There Be Beasts - report on London Cryptozoology Club's first conference - April 2013

Locals in a village in Burma with Richard Thorns's pink-headed duck lure. Photo: copyright Richard Thorns used with permission

This article first appeared in Fortean Times FT 302. Following a letter to Fortean Times from Paolo Viscardi, I have corrected a conflation of two different stuffed mermaids that appeared in the original article, this passage is indicated in bold type.

It was a full house in the basement at Treadwell's "esoteric beliefs" bookshop in Bloomsbury for There Be Beasts, the first London Cryptozoology Club (LCC) mini-conference in April. Treadwell's had helped out at the eleventh hour after the original venue fell through. James Newton, founder of the LCC and one of the conference's organisers introduced the day's proceedings before allowing

Richard Freeman, zoological director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, to kick off, resplendent in a waistcoat emblazoned with gold dragons. His pet hate is Hollywood's tendency to depict dragons as having only two legs, when they should have four. The two-legged versions aren't dragons, they're wyverns, says Richard. "People who put wyverns in films and pass them off as dragons" drive "cryptozoological pedants like me" into a murderous rage.

He reeled off a list of mystery animals, a list that until 1904 would have included the gorilla, then regarded as just "a hairy ogre from 'native' folklore." Richard feels that Gigantopithecus – a huge fossil Asian ape whose fragmentary remains suggest it walked upright – is a good candidate for the identity of a current cryptid, the yeti.

Richard Freeman at previous talks - CFZ's Weird Weekend 2006 (above) and the Fortean Times UnConvention 2010 (right)

While earlier researchers perceived Bigfoot – North America's manimal – as an ape akin to Gigantopitchecus, "armchair cryptozoologist" James Newton introduced us to current trends in Bigfoot research, which suggest we're dealing with something much closer to us humans. James worked as a volunteer at South Dakota's Cheyenne River Youth Project with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, a division of the Lakota Nation. Over twenty years of experience in youth work means he's good as spotting when children are trying to pull his leg, but he was struck by how Lakota kids he worked with described their attitudes and encounters with Bigfoot in a matter-of-fact way. Like the time in 2006 when, out of the blue, a girl named Misti Bad Warrior pointed to an illustration of Chewbacca in a Where's Wally? book and said, "That's Bigfoot."



Self-described "armchair cryptozoologist" James Newton, pictured when he was a youth worker with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe division of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota. Photo by kind permission of James Newton

Recent takes on Bigfoot, by the likes of researchers Autumn Williams – herself a childhood Bigfoot witness – and the "Tennessee Bigfoot lady" Mary Green, describe "habituation scenarios" – years of interactions between rural families and Bigfoot communities. The witnesses "were people who lack the sophistication to make it in cities… but were tuned in to their environment". Encounters could take the form of gift exchanges – missing animal feed, "artwork" gifts like knotted stalks of grass left in return, or a mother looking out of the kitchen window to see their child handing some biscuits over the fence to their "big hairy friend".

Suburban south London's Horniman Museum has in its collection a specimen known as "Japanese Monkey-Fish; Merman (Ningyo)." The Horniman's natural history curator, Paolo Viscardi,took us through an "unnatural history of mermaids."

It seems that in nineteenth century Japan, small representations of nature spirits were made – from a monkey and a fish – for shrines. When the first Western sailors turned up at Nagasaki, Japan's only trading port, a of monkey-fish mermaid cottage industry grew in response to demand.

Everyone assumed the Horniman mermaid, and all other mermaid "gaffes", were made from the head, arms and torso of a monkey sewn on to the back end of a fish. It transpired the Horniman "monkey fish", while it probably the back end of a carp, has no monkey parts at all. It has wire for fingers, a clay and papier-mâché head, fish jaws, bamboo neck, arms of wood and wire. Under X-rays or put through medical scanners, most "monkey-fish" mermaids display an absence of actual monkey bits. Leiden's small mermaid known as the Blomhoff Specimen can be traced to one of the nineteenth century trade fairs that took place around Nagasaki, but an extant mermaid specimen from India seems to be the only known still extant example of a mermaid that actually contains monkey body parts.

