Fortean Traveller: Grutas Park, Druskininkai, Lithuania

This first appeared in Fortean Times, FT456, April 2025.

There were more statues of Lenin than you could shake a stick at. A superfluity of statues and busts of Lenin in various scales, from life size to huge, in a line stretching into the pine forest as far as I could see. Lenin, Lenin, Lenin, or “Leninas” as he’s known in Lithuanian. The grammar of the Lithuanian language means the names of most famous people are Lithuanianised to ensure agreement of nouns by gender and case ending.

Leninas, with goat

Leninas, Leninas, Leninas, Leninas in a variety of sizes and formats

It was a peculiar set of circumstances that brought me to the faux frontier post guard's kiosk at the entrance to Grutas Park. It was a "dark tourism" side-trip that was part of a health tourism honeymoon – I was accompanying my brand new bride, supporting her in getting a hip replacement in Lithuania. It turned out the strange tourist attraction that is Grutas Park is under ten minutes by cab from the spa where we were staying for post-op convalescence and physio in Druskininkai, an out-of-the-way health resort in the middle of a huge forest and national park in the southern end of Lithuania, not far from the Belorussian border.

The weather wasn’t conducive to the “dark tourism” vibe, though. It was a record-breakingly hot early September, so hot that I was glad to be in the shade of the pine forest. The three-kilometre loop around the site to see over 80 sculptures requires a lot of walking, it’s not for people who’ve just had their hips replaced. So I left my recuperating bride to rest in our room for an afternoon and took a cab to Grutas Park, also unofficially known as "Stalin World."

Grutas Park's friendly rheas

An appropriately brusque woman wearing a young pioneer’s red neckerchief took €12 off me and I entered the park. The first thing I noticed was that, alongside monuments to the heroes of the Soviet Union, there were many enclosures with rabbits, black swans, exotic geese, emus, several interesting breeds of goats, wallabies, peacocks (of which some were albinos), budgerigars, llamas, alpacas and some very friendly rheas who seemed to like having their photos taken.

Grutas Park was planned in response to a parliamentary committee set up to find a “solution” to the dumped Soviet statuary then littering Lithuania’s municipal yards and warehouses. Lithuania had enjoyed independence since the Russian Revolution of 1917, only to be annexed to the Soviet Union by force in 1940. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was welcomed here by pretty much everyone.

Grutas Park's sign

A few Soviet monuments had already been torn down and broken up by crowds in ’91 before local boy Villumas Malinauskas, an entrepreneur in berries and mushrooms, started urgent talks with the Ministry of Culture about a plan to save Lithuania’s antique Social Realist statuary heritage from the Soviet era at minimal expense to the state. After all, they were sculptures by Lithuanian artists, half a century’s worth of the nation’s public art.

These public sculptures had once stood in endless war cemeteries, university campuses, town squares and at prominent points in those multiple-laned, otherwise empty boulevards and “prospects” going out of town, which are now prime retail and hospitality locations.

Malinauskas said his mission was to keep memories of repression alive and bearable, which he hoped to achieve partly through “irreverence”. Humour, said Malinauskas, “helps overcome the fears of the past.” The Park opened on April Fool’s Day 2001. Soon after its opening, the Park won an Ig Nobel award.

As part of that irreverence, heroes of the Soviet Union share space with much more recent-looking “naive art” wooden sculptures of scenes from fairy tales. There's a particularly sinister-looking encounter between Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, there’s the full cast of characters from The Great Big Enormous Turnip. Also on view is a fairytale family group including a woman clutching a snake who wears a crown. This is from perhaps Lithuania’s most famous and most-researched fairy tale, Eglė the Queen of Grass Snakes. It's complicated, but Eglė’s family pull several scams to get her out of having to marry Žilvinas, King of the Grass Snakes, followed by a horde of snakes turning up threatening to unleash a famine. Eglė is finally coerced into marrying Žilvinas. But when she moves into his magical underwater realm, he turns out to have changed his form from that of a grass snake into that of a rather handsome human. They live there happily and have four children, until Eglė’s family brutally murder Žilvinas and Eglė turns herself and her children into trees.

