Innholdsfortegnelse for 452 i Fortean Times

A BOX OF CHRISTMAS DELIGHTS Welcome to our special Christmas edition of Fortean Times, a feast of festive weirdness to help you make it through to the end of the year. Our cover story examines the growing number of time slip reports emanating from just one street in Liverpool. Bold Street, in recent years, seems to have become the time slip capital of the world, featuring on Danny Robins’s Uncanny podcast and generating lots of online discussion. Here, Rob Gandy unveils two new accounts, while Dr Ann Winsper shares cases from her Bold Street files and offers an overview of this most intriguing of fortean phenomena. We also mark the 40th anniversary of a forteanTV favourite, the BBC’s 1984 adaptation of John Masefield’s magical fantasy The Box of Delights. Lisa…

In 2022 archæologists Dariusz Polinski and Magda Zagrodzka uncovered an unmarked cemetery containing 100 graves dating back to the mid-17th century near Pien in Poland. What they found in the graves has earned the cemetery the name “Field of Vampires”: 30 of the bodies show signs of being restrained to prevent them rising from the grave. Some were turned face down, others had been piled with heavy stones, and yet more had coins placed in their mouths. One body in particular stood out: a young woman with a sickle placed over her neck and a padlock around her left big toe chaining her to the ground. “Those burying the woman were afraid that she would rise from the grave,” said Polinski. “The sickle was not laid flat, but placed on…

TRASH BANDIT HOLD-UP For 35 years, an unnamed woman from Poulsbo, Washington, peacefully fed the few wild raccoons that lived around her house. However, sometime in early September, all that changed. “Somehow, the word got out in raccoon land, and they all showed up to her house expecting a meal,” said Kevin McCarty, from the local sheriff’s office. Hungry raccoons were now all round the woman’s home, and by 3 October there were at least 100 animals pacing about her yard demanding to be fed. She called the sheriff, saying the raccoons were surrounding her place day and night after their population had “exploded” about six weeks before, adding that she was scared to leave in case they became aggressive. After officers attended the scene, McCarty said: “They were shocked.…

304: BUILD THE WALL! Obvious titular debt to YOU-KNOW-WHO. No evidence Hadrian expected the Scots to pay for it. Melania walked on it. Pierre Trudeau danced on it. Richard Nixon, faced with it, gushed “It’s a great wall”. Niall Ferguson saw it as a cultural statement: This Side Civilisation. The Other Side Barbarians – over to Nicola Sturgeon. Latest addition to the cornucopian bibliography is Adrian Goldsworthy’s Hadrian’s Wall (2018). Anything by Brian Dobson is worth reading. See also Hunter Davies’s travelogue, A Walk Across the Wall (1974). And don’t forget the classically inclined Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Puck’s Hill (1906), of which Anthony Burgess (One Man’s Chorus, 1998) observed: “When he placed a particular Roman legion on Hadrian’s Wall, the scholars said he was wrong. Later, they discovered that…

CHINESE PANTS I An unnamed Chinese company recently made public a text exchange between their customer support team and a member of the public. In these, the woman claimed that her daughter had become pregnant through wearing a pair of brand-new underpants bought from the company through Taobao, a major Chinese online retail platform. “My daughter is pregnant after wearing your underwear,” the woman wrote, and although the company’s staff answered that “underwear cannot be used as a means of transmission of pregnancy” the complainant insisted that this had happened and would not be placated, demanding an explanation. In the end, customer service told her that its factory staff were all women, and that their boss had had a vasectomy, so there was no way in which the girl’s pregnancy…

The myth The robin is associated with Christmas in Britain because it appears in gardens seasonally – or, if not that, then because its red breast is reminiscent of the tunic worn by Victorian postmen. The “truth” Both these myths are easily dealt with. The European robin (Erithacus rubecula) is present all year round, and is one of our most commonly encountered birds in summer as in winter. As for the posties, it’s undoubtedly true that the connection was popularly made between the orange of the bird’s breast and the scarlet which was part of the mail carrier’s outfit from the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. This may explain the ubiquity of robins on Christmas cards (invented 1843), but they had been a symbol of the season more generally for…

