"My dad saw Shuck in the Seventies!"

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT412;58-59, December 2021.

I investigate reports of big cats in Suffolk, I've received over a hundred of these over the past seven years. But while seeking testimony on Suffolk big cat sightings, a surprising number of unsolicited accounts of encounters with the phantom East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck seem to come my way. Shuck can't possibly exist, of course. Nonetheless, I still receive testimony of his antics in the country of Suffolk. An interesting and surprisingly consistent pattern in this handful of Shuck reports is that most of them describe encounters from 40 years ago, usually reported by sons keen to tell me how "my dad saw Shuck in the Seventies."

Detail of the coat of arms of Bungay on the "Welcome to Bungay, a fine old town" sign. Bungay is the epicentre of Black Dog culture in Suffolk.

During Shuck's long history, the two peaks in reported East Anglian Shuck activity occurred in the 1920s and in the groovy, cool, fab era that was the 1970s. The ancient horror that was East Anglia's Black Shuck was at large scaring the residents of Seventies Suffolk as never before.

Ivan A.W. Bunn's excellent contemporary analysis East of England Shuck traditions, "Shuckland: Analyzing the Hell out of the Beast" remains unequalled to this day.

Among the many 1970s Shuck experiences that came to Bunn's attention was one via a letter from 1973, in which Lincolnshire man with no previous knowledge of East Anglian black dog traditions told how he was laying drainage pipes across the marshes behind the massive Holy Trinity Church at Blythburgh (so huge it's known as "the Cathedral of the Marshes"). Suddenly, he heard a dog loudly panting behind him. He turned round and there was... nothing. It was only when he told some locals in the pub that they produced a book of local Shuck stories.

Although Bunn's researches were turning up "hitherto unrecorded characteristics" in Seventies Shuck sightings, he observed at the time that 1970s reports don't mention the more spectacular aspects that Shuck displayed in earlier times. Seventies Shuck tended not to be headless, not to have one eye in the centre of its head, not to have horns, not to wear chains, nor to resemble a calf or grow in size or shape-shift or foretell deaths or explode. He didn't even seem to walk in step with witnesses that much.

Even Shuck's red eyes were seldom mentioned anymore. He was increasingly just a strange, rather big dog that appeared out of nowhere. He still did his vanishing act, although witnesses just reported not being able to work out where he could have gone. Modern Shuck witnesses were left wondering whether they’d in fact seen a huge, black but otherwise ordinary dog.

They came thick and fast, the Seventies Shuck sightings, particularly around Lowestoft, Suffolk's next biggest town after Ipswich, where Shuck chronicler Ivan Bunn is still based. A woman spotted Black Shuck in the bushes at Lowestoft's Belle Vue Park in 1975, although her husband saw nothing. Folklorist Theodora Brown claims to have had an encounter of her own with the Black Dog in the churchyard of St Mary's Bungay in the 1970s. A Mrs Whitehead saw a death-portent Shuck in the streets of Bungay at the moment her mother died, while Police Constable Jenkins had several seventies Shuck experiences around the A12 road at Blythburgh. Peter Jennings's Haunted Suffolk records an early Seventies sighting of a large white dog seen by a woman walking in Beccles cemetery. The dog faded away as she approached. Keith Flory contacted Ivan Bunn's Hidden East Anglia team to tell them about the night in 1973 when, motorbiking home from Woodbridge, he was followed by a Great Dane-sized Black Shuck who bounded after his motorcycle all the way down the town's Old Barrack Road - effortlessly keeping up with him all the way until Flory finally lost his pursuer in Seckford Hall Road.

Old Barrack Rood, Woodbrige, scene of a Seventies motorcycle chase featuring Black Shuck

Some 40 years later, a few of my Suffolk Shuck informants said they'd never before communicated to anybody else what their fathers had related to them in the Shuck department, one informant felt they could only tell me because their father had since passed away. Some informants expressed regret at not having pressed their dear departed dads for more on their Shuck sightings. It's as if there's a complicated Shuck-experience dynamic in father-and-son relationships in the county of Suffolk.

The other pattern emerging in these testimonies of Seventies Suffolk Shuck sightings is more the absence of a pattern - they are all very, very different. While the magical powers of Shuck seem to have been gradually shaved away over time, the sheer variety of shuck encounters has if anything increased.

A man from Rattlesden told me his father, back in the 1970s, was driving on the A140 from Ipswich to Stowmarket one night when he collided with Black Shuck in the dark. He got out of the car to take a look and found... nothing. The next day there was a strange deposit on the bonnet of his car, "like eggshells." Another bizarre encounter narrative came from a man identifying himself as "Major Pickle" on Twit'er. He disclosed how his father (eventually) told him that on 5th August 1973, he (Major Pickle's father) and a friend were driving from the small, mostly agricultural village of Henstead, west of the A12 to the coast at Bawdsey to go canoeing.

Coming round a corner on the road near Henstead, the canoeists saw a huge black dog with something like a mane, standing in the road just looking at them. It "seemed to be there and was just gone" according to Pickle's account. When his dad got out of the car for a look, there was nothing to see except (then) open fields. It was what happened next that made those two 1970s canoe enthusiasts think they'd had a brush with a beast of ill omen. The friend with whom my informant's dad went canoeing always mapped and researched their canoeing routes. They'd regularly been canoeing off the coast at Bawdsey before, but "they never encountered anything like this". Their canoe went into a "freak tidal whirlpool", they capsized and were almost drowned. They were washed up on the Ministry of Defence's Bawdsey Island Radar Station, "an interesting experience during the Cold War". Their inadvertent trespassing in a then restricted Cold War-era defence installation meant they kept quiet about the events of that day.

Major Pickle said of his dad's encounter, "To the day he died he was convinced it was Shuck and the story never changed in any way." Could it have been a big cat? Dad insisted it was a really big dog.

Folklorist Theo Brown claims to have had an encounter with Black Shuck in the churchyard of St. Mary's, Bungay, in the 1970s.

Jim Bradley, a Norfolk birdwatcher, contacted me to tell me how "my friend's father who I would say is now in his 60s" encountered the Black Dog himself "in Orford in the late 70s... He and a friend were out walking and a black dog, calf-sized, wandered onto the track and stared at them. It eventually lumbered off into the scrub. They followed its path but the beast had seemingly disappeared, no trace whatsoever."

This wave of Seventies Suffolk Shuck sightings may have been Shuck's last hurrah, after that reports of Shuck encounters tailed off. The few Shucks that have manifested in Suffolk since then seem to have lost many of their supernatural powers. Christopher Reeve, co-author of Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay, told me that by 2014 he couldn't find any adults who would give him new accounts of Shuck experiences. Small children still seem to see Shuck locally, or at least have no inhibitions about relating other people's sightings.

Bungay's football team is the Bungay Town FC, known as the Black Dogs, although its training ground is just a couple of hundred metres over the Norfolk border in Ditchingham.

While "my dad (or my dad's best mate) saw Shuck in the seventies" accounts emerging over 40 years later are still surprisingly common, accounts of more recent Suffolk shuck experiences are rare. From Rendlesham Forest comes a 1980s story of an encounter by Paul and Jane Jennings “on a cold winter’s afternoon in 1983”, as related by ufologist Nick Redfern in his article "Weirdness in the woods". The Jenningses encountered a big black dog on the forest path. Jane said the beast's head "was clearly canine in appearance… much larger than that of any normal dog. Yet... its body seemed to exhibit characteristics that were distinctly feline". It had an "eerily mournful expression upon its face... Suddenly, the beast began to 'flicker on and off for four or five times', then finally vanished” leaving a strange metallic smell.

A post on the Centre for Fortean Zoology's blog from "Woody" related his how he and his dog Max had a 1994 Shuck encounter on one of their regular runs around "Martlesham Creek... by the river Deben, that runs to nearby Woodbridge." It was there that Woody became "aware of being watched, checking behind me about 50 yards back stood a huge black dog, my own wouldn’t take his eyes off it. It stood stock still, watching us ... (I) put my dog on a lead” and walked out of sight of it." Max turned again and growled. "There stood the big black dog again... I began to worry a bit." There followed three or four more sightings of the same black dog, always the same distance away, always with the same stance, and "with me very nervously looking over my shoulder until we got level with Martlesham Church, when Max turned, growled and practically broke the lead in his eagerness for a fight only... there was nothing there!" Woody and Max then "ran like hell the remaining mile... home and locked the doors." Woody admitted "the dog I saw may just have been someone's... be it a bloody big one."

This dog from the coat of arms of the Gooch family watches over the Benacre Estate on the North Suffolk coast.

One of my unsolicited Shuck informants told me a story of "a guy" out near Coddenham, north of Ipswich, who in the early 2010s took his dog for a walk on a windy, rainy day and they were apparently chased by a big dog, as soon as it got nearer to them it would vanish and the process started again."

