Innholdsfortegnelse for 460 i Fortean Times

EDITORIAL

UP IN SMOKE Spontaneous human combustion is one of those alleged fortean phenomena that despite being roundly damned by professional sceptics such as the late Joe Nickell (whose obituary will follow in a future issue of FT) and dismissed by scientists as a result of the ‘wick effect’, continues to exert a powerful fascination; whether this is due to the handful of shocking photographs that record the aftermath of these deadly fires – whatever their immediate cause – or the recurrence of the idea in popular culture from Melville and Dickens to The X-Files and Spinal Tap is difficult to judge. It’s certainly a topic that we have returned to on a number of occasions over the years, even though putative cases remain rare; the last we recall was in…

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SIDELINES

MOTH MANSION Iya Patarkatsishvili and her husband Yevhen Hunyak were expecting a life of luxury when they bought a Notting Hill mansion for £32.5 million, but after moving in they found they were overwhelmed by clothes moths (Tineola bisselliella), swatting dozens every day. The moths ate their clothes and carpets and got into everything, including food, wine and toothbrushes, and resisted all attempts at extermination. Eventually the couple threw in the towel and left, successfully suing the seller to get their money back, plus damages. editions.cnn.com, 11 Feb 2025. CRISPED Unable to open a bag of crisps, a man in Dalton, Georgia, decided to use a lighter to burn his way into the packet instead. “While doing this, the man accidentally set himself on fire while sitting in a recliner,”…

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SPACE NEWS

ONE SMALL STEP … The high-tech Japanese sake company Asahi Shuzo is taking a bold step forward by attempting to brew its sake off-world for the first time, with the ultimate goal of being able to brew sake on the Moon. Their first step is going to be making the drink on the International Space Station (ISS), to which they are planning to send equipment and ingredients later this year. There, Japanese astronauts will recreate the gravity of the Moon’s surface and start brewing. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi was excited by the prospect as it would be something that has not been done in space before, saying, “Until now, we were just taking something into space. Now they are actually going to make sake in space, which is a huge undertaking.”…

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CLASSICAL CORNER

312: BETTER RED THAN DEAD “Red-headed women buck like goats” – Buck Mulligan in James Joyce, Ulysses For the full story, see NR Scott, An Esoteric History of Red Hair (2018) – featured on YouTube. Also a massive compendium in WS Walsh, A Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), pp937-8. The word ‘Redhead’ first appears in 1510 (OED). According to Wikipedia, red or ginger hair occurs in about two per cent of the human race, especially common in Northern European peoples. Greek and Roman authors recognised this, e.g. Herodotus (bk4 ch10 para8) and Livy (bk38 ch17 para4). The former, writing about the Budini, appends the fortean titbit that among them live strange box-like creatures whose testicles they used to cure uterine diseases. Similar comments were made by Seneca and Tacitus, the…

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THE CONSPIRASPHERE

UNHAPPY TRAILS Last weekend, there was a decently-sized demonstration in London that largely passed under the radar of mainstream news media. The reason for the omission may well have been the topic of the protest. Ostensibly it was a demonstration against geo-engineering, and in particular the – frankly peculiar – attempts suggested by scientists to control the weather by means of cloud modification. But the word on everyone’s lips (and many of the posters, and a lot of T-shirts) was chemtrails. These hardy perennials of the C-sphere have had a rather spotted history. When I first began to observe the world of conspiracy, chemtrails were right out there, along with flat earth and lizard people. Flat earth and the lizards have stayed out there, but chemtrails, if they’ve not gone…

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ALIEN ZOO

NEW CROCS FROM OLD Neotropical crocodiles occupy a diverse array of habitats, ranging from coastal and inland to isolated insular populations. Mirroring this, their genetic diversity has lately been shown to be much greater than hitherto suspected. Now, two previously unrecognised species have been revealed, each of them confined to a small, separate Mexican island – namely, Cozumel and the atoll of Banco Chinchorro respectively. Both of these are located off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Their hitherto-unsuspected status as valid species in their own right was exposed by a study conducted on populations of the American crocodile Crocodylus acutus by a team of researchers featuring Prof. Hans Larsson from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. To the team’s great surprise, as they had gone into the study assuming that all of the…