Richard Thorns, the "pink-headed duck guy" has been on three trips to Burma in search of that elusive bird – a large, mallard-sized diving duck with a long, ramrod-straight neck, chocolate brown in colour with a "bubble-gum pink" head (a gentler pink in the females). The duck was shy and solitary, preferring deep pools in wetlands. We're unsure if it was a species of pochard or a genus all of its own. It was always a rare bird, regarded from the early days of the British Raj as "a good day's bag." A 1920s captive breeding programme in Surrey failed, and the last recorded pink-headed duck (P-HD) was seen in 1935, in the north Indian state of Bihar. The wetland habitats around India's mega-cities have gone the same way as the pink-headed duck, but numerous marshes resembling those "vanished ecosystems" still exist over the border in Burma. "How could you possibly not want to go after that?" asked Richard.

His first Burma trip took Richard to Kachin State, three days upriver from Mandalay. You "can only stay at approved hotels" in Burma, so he had to use the services of a clandestine guide who had to hurry home when news came that "Immigration" were questioning his wife. In Richard's video interviews with locals, the camera's often pointed to the ground. People apparently didn't want to be photographed. Eventually, witnesses reported two P-HD sightings at one lake, and Richard heard about an unconfirmed sighting – lasting only a few seconds – by a Dutchman atop a hired elephant during a 2003 expedition to a lake at Naung Kwin. One fisherman said of the mystery duck, "it was here once." A broken hand from a motorbike accident cut short Richard's most recent expedition, while the Kachin Independence Army insurgency meant "unauthorised contact with foreigners" would land his guides in jail. He thinks one of the photographs he took just might show a P-HD on the lake. Time may be running out for the duck, if it does still live in Burma. Saffron and mustard cultivation are encroaching on the wetlands. Says Richard, "if Burma opens up, it would be very bad news for the pink-headed duck."

London Fortean Society coordinator Scott Wood described the legendary parakeets of London and friends. (The "friends" include the brand new Fordham Park panther – sighted by a woman in a street of that south London neighbourhood earlier that week.) Ring-necked parakeets are now endemic to a 30-kilometre stretch of West London (and Ramsgate), while South London is home to the Monk parakeet. Scott's fascinated by the urban legends and far-fetched "escape scenarios" surround the parakeets' arrival in the capital. These include Jimi Hendrix's two parakeets escaping from his Portobello Road flat at the moment of his death, fugitives from the Twickenham aviary of the exiled King Manuel the Unfortunate of Portugal, (still commemorated in Twickenham's Manuel Road,) break-outs during the filming of Anthony and Cleopatra and/or The African Queen at Shepperton Studios – except the later was filmed in Isleworth. Parakeet lore has turned the birds into a metaphor for immigration panic, a celebration of London's multiculturalism or a harbinger of global warming. The problem with these "scenarios" is that a DEFRA report says parakeets have been kept in English captivity since 1855, and are known to have been "naturalised" by 1960, before the demise of Hendrix.

James said of There Be Beasts that it "proved far more successful than we had imagined. We are hugely thankful to the speakers who gave their time and knowledge for free." There are plans afoot for "a bigger event in 2014" and for a summer LCC expedition to Dorset, in the company of "large cat" expert Jonathan McGowan, searching for traces of British Big Cats.



Barry Tadcaster, compere at the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Weird Weekend 2012, shown here with his partner in crime Orang Pendek. Several attendees pointed out Tadcaster's uncanny resemblance to Richard Freeman in a fez. Photo copyright Matt Salusbury

Since this article appeared in Fortean Times, I've spotted a parakeet in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington, London N17 - much further east than London parakeets have been reported before. And I've heard - but not yet seen - parakeets even further east, in London's Victoria Park.


The LLC is on Twitter: @WeAreTheLC
email: london.cryptozoology@gmail.com

© Matt Salusbury

Big cats in Dorset - London Cryptozoology Club expedition, with Jonathan McGowan

Jonathan McGowan (above, with sika deer pelvis fragment which he says bears teeth marks from a Big Cat) is a Big Cat consultant familiar to readers of this blog from his talks at CFZ's Weird Weekend, kindly hosted myself and two others from the London Cryptozoology Club (LCC) in early June on one of his regular Big Cat surveys with the Dorset Big Cats Group.

