A missing puma, a misidentified mutant greyhound? The Lakenheath big cat wave of 1965

A mysterious cat-like animal, a missing puma, a misidentified greyhound – what really happened around Lakenheath in February 1965?

I keep discovering long forgotten waves of big cat sightings in Suffolk, each new historic Suffolk big cat wave I discover gets get more bizarre than the last one.


The big cat wave of February 1965 - recorded by the Bury Free Press and Newmarket Journal at the time - is no exception. You can read my account of the whole extrordinary saga of the "missing puma", the "mysterious cat-like animal", the hunt for it involving at least two police forces (one using tracker dogs) and the nigtmare-fuel mutant greyhound with a “weirdly-shaped head and strange-looking eyes" here, at bigcatsofsuffolk.com.

Small or far away?

This article first appeared in Fortean Times FT 474, September 2026

The author walking around the yard of a North Suffolk free range chicken farm with a "biggest possible domestic or feral cat" cut-out, attempting to recreate an alleged big cat caught on camera. The ghostly image of an alleged "big cat" overlaid on the photo of the exact same location reveals it to be a smaller domestic cat.

Oops! CCTV footage of an alleged big cat overlaid on a photo of the author moving around the yard with a measuring pole reveals it is a small domestic cat.

Fans of Father Ted may recall the scene featuring an exasperated Father Ted trying to explain to the simple-minded Father Dougal McGuire how toy cows in 1/32nd scale held up in front of him, which are “small”, appear the same size as real cows outside and visible through the window – because “those ones are far away.”

While few us us are as hopeless at Father Dougal at judging size and distance, do we still have a tendency to misperceive the size of an animal or its distance away from us? In British big cat investigations, whether that dark blur is really a black leopard seen far away or just a black-coloured large feral domestic cat not so far away is of crucial importance. Understanding perceptions and misperceptions of size and distance are essential for other areas of cryptozoological research, such as the study of sightings of water monsters.

How good are witnesses at estimating the size of the animal they’ve seen and the distance away from them, on land and sea? It’s an important question for cryptozoologists and not one that’s been tested that often. How likely are witnesses to mistake – for example – a bog-standard domestic cat for a puma or a floating duck or swimming deer for the Loch Ness Monster?

In psychology there is the term “egocentric distance perception” or “egocentric distance estimation” and there are various different methods to test an individual’s perception of distance, with different methods often yielding different results regarding how accurate people are at judging distances. All these various methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Training people to estimate distances is a thing, especially in endeavours such as whale surveys.

There have been a handful of experiments (not all written up yet, see below) to test the accuracy of witnesses’s judgement of the size and distance away of an animal – in the water and also on land. And anecdotal evidence also suggests we easily misperceive photos or footage of cryptids in which there’s a lack of clear background detail that can help us judge the size of the creature.

Dr Charles Paxton of St Andrews University, an FT contributor, carried out a statistical analysis of sightings of sea monsters going back all the way to 1758 and up to 2000. Titled “The plural of ‘anecdote’ can be ‘data’: statistical analysis of viewing distances in reports of unidentified large marine animals 1758–2000,” (C. G. M. Paxton, Journal of Zoology, 279 (2009), pp 381–387. See also FT290.) A few of the reports it number-crunched were from Royal Navy ships’ logs. These reports are particularly valuable – ship’s logs are treated as legal documents, they are generally filled in soon after the event and are usually conscientiously kept up to date.

Dr Charles Paxton’s number-crunch data from sea monster accounts from 1758-2000 led him to the conclusion that there seems to be not much difference between sightings from a ship and sightings from the shore in terms of the spread of distances away from the witnesses of reported “sea monsters”.

Victorian fisheries magazine Land and Water of 1877 investigates alleged sea serpent sightings, attributing some of these to misidentified basking sharks. Photo: courtesy the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

But Dr Paxton concluded from his survey that the creatures seen were probably “closer than you’d get by chance alone”, suggesting witnesses had misjudged their distance from the observed alleged animal. You’d expect a more random distribution of distances but there was a “spike” in the data in “nearest recorded distances” of 200m (656 feet) or less. Random distribution should have had a bigger spread of nearest reported distances than there was, although we cannot be sure of this in the absence of any “control sample”.

The predominance of large sea animals seen up close can only partly be explained by ships moving towards the animal to investigate, by reported attacks on ships by the animal, or by reports of floating carcasses that come really close or even bob up against it but are not recovered.

Paxton suggests that the absence of really distant large sea animals may be partly down to a “reporting bias” –Victorian newspapers were interested in reporting a spectacular sea monster seen in lurid detail, less interested in a vague shape seen on the horizon. It could also be that sightings at a considerable distance are just less often reported as witnesses are less confident that what they’ve seen so far away really is a “sea monster” and not something else. (See here for a sceptical contemporary take on Victorian "sea monsters".

I note the same phenomenon with big cat sightings reports that come into my website bigcatsofsuffolk.com – there are plenty of reports of a big cat seen in the beam of the witnesses’s headlights after dark 10 or 15 feet away, (3 or 4.5m away) much fewer reports of a vague black blob on the horizon, with the witness less sure about what it is they’ve seen anyway. Yes, I do receive the odd photo of a tiny dark blob right at the other end of that field, but these are a bit rubbish and we can conclude absolutely nothing from them.

You’d also expect more distant sea monsters to have a longer recorded length, as bigger animals are just easier to see when they’re further away than smaller animals further away, as an exasperated Father Ted would no doubt explain to Father Dougal. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.

In Dr Paxton’s database there were slightly more reports that include a length given for the animal than there are reports that include a distance away from the animal. As Dr Paxton says, “however it is often unclear what the witness means by length...estimated length of whole animal or just what was seen,” a lot of the animal could of course be under water and so not visible.

Dr Paxton also did a statistical analysis of Loch Ness Monster reports since 1930, from which he concluded that the average duration of the sightings was rather longer than you’d expect by chance and that this may be down to “misperception” – could witnesses also be misperceiving how long their encounter lasts, as well as potentially getting the animal’s size and distance wrong? The reported duration of Loch Ness monster sightings, though, seems to have dropped over time, according to Dr Paxton’s statistical study. (“Identifying Biases and the Relevant Statistical Population: The Case of the Loch Ness Monster", Charles G. M. Paxton, Adrian J. Shine and Valentin M. Popov, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2025, linked from here..

Do these scenes from the Bayeux Tapestry show an early attempt at perspective, with boats crossing the channel appearing smaller because they are further away? Or does it just depict boats as smaller because they are the less important ones, not carrying knights or their horses? (These are photos of the replica in Reading Museum.)

Results from the Exmoor Zoo experiment, into perception of size and distance of cut-outs the size of a big cat, were encouraging. Over a day at the zoo, under the direction of naturalist Trevor Beer, a film crew from the History Channel set up a series of cat-shaped cut-out silhouettes of various sizes, from domestic cat to jungle cat to lynx, puma and up to leopard-sized.

