Innholdsfortegnelse for 439 i Fortean Times

'RITUAL MASS MURDER' REPORT IN CHAPEL ST LEONARDS WAS YOGA CLASSBBC News, 8 Sept 2023. "I will break your f****** neck": Police officer 'grabbed naked woman covered in salad cream by the throat' in Hilton hotelManchester Eve. News, 12 Sept 2023. MAN TRYING TO CROSS ATLANTIC IN GIANT ‘HAMSTER WHEEL’ CHARGED OVER ALLEGED KNIFE THREATGuardian, 7 Sept 2023. Fifteen people a day attacked by fish in Benidorm as people with moles warnedIndependent, 4 Sept 2023.…

SEXY SPIRIT SOLDIER It was a dark and stormy night when singer-songwriter and Instagram influencer Brocarde, 40, claims she met the ghost of a Victorian soldier named Edwardo, who, she says, suddenly burst into her bedroom in the midst of the tempest, immediately charming her. “After our initial meeting Edwardo slowly revealed more about himself to me. I saw his images as a Victorian soldier, he was always in his uniform…his face is devilishly handsome, shoulder length unruly hair, he looks lived in, well worn, troubled almost, there’s a pain attached to his being”, she said, adding “His voice is commanding and forceful, yet he whispers to seduce.” After a whirlwind romance, Brocarde “married” the ghostly Edwardo at The Asylum Chapel in London on Hallowe’en 2022, but cracks began to…

FROM HELL TO SKELMORLIE In the run-up to Hallowe’en the village of Skelmorlie in North Ayrshire, Scotland, was haunted by a ‘killer clown’, allegedly terrifying residents. Wearing a costume reminiscent of Stephen King’s evil clown Pennywise, with white gloves, a lace collar and big red fluffy buttons coupled with a scary mask and makeup, he was rarely sighted by locals, but left red balloons dotted round the village at night and ran a Facebook account under the name “Cole Deimos”. This documented his activities, complete with photographs showing him posing at night around the village, often holding one of the balloons and staring at the screen with a hideous grimace across his face. In one image he can be seen creeping across a bridge in the village on all fours.…

SNAKE PARASITES ALIVE! When a 64-year-old woman from New South Wales, Australia, was first admitted to her local hospital in January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats, doctors could not pin down the cause, so continued to monitor her. By 2022, her symptoms included depression and forgetfulness, so she was referred to a Canberra hospital for a brain MRI. Her scan revealed brain abnormalities that needed surgery to investigate further. The operation was carried out by neurosurgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi, who immediately called his colleague Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease specialist and said, “Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.” He…

PERMANENTLY SEASICK In July 2001, Jane Houghton, 37, from Warrington in Cheshire, went on a week-long Mediterranean cruise starting in Palma, Majorca, with her husband and teenage son. Halfway through the trip she became seasick. “In the evenings, when we were on dry land having a meal, I would continue to feel as if I were out at sea. In restaurants the tables would bob and weave about. I felt like I was constantly walking on a trampoline.” The feeling continued after she returned home. Her doctor prescribed anti-motion seasickness tablets and later anti-depressants, neither of which helped. An MRI scan failed to show a brain tumour. “The sensation of being on rough seas was constant, no let up, even when lying down,” she said. “Everyday tasks like using a…

It was a typical day at school around 1979. Having strategically feigned a sprained ankle in order to get out of cross-country running, I was confined to the library with the suggestion that I could maybe do some homework (for once). Instead, I noticed a book, that would (for once) actually change at least part of my life. The Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts (hereafter RDSSAF) sang to me like a shelf-bound siren. Its cover alone grabbed my attention – some fops being startled by another fop riding a bear into a Georgian dining room; a snake eating an egg; what looked like Charles Dickens with a big shard of something; and the incredible melting man (actually a Kirlian photograph, but I didn’t know that then).…

