Paranormal Magazine

Mark Fraser of the research organisation Big Cats in Britain has kindly passed on the following picture that has just been submitted to BCIB. The photograph of a possible Alien Big Cat was taken by Paul Dennys, who explains: ‘I took this photo in North Cornwall. I’m a natural history photography student with Falmouth University. I was with three other students, getting a panning shot for a short film (no film footage was taken) and was setting my exposures on my still camera when I heard: ‘What the hell is that? Is it a wild cat?’ I focused on the cat and shot (not a a great exposure as I was still setting up). Once I took a shot I looked up to see a dog-sized black cat sprint into a bush. I think you can tell from the photo that it’s not a normal-sized cat.’

Our thanks to Mark Fraser, BCIB and Paul Dennys. The photograph is copyright Paul Dennys, all rights reserved.

Fairies may seem to belong firmly in the folklore of the past but the ‘little people’ continue to be seen by ordinary people throughout the British Isles. JANET BORD provides a fascinating field guide to modern fairies from her collection of first-hand reports.

Fairies have wings, don’t they?  The answer to that question is, Not usually.  The alternative name ‘the Little People’ is usually more appropriate, because very few ‘fairy’ sightings are of winged beings.  Having said that, wings are sometimes mentioned by witnesses. One such report was told to me by a personal friend, Nona Rees, who saw a tiny winged fairy when she was a child in St David’s, Pembrokeshire.

On a hot summer’s day in 1947 when walking home from the beach with her mother, they saw, ‘hovering over a gorse bush, a tiny pure white creature, with wings, like the traditional Christmas Tree fairy’ only an inch or so high.  It ‘hovered upright’ and was definitely not a moth or butterfly:  ‘To us, it was definitely a fairy.’  In 2004 a couple sitting in their garden in Croydon saw a female fairy around 12 inches tall, hovering horizontally over the house gutter.  She wore a flowing white dress, had almost white hair, and white wings.  People who see tiny fairies among flowers also describe seeing wings.

You can read the rest of this article in issue 29 of Paranormal Magazine

NICK REDFERN rummages through some real X-Files to uncover the truth about how the US government investigated the military potential of ESP.

In 1977 Dr. Kenneth A. Kress, an engineer with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services prepared a document for the Agency titled Parapsychology in Intelligence. It dealt with the CIA’s involvement in Remote Viewing - what could arguably be termed ‘psychic spying’ - and remained exempt from public disclosure for decades.

Among other highlights, the now declassified document demonstrates the American Government’s secret interest in ESP-type phenomena dated back to the Second World War. It also reveals that studies run by the CIA on the intelligence-gathering value of ESP were initiated as far back as 1961, and perhaps even earlier. Moreover, there is a clear indication that the Agency had some very real and startling successes in this controversial field.

The document begins by explaining the nature of the CIA’s investigations of parapsychology, the potentials and pitfalls faced by the Agency once it became immersed in the murky world of psychic phenomena, and much more. Most notably, the report states that: ‘Tantalising but incomplete data have been generated by CIA-sponsored research. These data show, among other things, that on occasions unexplained results of genuine intelligence significance occur…’

You can read the rest of this article in issue 29 of Paranormal Magazine

RICHARD HOLLAND tracks down some ‘frightful fiends’ that are still said to prowl around the British countryside.

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

When Coleridge wrote those famous lines in his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, he may well have had in mind a particular kind of supernatural horror that has been terrifying night-bound travellers throughout Britain for centuries: the Black Dog.

These weird apparitions fall into a class of their own. The classic Black Dog appears in the form of a huge black hound of the mastiff variety, with a shaggy pelt and big, fiery eyes. The size is commonly stated as being about the size of a calf.

Not all Black Dogs are black, not all are huge, not all have shaggy hair or glowing eyes, but they all have certain characteristics in common: they are more or less canine and they haunt lonely lanes at night or twilight. They share the unpleasant habit of following solitary travellers, keeping abreast of them or pacing along unnervingly behind - literally dogging their footprints. In some areas death is believed to follow if you catch sight of one - and on rare occasions instant death has been reported from direct contact.

So well-known are the Black Dogs in certain regions of the UK that they have local names: Shriker and Trash in the North West of England, Padfoot in Yorkshire, Black Shuck in East Anglia and Gwyllgi (‘Dog of the Twilight’) in Wales.