Over 100 visitors to the zoo were tested from distances of 50, 100 and 150 feet. (around 15, 30 and 45m.) Taking into account perhaps too ideal conditions – a flat landscape, good lighting and fair weather – witnesses did surprisingly well. Around 96 per cent of the zoo’s visitors were able to judge size and colour accurately. (Big Cats – Facing Britain's Wild Predators, Rick Minter, Whittles Publishing, Caithness, 2011.)

Rick Minter's wooden cut-outs sillhouettes, on display at a meeting in Eye, Suffolk in early 2026. These are similar to the ones used in the Exmoor Zoo Experiment. Top: Eurasian lynx; bottom: melnistic leopard.

I was told of another experiment conducted some time before 2007, which has yet to be published. The experimenters – who I’ve been asked not to name yet – aimed to test witnesses’ ability to correctly estimate the size and distance away of an alleged sea monster.To do this, they installed a two-metre high model of an F-shaped “monster” floating on the surface of a lake and asked people to describe it. It was “deliberately rubbish” and made of plastic pipes. Most subjects in the experiment over-estimated the distance away from them that the fake monster was. There were differences in results for different demographics – children, adult males, adult females (women made more accurate drawings when asked to draw the “monster” they had seen from memory, for example.) We’ll have to wait a while, though, before these findings appear published in a peer-reviewed journal – if ever.

Anecdotal evidence from a couple of investigations into alleged “big cats” caught on camera seem to show these are misidentifications, with the size of mystery cats captured in such images sometimes greatly exaggerated by misperceptions of distance.

The author's caracal-sized cut-out used in a 2016 North Suffolk investigation.

My own misadventures in mystery moggy identification in North Suffolk back in 2015 demonstrate just how easy it is to misidentify a small but odd-looking domestic cat caught on nocturnal monochrome CCTV footage as showing something much bigger and more exotic than it really is. This is especially true when there’s nothing in the background of the image to give a clear scale.

The author's "average-sized domestic cat" cut-out used in the same 2016 investigation (see above.).

A similar phenomenon appeared to be at work in a 2022 investigation by officers of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation into a “mountain lion” (puma) caught on a daytime trail camera.

Pumas have become officially Out of Place Animals in New York State, generally regarded as having disappeared from the Empire State by the end of the 19th century. A 2011 US Fish and Wildlife Service report declared the “eastern puma” subspecies Puma concolor couguar – once native to North America’s eastern seaboard – officially extinct. The same report did note, however, that sightings of pumas had persisted in New York State and other nearby US states and Canadian provinces up to that date. These were thought by the report’s authors to be the result of occasional wanderings of individuals from the currently still extant puma populations known to live in the western USA and western Canada, or escapes from captivity. Canada, whose provinces of Ontario and Quebec adjoin New York State, confirmed eastern pumas as already long extinct in 2018.

There is a small relic population of “Eastern panthers” (pumas) at the southern tip of Florida, some 1,400 miles (2,250km) due south of upstate New York. While these “Eastern panthers” have a somewhat different look to “Western pumas”, more recent genetic studies suggest these Florida “Eastern panthers” are genetically closer to Western pumas.

A still photo showing a suspected "puma" captured by a trail camera in Upstate New York in 2022. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation





So there was much excitement in 2022 when trailcam photos appeared to show a slim “mountain lion” (puma) on the edge of a field of maize somewhere in upstate New York. An investigation by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation involved its officers revisiting the scene and parking a life-size plywood puma cut-out there, as well as measuring distances on the ground and the height of the maize crop. This immediately showed that the animal caught on camera was a small domestic cat with unusual colouration. (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Facebook post, 13 March 2022.)

A warden places a puma-sized cut-out at the exact spot where the suspected "puma" was filmed. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The puma-sized plywood cut-out overlaid on the original trail cam footage, revealing the Out of Place Upstate New York puma to be in fact a domestic or feral cat with unusual colouration. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

With thanks to Dr Charles Paxton, Rick Minter, Benjamin Bober of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and to the Association of Cryptzoology Fieldwork and Analysis Facebook group.

©️ Matt Salusbury 2026

Update (10 September 2026): The BBC's 2026 documentary Our Lives - The Big Cat Investigator includes a scene in which footage of an very convincing-looking alleged big cat filmed at a distance is revealed by Surrey big cat investigator Gary Ridely, walking around the location with a measuring pole, to be a domestic or feral cat less than 2ft (60cm) tall.

My Life in the Fort Sort Cohort

This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT471;June 2026.

The new plastic Sort Engine

Since the beginning of 2025 I have taken part in monthly Fort Sorts, I even hosted the Fort Sorts at the family home in Islington throughout that year. This has allowed me to monitor recent trends in background cosmic weirdness.

The Fort Sort involves a small band of volunteers sorting newspaper cuttings sent in by FT readers into the “sort engines” – towers of labelled pigeonholes for the various categories of weirdness. One of the original cardboard “sort engines” were showing their age and has recently been replaced with some much smarter and more user-friendly plastic ones. After a lunch break usually featuring a leisurely walk or drive to the chip shop, at the end of the day the piles of clippings in their pigeonholes are carefully sorted into labelled cardboard envelope files and eventually make their way to FT co-founder Bob Rickard. Bob in turn arranges their collection and shipping to an archive for anomalous phenomena in Sweden.

The old school cardboard Sort Engine in situ in the former Salusbury family home in London N1. It's still seeing action in a new Fort Sort location.

There is a lag of at least six months between the articles appearing and them turning up as cuttings in an intimidatingly large, full box, while there were seams of cuttings that went back all the way to 2020. (Some cuttings have already passed through the hands of FT’s editors and found their way into “Strange Days” summaries.) Some readers seem to be clearing out their old cuttings libraries – the “folklore” category is heavy with neatly sourced photocopied articles from 1940s Country Life. The self-imposed work ethic of us Fort Sorters means I give each cut-out article only the most cursory glance as I speedily file it by category in its correct pigeonhole, so in most examples below I can’t give a source or date.

An intimidatingly big box of cuttings, in which there are considerably fewer at the end of the Fort Sort day. Contributor's names blurred for reasons of data protection.

One extraordinary phenomenon revealed by the Fort Sort is the surprisingly rude health of physical print newspapers – still widely read by FT readers, with sometimes half a dozen duplicates of the same sweary parrot story sent in. It’s a shame, though, that 21st century print media still insist on referring to scientists and researchers with the cringeworthy term “boffins” in headlines, or if it’s the Daily Star, “boffs”.

The Daily Star's extensive coverage of astronomy includes the latest discoveries by "boffs".

Anecdotal evidence from the Fort Sort suggests that some strange phenomena are in decline. Spontaneous human combustion seems to have fizzled out almost completely, as have crop circles now that we know how they’re done.