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MYTHCONCEPTIONS

293: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS The myth It is illegal in the UK to stick a stamp on an envelope upside down. The “truth” Some myths seem to be believed precisely because they are so unbelievable. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “The world is absurd, this story is absurd, ergo this story must be true.” The upside-down stamp is a good example. In its most extreme form it states that you can be hanged for treason for placing your stamp arse-over-tit, because all UK postage stamps carry a portrait of the reigning monarch, turning him upside down shows an anti-monarchist standpoint, and republicanism is still technically illegal under treason laws of the 14th and 19th centuries. In practice, there hasn’t been a UK treason trial since 1946, death…

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MAKING THE CASE FOR SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION PART 1

Spontaneous. Human. Combustion. These three words – and their translated equivalencies – are found and accepted individually without consternation in every firefighter’s vocabulary and training. Daring to fuse these words into a singular concept, however, unleashes from most fire experts a firestorm of disdain, derision, denial, damnation and debunking. Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) ranks prominently among the damned enigmas catalogued by Charles Fort. Historically, SHC is characterised by a person almost wholly incinerated with an assortment of extremities partially extant amid nearby easily ignitable combustibles that exhibit uncharacteristic minimal-to-no flame damage in the absence of any sensibly identifiable ignition source. It is an alleged anomaly argued about in literature for centuries. Mention dates back at least to the Renaissance chronicler Thomas H Bartholini, who described in his 1654 Historiarum Anatomicarum…

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THROWING STONES Revisiting The Liverpool Leprechaun Hunt

For many, the 1960s were an exciting time to be alive. Yet the changes that defined this decade could also be unsettling. Everyone knows about the Cold War, UFOs, the music, the fashion… and the leprechauns. On Wednesday 1 July 1964, reportedly “thousands” of children went looking for leprechauns that had been spotted the night before on a bowling green in Kensington’s Jubilee Park. Talk of leprechauns resulted in another substantial hunt taking place in Kirkby about seven miles to the north-east of Kensington. This search lasted two days and peaked on Saturday 11 July. Liverpool’s leprechauns are a well-established part of fortean lore (see FT299:26-32). Readers of this article should also consult the studies by Nigel Watson and SD Tucker.1 Here, some reference will be made in passing to…

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FOR THOSE WHO SEEK THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

For anyone with a sense of adventure, an enquiring mind and a love of the weird and wonderful… Every month, Fortean Times takes you on an incredible journey into the unknown where you’ll encounter some of the most fantastic phenomena on Earth… and sometimes beyond. SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND GET 3 ISSUES FOR £3 + FREE! A FANTASTIC FORTEAN TIMES MUG GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE • 13 Issues delivered to your door (postage included)* • 13 Issues available on mobile/tablet to keep on your device** • Save on the cover price • Every issue delivered before it’s available to buy in shops SUBSCRIBE TODAY ! Order online at SHOP.FORTEANTIMES.COM/FT460P Email us at hello@metropolis.co.uk or call 020 8752 8195 quoting FT460P The trial offer will automatically revert to a 6-month direct debit which…

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Making the same mistakes

Conspiracy Theory The Story of an Idea; An Origin Story Book Ian Dunt & Dorian Lynskey Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2024 Pb, 192pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781399612869 We hear a lot about conspiracy theories lately. Certainly, they have existed almost as far back as recorded history goes, but in the last decade they have attracted unprecedented attention from news outlets. Much of this attention is most likely due to the rhetoric of prominent politicians, many of whom have, for the last decade, used conspiracy theories to build coalitions and generate support, in a way not seen previously in our lifetimes. Consider, for example, the use of conspiracy theories by Trump and his acolytes in 2016: they deployed numerous conspiracy theories accusing the political establishment of all manner of sins. This use of…

