Innholdsfortegnelse for 465 i Fortean Times

CHRISTMAS CRACKERS Our cover story marks the 20th anniversary of the onset of one of Britain’s most notable modern poltergeist cases. In December 2005, a family in South Shields, SouthTyneside, began experiencing disconcerting events in their modest and, up until then, perfectly normal home. By the following year, fearing they were being haunted, they had reached out for help to their local church, a Spiritualist group and, finally, to paranormal investigator Darren W Ritson. Darren and his colleague Michael J Hallowell began an investigation that went on for many months and allowed them to witness the whole range of phenomena traditionally associated with poltergeist activity, from the relatively mundane – objects being moved, mysterious knockings – to the explicitly threatening – crude messages and physical attacks. Looking back, Darren feels…

STILL NOT HAPPENING A flurry of excitement rippled through Christian social media in September when, during an interview with Innocent and Millicent Cent on the CENT-TWINZTVYouTube channel, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela announced that he had received a vision telling him God was going to “rescue the Christians out of the world” on 23 and 24 September. This was also Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets, the day marking the Jewish NewYear, which in some versions of evangelical Christian eschatology also signifies the return of Christ and the Rapture, when God bodily transports all true Christians to Heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to experience seven years of “tribulation” before Judgement Day. Mhlakela went on to prophesy that this would “happen with such power that it would cause the…

Deputies were called to an ice cream parlour in South Lake Tahoe, California, after the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office received reports of an unusual disturbance on 17 August. Entering the shop, they were greeted by the bizarre sight of a bear peering over the counter having apparently broken in looking for something to eat. According to the Sheriff’s Office Facebook page: “In the early morning hours of last Sunday… Deputies were dispatched to a call for service at the Ice Cream Shop at Camp Richardson in South Lake Tahoe. The deputies could barely believe their eyes as they saw a large bear behind the counter of the shop. With some encouragement, the bear ultimately left, but only after showing interest in the strawberry ice cream. “Thankfully, the bear…

The weekend of 5-7 September marked the inaugural Strange Days Festival of Forteana. Organiser Matt Page’s promise of ‘The most extraordinary weekend of your life’ was spoton. Strange Days took place at the Barge Inn near Avebury in a sleepy rural village that had a rude awakening as overloaded cars, campervans and Brian Blessed descended. Freeman’s Freaky Fact Fest kicked off the festivities on Friday as teams gathered around haybales to debate the answers to Richard Freeman’s mind-boggling trivia. Those who survived the quiz were treated to a set by Mr Teatime (Shaun Amos ofThe Scribes) who had successfully travelled from the year 2056 with alarming warnings about the future. Paddy Steer came to the rescue with his otherworldly psychedelic tunes, closely followed by Frankenstein’s Lobster, and the night drew…

DIARY OF A MAD CONTINENT I read recently that scientists allegedly agree that there is no increase in extreme weather events and conditions. If that’s so, the journals I checked must not yet have got the memo. The German Helmholtz Institute warns that dangerous weather extremes are increasing, and the German Meteorological Service says studies have shown that extreme weather occurs more often each year. Summer 2025 seemed to demonstrate this. In just one week we had forest fires near Madrid in Spain and Martigues in France (18 July); torrential rains in southern and eastern Germany (21 July); 40°C temperatures in Greece and Turkey, and 32°C at the North Cape, Norway (22 July). Fires and torrential rain continued for at least a week. Early in August, tennis-ballsized hail hit Rimini…

MUSK HITS MUSK? On 19 October vet Andrew Melville-Smith was driving near the Spencer Gulf in South Australia in his new Tesla Model Y when there was a deafening explosion and he and his passengers were showered with glass from the windscreen as the car filled with white smoke and a smell of burning. “I thought we’d crashed,” Melville-Smith said. “I was in shock; I remember wiping glass particles from my face and being completely disoriented.” His wife said, “The car’s blown up,” while Melville-Smith himself “thought someone had fired a shotgun at us.” But apart from a shattered windscreen, the car was fine, and he kept on driving. Melville-Smith credits Tesla’s self-driving mode for keeping them safe, saying, “If we were in any other vehicle, we would have crashed…

It’s a relief after the horrors of Fortean TV Uncut (FT464:46-51) to find that Lionel Fanthorpe was given one last hurrah by Channel 4 – an “X-mas Files” seasonal special punning off the then wildly popular US drama series featuring Agents Mulder and Scully. The intro treats us to a bonkers festive micro-budget remix of the FTV title sequence, shamelessly exploiting Fanthorpe’s “resemblance to a certain Mr Claus” as he promises to uncover for us the “truth behind the tinsel.” I have read elsewhere that the Rapido production team behind FTV had more than adequate finances, but delighted in making stuff look cheap on purpose.1 Was this also true for their supernatural spin-off? Fanthorpe starts by attending Charles W Howard’s Santa school in Michigan, where gentlemen of a certain physical…

