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Fortean Times|443EDITORIALFLYING OFF FOR EASTER? Welcome to our Easter issue, in which we are pleased to publish a major new article by FT founder Bob Rickard tackling the thorny issue of ‘explaining’ the apparently miraculous. Saint Joseph of Copertino was a 17th century Capuchin friar – untutored, humble, deeply religious and prone to religious ecstasies of an unusual nature: seemingly spontaneous feats of levitation that took place on a regular basis and sometimes observed by multiple witnesses. Celebrated US ‘skeptic’ Joe Nickell (of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) believes he has been able to ‘explain’ Joseph’s levitations, but, for Bob, his approach is reductive, disingenuous and filled with dubious ‘straw man’ arguments and condescending attacks on witnesses. What, then, to make of the ‘phenomenal surreality’ that Joseph’s rapturous flights, defying all…3 min
Fortean Times|443GETTING WRECKEDCAPE RAY CONUNDRUM Gordon Blackmore from Cape Ray, Newfoundland, Canada, was surprised to spot a long shadow just off the local beach on an early morning walk on 20 January as there had definitely been nothing like it there a few days earlier. As soon as the tide had gone out, he returned to investigate with his mother Wanda. What they found was a 24-metre-long (79ft) shipwreck that had suddenly appeared in the bay; however, it was not complete, so the original ship had clearly been even longer. Called in to investigate, Neil Burgess, president of the Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, deduced that the ship was likely to date from the 1800s, as its planks were held together with wooden dowels known as trunnels that were used…9 min
Fortean Times|443ARCHÆOLOGYBALTIC BLINKERWALL What has been styled as a ‘Stone Age megastructure’ has been discovered submerged 21m (69ft) below the surface on the Baltic seabed. It was found by archæologists using a multibeam sonar scan from an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in the Bay of Mecklenburg off the coast of Germany, and is essentially a kind of stone wall (called ‘Blinkerwall’). It consists of 1,673 stones that are mainly under a metre in height, placed side by side over a distance of almost a kilometre linking 300 larger boulders, showing deliberation rather than a random act of nature. Multi-disciplinary researchers estimate it was built by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago on dry or marshy land after the ice sheet retreated, only to be eventually drowned in what is known as the…3 min
Fortean Times|443MH370: STILL MISSINGTen years ago, on 8 March 2014, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, flight number MH370, left Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for Beijing. It had 12 crew and 227 passengers aboard, but 40 minutes into its flight the plane vanished from radar screens as its course took it out of radar range and into airspace not frequented by commercial aircraft. What is currently known about the missing flight is that having taken off at 12.41am, the plane sent its final automated position report at 1.07am. At 1.19am, a final voice transmission was received by air traffic controllers saying, “Good night Malaysian three seven zero”. No distress signal was ever sent, and the plane’s course changes after that final transmission appeared to be made deliberately and were unlikely to be the result…3 min
Fortean Times|443FORTEAN FOLLOW-UPSWORLD’S OLDEST DOG [FT429:13, 430:25, 439:23] When he died last October at the apparent age of 31, Bobi the Rafeiro do Alentejo mastiff held the record for not only the world’s oldest living dog, but also the record for the oldest dog ever. His owners, the Costa family from the village of Conqueiros in Portugal, attributed Bobi’s longevity to a “calm, peaceful environment”, but post-mortem scrutiny of Bobi’s life suggested that all was not as it seemeds. Suspicions about the veracity of Bobi’s age claim caused Guinness World Records (GWR) to suspend his records while further investigation was carried out. Among the factors causing doubt is a photo taken in 1999 and claimed by his owners to be of Bobi that shows a dog with different coloured paws to the…7 min
