West Suffolk’s 1985 big cat flap

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

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

Mermaids and manimals of Suffolk

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crypto-conference

Matt Salusbury reports from the 2023 'Rencontres Europeennes de Cryptozoologie' in Dinant, Belgium This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 441.

A clutch of cryptozoologists in search of an unknown animal - it turned out to be a domesticated rhea in the grounds


There was excitement as a dozen cryptozoologists crowded at the window. Someone insisted they'd seen "an out-of-place animal… an ostrich or something" walking past. Some were sceptical; there were cryptozoology in-jokes about "the unreliability of the witness" and ironic cries of "Canular!" ("hoax" in French). Our out-of-place animal turned to be a rhea pottering around its small "hobby farm" in the hotel's extensive grounds.

We were in Day Two of 'Rencontres Europeennes de Cryptozoologie (European Cryptozoology Meeting) organised by Abepar in Dinant, Belgium, where the Ardennes mountains begin. I had attended the event 11 years previously and struggled to follow the talkls in French. At the event in Brussels in 2017 I gave a presentation on pygmy elephants in my own very poor French. They asked me back this year, but for a talk in English.

Shortly after my arrival there was a "round table" discussion presented by conference instigator Eric Joye. Bernard Heuvelmans, the "father of cryptozoolgy", was, of course, Belgian. I learnt during the round table that besides his zoology gig, Heuvelmans also had a brief career as a jazz singer in wartime and post-war Paris, where he reportedly met Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker.

Eric described the proto-cryptozoologists who predated Heuvelmans - Erik Pontopiddan, a Danish Lutheran bishop whose two-volume The Natural History of Norway (1752-1753) covered kraken and mermaids and was the first published work to describe the giant squid. Other pre-Heuvelmans cryptozoolists included Pierre Denys de Montfort who in the 1770s collected possibly dodgy accounts of giant octopuses off France's Atlantic coast. There was also Antonie Cornelius Oudemans, director of The Hague Zoo, whose English-language The Great Sea Serpent concluded that these could be a long-necked species of seal (FT348:38-39). French dictionaries, noted Eric, have defined cryptozoology as "scientific study" for some time; it's firmly categorised as "pseudoscience" by an army of sceptical editors on today's English-language Wikipedia.

Some 15,000 new species are discovered each year, of which only a handful are mammals. The Kobomani tapir was discovered in 2013, three species of monkey, including the lopunji, have been described to science within the 21st century, while Caprimulgus solala, the Ethiopian nightingale, has been scientifically described without a complete specimen having yet been found - we just have one of its wings.

I did my talk on big cats in Britain (Suffolk in particular, it's all in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.) I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand all the French-language questions afterwards. One young first-time punter, a local vet's assistant, said he'd been inspired by recent news reports of a big cat seen on the Belgian-German border. (Eric thinks it might have been this report from 2021, confirming lynxes have returned to Belgium after an absence of well over 250 years.) I mentioned in my talk that two fortean investigators in the UK - Neil Arnold in Kent and Darren Mann (the Paranormal Database) in Ipswich - regularly get big cat reports from Belgium or the Netherlands as there seems to be no one easily identifiable to report big cat sightings to in those countries.

The tigre de Tasmanie (Tasmanian tiger or thylacine) - and whether it still lives among us-was the subject of Adele David's talk. Thylacines had been hunted for about a century in the belief that they killed sheep, with bounties offered for their skins. The practice was finally banned in 1936 - too late: the last known thylacine died that year in Tasmania's Hobart Zoo. Reported sightings of thylacines in the wild started almost immediately. The species was declared extinct in 1982. But Adele told us there have been around 3,000 witness reports, including many on the Australian mainland. There have been possible thylacine tracks, videos and recordings of its calls. There is consistency in sightings with descriptions of something "like a dog with a broken back", a "steep" sloping tail, a "particular" gait and a distinctive, strong odour.