Top: an especially sinister version of Snow White's first encounter with the Seven Dwarves. Bottom: Egle second from left holding her bridegroom Žilvinas King of the Grass Snakes and their four children from the Lithuanian folktale Egle the Queen of Grass Snakes

Lithuania was a pagan country with many well-documented gods and goddesses right up to 1387, it’s thought that the grass snake may have once been revered as a sacred animal. This group of statues at Grutas may be a parody of the traditional wooden carvings depicting the same fairy tale at a more mainstream folklore-themed tourist attraction down the road, the Lithuanian Foresters’ Union’s Forest Echo Museum.

There were no agit-prop shows on at the little open air theatre at Grutas Park when I was there on a Monday, while the loudspeakers that used to play Soviet “patriotic” songs were silent. (I’m told these are used only for anniversary celebrations or commemorations of now defunct festivals from the Soviet-era calendar.) The original plan was to bring customers to the gate in cattle trucks pulled by a Soviet-era locomotive, like prisoners being bought to the gulags, but the “inappropriate” klaxon sounded at the Minister of Culture and the proposal was dropped.

A Soviet locomotive from the time of the "deportations"

Parked at the entrance, though, there’s a black Soviet freight loco with a red star on the front and a couple of freight wagons, said to be from period of the “deportations” – many Lithuanians were sent to the gulags when the Soviet drove the Germans out of Lithuania and re-occupied it at the end of World War Two. And was the heavy use of barbed wire and the high fence of the enclosure at the edge of the Park mimicking the perimeter fence around a Soviet gulag, or was it just to stop particularly escape-prone exotic goats getting out?

While there seems to have been an endless demand for “Leninas” statuary, Grutas Park also has a statue of “K. Marksas” (Karl Marx) who appears to rise out of his square plinth. There's also a double bust of Marx and Engels. And there are endless mourning war widows and soldiers at attention with bowed heads aplenty, for those many, many war cemeteries, and monuments to what was once known as the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, now downgraded in the signage to the "Soviet-German war".

Left to right: Engels, K. Marksas, Leninas again, Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas and a rare surviving bust of "Stalinas".

Another figure who pops up a lot in the state-sponsored statuary of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was the impressively moustachioed Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas. He was an old-school underground Communist in the last decades of Tsarist Russia, in a Lithuanian Communist party founded a decade before the Russian one. Mickevičius-Kapsukas served in brief Soviet republics set up by the “Reds” in Lithuanian territory during the Russian Civil War, before the Poles forced these out and he went into exile in Moscow, where he was on the board of the Comintern, the Soviet Union’s operation to promote international revolution. The several statues of Mickevičius-Kapsukas at Grutas include – inevitably – one depicting him in conversation with “Leninas.”

As well as “Leninas” and Mickevičius-Kapsukas, some relatively obscure local revolutionaries, middle-ranking Soviet staff officers or bureaucrats are immortalised in stone, concrete or bronze at Grutas. Some of these were “martyred” by the firing squads of the Tsarists, or the Nazi occupiers, while others, such as Karlos Pozeja and most of the Central Committee of Communist Party of Lithuania, met their end facing the firing squads of the nationalist authoritarian regime that ruled Lithuania from 1926 onwards, in what is now euphemistically referred to in signage as “the upheaveal” (military coup), after which independent Lithuania had its own gulags and firing squads and and locked up its cartoonists.

Karlos Pozeja, a Communist organiser shot by independent Lithuania's firing squad following the 1926 nationalist coup

The entire Central Committee of Lithuania's Communist Party, who met their end in front of a 1920s post-coup firing squad.

Some of the Lithuanians among the Soviet partisans operating behind enemy lines in “the Soviet-German War” went on to become much hated postwar Soviet enforcers in the Lithuanian SSR, which earned them immortality and a statue now in Grutas Park. Ironically, a surprisingly high proportion of these brutal Soviet enforcers of Lithuanian origin would subsequently be among the many “disappeared” who were executed Stalin’s purges. Their statues at Grutas date from a slightly later, post-Stalinist period in which these former “non-persons” were posthumously rehabilitated and elevated to the devine status of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

There was one “Stalinas” statue and one large Stalin bust. These had presumably been taken out of storage – his image fell out of official favour in the 1950s. There was also a solitary statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, another local boy, a Belorussian who was active in underground Communist circles in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in the early years of the 20th century. Dzerzhinsky went on to set up the dreaded NKVD Soviet secret police force, precursor to the KGB. His image also disappeared from public view at around the same time as Stalin’s. There’s also a Soviet statue of Victory, she’s missing an arm.