Fortean Times|443FAIRIES, FOLKLORE AND FORTEANAHOUSE/MOUSE FAIRIES Here’s a story that almost defies belief. Seventy-five-year-old Rodney Holbrook, from Builth Wells, in Powys, Wales, noticed that someone was tidying up his work bench at night, “picking up items such as nuts and bolts, clothes pegs and cable ties and tidying them away into a box” (see FT442:7). Rodney put up a night-vision camera and waited. To his amazement, the film (now widely available online) revealed a mouse. FT stalwart and general scallywag Rob Gandy, who introduced me to the video, wonders whether activity of this sort might not explain some of our stories about house-fairies. House fairies, it will be remembered, not only tidy up, but are also known for doing basic manual labour, leaving coins in shoes, sitting up late in front of the fire,…2 min
Fortean Times|443THELEVITATIONS OF ST JOSEPH OF COPERTINO EXPLAINED?The idea of human levitation is, by its very nature, subversive and surreal. The phenomenon – if we temporarily accept such a thing in order to examine it – involves events that imply that our understanding of physical ‘reality’ is incomplete. At the same time, the idea of levitation as a symbol of transcendence is both profound and ancient. Narrative accounts of it are reported from most cultures and ages. Despite this persistence, there has been little scholarly discourse about reports of the human body rising into the air.1In most societies this feat is the prerogative of a shaman, or holy mystic; a token of divine favour; and imitated by magicians and occult adepts. In the context of anthropology, it becomes an element of a shamanic symbolic journey. In the…37 min
Fortean Times|443FORT TALKCharles Paxton is a research fellow at St Andrews University. His academic pathway is a pretty standard one, as he says “My first degree was in zoology (Liverpool) and then I did a doctorate (Oxford) in fish behaviour because my interest is really fish biology and ecology. I did some postdoctoral research looking at fish ecology and to do that work properly I wanted to use statistics to make sure that I reached well justified conclusions – so I took an interest in statistics, and now I’ve ended up working in the school of mathematics and statistics at the University of St Andrews.” With that background, he says, “I would actually describe myself as a statistical ecologist in that I’m an ecologist who uses statistics rather than a statistician who…12 min
Fortean Times|443A compendium of cryptidsTO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Bigfoot to Mothman A Global Encyclopaedia of Legendary Beasts and Monsters Margo DeMello Bloomsbury Academic 2024 Hb, 320pp, £75, 9781440877254 Margo DeMello is a cultural anthr-opologist, assistant professor of anthrozoology and the author of a number of books. This encyclopædia of cryptids is a scholarly work in which she looks at cryptozoology through the lens of cultural anthropology. It is divided into two sections: the first is an A-Z list of cryptids; the second covers extinct, invented or mythical creatures similar to cryptids. Each of these listings has a mini-bio and date of last sighting as well as suggestions for further reading. In this work, DeMello states that “the presence of monsters – unknown, unchecked, inscrutable – may be…14 min
Fortean Times|443THE HAUNTED GENERATION“I love that crossover of high strangeness in 1970s suburbia,” says Neil Scrivin. “Creepy stone heads dug up in a garden, poltergeist activity and apparitions of weird creatures. It could almost be a follow-up to The Stone Tape…” The story of the Hexham Heads (FT294:42-47, 295:44-49) is a Haunted Generation touchstone. Or rather two mysterious little touchstones, unearthed by brothers Colin and Leslie Robson in their Northumberland garden in the early 1970s. Bringing these tiny carved faces into the house seemingly unleashed a wave of supernatural strangeness, including nocturnal visitations from a bizarre half-man half-goat creature and – as reported by Celtic artefacts expert Dr Anne Ross – an encounter with a passing werewolf. When the story was featured on BBC1’s current affairs programme Nationwide in 1976, it lodged forever…4 min
Fortean Times|443Roads less takenTO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE EDITOR AT DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM All You Need is Death Dir Paul Duane, Ireland 2023 In cinemas from 19 April A very strange film indeed. Straddling the border that separates body horror from folk horror, with a bit of the Roy Castle ‘voodoo jazz’ segment from Dr Terror’s House of Horrors thrown in; you could create a truly bizarreVenn diagram to summarise this film. The central characters are Anna and Aleks, who, like most young couples, are absolutely mad keen on obscure Irish songs. I don’t mean U2 B-sides; we’re talking about Irish folk songs. Getting wind of one such number – a properly ancient one, rooted deep in mythology – they track it down to a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, the home…4 min