Are some localities anomaly hot spots? In practice, it can be hard to tell. If a few incidents receive publicity, that could encourage other witnesses to come forward. The total number of strange incidents might be no higher than elsewhere, but differential reporting could give a false impression that an area was a hotbed of strange activity. Of course, reports might arise from misperception, misinterpretation or hoaxing. The latter might entail invented witness testimony, the fabrication of physical evidence, or a combination of both (e.g. sending a bogus UFO story to a newspaper along with fabricated photos). Another problem is the tendency for commentators to describe presumed hot spots as ‘triangles’, thereby implying that the strange incidents distribute themselves in a distinctly triangular pattern. Usually, no statistical evidence will be…

KINGDOM OF KUBALA [FT463:8-9] Having set up the “Kingdom of Kubala” in woods on the edge of an industrial estate near Jedburgh, Scotland, in the spring, Kofi Offeh, 36 from Ghana, Jean Gasho, 42, from Zimbabwe and Kaura Taylor, 21, from Texas (AKA King Atehehe, Queen Nandi, and Lady Safi) were evicted by five sheriff officers on 16 September. They claimed that the land was rightfully the property of their African “tribe” because King Atehehe was a descendant of the biblical King David, whose kingdom of Zion was not in the Middle East as generally accepted, but in Scotland, and had been stolen from them 400 years ago. The tribe did not move far though; having been forced off the private land where they had set up camp, they merely…

The comet dubbed 3I/ATLAS, a rare extrasolar intruder, continues to barrel through the Solar System, attracting interest and speculation from astronomers and space scientists worldwide. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who controversially published a paper speculating on the possibility that the object is an artificial craft, continues to share his headline-grabbing thoughts about 3I/ATLAS. In August, he teamed up with appropriately named congresswoman Anna Paula Luna to call for NASA to closely monitor 3I/ATLAS and to divert both the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Jupiter’s Juno probe to inspect it. They said they feared that if the object is alien technology, “it could either visit us or release some mini probes that arrive to Earth and appear as UAP,” adding, “We need to be aware of that possibility.” While NASA did not…

The SAS (Special Air Service) make routine use of sleep-deprivation exercises in their selection process, and these often feature in later training. Hallucinations during such exercises are very common, while acting upon them is frowned upon. One particular night we had been up for 48 hours marching around doing the most routine military crap imaginable, but not doing it very well, and as punishment we were made to stay out for another night in a patch of boggy ground deep in an ancient Welsh deciduous woodland. There were about two dozen of us, and we fanned out silently into a large defensive circle, each man was 20 metres from his colleague, each covering his own arc, rifles pointed out into the pitch-black night. If you’ve never looked through an antiquated…

Supernatural Bodies Stigmata in Modern Britain and Ireland Kristof Smeyers Manchester University Press 2024 Hb, £85, 264pp, ISBN 9781526177230 In the latter half of the 19th century, a strange event began quietly in a Belgian village, sparking a controversy that eventually created divisions of opinion about the role of the supernatural in social history and in religion that had far-reaching consequences for almost every level of Western culture. A young village girl called Louise Lateau (1850-1883) became bed-ridden with a mysterious condition. By the 1870s she had manifested, in her body, the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. Of course there had been earlier similar stigmatics – since the time of St Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) – but Louise’s appeared in the 1870s. Gradually descriptions by visiting doctors and other notables began…

The Wolf of Whindale Jacob Kerr Serpent’s Tail 2025 Hb, 336pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781800811522 The Wolf of Whindale is Jacob Kerr’s second novel set in the county of Northalbion – a version of Northumberland where myths and folklore have reality – and is very different from his The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (FT430:57). It’s set in a mining village in 1845, where a body has been found, ripped apart by, apparently, a great wolf. Mine worker Caleb – a remarkably well-read young man – is physically punished and banished for crossing a picket line during a strike. Badly injured and having to make his own way across the hills, he encounters the wolf – and later the truth about the wolf. It’s not always an easy read, in part…

The Horror of Toilets Reading Laura Mauro’s “Japanese Toilet Ghosts” [FT459:30-35], reminded me of a less well known fear in the Western world, which – according to the modern rabbinical Internet resource site TheTorah.com – is “a source of horror to many Jewish children”. This curious situation is particularly intense during Nittel (Christmas Eve), a period known as ‘Nittel Nacht’ since the late 16th century. Amid the traditional observances, some Jewish households in Europe would read from the antisemitic satires of the life of Jesus known as Toledots of which there were many versions. Somehow, the ‘toilet fear’ evolved out of the ‘lampooning’ (at family gatherings) of the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus at this time, in particular stories that mention all sorts of ‘pollution’ that defile…

While the original National Folklore Survey from the 1960s was unscientific and open ended, simply asking random people “what do you know to be true?”, its 21st century successor is a very different beast. Announced last October (FT453:4-5), the two-year project is a collaboration between Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Hertfordshire and Chapman University in the US. Led by regular FT contributor David Clarke and colleagues, it uses all the sociological and statistical tools available to modern polling and research to interrogate the folkloric beliefs of the English population. Investigations into the other UK nations depend on securing additional funding. On 10 October, they announced their first results, just in time for Hallowe’en. The National Folklore Survey used the public polling apparatus of IPSOS UK, an extremely well established…