Those who have experienced harassment by over-zealous Marxist paper sellers on demos or outside Tube stations would be amused by the statue of Zigmas Angarietis, who is portrayed brandishing a copy of the early Lithuanian Communist newspaper Tiesa – which he founded.

There was a distinctly Baltic-Nordic vernacular style to many of the Soviet statues at Grutas, an Art Deco influenced Modernist look. The exception seemed to be statues and busts of “Leninas”, all the work of sculptors with Lithuanian names, but which appeared fixed in an early 1950s or even 1930s style. This was despite many of the “Leninas” statues of Grutas dating from as recently as the 1980s, including one “Leninas” statue from 1986, when Gorbachev was already in power and enacting perestroika and glasnost.

Grutas has several statues of Marytė Melnikaitė, the female Soviet partisan who once had streets and collective farms named after her – captured and shot by the Germans aged just 20 in 1942 after just a few months as a guerrilla. The somewhat ranty signs at Grutas now view the Soviet partisans operating in Lithuania as “saboteurs” stealing from the population. There certainly seems to have been little enthusiasm for the Soviet partisans among Lithuania’s population, given their agenda, which was basically the re-conquest of Lithuania and its forcible re-incorpation into the USSR.

Marytė Melnikaitė, Lithuanian Soviet partisan martyred aged 20.

Monument "to underground Soviet partisans" from 1983

Local Soviet partisans like Melnikaitė fought in a complex, many-cornered guerrilla war between German army and SS death squads and their Lithuanian collaborators, the Polish Home Army, the nationalist Lithuanian Territorial Defence Force and also random gangs of bandits taking advantage of the chaos.

The souvenir shop selling Soviet wooden toys and porcelain Lenin busts was closed when I visited on a Monday, perhaps as part of a “living history” re-enactment of Soviet-style customer service. There was a Soviet "militia" (police) car with hammer and sickle emblems on its doors, a Muscovite car in that kind of dull orange-grey colour the Soviets did so well. Also on display was a frighteningly insanitary mineral water dispensing machine of the type I remember putting a few kopeks into on the streets and squares of Moscow on a school trip there back in 1980. It had glasses that you pressed into a feeble water jet under the dispenser that was supposed to rinse them before re-use. A row of buttons allowed customers to choose from a variety of nasty, weak, sticky flavours to add to your sparkling mineral water.

Other curiosities on show include the tyre treads of a Red Army GAZ jeep and the prints of various issues of a Red Army boot, all set in concrete. There’s a bar, a done up as a hunting lodge with trophies and stuffed wildlife. One of the weirder structures on site was a building with pillars made from trees with the branches still on, display cases full of little statues of the devil, like a little local version of the Devil Museum in the city of Kaunas to the north (FT180).

1980s "Militia" (police) car, a Muscovite in orange-grey

Flavoured mineral water vending machine from the Soviet era.

Grutas is dark tourism light, not really dark at all – just really, really odd, and pleasantly so. It seems to best way to make “memories of repression… bearable” is to put them in a beautiful tranquil forest setting, throw in some exotic animals and soak the place in an atmosphere of eccentricity and memorable quirkiness.

Grutas Park, adult admission €12. Bus M-203 from Vilnius bus station to Druskininkai then Bus 2A or Bolt cab (around €6) to Grutas Park http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/.

Copyright ©️ Matt Salusbury 2024

The author with a monumental Soviet soldier

Zigmas Angarietis, turn-of-the-twentieth-century underground organiser, street-selling a copy of Communist newspaper Tiesa, which he founded

One of several mourning war widows

Cubism-influnced war memorial

Another Soviet soldier by the cafe. Painting concrete statues in chrome paint to make them look like they were made of steel was a thing in Soviet art.

Fossil remains of an "Oliphant" in the 16th-century St Lawrence Jewry church, City of London?