Fortean Times|443SATANIC TAYLOR SWIFTWith her continuing and massively popular Eras tour, its accompanying blockbuster film and an intense album release schedule, Taylor Swift is inarguably today’s biggest pop star, and quite possibly the biggest there has ever been. A billionaire from the proceeds of all this, by rights she ought to be at the “pet chimp and personal theme park” level of eccentricity by now, but against all odds she projects a slightly bland image of grounded sensibleness and has an inclination towards socially conscious low-key generosity in the George Michael mould. This, along with her ubiquity, makes her an ideal canvas upon which others can project their fantasies, not least that Swift is a pawn of the Illuminati (see Conspirasphere, p.11), along with Lana Del Rey, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kesha and the late…7 min
Fortean Times|443NOT THE MOST HAUNTEDTHE PHANTOM OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA When asked by the Daily Telegraph about whether he had experienced any theatre ghosts, impresario and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the music for The Phantom of the Opera, a West End hit since its 1986 debut, confessed that he hadn’t. He did, however, believe he had experienced a well-behaved poltergeist in his central London home in Belgravia, saying, “I did have a house in Eaton Square which had a poltergeist. It would do things like take theatre scripts and put them in a neat pile in some obscure room. In the end we had to get a priest to come and bless it, and it left.” One social media wag reflecting on the story said, “When the paranormal is attempting…4 min
Fortean Times|443CLASSICAL CORNER295: ROMAN ROAD RAGE Actually, the earliest episode is Greek, in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. As Œdipus tells it (vv800-14) to his wife, this is how it went: When I came to the place where three roads meet, I met a herald followed by a horse-drawn carriage with a man inside. The leader rudely told me to get out of their way, and his lord and master arrogantly said the same. The driver pushed me aside. I struck him in a temper. Sticking his head from the carriage, the old man saw this, seized the driver’s two-pronged goad and cracked my head. I made him pay the price. Quick as a flash, I wielded the staff in my right hand, knocked him from the carriage and killed them all. Nowadays,…5 min
Fortean Times|443Let’s get physicalMany stories of tactile ghosts are recorded across the years from séance chambers and haunted houses – entities that stroke, caress, tap, grasp, poke, pinch, punch, push, pull, scratch, slap, beat, levitate and even on occasion take intimate liberties with people. But have you ever heard of a ghost checking the pulse of a living person? I must admit I had not, or at least until I read the remarkable account given by novelist Jeanette Winterson of the haunting of her Spitalfields home to the Daily Mail online last October. Situated near Spitalfields Market, her house dates from around 1780. The ground floor opened as a grocery in 1805, but the whole building lay abandoned and derelict when she bought it in the 1990s. During the rebuild, she decided to…12 min
Fortean Times|443MYTHCONCEPTIONS278: HADRIAN’S WALL The myth Hadrian’s Wall marks – or else used to mark – the boundary between England and Scotland. The “truth” Colloquially, Scotland is sometimes referred to by more southerly Britons as being anywhere “North of Hadrian’s Wall” – and a surprising number of people take this literally. In fact, the wall has always been in England, as long as England has existed, and no part of it has ever been in Scotland. To the south of the wall lies England, and to the north of the wall lies more England; Northumberland, chiefly. The formal boundary between England and Wales has varied over time, but it has never touched the wall. Sources www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall; www.visitnorthumberland.com/explore/destinations/historical-sites/hadrians-wall; www.themaparchive.com/product/hadrians-wall-122-ce; Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2023); SPQR by Mary Beard…2 min