Twenty-first century Shuck witnesses often concede it could have been an ordinary dog they saw. When a "shaken driver" reported his encounter with "a white wolf stalking the back roads of Suffolk" in 2009, he believed he’d seen an escaped exotic animal rather than a Suffolk Shuck phantom. Nigel Stebbing, who was able to photograph the "white wolf" from his van at Kersey, near Hadleigh. didn't think he'd seen a phantom hellhound. (There's a tradition of a White Shuck around Woodbridge and a ghostly "White Dawg" in Lowestoft, though.) By 1998, a couple from Bungay visiting Suffolk's Dunwich Forest who heard panting or growling no longer assumed - as did our pipe-laying Lincolnshire man back in the 1970s - that it was Black Shuck. They were instead convinced they'd heard an Alien Big Cat.

© Matt Salusbury 2021

A talbot, a white dog, on the coat of arms of the South Suffolk town of Sudbury. There are white Shucks as well as Black Shuck in Suffolk too. Woodbridge has a White Shuck and Lowestoft has a ghostly "White Dawg."

Appearance on Weird Tales podcast, talking about big cats in Suffolk, woodwoses and mummified cats

I recently appeared on the Weird Tales Radio Show podcast, hosted by my colleague Charles Christian, who I persuaded to rejoin the NUJ after a quarter of a century. (He refers to his NUJ membership in the intro.)

You can listen here. It's a couple of minutes short of a hour. I hope to later add links to my articles on the subjects covered, in the order in which they are discussed in the podcast.

Front page story in this month's Fortean Times

My feature on the woodwoses of Suffolk seems to have pushed the Daleks off the front cover of this month's Fortean Times, having been updgraded from a humble Fortean Traveller piece at the back to the cover story! (That's FT 318, September 2014).

It'll be up on this site as soon as the First British Serial rights have reverted to me, ie when the October issue is out. Update: the woodwose story is here. Fortean Times recently took all the back issue stories of its website, so this is the only place you can (legally) read it.

I note that I'm all over the editorial of this month's FT as well, in which FT claims they "sent" me to my "native" Suffolk. Not strictly correct - I pitched a story to them, and arranged (minimal) expenses for some of the trip and some photocopying at the Suffolk Records Office, and I have been "native" to Suffolk only since I started getting my bank statements sent there, joined the Suffolk Coastal electoral roll and registered as a "temporary resident" with the doctor's surgery there back in May. (Suffolk Coastal's MP has still not replied to my letter on changes to copyright law, which I sent her in June, please note!)

Here, are a couple of my photos of woodwoses similar to the ones in the Fortean Times feature. (They are of woodwoses whose photos do not feature in the article, from St Bartholemew's Orford (top) and a damaged woodwose at St. Peter's, Theberton (bottom).







I also get a mention in this month's FT in Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo section, for which I am grateful to Karl. He bigs up my researches into Baron Maurice de Rothschild's tusk "of enigmatic origin", which was the subject of my recent Weird Weekend talk, and which will be the subject of a future Fortean Times forum piece just as soon as I can find a way to describe it all in 800 words. See Dr Karl's recent blog post on his own researches in this area - he's got further than me, and has much better French!

Oh, and I'm in the "clipping credits" too, for sending in a suitably bizarre news headline. If I recall correctly, it was the Guardian's "Ghost ship packed with cannibal rats not likely to crash into UK, say officials."

Legendary Beasts of Britain - book review

This first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 306, October 2013

Legendary Beasts of Britain
Julia Creswell
Shire Publications, Oxford, 2013
£6.99
pb, 48pp, illus. (colour), index, refs.
ISBN 978-0-74781-204-3



What stands out immediately from Legendary Beasts of Britain is the astonishing beauty of its illustrations – excellent colour reproductions of manuscript medieval bestiary illustrations (the yales, dragons, basilisks and "worms" – with and without legs – from the British Library's Harley manuscripts in particular), and photos of mythical beasts on coats of arms and on church misericords. Legendary Beasts is worth the very modest cover price – less than many of today's glossy magazines – for its images alone.

Nor are the illustrations and subject matter exclusively of Medieval vintage or mythical in nature. There's a spread of contemporary photos of Alien Big Cats, including a stuffed puma shot in 1980s Invernesshire, and a Morris dancing Beast of Bodmin putting in an appearance at Bodmin Riding Day just two years ago. The heraldic griffins, mermaids and dragons are neatly brought up to date with examples of logos – the Starbuck's mermaid and Midland Bank and Vauxhall cars griffin.

Cryptozoological pedants will be soothed by Legendary Beasts' quick to clearing up dragon-wyvern confusion, dragon-griffin and St Michael-St George confusion, with a sympathetic explanation of why heraldic dragons are so hard to confuse with griffins in the first place.

And the text's strong as well, with a surprising amount covered in a mere 45 pages of narrative. Oxford medievalist and linguist Julia Creswell points out some of the peculiarly British traits of our dragons – they're less interested in guarding gold compared to their Continental cousins. UK dragons are also keener on stealing milk than devouring damsels, as well as statistically less likely to meet their end through the deeds of noble knights, and more likely to be dispatched by guile at the hands of cunning commoners.

There's also a mention of what was probably Britain's last dragon hunt, in the North Wales county of Denbighshire as late as 1812. What put the locals into such a sudden panic appears to have been the misidentification of an impossibly exotic-looking new arrival into the valleys - the pheasant!

Another national characteristic is the "British love for creating comic rather than frightening monsters." It seems we British deal with our really terrifying monsters by turning them into children's cartoon characters or soft toy versions of themselves. "Nessie," it turns out, is an old Scottish pet name for Agnes.

It's a fine introduction to the beasts of British folklore – as well as some very modern British cryptozoological phenomena – making it the perfect small gift both for seasoned forteans and not-yet-enthusiasts alike.

VERDICT: 9 OUT OF 10

A SMALL THING OF GREAT BEAUTY

© Matt Salusbury

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder part 2

As self-defined prophet and former newsreader Jeron Criswell King, aka The Amazing Criswell, notes in his bizarre prologue to the 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space, “ you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable, that is why you are here.” For many forteans, there was a catalyst in their early life that first kindled their interest in the world of strange phenomena, and set them on the road to a preoccupation with high strangeness. Asked what that formative experience was, a number of today’s forteans now in their forties – at least those who grew up in the UK, Holland or the Commonwealth – would answer that what first got them hooked on “the mysterious, the unexplainable” was reading World of Wonder’s “Strange Stories”.

World of Wonder (WoW) magazine appeared every Saturday – usually dropped through the letterbox by the paper boy – into many households in the first half of the 1970s. WoW dealt with science, history, geography, technology (especially Spitfires and the latest cutting edge developments in “the mighty transistor”). But by far its strongest section was its “Strange Stories” spot. “Strange Stories” presented the kids of the 1970s with a firm grounding all the usual fortean staples - the Marie Celeste, the “abominable snowman”, sasquatch, the Cardiff giant, Kasper Hauser, Indian wolf children, the “Devil’s footprints “of 1855 Devon, the hollow earth theories of John Clere Symmes and others, Spring-Heeled Jack, the man in the iron mask, the Oak Island money pit, James Churchwald and his alleged lost continent of Mu, the Tunguska explosion. (WoW 156 carried an illustration of alarmed Transiberian Railway passengers in Tsarist Russia period beards, stiff shirt collars and all, witnessing the explosion from afar,) Less well known mysteries that seems to have been forgotten about in the intervening 40 years were also given space in the pages of “Strange Stories”, (see, for example the “Strange Phenomena Involving U-Boats in WWI” below.)

World of Wonder was a slightly text-heavier spin off publication from its sister publication Look & Learn, founded in 1962 by Leonard Matthews, who had launched several children’s comics, and brought in some of the best of the comics illustrators to engage the kids with dynamic illustrations that would draw children in to history, geography and science. Both World of Wonder and Look & Learn had to do this while also somehow remaining acceptable to parents – a tall order, and probably the reason why there were so few appearance of any “Strange Stories” on World of Wonder’s cover.

World of Wonder shared several illustrators with Look & Learn. British childern’s comics expert Steve Holland recalls that World of Wonder came into being in an attempt to produce a format that – it was hoped - could be easily translated to be sold on to publishers in Germany, France, Italy, Holland and Yugoslavia. In the event, there was only an English version – under the editorship of Robert Bartholomew - and a Dutch language edition. After a five-year run, the publisher that bought the Dutch edition of World of Wonder from publishers IPC decided to go it alone, commissioning their own material. As WoW had less of a pedigree than its slightly brasher cousin Look & Learn, publisher Fleetway (a division of IPC) absorbed WoW into a new look L&L with some extra pages, and Strange Stories continued in L&L, for a while, at least…