Could there have been the fossil remains of a prehistoric mammoth or elephant, such as the "straight-tusked elephant" Elephas antiquus, on show at the City of London's St Lawrence Jewry church in the 16th century?

I was at the Guildhall Library recently and they had a copy of John Stow’s A Survey of London open at the St Lawrence Jewry entry. (1595, 2nd edition 1603. Photo above - out of copyright.)



The historian John Stow was born 1525, so his account of what "I myself have seen in this churche some 60+ years since" is feasible, he would have been 10 years old at the time he says he saw the fossil bones.

60 years earlier, when Stow visited as a ten-year-old, the church had “the shank bone of a man (as it is taken) and also a tooth of a very great bignesse hanged up for shew (show) in chaines of Iron upon a pillar of stone, the tooth being about the bignesse of a man’s fist is long since conveyed from thence: the thighe or shanke bone of 25 inches (62.5 cm) in length by the rule remaineth yet fastened to a post.” (Thanks to Tim Holt Wilson for help deciphering the Gothic typeface from that era.)

A marginal note adds:
“The tooth of some monstrous fish, I take it. A shank bone of 25 inches long, of a man as is said, but might be of an Oliphant." (Photo below, out of copyright.)

A "shank bone" (thigh bone or femur) of a tall human, the longest bone in the human body, could be 25 inches long, but it's rare. The leg bones of a Proboscidean (elephant, mammoth or mastodon) resemble that of a scaled-up human, so Stow's speculation that it's a bone from an "Oliphant" is reasonable. The "tooth of a very great bigness" sounds like a massive molar of an elephant or mammoth, or a fragment of such a molar.



It's a good educated guess by Stow, especially given the scarcity of published works at the time that would have described elephant skeletons. Stow's identificaton is also ahead of its time. Half a century later, a correspondent from Suffolk described a likely fossil Proboscidean skeleton as "the Body of a Mighty giant", while Cotton Mather in colonial Massachusetts - a century after Stow was writing - was shown teeth and bones from an elephant or mastodon from upstate New York and interpreted these as the remains of the Nephilim - "fallen angels" from the Old Testament.

St Lawrence Jewry church, which takes its name from the nearby neighbourhood where Jews once settled, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Before that, the church had likely had a clear-out of "superstitious" artefacts in thr Reformation, whose peak was in the 1540s. This may explain why some of the artefacts Stow had seen there as a child had been "long since conveyed from thence." The iconoclasts of the Reformation, though, had as their target anything that looked Catholic rather than anything prehistoric. The bones of a giant, "monstrous fish" or "Oliphant" don't seem to have been passed off as a saint's, so they were safe from the Reformation's iconoclasts but not from the Great Fire.

See a detailed invesigation into the "the Body of a Mighty giant" unearthed at Brockford Bridge, Suffolk in 1652, co-authored with Tim Holt Wilson, here.

Black government wagons in The War of the Worlds

This article appeared in Fortean Times, FT

EVER SINCE Albert K. Bender first described his own and other ufologists' encounters with "Men In Black" (MIBs) from 1952 onwards (first documented in Gray Barker's 1956 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,) the MIBs have reportedly driven around in shiny, new black cars – often Cadillacs – in their efforts to intimidate and silence UFO witnesses.

The cars the Men In Black arrive in are even said to smell new. Investigators report their attempts to trace such vehicles from their licence plates reveal no such registration exists. These strange black vehicles were hard-wired in MIB mythology from the beginning. Much has been written about how sci-fi imagery prefigures tropes within ufology, while Jenny Randles (FT 447;29) has written recently on how secret experimental military tech and Cold War anxieties affected the UFO phenomenon. I have spotted a turn-of-the twentieth century precursor to the shiny, new black cars used to convey the MIBs, from the dawn of science fiction when the genre was still known as "scientific romance."

There's a scene in Book 1 Chapter 12 of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (TWotW, 1895-1897) – a chapter entitled "What I saw of the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton." The narrator witnesses "Three or four black government wagons, with crosses in white circles, and an old omnibus, among other vehicles, were being loaded in the village street."