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LETTERS

Airfield Encounter In 2007 my parents visited RAF East Kirkby airfield in Lincoln-shire. While in the large main hangar my mom had become totally engrossed in a long, framed photograph on one of the walls. It showed an entire squadron of men with a Lancaster Bomber, many of whom had been based at East Kirkby during World War II. A lot of the men in the photo were on the wings either side of the plane’s fuselage and my mom thought it was a wonderful shot. As she continued to study it she became aware of someone standing very close behind her, just by her left shoulder. She says it was unmistakable. She assumed it was my dad and so started to turn around to comment on the photo she…

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Fortean Traveller

146. Froggyland, Diocletian’s Palace, Split The ancient city of Split lies on the Croatian coast of the Adriatic, at the political and economic heart of the old Roman province of Dalmatia. The Emperor Diocletian built his vast retirement palace here in the third century, and much of the old town lies within its enormous limestone walls and arches. The palace boasts a long and complex history; like the city itself, it has remained in constant use for over 1,700 years. Its winding streets navigate the mismatched and collapsing architecture and are filled with little boutiques, cafes serving fish risotto, and sheltered courtyards where the locals sip rakijia, the strong liquor made from grapes, plums, walnuts, or seemingly anything else the locals can distil. The overwhelming impression is that modern European…

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OUT NOW!

Strange fascination… David Bowie has enthralled the world for more than half a century, and the work he left behind arguably tells us more about ourselves today than it did during even the 70s, when he made the radical moves covered in this first instalment of Record Collector Presents… David Bowie. In focusing on the years 1947-1980, we chart Bowie’s rise to fame and his subsequent rewriting of all known rulebooks, with key collaborators Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, Mike Garson and Carlos Alomar adding crucial insight through all-new interviews. Reviews of every album, plus a discussion of Bowie’s influence on fashion and guides to the London and Berlin landmarks that shaped his music, provide further understanding of the ch-ch-ch-changes he went through during his period. Add an eight-page discography packed with…

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BUGA ME SIDEWAYS!

On 2 March, a spherical UFO was spotted making erratic zigzag movements over the city of Buga in Colombia. Shortly afterwards, a group of people recovered a metal sphere, roughly the size of a football and weighing about four and a half pounds (2kg), from woodland in the city. They believe this was the UFO sighted earlier, although no one saw it make a landing. One of its finders, David Velez el Potro, said that his companion, named only as Jose, “felt sick for days” after touching the object, adding “When I poured water on it, it started to smoke and the water vaporised instantly”; although, confusingly, he also says the sphere had “the temperature of a refrigerator.” His group retrieved the object, seemingly without it making anyone else ill,…

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SIGNS & PORTENTS

MANGA PANIC In 1999, Japanese manga artist Ryo Tatsuki published a strip called The Future I Saw, which featured a cartoon version of herself sharing her visions and dreams. In it, she predicted a major disaster hitting Japan in March 2011. At the time this did not attract any particular attention, but when a massive earthquake did strike the Tohoku region in March 2011, wrecking the Fukushima nuclear plant, it made Tatsuki famous across Asia. Analysing her work, Tatsuki’s fans believe she not only predicted the Tohoku quake, but also the earlier Kobe one and the Covid pandemic, as well as the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury. Tatsuki released an updated “complete version” of The Future I Saw in 2021 in which her manga doppelgänger sees a crack…

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SIDELINES…

FLORIDA MEN After a successful debut in 2024, The Florida Man Games have returned in 2025. Male and female teams compete to be anointed “the world’s worst superheroes”, with rounds such as the Evading Arrest Obstacle Course, Beer Belly Sumo, Hurricane Party Prep, Grocery Aisle Brawl and Human Beer Pong. Croix Bruns, 29, a winner in the weaponised pool noodle competition, said: “We’ve got the Olympics, but they don’t have gator tossing, they don’t have a contest where you’ve got to hold your beer and fight someone else at the same time.” [AP], 2 Mar 2025. NICE TRY Customs officers checking Raj Mathatu’s colourful suitcases at LAX airport in Los Angeles became suspicious when they found that the clothes inside were stiff and shed a white dust when shaken. A…

