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43 Articles

CAPUCINE DESLOUIS THE ART OF THE WEIRD You’ll notice that our June issue has a loose theme running through it: we have focused on the often surprising relationships between the world of strange phenomena and that of the visual arts, a decision prompted in part by two major exhibitions running currently in London that each provides a food for fortean thought. The identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’, and the killer’s subsequent quasi-folkloric afterlife, has exercised many a mind since the conclusion of the unsolved Whitechapel murders, with contributions in these very pages from the likes of Therese Taylor, Jan Bondeson, Scott Wood and the late Ripperologist and one-time FT stalwart Nick Warren. In our cover story (p28), Billy Rough tackles what must be one of the strangest Ripper theories, as…

WEIRD TALES FROM THE WAR

WITCH VS WITCH Some believe that Germany’s failure to invade Britain during the Second World War was due to the intervention of Britain’s magic practitioners, organised by Dion Fortune (see FT267:34-41). Whether or not that was the case, witches on both sides of the Ukraine war have now mobilised to support their countries. In what seems more like a media stunt than an actual magical working, on 12 March the “Great Witches of Russia” held a general council in support of Vladimir Putin. This involved more than 100 witches gathering in Moscow and carrying out a 20-minute ritual to boost Putin and Russia, filmed by Russian TV. Presided over by Aljona Polin, who was described as “Russia’s leading witch”, the participants, dressed in matching dark hooded robes decorated with birds…

WEIRD TALES FROM THE WAR

FORK IN THE BRAIN Fairview, Oregon, is seeking a Guinness World Record for the tallest fork, having installed a 37ft (11m) one outside a new food truck plaza. “We wanted something on the corner, and then one of the design teams said, let’s just put a fork here and we’ll come back to it, and it just kind of stuck in the brain,” said Mayor Brian Cooper. “You can come up with an entire marketing scheme of ‘Take a left at the fork’, ‘The Fork in Fairview’”. The current tallest fork is 35ft (10.5m) high and is in Missouri. [UPI] 16 Feb 2022. CHOPPED POTATO In Cyprus, locals awoke on New Year’s Day to find someone had chopped down the 13ft (4m) “Big Potato” that stood at the entrance to…

THEY DO LIKE IT UP ‘EM!

• When Indiana paramedics were called out to an emergency in a rural area, they found 57-year-old chicken farmer Christopher Adams lying drunk on his henhouse floor, naked, covered in blood and with a live, five-pound (2.3kg) chicken sticking out of his rectum, clucking loudly. After unsuccessfully attempting to remove the bird there and then, they took Adams and his chicken to hospital where the hen was extracted in a delicate seven-hour operation, with both man and chicken surviving. “The bird was dying of suffocation when it got here. It had already badly lacerated the patient’s bowels in a desperate attempt to get out and was still gashing at it like crazy,” said a hospital spokesperson. The chicken suffered only minor injuries, but Adams needed seven blood transfusions and more…

THEY DO LIKE IT UP ‘EM!

WHO BY FIRE When the fire department of Laranjeiras do Sul in the Brazilian state of Paraná were called out to deal with a burning lorry on the BR-158 highway, they found the vehicle’s cargo box ablaze and despite their efforts, it was almost completely destroyed. The only parts remaining were the rear doors with a painting of Our Lady of Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, on them, which were completely intact and undamaged, showing no sign of the effects of fire. Fire department spokesperson Carlos de Souza said they could not explain why the doors were undamaged saying: “It burned very quickly, the only explanation is really something supernatural, a miracle”. viraltab.news, 12 Jan 2022. WHO BY WATER When Father Stepanos Doudoukjian, parish priest at St Peter Armenian…

DINOSAUR LEG-END

BBC Researchers digging at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota in the US have turned up an extraordinarily well-preserved fossil dinosaur leg complete with skin. Professor Paul Barrett from the London Natural History Museum said: “It’s a Thescelosaurus. It’s from a group that we didn’t have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren’t feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries.” The leg was found on its own, with no evidence of the rest of the dinosaur anywhere in the vicinity. “This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly. There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being…

