In the summer of 1917, while war raged abroad, the town of Monticello, Illinois, just northeast of Decatur, found itself under siege by an inexplicable, foreign terror. On the night of Friday, June 13, Thomas Gullett, a butler, was out gathering flowers on Robert Allerton’s large estate just west of Monticello, when something emerged from the shrubbery and attacked him. The beast, Gullett later claimed, was an African lion: It pounced on the butler, toppling him to the ground, and the two grappled for a few moments before he seized…