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Going viral

In April 2025, the White House website officially pronounced that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Once dismissed as an unfounded conspiracy theory, the lab leak hypothesis is now arguably the dominant narrative, ahead of the rival theory that the virus spread from a market where illegal animal meat was sold. Is this a triumph for the truth-seeking scientific process which weeds out falsehoods and corrects itself, or something else entirely? The lab leak theory originally emerged from conspiracy sites like 4Chan and Infowars. Variants included the suggestion that it was a biological weapon released deliberately. The theory died out in late 2020, but was resurrected in an August 2021 report from the Republican members of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee. This was based on Chinese sources…

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SEX AND DRUGS AND…

BRONZE BOOB BATTLE For 37 years Dublin has been graced by a statue of Molly Malone, the heroine of a folk song about a Dublin seafood vendor, created by the renowned bronze sculptor Jeanne Rynhart. The statue gives Malone a revealing cleavage, and over time a tradition has grown up that if you rub her breasts it will bring good luck. As a result, they are now a very different colour to the rest of the statue – a bright gold as opposed to the dark brown patina elsewhere. Now, Trinity College student Tilly Cripwell has started a campaign to put an end to visitors “violating” the statue by groping it, condemning this as “disgusting behaviour”. “It triggered me so much, I just had to put a stop to it,”…

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PET TREKKIN’

THE CAT CAME BACK For some reason Benny and Susanne Anguiano, from Salinas, California, decided to take their Siamese cat Rayne Beau with them when they went camping in the vast wilderness of Yellow-stone National Park. While there, something startled the cat, and he shot off into the trees and disappeared. The couple spent five days searching, calling him, putting out food and laying out his toys in the hope of attracting him, but without success. Eventually a campsite worker explained to the couple that the area was full of grizzly bears and coyotes, and that their cat had probably been eaten by a predator, so the Anguianos reluctantly went home, with Susanne saying: “That was the hardest day, because I felt like I was abandoning him.” For 60 days…

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The UFO doctors

UAPMED This is a relatively new organisation that provides information on how healthcare professionals can support anyone traumatised by the UFO phenomenon. To this end they plan to a run a series of online courses that are intended to end the stigma attached to individuals who report a UAP experience; prepare first responders for UAP events and individuals exposed to UAPs; advise medical professionals on physical effects from UAP exposure; provide guidelines for mental health professionals on UAP exposure. Writing on their UAPMed website, Sarah Harmon in her article “From Sensationalism to Support” notes: “The portrayal of UAP encounters often borders on the fantastical, which can marginalise individuals who report such experiences…This sensationalism can deter people from seeking mental health support, fearing disbelief or ridicule…” Elsewhere the website states: “Whether…

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THE COLOUR OF MAGIC

Colour provides an avenue into ‘worlds’, or spheres-of-being, other than that recognised by everyday perception”.1 So said the artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, summarising the colour-theory of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She never quite managed to be a member of that well-known secret society, but its ideas infused her world; and on its foundations, she built her own transcendent magical visions. Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was a child of the Empire, born in India in 1906, to British parents – whom she never quite forgave for relocating her to unglamorous England before she’d turned two. Her parents were distant and often entirely absent, with little concern for her formal education, so young Margaret was free to follow the curriculum of her imagination. The India she would never see…