DINOSAUR LEG-END

THE CONSPIRASPHERE

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARIES Anniversaries have a particular significance in the Conspirasphere. It sometimes seems as if competing sects of conspiracists count time from different beginnings: so many years since JFK; so many years since 9/11, and so on. And sometimes, anniversaries occur on anniversaries, adding a layered telescopy to the complex numerology of deep events. One such date occurred recently. On 19 April 1995, the Alfred P Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City was ground zero for a terrorist attack; the worst, at that point, in US history (FT189:44-49). 168 people lost their lives, including 19 children and infants; an estimated 700 more were injured. Apart from the Murrah Building – a large complex of federal offices – some 300 buildings in the city were damaged. The bombing was carried out…

THE CONSPIRASPHERE

PAUL DEVEREUX uncovers a sacred reflecting pool, plus ancient tsunamis and stoned child sacrifices SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY, ROME AFTER THE FLOOD Sometime between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s BC, a colossal volcanic eruption on the ancient island of Thera (now the Greek island of Santorini) in the Aegean produced a gigantic tsunami or series of tsunamis that destroyed coastal habitations for hundreds of miles around, and ultimately led to the decline of the Minoan civilisation on Crete. Tsunamis tend to drag debris back into the sea, so though dense layers of volcanic ash remain, little other evidence of the Thera tsunami has been found. But a rare, grim exception has been uncovered by an international team of researchers working at a dig site along the shoreline of Çeşme Bay in western Turkey.…

CLASSICAL CORNER

271: NOT ARTHUR DALEY This is the tale of a Roman military officer mentioned in no Græco-Roman literary sources, who is often marketed as the prototype of King Arthur, who probably never existed. In cause is Lucius Artorius Castus. The Arthurian link has most recently been raised in Graham Robb’s The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England (2017), adumbrated thus by Hugh Thomson in The Spectator (2 Feb 2018): “The King Arthur of legend was a Roman centurion called Artorius, who led resistance to a powerful Scottish invasion around 180 AD. As described by the chronicler Cassius Dio, this was the biggest war fought anywhere in the Roman Empire during that time, and for a while a near catastrophe for the Romans – the Scottish got as…

CLASSICAL CORNER

Make or break for the quantum drive?

‘Impossible’ space drives claimed to work without propellant (FT201:14) have buzzed around space science for many years like an irritatingly persistent pest. And now, that pest may be getting ready to sting – or vanish. Such drives annoy scientists because, in the scientists’ view, they have to be hoaxes or bad science: you cannot pull yourself into the air by pulling on your own bootstraps. But in 2002 British inventor Roger Shawyer claimed effectively to have done that with his EmDrive. By confining microwaves in a truncated cone, he claimed to get more pressure on one end than the other, producing a net thrust. There was no scientific interest in Shawyer’s invention until a Chinese team led by Prof Juan Yang at Xi’an Northwestern Polytechnic took it up in 2008.…

Make or break for the quantum drive?

WEIRD WAVES & BOOMS

GOING ROGUE Once considered the mythical stuff of sailor’s yarns, rogue or freak waves entered the realms of respectability in 1984 when one hit the Gorm drilling platform in the North Sea. The first rogue wave to be reliably measured was what is known as the “Draupner Wave” in 1995: that hit 26.5m (87ft) in height in a sea where the average wave height was around 12m (39ft). Since then, several others have been measured, and rogue waves have been defined as any wave with a height more than double that of other waves occurring around them. Now, the most extreme rogue wave ever reported has been measured off the coast of Ucluelet, British Columbia, in Canada. This was 17.6m (57ft 9in) high in a sea with waves averaging 6m…

WEIRD WAVES & BOOMS

A vigil in Westwood Lodge

TREVOR WOOD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO A new book – Britain’s Ghostly Heritage (2022) by John West – contains an enjoyable introduction by historic crime authority Stewart Evans. Best known for his bestselling studies of the Jack the Ripper murders (and one of a handful of writers actually worth reading on the enduring mystery), he reveals a long-standing side interest in ghost stories, especially those from East Anglia. In his introduction he shares a personal account of a ghost hunt he embarked upon in October 1972 while serving as a young police officer with the Suffolk Constabulary. Along with two fellow constables, he spent a night inside the reputedly haunted Westwood Lodge, an isolated manor house near Blythburgh in east Suffolk. His account recalls the style of independent, low-tech ghost…

A vigil in Westwood Lodge

NORTHERN WEIRDNESS IS BACK!