He is a naturalist and works at Bournemouth Science Society, and also does taxidermy. (McGowan said he was busy with taxidermy at the moment, most of it restoring hundred-year-old museum exhibits. The century-old sea eagle he was restoring for the Dorset County Museum had to be moved off one of the armchairs when the LCC rendezvoused at his Bournemouth home.) To his dismay, McGowan's most famous for his roadkill diet, which accounts for all the meat he eats, and has seen him interviewed on TV and radio shows in the US and Russia.

While the leopards reported in the UK used to be almost exclusively melanistic (black) leopards, now we're seeing "more spotted ones," says McGowan. The "leopard wool" (below, the under-layer of fur) we later picked off the barbed wire fences at Purbeck was from a spotted leopard.

Most people taking the chain ferry from Bournemouth over the estuary head straight for Shell Bay Beach (below, famous for its nudist colony) but few beach-goers are aware that there are "leopards on the beach at night."

A short drive inland took us the Purbeck Reed Beds (below) and other locations nearby that I was requested to be vague about, suffice to say there's absolutely nobody about and very few signs of any people having been there recently. The tourists driving through, however, were enough to make the Big Cats go to ground for the summer, and all the signs of them that we found were in McGowan's opinion at least a couple of weeks old.Apart from a couple of seaside towns in the way, there's a wildlife corridor along the south coast from here all the way to Devon and Cornwall.

The Big Cats in the Purbeck Reed Beds, a wilderness of heathland and lakes where we went, take one of two deer a week each, according to McGowan. He says that this is less than the "three to four deer a week run over on the roads" he routinely finds, with more deer lost to car collisions than to Big Cats. Roads sometimes act as territorial boundaries - where we went was the territory of a "small female" ("she's been here at least six years" (according to McGowan) and her cubs, which overlapped with a large male. McGowan and his arborealist friend (see below) recently found "fist-sized" prints of a big male leopard in soft ground.

We did find some prints of a small female leopard (below). McGowan says leopards avoid walking on soft ground where possible, as they don't want their tracks to alert people to their existence.

Leopard territories in Purbeck overlap with puma territories too, and McGowan told us he'd found evidence of a fight between a leopard and a puma, with bits of two different types of fur.

We found leopard scat (poo, below) lying around on the ground almost as soon as we got out of the car. At two weeks old, the action of the summer sun and rain on it means that the the scat crumbles into mostly clumps of deer hair and few beetles (yes, leopards also eat these) when handled. Leopards always mark their trails with scat, "sometimes every 100 yards," except for female leopards when they were with cubs, in which case they would bury it.

Big cats also make fastidious "scrapes" - scratch-marks in the ground laced with scent from their urine, which they use to mark territory. The scrapes are made with their hind feet and end with a little pile of earth. We saw several of these.

At Purbeck we were joined by an arborealist who helps out McGowan on his Big Cat surveys, and who subsequently made it clear he was ticking the "no publicity" box, so I've not named him. Of the British Big Cat phenomenon he said, "This isn't a joke, this is real."

McGowan also pointed out different-looking fox poo and otter scat (below) - this has the telltale sparkling fish scales. McGowan says the Big Cats eat otters, and badgers.

The deerstalkers around Purbeck apparently aren't being very effective, as McGowan says he's been out in the reed beds at dusk and seen herds of over a hundred sika deer, the preferred food of the Big Cats. We saw some of these from a distance, with their long necks and strange, squeaky calls. We also came across a sika deer fawn hiding from us in thick woodland. There were several spots where sika deer bones were scattered (littered with the remains of several skeletons on one case). Several bones bore evidence of having been nibbled by the teeth of a cat (example below). While dog and fox teeth puncture holes in bones and break them up, only the carnassial teeth of a Big Cat can make the clean cuts to bones that McGowan pointed out to us.

