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).

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

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

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)

Nights are closing in and so is Uncanny UK

Hallowe'en is streadily approaching and so is the launch of the Uncanny UK website. The finishing tweaks and flourishes are just being made to it and it will go live (as opposed to undead) on October 31.

Once upon a time this date marked the end of the Celtic year and I'm beginning to understand why. The season has suddenly turned; it's become much colder, damper, mistier and the light seems to drain out of the sky more quickly. Here in Britain, of course, the 'clocks have gone back' an hour and night is upon us almost indecently quickly.

Twilight, rather than midnight, seems the more usual time for ghosts to haunt, certainly out of doors. Twilight, like Hallowe'en, is a between time and this indeterminacy suits the supernatural: the barriers between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds have become less well defined. Twilight is now upon us at about 6pm, a time when there are plenty of people still about - so that ups the chances of more spooks being encountered.

In folklore in-between places, like bridge, stiles and crossroads were the favoured haunt of ghosts. If you really want to see a ghost, then, here's my suggestion to offer you the best chance:

On Hallowe'en at twilight visit a crossroads with a bridge nearby and a stile leading off from at least one of its lanes. Don't blame me, though, if your hair turns white (unless it's already white, in which case don't blame me if it stands on end and then falls out).

Much safer to stay in by your trusty computer and read all the articles about ghosts and other esoteric subjects you'll find that evening at www.uncannyuk.co.uk

(Don't forget in the meantime, to check out my other blog http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com)

Scary nights in museums

Chris Jolley, the chap putting the finishing touches to the soon-to-be-launched Uncanny UK website, happened to stumble upon a reference to a haunted aeroplane. According to a review of Cosford Air Museum in Shropshire on 'John Hopkin's Aviation Pages', an Avro Lincoln bomber on display 'is reputed to be haunted'. Oo-er! Unfortunately, I have no details to add yet.

Chris seems to recall that 'the Fleet Air Arm musuem down south has a haunted plane as well'.

I vaguely remember reading about a German aircraft in a museum where its former pilot is sometimes glimpsed still seated in the cockpit. A quick flick through Hippisley-Coxe's 'Haunted Britain' also confirmed my recollection of a haunted tank - in a Tank Musuem at Bovington Camp in Dorset. Hippisley-Coxe writes: 'a German officer has frequently been seen, peering at the Tiger tank he commanded - and in which he may have died - in World War II'.

There have been rumours of other haunted museums, mainly centred on ancient artifacts like Egyptian sarcophagi. One day I intend to make an inventory and write a book about all these haunted exhibits and indeed any other solid, three-dimensional haunted objects you can visit.

I strongly suspect that a former World War II bomber will turn out to be the largest artifact, though!

Check out the reference to the haunted bomber at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_hopkinson/Cosford.htm You may also ike to look at www.tankmusuem.co.uk

Don't forget to read my blog devoted to the ghosts of Wales: http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com

Mysterious mason gives head

My friend Karen Bailey has just sent me a link to a BBC news page about a very odd incident in Yorkshire.

In the small hours of the morning someone has been leaving big, heavy carved stone heads about (such as the one pictured). Why, nobody knows. Twelve of them have turned up so far, in villages as far as 50 miles apart. Three alone appeared overnight in Braithwell, South Yorkshire, where the mysterious giver of heads was caught on CCTV leaving one outside the post office. So far he remains unidentified.

As you can see from the photograph, these heads aren't throw-away items: they are solid lumps of rock, expertly carved. The only clue to the artist is a device on the verso of each which spells out the word 'paradox'. Each also bears the following line of doggerel: 'Twinkle, twinkle like a star, does love blaze less from afar?'

Reaction to the odd gifts has been varied. The couple who run the Braithwell post office seem to have been a bit creeped out, because they handed the CCTV footage over to the police. The licensee of the Foresters Arms Hotel, Kilburn, North Yorkshire, has given her head - which she found staring at her from the patio one morning - pride of place on the bar. She told reporters: 'We'd love to meet or find out who it is. Whoever it is is extremely talented.'

Maybe it's a publicity stunt. Once a buzz has been created about the heads - lo, they shall go on sale. But even that seems far-fetched. After all, time and skill has gone into making them and distributing 12 of the things is surely over the top if the intention is ultimately commercial. Perhaps it's some sort of weird situationist art project. Or someone is just having a lot of fun, doesn't need the money and is enjoying surprising people.

Good old British eccentricity, that's what it is, I reckon. It reminds me of that chap who turned up in Aberystwyth in Mid Wales (was it last year or the year before?) and suddenly started handing out great wads of cash before disappearing. Now that sort of eccentricity is worth encouraging!

To read more about the mysterious Yorkshire heads, follow this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7022091.stm

(And don't forget my sister Blog, http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com