After a three-year interregnum, Weird Weekend North returned to the Community Hall in Rixton-with-Glazebrook, Warrington, on 2-3 April. Glen Vaudrey deserves praise for his determianed efforts to overcome many obstacles and keep the weird flag flying! His programme included a good mix of new and old faces, with compere ‘Barry Tadcaster’ (Richard Freeman sans trademark beard) delivering bizarre introductions, helped by Orang Pendek Ken Jeavons and Gef the Talking Mongoose. One unanticipated problem was that the refurbished hall now had black curtains behind the stage, so presentations had to be projected onto a side wall. The attendance of around 80 would have been greater had not some people fallen victim to Covid. I opened Saturday’s proceedings with what I can assure readers was a new talk (see panel) about The…

NORTHERN WEIRDNESS IS BACK!

PRESENTATION PRESCIENCE?

Following my ‘Aintree Spectres’ presentation, a woman hurried over to me and asked why I had repeated it from an earlier WWN rather than delivering a new talk. Surprised, I explained this was the very first time I had ever given it, which perturbed her greatly. She told me she had seen me give the exact same presentation before, even down to the jokes and asides. As we chatted later, she explained that she sometimes had similar inexplicable episodes, but was adamant about having seen my ‘Aintree Spectres’ talk before. Her daughter, who was with her, added that they had heard someone else say that they had seen me do the talk before, and pointed him out. I went over to speak to the man, who confirmed that he believed…

PRESENTATION PRESCIENCE?

KARL SHUKER uncovers the surprising truth behind Thailand’s green hairy snake GREEN, HAIRY, SCARY! In early March 2022, numerous websites were reviewing a TikTok video posted on 27 February by user @firstminimini of a bizarre, scary-looking freshwater snake – captured alive by local man Tu in a swamp in Thailand’s Sakon Nakhon province – that seemed at first sight to be covered in long green hair or fur. In fact, its ‘fur’ was profuse algæ attached to this 2ft/60cm-long snake’s dorsal and lateral scales (its belly was unaffected). Taxonomically, it was apparently a species of Homalopsis water snake, a mildly venomous Asian colubrid that typically lurks motionless inside rocky crevices in still, stagnant water to seize prey, but where, as a result, algal growth upon it can occur. Although this…

AFRICAN ODDITIES

KENYAN MERMAID In mid-April, a video claiming to show a real beached mermaid went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms, initially in Kenya, and then across the rest of Africa. The video shows what appears to be a creature with the upper body of a human child and the lower body of a fish lying on a beach, still alive and sporadically twitching, surrounded by curious onlookers. Most posts claimed it was filmed in Kwale, Kenya, but police there swiftly stepped in, saying: “Reports indicating a mermaid has been spotted in Kwale are fake.” In fact, the first posts, made on 6 April, claimed that the creature had been filmed in Muizenberg, South Africa, and later there were also claims it was in Uganda. Some people have speculated…

AFRICAN ODDITIES

CHIP HIRES / GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES RICHARD LEAKEY Celebrated as a palæoanthropologist who discovered more ground-breaking hominid fossils than anyone else, Richard Leakey, who has died aged 77, lived a colourful, controversial and varied life. The son of famed primatologist Louis Leakey, who held the record for discovering the most hominid fossils until Richard surpassed him, he went on his first fossil hunting expedition aged three and discovered his first important fossil at six – the jaw of an extinct giant pig. His formal education ended at 16 and he initially took a different path to his father, setting up a safari firm catering to tourists, but he was soon taking part in fossil hunting expeditions again, although he was angered by being sidelined by academics for his lack…

FAIRIES, FOLKLORE AND FORTEANA

THE BOGGLE FACTOR Many FT readers will be familiar with the Boggle Factor, the moment in a fortean account when you cease to believe. Your average UFO researcher will be happy, say, to hear about an interdimensional spacecraft landing in your garden. But he will become anxious if the aliens, according to your account, dance a Highland jig on the lawn afterwards, announcing that you are the new messiah. Everyone has different boggle thresholds, of course, depending on the matter in hand. Personally, I am fascinated by telepathy in dreams. I, likewise, get a kick out of fairies in the hill or ogres under the bridge and I love poltergeists. But I cannot stand the notion of precognitive dreams. The idea of visits from dead loved ones (aka ghosts) offends,…

FAIRIES, FOLKLORE AND FORTEANA

Phantom menaces?