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Beyond the veil

“Somebody said to me that it’s like Detectorists meets The X Files,” smiles Will Maclean. “And as far as I’m concerned, there is no higher praise.” We’re discussing Broken Veil, a new six-part podcast created and hosted by Will and his longterm friend Joel Morris. The comparisons made are entirely apposite: like gentle BBC comedy Detectorists, Broken Veil explores the hobby-based bonds of male camaraderie against a backdrop of tangled Essex countryside. But it also boasts a sense of all-pervading weirdness, an atmosphere of creeping unease far more relevant to the investigations of Mulder and Scully. Both Will and Joel are celebrated writers. Will’s supernatural 2020 novel The Apparition Phase was widely acclaimed, while Joel continues to be a prolific TV writer, putting words into the mouth of Diane Morgan’s…

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Deciphering the cryptic

Cryptic From Voynich to the Angel Diaries, the Story of the World’s Mysterious Manuscripts Garry J Shaw Yale University Press 2025 Hb, 352pp, £25, ISBN 9780300266511 Voynich Reconsidered The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World Robert H Edwards Schiffer Publishing 2024 Hb, 336pp, £45.99, ISBN 9780764367496 Here are two fine books on the thrilling subject of mysterious manuscripts. While one takes a more narrative approach, the other delves deeply into attempts to analyse a totemic cryptographic enigma, a manuscript whose reputation for mystery dwarfs other, no less interesting works, despite their relative obscurity in the fortean and crypto-spheres. In Cryptic we go on brisk forays through key stages in the lives of cryptographers and the later journeys of their manuscripts from Hildegard of Bingen to the alchemical texts of Michael…

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Dark side of the art

Art for Everybody Dir Miranda Yousef, US 2025 Digital platforms Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died from an overdose of valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist and FT regular Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated around the ‘Painter of Light’ and his artwork during his lifetime [see FT416:36-41 for the full, strange story]. To Vallance’s astonishment, when he recounted the dream to Kinkade’s family during a symposium on kitsch a few years later, it turned out that the vault really existed, and indeed contained a motherlode of non-canonical Kinkades. In Miranda Yousef’s new documentary on Kinkade, Art for Everybody, Vallance tells the story of his prophetic dream again, and she…

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It Happened to Me…

Holiday Haunting My husband Luke and I love to take holidays in the Midwest of America exploring in our car. We’ve discovered many interesting places such as troll villages, Norwegian towns with midsummer festivals, and glass houses built on big rocks. One time we visited an old lead-mining town that was rich in history, and found a lovely inn. This was located next to the county court house and used to house over-night drunks. We decided to stay there, and spent a fun evening exploring the town and playing board games. It must have been well past midnight when I was awoken by a group of seemingly drunken youths outside, shouting at one another in a boisterous manner. This was annoying, as I had been happily asleep. The next thing…

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EXTRA! EXTRA!

THE SEA MONSTER RETURNS Economist, 25 May 2024. Werewolf tots are on the rise D.Star, 10 Dec 2024. RAT URINE FLAVOUR VAPES ON OFFER? Spalding Voice, 20 Feb 2025. Man’s pop-up urinal death may never be explained, family fears BBC News, 9 Feb 2025. NEW LASER EQUIPMENT TO HELP BURN PATIENTS Brighton Argus, 8 April 2025. Unknown flying flaming objects helped spread huge Dagenham fire that left 80 homeless Evening Standard, 25 April 2025.…

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SIDELINES…

TAKE YOUR PICK Since June 2023, the “Ice Pick Bandit” has been targeting trucks parked up at night across the south-eastern US, destroying their tyres with an ice pick. His first spree hit six trucks across several interstate highways in Florida, and he has gone on to destroy more than 1,000 tyres across Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. The man has been caught on camera several times, and is believed to be a disgruntled former truck driver, but has not been identified. “There’s no rhyme or reason for his actions,” said trucker Mark Watkins, but “[Truckers would] love to catch him and put a whooping on him.” thedrive.com, 2 Feb 2025. COMPLETELY TRUCKED Inspired by Elon Musk’s claims, Tesla Cybertruck owner Dante Colle decided to demonstrate how bulletproof the…