There's one concealed clearing at the edge of woodland (with sika deer bones) that McGowan thinks might be an ambush site for leopards to wait for passing sika deer. We also went to a secret location to change the memory card on one of the camera traps that McGowan's associate had set up (below).

McGowan estimates that in the UK there are "leopards - a few hundred, puma the same, less lynx." The directors of some local wildlife Trusts are beginning to be open to Big Cats, he says, but the British Deer Society fear their jobs in deer management are "in jeopardy if they admit to" Alien Big Cats (ABCs). McGowan says there's evidence they're eating another introduced species, feral wild boar. He also said that some naturalists are coming to the opinion that brown hares, long thought to have been introduced by the Romans, might not have been introduced and may always have been native to southern England.

As McGowan's got a book coming out soon, I refrain from reporting on some of the information he gave us, the latest photos he showed us by Sarah Ramsden from Kent or the spotted leopard photo from "Miss Leggins", the recent "Gloucester footage" or the audio he played us of leopard roars in the very English countryside. McGowan's book is provisionally tilted The British Large Cat Phenomenon: The Dorset Enigma.

By a lake in Purbeck. Leopards are good swimmers, and can swim after deer to islands on the lake.

LCC people in a silver birch forest somewhere in the Purbeck area

The skull of a sika deer with what McGowan described as dents made by a Big Cat's teeth (dents just above the fissure running from the left right to the bottom left)


All photos and words copyright Matt Salusbury. This article was amended 06/08/13 to obscure a personal name and a place name. This was done at the request of one of those featured in the article.

‘There Be Beasts' The First London Cryptozoology Club Mini-Conference - 13 April

I'll be helping out at ‘There Be Beasts ....’, the London Cryptozoology Club Mini-Conference is on Saturday 13th April 2013
11am – 7pm (first presentation at 11.30)
Upstairs at The Old Kings Head, 47-49 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1NA
Tickets: £5 / £2 concessions (students, OAPs, people in receipt of benefits)

To register and purchase tickets please email london.cryptozoology@gmail.com or call James Newton on 07805 356461

Confirmed talks:

• “On the Track of Unknown Animals Worldwide” Richard Freeman, Zoological Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology



Richard Freeman of the CFZ at the Fortean Times UnCon 2010

• “Mermaids: A Natural and Unnatural History” Paolo Viscardi, Natural History Curator and Mermaid Anatomist (works at the Horniman Museum).

• “Current Developments in Bigfoot Research” James Newton, self-confessed Armchair Cryptozoologist. This includes recent research suggesting that Bigfoot may be much closer to us humans than we thought, not a Gigantopithecus at all but a manimal with a culture and a language, that knows how to stay hidden!

• “Does the Pink-Headed Duck Still Survive in Burma?” Richard Thorns, Writer, Ornithologist and Explorer

• 'The Legendary Parakeets of London and Friends' Scott Wood, Co-organiser of The London Fortean Society

Getting here: Nearest train: London Bridge (5 minutes walk)
Nearest tube: London Bridge (5 minutes walk)

Buses: 17, 21, 35, 40, 43, 47, 48, 133, 141, 149, 343, 381, 521, RV1

I've heard James Newton, Richard Freeman and Richard Thorns speak on these topics, all recommended!

See here for London Crytozoology Club's sceptical, pub-based "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" investigation earlier this year.

Chasing shadows – London Cryptozoology Club's "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" expedition

Investigating a Tunbridge Wells mystery

In November last year, there were widespread news reports of a sighting of what became known as the Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot, a roaring, black hairy figure "eight feet tall" with red eyes that startled an eyewitness walking on The Common at night. London Cryptozoology Club decided to investigate.

It should be noted that we went to Tunbridge Wells with a very sceptical view of this so-called "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" (TWB) phenomenon. We were particularly sceptical of an online posting by "Greham S," who claimed that a courting couple on a bench in The Common had witnessed the "Ape-Man" back in World War Two. Greham S left no other identifiers, and didn't give his source. There was also said to be an encounter with the "Kentish Apeman" by Territorial Army soldiers in 1991 at Bluebell Hill, Kent, which they saw off by throwing stones at it. We were not expecting to find TWB, we felt that the answers, if any, were more likely to be in what they diplomatically call the "pyscho-social realm".