THE CLASSIFIED 2021 UAP TASK FORCE REPORT Through the use of a Mandatory Declassification Review, John Greenewald (The Black Vault) obtained a 17-page-long version of the ‘Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ report. This was originally made public last year as a nine-page guide for US policymakers to understand the challenges associated with investigating the potential threat of UAPs. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, comparing the two versions, notes that this had “a misguided objective from the very beginning. The association of materiality is a preconceived notion that adds unnecessary dramatism and fantasy to the subject. Obviously, this has happened because of the active pressure of lobbying ufologists and promoters of alien ideas, mainly from the political and intelligence sectors.” He approves of the fact that both versions state that UAP “observations could…

Phantom menaces?

May Day! May Day!

Given the season, this is an appropriate title for this column, even though the well known anglicised version of the international distress call is a tad misleading. A century old, it was created because S.O.S. (“Save Our Souls”) was hard to transmit correctly due to poor sound definition of the letter S. So “May Day” has nothing to do with the month of May and is in fact taken from the original French cry of “M’Aidez” – “Help me”. I was reminded of this by a recent case from Scotland, where, on the morning of 22 November 2021, a joiner working on a wastewater plant in Dalmarnock, East Glasgow, saw what looked like a ‘May Day’ incident unfolding in the sky: a bright white object and a dark object appeared…

May Day! May Day!

THE ART OF MURDER THE STRANGE CASE OF WALTER SICKERT AND JACK THE RIPPER

Whitechapel, London, the autumn of 1888. Through the midnight streets stalks a dark figure, wrapped in a long, checkered coat. As the secretive figure makes his way along Copenhagen Street, he attracts the attention of a group of young girls. Talk of “Jack” is in the air and strangers are viewed with suspicion. The terrified girls scatter, screaming, “Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper!” The figure moves silently on, through Kings Cross, toward Hampstead, sinking back into the shadows. The story is intriguing. Had these girls actually come face to face with the notorious Jack? What’s curious about the encounter is that we actually know exactly who that figure in the checkered coat was – as he gleefully admitted to it. He was a man who would later come to…

THE ART OF MURDER THE STRANGE CASE OF WALTER SICKERT AND JACK THE RIPPER

1 Robert Emmons, The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert (Faber & Faber: London, 1941), pp.48-49. 2 Denys Sutton, Walter Sickert (Michael Joseph: London, 1976), p.51. 3 Matthew Sturgis, Walter Sickert: A Life (Harper Collins: London, 2005), p.160. 4 Ibid., p.628. 5 “Jack the Ripper ‘solution’ was a hoax, man confesses”, Sunday Times, 18 June 1978. 6 Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (George Harrap: London, 1976. 6th edition, Granada Publishing: London, 1983) also provided inspiration for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s acclaimed graphic novel From Hell, first published in serial form between 1989 and 1998, and the subsequent 2001 movie. 7 Jean Overton Fuller, Sickert & The Ripper Crimes (Oxford: Mandrake, 1990), p.9. 8 Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (Little,…

PAINTER of LIGHT THE STRANGE DOUBLE LIFE OF THOMAS KINKADE

The American artist Thomas Kinkade (1958–2012), also known as “The Painter of Light”, is celebrated for his luminous candy-coloured landscapes and especially for his trademark paintings of cosy cottages. In his lifetime, he was one of the most highly collected artists – his paintings found a place in one American home out of every 20. KINKADE IN HEAVEN Before I met Thomas Kinkade, I had an intuitive sense that there was more to him than met the eye. I felt that deep within him was a concealed dark prankster. There was no way I could have intuited this from any outward signs – I just knew it. I believe that on account of this, when we met, we understood each other. One prankster recognises another. That is why in 2004,…

PAINTER of LIGHT THE STRANGE DOUBLE LIFE OF THOMAS KINKADE

TWENTIETH CENTURY TALES

PART THREE: 1935-1951 For 11 years, two girls lived within four blocks of each other In Butte, Montana. They went to the same school and became the best of friends. It was only in May 1935, when they were aged 18 and 16, that foster parents, checking adoption papers, discovered they were sisters, born Rose Montana Neal and Josephine Lee Neal. Their natural parents had separated 12 years earlier, and the mother put their four children in an orphanage, from which each was adopted by a different family. One was still untraced at the time of the report. [AP] NY Times, 6 May 1935. During a public performance in Izsak, Hungary, a hypnotist asked for a volunteer. Karoly Szani, a young farmer, accepted the invitation and was soon in a…