Other categories of forteana are now being reported so frequently as to be almost at the point of being so mundane as to be no longer fortean. Once extraordinary skateboarding dogs are becoming increasingly pedestrian. In the field of inept crime, burglars arrested after falling asleep in the house they were burgling has now become so commonplace it’s not fortean anymore, except in one 2025 case in which a repeat offender burglar was back in court after falling asleep on the job multiple times.

Dumped sex dolls – especially those floating in rivers or the sea – being mistaken for corpses has become so routine that they now also fall into the not-fortean-anymore category. A resuscitation training dummy floating at sea leading to a call out of air sea rescue still makes the grade, though.

The “animal behaviour” pigeonhole has been particularly full of late. Sweary parrots are increasing in frequency. Reports of cats making epic journeys of hundreds of miles while napping in the engine housings and wheel arches of cars, vans and trucks is becoming much more common too. Killer whales are escalating their attacks on boats, bears are stealing sausages and luggage and crashing swimming pools and ice cream parlours, while symbiosis between ocelots and opossums has been caught on camera.

The “animal deaths” category is also a busy one, featuring mystery mass die-offs of crabs in Tyneside in August 2025 and seagull die-offs in Yorkshire in February of that year. There was also more coverage of celebrity animal deaths – “world’s oldest wombat dies”, “world’s oldest penguin dies” and so on.

The beginning of 2025 also saw a global odd crime wave involving fake whales and fake sharks used to smuggle drugs ashore, with controversy on whether there was a human inside the fake whale, piloting it ashore with a motor.

Two new Fort Sort categories were created this year with files of their own. Men up in court for a roadside set act with a traffic cone or sex with a pile of leaves made it into the Fort Sort’s new “sexual oddities” category. A new “AI” category split off from the “technology” category as most tech stories are now about AI. Such AI stories are generally along the lines of “we’re all doomed”, with a cheesy library picture of a skeletal T2 Terminator from the film cycle of the same name. More cerebral articles on AI, especially via the New York Times, dwelt mostly on the stupidity of humans trusting ChatGPT as a life coach.

There has been a surge in new animal species being described to science of late – mostly invertebrates but also tiny, fly-sized species of frogs. Out-of-place animal stories for 2025 included many well-documented wallaby sightings in Nottinghamshire, with the county’s Wildlife Trust on the case cataloguing these. Meanwhile, drones revealed a healthy population of wild wallabies on the Isle of Man.

Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust are on the case re: British wallabies.

“Foreign” tropical ticks are showing up in the United States. Coyotes are turning up in Chicago and New York City – they’re moving east due to deforestation, and growing in numbers due to slump in the fur trade. (Economist 19 June 2020.) Obama nungara, a three-inch long multi-eyed slug-eating and snail-eating flatworm, has become a threat to garden ecosystems on the continent of Europe, where it had established itself by 2020.

In simulacra and spontaneous images news, simulacra of celebrities are pushing out the now much rarer gods and messiahs. Jesus appearing in an orange in August 2025 was a rare exception, you’re now much more likely to see Elvis than Jesus in toast, or the profile of Welsh crooner Tom Jones in a huge shadow near Talgarth in the Brecon Beacons (Daily Mail, 29 March 2020).

UFO reports coming into Fort Sort are increasingly mystery drones, burning up space debris from satellites or Chinese spy balloons. The Daily Star uncritically reports the latest theories on “Rendlesham”, probably not peer reviewed. CETI projects, the approaching 31_ATLAS object and the discovery of markers in a rock suggesting “life on Mars” also dominated coverage of UFOs and “aliens”. The lag between reporting and cuttings ending up in that big box means that with frustrating frequency I come across cuttings about a spectacular astronomical conjunction that I’ve just missed.

A depressing Fort Sort trend is a deluge of lame ghost stories with a wafer-thin celebrity connection. This seems to have started with claims around pop star Adele’s house being haunted. Such celebrity ghost stories are along the lines of Cher seeing a ghostly face in some curtains, Friends actor Courtney Cox telling the Daily Star (21 May 2024) that co-star Matthew Perry visits her from beyond the grave and – according to the Daily Mail (2 August 2025), Nadine Dorries “called in a priest” after “sinister encounters” in her home.

Another lame celebrity ghost story, this one from the Daily Mail of 2 August 2025.

The late summer of 2025 saw an uptick in mummified bodies kept by families. There were a lot of witchcraft stories in this period too – mostly involving witches taking each other to court.

But the most striking among Fort Sort trends was the rise and rise of stories about animal swarms – “swarms” having a pigeonhole of its own in the Fort Sort “sort engines.” Some such swarms are apparently fuelled by climate change – or at least by temporary heatwaves (which could of course be part of climate change). Warmer weather was sending swarms of Asian wasps and bees into the UK, and swarms of small octopi into UK coastal waters, even the occasional locust was being blown to the UK by thermals. European praying mantises are establishing themselves in Cornwall and are surviving its warmer winters, having either arrived “in luggage” or been blown over from the continent.

The now well-established “gulls gone bad” phenomenon was taking a sinister new turn as well, with seagulls “drunk” after feasting on a “toxic” species of flying ants that had become suddenly abundant due to a heatwave across the British Isles (Daily Express August 12 2025.) While chip-snatching and pasty-snatching gulls hardly warrant reporting anymore, gulls have now reportedly graduated to snatching and smashing phones – although whether this is exacerbated by intoxication on poisonous flying ants is unclear.

Chip-snatching gulls, like these ones in Littlehampton, are now so commonplace they no longer make the grade these days - unless they're "drunk" after eating poisonous ants, or snatching people's phones.

Meanwhile, China had mobilised an “army of 100,000 ducks” on standby to gobble up an expected locust plagues in Pakistan, driven by record-breaking temperatures. (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2020.) “Swarms” of grey-headed flying foxes were turning in Adelaide, also due to a heatwave, according to the Adelaide Advertiser of 7 March 2024, while more rain than usual predicted in South Queensland was expected to lead to an influx of bats there too.

There was even a “swarm” of blue whales around South Georgia, with a 2020 British Antarctic Survey count finding 55 of them instead of the usual one or two. (Climate change doesn’t seem to have been a factor here, though.)

Climate change is also causing sharks and other large fish to move around in the waters surrounding Australia as ocean temperatures rise. Bull Sharks are migrating north when it’s cold and south when it’s warmer, so recently they’ve been staying longer around Sydney due to global warming, with an inevitable increase in those “Shark Attack!” headlines in the healthy Australian regional print media. Tiger sharks, zebra sharks and manta rays also are showing up outside their usual range and are now found as far south as Tasmania. (“Sharks seek sea change as ocean temperature rises with climate change”, ABC News, 18 January 2026,).

