On the artificial manufacture of wild men

China, 1890s
A likely fabrication, credited to the Chicago Inter-Ocean, where it was reported that an unnamed (but well-known) English doctor related that youths were kidnapped in China in order to transform them into a wild man of the woods for exhibition, the process involving their isolation in a "perfectly black hole" for an unspecified number of years, while their captors gradually graft the skin of a dog or bear grafted onto their flayed bodies and destroy their vocal chords with charcoal.