Could the "black government wagons" – noticeable and identifiable, needing no further explanation to the readers of 1897 – have wormed their way into the collective sub-conscious to give rise to MIB lore? And what could the "black government wagons" have been, at a time when "government" was much smaller than it is now.

Illustration by Warren Globe from the original edition of The War of the Worlds, serialised in Pearson magazine. Out of copyright.
Horse-drawn black police wagons to haul away detainees were a thing as early as the 1860s, with engravings from the Illustrated Police News and other publications showing Fenians attempting to hijack such vehicles and rescue condemned prisoners. But such incidents were three decades before TWotW, first serialised in 1897 by Pearson magazine before publication as a book soon after, with the action taking place starting on a then near-future New Year's Eve 1899. Surviving photos or illustrations of dark-coloured police wagons in the late 1890s seem rare.

And anyway, they were black government wagons, not police wagons in TWotW. They don't seem to have been ambulances either – surely had they been ambulances they would have been described as having red crosses on them. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Niell, in their 2003 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II graphic novel retelling of TWotW portray the Extraordinary Gentlemen themselves emerging from a sinister, shiny, hearse-like black carriage bearing "VR" initials and a crown. An equally glossy black two-door Hanson cab bedecked with a Masonic compasses and set square logo conveys devious spymaster Campion Bond.

In those days, "government" basically meant military, foreign policy or espionage. New and suitably sinister government agencies then forming could have deployed Wells's black government wagons. The Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police, set up in 1883 to combat the "Fenian menace", was at the time of TWotW

Invasion paranoia was in the air too. Wells parodied a rich vein of "invasion literature", kicked off in 1871 by George Tomkyns Chesney's bestseller The Battle of Dorking, in which Germans invade England' south coast. Some 60 "invasion literature" works followed, although by the time TWotW appeared, the invader was more likely French or Russian.

The better-known illustrations from TWofW, for the 1906 edition by Henrique Alvim Correa. He contacted Wells to tell him he thought he could better illustrations than Globe's.

Could the black government wagons have been steam wagons? The Thornycroft Steam Carriage had been in production since 1895, with Chiswick Council using one as a dust cart. Meanwhile, the Foden Steam Vehicle – a traction engine with a space like a flat-bed truck at the back – was used in Army trials at the end of the 19th century. Contemporary monochrome photos show the Steam Vehicle in a dark colour. Foden's Steam Lorry made its appearance in 1900, with War Office trials of the vehicle the following year, it also appeared in a dark colour in contemporary photos. The Lancashire Steam Motor Company (later Leyland) was already turning out steam vans by then, while the Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal had been circulating since 1896.

That dark coloured paint job for contemporary "government wagons" though, could have been khaki. The militia and yoemanry units massacred by Martian heat rays in TwotW would have been the last British army units to go to war wearing redcoats. Khaki uniforms had already made their appearance on the battlefield for regular units fightings in the Boer War in 1900. Steam lorries still in use at the outbreak of World War One, with "WD Roads" stencilled on the side, are known to have been painted in khaki. In any event, it’s intriguing to find the shiny black vehicles conveying the Men in Black prefigured over a half century earlier, with fictional "black government wagons" deployed in response to the equally fictional incursions of extraterrestrials.

A World War One era steam lorry painted in khaki with "WD" (War Department) stencilled on the side. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

©️ Matt Salusbury 2024

Mary Anning and the sea dragon

Was one of paleontolgy's most sensational discoveries originally named after a lethal triphibian cryptid that had featured in that fortean classic The Gentlemen’s Magazine?

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT449

The head and neck of the "sea dragon" Ichthyosaur discovered by Mary and Joseph Anning from 2011. Part of the neck and torso of the specimen has since been lost. This species has since been renamed Temnodontosaurus platyodon It's now on display at the Natural History Museum (the British Museum, Natural History at the time.) Photo: Matt Salusbury

Among the great stories from the history of paleontology is that of how Mary Anning, then aged 12, together with her brother discovered the first identified prehistoric marine reptile. Mary's brother Joseph found the skull of what became known as Ichthyosaurus in the cliffs between their native Lyme Regis and Charmouth in 1811. From the time of Joseph's discovery of the the skull, the name "sea dragon" attached itself to the find – apparently because of its many sharp teeth and its big eye sockets.