With thanks to the Fort Sorters.

The Fort Sort, assisted by Doja Cat, takes over the Salusbury family sofa.

The trouble with reporting spycops

This first appeared in the June 2026 issue of the Freelance, magazine of NUJ London Freelance Branch, ahead of "Tranche 3, Phase 3" of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Tranche 3, Phase 3 deals with the managers who ran the Met's Special Demontstration Squad unit of undercover police officers. It's still possible at the time of writing to turn up on the day to follow Inquiry hearings from the public gallery in person, or to negotiate being able to follow it online via the Live Link.

REPORTING THE Undercover Policing Inquiry is complicated, not least by secrecy orders that are themselves secret. The UCPI is the public inquiry into undercover police officers who infiltrated over a thousand political campaigns and groups from 1968 onwards. It resumes on 15 June, with another “tranche” of hearings - this one questioning and cross-examining the managers who ran the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) unit of “undercovers”. Read more...

A likely big cat kill from Dunwich, Suffolk

I was sent this photo of a muntjac carcass – possible big cat kill(?) – found in Dunwich, Suffolk on 01/03/2026. Read more...

Suffolk big cat sightings update – November 2025 to March 2026

Above is another of my hand-drawn maps with an update on big cat sightings and kill signs in and around Suffolk. It covers the period November 2025 (when I last did an update map) up to March 2026, so just four months, which were averagely busy. Most of the big cat activity of late has been in Suffolk Coastal District near the coast or in the area around Woodbridge and in the nearby Bawdsey Peninsula. Read more...

Zwarte Piet update

This first appeared in "Fortean Follow-ups" in Fortean Times, FT470, May 2026.

A window display featuring Zwarte Piets in a random bakery in Amsterdam in November 2018, when such scenes were still fairly typical. By 2025, such displays had become vanishingly rare.

Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”, Saint Nicholas’s controversial blackface helper, seems to be disappearing from the Netherlands. St Nicholas’s Day, 5 December, has long been the day when St Nicholas – Santa Claus but thinner and he’s a bishop on a white horse – brings Dutch children presents. For generations, he’s been accompanied by a gang of Black Petes – mischivious helpers in blackface. Black Pete wears the elaborate livery of a Renaissance servant boy and until recently sported large fake gold earrings, a curly black wig and spoke in a "silly" voice. (While St Nicholas has been in business for at least 1500 years, Black Pete was invented by schoolteacher and children’s book author Jan Schenkman in 1850.)

Mid-November sees the “arrival of St Nicholas” in a boat, from Spain. Towns and villages have their own local “arrivals of St Nicholas” parades with a national, televised “arrival of St Nicholas” as well. It is during these parades that trouble usually kicks off. Since 2015, peaceful protests against “Zwarte Piet” have occured, usually organised by pressure group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (KOZP). Trouble would usually start when KOZP protesters were attacked by crowds that often included “firms” of football fans.

Starting in the late 2010s, Black Pete has gradually been replaced with Rootveeg Piet, Sooty Pete. While retaining the Renaissance costume, Sooty Pete’s face has only a light dusting of soot, as if he'd just come down the chimney. Dutch parade organisers gradually switched from Black Pete to Sooty Pete. In 2022 Instagram and Facebook banned images of Zwarte Piet.

In 2025, though... nothing. KOZP had planned a protest at the “national” arrival of St Nicholas on the island of Texel, as there had been Black Petes in blackface on the parades there previously. The national St Nicholas parade was briefly cancelled as its organisers couldn’t guarantee security, then there were talks between KOZP and Texel Council, and between KOZP and ten other local councils whose parades had Black Petes on show in recent years.

The result was that KOZP called off its protest after Texel’s assurances it would prevent any Black Petes appearing. The national St Nicholas parade at the time of writing was set to go ahead. A similar outcome was achieved in the town of Middelharnis in South Holland, which had also seen trouble in its 2024 parade, with four arrests.

In 2024, the village of Yeserke in Zeeland held a parade with Black Petes, some 20 people attending a KOZP protest there were pelted with stones, apples, eggs and fireworks until many police officers intervened. Yeserke Council said it would still allow blackface in its 2025 parade, so KOZP announced it would proceed with its protests. The parade was cancelled due to security concerns over “risks to children,” although an unofficial parade reportedly took place through the village on 15 November with some 100 Black Petes in attendance – without the Council’s knowledge and apparently arranged by word of mouth.

KOZP announced that it was celebrating St Nicholas’s Day 2025 by winding itself up, with a farewell party, as all its “aims had been achieved,” one of which was that Black Pete has “disappeared.” Jerry Afriyie, KOZP’s founder, appealed to Dutch people to “continue our work.” A columnist in the broadsheet newspaper De Volkskrant noted on 18 November 2025 that “Black Pete has become an obscurity, a clandestine phenomenon.”

©️ Matt Salusbury 2025



2021 Zwarte Piet update from the Freelance.

An even earlier Zwarte Piet update from 2020.

A big cat kill sign from Ufford, Suffolk - and recent lynx sightings in the area

I was sent this photo apparently of a muntjac carcass found in Ufford, Suffolk, showing signs of predation by a big cat. The copyright-holder is known to me. There were also several sightings of a lynx-like cat locally in the weeks before and after the discovery. There's an update on bigcatsofsuffolk.com.

The Woodwoses and Wildmen of Suffolk - a talk for Dunwich Museum, now online

MY TALK for Dunwich Museum on The Woodwoses and Wildmen of Suffolk is now online, here. Many thanks to Dunwich Museum managers - Jane Hamilton and Sarah Peel for making this talk possible and especially to Sarah for editing it.

The talk was a fundraiser for Dunwich Museum. If you enjoy the talk, please consider donating to Dunwich Museum. A donation of around £6 per visitor is enough to keep the Museum going. All heritage tourist attractions seem to have seen visitor numbers fall and not recover since Covid, so we as a sector are increasingly dependant on donations.

At the request of some attendees I have included some notes to the talk with links, adding also some additional research since the talk happened on 8 October 2025.

Slide 2 The talk is an update from Chapter 1 of the book Mystery Animals of Suffolk, (Matt Salusbury, Leiston Press 2023), available via bigcatsofsuffolk.com  (it has a list of Suffolk bookshops where you can buy it) or via its distributor Bittern Books of Norwich.

There are updates on Mystery Animals of Suffolk and on Suffolk big cat sighings on used-to-be-Twitter at @MysteryAnimals  and on BlueSky at https://bsky.social/mysteryanimals.

The mailing list for Mystery Animals of Suffolk is via mysteryanimalsofsuffolk@gn.apc.org The mailing list for Dunwich Museum is chronicles@dunwichmuseum.org.uk

Slide 5 King Charles VI of France and others were burnt while cavorting in wildman costumes at a ball in 1392. I erroneously said King Charles VI burnt to death at the ball - he survived, but the trauma of the fire greatly exacerbated his existing mental illness. His brother Louis, Duke of Orleans, was killed, along with a friend of Louis.