Veteran cryptozoologist Michel Raynal explained how "the Belgians failed to discover the okapi". The British pipped them to the post by a few months, when Philip Sclater formally described Equus(?) johnstoni (now Okapi johnstoni) for the Royal Zoological Society of London in 1901, based on a striped okapi-skin belt sent by Sir Harry Johnston from Uganda. From the 1870s various explorers, first Germans then French and Belgians, reported "strange antelopes", donkey-like animals, something "zebra-like" or an "antelope-ass-giraffe". These were known by various peoples as ku-mbutti, atti, makapi, ndumba, abuttu or okapi.

Local chiefs showed their status by wearing belts made from the animal's striped hide. Lieutenant Leon Vincart, in the service of "the authorities of the Belgian Congo", in 1899 sent one such belt to Maredsous Abbey, not far from Dinant, where his brother was a monk and where Father Gregoire Fournier had a zooiogy collection which exists to this day. Michel tracked down the okapi-skin belt, still in the collection and logged just a few months before Sclater's description.

Dr Charles Paxton presented work "in its very early stages" that asked: "How can we explain cryprozoological experiences?" There are, he said, no rules for explaining encounters with creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster, for which there are now over 100 different hypotheses on offer, mostly involving misidentifications.

Charles's studies are now taking him from marine biology and statistics into the realms of philosophy and "thought experiments". Concentrating on historic sea serpent sightings with multiple witnesses, he described what happens if we have two hypotheses of "equal explanatory power'': we choose the simplest one. He went into offsetting complexity and explanatory power in explaining sea serpent sightings, "abductive arguments" as used by Sherlock Holmes and "the problem of causation". He admitted that he was "trying to find a tame philosopher to help me get through the philosophical literature" on this.

Looking to the future, Eric has plans for a cryptozoology "festival" next time, aimed at a broader, non-specialist audience. Details will be on the Abepar website www.cryptozoologia.eu.

Thanks to Eric (on the left), Pierre-Yves ("Pierro") on audio-visual and all at Abepar, and in particular to the equipe de traduction - the translation team, on the right: Cassandra, Corentin and Anna - all students from The University of Mons, who rendered my talk into French as I gave it.

Hotel Castel Pont a Lesse in the foothills of the Ardennes. Originally a chateau, it was bought by a steelworkers' union to become "The Castle of the Trade Unions", a venue for their congresses and cadre training. It was the scene of an abortive Declaration of Independence for Wallonia (the French-speaking region of Belgium) in 1950.

The town of Dinant's unique selling point is being the birthplace of Adolphe Saxe, whose birthday it was the day I left. The open-all-hours supermarket and the laundrette in Dinant celebrate the saxophone.

Rows of giant saxophones on the Charles de Gaulle Bridge. (The future President of France was wounded defending the bridge as a lieutenant in the opening days of World War One, when the town also witnessed a massacre of civilians by the advancing Germans.)

A statue commemorating De Gaulle's stand on the bridge at Dinant as a young lieutenant in 1914, although he seems to have lost a hand!

Dr Charles Paxton

The author with Abepar's Tintin in Tibet-inspired conference banner.

Michel Raynal on "how the Beglians missed out on discovering the okapi".

Mystery Animals of Suffolk and bigcatsofsuffolk.com

I am pleased to announce the publication of my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk - including an account of over 150 mystery big cat sightings, published by Slack-jawed Amazement Productions and printed in Suffolk by Leiston Press.


It's available from its distributors Bittern Books and yes, it's on Amazon UK too. If you're in East Anglia, you can buy it at Dunwich Museum, Aldeburgh Bookshop, The Halesworth Bookshop, The Chocolate Box, Bungay and the Arts and Craft Centre, Old Hunstanton.


So far I have been interviewed about Mystery Animals of Suffolk by BBC Radio Suffolk twice (most recently here) and on Gen-X Suffolk Radio, also by East Anglian Daily Times and Suffolk News website.


It's all on my website bigcatsofsuffolk.com, which has updates on Mystery Animals of Suffolk and events around it. It also has a "report a big cat sighting" form - I'm getting about one report a week now. The website also has footage of what looks like a black leopard in Wortham from 2010 and a video showing a very strange animal just over the Norfolk border on the edge of Thetford Forest.

