A coworker forwarded me a story from a Nigerian newspaper about a cat turning into a woman in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The story is excerpted below

This woman was reported to have earlier been seen as a cat before she reportedly turned into a woman in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, on Thursday. Photo: Bolaji Ogundele.

WHAT could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway. Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though. Another witness, who gave his name as James, said the woman started faking when she saw that many people were gathering around her. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. I saw a woman lying on the road instead of a cat. Blood did not come out of her body at that time. When people gathered and started asking her questions, she pretended that she did not know what had happened," he said.

Reading this reminds me how commonplace it was to read about the kind of mind boggling supernatural stories that you'd expect to see in the Weekly World News in regular newspapers alongside sports, political and stock market news in Nigeria.  Unlike the stories of alien abduction you find in the U.S., the newspaper stories of supernatural events often had witnesses and signed confessions from the alleged perpetrators of supernatural acts. Nobody doubted these stories, everyone knew they were true. Witches who would confess to being behind the run of bad luck of their friends & family or who'd confess that they key to their riches was offering their family members or children as blood sacrifices to ancient gods. It was all stuff I read in the daily papers as a kid as I would be flipping through looking for the comics. 

The current issue of Harper's Bazaar talks about the penis snatching hysteria from my adolescent years. The story is summarized in Slate magazine shown below

Harper's, June 2008
An essay reflects on the widespread reports of "magical penis loss" in Nigeria and Benin, in which sufferers claim their genitals were snatched or shrunken by thieves. Crowds have lynched accused penis thieves in the street. During one 1990 outbreak, "[m]en could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets." Social scientists have yet to identify what causes this mass fear but suspect it is what is referred to as a "culture-bound syndrome," a catchall term for a psychological affliction that affects people within certain ethnic groups.

I remember that time fairly well. I can understand that this sounds like the kind of boogie man stories that fill every culture. In rural America, it is aliens in flying saucers kidnapping people for anal probes and mutilating cows. In Japan, it's the shape changing foxes (Kitsune). In Nigeria, we had witches who snatched penises and could change shape at will.

In the cold light of day it sounds like mass hysteria but I wonder which is easier to believe sometimes. That a bunch of strangers on the street had a mass hallucination that a cat transformed into a woman or that there really are supernatural things beyond modern science's understanding out there? 

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