Fortean Times|443Solving the Socorro mystery?A FLASHY FRAUD? One of the most famous UFO contact cases, much like the Valensole incident noted in my last column, was reported by Police Sergeant Lonnie Zamora. On the afternoon of 24 April 1964, he saw a craft and its occupants in a desolate area south of Socorro, New Mexico, when chasing a speeding motorist. A loud roaring noise and a flame in the sky made Zamora think a nearby dynamite shack had exploded, so he immediately abandoned the car chase to investigate the matter. Zamora saw an egg-shaped object on the ground, and two small humanoid beings clothed in white coveralls standing next to it. After a few seconds the object ascended to a height of about 10ft (3m) and drifted away on a horizontal flightpath. When Dr…5 min
Fortean Times|443REAL GHOSTS AND CRYSTAL SKULLS THE WEIRD LIFE OF DAN AYKROYDDan Aykroyd has always embraced the weird in all its varied manifestations. For example, in 2005 the Canadian actor hosted a documentary called Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs and has even been described as “the celebrity face of MUFON [Mutual UFO Network]”.1 On a recent podcast appearance he (somewhat half-heartedly) defendedTV psychic John Edward to a sceptical Joe Rogan, who repeatedly stated that Edward’s credibility had been debunked.2 Aykroyd encourages people to read about ‘The Ghost of Flight 401’, which he calls “the most famous ghost story of all time”, and regularly namechecks such fortean figures as Oliver Lodge, Lord Hill-Norton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Hans Holzer, whom he has saluted as “the greatest ghostbuster of all time”. He has publicly expressed a wish for more DNA testing on…16 min
Fortean Times|443Darkness at noonSEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM The sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken … and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” American Fundamentalist Christians will be eagerly opening their Bibles at Matthew Chapter 24 as 8 April approaches. While NASA scientists are expecting an unusually long-lasting and spectacular solar eclipse visible right across the United States, millions of Americans are anticipating even more – an event of apocalyptic importance. Totality, the time when the Sun will be totally obscured by the Moon and daylight will vanish, will last over four minutes. The April eclipse, says NASA,…5 min
Fortean Times|443Under mediæval skinThe Art of Anatomy in Mediæval Europe Taylor McCall Reaktion Books 2023 Hb, 223pp, £16.95, ISBN 9781789146813 In Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (1981), a body is discovered with multiple weapons protruding from it, seemingly the latest victim of a serial killer. On investigation, FBI officer Will Graham discovers how the victim was once treated by a Dr Hannibal Lecter. OnvisitingLecter’s office – and discovering his collection of historical medical textbooks – Graham understands the arrangement of the victim’s body to be a recreation of an image of the mediæval period, the so-called “Wound Man”. This referencing of the “Wound Man” – which would again be drawn on in the Hannibal TV series (2013-15) – is outside the scope of Taylor McCall’s study but it alludes to how historic images…2 min
Fortean Times|443THOUGHT BUBBLE CONVENTION 2023Aliens, the paranormal, and the strange have been at the heart of comics for nearly a century. For me, comics are the most fortean artform, and, in my humble opinion, Thought Bubble is the premier comics festival in the country. Although the main focus of this week-long celebration of comics is the two-day convention (more on that in a moment), the festival also hosts talks, workshops and exhibitions, both in Leeds, where Thought Bubble first started, and its current home of Harrogate. Why do I think Thought Bubble is the best comics event in the country? For me it stands out because it focuses purely on comics. It never tries to be a pop culture convention, with actors from major franchises signing autographs for a fee. Instead, everyone exhibiting is…2 min
Fortean Times|443TELEVISIONForty years ago, a publishing sensation was born: a book, promoted as wholly factual, by journalist Jay Anson about the haunting of a house in Amityville, Long Island, which had been the site of a massacre years before. The perp, Ronnie DeFeo, claimed at the time he’d been possessed by malign forces that had forced him to take the lives of his family; when the young Lutz family subsequently moved in they apparently experienced all manner of terrifying phenomena. Anson’s book sold in the millions and a film (and multiple sequels) soon followed, confusing and elaborating the story for the next four decades. Now, 40 years on, MGM+ have attempted to unsplice the knots of confusion in a well-crafted four-part series, Amityville: An Origin Story, each episode looking at a…5 min
