The story is well known, it is written in an autobiography, a novel and has even been dramatised in Hollywood, with the faces of Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer (Ghost and the darkness). It is that of the 'man-eating' lions in the Tsavo savannah in Kenya.
Two mane-less specimens that mauled, according to legends of the time (1898) as many as 135 Indian workers hired to build part of the British Empire railway that would connect the port city of Mombasa to the Ugandan city of Kampala. Although later studies of the lions suggest that the two captured men were only responsible for 35 deaths.

Led by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, with the help of soldiers and Maasai, the 'maneaters' lions would be captured and today are on display, stuffed, at the Field Museum in Chicago.
We decided to tell you the story in a video filmed on location, right next to the former Tsavo station, where the famous Lunatic Express stopped for many years, and which languishes abandoned after the construction of the modern Chinese fast railway.

What remains, however, is the lodge on the banks of the river of the same name, where elephants and other herbivores water and hippos and crocodiles swim, but there is no trace, fortunately, of relatives of the heinous lions. We are at Maneaters Lodge, a place of relaxation and memories, where one not only makes a holiday stop, but can visit the museum-exhibition that tells a unique story.

Bruce Patterson, who despite his surname is not related to the protagonist of the story, writes in his book 'The Lions of the Tsavo' that this was a cursed place: the area of Mtito Andei (and the name of the town, in Akamba dialect) recalls one of the greatest massacres carried out by the Maasai against the local population.

The first man to disappear was Lieutenant Withehouse's aide, one Abdallah. They found him without limbs and thus discovered other victims. Within a few months, 16 more of Patterson's men disappeared.
Of the 1,500 workers on the railway, several in April of that year left their jobs in fear and the construction of the bridge over the Tsavo River blocked the entire railway until December, when the first of the two 'maneaters' was captured. It took three weeks before Patterson, with the help of a professional hunter, managed to capture the second one as well. The bridge was completed in February 1899 and the entire railway was opened shortly afterwards. In 1907, the British graduate retired and wrote about the incredible African adventure he had experienced.

There was much speculation as to why the Tsavo lions had fed on humans, instead of herbivores as natural. In addition to the coincidence of a cattle plague in the late 1800s that may have also affected zebras and gazelles, more than a century later, studies by zoologists and palaeoecologists have speculated that the lions fed on humans because of malformations of the dental system, so that humans, though not appreciated as a taste, would have had softer flesh and bones.
Studies are progressing, but the legend remains and can still be relived in that very place.
In Tsavo, Kenya.