Innholdsfortegnelse for 463 i Fortean Times

GHOSTS, WITCHES & SANDOWN SAM Autumn is upon us, and with Hallowe’en imminent we bring you a seasonably spooky issue, full of witches, ghosts and – even more terrifying to some – Morris dancers. Our beautiful cover photo records the work of Herefordshire’s Dark Morris side Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk, who have built up a reputation for bringing Britain’s folklore to life with their unique performances celebrating key points in the ritual year. FT’s Lisa Gledhill has been off the beaten track in deepest Herefordshire to see them in action and brings us her report in this issue (p.28). As we prepare to unleash our next FT special edition – Witches and Witchcraft, on sale 9 October – Rebecca Batley gets us firmly in the mood with her survey of one…

315: LIFE GOES ON DAY AFTER DAY So did Gerry and the Pacemakers. Still, suppose we should, after Portia in The Merchant of Venice, afford them some Quality of Mersey. I’ve previously [FT255:17] surveyed the archæology and history of Pompeii. This column is devoted to the city’s graffiti and what they tell us about everyday and everynight life there. Texts of the 11,000+ graffiti are collected in volume 4 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. If, like Peter Cook, you haven’t got the Latin for the judging, Jack Lindsay’s The Writing on the Wall (1960) has an abundance of translated ones, whilst the amatory side is well provided for in M Della Corte’s Loves and Lovers in Ancient Pompeii (English tr. 1980). Many websites offer selections large and small. Keep an…

MYSTERY PILOT While at 75, Jason Hong rarely flew anymore, he still owned a colourful single engine 1958 Cessna Skyhawk that he called his “old treasure”. Making a rare visit to the plane at Corona Municipal Airport, in California, he found his Cessna was not where he thought he’d left it. “I got confused,” he said. “I thought, ‘Did I park it somewhere else? Did the airport manager move it?’ But I looked all over.” The plane was no longer at the airport, so a baffled Hong reported it missing to local police. Shortly afterwards, he got a call telling him the Cessna had turned up at Brackett Field Airport, still in California, but some distance away. Following this up, Hong went to Brackett Field, and, he said, “There’s my…

BUT IS IT ART? The most famous living immigrant to the United States, Melania Trump, née Melanija Knavs, was born in Novo Mesto in Slovenia in 1970. She spent her childhood in Sevnica where in 2020 the US concept artist Brad Downey and Slovenian artist Rok Pahor erected a life-sized bronze statue of her. It was the replica of an earlier wooden statue of the American first lady, also commissioned by Downey, which had become a victim of arson on 4 July 2020. On 13 May unknown art lovers (or art haters) sawed off Melania at the ankles, leaving only two feet on a pedestal. Police in Slovakia’s capital Ljubljana say the have no idea who the vandals were. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 17 May 2025. PASSIVE RADAR TRACKS SKY PHENOMENON According…

At the end of July, thousands of fans gathered for Ozzy Osbourne’s funeral procession in Birmingham. Some of them shouted “Ozzy forever!” The hard rock singer died 22 July 2025 at the age of 76.1 After a procession like that, it’s perhaps hard to remember just how reviled the singer was in certain quarters just a few decades ago at the height of the “Satanic Panic” hysteria of the eighties. It was a period when Ozzy’s reputation reached its nadir. DIARY OF A MADMAN Tabloid trash host Geraldo Rivera hosted Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, which aired on 25 October 1988 on the NBC Network. Geraldo interviewed Ozzy thanks to a video monitor in his studio, getting things off to a rocky start with the claim that “every single kid……

“Every time I go into some Midsomer Village it’s always the same thing. Blackmail, sexual-deviancy, suicide and murder. How could you possibly expect me to go live in one of them” – DCI Tom Barnaby We all love Midsomer Murders, right? The murdered wealthy, missing wills, glamorous mistresses, severed hands – and that’s just one episode.1 Similarly, the murders: head bashed in with a flashlight, force-fed a meat-pudding, run-over by a steam roller on a cricket field; and, yes, that’s all one episode too.2 With its gothic, red-stained lettering and sinister waltz theme (played on a theremin, no less), Midsomer Murders wasn’t designed to look like the averageTV detective show, but something more reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected or Hammer House of Horror. Debuting on 23 March…