After the Annings's discovery of the skull, Mary found the neck and partial torso of the same animal the following year. Although the Anning family had been on the poor relief, they managed to raise funds to pay labourers to dig out the fossil in November of that year. The Annings sold the skeleton of the "sea dragon" to lord of the manor Henry Hoste Henley for the princely sum of £23, enough to lift the family out of poverty. The fossil found its way to Bullock's Museum of Picadilly. It was later auctioned off to Charles Konig of the British Museum, where it caused a sensation.

The scientific establishment was forced to accept that animals had once walked the Earth or swum its seas bore scant resemblance to anything still alive in the 1820s. This allowed people to contemplate the immense span of time that had passed since the "sea dragon" lived – far longer than allowed for in a world created on October 22 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop Ussher of Armagh. The "sea dragon" undermined the prevailing orthodoxy which held that all animals were created as part of God's plan.

Various official names for the beast discovered by the Annings were suggested, including the grand-sounding Proteosaurus. But the official name Ichthyosaurus ("fish lizard"), Konig’s idea, finally stuck. One of the earliest life reconstructions of Ichthyosaurus was in Thomas Hawkins' Book of the Great Sea dragons – icthysauri and Plesiosauri, gadolim, taninim, of Moses. This appeared in 1840, so the "sea dragon" terminology was still in use some 30 years later.

The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1810, just before the Annings' discovery, featured an entry for "SEA-Dragon". This quotes an article in that fortean favourite The Gentlemen’s Magazine of 1749 describing an encounter "between Orford and Southwold" on the Suffolk coast with a "monster of a very singular nature." In the words of a witness who'd seen the creature’s corpse, its "head and tail… resemble those of an alligator; it has two large fins, which serve it both to swim and to fly… shaped like those which painters have given to dragons… Its body is covered with impenetrable scales; its legs have two joints, and its feet are hoofed like those of an ass: it has five rows of very white and sharp teeth in jaw and is in length about four feet."

The Britannica entry recorded how two fishermen captured the animal after a struggle in which one fisherman had two fingers bitten off, he died soon after. As the "sea dragon" was brought ashore, it escaped, flew 50 yards and lacerated another man's arm with its bite before it was battered to death with a boathook. The entry for "sea dragon" was still in the Encyclopeadia Britannica in its 1823 edition. Suffolk Ghosts and Legends quotes another Gentlemen’s Magazine article of 1750 that describes a living "Suffolk monster" exhibited in London. Possibly an attempt to cash in on the previous year's "sea dragon", this Suffolk monster looked suspiciously like a seal or sea lion.

Mary Anning is known to have been an autodidact who as an adult borrowed the latest natural history journals and laboriously copied out their articles. So could Mary have been inspired by the sea dragon Britannica entry in naming it? Lyme Regis was already a seaside resort where the well-to-do holidayed for the "sea bathing", while Encyclopedia Britannica was for some a much-used work of reference. So it's not hard to imagine a conversation involving a holidaymaker visiting Lyme Regis and remarking on the similarity between Mary Anning's new discovery and the spikey, bitey, many-toothed flying monster that mauled a fisherman off the Suffolk Coast half a century earlier, so extraordinary that they'd remembered it from Britannica.

In recent years, popular science media has revived the term “sea dragon” to describe Ichthyosaurs, the BBC's 2018 documentary Attenborough and the Sea Dragon being an example. (Yes, it’s another Ichthyosaur, whose huge skull was discovered on Britain's Jurassic coast.) Presumably, the current vogue for rebranding Ichthyosaurs as more accessible-sounding “sea dragons” is because Ichthyosaurus is near-impossible to either spell or pronounce.

SOURCES:

Encyclopedia Britannica Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature Volume XIX, 1823, which quotes extensively from The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1849. The 1823 Britannica entry for the sea-dragon is near identical to that in the 1810 edition, Suffolk Ghosts and Legends, Pamela Brooks, Halsgrove, Wellington, Somerset 2009, has a retelling of the story which quotes Britannica in its edition of 1810.