Magic & Modernism Art from Cornwall in Context 1800-1950 Rupert White Antenna 2023 Pb, 190pp, £10, ISBN 9798376360903 Ill-Wished Witchcraft and Magic in 19th-Century Cornwall Rupert White Antenna 2023 Pb, 232pp, £9.95, ISBN 9798388351715 There is no shortage of popular and scholarly studies on Cornwall and its folklore and customs, nor indeed on its artists, both homegrown and incomers to the area. But few authors have documented the plurality of interconnections between the art scene of Cornwall and the magical and folklore traditions that serve as its inspiration. In Magic & Modernism Rupert White has taken that leap. As he points out: “Existing narratives have tended to describe the activities of the artists as if they relate only to art-history and to æsthetic concerns that belong to an exclusive, even…

SEASON’S WEIRDNESS Welcome to our Christmas issue, a box of festively weird delights to see out 2023. In our cover story, veteran Kentish monster hunter Neil Arnold celebrates the 60th anniversary of an oft-retold incident that brought high strangeness worthy of John Keel to a usually quiet corner of Neil’s own home county. What has become known as ‘The Hythe Mothman’ seems on first inspection to be a straightforward, if terrifying, precursor of the entity famously reported three years later in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, lending its name to Keel’s best known book, The Mothman Prophecies. But as Neil’s research revealed, while the Hythe incident initially sounded a lot like its more celebrated American cousin – teens encounter a headless bat-winged entity in the dark lanes on the edge of…

DUCK! Police were called when residents of Poole in Dorset saw a man and a woman having a violent altercation over a duck in the middle of the road. “They were wrestling on the floor and trying to get the duck off each other,” said a witness. By the time police arrived the couple had fled the scene, and the fate of the duck remains unknown. Sun, 7 Jul 2023. FIRE FAIL Fourteen vehicles were destroyed in a fire on an industrial estate in Launceston, Cornwall, after a paper sky lantern landed on a van’s windscreen. The lantern set fire to the rubber on the vehicle’s wipers, which in turn caused the whole van to ignite, with the fire swiftly spreading to adjacent vehicles. Sun, 5 Jul 2023. UNSAFETY SIGN…

MYSTERY BLASTS Residents of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, USA, have been disturbed at least once a month by mysterious “booms” and “explosions” that have shredded nerves and terrified children. Faith Ferris said, “It shakes my whole house. I grew up on a military base in Oklahoma, and it really does sound like testing explosives or some sort of bomb,” adding, “There’s something weird going on.” After hearing a massive explosion one Sunday, Dawn Souza, who lives adjacent to a golf course in the town, said, “It just seemed unusual, very unusual. It was horrifying, I was scared to death, and I looked out towards the golf course thinking I’d see an explosion. No smoke, nothing at all.” Police and federal authorities admitted to being baffled as they had been unable…

291: BIBLICAL BADDIES “I have noted much that has impressed upon my mind the thought that religionists have taken over many phenomena, as exclusively their own – have colored and discredited with their emotional explanations – but that someday some of these occurrences will be rescued from theological interpretations… I incline to the acceptance of many stories of miracles, but think that these miracles would have occurred, if this earth had been inhabited by atheists” – Fort, Books, p965 Given the countless hewings-asunder and massacres he ordered, Jehovah easily takes first place. Most exotic and remembered of Old Testament malefactors tend to be women. True, no shortage of these in classical Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, but you don’t need to be a feminist to wonder about male bias in the…

DRONING ON [FT416:18-19, 424:22, 436:24] In Ukraine, Chechen troops fighting for Russia under the command of the notorious warlord Ramzan Kadyrov (who may, or may not, be one of the latest victims of the ‘mysterious deaths’ afflicting Russia’s military leadership; see FT421:8-9, 424:22-23, 428:27) claim to have been attacked by mystery drones. They accuse Ukraine of using giant drones equipped with pincers to swoop down and abduct their wounded, dragging them off into the sky without warning. A member of the Chechen Akhmat battalion described the things as “Baba Yaga”, named after the witch from Slavic folklore who abducts and eats children, saying, “The drone is equipped with special devices that look like claws, with which it captures a person who is not able to run away, hide or fight…

