Case file · High strangeness
Kitum Cave and the Marburg deaths
Elephants walk deep into Kitum Cave on Kenya's Mount Elgon to mine salt with their tusks. In 1980 and 1987 two European visitors who had entered the cave died of Marburg virus.
1987 CE · 1.05, 34.58 · status: explained
The account
The cases were made famous by Richard Preston's 'The Hot Zone' (1994), which cast the cave as a lair of a mysterious killer. Expeditions searched it for the virus's natural host.
The sceptical view
The 'curse' was a virus: Egyptian fruit bats, which roost in such caves, were later identified as a natural reservoir of Marburg virus.