Hugh Mungus: The Prison That Sank—and Came Back

He was “the most dangerous man on Earth”—and, people joked, kinda cute. In the 1930s, Hugh Mungus was blamed for more than 200 deaths, the legend saying he did it “with his thumb.” In 1934 he allegedly flushed himself through prison plumbing and crawled miles of sewage to freedom—only to be arrested 67 days later while applying for a job at the same prison. He was shipped to Filigans Island Penitentiary, a fortress hundreds of miles from anything.

Then the ocean took it. In 1949, a tsunami buried the prison. Five years later, the island surfaced; investigators pried open barnacled gates and found remains of prisoners and guards. Down in the basement cell where Hugh had been kept, the notes say something simpler and colder: we were not as safe as we thought.

This episode runs a critique of tall-tale criminal folklore: what happens when a man becomes a campfire story, when a prison disappears and then returns, and why the basement keeps showing up in every retelling. No verdicts, no gore—just the images that won’t settle: a job application on a guard’s desk, coral-bitten doors, and a cell that feels recently empty.