While time slips are reported from all over the world, there is one place where they are reported almost more than all the others put together. This is Bold Street in Liverpool. Bold Street was originally one of the city’s ropewalks, the length being used to measure rope for sailing ships. The city merchants had houses on the street, then when the suburbs became more attractive to them, the area was turned over to shops. It was described as the Bond Street of the North due to the high end goods that were sold there. The street is rich in history: the Lyceum building was England’s first subscription library and at the top of the road is St Luke’s Church, or the Bombed-Out Church as it is commonly known, having…

I first watched The Box of Delights when I was four or five years old,” says Chris Chapman. “We had it on VHS, taped from the telly. It was a programme my mum and dad adored, and they wanted to introduce me to it. My dad loved it because he was a train buff and it had so many shots of the SevernValley railway line! And my mum loved it for the traditional British folklore and fairy tales it features. “Whereas I just found it completely magical. I genuinely think it’s the BBC’s greatestever endeavour. In terms of every department going full steam, every cylinder, it’s the most ambitious series they ever made. It had a budget of a million pounds, and a director in Renny Rye who was hungry and…

There is, it seems, a witch for any occasion. Witchcraft “can be seen as an area of criminal law, a manifestation of religious belief or secular power, a sign of social stress, a display of sexual prejudice and fear, [and] a temporary and inexplicable mania,” comments historian Rosalind Mitchison. Witch trials and hunts also became, Mitchison notes, “a nasty and squalid manifestation of cruelty”.1 Indeed, as Tracy Borman points out in her book on the English witch hunts, people in authority could “indulge their sadistic fantasies” during witch trials and interrogations.2 Witch trials haunt our consciousness, part of the current penchant for retrospective justice. Pagan books promoting eco-consciousness and self-empowerment fill our shelves. Stories involving witches top our viewing habits: we after all need escapist entertainment. But perhaps the fascination…

A Date with the Two Cerne Giants Reinvestigating an Iconic British Hill Figure ed. Michael J Allen Oxbow Books 2024 Pb, 376pp, £24.95, ISBN 9781914427374 Despite the “excited young man” being sky-clad and seemingly baring all, he has retained a metaphorical (and possibly physical) mantle of mystery. The first half of this book on the National Trust excavations in 2020 describes, in enormous detail, the archæological field work and excavations, literally to shine a light on some of the quandaries. Most especially when and how he was created, but also providing partial answers as to why, plus how he was able to appear and disappear for centuries, whilst shape-shifting and slowly moving downhill. The archæological investigation of a seemingly simple chalk-cut figure that has been refreshed/rechalked on a number of…

Rumours Dir Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, Evan Johnson, Canada 2024 On general release from 6 Dec An ever-relevant genre across multiple media, political satire has been working overtime in recent years, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Guy Maddin has joined forces with frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson once more to tell the tale of a G7 summit gone terribly awry. Here, we are introduced to fictionalised versions of a septet of leaders from Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA. After the obligatory posing for group photos, the leaders withdraw to the woods to compose a joint statement on the latest global crisis; but when their wine glasses need refilling and the waiting staff are suddenly nowhere to be found, it slowly begins to dawn…

SCHOOL DENIES PROVIDING LITTER TRAYS FOR PUPILS IDENTIFYING AS CATS D.Telegraph, 11 Nov 2023. Folkestone man bit barber’s testicles and said: “I’ve got AIDS” Kent Online, 22 Feb 2024. MAREE STUN DEMONS, NEPTUNE IN CONTROL Irish Examiner, 13 Nov 2023. Strangers make Earth sandwich with slices of bread on opposite sides of planet Belfast Telegraph, 21 Jan 2020. WHEELCHAIR USERS FLYING UNDER THE RADAR Gold Coast Bulletin, 29 July 2024.…

STOLEN CHURCHES Whitney Foster, 56, a pastor at the True Foundation nondenominational church in Dallas, Texas, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of stealing churches. Foster, whose small congregation did not have a church of its own, set about acquiring one by filing fraudulent property deeds that transferred the ownership of other churches in the area into his own name, faking the identities of their clergy and officials to do so. He laid fraudulent claim to the First Christian Church in Lancaster, Texas, Canada Drive Christian Church and the Church at Ninevah, with a combined value of more than $800,000 (£600,000), embroiling their rightful owners in complicated legal wranglings to try and reclaim their places of worship. At the time of Foster’s prosecution, his congregation…