It was the illustrations that “Strange Stories” – and its occasionally fortean sister series “Talking Point” - particularly excelled at, and which made the biggest impression on its pre-teen audience. (See Part One for more on the usually uncredited WoW artists.) “There Are Giant Serpents in Every Sea” declared WoW 26, depicting a collosal long-necked plesiosaur swimming in bright green seas, dwarfing a sailing ship of the Olden Days, as well as one sea serpent spotted by startled straw-boater and blazer wearing holidaymaker and his wife at the northern English seaside reasort of Skegness in 1966. The fearsome Serrano Cay giant octopus featured on the cover of WoW 179, menacing two Mexican lighthouse keepers when it suddenly came out of the depths in 1905. According to “Strange Stories”, the octopus killed one keeper, Diego Alvez, before his colleague Ferdinand Moxo eventually managed to shoot it with a rifle. Another giant octopus, spotted from the French sailing frigate Alecton. (WoW 76) was depicted in brilliant pinks. There’s also the narrative of James Bartley, (WoW 58), a British harpooner swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falklands in 1891, and cut out alive from its corpse the next day (after his funeral). His hair was bleached by “gastric juices” and he went briefly insane, before he resumed harpooning duties. WoW58 filled a whole page with the gaping mouth of the whale closing in on helpless man overboard Bartley, with the large headline SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Other “Strange Stories” from the annals of natural history and cryptozoology included (WoW 35) a decade of disbelief at Sir Harry Johnston discovery of the okapi in the forests of the Congo until he finally came up with photos of it in 1909. The Parisian pet derby of 1909 (WoW 78) was a race involving the exotic pets of decadent fin de siecle Parisian aristocratic ladies – contestants included an Egyptian dung beetle, a goose, the Princess of Lucinge’s lion cub, a tortoise and a monkey, with some prize pets depicted held on leads by the Parisian aristocratic ladies with girly bows round their necks. After a short race which descended into mayhem as runners tried to stangle or eat each other, Madamoiselle Yturbe’s monkey won. The illustrator got a little carried away with some of the French gentlemen’s top hats, some of which obscured part of the text.
Stranger still was WoW’s short and wilfully obscure ‘Birds that cannot fly” series, which covered (WoW 224) the “Emu War” of 1932, in which the Australian Heavy Battery artillery unit of the Australian Army attempts to exterminate a huge, crop-devastating flock of emus was outwitted by the nimble birds running around in all directions. An emu-proof fence eventually proved slightly more effective.
Incredible journeys were favourite theme of Strange Stories. In WoW 141, Apsley Cherry Gerrard made the worst journey in the world across Antarctica over five weeks in 1991 to collect three penguin eggs. Mark Poltorctzky, aged 13, walked 700 miles across Russia in 1714, surviving trees falling on him and exposure in the snow to reach Moscow ands take up hiw post as an Imperial Choirboy in Moscow in WoW 146. The coffin containing the body of actor Charles Coughlan, (WoW 135) who was buried in a coastal cemetery in Galveston, Texas in 1899, was swept out to sea in a hurricane the following year to finally come ashore on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, close to his birthplace on 15 September 1927. Coughlan’s coffin had made a journey in which it averaged 65-80 miles a day.

Former Italian diplomat Felice Benuzzi and two of his compatriots and fellow prisoners of war interned in Camp 354 in Kenya also made a “Strange Stories”-style incredible journey in WoW 92, escaping to undergo an 18-day ordeal ending in a climb to the summit of Mount Kenya, where they planted a homemade Italian flag, then returned to 354 to give themselves up. They were apparently bored in captivitiy. But my favourite incredible journey story has to be the one from WoW 130 of the extraordinary hardships endured by Frenchman Rene Caille, who made a year-long odyssey in 1828, disguised as a runaway Egyptian slave, to become the first white man to gaze on the legendary splendours of the forbidden city of Timbuktu, thereby claiming a 10,000 franc prize. After many life-threatening episodes, he discovered that Timbuktu had become a complete dump.

For those who found school history lessons boring, there was plenty of Strange Stories of historical revisionism. WoW7 speculated on the possible survival of Louis XVII, crown prince who went missing aged nine in the French Revolution. WoW2 asked, was Napoleon poisoned? WoW 108 asked, was American school teacher of French origin Philip Ney really Napoleon’s Marshall Ney, who had emigrated after surviving a firing squad? Look & Learn (L&L) 692 asked whether Joan or Arc had survived, having not been burnt at the stake after all. WoW 33 presented claims that Guy Fawkes was a patsy, an innocent tenant of the Westminster cellars, caught in an anti-Catholic plot to convince James I that ‘Papists’ were trying to blow him up. WoW 46 offered alternative authors of Shakespeare’s plays, while - somewhat more plausibly – WoW 57 suggested that missing American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was a spy who fell into Japanese hands. “Strange Stories” was an advocate of the teaching of what we would now call “critical thinking”. Always gently sceptical, “Strange Stories” gave these revisionist history theories the time of day but suggested to impressionable young minds that such theses should be taken with at least a healthy pinch of salt

“Strange Stories” seemed to have a particular affection for chancers and adventurers who became living gods. These included penniless Irish sailor David O’Keefe, shipwrecked on the South Sea island of Yap, who was welcomed as its king, who displaced the German “agent” active on the island at the time, who built a trading fleet to export coconut kernels direct to Hong Kong, who saw of pirates and Dutch colonists, before a German battleship and troops finally forced him into exile in 1901. “Lawyer Lebeau” tricked onto a prison ship to New France (as the French possessions in Canada were then known), where he was captured by the Iroquois. He persuaded the Iroquois nation he was a messenger from the Great Spirit, convincing them his law degree was a letter from the King of France giving him authority to flatten mountains. The Iroquois eventually lost interest in him (WoW 257). And there was also James Brooke, who “accidentally” became king of the headhunters in 1920s Borneo. Not quite a living god, but certainly a Venezuelan national hero after his work as a “hero doctor” fighting a plague epidemic in Peru was Pierre Bougrat, whose Strange Story featured in WoW 158. Whilst esteemed in Latin America, right up to his death in 1962, Bouget was regarded by the French has an fugitive convicted murderer, having escaped to South America from France’s Devil’s Island penal colony on a small boat with five other convicts.

Are there patterns that can be discerned in high strangeness? There are certainly themes that keep coming up in “Strange Stories.” As we saw in Part One, hoaxers, spectacular criminals and spectacular crimes, hoaxes, amazing scams, archaeological mysteries, extreme eccentrics, curses were popular Strange Stories subjects, as were unusual episodes from the annals of war. Cryptozoology was also a Strange Stories favourite, lending itself as it did to spectacular illustration possibilities. Then there were Strange Stories clusters of incredible journeys filled with hardship, historical revisionism and men who accidentally became prophets or living gods (see text). Timeslips - especially Parisian timeslips - were another theme, including the sighting by two British tourists at Versailles in 1901 of women in the clothing of Marie Antoinette’s time. Then there was the apparent timeslip involving the disappearance – along with all records of her having been there - of a Mrs Randolph staying in room 343 of the Carillon Hotel, Paris with her daughter during the 1899 Paris Exhibition. The ever sceptical “Strange Stories” told its young readers that there was a likely rational explanation – Mrs Randolph disappearing from history, right down to her entry in the hotel register, was actually down to her being discreetly spirited away to hospital by a Parisian health authoritiy conspiracy, they being eager to avoid panic in the streets after being alerted that she had caught “the plague” in India.

But for a bizarrely obscure fortean sub-genres, nothing comes close to Strange Stories apparent pre-occupation with strange phenomena associated with German U-Boats of the First World War. Strange Stories catalogued four such cases, which you don’t read so often about in fortean circles these days.

One “Strange Stories” round-up of maritime mysteries featured U-Boat U236 which survived a mid-Atlantic torpedoing from a British sub in 1917 after one of these malfunctioned and jumped over U236. A year later, another (unnumbered) U-Boat fired a torpedo at the British Q ship Stock Force, only for the torpedo to slew back and blow the U-Boat up. WoW39 described how the U-Boat UB-65, reportedly haunted by the ghost of a dead officer, was beset by inexplicable disasters, and was spotted floating apparently abandoned by an American sub in 1918. (“Strange Stories”, perhaps wisely in view of possible parental surveillance, generally steered clear of ghosts.) WoW 25’s “Talking Point”, alongside better-known sea serpent sightings, had a dramatic illustration of Captain Georg van Forstner, on the bridge of yet another World War One U-Boat, this one while on active service in 1915, witnessing a strange, 60 ft- long “crocodile-like creature” – which in WoW’s illustration more closely resembles a finned Jurassic mososaur - being blown out of the sea and into the air by the boiler of explosion of a sinking British steamer that he’d recently torpedoed.

Normally sceptical WoW refrained from presenting a perfectly logical explanation for the “crocodile-like creature,” but the misidentified, fleetingly-glimpsed thrown up floating decaying corpse of a basking shark of whale as it shot past Captain Forstner before plunging beneath the waves does spring immediately to mind.

Some “Strange Stories” weren’t all that strange at all – Cardinal Wolsey’s rise to power, the invention of jeans by Levi Strauss, Napoleonic prisoners of war making intricate models out of bone – and the only mystery is what they were doing in Strange Stories at all. Just as newspapers have the odd “slow news day,” Strange Stories had the odd low strangeness week in which presumably already commissioned historical features – such as the dramatic yet not particularly strange rescue of Mussolini by powered glider, or the noteworthy but not exactly eyebrow-raised 1944 Operation Valkyrie plot against Hilter - had to be hastily rebranded under a dubious Strange Stories masthead. There is, after all, only so much strangeness out there suitable for a child audience, and “Strange Stories” had to find enough strangness to fill at least a full page every week for over five years.