"Do Well, Doubt Not!" Motto on bridge near Tunbridge Wells station (click on the image to enlarge)


Our plans, such as they were, mostly involved going to the pub and asking locals if they'd seen anything odd. Sitting around the pub was particularly high on our list of priorities.

Light snow over Wellington Rocks

So myself, "Other Matt", Rosie and Dewey set off on a January morning, and (mis)adventures already came our way before we'd even hit the platform at (Royal) Tunbridge Wells. One of our number caused us to miss a train with a complicated transaction involving getting a few quid off his ticket on the basis of his Oyster season ticket, and I left my bag on the train and had to jump back in and get it before the doors closed. That's how intrepid we are in the London Cryptozoological Club!

Wellington Rocks on Tunbridge Wells Common

Someone had come all the way from Brighton to run his radio-controlled all terrain cars over Wellington Rocks

Sophisticated Metropolitan city slickers that we are, we naively imagined that Tunbridge Wells Common would be some well-manicured Home Counties park with beds full of flowers in orderly rows, and perhaps a boating lake or something. Google Maps didn't really indicate just how wild it is either. In my naivety I half expected to bump into prolific letter-writer Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

It turns out The Common is a 200-acre wilderness, with bogs and spooky dead trees and three rock formations – Wellington Rocks, beloved of BMX bandits – High Rocks and Toad Rocks (we didn't get to see the last one). It was extraordinarily bleak, not the sort of landscape I'd associate with the Home Counties. There was even a mysterious disused railway running through the woods on The Common.

An uphill struggle

After about an hour of up hill and down dale, along Hungershall Park (Hunger shall lead us to the pub!) and Cabbage Stalk Lane, we finally made it to the Beacon pub. On the way, we talked to one dog-walker whose little dogs were shivering in the cold, and when we said we were looking for Bigfoot he joked that we must have been to the pub already.

Winding roads on the Common

The excellent Beacon pub – near High Rocks - has in a stain glass window the coat of arms of the Harrison family, with hedgehogs on it (herrison in French) and two golden crescent moons with red in the middle. While some of us felt they might be something to do with the red eyes on the TWB, the waitress said, "We call them stuffed olives." Over drinks and food, we speculated on the rock formations and various "Stone Tape" theories about geological formations and faults having an influence on the human brain, making people see things.

Hedgehogs and "stuffed olives" (red eyes?) on the Harrison coat of arms (click on the image to enlarge)

There followed a brisk walk across The Common and back to the station, as it was getting dark and we did not want to be out on the Common in the middle of a winter's night. A follow-up expedition involving a night vigil was suggested as we took the train back to Charring Cross.

Night manoeuvres on the Common


The previous evening, I'd emailed Neil Arnold, the go-to guy for all things strange and cryptozoological in Kent, about our outing. The morning after our trip out of town, I got this email from him:

"Hi Matt, there is no Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot and I've had to spend the last few months trying to tell so many papers etc this. I have a piece in next month's FT [Fortean Times] regarding it. The report in question was dubious to say the least, and not sure why anyone would go chasing shadows around TW. The common is relatively small. All this has been investigated by myself over two years ago after reports of a monkey on the loose around 1949. I've just had published a book called Haunted Tunbridge Wells.Regards, neil."

Oh well, chasing shadows it may have been, but a fun time was had by all.

A strange, dark, vaguely human shape looms out of the dark on the Common!

London Cryptozoology Club investigate the Wellington Rocks


Text and photos copyright Matt Salusbury

update: 4 December 2022 - the song "Where's you car, Debbie?" by Tunbridge Wells-based punk duo Slaves is apparently based on the early 2010s Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot sighting. Its official video features an ape-like creature lumbering around in the dark. There's a glimpse of one of band reading a mocked-up Tunbridge Wells local newspaper with a "Bigfoot-Spotted" headline. There's a link here.