Big cats around Bournemouth

This book review first appeared in Fortean Times magazine.


The British Big Cat Phenomenon – Differing Theories, Eye Witness Reports, and the Predators Diet, Jonathan McGowan, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 190 pages

The British Big Cat Phenomenon -Searching for Evidence and Territorial Marks, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022 191 pages

The British Big Cat phenomenon – Sightings, field signs and bones, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 183 pages

The British Big Cat Phenomenon - Environmental impact, politics, cover ups, and revelations, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 153 pages
Black and white photos, no index or bibliography

Jonathan McGowan's achievement in gathering so much evidence for big cats in Britain over a lifetime is extraordinary.

The British Big Cat Phenomenon comprises four slim volumes. It's unclear what order they're in, but I'm guessing Differing Theories comes first, followed by Searching, then Sightings and then Environmental as the final in the series. Differing opens as an evocative natural history memoir, describing McGowan's first sightings of big cats as a teenager in the 1980s. After an abusive childhood with periods in foster care, the young McGowan sought solace in watching wildlife, badgers in particular. It was through nocturnal badger watching that McGowan had his first big cat encounter - with a Dorset puma apparently stalking badgers.

McGowan's experience as a "field naturalist" frequently leads him to big cat sightings - the warning calls of birds alert him to a big cat in the area. He has received multiple reports of a British "running cat" observed while it's on sustained, long-distance chases after deer. This is different behaviour from leopards and pumas – ambush predators that can only manage short sprints.

Searching for Evidence dives straight into the evidence accumulated from McGowan's decades of experience in his "study area" around Bournemouth and Poole. Evidence includes scats (big cat poo) and scent sprayed on bushes and posts. There partial deer skeletons that have fallen out of trees after storms. There's much detail on scent markings and "scrapes" - claw marks in the ground made by big cats scent-marking, on big cat footprints and on how to distinguish them from dog tracks, as well as scratch marks on trees made by climbing leopards.

There are even urban big cats - their scats show up on Poole's parks, golf courses and streets. They travel along Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole green corridors and leave scratches on garden gates and they feast on rats, foxes and domestic cats.

People report hearing the low guttural growls and coughs of Dorset leopards. Puma screams are more cat-like or human-like. Police have been called out when a puma scream was mistaken for a human's.

On camera traps and why they produce so few big cat images, McGowan describes the phenomena of bait suddenly disappearing from them. "Something very strange is going on." I'd have appreciated sources for McGowan's assertion in Sightings, the next(?) volume, that cats can avoid the infra-red of camera traps by sensing electromagnetism through their whiskers.

Where is the big cat road kill? In some thinly-populated parts of the USA, a third of all young pumas are killed on remote roads. But given the UK's road traffic density British big cats would, McGowan believes, already be acclimatised to constantly passing cars and better at be dodging them. Big cats would probably survive most collisions anyway – just as many domestic cats somehow manage to crawl home after a road collision.

McGowan and others have seen big cat roadkill on busy dual carriageways where it's too dangerous to slow down to investigate. Returning a few hours later there’s nothing left, the remains squashed so flat as to be unrecognisable. He found the Blackwater Junction Black Cat – "totally pancaked out", its skin had melted to the tarmac and its bones were all crushed.

Sightings includes 69 photos of big cat field signs and kill signs. Included are many photos of big cat paw prints with McGowan's boot for size comparison, together with images of big cat feeding places littered with bones and grisly images of kills including dead swans and a half-eaten fox.

Stomach-churning detail describes how big cats kill their prey. Leopards clamp their jaws round the muzzle of a deer in a full-face hold to suffocate them, pumas often bite deers' noses off. Kills by dogs and foxes are much messier than those of a big cat.

Why are there so few photos of the big cats themselves? "This is a valid point," admits McGowan. There are a few in Sightings - a blurry photo of a "blonde puma" and a clearer trail cam image of a big cat sharpening its claws on a tree.