Slide 8 Saint Onuphirus, wildman saint.

  Slide 9 The Four Sons of Aymon and the Horse Beyard features the four sons killing wildmen on an island. The Ros Beyard parade held every 10 years in Dendermonde, Belgium, is based on The Four Sons of Aymon. Five years before the parade, the bearers of the Pijnders' Guild - strong men who carry the float of the horse Beyard - are selected in the "Wildemanloop", the Wildman Run, in which they strip to their underpants and glue feathers to themselves (to look like wildmen?) and compete in feats of strength.

Slide 10 The Romance of Alexander

  Slide 11 - the Wildman of Orford, in Ralph of Coggeshall's  of the English

  Slide 13 - See Simon Knott’s  excellent Suffolk Churches website.

   Slide 56 - Many of the Suffolk wildmen are in my Fortean Times article The Woodwoses of Suffolk. and also in Chapter 1 of Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

  Slide 58 - Michael Angelo Rooker, View of the Interior of All Saints, Dunwich, Suffolk, V and A Museum; Sketch of the interior of All Saints, Dunwich, photo from Dowcra Collection, Dunwich Museum, see e-hive.

Slide 62 - "wildeman" pubs in Belgium and the Netherlands: In De Wildeman beer tasting pub, Amsterdam
Restaurant De Wildeman, Tielt, Belgium
Hotel Wildeman, Lemmer, Netherlands (closed)
De Wildeman Community Centre and Cafe, Herent, Belgium 
Café Brasserie De Wildeman, Saantpoort Noord, Netherlands
Café Restaurant De Wildeman, Vierlingsbeek, Netherlands
Café De Wildeman, Oirschot, Netherlands
Grand Café De Wildeman, Eindhoven, Netherlands
De Wildeman, Ziekerzee, Netherlands (closed)
Café Brasserie De Wildeman, Ijmuiden, Netherlands
Restaurant De Geiser Wildman, Noordeloos, Netherlands 
A new De Wildeman pub recently opened in Dendermonde, Belgium

See below for subsequent research uncovering a Wildman pub in Norwich.

Slide 66 - The Fight between Carnvial and Lent, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559.

Slide 70 - sighting of a "pale ape" in Elveden, #Suffolk, reported to The Paranormal Database.

Slide 71  Donate to Dunwich Museum

See also @DiscoverDunwich on used-to-be-Twitter, @DiscoverDunwich.bsky.social and Dunwich Museum on Facebook and Insta.

Mailing list for Dunwich Museum news and events chronicles@dunwichmuseum.org.uk

Maaike who joined the talk from the Netherlands contacted me soon afterwards to tell me about Pulsatila vulgaris, the herbaceous perennial flower known in England by many names, including April fool, badger, blue money, cat's eyes, Coventry bells, Dane's blood and many others. In Dutch it's known as wildemanskruid, wild man's herb, possibly because it has "hairy" flowers.

Dunwich Museum trustee Sue Hardy at the talk recalled that her grandmother - who was a child who grew up not far from Windsor Castle in Buckinghamshire around 1890 - used to play a game called "Green Man Arise." Whenever the found a big pile of freshly mown grass, possibly to be made into hay, one of the children would climb into it. The other children would shout "Green Man, Green Man, Arise!" and then the child would burst out of the pile of grass and chase the others.

Sue also brought up another wildman in the Bible (besides Nebacubnezzer and John the Baptist, who I mentioned), Samson. I noted that in Tombland, an ancient street in Norwich, there are two wooden giants outside a building that look a lot like some of the little Suffolk woodwoses in the churches. They are known as Samson and Hercules.

They are faithful reproductions of the 1657 originals that are now in the Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell. (It's five-minute walk from their replicas in Tombland.) By the 1990s they were much decayed, Sampson's feet were gone. The fibreglass reproductions were repainted many times, when I saw them they were painted bright red as the property they stand outside was recently a lobster restaurant. They wear lion skins and carry clubs. Their names are Samson and Hercules. (I photographed them back in 2017, I've forgotten which is Samson and which is Hercules.) Here's a photo of them:

Samson and Hercules in Tombland, Norwich

Still on the subject of Norwich, thanks to Ian Simmons. Fortean Times news editor, for bringing to my attention another East Anglian Wildman pub. It's in Norwich's Bedford Street, on the corner of Bridewell Alley. (Yes, a minute's walk away from the Museum of Norwich.) This Wildman pub, though, is thought to be of much later vintage than the woodwoses in East Anglian churches, though. Its name is believed to commemorate Peter the Wild Boy, found in 1725 living wild in the forest and walking on all fours in a forest near Hamelin, now in Germany, by a hunting expedition that included King George I of England, then on a visit to his native Hanover.

Peter was brought to London, when interest in him subsided he was put in their care of one of the royal household servants and their family in Northchurch, Hertfordshire. Peter went missing in the summer of 1751.

He turned up in October of the year - among the inmates of Norwich City Gaol, then in the city centre opposite the Guildhall, near where the Wildman pub stands today. The prison's inmates had to be evacuated as a fire swept through the neighbourhood and Peter was identified. He was returned to Northchurch, in later life he eventually learnt to say a few words and to understand what was being said to him. He died in 1785, his grave still stands in Northchurch.



Update (07 02 2026): Here's a report of another East Anglian "British Bigfoot" sighting at Holkham Beach, Norfolk, from the Daily Star, 28 August 2022.

Sceptical scrapbook of The Sea Serpent Killer

This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 462, October 2025.

Owen's scrapbook includes this 1877 engraving of a 60ft(18m)-long sea serpent with an alligator-like head and a single set of 10-foot (3m) long flippers, depicted alongside the ship Sacramento on its passage from New York to Australia. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

THE GREAT naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur", wrote the first scientific descriptions of dinosaurs and was a founder of the first Natural History Museum (NHM) and its first director. Well over a century before Fortean Times started collecting clippings, Owen was on the case with his scrapbook of reports of sea serpent sightings, spanning the four decades from 1830 to 1870. This can still be found in the NHM's Library. Owen was somewhat fortean in his interests, although sceptical in his views on sea serpent sightings in particular. This caused Prince Albert to dub Owen "The Sea Serpent Killer."

The Owen scrapbook is a ledger with inventories scrawled into it by hand, then re-purposed to paste in sea serpent-related newspaper cuttings, articles copied out by hand and letters. The ledger now has “SEA-SEPRENTINES OWEN COLL.” embossed on the spine. A frontispiece written in a cursive hand (not Owen's) reads: “Ms. Notes, Newspaper cuttings, relating to the alleged appearances of the 'Sea-Serpent' Collected by Sir R. Owen.” A few loose cuttings from after Owen’s death in 1892 have been added between the pages. One of the post-Owen clipsters was even more brutal than Owen – a press clipping from 1912 shows a round, speckled floating hump, the words "Dead rorqual" have been written in the margin. (Rorquals are a group of baleen whales that includes blue whales, minke whales, finnwhales and humpback whales. I am grateful to Tyler Greenfield for correcting my eariler misreading of this handwritten marginal comment.)