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ISLAND ODDITIES

SEA DEVILS Residents of Holyhead, on the island of Anglesey in Wales, are periodically spooked when low tides cause strange, human-like forms to loom over Newry Beach. Resembling Sea Devils from Doctor Who, they have been dubbed the “Newry Beach Ghouls” or “maritime Chewbaccas”; in fact, the creepy entities are seaweed-coated pilings, all that remains of a demolished lifeboat ramp. One visitor to the beach admitted: “I wouldn’t like to see them on a dark evening – very spooky”. dailypost.co.uk, 30 Oct 2021. GEF LIVES! One of the strangest and most beguiling characters in the annals of forteana is Gef the Talking Mongoose, who haunted the Irving family on the Isle of Man in the 1930s, claiming to be an “extra extra clever mongoose” (FT269:32-40, 353:34-39, 315:18-19, 436:32-35, 56-59.). This…

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Half-bodied ghosts

In a field as crowded as the paranormal book market, it is difficult to come up with a work which stands out. But it seems quite likely that comedienne and actress Daisy May Cooper has achieved this with Hexy Bitch: Tales from My Life, the Afterlife and Beyond (2024) by packing in more swear words than any other paranormal book to which I have been exposed. Left struggling for words to convey her amazement or fraught reactions when confronted by manifestations she is frequently driven to express herself with expletives. Now this could be indicative of the limitations of language in the face of indescribable and baffling phenomena. Alternatively, and being charitable, maybe Daisy May Cooper is particularly in touch with her unconscious mind, within which may lurk all kinds…

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STRANGE CONTINENT

NORTHERN ENCOUNTERS “There are too many women traveling luxuriously in ‘Darkest Africa’. Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper,” Charles Fort wrote in New Lands. So I checked whether there were still newspapers in Greenland: they have two, Sermitsiaq and Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten, and both share the same page on the Internet. As Greenland has been much in the news in the last months, I thought I might look for fortean reports, and I found a fairly recent lake monster. Under the headline “Grønlandsk Loch Ness?” we read in sermitsiaq.ag of 16 September 2009 that Reindeer hunter Jens Frederiksen and a hunting companion “recently” saw a large animal the size of a whale in a lake at Nordre Strømfjord Nassuttooq, which could not have been either a whale or a seal.…

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MEDICAL BAG

SLOW ON THE UPTAKE For four months Canadian doctor Chris Loreto had been suffering chest pains that became intense whenever he exercised, which he put down to acid reflux. The medication he had been prescribed for it did not seem to be working, though, and even when he experienced extreme pain while playing hockey on 12 November, he “shrugged it off”, according to the Timmins and District Hospital, where he worked. “He went to work the next morning,” the hospital said. “Near the end of his shift, a patient had a massive heart attack which Dr Loreto jumped in to help with. Afterwards, he spoke to the patient’s wife to learn more about his symptoms leading up to this event. Both he and the patient were on the same medication…

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Off to see the wizard

In the early days of the summer I met up with an old friend, Kate, whom I had not seen in a year or so, for an expedition to a place I once knew well but had not revisited since the 1980s. Back then, my fiancé Paul and I would love to walk the wooded trails of the heavily worked ancient landscape of Alderley Edge in north Cheshire. This has many legends linked to King Arthur and the sword in the stone, and when you climb through thick foliage in midsummer, with just the occasional faint interruption of an aircraft taking off from Manchester, there is indeed an eerie, magical feel to the place. On this occasion the British weather did its summer trick of closing in fast. It was…

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ITHELL COLQUHOUN AT TATE BRITAIN

You enter the Tate Britain exhibition through a windowless red corridor. It’s a claustrophobically vaginal approach, echoing themes of the art on display beyond the big red door. This is the world of Ithell Colquhoun, full of double images and double meanings, where a cave can be a womb, an angel can be a gorgon, and a cucumber in a jam jar can be something else entirely. For an artist who was always elusive, rare and obscure – it’s a surprise to see the sheer number of her works in one place – Colquhoun is finally getting more attention than she could have ever dreamed of. Or maybe not, because she was never one to undervalue herself. That’s clear from the assertive self-portrait, painted aged 23, that stares you down…

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FULL OF BULL?