Environmental includes a guide to British big cat scats, with 22 monochrome photos of long thin twisted spiralled scats of leopards, lynx, puma and jungle cats. Some big cat scats McGowan's found contain bones and deer hooves.

There is no bibliography, index or referencing. Nor is McGowan's mostly compelling thesis helped by ranty digressions on how results of DNA tests are "covered up by the authorities". He asserts that the population is "brainwashed" into big cat scepticism, and so on. He's let down by his editors too, with basic typos too numerous to mention.

McGowan concludes Environmental by convincingly asserting that "the evidence for large cats living in Britain is overwhelming." Issues with the format and structure notwithstanding, the content of the four volumes of The British Big Cat Phenomenon make it essential reading for any serious British big cat investigator.

VERDICT: 4 stars ****


© Matt Salusbury 2023


Big cats in Dorset - expedition with Jonathan McGowan (June 2013)

Jonathan McGowan's large cat update (October 2012)


Britain's secret wildlife - lizards and big cats with Jonathan McGowan


Big cats of Suffolk website

Goat riders in the sky - the bokkenrijders

This article firsr appeared in Fortean Times 428, February 2023.

FOR MOST OF the eighteenth century, border provinces of what's now the Netherlands and Belgium were gripped by a reign of terror. Mysterious gangs of armed robbers carried out nocturnal raids and blackmailed the population with brandbrieven (arson letters), leaving demands for money or their houses would be burnt down.

These bendes (gangs) carried out arson attacks and robberies with great violence. Victims were tortured, raped and killed during their operations, with children among those murdered. Gang leader Joseph Kerckhoffs allegedly gave the order during one robbery "in the event of resistance to shoot dead or strike down everyone." ("Derselven chirugijen [Kerckhoffs] ordner hadde gegeven ingevalle van resistentie alles doot te scheiten of te slaan." Rijksarchief Limburg Maastricht LVO inv.no 8172, quoted in De Bokkenrijders in Nederlands and Belgisch Limburg 17726-1794, Tom Oversteegen, eigenboekuitgeven 2014.) Preferred targets were church estates, priests' homes, farmhouses (preferably isolated ones), inns, monasteries and castles. The gangs had an apparently supernatural ability to cover distances at speed and to melt away before law enforcement could mobilise. The gangs became known as the bokkenrijders - the billy goat riders, or buck riders.

Defendants testified in court that gang members used witchcraft - they flew through the air riding on the backs of billy goats. They were said to have sworn "ungodly oaths" in which they renounced God and pledged themselves to the Devil. Courts heard how they used in their robberies "hands of glory", dried and pickled severed human hands, in magic to prevent their victims raising the alarm. They were alleged to have gangs of 50 to 100 or more at their disposal, or even small armies.

An estimated 600 bokkenrijders were tried and convicted in three waves of persecution over a 75-year period. At least 350 – nearly all men - were executed. But did the bokkenrijders gangs even exist?

The provinces where the bokkenrijders committed "robbery in the Devil's name" are now roughly Nederlands-Limburg - a province in southern corner of the Netherlands - and Belgian-Limburg, a border province of Belgium. Some operated in Herzogenrath, now a corner of the federal state of North Rhine Westphalia in Germany.

Back in the days of the bokkenrijders, the region was the Land van Overmaas - the Land over the River Meuse (Maas in Dutch, hence the city of Maastricht). An earlier peace treaty had divvied up in this territory between the Republic of the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands and the Spanish Hapsburg Empire.

The Spanish territories were seceded to Austria from 1714, so in the time of the bokkenrijders there was two versions of the Land over the Meuse. There was the "Staats" version of Overmaas - Dutch territory. The States General, the Parliament of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces of the Netherlands, was officially very Protestant. It didn't trust its Catholic provinces of the South. So the very Catholic Dutch Overmaas was under direct rule by a States General-appointed Guardian.