The spine of the Owen scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Handwritten frontispiece to the scrapbook, in another hand than Owen's. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

The scrapbook opens with a handwritten account pasted in, with the heading “Sea-serpent.” Describing a sighting by a Captain Sullivan and three soldiers on a fishing expedition at Mahone Bay near Halifax, Nova Scotia in May 1833, it was written by the witnesses three years afterwards.

Land and Water, at the time a trade paper for the fisheries industry, was on the case re: sea serpent reports. The trade press took a keen interest in sea serpent sightings, apparently with an eye to the possible commercial exploitation of any such vast unknown creatures as may be out there. The scrapbook also includes a review of Henry Lee’s Sea Monsters Unmasked, launched at the International Fisheries Exhibition.

Lee, who worked with octopi at the Brighton Aquarium, wrote as people were beginning to accept that squid up to 60 feet (18m) long could exist and their existence could explain sea serpent sightings. An 1877 letter to Land and Water describes how a “sea serpent” seen off Inverness turned out to be a basking shark, while an 1872 cutting from Land and Water references Captain Sullivan’s Mahone Bay sighting from way back in 1833.

A clipping from the Cape Argus of March 14 1857, sent in by the Secretary of the Geological Society, describes in a long front-page article “The Great Sea Serpent” seen in Table Bay, with testimony in letters from witnesses. An accompanying illustration shows a collosal tadpole with a long, sinuous tale. There is an extract from an untitled article cut from the Telegraph of 8 May 1847, above which Owen has scrawled “Sea-serpent”. Where the article describes how “the crowd stared at the “hideous creature”, Owen’s marginal note asks “!Why hideous?” and adds “a desire for the truth would have led to other witnesses”.

Owen's marginal note on the crowd's reaction to a "hideous" sea serpent reported in the Telegraph of 8 May 1847. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Anonymous pamphlets dissing scientists and their discoveries whilst praising the works of a certain Sir Richard Owen were a phenomenon in Victorian science. These pamphlets turned out to be fairly obviously written by Owen himself. Such a pamphlet demolishing Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species – pointing out some actual flaws or omissions in Darwin's arguments but mostly motivated by professional jealousy – is one such example. Another anonymous pamphlet, also driven mostly by spite and disparaging naturalist Gideon Mantell’s pioneering work on the dinosaur Iguanadon, turned out to be by Owen as well.

This is probably why an NHM librarian has included along with Owen’s scrapbook an anonymous 1849 pamphlet An Essay on the Credibility of the Existence of the Kraken, Sea Serpent and Other Sea Monsters, marked “R. Owen” on the cover. The librarian concluded that this was by Owen, who clearly had form in this genre.

Cover of the anonymous An Essay on the Credibility of the Existence of the Kraken, Sea Serpent and Other Sea Monsters, thought by a former NHM librarian to be the work of Sir Richard Owen. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Despite his scepticism, Owen collected many sea serpent reports in what is probably one of the first cryptozoological clippings libraries. His network of sources and clipsters was impressive – aside from the Secretary of the Royal Geological Society, Owen’s clipsters also included James Emerson Tennent, former governor of what's now Sri Lanka and author of The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing it in Ceylon.

There are in addition same handwritten letters – including some by seamen who saw the "Bombay to Liverpool Sea Serpent" in December 1857. These are copied in several different hands other than Owen’s. A hand-copied letter of April 1873 from Admiral Sir G. Rodney Mundy KCB begins: “Sir, in accordance with your memo of this date, I beg to submit an outline of the head and shoulders of the Fish seen and noted in the log of the HM Ship under my command..." Owen apparently had a source in the Home Office who forwarded to him many handwritten copies of testimony from sailors. These usually began “I am commanded to give an account..." and listed precise coordinates.

A letter, likely a handwritten copy of a letter from Admiral Sir G. Rodney Mundy KCB to the Admiralty, forwarded by a contact of Owen's in the Home Office, describing a sea serpent sighting of which “I am commanded to give an account." Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

There are even cuttings in French. An undated Chronique Local from the newspaper Phare de la Loire describes a “serpent du mer” seen from the French ship Tocantin off the California coast. Owen has underlined phrases including “palettes servant de nageoires” (paddles serving as fins). There’s a page torn from a French book with an illustration of a giant horned tadpole with dreadlocks menacing a ship. A loose scrap of paper has notes in French on a sighting from 1690.

An illustration of a menacing giant horned tadpole, cut from a French book and pasted into Owen's scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Noteworthy illustrations include a magnificent front-page engraving of whiskery sea monster seen by the crew of the ship Hydra, from that fortean favourite The Illustrated Police News. There’s a beautiful 1877 newspaper engraving of a 60ft-long sea serpent with an alligator-like head and a single set of 10-foot (3m) long flippers, depicted alongside the ship Sacramento on its passage from New York to Australia. There are many sketches of multiple humps seen from a great distance.

A whiskery sea serpent seen from the ship Hydra makes the front page of an 1877 edition of the Illustrated Police News. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

The "Bombay to Liverpool Sea Serpent" observed by the crew of the Castilian on 13 December 1857 off St Helena, was reported with a long extract from the ship’s log. The Castilian sighting generated much letter-writing to the Times, clippings of which are in the scrapbook. The Castilian crew apparently came forward soon after the famous HMS Daedalus sighting was reported. Reports of the Daedalus and Castilian sightings in The Times prompted a letter from a Mr Frederick Smith, of February 12 1858, to write in about a sighting at Lattitude 26 South, Longitude 6 East, off the West African coast, of a barnacle-encrusted “extraordinary-looking thing of considerable length.” A Daily Telegraph cutting from September 1879 describes testimony from the captain of the ship Privateer, who observed 100 miles off France’s Atlantic coast a huge, black “snake or or eel”. Owen's scrapbook catalogued waves of sea serpent sightings, fuelled by press coverage. The Standard in particularly was a source of many contemporary sea serpent reports back around 1859.

The Telegraph of 9 February 1859 quotes a report in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet newspaper of an Atlantic sea serpent at lattitude 6 degrees, 30 minutes North, longitude 3 degrees, 20 minutes West, in which “the sea-serpent seems at length to have received its solution in a very natural way.” According to one witness, Eric Manusson, the crew spied “exactly ahead of the ship, an object resembling a sea serpent of unusual size and length, moving itself up and down.” Manusson describes how “the crew and myself were struck with astonishment, the wonderful animal, which appeared to us all like a living creature, at least two hundred fathoms long, (1,200 feet or 265 metres,) covered with shiny scales… on approaching nearer we could see distinctly that the body possessed life and motion,” they prepared for an “inevitable collision.” Only then did it become clear that the “serpentine mass was nothing else than a swarm of herrings making their way in this singular manner through the sea."