CHRISTMAS VS SPIRITS Is Christmas the most fortean day of the year? Certainly, our ancestors thought it was a thin time, when the line between this and the other world faded away, almost to nothing. A particularly striking example of this are the beliefs around animals (domestic and wild). On Christmas Eve, animals altered their habits radically. In tribute to Christ’s birth, bees buzzed in a different way (!), “the bird of dawning singeth all night long”, and oxen, horses and cows knelt in their stables. We are told by one south-western author that farmers had to be careful on Christmas Eve with kneeling beasts. If their animals were tied up too tightly, they would throttle themselves, so great was the compulsion to get on their knees! Nor was it…

Every time the autumn comes around, a chill runs down my spine as childhood memories are conjured like swirling wisps from a witch’s cauldron stirred on All Hallows Eve. The bonfire-scented month of November crackles with a soundtrack of crisp, trodden leaves and takes me back to a horror that has stuck with me for decades. And it’s a horror quite well known and often regurgitated within fortean circles. It started for me as a kid. I was born in 1974 in Kent – a county steeped in folklore. During the early to mid 1980s I was already immersing myself in a subject that, unbeknownst to me back then, was known as cryptozoology. My introduction was the 1974 Carey Miller book A Dictionary Of Monsters, given to me by my…

“I was a little late seeing The Stone Tape for the first time,” admits Rob Glover. “It was something myself and a close knit group of friends had read about online, mentioned in whispers on Internet forums. We had to hunt it down…” Safe to say he’s caught up now. Inspired by the 50th anniversary of Nigel Kneale’s still-disturbing 1972 TV play, Rob has launched a spanking new record label – Hidden Britain Tapes – by commissioning an impressive compilation album, the evocatively-titled Analysing A Ghost By Electronic Means. Here, the likes of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, The Night Monitor and The Soulless Party contribute an eclectic array of original electronic music, all influenced by the brickwork-based hauntings that once got Jane Asher in such a terrible tizz. “It…

Creepy critters I met my current partner Nicky in early 2021 and we moved to a house in Watten, in the far north Highlands, later that same year. We really bonded and have many mutual interests. One day, I was manically singing a line from Ian Dury’s “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”, then turned on the radio to find it playing – not the second or third song in but it was immediately on. It was as if I’d picked up the transmission in my head and there it was playing. Anyway, the story isn’t really about that but perhaps it helps show that a strong human relationship may manifest unusual occurrences. Not long after (autumn 2021), we were lying in bed reading when we saw a spider on…

MEXICAN WAVE As well as the “poisoned” schoolgirls in Iran and Afghanistan (FT430:6-7, 435:24-25), “possessed” Ouija board users in Colombia (FT427:4-5, 431:4-5, 436:24) and “fentanyl overdosing” police in the US (FT431:5), Mexico has been having its own social panic. On 23 September 2022, a 12-year-old girl named Esmeralda emerged from the girls’ toilets at the Federal 1 public secondary school in Tapachula and fainted. Her friend Diala, who came out after her, then fainted too, swiftly followed by another nine girls and a boy, with another 22 school students complaining of severe headaches and vomiting. Some students reported a smoky smell, like burning leaves, making authorities suspect drugs, while others said they had seen a mustard-coloured powder in the bathroom, but toxicology revealed nothing. News of this triggered incidents elsewhere…

SEYCHELLES SORCERY As part of an investigation into “witchcraft” and “unnatural and superstitious” practices after the discovery of two bodies illegally exhumed from a cemetery on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, the country’s main opposition party leader Patrick Herminie has been arrested. He was charged with witchcraft along with seven alleged accomplices following a raid on his party’s offices by more than 40 police officers. The charges include possession of items intended for use in witchcraft, conspiracy to perform witchcraft and procuring services related to witchcraft. The raid took place after Herminie was named in a WhatsApp message sent to a Tanzanian who it was suggested was implicated in the exhumations and had been arrested at the main international airport on the island for possessing “magical” items. Authorities…

Every year, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) convenes in its own, very particular manner, with members from the length and breadth of these islands (and further afield) concentrating their ASSAPness into a phenomenological singularity where its denizens discuss the wonderful world of the weird, in between bouts of chat, catching up, medium-weight networking and borderline frolics. So, on a bright, warm September morning a host of weirdness aficionados descended upon Bath University, having first negotiated the carpark and campus, the like of which has not been seen in terms of complexity since The Krypton Factor (or possibly The Crystal Maze), ready to have our horizons expanded, minds blown and various parts tickled. There was a flurry of hellos – many of us, though familiar with…