Nextdoor was another version of the Overmaas, ruled by a Councillor of State on behalf of the Austrian Empire, with the Empress Maria Theresa as its sovereign for much of the bokkenrijders period. (It's now part of Belgium.) The Overmaas included the Land of Hertogenrath - nominally part of the Austrian Empire in whose name a steward of a local abbey ruled, but effectively an autonomous dukedom where a dialect of German was spoken. There were "neutral" roads connected scattered bits of Austrian or Dutch territory with each other. Within the Overmaas were territories of prince bishoprics and monasteries that were also local lords, with their own courts, ensuring a chaotic administration of justice.

Being the border between empires, the Land over the Meuse bore the scars of several recent wars. Both versions of the Overmaas remained backwaters of their respective states, but as border provinces they were sorely taxed and compelled to billet troops. Some saw the modus operandi of the bokkenrijder gangs as inspired by the armies that passed through the region, plundering and living off the land.

The earliest documented robbery by a bokkenrijder gang was in August 1726, silverware was looted from the castle as Huis Oost near the Dutch city of Valkenburg. The robbers tried to fence the loot through pawnbroker Levi Jacobs in the town of Sittard. When he asked how they came by it, they threatened to shoot Jacobs dead, forcing him to accept 1440 guilders-worth of silver. The robbers showed up at Huis Oost again in 1738.

Bokkenrijder images generated by AI website Dall-E by the author, in the reasonable belief that copyright rests with them, although in the knowledge that this is about to be tested in multiple court cases.

The bokkenrijders covered their faces with scarves and wore wigs during robberies to disguise themselves. One Michel Hendrix was sentenced to death as a bokkenrijder after a search of his house uncovered a quantity of wigs that he couldn't explain. Witnesses occasionally described masked-up women in men's clothes among the bokkenrijders keeping watch during robberies.

In the West-Herck region of the Austrian Netherlands, one Francis van Leuwe in 1753 led a local bokkenrijders gang known as the zwartmakers ("those who made themselves black"). This was a revival of an old name. The original zwartmakers, who had already passed into folklore by the 1750s, were a gang operating further north, in the Dutch provinces of North Brabant and Gelderland, in the 1690s.

Jacobus van der Schlossen led the original zwartmakers - ex-soldiers who hid in the forests of Slabroek. They blacked up for their night raids to disguise their faces. They would batter down the doors of houses with thick poles and lock the residents in their cellar while they robbed them. Van der Schlossen was eventually hanged in Ravenstein Castle in 1695, in front of 20,000 spectators. Other Zwartmakers gangs operated from the heath at Teteringen near Breda and in Gelderland at around the same time.

Supernatural elements attached themselves to the zwartmaker stories, as they later did to the bokkenrijders. Anna Dirks, hanged in 1707 in Rhenen along with her mother and her aunt, was said to have brought to robberies a severed child's hand that she burned to bewitch the residents of houses so they didn't wake up. Van der Schlossen was said to have once avoided capture by jumping into a marsh and transforming into a bullrush, while the corpses of the hanged zwartmakers were said to roam the sites of their execution in Gelderland.

The peaks of bokkenrijder robbery came in 1726-1743, 1749-1750 and 1751-1774. While bokkenrijder crimes within the Dutch Republic were predominantly robberies, in the Austrian Netherlands they were also blackmailers, extorting money through their brandbrieven letters threatening arson. Many such "arson letters" survive in the Limburg historical archives, usually demanding the addressee leaves money in a particular place - under a stone, in a hole in the ground, by a wayside cross or shrine. One such letter, from Arnold de Wal to the innkeeper at Gerlingen warned "I will set fire to the four corners of your house" in the event of non-payment.

More bokkenrijder images generated by the author using Dall-E.

In the rural municipality of Wellen in the Austrian Netherlands there were between 20 and 30 such threatening letters received in less than a year in 1773. It was in one of these arson letters received in Wellen that the term bokkenrijder first appears. Its author wrote that "the Devil hunts us, now you shall know how the bokkenrijders live... through the Devil's intervention we rule..." The name bokkenrijder started to appear in local court documents. Previously there had just been "gangs", "rbbery gangs", "ungodly thieves" or "the Overmaas gangs." By 1790, bokkenrijder was a term in common use, with interrogators in Bree (now in Belgium) asking suspects if they were "with the gang of Overmaas or Valkenburg or the so-called bokkenrijders."

