July – 2008 – Paranormal Magazine

The Penguin Book of Ghosts

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Author: Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: Hardback £14.99

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Not the usual Penguin book: this is a chunky hardback more than 400 pages thick. The Penguin Book of Ghosts consists of everything ghost-related from the two folklorists’ magnum opus, The Lore of the Land, published a few years ago.

Forget your orbs and EVPs; this comprehensive collection of yarns and superstitions is kept strictly within the bounds of traditional ghost-lore, old stories of good old-fashioned ghosts from the length and breadth of England.

Arranged county by county, this scholarly but thoroughly readable guide to England’s ghostlore will introduce you (or reintroduce you) to such charmers as Black Toby, Skulking Dudley, the Lumb Boggart, Old Cloggy and the ‘Queen of Hell’. Although the stories are of some age, the authors have been careful to check for up-to-date sightings and other information on the ghosts.

Here are just a few extracts to whet your appetite:

‘The neighbourhood of this tree [at Hockley, Essex] was believed to be haunted, as being at, or near the spot, where a woman is said to have killed her child, and during the night noises were heard resembling “Oh mother, mother, don’t kill me.” People used to come from miles to listen to the “shrieking boy”.’

‘One farm worker in the 1960s claimed that he used to hear [the ‘screaming skull' of Bettiscombe, Dorset] “screaming like a trapped rat in the attic”. Some believe the skull sweats blood before national calamities.’

‘As both were returning home drunk from the inn at Nether Stowey [Somerset], Walford strangled his idiot wife and hid her body in a ditch. The crime was soon discovered, and he was condemned to be hanged at the scene of his crime, and his body then gibbeted there. Some people still say they hear the gibbet’s iron chains rattling on windy nights, or smell rotting flesh.’

The comprehensive index is a particular joy of The Penguin Book of Ghosts. Not only does it allow you to look up any location or named ghost, every type of manifestation imaginable seems to be listed: from Black Dogs and headless horsemen to such specifics as silk-clad ghosts, bicycling ghosts and claw marks.

It is only unfortunate that there was no room for Wales, Scotland and Ireland in this unrivalled compendium. Perhaps this was a plan for the future, defeated by the sad and untimely death of Jennifer Westwood earlier this year.

Resident Evil returns

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Resident Evil 5

The original ‘Survival Horror‘ videogames series, Resident Evil, is set to make its first appearance on ‘next gen’ games consoles when Resident Evil 5 is released early next year. Set in Africa, the game tells the story of the origins behind the virus that the series centres around.

The game is currently set to be released in March 2009.

UFOs spotted near Dewsbury

Monday, July 14th, 2008

CLOSE encounters of the first kind seem to be occurring regularly at weekends in a remote area near Dewsbury.

Bright lights hover in the sky, sometimes in a triangular formation, and then apparently fly off at great speed.

They have been witnessed for months by Mrs Lorraine Senior at her home near Woodkirk Valley Country Club. Leeds Road. Finally, she took some shots of them on her mobile phone camera and showed them to her sceptical sister, Yvonne Hawthorne, of Beeston.

Yvonne, 47, who works on National Express trains between Leeds and London, called at the British Library for a coffee break.

There she showed the eight-minute film to a UFO enthusiast who declared it to be first class footage.

“When my sister first told me the lights were coming near her balcony, I said she was hallucinating,” said Yvonne. “But she insisted she was right.

“They come regularly at weekends about 11.30pm and hang around for about 20 minutes. They are oval and diamond-shaped and have multi-coloured lights.

“Sometimes they fly in a triangular formation and shoot off at great speed. I would guess they are about half a mile away. There is nothing in the area but green fields. I’m a believer in them.

“I have been itching to tell people about them but it’s embarrassing unless you can provide footage like this.”

A close encounter of the first kind is a sighting of one or more unidentified flying objects which include odd lights and flying saucers. Whereas a close encounter of the third kind, popularised by the Stephen Spielberg film of that name, is observation of animate beings linked to a UFO sighting.

