Monkey God City Still Cursed

Here's something that Indiana Jones never had to contend with. Following the legend of a cursed 16th century city in Honduras dubbed "the City of the Monkey God," explorers considered themselves especially fortunate when they worked out its location in 2015. But recently, when they arrived at the site, they discovered the totally mundane reason that the city was abandoned. The place turned out to be infested with a rare flesh-eating parasite that devours the faces of those it infects.

Legend has it that the locals fled Honduras’ City of the Monkey God in the 16th century fearing that it had been cursed with disease. Five-hundred years later, a group of explorers excavating the lost city became the latest victims to incur the wrath of the monkey god when they nearly lost their faces to a rare flesh-eating parasite.

“The parasite migrates to the mucous membranes of your mouth and your nose and basically eats them away,” Doug Preston, an author who documented the trip, said. “Your nose falls off, your lips fall off, and eventually your face becomes a gigantic, open sore.”

The group, made up of American and Honduran explorers and archeologists, announced they found the lost city, also known as the Ciudad Blanca or the White City, in 2015. The city earned its name, according to American explorer Theodore Morde, because of indigenous legends stating it contained a giant buried statue of a monkey god. Morde claimed to be the first to find the lost city after returning from an expedition, but died before he could return.

So yeah, that sounds like a pretty nasty curse to me. If people in my city started losing their faces, I would leave too. The takeaway, I suppose, is that many of these abandoned sites were abandoned for perfectly good reasons. Sometimes those reasons have to do with events that are long over, but sometimes they endure. Presumably, the city was built too close to where these parasites live, and the residents began to become infected at an accelerated rate before the mass exodus.

The article also notes that in order to reach the site, the explorers had to contend with Indiana Jones' most feared and hated foes, poisonous snakes. So at least that's one place where the movies tell it like it is.