And indeed, the “Strange Stories” strangeness supply did eventually run dry. WoW was taken over by Look & Learn in February 1975, with only a week’s warning to subscribers. While “Strange Stories” was among the limited number of WoW spots that made the transition, other regular WoW spots finished abruptly in mid-series, when WoW 258 was suddenly followed by L&L 686. L&L is best known for the sci-fi strip The Trigan Empire, which lost is excellent illustrator Don Lawrence soon afterwards and went downhill from there. The first L&L “Strange Stories” was the Turin Shroud, which had already been done as a Strange Story a couple of years before back in the old WoW glory days. “Strange Stories” went into decline in its L&L ownership, it ceased to be a weekly event and became more and more occasional, until it finally stuttered out of existence and faded from view forever around L&L 649 in 1975. The short fortean series “Haunted Britain” (featuring Geoff the talking mongoose and Drury Lane’s numerous theatre ghosts, followed, but L&L was a less nurturing environment for forteana than WoW, and it lived on only in the memories of then young forteans. (And not just the fortysomethings – at least one thirtysometing Strange Stories fan on online blogs recall discovering the series after stumbling across a complete set of WoW back issues in a box in a friend’s attic. Look & Learn, having gobbled up WoW and several other kid’s “knowledge” weeklies – Treasure, Tell Me Why, Speed & Power – finally bit the dust in 1982 – killed off by, of all things, soaring paper prices.

Most “Strange Stories” were presented to a young audience in good faith, and if “Strange Stories” team felt a story was not grounded in some kind of fact, they said so. After all, the “Strange Stories” team would face the wrath of angry parents if they passed off fantasy as sort-of-possibly-fact to the kids. But in retrospect, it seems one or two “Strange Stories” that were in fact groundless tall stories may have slipped through the net, probably copied from other secondary sources that had been unwittingly duped and hoaxed.

In this category of ‘probably made up’ was the alleged Parisian pet derby related above. Did the Parisian aristocratic ladies’ exotic pets derby (WoW 78) really happen?

And, finally… there is the most intriguing Strange Story of the Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California in the 1870s (WoW 228). According to Strange Stories, Imperial China under the Qing Dynasty sent a fleet of junks on a punitive expedition to America, in revenge for the way America cruelly exploited and humiliated Chinese immigrant workers in that country. So hopelessly antiquated was the Chinese invasion fleet that its navigators ran into trouble after underestimating the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and headed for Monterrey, which had earlier briefly been the state capital of California, but not anymore. On landing, the Chinese invaders could not get the good citizens of Monterrey to understand that they’d come to punish them, and the locals seized them and carried them shoulder-high through the streets in welcome, as depicted by the “Strange Stories” illustrator. The invaders quickly assimilated into the immigrant Chinese community of Monterrey.

The brutal Qing dynasty certainly couldn’t give much of a damn what happened to the hordes of peasants, who were risking life and limb to flee the feudal miseries of China and its rulers in the first place. Qing China’s formidable foreign ministry, the Zongli Yamen, had been in operation since 1861, and its intelligence-gathering section woul have been informed of the correct distance across the Pacific. Any fleet of war junks China could have raised would probably have been blasted out of the sea by the numerous European, American or Japanese fleets that had taken up residence in the “Treaty Ports” they had carved out along China’s coast. And the internet is suspiciously silent on the subject of any alleged 1870s Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California. This begins to look awfully like one of the small town19th century American newspaper tall tales made up to fill space, or a faintly racist satire on contemporary Chinese immigration. Can any FT readers enlighten us on whether this particularly Strange Story really is made up?

As a nine-year old I of course believed every word of it, I had read it in the totally groovy coll fab Strange Stories, after all, so it must be true. I even vigorously defended the veracity of Strange Stories-sourced evidence, 13ft-high Mexican giant skeletons and all, against contemptible doubting Look & Learn readers in the back of the car on the school run.

While there have been compilations of Look & Learn published since its demise, back issues of World of Wonder and “Strange Stories” seem to command little value or interest – so little interest in fact, that I wasn’t even able to find out from ebay how much I could get for the complete bound volumes of WoW that earlier this year were still knocking around the home I grew up in. My mum wanted to throw them out, so I donated them to the offices of Fortean Times for safekeeping – a suitable home for what Charles Fort called “damned data.”

SOURCES

World of Wonder bibliography http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/bibliography.html

26pigs.com – reminiscences on World of Wonder http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/index.html

Official Look & Learn website http://www.lookandlearn.com

The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, selected by Stephen Pickles, Century/Random House, London, 2007

World of Wonder is held in the British Library serials collection (http://catalogue.bl.uk), shelf mark P.993/58. The Fortean Times office holds a complete bound set of World of Wonder.

Update (2025): The bound copies of World of Wonder and Look and Learn featuring Strange Stories are now held at the Charles Fort Institute, their contact details are on their homepage.

Farewell to Colindale

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, no 241, October 2008


Colindale is drab North London suburb that most Londoners, let alone people from out of town, would be hard-pressed to find a reason for visiting. For many, its only draw is the creaky 1930s building at 120 Colindale Avenue, which houses the British Library’s national newspaper collection.

Charles Fort, of course, spent way too much time in the British Library (BL) newspaper collection, back when it was still housed in the original British Library complex in Bloomsbury. That circular reading room, where Karl Marx also researched Das Kapital, is now a permanent exhibit surrounded by the British Museum, but don’t expect to find Fort on the list of famous BL ticket-holders displayed there. Shortly after Fort’s day, the newspaper collection shipped out to leafy Colindale.

Most researchers have a love-hate relationship with Colindale, and its reliance on the world’s least user-friendly format, microfilm. Most of the newspaper collection has ended up as fiddly spools of this albatross-like intermediate technology. The BL admits its surveys of Colindale users found their experience of Colindale was ‘very poor.’

But frustration with Colindale now turns to teary-eyed nostalgia, as the newspaper collection will soon be leaving. Its digital and microfilm elements will move to the excellent British Library site at St Pancras, close to the Channel Tunnel train terminal. Old-school physical periodicals on actual newspaper will go to 262 km of shelving in the ‘low-oxygen’ building in the BL’s Document Supply Centre in distant Boston Spa, up North in West Yorkshire. The BL press office scotched rumours put about by a marketing manager that the new facility’s automated newspaper handling machines looked like Daleks. (Source: author’s notes on ‘A Library for the 21st Century’ presentation by Barry Smith, senior marketing manager BL St Pancras, 21 April 2008)

Scanned or photocopied newspaper pages can be ordered (for a fee) but once the newspapers have moved to Boston Spa, you will only be able to get your hands on the actual physical copies there ‘in extreme circumstances’ and at least 24 hours notice. (Source: email from BL press office Lawrence Christiansen, 15 August 2008)

You won’t be able to walk into Boston Spa unannounced and expect newspapers to be delivered to the desk in as little as 45 minutes, as you currently can at Colindale. Once a newspaper is on microfilm and digital, you’ll usually have to go to St Pancras to see it on these media. An ever-shrinking proportion of newspapers will remain that they’ll let you actually handle at Boston Spa.

Why the move? 30,000 people trek out to Colindale annually, to hasten the destruction of the collection by handling it with their own fingers and thumbs. 15 per cent of the print collection has been ‘rendered unusable’ by those pesky readers handling it, with another 19 per cent of newspapers ‘high risk’ enough that they’ll will need withdrawing soon.

Fortean researchers have until December before the newspapers start their gradual migration out to St Pancras and Boston Spa. The collection will go within three years, and Colindale finally closes its creaky doors in 2012.

Colindale’s opportunities for local procrastinatory skiving for researchers will also be a thing of the past. Gone forever will be work avoidance breaks spent browsing in the Japanese pound shop in Colindale’s ‘Oriental City’ shopping centre and Hannants, Britain’s biggest aviation model shop nearby.

So be quick about it if you’ve ever wanted to hold in your hands the 13 March 1986 print edition of The Sun newspaper with the headline ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’. If you’re curious about whether the Westmoreland Gazette reported any pre-1950 sightings of giant eels on Lake Windermere, or have even wanted to check a century’s worth of North Wales newspapers for possible references to Llangorse Lake’s giant pike, do it now if you’re a technophobe or you dislike microfilm as much as I do.

One day the BL’s complete collection will be ‘digital surrogate’ - digitised copies of microfilm spools. Digital will hopefully get cheaper and easier, but until then, the BL will continue to transfer paper copies onto microfilm and (maybe) digitise these. They hope to have 3 million pages of microfilm digitised by the end of 2008, but with 750 million pages of the stuff at £1 a page to digitise, expect to be swearing at snapping, scratching and jamming microfilm for a long time to come. My favourite microfilm ritual is discovering a spool that’s never been ordered before, so you have to take it to the enquiries desk where they loudly ‘trepan’ a spindle hole into the spool using a hammer and a centre punch on the library floor.

By keeping its microfilming operation, the BL wisely hedges its bets about digital formats, pointing out that the long-term archival permanence of digital media like CD-Rom is still unproven. Most customers going to the BL still want to handle paper books and newspapers. And despite BL’s stated aim to get its customers to ‘migrate’ to digital document delivery, 70 per cent of all BL copying is delivered at the request of punters in paper format and sent by post.

