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.

The woodwoses of Wissett and the imps in Wenhaston Doom

Thoughtful woodwose, Wissett church font



Less intelligent-looking woodwose on the same font



Damaged cross-legged woodwose



Woodwose with club, face vandalised

I discovered another Suffolk church with woodwoses in it, at Wissett, north of Halesworth. Not only does it have woodwoses on the font, there is evidence from tiny flecks of turquoise paint and from parish records, that they used to be painted. (Last painted 1492, according to parish records.) They are slightly vandalised, with the faces more scratched out than the entire heads chiselled away, as at other churches like Theberton and Covehithe.

Particularly interesting was the beard-stroking intellectual woodwose, deep in thought. (See above.)

I then went to the local pub, The Plough at Wissett. I was very proud of myself at having cycled from Dunwich to Halesworth in 40 minutes, but and two of the punters at the pub had arrived on horseback, with their still saddled and bridled horses let out to graze on the grass in the garden with the tables round the back. I later found that Wissett has two phantom Black Dogs, said to haunt the two little humpback bridges near the village, and enough ghosts to fill a book, The Wraiths of Wissett.

Soviet-style Social Realist art is alive and well on the Wissett village sign, which glorified a tractor. (The other side of the sign has a more traditional horse-drawn plough.)



Soviet social realist-style tractor image on the Wissett village sign (there's a more traditional horse-drawn plough on the other side of it)

I also stopped off at Wenhaston, and discovered something rare in pancake-flat Suffolk - a serious stretch of downhill on the way to the village. The church has the Wenhaston Doom, the Last Judgement. There's some fairly boring stuff on the left of "virtuous" princes standing naked before God, being judged by angels, and then it gets a bit more Heavy Metal album cover as you go further to the right of the painting. There's something going on with weighing souls and comparing them to the weight of imps. If your soul weighs as much as two imps, you seem to be in the clear.

See here for the "witch-weigher" in Oudewater, Holland, where they used to weigh people to make sure they weren't witches. They generally weren't. Many of East Anglia's convicted "witches" in the witch trials of the seventeenth century were convicted for "feeding imps," which generally took the form of exploding mice or ducks, giant flies, legless horned greyhounds of headless bloodsucking babies. And Black Dogs of course. These descriptions were mostly extracted under torture, with some copied and pasted from 15th century demonologies. Black Dogs were probably implanted into the testimonies to give them a bit of local colour and fake authenticity.

Imps on the Wenhaston Doom. If your soul weighs more than two imps, you appear to be in the clear.

It's all in the forthcoming Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

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."