Fortean Times|443It Happened to Me…Wandering passport In November 2023, my wife and I took a winter sun trip to the island of Tenerife with a group of friends as a break from cold, wet northern England. We had a lovely room in a nice hotel in bustling Los Christianos. We were on the third floor and the room felt very secure, so we didn’t bother renting a safe. Passports were tucked away out of sight in the bedroom, money was in money belts, all felt good security wise. One morning, my wife Nicky, who is an early riser, woke me in a panic. She couldn’t find her passport despite having put it safely away in the bedroom and having checked it the night before. She does tend to stress about losing things, but I…12 min
Fortean Times|443WHY FORTEAN?FORTEAN TIMES is a monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents. It was founded by Bob Rickard in 1973 to continue the work of Charles Fort (1874–1932). Born of Dutch stock in Albany, New York, Fort spent many years researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library. He marshalled his evidence and set forth his philosophy in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). He was sceptical of dogmatic scientific explanations, observing that some scientists tended to argue according to their personal beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and that inconvenient data were ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away. He criticised modern science for its reductionism,…1 min
Fortean Times|443ANIMAL NEWSSHELL SHOCK Marine creatures are making use of human pollution in creative ways. Two-thirds of hermit crab species have been found using debris that humans have discarded as ‘artificial shells’, instead of those left behind by molluscs. In a study of hermit crab residences using photos taken by tourists and posted on social media and photo-sharing websites, Marta Szulkin, an urban ecologist from the University of Warsaw, explained, “We started to notice something completely out of the ordinary… Instead of being adorned with a beautiful snail shell, which is what we’re used to seeing – they would have a red plastic bottle cap on their back or piece of light bulb.” Szulkin’s study found a total of 386 individuals using human junk as shells – mainly plastic caps. “According to…8 min
Fortean Times|443THE CONSPIRASPHERETHE SWIFT AND THE DEADShe has 279 million followers on Instagram. Her last tour grossed over $1 billion, making it the biggest of all time. The movie of the tour grossed better than most Hollywood blockbusters. Apparently nearly one-fifth of Americans said that they would probably vote for a candidate that she endorsed; and to date, her favourite candidate is genial Joe Biden. The (self-described) ‘reactionary feminist’ Mary Harrington recently wrote that American conservatives are terrified of her. All in all it’s little wonder that conspiracists, especially those on the right, suspect her of being a tool of the Deep State. Taylor Swift (rumours that I had to ask my teenage sons who she was are entirely unfounded) is, according to a raggedy little poll seized upon by a few…5 min
Fortean Times|443The weird and wonderful sky at nightThe Vera C Rubin Observatory is a new astronomical facility being built on Cerro Pachón ridge in Chile to search for what researchers call “weird and wonderful” objects in our Solar System and beyond. The observatory, known as VRO, starts work in 2025, and AI will sift through the vast amounts of data it gathers, promising a rich and strange harvest of anomalies. Space, as Douglas Adams observed, is “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big”. There is a lot of night sky to observe, and only a limited number of observatories. This is why astronomy has always been such a fruitful field for amateurs: if you point even a small telescope at a patch of the heavens that nobody else is looking at, you might find something that nobody else has seen.…5 min