© Copyright Matt Salusbury 2008



The excellent British Library St Pancras site. Photo: © Matt Salusbury

Note: since this article was written, the British Library has announced that it will also be moving its "low-use" science and humanities serials and monographs from its depot in Micawber Street (round the corner from the St Pancras site) to Boston Spa, starting in January. The BL's estimate of when the newspaper library collection will start to move is now being reported as "later in 2009". See www.bl.uk/collectionmoves for details.


See also British Library collections leave London from the Freelance of October 2008.

Freak Show

Freak Show

One of several conjoined lamb skulls from the NHM collection. Photo: copyright Isabelle Merminod, all rights reserved.


A rare glimpse at the freaks collection London's Natural History Museum
This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, October 2007

They look like gone-wrong GM experiments, or the products of chemical contamination or the fallout from Chernobyl, but many of the specimens in the Natural History Museum’s ‘anomalies collection’ are well over a hundred years old.
This isn’t a collection as such, and is spread over the mammals collection, as ‘abnormalities fall outside taxonomy.’ The curators are careful to avoid tasteless sensationalism, but that’s how the museum started, as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ assembled by the likes of Hans Sloan, founder of the British Museum, from which London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) grew. The mid-seventeenth century collection mania of the aristocratic “grand tour” set included collecting ‘oddities and abnormalities,’ and there were even Mediterranean cottage industries turning out fake prodigies in the form of altered skulls or tampered-with stuffed animals.
Gradually, the cabinet of curiosities came to be arranged in a more orderly fashion, in a way supposed to reflect the organisation of the natural world. The freaks became an embarrassment and were relegated to the cupboards, eventually ending up in storage in the eleven-storey Mammal Tower at the Museum’s site in Kensington. Some of these prodigies were brought out for a rare public viewing at a well-attended one-off ‘Freaks of Nature’ lunchtime lecture event last December. The curators who presented them were clearly enjoying themselves. NHM Mammals Curator Richard Sabin told how he had been inspired to go into zoology by a childhood of Bank Holidays spent in the back of the car being driven by his dad, looking for a suburban museum where he was promised a two-headed pig. (They always got lost and never made it to see the two-headed pig before closing time.) “Now I get to work with a pig with two bottoms,” said Sabin, with some pride.



NHM mammals curator Richard Sabin proudly displays a two-headed lamb skull.. Photo: copyright Isabelle Merminod, all rights reserved


Specimen 79522, as the pig with two bottoms is officially known, was acquired from Barry Knight in Edwardian times. It has two bodies and a single head; the ‘extra’ two front legs protrude out of the creature’s back. It almost certainly died as a newborn piglet. Sabin says that, while we are uneasy about the current high-speed genetic modifications science is throwing up; selective breeding has been going on for thousands of years with domestic animals. Sabin notes that, with ‘their genes tampered with by humans for so long,’ most freaks that turn up are pets or farm animals. ‘Egypt and Ancient Rome documented deformed domestic animals as portents of the gods.’ (See FT 224;21 for a survey of domestic prodigies from Greek and Roman sources, and FT 223: 57 for a seventh century Korean ‘pig with two bottoms,’ interpreted as a favourable omen.)
While Sabin’s predecessors locked the freaks away, dispersed among the Museum’s three quarters of a million mammal specimens gathered over 250 years, the freaks have long been in constant demand for study by vets, looking for clues to ‘developmental defects’ in pets and cattle.
‘It’s a difficult thing to admit you have a passion for two-headed sheep,’ says Sabin. The Museum’s ‘very small collection of abnormalities’ includes two examples of conjoined sheep, both of them newborn lambs. One conjoined sheep skull came from a hospital medical collection and has a large skull joined to a smaller skull, ‘one skull hasn’t developed to the same degree.’
Another two-headed lamb specimen has two skulls that haven’t separated. In the centre of the face, the left and right eye socket of the two skulls have fused into a single third socket – there are two rows of teeth of the first and second skull side by side. It’s ‘fantastically symmetrical, (this is) not that uncommon in domestic animals… We’ve tampered with their [domestic animals’] genes through breeding.”
The Museum’s collection of ‘polydactyl cat leg bones’ is a section of wooden board with the bones of the front limbs of several cats stuck to it. They have extra toes, some up to seven on each foot, ‘quite damaging to your sofa,’ comments Curator Daphne Hill.
Frank Buckland, the nineteenth century naturalist, passed to the Museum a box of delicate rabbit skulls where the top and bottom jaws didn’t ‘fit’ with each other, so that the teeth weren’t wearing down. Ms Hill showed the ‘huge corkscrew teeth’ in these skulls, but added that many corkscrew-teeth afflicted rabbits grew to a ripe old age, apparently not too bothered by their bizarre deformity. Ms Hill also showed us two skulls of hippos, each with one endlessly growing corkscrew canine – but the animal had survived this. And the Museum’s aircraft hangar-sized depot in Wandsworth, South London, has ‘twenty-one and a half skeletons of large whales,’ including sperm whales with lower jaws that grew into outlandish corkscrewing curling shapes, but their ‘teeth wear shows they lived to their early teens.’
The most surprising aspect of the NHM’s hard science freak show was how often deformed animals in the wild made it to a ripe old age. This suggests that we may be wrong in our received ideas about ‘nature red in tooth and claw,’ with the stronger animals eliminating the ‘weak’ of their own kind. Ms Hill showed a the skull of a North Canada wolf with a short muzzle, the upper jaw’s teeth didn’t fit the lower jaw, so it couldn’t bite its prey. It was an adult and ‘had very worn teeth as if eating scraps which shows that as a pack member there was some kind of social organisation that allowed it to survive.’
‘Evidence for social interaction’ that accommodates deformed members of mammal communities could also be a force at work among North Sea white beaked dolphins. In the course of a century, the Museum has acquired sections of vertebral column from three different individuals of this two-meter long species of dolphin. The vertebral columns are ‘bent like the U-bend of a sink,’ giving the dolphins floppy spines. This was ‘something that developed in the womb’, but the dolphins that had this deformity were adults with full stomachs when they were found washed up on the beach. Either a floppy spine doesn’t matter so much when you’re buoyed up by water, or the pod of dolphins were organised to feed their floppy-spined members by driving shoals of fish at them.



Sabin with floppy porpoise vertebrae. Photo: Copyright Isabelle Merminod, all rights reserved.
Sabin also cast light on a possible explanation for some sea monster carcasses. He said that when whales decompose, their skin detaches as the outer layer of blubber rots away. The skin floats away, the skeleton in some cases come out of their mouths, leaving an indistinguishable “globster” mass.
The Mammal Tower’s cabinets also house a stuffed cheetah from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that, unlike normal spotted cheetahs, was striped along its back. It was found in 1927 and named as a new species of “King Cheetah.” Recently, an orphaned cub with the same markings was found, and it bred at South Africa’s Kruger National Park. It had one or two striped young; the others were normal spotted cheetahs. The collection also has stuffed Indian civets with anomalous white paws, and specimens of the Bull Island mouse. Bull Island is just off the coast near Dublin, and is a sand bank, which formed just over 200 years ago. Since then, mice that colonized the island developed a freakish sandy colouration, and it was such an ‘advantage to be yellow on a sandy island’ that the whole population is now sand-coloured.
Some animal deformities aren’t the result of gone-wrong embryology, but of animals coping with disease or even accidents. Roe deer usually shed their antlers once a year. Antlers that – for whatever reason – don’t shed take on a weird form, like a shapeless mass of fuzzy, velvety coral. We were also shown a roe deer’s lower leg illegally snared on the Sussex coast. Wire had cut into the bone, but bone has grown over and around the site of the wire snare, the snare had been round the deer’s leg for at least two years when the deer died, of natural causes. It had lived a long time, it had a mature skull. The bone could have grown around the snare in under a year, ‘bone incredibly reactive material,’ Sabin explained.
The NHM is now proud of its centuries-old freaks, recognizing that they ‘underpins the modern museum,’ and
acknowledging the role they played its foundation. But there are no plans to put them on regular display to the public, and the NHM still does draw the line somewhere. There are no cyclopean freaks in its collection. Ms Hill says they were offered a stuffed rearing cyclopean foal from a private collection that was up for auction, ‘but it was on offer at quite a high price and we don’t normally pay large sums for specimens.’
The newly-opened Wellcome Collection, also in London, has anomalous animal specimens including a two-tailed lizard, while the city’s Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons has a truly stomach-churning collection of human foetal anomalies.

© Matt Salusbury 2007



Two bones from legs of an adult red deer in the Museum's collection. It had caught one leg in an illegal wire snare, and the bone had grown round the cut over several years. Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury

Thanks to freelance photographer Isabelle Merminod for kindly agreeing to licence the use of her copyrighted photos for this site only. You can see more of her documentary photos on her website.

Update (October 2012): I visited the Museum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, which is itself a museum piece dating from the days of Baron Georges Cuvier, the turn of the 19th century founder of comparative anatomy. In its truly stomach-churning hall of skeletons and pickled bits of baboon and so on, it has a little corner of conjoined twin births of calves and cyclopean kittens, among others. Mercifully, they're not the actual pickled freaks themselves, but painted plaster-casts of them, and they are at least 200 years old.