WHALE TALES A sperm whale in Lake Zurich? On 19 August, a dead 50ft (15m) sperm whale was found on the Utoquai, the promenade of Zurich. The large carcass was surrounded by workers in white protective suits and the dead animal was fenced off, with signs explaining that the International Whale Association was investigating the situation. However, the whale had not made its way up to the Swiss mountains by itself – it was a model made by the Belgian art collective Captain Boomer to protest for the protection of the seas. “Whale strandings have always been some magical event,” the collective explained. “When it happened, whole villages were frightened and amazed. This is what we re-enact. And the whale is a symbol for our endangered ecosystems. People feel that…

OUTLAND A team of forensic scientists from Staffordshire University and the University of Hull have been collaborating with an American crime scene investigator to develop the new discipline of Astroforensics for investigating potential off-world crime. Using the Zero Gravity Corporation’s modified Boeing 727 parabolic aircraft, also known as “the vomit comet”, to simulate zero gravity, they have been investigating how blood splatters might form in space. Researchers used a mixture of 40% glycerine and 60% food colouring to simulate the relative density and viscosity of human blood, then squirted droplets from a hydraulic syringe toward a target during periods of reduced gravity of between 0.00 and 0.05g and reconstructed the angle of impact. Zack Kowalske, the US Crime Scene Investigator on the project says, “Studying bloodstain patterns can provide valuable…

Slips in time have been used as plot devices in fiction for many years. I still recall reading Tom’s Secret Garden as a child, with its protagonist slipping into aVictorian garden at night. And who can forget the hilarious film version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, based on the 1889 book by Mark Twain, complete with Bing Crosby musical numbers? More recently, the 1990s sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart has gained a cult following, with its adventures of a television repairman who finds a portal in time back to the 1940s. Each of these involves a person apparently travelling back in time to a past era, either spontaneously or through some sort of portal. But surely all this is fiction? After all, currently physics has no testable explanation for…

If asked to name history’s deadliest item of clothing, you might go for the corset; it constricted organs, restricted breathing, and launched a craze for insanely small wasp waists achieved by tight lacing and the removal of ribs. Or perhaps, if you are of a certain age, you might nominate bondage trousers, which could be truly lethal to try and walk downstairs in. Either way, you’d be wrong: the honour belongs to that stately 19th century favourite, the crinoline. Crinolines may look fusty, overly modest and more than a little twee, but that has more to do with 50 years of television costume dramas than reality. In truth, a number of factors combined in crinolines to make them a ridiculously dangerous death trap for anyone wearing them. During the peak…

Amid a fanfare of publicity, Amazon Prime promises us an exclusive peek into the unique relationship between the royal family and the unexplained in The King of UFOs. Narrated by Howard Hughes, presumably not the dead one with tissue boxes on his feet, and produced by fortean musician Mark Christopher Lee, presumably not a descendant of Lord Summerisle. With such prestigious names, you would expect great things but what follows aspires to be Fortean TV upholstered by the creators of Twin Peaks. Cue Summerisle repeatedly walking in and out of his front door in the manner of a man who forgot to get some milk, followed by Richard Felix (not literally), revealing that most castles are (shock, horror) haunted. For a start, King George VI saw Elizabeth I eight times…

Dealing with the Devil Your review of the book Devil’s Contract [FT449:60] brought to mind something that has always bothered me about the very idea of making a deal with Old Scratch. By pretty much any reading of the multiple versions of Christian theology, any such attempt is pointless. The simple act of going to Satan for a deal is a rejection of God and your soul is already forfeit so you will get nothing; nix, nada, nowt. Now I can understand why Satan herself (my only encounter was with her in female form, but that’s a story for another time) might play the poor black-candle burning saps along for a while as she does like a good laugh. Imagine the demonic minions asking the Princess of Darkness to play…

Members of the “Haunted Generation”, growing up in the 1970s surrounded by proto-folk horror and truly menacing public service announcements, still reserve a special place in their hearts for a 1976 report by Luke Casey about the fabled Hexham Heads, shown on the BBC’s teatime Nationwide programme. Broadcast only once, the Nationwide report tells the story of the 1971 discovery of two 6cm (2.4in) tall, crudely carved, stone heads found in the garden of a council house in Hexham, Northumberland, by brothers Colin and Leslie Robson, then aged nine and 11, and the subsequent strange encounters with a werewolf-like entity. As is often the case with media from those days, it takes little account of the possibility that children or people of a sensitive disposition might be watching, and features…