Fortean Times|443ALIEN ZOOIn last month’s Alien Zoo (FT442:17), I covered no fewer than four allegedly different types of Mexican mystery cat, two of which – the gracile mazamiztli or deer-puma, and the mane-bearing leoncillo, had not previously been documented in the cryptozoological literature. But that is not all. I have now learnt of two more Latin American feline enigmas, one of which is cryptozoological, the other cryptic. So here they are. THE TANTALISING TLALMIZTLI It was longstanding Facebook friend Hodari Nundu, a renowned Mexican artist and crypto-enthusiast, who had kindly drawn my attention to two early Spanish works documenting the mazamiztli. Moreover, in one of those, his 1570s magnum opus Historia Natural de la Nueva España, dealing with the wildlife of what is today Mexico, Spanish naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo has…3 min
Fortean Times|443MEDICAL BAGEXTREME NOSE TERROR An unnamed Florida man turned up at the HCA Florida Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville in early February after he started feeling like “his whole face was on fire”. He had been suffering minor symptoms since October, but went to hospital when they suddenly became much worse. “Over a couple hours my face just started swelling, my lips swelled, I could hardly talk,” he said. “I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom without my nose starting to bleed.” He was examined by ear, nose and throat specialist Dr David Carlson, who was shocked to find a large number of insect larvæ, some the size of the end of his little finger, feeding on the flesh in the man’s nose and sinus cavity. “I knew he…5 min
Fortean Times|443The call of the UFOMany years ago when I was running the investigations department at BUFORA – the largest UFO group in the UK – I was presented with a new challenge – UFO Call. This was a telephone ‘hotline’ for UFO reports, and it started exactly 35 years ago as I am writing this piece – 10 February 1989. Taking the UFO mystery to the nation via their telephones offered the potential to greatly increase the number of cases that might be reported to BUFORA. From phone calls to that hotline, we had a brief snapshot of a case, which would lead to an investigation by a local ufologist if the witness was willing. But UFO Call was a service too, reporting on interesting cases and giving the results of our investigations. By…5 min
Fortean Times|443ON THE TRAIL OF THE LIRPA LOOFIt’s 1 April 1984, and lead presenter Esther Rantzen is introducing the closing segment of BBC1’s Sunday night magazine programme, That’s Life. “The Lirpa Loof…” she begins, as the studio audience listen attentively. “The little Tibetan animal with a talent for mimicking other animals. We read about him when he came to London Zoo six months ago, when the Chinese gave him to us. But this week he has actually been on show there, for the first time since he was allowed out of quarantine…” As usual, the show that evening has effortlessly combined serious reportage with splendidly light-hearted fare. It has looked at the difficulties faced by disabled people in applying for the government’s mobility allowance; it has also taken to the streets to offer hedgehog-flavoured crisps to unsuspecting…16 min
Fortean Times|443Food of the godsThere is something sublime about chocolate. Every culture that encounters it has recognised this. Even the literal-minded Carl Linnæus poetically named the cacao tree ‘Theobroma’ – literally, the food of the gods. Was he aware of the plant’s sacred status within Mesoamerican cultures or had he just tasted a divine cup of cocoa? The earliest traces of cacao being processed and used as a food, medicine and ritual offering date back 5,500 years to the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañón people of Ecuador.1 Not much is known about this ancient culture of farmers and builders but their cocoa recipe seems to have caught on and it passed up the Pacific coast to the more famous Olmec, Aztec and Maya civilisations. Ecuador is still exporting some of the world’s finest chocolate to grateful worshippers across…6 min
Fortean Times|443Magical textsArt of the Grimoire An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells Owen Davies Yale University Press 2023 Hb, 256p, £25, ISBN 9780300272017 With a proven record in the study of magic and witchcraft, Owen Davies brings us this full colour appraisal of magical texts from around the world. With a focus upon the visual dimension of the texts from their first appearance to the modern day, Davies offers a sophisticated discourse that entwines history, æsthetics and the emergence of print media. Magical texts, he believes, are complex epistemological objects that mirror the underlying desires of their host societies, curious and unique explorations of the gaps in our understanding of being in the world. Davies addresses the materiality of the magical text and how the symbiosis between author and existent…4 min