Attenborough and the Sea Dragon, BBC iPlayer, 2018, 2023,

There's more on the "sea dragon" and other Suffolk sea monsters and sea serpents in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

West Suffolk’s 1985 big cat flap

The county police forces of both Suffolk and Norfolk had multiple call-outs in April 1985 following a wave of big cat sightings in West Suffolk, according to newspaper articles from that time that I recently tracked down in the British Library. There was also a big cat alert at the time around the local RAF Honington air base.

This is significant as credible reports of big cat sightings in Suffolk in the 1980s are very rare. Read more...

Mermaids and manimals of Suffolk

The following extract from Mystery Animals of Suffolk appeared in Fortean Times, issue FT444.


“PRAY resolve me in your next Week’s Paper, whether there be any such Thing in Nature as Mermen and Mermaids, I being not yet satisfied in the verity thereof, notwithstanding the Reports of Seamen and others.” That was the plea from a letter writer to the Ipswich Journal, 27 May 1721. The vexed reader of the Ipswich Journal may well have believed in mermaids, possibly because his parents had told him from an early age to believe in mermaids (as they might convince their infants to believe in Father Christmas today). His parents would have a very practical reason for doing so, as we will see.

With the possible exception of the Orford “merman” found by fishermen off the coast at Orford Ness and described by medieval chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, Suffolk’s merfolk were all female – mermaids rather than mermen. And “Reports of Seamen” didn’t feature in Suffolk mermaid traditions. The Orford merman – possibly just a human gone feral – was the only merperson found off the coast, as all the Suffolk mermaids were freshwater mermaids, found in the county’s rivers, lakes, wells, pools and even its drainage ditches. Read more...

A sceptical report of wildmen seen in pre-Roman Britain in AD16?

A wildman on the porch of the church at Peasenhall, Suffolk. It dates from around 1490.

I found what's likely to be the earliest surviving reference to wildmen in England – or at least possibly in what's now England or possibly somewhere on the North Sea coast. The source is from way back in around 116AD, describing alleged events a century earlier.

The Annals, written by the Roman historian and senator Publius Conrelius Tacitus, describes the reigns of the early Roman emperors Tiberius and Nero. It covers the period from AD14 to AD68. The Annals was written around 116AD, so around a century after the events it describes, possibly using as a source the Acta Senatus, the records of the Roman senate, to which he would have had access to as a Roman senator.

In the Annals Book 2, 23-24 there is an account of a Roman fleet commanded by the general Germanicus Julius Caesar, nephew and adopted son of the Emperor Tiberius, in 16AD. This fleet was transporting legions returning from campaigns against German tribes and going back to their forts in the province of Germania Inferior (the southwestern part of what’s now the Netherlands up to the Rhine and parts of Germany and Belgium).

Long before the canals linking the interior to the North Sea were constructed, this required the fleet to sail up the River Ems (now on the Dutch-German border on the Fresian coast), sail into the North Sea and then make the dangerous journey along the treacherous Dutch coast before entering the River Schelde and returning to base. The fleet of Germanicus was blown off course, some troops were left marooned on islands in the Waddenzee around the Dutch coast or even blown all the way to Britannia (then still outside the Roman Empire), these troops were later returned to Roman territory, sent by boat by British "local chieftains."

Tacitus describes how shipwrecked Roman legionaries and sailors who had been blown off course to the "distant regions told the most amazing stories; enormous tornados, birds that nobody had ever heard of before, sea monsters, and enigmatic forms that were half man and half beast: they had seen or imagined them in their terror." Tacitus was apparently of the opinion that soldiers and sailors in the service of Roman had imagined such horrors as "half men, half beast" while suffering from what we would now call PSTD. At the time that Tacitus was writing, Britannia had been largely brought under Roman rule, and while it was known to be populated with "barbarians", Romans knew there were no wildmen to be found there. However, in the days of Germanus's expedition, the thought of setting foot in the wild, unknown land of Britannia, beyond the edge of the known world, induced terror.

So in the early days of the Roman Empire, there were already stories of wildmen, "half man and half beast" living on what was seen as the edge of the world, with at least one author showing scepticism about such tales. This is at least 800 years before the first evidence for Western European Wildman traditions.