Catholic and Anglican churches all over the world marked the feast day of St Francis of Assissi on 4 October by holding animal blessing ceremonies in which beloved pets, working animals or livestock are brought by their humans to receive a blessing from a priest. In the top picture a dog is blessed by Deacon Carsten Lehmann in front of Osnabrück Cathedral in Lower Saxony, Germany. In the bottom picture, hundreds of people bring their cats and dogs to be blessed at San Francisco Church in Quito, Ecuador.…

In the dim light of the cluttered surreality of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities near Bethnal Green, London, with the subtle scent of absinthe rising to the low ceiling from our shot glasses, the unusual display of artwork on the walls seems very much at home. ‘Four Witches & a Warlock’ is an exhibition of sketches and finished artwork by five of the 20th century’s most significant esoteric artists: Rosaleen Norton, Madge Gill, Austin Osman Spare, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington. The title is perhaps a little over the top; only Norton, the selfstyled ‘Witch of Kings Cross’ in Sydney, Australia, could really be called a witch, though Ithell Colquhoun was a serious occultist and Spare created significant magical systems, notably his use of sigils – but was he…

PINING FOR THE WEST COUNTRY Once widespread across Great Britain, the pine marten Martes martes, a handsome arboreal relative of weasels and stoats, was virtually wiped out by hunting and habitat destruction, so that by the end of the 1800s it was seemingly confined wholly to Scotland, mostly the Highlands (though there is some evidence that a few small relict populations may have persisted in parts of central and southern England). Thanks to modern-day legal protection, however, its numbers have increased again, resulting in its distribution range expanding southward back into England and Wales, by natural means as well as by official (and also some unofficial?) reintroductions. Consequently, this species now occurs in northern England, Hampshire, Shropshire, and mid-Wales; on 3 July 2022, there was even a confirmed, ZSL-filmed sighting…

INVISIBILITY SERUM Zihao Ou, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues have published a paper that describes a technique to make the skin of mice transparent using a mixture of water and tartrazine, a common yellow food colouring frequently used in crisps, candy coating, ice cream and baked goods. “For those who understand the fundamental physics behind this, it makes sense; but if you aren’t familiar with it, it looks like a magic trick,” said Ou. “We combined the yellow dye, which is a molecule that absorbs most light, especially blue and ultraviolet light, with skin, which is a scattering medium,” he explained. “Individually, these two things block most light from getting through them but when we put them together, we were able to achieve…

CHRISTMAS ENCOUNTERS Parents be warned. No child under 10 should read what follows… My sermon today concerns someone whom you have been seeing quite a lot of recently. I refer to Old Man Christmas who – like Isis – goes by many names: Saint Nick, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Papa Noel… Askyourself, how often did you glimpse his diabolical face in windows and on decorations the last time you walked into town? North Koreans see fewer pictures of Kim Jong Un strolling through Pyongyang. Then there are also, during his December tyranny, doubles in shopping malls and church halls handing out ‘gifts’ and terrifying toddlers. “Come and sit on my knee, little boy…” I’ve been collecting, for a few years, the fortean accounts of adults who remember, when young, seeing…

Fa few days in 1902 a house in King’s Lynn caused a short-lived sensation, which was reported well beyond its Norfolk environs. On or about 26 May, a family from Norwich moved into a dwelling in Windsor Terrace and almost immediately were beset by paranormal pandemonium. On that first night, the young occupants of a certain bed in the back bedroom rushed from their room, after “a ghostly visitor” had given the bedstead “a good shaking… a fit of St Vitus’s dance as it were” that flung them from the mattress. Then they saw a shadowy figure, with two big fiery eyes staring at them… Trying to convince the children to go back to the bed, their father saw the bedstead shake and heard a sound resembling “the rushing of…

How to Think Impossibly About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else Jeffrey J Kripal University of Chicago Press 2024 Hb, 312pp, £28, ISBN 9780226833682 There is something, up ahead in the future, called “superhumanities”. It attempts a new approach to what Fort called a “more inclusive science”, paying attention to its exceptions as well as to its core principles. It is a concerted academic discipline comprehending the totality of our existence between the extremes of our inner and outer sensoria, from the furthest stars down to infinitesimal quantum eddies, and (importantly) embracing the ostracised realms of authentic anomalous, paranormal and mystical experience so energetically cancelled by a cynical scientific materialism. In this sequel to his Authors of the Impossible (2010) and The Superhumanities (2022), Jeffrey Kripal sets out an…