Saying UAP It’s high time we settle on an acceptable way to say “UAP” now that it’s the accepted nomenclature for airborne flying weirdness. UFO was sonically satisfying whether you said the letters individually or made a phonetic word out it. It has a wonderful finality in the “O” and the phonetic variation of “You-Foe” adds a layer of menace appropriate to the more threatening scenarios surrounding alien intent. UAP, however, has a less appealing sequence. Saying the letters “U-A-P” has an inadvertent “ape” sound if you rush it. When we say the individual letters with deliberation, we end with an emphasised “pee”. A phonetic pronunciation is, to me, also fraught with uncertainty. Is it “You-App”? “Uh-App”? Or if we use the “ua” pronunciation from guacamole, “Whapp”! All are sounds…

In the annals of high strangeness forteana, few cases are quite as strange as that of Sandown Sam. On aTuesday afternoon in May 1973, a seven-year-old girl (given the pseudonym “Fay” in the BUFORA report) and an unnamed boy were walking on Lake Common near Sandown on the Isle of Wight and encountered an extraordinary entity: humanoid, about seven feet tall, with triangular markings for eyes, a brown square for a nose and unmoving yellow lips on a stark white face. His arms and legs were described as “like wooden slats”, and he was wearing multicoloured clothes, with a pointy yellow hat that had a knob on top and wooden antennæ on the sides: his appearance led to him being dubbed “The Sandown Clown”. He sometimes spoke through a device,…

At the foot of the stairs up to the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, south London, are two massive writhing naked male figures by 17th-century sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber, known as Raving Madness and Melancholy, from the gates of one of Bethlem’s previous sites at Moorfields in central London. In stark contrast, the first thing you see when you enter this exhibition about dreams and visions is a huge pile of bedding, duvets and pillows all jumbled together in the corner of the room. Night Tides is oddly disturbing: it feels confined, constricting, especially when you step into it. I told the artist, Kate McDonnell, that it was disquieting, and she leapt on the word. She wanted to create a visceral visual image of how it feels when…

Just where did all the weird ghosts go is a question that has been posed in Fortean Times. One answer might be Wales. Ghost hunter John Harries declared, “In order to meet a Welsh ghost one really needs to be Welsh” (The Ghost Hunters Road Book, 1968), but for those who are not, an excellent guide book has appeared lately – The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts (2024) by Delyth Badder and Mark Norman. They demonstrate ghosts in Wales are a truly diverse lot. Particularly valuable are the authors’ copious translations of archival and documented material inaccessible to non-Welsh speaking readers. Also provided is a helpful glossary of Welsh language supernatural terms. Ringing from the pages are words and dread names: Cyhyraeth (skeleton, apparition, death portent), Drychiolaeth (apparition, spectre, revelation) and Gwrach-y-rhibyn…

For centuries, a mysterious mummified body has been kept in the crypt of the church of St Thomas am Blasenstein in Upper Austria. Nicknamed “the air-dried chaplain” the body was believed to be the remains of an aristocratic former vicar, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, who died in 1746 aged 37, probably of tuberculosis. No one was sure, though, exactly how von Rosenegg had been preserved as there was no evidence of any mummification process on the outside of the body. Now, a study by Dr Andreas Nerlich, a pathologist at Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich, Germany, and his team has discovered how it was done. Nerlich found that the abdominal and pelvic cavities of the body had been packed with wood chips, broken twigs, zinc chloride and shredded fabrics,…

In the borderlands, something is stirring. A current of eclectic neopaganism braided with folk music, performance art and countercultural fashion. From time to time when the stars align these currents burst forth in an efflorescence of creative expression, and one of those dark blossoms is Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk. Blackthorn are more than just a Morris dance side, though they spring from the Dark Morris trend that has been steadily rising along the border between England and Wales since the 1990s.1 They perform their rituals at dusk, primarily around the pagan festivals and turning points of the solar year. They wear costumes of tattered black, accented by the blue-purple colour of sloes, and they paint their faces in the same colour. Each member of the group takes a name from a totem…