According to Belgian folklorist Signe Maene,riderless flying goats were already a phenomenon in Belgian skies before the bokkenrijders made their bokkenvluchten flights on the backs of billy goats. Some were afraid to go out at night because of "ghost goats" that "screeched eerily" as they flew overhead. Less fearful folk would gather to watch their flights.

At the time, a day's ride on good roads in daylight was 51km, a day's walk was 40km. Bokkenrijder "goat flights" seem to have shaved at least an hour or too off usual travel time, with travel by horse at night next to impossible anyway. At least six written testimonies of nocturnal "billy goat flights" from the Netherlands and four from Belgium survive.

Mathijs Smeets told how in September 1773, after an oath ceremony in the Saint Rosa Chapel in Sittard, he was led him to a crossroads out of town where a "long-bodied, black thing appeared, standing no more than a few feet from the ground." His description is vague, "we were so amazed we couldn't tell what it looked like," it resembled some enormous dachshund-type goat. All 42 bokkenrijders present could climb up onto its back, with the gang's "major" and the "captain" both "sitting at the head of it." On this beast they were whisked through the air from Venlo to Roermond in the space of four hours, less than it would take to walk it in daylight. There they carried out a robbery. The supernatural long-bodied black goat thing brought them all back to Sittard "in no time" by early next morning.

Reiner Sijban, detained in a Dutch prison, recalled flying from Klimmen to Maastricht with two other men on the back of a "bok", a flying billy goat, on night in 1774. There they found "a number of perpetrators" who'd also arrived on goats. They all did a burglary, then flew back to Klimmen.

Arnold Gielen, held in an Austrian prison in Wellen in the same year, told how following a meeting on the heath outside Abswellen, there appeared "nine or ten beasts in the form of a billy goat, slightly bigger and longer." Gielen's "captain" assembled the men to "fly over the treetops" on goats to rob a tenancy farm on the other side of Maastricht, leaving their goats "standing there" before returning to their Abswellen assembly point within two hours. (It's a four-hour walk in daylight.) A cross-border goat flight from Abswellen to Meersen in the Dutch Republic featured in testimony by Peter Willem Stassen. He recalled being in a group of about 30 gang members, each "sitting on a billy goat the greatness of a horse."

Some "eight or nine hundred people," including "three or four parties from Wellen," made a cross-border billy goat flight in 1770 from a point on the Meuse between Liege and Maastricht, according to Mattijs Goffins, "with three or four men on a billy goat". The flight took in the Linen Tree Inn along the river, the town of Tongeren and a castle where "hundreds" stood on guard while bokkenrijders climbed in through a window. Another account by a bokkenrijder named Gerits had the Devil himself transport "accomplices" from the Our White Lady convent outside Maastricht into the town. The Devil, summoned by chanting the bokkenrijder oath, appeared "in the shape of a great billy goat with horns and the rear of a horse." In other testimony the Devil appeared as several large billy goats to transport bokkenrijders to robberies.

"I forswear God and pledge myself to the Devil!" That was the bokkenrijder's oath. Both Dutch and Austrian authorities regarded such oaths as a threat to the social and spiritual order - it was these "ungodly oaths" that earned many bokkenrijders the death penalty.

Gang members were inducted in blasphemous oath ceremonies, often ending with tips or "change" - coins being pressed into their hands. Ledgers with membership lists were produced, some showing members' military "ranks". Ceremonies featured stolen holy wafers -participants spat these out - a green drink that "drove men mad" (probably absinthe) and a red-coloured, bitter oil sprinkled on food. Sometimes they held their ceremonies in chapels, with participants crawling in on their hands and knees, some oaths were administered in the woods. Sometimes a drawing of the Devil or a goat's head was displayed, or a dried pickled "hand of glory" was on show. Arnoldus Zander testified to being at an inn in Hertogenrath where alleged bokkenrijder Joseph Kerckshoff was administering oaths and had with him a "death's head" - a severed human head.

