Michelle Kane

You behave or I'll feed you to the Edwards, for example.

1953, Colfax, California.

A new mother, distraught over her husband's infidelities, kills and butchers her one-month-old child and serves her husband a kidney pie, which he eats.

1911, Smolensk, Siberia.

Long-standing winter cannibalism practiced by a community of several hundred.

Two to three victims each year are chosen by lottery, viewed as one of the few documented cases of institutionalized survival cannibalism.

1967, Badwadhar, India.

The Vaisya caste of this community practices medicinal cannibalism, believing that the hearts, lungs, and brains transmit strength and long life to the eater, leading to the regular abduction and murder of people of the Shudras caste.

The practice persisted for decades.

In 1906, in Beaumont, Oregon, a small religious cult arose that believed in the spiritual potency of human blood, and they fed on one another like vampires.

Not technically cannibalism, but worth noting.

In the 1930s, a small community in the western Sierra Nevada foothills called Fire Creek practiced a peculiar form of cannibalism.

in which every family would consume their firstborn child.

Widespread, filicidal cannibalism.

They went undetected for years by never going outside their community until federal agents, on an unrelated investigation, uncovered all the grisly evidence they needed to arrest every adult in town.

The children of the town were removed and placed into foster care,

including a red-haired little girl named Helen Grove.

She was my mother.

I have spent most of my adult life pursuing the question of what drives this kind of highly aberrant behavior.

What makes someone or some group turn to actions that are widely regarded as beyond the pale?