Thursday 29 November 2007

Ghost-hunting in online newspaper archives

The Guardian and Observer newspapers have made their entire archive available to the general public this month. It costs money, of course, but until the end of the week, one can search for free, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Previously, I have accessed The Times newspaper archive and been able to download some interesting accounts of hauntings from the 19th century. The searchability of these sources is quite extraordinary: typing in a word like 'ghost' and finding it highlighted in a news article from 1851, for example. Searching can be hard work, though, because the word 'ghost' can have several meanings and is used in unrelated terms like 'ghost town'. One has to be more cunning than that.


So far, my Guardian searches haven't proved as fruitful as those I made in The Times. Mainly, I've been coming across reviews of books and radio broadcasts. For example, I have seen several rather lukewarm reviews of a 1934 BBC Radio broadcast from an alleged haunted house in which little was recorded other than the whining of the owner's dog and lots of setting up of equipment. What's interesting, though, is that Psychic Investigator Harry Price was there to lend a hand and to keep his publicity machine going. With him was Dr C E M Joad, who later joined Price on his investigations at infamous Borley Rectory.

Seeing names like Harry Price cropping up in contemporary news reports is fascinating. These archives are windows on a vanished world.

In earlier records, Arthur Conan Doyle crops up regularly, too. It appears he put in a great deal of effort promoting the study of psychic phenomena around the world. I was amused by one story of a tour he made of the British Commonwealth countries in Africa. As part of his presentation, he showed a slide of a ghost photographed in a mansion in Nottinghamshire. Imagine his dismay when a man in the audience stood up and announced: 'That's me! It's a trick photograph.'

It still seems extraordinary that the man who created Sherlock Holmes, that exemplary proponent of the rational and logical, should himself sbeen so gullible, far too keen to accept the truth of the Cottingley fairy photographs and the claims of fraudulent mediums.

(Visit www.guardian.co.uk/archive to make your own investigations).

Tuesday 20 November 2007

Big Cats on the prowl in North Wales

(Since the bulk of this article is about a previously unrecorded Alien Big Cat, or similar, I hope readers of Uncanny UK will forgive me for copying it from my Haunted Wales blog).

One of the two articles recently uploaded on www.uncannyuk.co.uk gives a brief outline of the so-called Alien Big Cats that are so often reported prowling round the countryside. Almost every county in Britain seems to have had reports of people glimpsing panthers, pumas or whatever they might be in the fields and hills. My own small county of Flintshire is no exception.

A few years ago I was talking to a young chap called Callum who told me he had seen a strange animal one evening in his home village of Cymau. Cymau is very much a rural village, on a B-road from the main road connecting the towns of Mold and Wrexham. It is in a fairly wild corner of pastoral Flintshire, surrounded by wooded hills.

Callum told me that he and a few friends were walking along a path that skirts 'the park', an open area in the village with a few swings and a slide. It was early evening. As they walked past a house, a security light came on, causing Callum to glance up to a spot where it had illuminated the top of a bank at the far end of the park.

He said: 'I saw a silhouette of some animal. It was dog-shaped but three or four feet high. The thing is, it was bounding like a cat, not running like a dog. And it was very fast: it cleared the width of the park in seconds. Then it disappeared into shadow. No one else saw it.'This was in 2003. A year previously reports had been circulating about a big black cat spotted by several witnesses around the village of Leeswood, about eight miles from Cymau as the crow flies (or the cat bounds).

There is a string about big cats in the area on the BBC North-East Wales website, including a sighting at Alex's Pool, Leeswood by a teenager named Matthew. Matthew says: 'It was black and had a tail about one metre long, and its body was even bigger. I heard something rustling in the bushes and when I looked around there it was. It stopped and then just made its way through the trees away from me.'

Maybe it was the same animal, for big cats can cover a large territory. What intrigues me, though, is Callum's description of his creature's being 'dog-shaped', although it moved like a cat, and that he saw it at twilight. This brings us smartly into the territory of the mysterious Black Dogs that appear to be more ghost than substance, and include the strange beast seen by Malcolm Jones at Brymbo (which is only four miles from Cymau).