The oaths included terrible punishments for those who betrayed their comrades, one read, "so the Devil break my neck." Some bokkenrijders described having to take the oath several times over. In some accounts, a hooded figure walked among the congregation, said to be the Devil or at least to represent him. Once a year, bokkenrijders were said to visit their master, the Devil, on the Mookerheide, a wasteland near the River Waal, north of Overmaas. Such details suspiciously resemble those in dodgy 15th-century witchfinder's manual Males Meleficarum

Joseph Kerckhoffs, a former officer in the Austrian army and the respectable town surgeon of Hertogenrade, was fingered as the leader of the bokkenrijders. But multiple testimonies described a supreme bokkenrijder commander for both the Dutch and the Austrian Netherlands, above Kerckhoffs. There were sightings of a tall, fat man of military bearing, wearing a fine pale blue officer's tailcoat with silver trim and silver trim on his hat too. He spoke High German and French, and was seen giving orders over a fifteen-year period up to 1775. He was named as Baron Joachim Reihold van Gleasnap (aka Hean). He is believed he died of natural causes.

This "robbery in the Devil's name" brought surprisingly little loot to individual bokkenrijders. Mattijs Goffins testified that an almost thousand-strong raid at a castle netted a total of only 20 shillings, while other bemused bokkenrijders said they earned as much in their "tips" after oaths as they did in shares of booty. Some bokkenrijder captains seemed overly keen on recruitment - court testimony regularly stated than ridiculously large gangs - 100 or 200-strong - turned up to (unspecified) robberies to "stand watch." Willem de Kamp stated of one 1756 robbery he was part of that "the portion was not great because the band was so strong" in numbers.

Jabobus Offermans claimed he had "heard say" that there was a plan "to make themselves masters of town and city and to ravage everything." The City Council of Maastricht in March 1770 got wind a vague conspiracy by some 500 persons who threatened the lives of the city government's officials. They took this seriously enough to post a reward of 100 gold ducats for "discovery of conspirators" - assumed to be bokkenrijders.

It's likely that these bokkenrijder numbers, along with their billy goat flights and their ungodly oaths, were exaggerated or planted under torture. The three biggest waves of bokkenrijder persecution came in 1743-1775 (with an estimated 200 people tried), from 1750-1751 (35 people tried) and 1771-1777 (400 tried). Some were on trial for crimes committed 12 years earlier.

In Dutch Limburg, the aldermen's courts tried bokkenrijders in "extra-ordinaire" trials. Prosecutions included a "first interrogation" within 24 hours of arrest. Then followed the streng verhoor the "strict interrogation" under torture - always in the presence of two magistrates, a secretary and a surgeon. Joseph Kerckhoffs, said to be a bokkenrijder "general", was tortured for months, including one torture session after he'd been sentenced to death. But he never confessed to anything, telling judges, "Gentlemen, you can tear my body to pieces, but I have nothing to say."

During prosecutions, courts would usually order the suspect's property confiscated to pay for the costs of the trial. In 1773, The States General in The Hague, while vigorously pursuing bokkenrijder gangs within the Dutch Republic, expressed alarm at the expense of bokkenrijder prosecutions. States General resolutions from this period request detailed breakdowns of the cost of prosecutions, remuneration for the executioners, secretaries and surgeons, how much was paid to informers, bills from carpenters who built gallows and so on. The States General imposed fixed fees for officers of the court trying and sentencing bokkenrijders and established systems for the speedy liquidation of their confiscated property.

Particularly in the Austrian Empire, bokkenrijders and thieves generally were executed on "the breaking wheel" or the "Catherine Wheel". They were tied down in a prone position while the rim of a heavy cartwheel was dropped onto them, starting with their legs and working their way up, dropping the wheel on their chest was usually enough to kill them outright. Hanging or garrotting was more common in Dutch jurisdiction. On one busy day for an executioner in the Dutch town of Heerlen, seven convicted bokkenrijders were hanged.