TV’s weekday magazine news programme Good Morning Britain is no stranger to tales of ghosts and poltergeists. Its regular presenter Richard Madeley is well known for his belief in spirits, and has reported several sightings of phantoms on-air himself. In 2021 alone, he told astonished viewers about two separate recent experiences. Interviewing fellow TV presenters Dick and Dom about their then-forth-coming E4 series Celebrity Ghost Trip, Richard revealed how he had not long seen a ghost too. Sitting in his garden reading the paper, Richard looked up into the empty upper floor of his house and saw what he described as “a white face looking down at me, not moving, but just staring at me… It was very pale and unmoving and it made me feel a bit strange.” Discussing…

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Baths, Booze, Bonking

Miracula Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome Paul Chrystal Reaktion Books 2025 Hb, 472pp, £18, ISBN 9781836390497 Paul Chrystal enters a crowded field. No mention (surprise?) of the three collections by JC Mc-Keown (reviewed by me in FT268, 309, 357), nor Anthony Kaldellis’s Byzantine anthology, not even the one by Philip Matyszak who here contributes a foreword (grossly misdating Athenæus). However, Chrystal triumphs in terms of sources and detailed narratives, written in clear prose (no academic jargon) with gusto and humour – I especially liked his verdict on feminine foot-aided masturbation: “Pedicure to end all pedicures”. Vast introductory survey of primary sources includes such unlikely ones as Augustine. However, he seems to miss arguably the most “fortean” of ancient collections, namely The Book of Prodigies by late-Roman…

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TELEVISION

The challenge? To find a paranormal programme that bucks the usual trend of running around in low light for a night, shrieking, hooting and hearing noises before clearing off into the grey dawn looking traumatised. We need something different. Something with a bit of tenacity, a bit cleverer. The gauntlet thus thrown down (which turns out in this case to be a sandal, but it is leather and goes on an extremity, so it’ll pass), the sword was picked up (we’ll come to that) and the quest begins. My Haunted Project (Prime) features hotel proprietor and emeritus fish-pedicurist Harry Achilleos, investigator Danny Moss and techie Dan Callaghan rigging up one of the most reputedly haunted hotels in Cheshire with cameras and microphones, recording everything everywhere for a couple of years,…

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READER INFO

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE UK: DD Subscription 6 issues £29.95, 1 year 13 issues £55.95; Europe/USA/CAN, 1 year 13 issues £71.95/ROW £79.95. Please see house ads in the latest issue for details of special offers. UK, EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA & REST OF WORLD Major credit cards accepted. Cheques or money orders should be in sterling, preferably drawn on a London bank and made payable to Diamond Publishing Limited. Mail to: Fortean Times, Diamond Publishing Limited, 4th Floor, Harmsworth House, 13–15 Bouverie Street, London EC4Y 8DP. NB: This address should be used for orders and subscriptions only. Telephone payments and queries: +44 (0) 208 752 8195. E-mail payments and queries: hello@metropolis.co.uk HOW TO SUBMIT Fortean Times reserves all rights to reuse material submitted by FT readers and contributors in any medium or…

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STRANGE DEATHS

Eric Slate, 52, died of “multiple blunt [force] injuries”, according to Tamara Willard, the chief deputy coroner of Horry county in South Carolina. Slate had been found dead in the kangaroo enclosure of 5 Star Farm, a children’s petting zoo owned by his brother, which he was known to enter to “roughhouse” with a kangaroo named Jack. It is believed that the animal got the better of Slate on this occasion and had kicked him to death with its powerful back legs, although the Horry county police department said that, “The death investigation remains active and ongoing.” Despite their size, strength and propensity for boxing, deaths by kangaroo are surprisingly rare, although an Australian man was killed by a pet roo in 2022; before that the last recorded death took…

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