Overview
A pair of seemingly unrelated stories—an 11th‑century Arab legend about a tree that bears women as fruit, and a late‑19th‑century New Jersey newspaper frenzy over a nocturnal dog‑walker named Charlotte Hemmenway—illustrate how bizarre narratives can travel across time and culture. Both episodes reveal how curiosity, fear, and the desire for sensational detail combine to keep “odd folklore” alive in scholarly archives and popular imagination alike.
Medieval Arabic Legend
The Wāq Wāq Tree appears in Kitāb al‑Bulhān (the “Book of Curiosities”), an anonymous 11th‑century Fatimid manuscript that blended geography, astronomy and a catalog of exotic creatures. A digitised copy held by Oxford’s Bodleian Library shows an illustration of a tree laden with humanoid fruit, each “suspended by their hair as if by green cords.” The text describes the fruit as having “breasts, female sexual organs, and curvaceous bodies,” which “scream ‘wāq wāq’” when plucked. A second, more elaborate variety is said to survive for a day after being cut and may even be used for sexual gratification.
The manuscript was intended as both an educational treatise and entertainment, a medieval precursor to today’s “weird‑and‑wonderful” books. Its vivid imagery reflects a broader medieval fascination with distant lands and imagined peoples, echoing other legendary locales such as Themiscyra, a kingdom of warrior women.
Scholarly Context
Modern historians interpret the Wāq‑Wāq island and its arboreal women as a distorted memory of real maritime cultures. Linguistic and trade‑route analysis suggests the “Waqwaq” may have been a corrupted reference to Javanese or Malay communities of the Srivijaya empire, whose seafarers reached East Africa in the 10th century. The legend could have been sparked by reports of the Poison Upas tree of Java or the Crinoida Dajeeana of Madagascar—both famed for their lethal or hallucinogenic properties. By framing an unfamiliar flora as a source of women, medieval authors encoded both awe and anxiety about the unknown.
American Folklore Case
Across the Atlantic, the small town of Clifton, New Jersey, made headlines in 1896 when local papers reported that a woman named Charlotte Hemmenway prowled the streets at night accompanied by a large, aggressive dog. Described as a “notorious night‑walker” who allegedly assaulted pedestrians, Hemmenway’s reputation grew rapidly through sensational headlines and word‑of‑mouth gossip. Police records from the period, however, show only a handful of complaints about stray dogs and no formal charges of violence.
Historians of American popular culture argue that the Hemmenway story exemplifies the era’s moral panic over “dangerous” women and stray animals, themes that resonated with contemporary concerns about urbanization and immigration. The lack of concrete evidence suggests that the narrative was amplified by rumor, turning a possibly harmless nocturnal habit into a cautionary tale of female aggression.
Persistence of the Peculiar
Both the Wāq Wāq Tree and the Hemmenway saga demonstrate how extraordinary claims survive when they tap into cultural nerves. In the medieval Middle East, exotic flora served as a canvas for projecting ideas about gender, sexuality, and the limits of human control over nature. In Gilded‑Age America, a solitary woman with a dog became a symbol of social disorder and the perceived threat of “deviant” behavior.
Today’s digital archives, such as the Bodleian Library’s online version of Kitāb al‑Bulhān, and the digitisation of 19th‑century newspapers, allow scholars to trace the evolution of these narratives. The continued interest in “odd folklore” is evident in recent publications, including the author’s new volume The Unnatural History of Man‑Eating Plants, now available on Amazon.
Looking Ahead
As researchers continue to compare medieval travel literature with nineteenth‑century American press, the interplay between fact, exaggeration, and cultural fear remains a fertile ground for inquiry. Understanding why societies cling to stories of women‑bearing trees or dangerous night‑walkers offers insight into broader human tendencies to mythologise the unfamiliar. Future interdisciplinary work—combining folklore studies, historical geography, and media analysis—will be essential for untangling the roots of these enduring legends.