Fortean Times|443COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELSProject: Cryptid #1 Mark Russell, Paul Cornell, Jordi Pérez, PJ Holden comicsahoy.com/comics/project-cryptid-1 31pp, £2.55 This is definitely a fortean comic. Containing two comic stories, as well as a prose tale by Grant Morrison, Project Cryptid is funny, cutting and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Let’s be honest, who could resist a buddy cop story about a Mongolian Death Worm? Blobby Horror Various, ed. Erika Priceć Frission Comics Pb,70pp, £10, www.etsy.com/listing/1608117715/blobby-horror-anthology-zine Back in the Nineties, few of us realised as we watched Saturday early evening TV that we were witnessing the arrival of an eldritch entity – a true god of chaos erupting across the light entertainment universe in vivid pink and yellow. Through this series of short comics a collection of writers and artists commit to paper the true horror…5 min
Fortean Times|443LETTERSBackstone Circle Strange phenomena experienced at stone circles, and especially the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, can be found in Paul Devereux’s book Places of Power (2nd edition, Cassell Illustrated, 1999). The filmmaker Jeff Figgis recounts the experiences of the late photographer Sir Simon Marsden, also at Rollright, where he was thrown back by an invisible force, with his camera ripped from his hands and which left a nasty bruise, recounted in Simon Marsden: A Life in Pictures [FT370:66-67]. Ron Gandy in his article It’s Weird Up North! [FT343:20-21], reporting on the 2016 conference of the same title, recounts speakers giving talks on all manner of weirdness, and this included Steve Jones discussing strange experiences at Backstone Circle on Ilkley Moor. In his book The Old Stones of Elmet (Capall Bann…21 min
Fortean Times|443PECULIAR POSTCARDS42. ENGLISH JACK Some months ago, I purchased some American postcards of English Jack, the Hermit of the White Mountains, New Hampshire, in front of his bucolic hermitage. It turned out that Jack was something of a local celebrity: when he died in 1912, allegedly at the age of 90, the New York Times published his obituary. For years, he had lived alone in his ramshackle shed, which he called his ‘ship’. An unkempt-looking, whitebearded old man, he was known for his reclusive nature and eccentric habits. He was still hale and hearty in his old age, and fond of hunting, trapping and fishing. He kept a corf of trout near his hermitage, and often cooked one of these fish for dinner on his primitive fireplace. He sometimes astounded visitors…4 min
Fortean Times|443STRANGE DEATHSIn Salmi, Gujarat, India, 10-year-old Dipak Thakor was playing with friends near a temple in the village when he was attacked by a “notorious gang” of monkeys who had already assaulted three people in the previous week. One of the monkeys dug its claws into Thakor’s abdomen and inflicted serious injuries. An official said: “His intestine was ripped out in the attack. He rushed to his house and was taken to a hospital where doctors declared him dead on arrival.” Forestry officers are now trying to capture the marauding langurs to relocate them to an area where they will not come into conflict with humans. dailymail.co.uk, 16 Nov 2023. Hongchi Xiao, 60, of Cloudbreak in California, has been extradited to the UK and charged with the manslaughter by gross negligence…3 min
Fortean Times|443OUT NOW!SUBSCRIBERS SAVE 10% Fleetwood Mac are no ordinary rock band, having sold 120 million albums and ruled the airwaves for half a century with an unparalleled catalogue of albums --so our new special edition, Record Collector Presents… Fleetwood Mac, is no ordinary magazine. For the first time in RC’s history, we’ve compiled a double-cover issue that devotes equal love and attention to the two halves of the Mac’s career. Once you’ve read the story of the band’s wild early years, when guitarist supreme Peter Green redefined the blues, flip the mag over for the tale of the even wilder Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham era, when the band were beset by drugs, infidelity and chaos and still produced the unmatchable Rumours. Think you’ve read some crazy stories? Read on… Available…1 min