TWENTIETH CENTURY TALES

SENSES RESTORED

• After an operation, specialists told Mrs Mary Lyons of Chester, West Virginia, that she would never be able to speak again. Four years later, terrified by a tightrope walker at a circus, the 32-year-old screamed and thereafter was able to talk. [AP] NY Times, 18 July 1927. • A stone thrown up by a horse’s hoof in 1897 blinded Stephen McCormack in his right eye. Thirty-three years later, Mr McCormack, by that time manager of the Griffith Fruit Company in Sydney, Australia, was exercising with a medicine ball when a companion accidentally poked a finger in his blind eye. He developed an excruciating headache, and suddenly his sight returned. [AP] NY Times, 9 July 1930. • When her house in Canaan, Connecticut, was struck by lightning in 1911, Mrs…

SENSES RESTORED

WHAT MAKES JACK TICK?

For at least 11 years, the head of Jack Husband, 20, of Hollis, Oklahoma, “ticked-tocked” night and day, and might have done so all his life. “Until somebody told me, I just thought everybody ticked,” he said. We are told that Mr Husband, a student at Southwestern State College in Weatherford, Oklahoma, had been examined by more than 200 doctors (!), none of whom had been able to learn the cause of the fast ticking, nor its exact location. It had never occurred to him that he was different from other people until, at the age of nine, he was wrestling with another boy. “What’s that?” the boy asked. He had noticed the metallic tick in young Husband’s head. A few days later he told his parents, Dr and Mrs…

WHAT MAKES JACK TICK?

• Maria Battesini, 56, appeared to have died in Milan on 26 January 1923. The next day, her coffin lid was being fastened down when she suddenly revived and sat up. Priests fled, relatives became hysterical, and doctors were summoned. NY Times, 28 Jan 1923. • Laid out with a crucifix and rosary on her breast, a 98-year-old widow from Duisberg in Germany terrified mourners assembled for her funeral on 16 October 1928 by sitting up just as her coffin was about to be closed. She looked around in astonishment and then voiced her indignation over the fact that she had almost been buried alive. She was thought to have died two days earlier. NY Times, 17 Oct 1928. • Acuna Castillo, 22, from Los Angeles in the Chilean province…

• In a report to the US Hydrographic Office in Port Townsend, Washington State, on 13 August 1910, Captain Samuels of the American barkentine Aurora, on her arrival from Callao, Peru, described a phenomenon that marine authorities declared to be without precedent. On 17 June, in latitude 11 degrees south and longitude 80 west, the vessel entered an area of snow-white water. The expanse was so large that it took almost an entire day’s sailing to traverse. Its merging with the natural ocean water was sharply defined in colour, creating a marvellous scene of marine beauty. Investigation with every means available failed to show the cause was submarine volcanic eruption or other upheaval. A bucket filled with the milk-white fluid, when left on deck for an hour, resumed a normal…

Guided to Grainger’s grave

SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Last night I found a smudge of lipstick on my Covid mask. I don’t drink or suffer memory lapses and have no recollection of any intimate encounter that might have created this crimson blemish. In a column for The Oldie, I described a romance with Audrey Hepburn, long whiles agone, brutally cut short by a Procrustean elevator. Audrey may well have materialised in a burst of ectoplasm on New Year’s Eve, and resumed her amorous attentions. To many, this may seem a far-fetched explanation, but it is the one that I offered my wife, who respects my interest in the supernatural. I am regularly haunted and, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I find the ghosts of past loves to be the most terrible.…

Guided to Grainger’s grave

Surrealism’s international magic

Surreal must be one of the most misused terms in common parlance when describing a situation. Take the incredulous British youngster who last year won an Olympic medal, standing in a Tokyo skate park and telling her BBC interviewer, “It’s really surreal!” What would be “really surreal” would have been a giraffe self-combusting in the velodrome, or the adolescent medallist performing her BMX stunts on a rocking horse, dressed as a lobster But even such Dalí-esque hallucinations fail to define everything that the term Surreal has come to encompass. The Tate Modern exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders sets out to challenge our notions even further. It defines Surrealism as an “expansive, shifting term” that encompasses a vast array of art beyond the conventional unconventionality of Dali, Magritte and the movement’s superstar…