KARL SHUKER on how contraband scales revealed a new species, plus a mermaid mystery P-P-PICK UP A NEW PANGOLIN! Known alternatively as scaly anteaters for obvious physical reasons, these animated pine cones are among the world’s most distinctive – but also, tragically – most endangered mammals, due to over-hunting by poachers for their meat as well as for their scales, the latter being illegally used in traditional medicine within their African and Asian distribution. Consequently, it is both surprising and pleasing that a totally new and relatively large – yet hitherto entirely-unsuspected – cryptic pangolin species has recently been scientifically revealed and duly added to the list of eight previously recognised ones. Its story began in 2012, when some pangolin scales were confiscated in Hong Kong, but didn’t seem to…

274: CHRISTMAS TREES The myth Prince Albert introduced the Christmas tree to Britain. The “truth” Of all the stories told about Albie, this is probably the second best known and the most believed. The combination of lights and evergreen foliage has been part of Christmas and other midwinter festivals across Europe as far back as history goes, and there are British traditions from the Middle Ages onwards which look like precursors of the 19th century tree. But the first written mention of a fir being taken into a living room and decorated for Christmas – in other words, something we would recognise as a modern Christmas tree – appears in Strasbourg in 1605. By the 1770s the tree had become central to Christmas in Germany, and widespread knowledge of it…

I have been kicking around on the paranormal scene for quite a time. As the years go by, I seem to notice more and more boasting, self-promotion, and egotism. For all I know, this could be happening everywhere. Maybe people at golf clubs, drama groups, colleges, churches, and choral societies are “getting up themselves” just as much as the paranormal/UFO brigade and their critics. But I’ll confine my comments to the field I know best, citing some typical manifestations and one or two of the more egregious variants. However, to avoid causing offence, I’ll refrain from naming names. The people I have in mind fall into two categories: vulgarians and pretensionists, although the boundary between them is fuzzy. In essence, there’s no fundamental difference, because they seem to be driven…

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill Alien Encounters, Civil Rights and the New Age in America Matthew Bowman Yale University Pres 2023 Hb, 278pp, £25, ISBN 9780300251388 Matthew Bowman, a religious historian who has written on that very UFO-adjacent American church, Mormonism, asks us to cast our minds back to 1961, a time when segregation was still a part of American life, people trusted scientists and their government and, perhaps most shockingly of all, almost nobody had heard of alien abductions. The story of Betty and Barney Hill’s late night encounter with something in the mountainous New Hampshire wilderness has been told many times in magazines, books, films (a new dramatisation is in the works from Barack Obama’s production company) and TV programmes, but never in such meticulous, wide-ranging…

The Enfield Poltergeist Dir Jerry Rothwell, UK 2023 Streaming on Apple TV+ An incident familiar to readers of Fortean Times – the goings on at 284 Green Street, Enfield, between 1977 and 1979 – have been documented, dramatised and regurgitated many times over the intervening decades, in recent years, most notably, in Sky’s three-part series The Enfield Haunting (2015). The case of an alleged poltergeist/demonic possession in a London suburb has been hard to resist, even for film-makers outside the UK: 2016 saw The Conjuring 2 tackle the subject, albeit with a shaky grasp of the details and much invention. Now, Apple+ reckon it’s time for another crack at it. To give the series its due, the makers have hit upon a method of relating the story in a fresh…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Sex Pistols trial In an instance of synchronicity may I alert you to my radio play Never Mind The Ballocks which is a dramatisation of the 1977 Sex Pistols trial in Nottingham as mentioned in Classical Corner [FT437:13] and is due to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2024. The manager of the Virgin Record store (Christopher Seale – not Seals) was charged under the obscure Act to Suppress Indecent Advertisements of 1889, which was originally drafted to prosecute purveyors of dubious cures forVD: ‘Any such advertisement relating to syphilis, gonorrhoea, nervous debility, or other complaint or infirmity arising from or relating to sexual intercourse, if it is…