The Museum being a temple to immediately post-Revolution enlightenment and the Age of Reason, there had to be a scientific point to its gruesome freaks display, and a didactic purpose to it for the edification of the masses. They found one - the freak plaster casts are divided into freaks "with an axis of symmetry" and "without an axis of symmetry".

Weird Weekend 2006

This Fortean Bureau of Investigation report from the December 2006 issue of Fortean Times (FT 217) appears as part of a general update of the site.

All pictures copyright Matt Salusbury



Woolfardishworthy, North Devon, so good they named it twice. Also known as Woolsery

Just getting to the village of Woolfardishworthy, Devon, home of the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) and its Weird Weekend 2006 convention, was already beginning to look like one of the CFZ’s own expeditions to the ends of the Earth in search of unknown animals. Here’s a travel tip: be wary of any railway branch line that’s named after an otter. My journey along the “Tarka Line,” which (eventually) takes passengers from Exeter to Barnstable, became a two-hour nightmare wait, followed by standing room only in a packed carriage. The stress and tedium was relieved only by the tall man in the orange ponytail, with his loud and clear recitations from a battered copy of A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy.

The “Tarka Line” experience was followed by a cross-country bike ride featuring a series of terrifying 1 in 5 gradients that dropped down sharp to disappear into dark, misty woods. Washed out at the campsite, I had my own cryptozoological encounter the next morning, picking strange yellow snails off my sodden bike.

Down at the barn-like Woolfardishworthy Sports and Community Hall, posters for the young farmers tractor pull event shared noticeboard space with an exhibition of Bigfoot images. Fiancées, girlfriends and neighbours’ kids had been roped into helping out, including “Little Ross” the microphone runner, and 14-year-old David Philips who ran the Weird Weekend sound and lights.

Highlights of the 12-hour endurance marathon that was ‘Weird Saturday’ included Chris Moiser from the Big Cats in Britain Group. The group made a Freedom of Information Act request for data on Big Cat sightings from all the UK’s 600-odd councils and 36 police forces. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s three-inch thick file of police logs revealed that the police force keeps a tranquiliser gun in its stores, and that many more sightings are reported to the police than to the press. Paul Crowther uncovered a local cottage industry in faked Big Cat photos.

Richard Ingram’s talk on the fall of civilizations listed the usual catastrophes, and some unexpected threats – the financial markets leaving ‘The City’ would pretty much finish off Britain’s economy overnight, while a sudden epidemic could take out the very small pool of people who keep nuclear power stations ticking over.

Ufologist Lionel Beer looked at several dozen potential locations for that “elusive historical butterfly,” King Arthur’s court at Camelot, and concluded that it may all be (literally) a load of rubbish, or a camelotte in French.

UFO researcher Nick Redfern – one of very few people who makes a full-time living out of what he calls “the subject”, had flown in from the States to talk about “saucer spies” – Special Branch, M15 and RAF Provost and Security Service’s surveillance of ufologists in general, and his colleague Matthew Williams in particular. Redfern’s thesis is that the security services wrongly believe that ufologists are being used as cover by other “subversive” groups.

In the CFZ quiz, “one of the greatest events of the Fortean year,” the punters team beat the experts’ team to walk away with Alien Big Cat models as prizes. By then, events were running a little late, on “Devon time.”

Paul Cropper arrived after a 37-hour journey from Australia at his own expense to give two talks in an afternoon, pretty much straight off the plane. He showed rare footage of a purported Australian black panther, and footage of a mainland thylacine, (Tasmania tiger) which we all agreed looked very much like a fox – an animal introduced to Australia to keep down rabbit numbers, and which quickly went feral.

Mr Cropper also treated us to a history of the Yowie, the Australian Bigfoot. Reports go back to Aboriginal traditions of the Dulgar (“hairy man”) from rock paintings and from stories collected and written down by Alexander Harris in the 1840s. (He thought he was being hoaxed at the time.) Many newspaper reports in the 1870s and 1880s refer to “many hairy men”, but then the Yowie disappears between 1910, reappearing only in 1975. Before 1975 they were known as Yahoos or “hairy men.”



Guardian columnist and fellow NUJ London Freelance Branch member Jon Ronson on owl-worshipping frat boy summer camp Bohemian Grove

“By the way, Ronson, you’re not going to say the Queen Mother was a reptile, are you?” asked CFZ Director Jonathan Downes as he introduced Guardian columnist and Channel 4 investigator Jon Ronson. After hanging out with subsequently banned fundamentalist Omar Bakri Mohamed, and a politically correct Ku Klux Klan faction that banned robes, cross burnings and racism, Ronson sneaked into gatherings of the Bilderberg group and then disguised himself in “preppy clothes” to gatecrash and film Bohemian Grove. This is a frat-boy “white flight” resort set up in the redwoods outside San Francisco in the 1920s, and is the venue of a bizarre two-week world leaders’ summer camp where the immensely powerful dress up in robes and do a mock human sacrifice of a wicker figure which they burn in the belly of a giant stone owl. Part pantomime, part Rocky Horror Show, part burlesque drag show and all tacky sub-Shakespearian pageant, the greatest mystery of Bohemian Grove is why the likes of (allegedly) George Bush Snr, Conrad Black, John Major and Clint Eastwood would want to spend their scarce holidays in a juvenile all-male environment where “80-year old men piss against trees.”

Although this Weird Weekend saw 140 people coming through the door from nine countries, it is also becoming a family-orientated event “for ordinary people, not just Fortean insiders.” A terribly nice Norway-based Satanist couple complete with upturned pentangle necklaces rubbed shoulders with the “very God-fearing” people of Woolfardisworthy. There was a kid’s treasure hunt and mad hatter’s tea party (Richard Freeman in his usual top hat,) while punky local schoolboy band C.A.S entertained us with their “Hunting the Yeti” song as one of their mates cavorted in a borrowed yeti costume. Mr Downes laments that “kids don’t keep caterpillars anymore” and has been working to reinvigorate the enthusiasm of the village children for natural history. “I believe in community,” says Downes. When Weird Weekend started seven years ago, he found the “Fortean scene was a bloody shambles – ‘official’ investigation teams, 40 or 50 groups with five members, everybody at each others’ throats.”

Goth zoologist and former head zookeeper for reptiles Richard Freeman reported back on the CFZ’s Gambia expedition in search of two elusive beasts – “Gambo”, a finned, crocodile-like carcass found washed up on Bungalow Beach and buried in the dry sand by holidaying missionary Owen Burnham in 1983, and “Ninka Nanka” a huge, swimming crested serpentine dragon that makes you drop dead within five years of seeing it.

Bungalow Beach is now heavily developed, and the team quickly found that after more than 20 years the sand had become too wet to preserve any Gambo bones. Witnesses they interviewed describe something very like a large dolphin.

The expedition found only one living witness to the Ninka Nanka, who claimed a witch doctor saved his life after his sighting, but even then he still lost his hair. Others told how relatives had seen it and then died. Some reports described a “fantastic, Godzilla-sized” animal. A story about a lorry crashing after running into a huge furrow left by a slithering Ninka Nanka in 2000 didn’t match the wreckage of a much older-looking, rusty wreck with trees growing through it. Alleged Ninka Nanka scales were passed around the audience. We agreed they were probably mica chips.

Mr Freeman concluded that if there is a Ninka Nanka – maybe a large, crested or combed swimming snake – it has died out in Gambia, and we will have to look for it over the river in more remote Guinea.


Footprint casts and photos of tracks on Paul Vella's Bigfoot stall

Paul Vella, of the Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers, set out a stall laden with Bigfoot footprint casts and photos of more Bigfoot prints. Mr Vella is a UK-based crime scene investigator specializing in computers and mobiles, but his interest in Bigfoot was kicked off by the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film – 40 years old next year – “it really bugged me.” Mr Vella asserts that, Patterson aside, “nobody makes any money out of Bigfoot… a lot of people spend a lot of money on Bigfoot research” and he knows of “five Bigfoot-related divorces. It consumes you.” He has promised his wife he will give up his research in 2010 and put all his Bigfoot books on E-bay. He presented convincing evidence for Bigfoot being real – prints, casts, and spine-tingling recordings of Bigfoot screams, which he played to us. He has heard rumours that logging interests were behind some obvious Bigfoot hoaxes in a conspiracy to stop their patch becoming a logging-free Bigfoot reserve.