Surrealism’s international magic

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SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND GET 3 MONTHS FOR £3 You’ll need a sense of adventure, curiosity, natural scepticism and good humour if you want in on the action. Every month, Fortean Times takes you on an incredible and somewhat twisted journey where you’ll discover the most fantastic phenomena on earth. YOUR PHENOMENAL OFFER: Get your first 3 months for £3 SAVE up to 23% on the shop price if you continue your subscription Enjoy your subscription either in print or digitally on your favourite device FREE delivery to your door before it hits the shops NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUR DIGITAL DEVICE Visit subscribe.forteantimes.com…

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Mesopotamian ghosts

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM The First Ghosts Most Ancient of Legacies Irving Finkel Hodder & Stoughton 2021 Hb, 368pp, £25, ISBN 9781529303261 Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the British Museum’s collection of c.130,000 Mesopotamian clay tablets, here deploys his expertise in transliterating and translating Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform inscriptions, demonstrating that a belief in the reality of ghosts is both ancient and – based on the extant scientific knowledge of the time – entirely rational. Evidence of grave goods found in Upper Palæolithic burials (c.50,000 BC) demonstrates the great antiquity of the idea that some aspect of a buried human being would be going somewhere else. By logical reasoning, it then followed that this aspect of a person, if able to detach itself…

Mesopotamian ghosts

Explaining the Donald

The King in Orange The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power John Michael Greer Inner Traditions 2021 Pb, 201pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781644112588 Donald Trump may be the ultimate anomalous phenomenon – at least for our age. How did an elderly American real estate and entertainment magnate, with baffling coiffure and no record in public service, rise to the level of what monarchist Buddhists once called a global wheel-turner, changing the course of empire? In their search for answers to that question, pundits of all stripes have been scouring fields from economics and psychology to criminology and theology for nearly five years. John Michael Greer, no stranger to the seemingly impenetrable, takes the explanatory path less travelled. The Trump phenomenon can never be understood, he says, without serious consideration of…

Explaining the Donald

Same old same old

The Unidentified Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters and Our Obsession with the Unexplained Colin Dickey Viking 2021 Pb, 320pp, £18, ISBN 9780525557586 In The Unidentified, Colin Dickey presents a compulsively readable yet deeply problematic overview of cryptozoology, ufology, conspiracy and pseudoscience. Dickey’s overworn central conceit is that interest in fringe beliefs is the result of a rejection of scientific rationalism and the “disenchantment” of the world, an attempt to regain the wonderment of a premodern and therefore irrational era. Dickey relies upon the flawed view that science and enchantment cannot coexist or are at cross-purposes, and that the advent of Enlightenment rationalism represents an all-encompassing division between the irrational and the rational. It is the same false dichotomy that Damon Knight ascribes to Charles Fort: one is either a scientific true…

Same old same old

THE HAUNTED GENERATION

“The story of Bill Russo and his dog stands out,” says Mombi Yuleman, with a shudder. “They were taking a walk at night, when a short hairy creature – a ‘pukwudgie’ – beckoned them to come closer. It seems to be a direct and intentional connection between our world and theirs…” He’s talking about the curious tales attached to the “Bridgewater Triangle”, a swampy region of south Massachusetts where all manner of nasties lurk amid the trees. Bigfoot, UFOs, even phantom trucks… all have been sighted, and Yuleman’s excellent new album, Beneath Bridgewater, combines dark ambience, “found” audio recordings and the fictional narrative of a missing motorist to shine a tentative light through the mists. “There have been many missing persons cases in the Triangle, and I wanted the story…

THE HAUNTED GENERATION

Young and innocent

TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM The Innocents Dir Eskil Vogt, Norway 2021 In cinemas and online Nothing whatsoever to do with Henry James (or Deborah Kerr), this Norwegian supernatural horror starts slowly but gradually draws you in and puts you under its spell. The film centres on a bunch of children on a housing estate. There is Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), a resentful girl who is jealous of her autistic elder sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who gets all the attention from their parents. There is Ben (Sam Ashraf), an Asian immigrant who lives with his neglectful mother and spends most of his time outside. And there is Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), a kind-hearted little girl who lives with her mother and misses her absent…

