to consider embracing a Monkey Man comeback. Look out for ‘Monkey Woman’ coming very soon to a rooftop near you. And this time her two main weaknesses are money and basic sanitation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the ‘Monkey Man’ of Delhi?

The ‘Monkey Man’ of Delhi was a mysterious creature reported to have attacked hundreds of people in the impoverished regions of the Indian capital in May 2001. Descriptions of the creature varied widely, ranging from a small, hairy monkey to an eight-foot bear wearing an astronaut’s helmet.

When and where were the first reported sightings of the Monkey Man?

The first reported sighting of the Monkey Man occurred on April 5th, 2001, in Purana Vijay Nagar in the city of Ghaziabad. Similar attacks were reported in the same city a couple of weeks later before the creature moved to east Delhi.

What were the reported weaknesses of the Monkey Man?

The Monkey Man was reported to have two main weaknesses: light and water. Witnesses claimed that light could temporarily blind the creature, while throwing water at its chest could short-circuit its systems if it was a cyborg.

How did the Delhi police respond to the Monkey Man sightings?

The Delhi police announced a reward of 50,000 rupees for the capture of the Monkey Man. They also placed thousands of police officers on night patrol and urged power companies to reduce blackouts to help in the search.

What were some of the more outlandish theories about the Monkey Man?

Some theories suggested that the Monkey Man was the result of a secret laboratory experiment, a terrorist plot, or an alien invasion. Others proposed that it was a human criminal, an escaped animal from the zoo, or even a robot controlled by remote control.

How did the media contribute to the Monkey Man hysteria?

The Indian press contributed to the hysteria by focusing on the most ridiculous aspects of the story, such as the creature’s supposed ability to shoot laser bolts from its eyes and turn invisible. This sensationalist coverage stoked fear across the population.

What was the impact of the Monkey Man on crime rates in east Delhi?

The general crime rate in east Delhi dropped dramatically during the month of May due to the heightened alertness of the population and the increased police presence. Only a few non-monkey-related crimes were reported for the rest of the month.

What was the most widely accepted explanation for the Monkey Man phenomenon?

The most widely accepted explanation is that the Monkey Man was a case of mass hysteria fueled by poverty, superstition, sensationalist press coverage, and insensitive handling by the police. Many of the reported injuries were minor and likely self-inflicted or accidental.

How did the Monkey Man phenomenon end?

The Monkey Man phenomenon ended abruptly when the police began cracking down on prank calls and the Indian press lost interest in the story. The combination of these factors led to an immediate subsidence of the wave of terror that had struck east Delhi.

Were there any fatalities associated with the Monkey Man?

Yes, at least two deaths were connected to the Monkey Man. One involved an industrial worker who jumped off a rooftop in fear, and another involved a pregnant woman who fell down a staircase while trying to escape the creature.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: What Was The ‘Monkey Man’ Of Delhi?
• Hero image source by Husain Nadir / openverse, by-sa.