Holy Thorn hacked down

One of the Holy Thorn trees round Glastonbury Tor was cut down by vandals overnight in early December. This is/was the most famous of the Holy Thorns, on Wearyall Hill, the one believed by (fairly modern) folklore to be the descendant of an original hawthorn planted by Joseph of Arimathea during his putative wanderings around the West Country. For the full story see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-11957440 

Lancashire 'Nessie'

An angler who has fished this unidentified lake south of Preston, Lancashire, for decades had never seen anything like this before, so videoed it for posterity. He said: "The old jetty behind the unidentified object is about 10 - 12 feet in length so that may present us with some comparative scale.” The YouTuber who confidently states that 'it's a snake' (meaning a grass snake, which do swim well), may have the answer, though.

The Witch of St Ives

Amusing sideline in Dr James Fox's recent programme on BBC4 on The Art of Cornwall. Apparently, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth was such a formidable character that the locals secretly referred to her as 'The Witch of St Ives'. A tongue-in-cheek morsel of folklore grew up that the abstract sculptures in her garden were actually the ossified remains of her victims, transformed by her Circe-like powers. 

James Stewart and the Yeti hand

BBC stalwart Sandi Toksvig mentioned an odd story that was new to me on last night's QI quizz series. She mentioned that actor James Stewart smuggled a 'yeti's hand' out of India - or rather his wife did, in her underwear. The man who'd stolen the so-called Pangboche Hand, a relic said to be the hand of a yeti, gave it to Stewart rightly trusting that his luggage wouldn't be searched. The relic had originally been stolen from a monastery in Nepal. The story was rediscovered by cryptozzologist Loren Coleman (whose site Cryptomundo.com I highly recommend). You can read the full story on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangboche_Hand 

Eerie crossroads

Two new articles on www.uncannyuk.com, each about the folklore attached to crossroads. These liminal places have long had an eerie aspect and there are many examples of haunted crossroads in Britain. Just click on the 'Ghosts' tab to read them.

Moving on

Uncanny UK has now moved to a new home at http://www.uncannyuk.com/ This new and improved site is on a better server and is fully content managed, which means that previous bugbears in which articles were taking up to a week to upload should now be eliminated. There should be no excuse for me now not to write and upload at least one article every week as planned - laziness notwithstanding!

This blog will therefore cease to be, with the Uncanny UK blog instead transferring to http://www.uncannyuk.com/ .

Avanti!

Senseless things

Almost every book on ghosts I buy - and I buy too many to fit my shelf space - presents me with some absorbing new story, some memorable account which had previously escaped my notice.

Such a case impressed me early on into leafing through my recently acquired copy of Graham J McEwen's 'Haunted Churches of England'. McEwen describes an extraordinary occurrence in a churchyard in south Devon. I outline this bizarre and inexplicable incident in the latest article to be added to the 'More Uncanny' section of www.uncannyuk.co.uk The article, 'Hole lot of nothing' can be accessed by any registerd reader of Uncanny UK. If you havent registered (it's free), please follow the 'Register now' link from the home page.

So much strange phenomena has been recorded and analysed, patterns of behaviour recognised and theories expounded that there's a particular attraction about an occurrence that makes no sense whatsoever (even in supernatural terms).

I remember reading a strange first-hand account in a newsletter of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomolous Phenomena. This chap had been walking home from work when he met his ex-wife, with whom he was on friendly terms and who lived further along his street. She couldn't resist pointing out that his coat looked a bit threadbare and could do with a couple of buttons being sewn on it. She invited him to call round later so she could make the necessary repairs.

After he'd had his tea and a bit of a sit down, the gentleman decided to take his wife up on her offer and went to fetch his coat from where he had earlier hanged it up. He was astonished to find that someone - or something - had sewn several very large, very red and entirely inappropriate buttons on it in that short space of time. His ex-wife was as mystified as he was. It was almost as if some helpful fairy or other cosmic being had overhead the conversation about the coat and had tried to clandestinely help - but not very efficiently. No explanation for this weird little domestic incident was ever forthcoming.