Perhaps some of these black cats are actually Black Dogs, or variants of them, and not real animals at all. There are quite a few articles on Black Dogs to be found on Uncanny UK at www.uncannyuk.co.uk
If you have seen what you believe to be an Alien Big Cat or a Black Dog in Britain, please let me know by emailing editor@uncannyuk.co.uk

Visit the Big Cat string for North-East Wales at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/guides/weird/mythsandlegends/pages/panther.shtml

Saturday 10 November 2007

The Hound of the Baskervilles and other big Black Dogs

Malcolm Jones's account on the Uncanny UK website of a huge, unidentifiable animal he saw in Brymbo, North Wales, recalls mysterious dog-like apparitions that are prevalent throughout British folklore. In Wales these spectres are known as Gwyllgi (translating as 'Dog of the Twilight'); in England they go by a variety of regional names, including Padfoot, Skriker, Trash and Black Shuck. In the literature, they are usually simply referred to as Black Dogs.

They are commonly described as being black in colour, with a shaggy pelt and closely resembling a dog of the mastiff breed but much larger, about the size of a calf. They are said to haunt lonely lanes at night or twilight. Mr Jones's spook, which may be an earlier sighting of 'The Beast of Brymbo', has many of these characteristics, although his had a leaner outline, more like a lurcher.

Such tales are believed to have been the inpsiration for Conan Doyles's famous Sherlock Holmes story 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', set on Dartmoor. This wild area of South Western England certainly has its Black Dog traditions, and they may be linked to the big black cats now currently haunting the moors. However, it has also been claimed the author got the idea while staying at the village of Clyro in Mid Wales (which has its own Black Dog and a pub called the Baskerville Arms), or while on holiday in East Anglia, an area particularly rich in Black Dog lore.

It's interesting to learn that such weird and inexplicable apparitions are still to be seen, at least as recently as 1971, the date of Mr Jones's encounter. When I was writing my 'Wales of the Unexpected' column in the North Wales Daily Post newspaper, I received accounts from readers of two separate Gwyllgi seen on Anglesey, dating back to approximately 1915 and 1930 respectively. These accounts are reproduced in my book of the same name (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, ISBN 1-84527-008-8).

The are several other stories of the Black Dogs to be found on the Uncanny UK website, including one that could fly! To read more visit www.uncannyuk.co.uk

If you are interested in ghosts in Britain, check out my other blog: http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com

Thursday 1 November 2007

Welcome to Uncanny UK

I hope you had the common sense to stay in on Hallowe'en night and avoid not only the wandering spooks but also the scary gangs of marauding trick-or-treaters. Far safer to stay by your computer and check out www.uncannyuk.co.uk instead.

If you haven't already visited Uncanny UK, I do hope you'll give it a go and enjoy my articles on ghosts, fairies, witchcraft and mysterious creatures. I hope, too, that you will regularly revisit to read the further features that will be uploaded every week.

It's early days yet and a few of the sections are a little sparse (I really need to write some more 'Strange Creatures' articles!). Over time, I hope more writers will join me and that readers will favour us with their own experiences, too. Shortly, there will be a Forum where readers will be welcome to share their views and comment on the articles.

I'm asking readers to register on the site (for free, of course), because it will help me gauge its popularity or otherwise. Registered readers will be able to use the Forum and also access an otherwise exclusive series of 'More Uncanny' articles on a range of weird subjects (fairy-ghost hybrids, guardians of burial mounds, prophetic dreams, all sorts of peculiar stuff). The 'More Uncanny' section will be presented with a new article every month.

Please visit Uncanny UK at www.uncannyuk.co.uk and let me know what you think. You can send your comments to: editor@uncannyuk.co.uk

(Oh, and don't forget to check out my other blog, devoted to Welsh ghosts: http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com)