APE STYLE Keepers at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia have noticed a fashion trend spreading among groups of chimpanzees living there – sticking strands of grass in their ears or rectums, and just leaving them to hang there for a while. Researchers cannot find any physical or medical purpose for the behaviour, but it has spread from chimp to chimp so that most of the animals in the sanctuary have been doing it. The grass-in-ear behaviour was first seen in a female chimp named Julie in 2010. She died in 2013, but by then the behaviour had started spreading through the group, with most animals participating by 2014. By 2024, the trend had largely fallen out of fashion in this first group, with only two of Julie’s sons continuing…

Have long wanted a chance to celebrate the Sex Pistols. Whatever you may make of Mr Rotten’s question to his last audience in America, “Ever got the feeling you’ve been had?”, the Pistols were great fun – my favourite ditties were “Bodies” and “Holidays in the Sun”. One ancient link here. Bishop Athanasius once dubbed pro-Arian hymns (Arius being the leading heretic of the time) “The roughest of songs sung by the roughest of people in the roughest of places” – certainly sounds like the Roxy club where Messrs Rotten and Vicious performed. Sorry, though, that I know of no evidence for Roman mosh pits or pogo dancing. An anonymous online statement offers the following food for thought: “Charles Fort, a self-published author known for his theories on anomalous phenomena,…

PRAYING FOR INSECT INSIGHT! The European praying mantis Mantis religiosa has breeding populations on the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands, yet only a very occasional vagrant individual or two have been reported from mainland Britain – but that may all be about to change. Earlier in 2025, the Cornwall Wildlife Trust (CWT) identified a number of specimens discovered inhabiting gardens near Truro and Mousehole, and the CWT has speculated that these individuals may have been blown across the English Channel from mainland Europe by strong winds. Traditionally native to southern Europe, this unmistakeable insect species has been gradually expanding its range northward on the Continent due to increasing temperatures there, presumably caused by climate change, leading to the opinion offered by the CWT that it is only a…

The myth Father Christmas delivers your children’s presents. The “truth” If he’s leaving gifts, he isn’t Father Christmas. That’s not what FC does. The first personification of Christmas that we know of today was Sir Christëmas, who appears in a 15th century English carol exhorting people to “be right merry”. The Lords of Misrule (see FT400:48-51) who compèred the long Christmases in noble houses during the Early Modern period were often given titles for the duration, such as ‘Captain Christmas’ or ‘The Christmas Lord’, but there was still no suggestion of an individual with supernormal powers. Or, indeed, of a geezer with a beard. For that, we had to wait until the culture wars of the 17th century. For conservatives, the (largely imaginary) old-style Christmases of Merrie England symbolised everything…

Nellie Sloggett is not a name that gets uttered very often these days, but she is nevertheless a very important figure in the history of folk collection, and someone who should be far better celebrated for her important contributions to folklore. Nellie was born in Cornwall on 29 December 1851 to Moses and Sarah Sloggett. Moses was a fisherman, and died when Nellie was six, so she was mostly brought up by her mother. After her husband’s death Sarah struggled to make ends meet and got a job cleaning in the town. Times were hard, and eventually the decision was made to move in with Nellie’s aunt, uncle and their children. They all lived together in a comfortable townhouse in the centre of the small fishing town of Padstow, and…

Forty years ago, in 1985, the genredefining platform game Super Mario Bros first launched on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console in Japan, an unparalleled 8-bit action-adventure which gave rise to videogaming’s most well-known franchise – and innumerable myths and legends. The Mario games have always been full of genuine hidden secrets, but Mario’s obsessive fanbase have long enjoyed spotting extra ones which are not really there, from a plot to turn players gay in Super Mario Galaxy (decorative stars on certain letters in the game’s logo spell out the sexuality-warping hypno-phrase ‘UR MR GAY’), to a subliminal encouragement for kids to commit suicide in Luigi’s Mansion (a brief graphical glitch makes it look as though Mario’s brother Luigi has just hanged himself). Some such ideas start as hoax pranks…

Free Radicals How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science Mike Jay Yale University Press 2025 Pb, 416pp. £11.99, ISBN 9780300282610 A new book from Mike Jay is always worthy of attention, even if Free Radicals is an updated version of an earlier title, 2009’s The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius. The subtitle of this new edition is clearly a nod to Jay’s last two books, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (2021) and Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2024) – and a canny ploy from his publishers to attract recent converts to Jay’s books to an earlier title on a related theme. Free Radicals is emblematic of Jay’s work, illustrating…

Shelby Oaks Dir Chris Stuckmann, US 2025 In cinemas It’s probably fair to say that Shelby Oaks, the directorial debut of YouTuber Chris Stuckmann, which he also wrote and produced, has divided audiences and critics alike. This is ironic in itself, as it is very much a film of two halves. The first mostly follows the found footage format and is full of intrigue and spine-tingling potential, while the second adheres to a more traditional, but ultimately less fulfilling path which soon descends into a slightly derivative, cliché-ridden romp. The Guardian ruthlessly labelled it, “junky Halloween horror [which] delivers zero scares”, which might be a little harsh. As a noted film critic in his own right, you would think Stuckmann would know his way around a movie set. And he…