The first written account of the bokkenrijders was Origin, Causes, Proof and Discovery of an Ungodly, Sworn Band of Night Thieves and Assailants within the Lands of Overmaas and Adjacent Regions written in 1790 by "S.J.P. Slienada", an anagram of A. Daniels, a Dutch priest who knew some of the bokkenrijders personally. Daniels wrote of the bokkenrijders' pacts with the Devil, and how "the common people" told stories of their nocturnal billy goat flights. His book includes a spell used to achieve goat flights - "Over houses, over gardens, over stakes, even to Cologne and into the wine cellar!"("Over huis, over tuin, over staak, en dat tot Keulen in de wijnkelder!")

Frontispiece from Origin, Causes, Proof and Discovery of an Ungodly, Sworn Band of Night Thieves and Assailants within the Lands of Overmaas and Adjacent Regions, the first published account of the bokkenrijders from 1790.


The bokkenrijders may have been an exaggeration or invention to cover up the weakness of the authorities of the Dutch Republic and the Austrian Netherlands, and their inability to deal with what was probably just lots of small gangs operating at the same time, mostly with impunity.

Records of bokkenrijder prosecutions are less frequent from the late 1780s onwards. 1789 saw a brief uprising in the Austrian Netherlands. A subsequent military campaign against revolutionary France ended badly for the Austrian Empire, with the Austrian Netherlands annexed to the Republic of France in 1795. The Dutch Republic became the pro-French Batavian Republic in the same year. Maastricht and environs was ceded to France, with all of the Netherlands eventually annexed to Napoleon's empire in 1811. The bokkenrijders disappeared, international criminal networks emerged operating across the Netherlands and into Germany, benefitting from the upheaval of regime change. The haphazard feudal courts were abolished, their revolutionary successors had no room for superstitious conspiracy theories. The Kingdom of the United Netherlands that emerged in 1814 after Napoleon's fall retained its secular courts. These were no longer inclined to hear testimony of suspects flying through the air on goats.

Having an ancestor who was tried as a bokkenrijder is now a badge of honour in both Dutch and Belgian Limburg. Today they have a reputation as Robin Hood-type anti-authority figures, celebrated in monuments and guided walks. There is a Bokkenrijders Festival in the Dutch town of Klimmen every August, and a Bokkenrijders Week every October in Valkenburg. Some municipalities in Belgian Limburg mark 11 May - the day Joseph Kerckhoffs was sentenced to death – as International Bokkenrijders Day.



Dixon Miniatues at the time of writing produce a set of two 28mm metal wargames figures of bokkenrijders on horseback and on foot.

Witches - mostly female - riding on billy goats was already a thing in European demonology long before the bokkenrijders. Shown here are details from engravings of the witches' sabbaths on the Blockberg in the Harz Mountains of Germany, 1688 or earlier and all out of copyright.


Further Reading in English
Jacobus van der Schlossen - Wikipedia
Zwartmakers gang - Dutch Folklore
Joseph Kerckhoffs of Herzogenade (video)
The Buck Riders' Fellowship (English pages)

Project Bokkenrijders have an English-language podcast series. They have an online transcription of Slienada's Origin, Causes, Proof and Discovery into modern Dutch, with an online English translation appearing soon. Thanks to Project Bokkenrijders for suggested translations of bokkenrijder terminology for this article.

Bokbier ("bock beer") is a special beer - usually dark in colour and on sale in the autumn, when Northern Europe starts to drink less outdoors in cafe terraces and starts to move indoors to drink. The label, pump art and beer mats for bok bier usually feature a billy goat. (Young stags and male rats as well as billy goats are also "bucks" in English.) Above is an out-of-copyright late 19th century ad for a "Bock" beer and a selection of images of 21st-century bok beers from Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands or the USA.

The craft beer themed Bok Bar in Leece Street, Liverpool, complete with billy goat's head logo.

The Buck's Head Pub, Camden Town, London NW1.