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Have YOU been abducted by aliens??

Monday, July 14th, 2008

A few days ago, the Weird Universe blog dug up a 1993 report on a UFO abduction survey, investigated by sociology professor Ted Goertzel at Rutgers University. The report was checking into a previous study’s claim that 3.7 million Americans were suffering from “UFO abduction syndrome.” While the Goertzel report largely debunked the idea that millions of Americans are actual abductees, you might still be in some danger — especially if you live in South Jersey.

Goertzel’s study first reviewed an existing UFO abduction survey, which asked about five major experiences that could indicate a possible abduction:

1. “Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.”
2. “Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been.”
3. “Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn’t know why or how.”
4. “Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them.”
5. “Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.”

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Monster interest in loch filming

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Loch Ness and the surrounding area are on the brink of a boom time due to the number of films being shot there, it has been predicted.

Willie Cameron, a location manager, said the past 10 days had been among the busiest in recent years.

Scottish Highlands and Islands Film Commission said there had been a gradual rise in inquiries about the loch from the film industry.

The figure has grown from about 30 to 200 in the last seven years.

Recent films to draw inspiration from the water’s mythical monster include made-for-TV horror Beyond Loch Ness.

Produced by Canada’s Insight Film Studios, it follows a cryptozoologist’s hunt for man-eating Nessie years after it killed his father during an ill-fated trip on Loch Ness.

A promotional stunt to launch a DVD for a more mainstream film – The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep – was one of a series of events involving the Highlands loch in the last 10 days.

The film itself was shot mostly in New Zealand, but Mr Cameron said the local area still benefits from any spin-offs from features that even just mention the loch, or its monster.

The Visit Loch Ness location manager said: “I think we’re going back to a boom time again.

“Loch Ness goes through a period of popularity and then there is a little dip, but we’re in a high interest period just now.”

He added: “In the last 10 days we’ve had the promotion of the Water Horse DVD, a fashion shoot for a German executive clothing magazine and contestants in a German reality TV show came here to collect water from Loch Ness.

“A documentary has been shot on the geology of Loch Ness and we are expecting another one to be done on the geology of the Great Glen.”

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English Civil War ‘ghost’ captured on film by paranormal enthusiasts

Monday, July 14th, 2008

A ghostly figure, supposedly the spirit of a dead soldier from a key battle in the English Civil War, has been captured on film by a group of paranormal enthusiasts.

The Northampton Paranormal Group caught the figure on camera during a visit to the site of the Battle of Naseby, a field between the villages of Clipston and Naseby in Northamptonshire, last month.

The visit coincided with the 363rd Anniversary of the Battle of Naseby. Members said they heard clunking noises as well as sounds like cannonball fire.

When the group then looked through pictures they took during the visit, they spotted what appeared to be mysterious figure walking out of the dark carrying something in its hands.

Emma Whiteman, leader of the group, said: “The picture was taken about an hour after we heard the noises but we didn’t see anything at the time.

“When we saw it, when we were looking back through the pictures, we were gobsmacked.

“We’re saying that it’s a soldier. Some people can see it sitting on a horse and some people just see it as a walking soldier.”

The Battle of Naseby in 1645 was a key win for the Parliamentarians over the Royalists in the English Civil War.

The battle involved more than 21,000 troops when the Royal army, under Prince Rupert, was beaten by Parliamentary troops led by Sir Thomas Fairfax.

Adrian Perkin, an author and ‘ghost detective’, said he thought the image was a soldier with a musket or pike walking through a gateway.

He said: “If this is genuine it’s a very, very, good example. It’s the best I have seen for many years.”

Sceptics said the effect was caused by the camera itself.

Anne Haddon, of The Naseby Battlefield Project, said: “I haven’t heard anything like this at the battlefield in all my association with it. It’s fair to say I’m a bit sceptical.”

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