Weird Weekend speakers, from left: Rendlesham witness Larry Warren, Ufologist Nick Redfern, Creaturama's Mussosaurus, cryptozoology's First Lady Corinna James, CFZ Directory Jonathan Downes, Danish lake monster investigator Lars Thomas
“It wasn’t a lighthouse,” insists Larry Warren, former USAF Security Police patrolman and witness to the UFO encounter at Rendelsham Forest around Christmas 1980, events so famous they have become known as the “British Roswell.” Warren, who now lives in Liverpool, recalls seeing a “craft under intelligent control” which fired “pencil-thin beams” into the sheds containing “the ordinance.” By “the ordinance” he meant a vast store of tactical nuclear weapons. As someone who grew up holidaying with my grandparents in the area, I found this the scariest Rendelsham revelation. It was Europe’s most important nuclear arms dump and nuclear target, and “Greenham Common was a diversion, we were guarding the nukes.” Warren went public in 1982 after the suicide of a colleague and fellow witness, “who should not have been allowed to carry arms” and alleges “brutal interrogation… violation of human rights in the 48 hours after the incident” by the Base authorities. The Rendlesham investigation is unusual in that “the witnesses push forward the investigation rather than the UFO community at large.”

The fallout from the alleged terrorist plot in the week before Weird Weekend grounded many flights to and from the UK, but in the event there was only one speaker who cancelled. The ever-hilarious Ronan Coghlan began his talk on the legendary “goatman” by apologizing in advance in case his dentures flew out during his talk – his denture fixative had been confiscated as he boarded his plane at Belfast as a suspected possible “liquid explosive.”

Coghlan’s goatman turns out throughout Europe – Pan and the Satyrs of Greece and Rome, the Danish geetman, the Scottish urish, and the nastier German bokschit. Pan is far older than the gods of Olympus, and was originally part of a whole race of Pans. Modern American legends – like the axe-wielding, murderous goatman of Prince’s County, Virginia – superimpose gone-wrong genetic experimentation nonsense onto older spooky campfire stories.

If you missed the Weird Weekend talks, you can still see highlights on CFZ TV, accessible via the CFZ website.


Jackalope, a fake monster made from deer antlers and a stuffed hare, on show in the CFZ museum
Weird Weekend was also a chance to visit the CFZ’s new headquarters at Myrtle Cottage, Back Street, Woolfardishworthy. The new office was as busy and crowded as my carriage on the “Tarka Line” when I visited, and the conservatory featured a jackalope, a pilot whale skull connected to the Mogwar sea serpent legend, and live snapper turtles and soft-shelled turtles, some of which came the CFZ’s way following Customs seizures. Cuthbert, one of their soft-shelled turtles, is the only known example of a newly discovered species.

Mr Downes rounded off by promising more CFZ expeditions soon – to Orange Country, Texas, in search of a mystery “double-bed sized” snapping turtle, a trip to look for mystery lizards on uninhabited islands in the Canaries, a second Mongolian Death Worm trip, and an expedition to find “the world’s largest earwig” in the South Atlantic on St Helena – the island of the giant insects.

Veteran Fortean John Michell is among the speakers already booked for Weird Weekend 2007, back in the Sports and Community Hall on 17th-19th August. Over dinner in the Farmer’s Arms pub afterwards, eating from a cryptozoology-themed menu that included Beast of Bodmin Steaks, Mr Downes promised the next Weird Weekend would also include Morris dancing and a parade by the local village kids dressed as monsters. “A bit like in The Wicker Man, or like one of those strange villages coming out of the mists in Hammer House of Horror?” I asked.
“Yeah! That’s right!”

© Copyright Matt Salusbury 2006

UPDATE: The local Morris team were unavailable for Weird Weekend 2007, and the proposed children's fancy dress monster parade turned into a Chinese-inspired dragon dance at the opening ceremony and a youth cavorting in a gorilla suit during a rendition of "Hunting The Bigfoot" by a local teenage band.

Sex and the séance room

This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue 233, March 2008

Kittie Klaw, nipple tassle-twirling, fan-dancing Queen of Burlesque is one of Britain’s best known burlesque and striptease performers, as well as a manager of other burlesque acts and a tutor of striptease skills through her Ministry of Burlesque agency. She’s famous in the fetish scene as a cover model on the front of ‘bondage’ magazines, and as a performer at fetish clubs such as London’s notorious Torture Garden. But – stop tittering at the back there! - I wanted to talk to Ms Klaw about her other passion – parapsychology.

Kittie was celebrating the runaway success of Victorian Values when we met. This is her theatrical-length music hall revue, which sends up the dark side of Victorian hypocrisy, and which had its debut at the suitably grand old Hoxton Hall in East London’s Shoreditch last August. Victorian Values sends up the Victorian séance, and features girls who can carry off that Victorian look well, and who look the part in period ‘tight lace-up corsets.’ Kittie directs and plays several characters in the show, including the two de Winter-Fairbottom twins, Kittie and Lilly. One is a bit of a prude, the other is ‘more experimental.’

Of her plans for future productions of Victorian Values, Kittie says that ‘a West End theatre performance is the Holy Grail at the moment.’ At the time of writing, there was a possible TV adaptation in the pipeline in collaboration with Robin Ince, who is part of Ricky Gervais’ writing team and who appeared in The Office. Meanwhile, a shorter, stand-alone sketch taken from Victorian Values, that ‘sexualises’ aspects of the Victorian séance, is doing the rounds as part of Kittie’s regular repertoire. See www.victorianvalues.info for updates.

We began our chat by discussing the connections between Victorian music hall and Spiritualist séances. The expression ‘knocking shop’ to describe a brothel originally comes from the table-rapping spirit world of the séance. The preoccupation with death and ‘the other side’ was often a code for another taboo that couldn’t then be spoken about at all – sex. ‘Sex sells, death compels,’ says Kittie. The hint of eroticism around the séance – sometimes it was more than just a hint – was justified by an ethereal veil of Spiritualist respectability. If you said you believed in the afterlife, you had an explanation when the police came calling and found scantily-clad women in the dark behaving strangely.

Then there’s the example of famous 1850s girl medium Florence Cook (See Fortean Times 179: pages 30-37), who used to disappear into the ‘spirit cabinet’ in séances and give rise to the materialisation of ectoplasmic ‘spirit form’ Katie King, a bawdy character from a pirate family who looked remarkably like Cook, and who would move among the sitters and touch them with remarkably solid hands, and who seemed to enjoy letting the sitters touch her too.

Accordng to Kittie, ‘there has always been a crossover between music hall-style entertainment and belief. Burlesque plays on this.’ Some of the most famous stage mediums, especially the phenomenally popular Davenport Brothers, who started their act in 1859, acknowledged that they were always showmen and never claimed to be mediums. But the Davenports were caught up in the burgeoning Spiritualist movement of the time and their show was hailed as genuine proof of spirit phenomena.

Kittie’s Victorian Values sends up the ‘elaborate farce’ of the Victorian séance. The play’s protagonist, Lord Dashwood, estranged cousin of Queen Victoria, is based on the real Francis Dashwood of the Hellfire Club. In Kittie’s revue, Dashwood is running a fake séance when Queen Victoria walks in, looking to make contact with her dear departed consort Prince Albert. Lord Dashwood panics, but it would be giving away the plot to tell what happens next in the ensuing procession of fake and real phantoms and pint-sized, flapping vampires. Victorian Values also sends up the erotic appeal of Gothic Horror. Kittie describes Gothic Horror’s enduring erotic appeal as ‘legitimised S and M,’ with ‘lots of Freudian sex and death.’ For example, ‘Dracula is the perfect hybrid of Mr Darcy and the Marquis De Sade – ideal husband and depraved sexual mentor in one’.

Victorian Values takes the art of burlesque, which until recently enjoyed a somewhat smutty reputation, back to the traditional burlesque form. Kittie is one of the longest performing artists in the traditional form of burlesque, a tradition for which she vigorously campaigns. Traditional burlesque is a British invention from the 18th century, and to ‘burlesque’ (the word can also be a verb) means ‘to send up, satirise and parody.’ The very first burlesque acts were short operettas, which inspired Gilbert and Sullivan. Trad burlesque could be Blackadder-type historical satire. Napoleon was a favourite subject. P.G. Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster are in the tradition of burlesque, which also mocked the class system as well as history, and told a funny story whilst it satirized taboos. The humour also included what Kittie calls ‘body satire.’

How, then, did the association with American strippers come in? The British burlesque performer and former pub landlady Lydia Thompson, after reaching the pinnacle of the British burlesque world, took her successful act to the US in 1868, with her troupe, the British Blondes – ‘none of whom were actually blondes.’ They may in fact have been among the world’s first peroxide blondes. They were dressed as boys, which meant they could show their ankles.

A variety of complex factors led to American burlesque dropping satire. The Depression, and Prohibition complicated US theatre licensing somewhat, and ‘there was no-class system’ to satirize in America, or at least none that Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes could easily discern. Striptease took over the American burlesque genre, but it was still called ‘burlesque’ because the strip acts alternated with stand-up comics.

Kittie, like Lydia Thompson, came to the performing arts early. Kittie was a professional child ballerina until the age of 12, and some of her burlesque dance routines are en point – right up on tiptoes, ballet-style. But from an early age Kittie showed strong academic achievement, which her school keenly cultivated her science talents. ‘As a girl, if you were one of the few who happened to excel in science, you were automatically pushed to have a career in science.’