An unsourced newspaper cutting showing multiple humps observed at sea, from Owen's scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

There are several cases in which sightings – including an 1861 one from a ship off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts – in which huge serpents with coils or humps are revealed when the boat closes with them to be shoals of “horse mackerel”, a generic term for a variety of larger fish found in shoals in open water that are up to around a metre in length, including the then-abundant jack mackerel. Other articles and illustrations collected in the scrapbook suggest other misidentifications – large rays (then known mostly as remains found in the stomachs of whales), giant squid, also known as a giant “cuttlefish” or “calamary,” dolphins or leatherback turtles.

Several of Owen’s cuttings explain the sea serpent as being a giant oarfish (Regalecus) or one its smaller close relatives the ribbon fish (Gymneterus sp). These had already been scientifically described and were turning up occasionally. The creature caught in Bermuda’s Hungary Bay (or “Hungry Bay”) by a George Trimingham featured in a front-page article in The Bermudian under the headline “The Great Gymnetrus”, which found its way into Owen’s scrapbook. A 12-feet (3.57m) long giant ribbonfish caught off the Northumbrian coast in March 1849 and touted as “The Wonder of the Sea! The Gymnetrus Northumbricus or Sea Serpent” was still being referenced decades later in cuttings stuck into the same scrapbook.

Sea serpent sightings also generated Victorian satire. An article cut and pasted into the scrapbook, undated and unsourced, has “Our Own Ananias” adrift at sea in a small boat, interviewing the sea serpent on “Silly Season matters”, in which the sea serpent mentions his old chums “The Toad in a Lump of Coal”and “The Shower of Frogs.”

One of the highest-profile Victorian sea serpent sightings was the one from HMS Daedalus in 1848. The Times of November 14 1848 published a response to the Daedalus sighting by Owen, who revealed that as custodian of the Hunterian Museum he had received “numerous inquiries” on the subject and that “I continue to receive many applications for my opinion of the ‘Great Sea Serpent’”.

Owen’s letter to The Times argued that from its description, the Daedalus monster couldn't have been a reptile and was a mammal, probably a large seal. Despite admitting that that "I am far from insensible to the pleasures of the discovery of a new and rare animal; but before I can enjoy them, certain conditions – e.g., reasonable proof or evidence of its existence – must be fulfilled."His argument for scepticism towards sea serpents was based on the lack of physical evidence, the lack of bones sent to a museum or found in a collection, "a larger body of evidence from eyewitnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent."

Owen's letter to The Times, widely reprinted in other newspapers, earned him the moniker "The Sea Serpent Killer." His scepticism soon caused other naturalists to adopt a default position of rejecting all testimony on unidentified animals by locals and amateurs.

An original drawing by a witness. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

The great sea sepent of Table Bay from the Cape Argus 14 March 1857. Image courtesy trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Manuscript: A collection of manuscript notes, newspaper cuttings, etc, relating to the Sea Serpent.Brought together by Sir R. Owen, c.1841-1881, Owen, Richard, item barcode: 000234930, Natural History Museum Library and Archives,

Update (05/10/25): The "Silly Season" the period from late June to early September when newspapers had little to report on by way of Parliamentary proceedings or politics, became a fixture of the press calendar from around 1860. In the decades preceeding that, the months that came to be known as the silly season was known as the Sea Serpent Season, as space that needed filling in newspapers would often be filled with comical reports about sea serpent sightings, with humourously sacracstic commments on these. See History Today's article on this. (Paywall). This article was updated on 22/02/26 to correct a comment on a marginal note identifying the "Monster of thr Deep" seen floating off thr Peruvian coast in 1912.



Copyright Matt Salusbury 2025

Ape sandwich story!

This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 459, July 2025

Front cover image for the purposes of a critique or review, fair use under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Ape Sandwich story! It sounds like another desperate idea for a TV series blurted out by Alan Partridge at a pitch meeting (fans may recall his “Monkey Tennis?”), but in the Dutch language broodjeaapverhaal – literally an “ape sandwich story”, is an urban legend. The saga of how our North Sea neighbours came to know urban legends and friend-of-a-friend stories as “ape sandwich stories” is itself a tale of almost fortean strangeness.

The book Broodje aap: de folklore van de post-industriële samenleving(Ape Sandwich: the folklore of the post-industrial society) by Ethel Portnoy was published in Amsterdam in 1978. It was a bestseller – its first edition sold out in a couple of months, it went through eight editions within the next two years. There was even a now largely forgotten 1992 sequel, Broodje aap met (Ape sandwich with extras).

Oddly, this Dutch bestseller was written by an American author, writing in English, not in Dutch. Philadelphia-born writer Ethel Portnoy met and married a Dutchman, Rudy Kousbroek, while studying anthropology and archaeology in France, and settled in the Netherlands with him. She earned a living as a newspaper columnist for various Dutch-language newspapers and magazines. She felt herself to be a Dutch author, she won a prize for (Dutch) feminist literature, all 25 of her books published up to her death in 2004 were in Dutch.

But Ethel’s husband translated her work from English into Dutch for publication, continuing to do so after their divorce in the 1980s, with Ethel’s daughter Hepzibah and her colleague Tineke Davids also translating her work for her. Weirdly, the extracts from Broodje aap below are my translations back into English, there being no extant Englsih version I could find. While Broodje aap and other anthologies by Portnoy are considered important enough to be in the British Library, its catalogues list no works by her written in the English langauge.

The post-industrial urban legends in Broodje aap are, in Portnoy’s words, about “cars, motorways, motorbikes, shops, departments stores, cheques, pills, marijuana, central heating, pollution, industrial monopolies, funeral directors, customs officers, police officers, hitch hikers... In a sense, this book is not written by me but by everyone. I just wrote down what I heard.” Portnoy compares her “incomplete and random” anthology of “ape sandwich stories” to the cabinets of “rarities” of the early 19th century.

A surprised-looking Ethel Portnoy at an Amsterdam Book Week 1979 press conference. Photo: Hans van Dijk/Anefo, placed in the public domain by the Nationaal Archief, Creative Commons.

Most of the “ape sandwich stories” in the collection are a few lines long. These are along the lines of “an English couple on holiday returning by car from Spain, their grandmother dies near the French border. To save time they stick her in the boot of the car and go for lunch, the car is stolen.” Then there are tales of copper one cent coins completely dissolved by Coca Cola, or of a man man getting lost in the sewers of Paris and all that is found of him is his shoes, eaten by giant albino rats that live down there.