Young and innocent

The Proof Might Be Out There… “Tonight, on The Proof Is Out There!” (History) says Tony Harris, importantly and directly into the camera, “Is the creature in this video an experiment gone wrong?” Well, he has immediately invoked Betteridge’s law (any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with ‘no’) – but wait! There’s more! “Is this video of UFOs flying in formation real or fake? And what did this pilot see in the sky over Mexico?” Cue Tony walking into his base of operations, yet again, as so often in this sort of programme, part study, part Halfords stock-room (see FT416:67), throwing his keys on the side like Sam Spade and logging on to be all investigative. He beams from behind his laptop. “I’m Tony Harris,”…

CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Joy of Fort Regarding the debate about ‘Middle-aged Mulder Syndrome’ [FT415:58-59]: encountering Fort for the first time in the late 1970s as a teenager, via Phenomena, Fortean Times and Fort’s Books, what I found (and find!) so exciting and liberating was the gloriously freewheeling playfulness of his imagination; the shamanic, poetic-magical speculations; the cosmic romance and humour of it all; strange objects flying across the Moon: vast, super-celestial, luminous wheels churning through the midnight oceans; owl men scaring children in a rural churchyard: a burning figure runs across a Wiltshire field… a man walks behind some horses and is never seen again… time-slips; dreamlike synchronicities and correspondences; a naked man…

The strange death of Hannah Twynnoy [FT417:42] reminds me that Malmesbury Abbey (the site of Hannah’s memorial) is home to the “Flying Monk”. Around AD 1125 the mediæval historian William of Malmesbury wrote in his book Gesta regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings) about a fellow monk reputed to be Britain’s first aviator. In about AD 1005 Elmer (sometimes also called Eilmer) allegedly managed to fly (or rather glide) “more than a furlong (201m/660ft) from the Abbey’s tower using a rudimentary type of hang-glider. On landing he is said to have broken both his legs, which left him lame for the rest of his days. Elmer is immortalised in a stained-glass window located in a side room off the main body of the Abbey, where he is depicted holding…

It Happened to Me…

Night in the Railway Museum I remain a benevolent sceptic where ghosts and other forteana are concerned – not that you would guess it from the number of books and articles I have written on the subject. Despite my scepticism, I am fascinated by the subject of ghosts and would love to be proved wrong. Hence my occasional ghost-hunts, related in my blog Spooky Vocation, which includes ‘Vigil on a Friday Night’ (originally published in FT151:46) about my disappointing ghost hunt at Lancashire’s Chingle Hall in 2001. I did, however, have two very odd experiences at the National Railway Museum in York in February 2010. Despite there being 10 other investigators on the vigil, I was alone during both experiences, so I don’t have any witnesses to back me up.…

It Happened to Me…

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Fortean Traveller

128. Las Pozas, Xilitla, Mexico North of Mexico City, the parched scrub desert of the central highlands slopes down towards the humid Gulf Coast through the rugged hills of the Sierra Gorda. Cactus and thorn bushes give way to wooded valleys, and eventually to dark green temperate forest flickering with butterflies and hummingbirds. Perched above the jungle is the small market town of Xilitla, and on its lower slopes lies Las Pozas (‘the pools’), a 20-acre valley set around a cascade of waterfalls, dense with ferns, bananas, magnolias, bromeliads and mango trees, and filled with huge and impossible structures. Tier upon tier of concrete platforms and classical columns sprout surrealist sculptures and flourishes, linked by a maze of steps and wrought iron gates, secret gardens, staircases winding aimlessly up the…

Fortean Traveller

Daniel Vanheyst, 22, was part of a team cutting down street trees in Oshawa, near Toronto, Canada, when he was dragged into a woodchipper and killed. An unnamed spectator who was watching the work with his family said that Vanheyst was disposing of branches when the accident occurred. “I saw his feet leave the ground. It was that quick,” he said. “It wasn’t a good scene for the young boys.” nypost.com, 18 Mar 2022. When police in Douglas County, Georgia, were called to a shooting in which 14-year-old Kyra Scott had been killed, they arrested her 13-year-old brother for the killing. He had been manufacturing “ghost guns” – weapons assembled from parts bought online that do not have identifying marks and are sold on the black market – and had…

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