It’s time to wrap up our rewatch of the second series of Fortean TV. And to think the unthinkable: are the zany graphics, Fanthorpe’s gnomic utterances and the surface level treatment of both the serious and the ridiculous in danger of wearing a tad thin? I mean, it’s still absolutely wonderful television, but in contrast to the chaos of series one, a formula is becoming apparent. In just a few weeks’ time we were to see how far Fanthorpe would push the envelope, outraging both rational sense and our common decency with a much darker and more challenging spin-off, but that will have to wait until next time: first, let’s look at episodes 5 to 8 of the main programme. EPISODE 5 It’s hard to think of a better example…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Presence The strange science and true stories of the unseen other Ben Alderson-Day Manchester University Press 2025 Pb, 304pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781526184948 “When I count,” wrote TS Eliot in The Wasteland, “there is only you and I together. But when I look ahead… There is always another one walking beside you.” “Who,” he asked, “is the Third?” That is the question posed too by psychologist Ben Alderson-Day in this invigorating, rigorous and highly readable survey of the common experience of the “other”. It’s a survey of a huge field. Some experiences come from extreme places: from explorers and athletes teetering on the edge of survivability. We meet Frank Smythe who, climbing Everest without oxygen in 1933, was accompanied by…

NEWS FROM THE CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL GARDEN MAPPING A CRYPTO-SPECIMEN Cryptozoological specimens are notorious for being almost as elusive as the cryptids themselves, with a worrying tendency to vanish out of sight, never to be recorded again. So it is always a pleasant (albeit rare) surprise if such a specimen reappears somewhere, as was the case recently with one that has apparently been hidden in plain sight for quite some time. On 26 August 2025, I was startled but delighted to learn from Florida resident and longstanding Facebook friend Adam Naworal that he had recently encountered a sample of tissue from the famous St Augustine globster. The sample was preserved and on public yet wholly unpublicised display in the map room at the St Augustine Historical Society – Oldest House Museum Complex…

Like the crunchy scraps of batter that loiter at the bottom of a chippy’s deep fryer, Mythconception’s filing system accrues fragments of myths. Considered individually they are not quite the whole potato, but since, for the sake of hygiene, every system should be cleaned once a decade whether it needs it or not, we present here a selection of such gribbles.Readers with anything to add to any of the topics briefly touched on are urged to wrap their thoughts in greaseproof paper and hand them in at the letters page. • Speaking of batter bits, it seems that many fish-and-chip customers, plenty of chip-shop proprietors, and most of the nation’s journalists believe that it is now illegal to serve them, due either to food safety or healthy eating concerns. Needless…

“I hope you don’t f***ing drop me. The way they’re carrying me, you’d think I’d died of f***ing lead poisoning.” Funerals are never an easy experience, and can be made considerably harder when the deceased is narrating the entire affair. Such was the case for the friends and family of Bernard Manning when he died in 2007. Manchester comedian Bernard Manning was as synonymous with working men’s clubs and mother-in-law jokes as he was with the casual racism that landed him in hot water during the latter decades of his career. Famous for his appearances on the popular 1970s shows The Comedians and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, his wartime dabbling in entertainment had led to a career in compering, comedy and crooning that was both controversial and…

Exterminate! Regenerate! The Story of Doctor Who John Higgs Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2025 Hb, 464pp, £25, ISBN 9781399614771 The story of Doctor Who. Again. We all know (now) the Doctor is a Timelord with two hearts who travels in a time/space machine called the Tardis, righting wrongs wherever they land. Do we really need another book to tell us all of this? But hang on – the blurb tells us this is the “offscreen story [which] is equally extraordinary … This is a story of change, mystery and the importance of imaginary characters in our lives”. Ah, that’s a bit different then. So we have a story that starts from 1958 for a bit of background setting, although our main area of interest kicks in at 1962 and takes us…

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Good Boy Dir Ben Leonberg, USA 2025 In UK cinemas from 10 Oct Pets hold special places in our lives and hearts – anyone who has or has had a beloved cat or dog will be able to attest to just how much they enrich our existence. In the world of cinema, pets have a long history as both lead performers and supporting actors, and while it may only be fiction, few things can cement an antagonist’s wretchedness more than someone hurting their pet, with such a misdeed even serving as the catalyst for an entire franchise, as was the case with the John Wick film series. In horror, pets have also made lasting impressions, Stephen King in particular being responsible…