A four-year Honours degree in Psychology at Glasgow University followed, with a thesis on ‘remote staring detection,’ in which Kittie felt she got ‘little or no support’ from her department. Glasgow University had just bid unsuccessfully for the Koessler Chair in Parapsychology, (see (See Fortean Times 201: pages 32-39), losing to traditional rivals Edinburgh. While an undergraduate, Kittie was active with the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR), along with astrophysicist Archie Roy. Kittie took part in investigations of a few a cases of hauntings and related phenomena, but never found anything that was convincing beyond someone’s ‘emotional needs.’

Kittie graduated from Glasgow in 2003 with a good mark in ‘straight’ Psychology and was taken on as a student under the personal supervision of Professor Bob Morris, who headed Edinburgh University’s Koessler Unit, to study for an MsC/PHd in Parapsychology.

Her only year at Edinburgh University was ‘the most difficult year of my life.’ The ‘exorbitant’ fees meant she held down a part-time job alongside her full-time research position, and had to scratch around for bits of funding here and there. She set up the Ministry of Burlesque agency at the turn of the 21st century, but the re-emerging burlesque ‘scene’ was still only in London, and she was travelling to and from London from Edinburgh twice a week to perform. She toured student unions and Scottish venues as one of the dancing girls for local cult band Hugh Reed and the Velvet Underpants. As one of the band’s dancing girls she often dressed in a makeshift burkha, which she would rip off for some appropriately costumed comedic belly dancing in the style of Carry On Up the Khyber. Her other dance routine was ‘naughty Nazis, satirical comedy rich in ironic slap-dancing and wrestling, very tongue in cheek.’

Meanwhile, Bob Morris was very supportive, and Kittie has fond memories of ‘many an eccentric chat, end of term parties at his house, (Bob) in his inimitable style, extremely charismatic.’ But Kittie’s research project was dogged by strange mishaps and coincidences.

The experimental part of Kittie’s Masters/PhD research followed from ‘remote staring detection,’ in the area of Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems (DMILS, pronounced ‘dee mills’). ‘You don’t want to say “ESP,” it’s a wee bit “woolly”. It’s a loaded phrase, full of implications… The DMILS research is the examination of a communicative phenomenon which could easily be completely normal but not yet understood. Perhaps even evolutionary.’

At the Koessler Unit, Kittie looked into ‘anomalous transfer of information between creative individuals.’ She found acrobat twins and lifelong double act jugglers from the Edinburgh festival. There were reasonable questions raised by Koessler Unit staff about the definition of ‘creative,’ but Kittie says ‘nobody bothered to point out that the computer system was suspected of being broken at the time. Only after I reported it, did anyone offer the knowledge that it had been acting up for some time, unbeknown to myself or Professor Morris.’ The research seemed to be going OK. It involved one person in a ‘creative’ team meditating on impressions seen by the other in a different room, when they were being shown a random sequence of scenes on video. Kittie became convinced that the sequences weren’t showing in a random order, that they were in an organised pattern.

The department had to take apart the ‘broken’ computer system, to eliminate the possibility it was a computer fault leading to this apparent non-random pattern in video sequences. Instead, Kittie and Bob had to use slides from the 1970s, which were difficult to run, and the subjects they’d brought in for the original experiment with the video begun to move on as the festival left town.

Then ‘the rest of the equipment started to fail.’ Monitors and light bulbs started to go wrong, a computer cable melted. There were so many electrical faults that it became a running departmental joke that Kittie was jinxed. Bob showed her books on people whose very presence messes up experiments. Kittie was ‘trying to be cheerful’ about all this bizarre equipment failure. She called Bob, joking, after the third projector/hardrive/general systems failure: ‘One of us isn’t going to make it to the end of this,’ she told him. And then Bob died suddenly in August 2004 (see obituary in (See Fortean Times 192: pages 26-27) In the time leading up to his death, Kittie had prophetic dreams of attending Bob’s funeral. She took his death as sign that ‘I’m not meant to be doing this.’ Her performing work was taking off by then, and she decided parapsychology was something she could always come back to…

But the paranormal had come into Kittie’s life long before she chose a career in parapsychology. She had a near death experience aged 10, as a result of an allergic reaction. Another childhood experience she describes was a ‘bizarrely accurate vision of the death of Princess Diana a year before she died… A black shadow from the North West coming over Paris, the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel at high speed,’ the feeling that she should ‘watch her back.’ Kittie has also had shared dreams with people, or witnessed other peoples’ dreams as they dream them.

She grew up in East Kilbride, south of Glasgow, although she didn’t know at the time it was a UFO hotspot. The sky round her house would be full of the searchlights of helicopters chasing escapees from the mental hospital over the moors. She remembers one night watching a searchlight moving around in the sky above the woods for ten minutes, ‘then I realised there was no sound beyond the rustling of trees, I couldn’t see a craft, just the light – not a source.’

Kittie’s interest in Ufology extends to a friendship with Ufologist Nick Pope, who got in touch with her after reading her interview in a UFO magazine. Says Kittie of Nick Pope, ‘he’s a lovely gent.’

Fortunately, Kittie saw the funny side of Ufology, as evidenced by the three-minute alien abduction burlesque routine, written by Kittie but still awaiting a debut. This skit ‘burlesques’ (sends up) The X-Files with a chorus line of aliens. It’s got ‘a medical Carry On style sequence, complete with alien surgical clichés referencing what people actually report. Although, as it is a burlesque, we don’t show any of the more “intimate” horrors.’

On a more serious note, Kittie says ‘I still have a problem with electricity… I once famously crashed the whole library network at Glasgow University.’ Bob Morris saw her apparent allergic reaction to electricity, which Kittie’s business partner and fiancé James, an IT expert and world-class programmer, can confirm. Says Kitty, ‘I go through laptops at an alarming rate, I have been known to interfere with TV signals, I get headaches and rashes when vacuum cleaners and computers power up. Light bulbs rarely last around me, cameras often don’t work and I have allergic reactions to the London Underground (seriously!) – I’ve often wondered if it’s the electricity… I get dizzy, over-hot and develop that peculiar rash.’

Then there was the time she participated in an experiment in Glasgow in which electrodes were attached to her head, and they didn’t pick up any data from her at all. This is supposed to happen ‘only if you’re dead.’

BBC Scotland once engaged Kittie as a ‘psychic detective’ as part of a programme that followed young paranormal investigators working in the reputedly haunted Britannia Panopticon Music Hall at Glasgow’s Trongate. At 150 years old, the Panopticon is Britain’s oldest surviving intact music hall. It’s said that it didn’t burn down -– like all the other Glasgow music halls – as there was so much urine soaked into in the wood. Stanley Laurel debuted at the Panopticon aged 16 in 1906, and Kittie has done fundraising gigs for the venue.

The ‘proper investigators’ of Kitty’s SSPR team started with some serious archive research and then set up equipment in various parts of the Panopticon – ‘TV cameras, infra-red cameras, mini-disc digital recorders to record EVP, absolutely nothing happened.’ The BBC team suggested focusing on a mediumship demonstration from a circle of people who believed themselves to be psychic. The result was ‘wordy, incongruous to facts and rather dull actually. It wasn’t data that we could use.’

While Kittie’s team was setting up, there were – understandably given the age of the venue – ‘knocking noises from the pipes (which the BBC got excited about and filmed three times). The suggestion that it was in fact plumbing was vetoed.’ The whole investigation was a ‘non-conclusive event. Those who went in believing came out believing, those who didn’t were unchanged.’

Kittie stressed that the SSPR have many mediums among their members and on its council. SSPR mediums attended the Panopticon vigil as part of the SSPR investigation. For this investigation, ‘myself and a few colleagues were approaching from a scientific viewpoint and had designed the vigil as such. Were at loggerheads with the (other) mediums who showed little regard for the importance of protocol and ignored our requests for structure.’

After the death of Bob Morris, strange stuff continued to happen. During a photo shoot for a fetish magazine at the Erotic Museum of Hamburg, Kittie was posing with straw and porcelain Victorian theatre dummy, when a soft, masculine voice came to her in German, and the dummy’s eyes appeared to look at her. ‘No way! I’ve not enough sleep,’ Kittie told herself. She ‘didn’t tell anyone for a few hours, (thinking) it could be lack of sleep.’ Then she found that the incident coincided with the failure of the photographer’s camera, and her boyfriend said that at the same time he’d chased a light up the museum’s stairs, the same stairs which fellow fetish glamour model Morrigan Hell fell down on a shoot shortly before. ‘So many people had experiences’ of the space, Kittie found out. Photography equipment seizing up on Kittie Klaw modelling shoots is, she says, something that happens often.

For the moment, being a global burlesque glamour phenomenon pretty much precludes a return to professional parapsychology any time soon. Kittie says she remains a sceptic in the academic sense, ‘I haven’t yet formed a firm belief’ one way or another. How does Kittie’s grounding in the science of parapsychology inform how she feels about the strange things that keep happening to her? ‘Studying parapsychology keeps me rational about it. To say that I’m only going to consider certain possibilities, that’s ridiculous… I’ve always maintained my interest in the paranormal… I’m a sceptical enquirer in the academic sense, but a fascinated enquirer with a desire to be convinced.’

‘Sceptic,’ according to Kittie, is a word that has come into disrepute over the years, like ‘burlesque’.

See also www.kittieklaw.com

© Matt Salusbury 2007