There is much grossness and biological implausibility – a woman gets “a million dollars” in compensation after becoming pregnant from staying at a hotel where they hadn’t properly cleaned the bathtub into which the previous male guest had mastrubatred, and so on. When Broodje aap was written, “the Pill” had recently taken hold. Portnoy observes “you could write a book on the myths of young girls on pregnancy and childbirth... or on the folklore of medical students, or that of soldiers.” Bizarre infant mortality, body parts, bad sex, unlikely accidental beheadings and unwitting cannibalism and general grossness feature heavily, as do “hippies.”

There are only two stories from the Netherlands in this Dutch-language anthology. In one of these, builders are laying paving stones in the streets of a Dutch town while a lady walking her little yappy dog stops in the street for a chat with a passing friend. When she finally moves on, her dog is missing. Dutch street pavers seem to have a legendary dislike of little yappy dogs, they had buried this one under their paving stones. In another tale, a young Dutch woman, who wants to emigrate to Australia, makes a deal with a couple of sailors in exchange for “services rendered” on the voyage. She is smuggled on board and kept below decks. Eventually she runs onto the deck and finds they’ve been repeatedly crossing the Ij Viaduct canal and never left Amsterdam.

Several of Broodje aap’s “histories” include West Coast millionaire playboy and amateur chemist Owsley, “the most recent of a series of figures in the American regional mythology.” Owlsely sagas include him visiting “hippies” in prison, convincing the wardens he was there just to read to them from the Bible. This he does for a while until the guards get distracted, then he rips out the pages and suggests to the prisioners that they taste these. The pages of the Bible are soaked in LSD! Other such sagas, with or without Owsley, feature “hippies” and police on drug busts being driven insane after accidentally taking LSD or marijuana or other unspecified “drugs” that all have vastly exaggerated, chemically impossible miraculous evil powers. (Owlsley is probably a garbled version of Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's sound engineer and "chemist", Ed.)

Aap, noot, mies... every Dutch person of a certain age will recognise the "aap" (ape), the start of the first line of the Hoogeveen reading board, used to teach Dutch-language voewl sounds to primary school children from the end of the 19th century right up to the early 1960s. "Aap" includes the long vowel sound represented by a double A.

In Portnoy’s late 1970s post-Nietzschean world, “God is dead here, there are a couple of supernatural stories where a motorway replaces a haunted house as anxiety inducing decor… The absence of ghosts or spirits and such betrays a lack of belief or importance attached to the hereafter,” the occasional phantom hitchhiker notwithstanding.

To be honest the stories themselves seem to me somewhat lame – obviously impossible “man in the pub” tales with the same level of sophistication as said-to-be-true stories I myself heard from my contemporaries back in around 1978 – when I was 14 years old. Some crude racism aside, these 1970s “ape sandwich stories” now seem charmingly innocent compared to the weaponised politically-motivated bot-driven social media antivaxxer chemtrail New World Order manosphere pizzagate lizard conspiracy misinformation that rules the world today.

Among the longer entries at just over half a page is the eponymous story number 84, the original broodjeaapverhaal. In this, police in the backstreets of the Bronx get a call. A headless, skinned body is found in the street, the police pathology laboratory declares it to be not of a human but of a gorilla. It turns out there was a collision between two trucks outside a hot dog factory and the carcass rolled out of the back of one of the vehicles. The police visit the hot dog factory nearby and find fillited and headless bodies of apes and bears, bought from a zoo. So it could just have easily become “bear sandwich story.”

A broodje can be a sandwich but also a roll, patty or bap or any bread-based thing that you can wrap around a filling, including ape hot dogs as in this Bronx yarn. Aap can denote an ape or monkey, and the @ symbol in Dutch is called an apenstaartje, a monkey’s tail. But given that they have more meat on them than monkeys, the primates in the original broodjeaapverhaal were probably supposed to be apes. Later analysts speculated that the story was spread by parents in the 1970s to discourage their children from constantly clamouring for yet another then-popular Happy Meal.

Portnoy’s detailed endnotes on the sources for her “ape sandwich stories” and their numerous variants are longer than the stories themselves. The broodje aap story itself is identified as type 1286 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folk tale type index, while Portnoy traces this particular yarn back to the Hunter’s Point in the Bronx in the 1930s, noting that it was also in more recent circulation in the Netherlands since crossing the Atlantic in a cutting sent from New York to the Dutch Telegraaf newspaper. The endnotes also trace phantom hitchhiker stories to Korea, while a lot of the book’s entries are revealed as very old stories that turn up in 1920s French anthologies which Portnoy probably came across while studying anthropology there back in the 1950s.

How, then, did all urban legends become ape sandwich stories in Dutch? This seems partly due to the unsatisfactory translation of “urban legend” into “stadssage”(urban saga) or stadslegende “city legend”, which doesn’t adequately convey the same nuance as “urban”. The Dutch adjective stats denotes “urban” but it’s more neutral and functional than the English “urban”, which conveys a grittier and more “street”, edgy, post-industrial feel, as in English phrases like “urban guerilla” to describe the Baader Meinhoff gang or Brigado Rosso terrorist cells, also from the 1970s. The somewhat tepid-sounding alternative Dutch phrase moderne sage (“modern saga”) never really took off.

There was already another Dutch phrase to describe urban legends or friend-of-a-friend stories, but this was becoming problematic around the time Broodje aap appeared. Pulp novels about cowboys and Indians in the Western genre had long been popular in the Netherlands, particularly “romantic” stories featuring Native American characters, many of these written by German author Karl May. There was a brief immediately postwar renaissance in Western novels and subtitled Hollywood Western films. By the 1960s there was a critical backlash against the genre, and Indianenverhaal – a story about Indians – became a commonly-used phrase to describe a risibly implausible plot.

By 1982, though, Indianenverhaal was seen as a derogatory, racist term, with a letter to the Communist newspaper De Waarheid that year criticising their use of the phrase as “racist” and “backward.” Then up popped instant bestseller Broodje app, “ape sandwich story”, with a phrase that did the same job better and sounded way cooler.

The Institute for the Dutch Language were picking up examples of the use of broodjeaapverhaal or just broodje aap for short, from around 1994. Anthologies and databases of folktales were using broodjeaapverhaal in their titles by 2006, and by 2014 “ape sandwich story” was in common parlance in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, where Paul Burger became the first academic to get a PhD in “ape sandwich stories” in that year. By 2020, local news website In De Buurt could write about ape sandwich stories made up to explain how the statue of King Willem II came to be in the city of Tilburg, confident that everyone knew what they were talking about.

Do any FT readers know of any other fortean phenomena that have unusual names and backstories to their names in other languages? Do tell, via the letters page.

Broodje aap: de folklore van de post-industriële samenleving, Ethel Portnoy, Harmonie, Amsterdam, 1978

©️ Matt Salusbury 2025