The origin of the Black Dog phenomenon is a mystery. Certainly they are not considered apparitions of once living dogs (although ghostly pet dogs occur, too). They are otherworldly, terrifying spectres - minor demons of the British countryside. It has been suggested that the Black Dogs represent a form of ‘ancestor memory’ of being pursued by wolves when they still ran free in Europe’s extensive forests. The fact that they prefer to haunt lanes and footpaths rather than open countryside is interesting because it is possible the routes they choose are ancient ones, perhaps spirit ways sacred in pre-Christian times, or old ‘corpse roads’ used to transport the dead in medieval times. Many pubs named the Black Dog may stand at the end of lanes known to be patrolled by these phantoms.

You can read the rest of this article in issue 28 of Paranormal Magazine

Paranormal editor RICHARD HOLLAND re-examines the strange cases of Gef and the Pwca Trwyn, two weird entities who befriended farming families in remote corners of the UK.

In his book Invizi-kids, Michael Hallowell devotes a chapter to one of the most extraordinary stories in the paranormal records, that of Gef, ‘the talking mongoose’.

Gef was a kind of familiar spirit who took up residence in a farmhouse on the Isle of Man during the first half of the 1930s. Hallowell ponders whether Gef was an elaborate example of the not-so imaginary friends he discusses in his book. The story is often included among those of poltergeists but when I revisited the case, I was struck by how similar it was to old tales of fairies who attach themselves to families.

Doarlish Cashen (Cashen’s Gap) no longer stands but in the 1930s it was an isolated and rather bleak farmhouse built of slate and faced with cement. So exposed was it on a slope of Dalby Mountain that when Mr Jim Irving moved there in 1917, he constructed an inner frame of match-boarding to keep out the wind. The space between this boarding and the exterior wall is important to the story, because the ‘mongoose’ used it to run about the house and to hide behind when conversing with the family.

Irving lived at Doarlish Cashen with his wife Margaret and daughter, Voirrey. Voirrey was aged between 13 and 17 during the four years of the mystery; adolescent girls are recognised, of course, as typical attractors of poltergeist activity. Initially, Gef’s activities were similar to those of a poltergeist: taps, thumps and scratches coming from behind the match-boarding. This progressed to ‘a crack that shook the place and set the pictures swinging’. Animal sounds of barking, growling and hissing followed and then, most amazingly of all, the ghost started to speak.

You can read the rest of this article in issue 28 of Paranormal Magazine

This is a photo taken by designer Neil Sandbach at a farm in Hertfordshire for inclusion in some Wedding Stationery he was preparing for a couple due to host their wedding at the venue. When Neil opened up the photo on his computer he was surprised, and not a little spooked, when he noticed a blurry white figure that he was certain wasn’t visible when the photo was taken, as there was nobody else around.

Neil explains, “a week or so later, just before the actual wedding, and without mentioning the photograph, the couple getting married asked the staff at the venue if anyone had ever seen something ’spooky’. Their faces went white as they described what they had seen on various occasions: the ghost of a young boy dressed in white night clothes, appearing close to the main barn”.

More than 1,000 people claim to have seen the Loch Ness monster since a mysterious shape was first photographed 75 years ago.

References to a monster in Loch Ness date back to St Columba’s biography in 565 AD.

But the myth only took its modern form when reports of a strange object and then a series of mysterious photographs appeared in press during the 1930s. The BBC website has marked the 75th anniversary of the appearance of the first of these photographs with a recap of the most iconic Nessie images to date.

Some time ago Ghost Finder paranormal group was kind enough to send in this interesting photograph taken at a spiritualist church. The red glow near the top of the frame does look rather like a woman’s profile. The chances are, it is some sort of reflection on the lens, light bounced back from the camera itself from another reflective source perhaps. Unfortunately, there is no way of telling without a careful examination of the room at the time. I recognise that it’s very easy to be dismissive of ‘ghost photos’ like these, though, and ones where a particularly lifelike image is captured are always intriguing. We all look forward to our readers’ comments!
EDITOR

This Doncaster student’s picture of an aquarium has baffled bosses at a tourist attraction with a mysterious image of a ghostly face. Emma Place, from Norton, took the picture on her mobile phone while visiting The Deep in Hull with her dad Alan, 48.

It was taken inside a tunnel which overlooks one of The Deep’s tanks and which appears to depict a human head, seen here at the bottom right of the picture.

The 21-year-old contacted bosses at the popular tourist attraction after her boyfriend Craig Richardson, 23, noticed the face after they had returned.

She said: “I was quite freaked out it’s the expression on the face. I have been there before and did not see it so I emailed The Deep asking what it was.”

Bosses launched an investigation to work out what the image was and CCTV confirmed nobody else was inside the tunnel.

Emma, a second year dental technology student at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “I don’t normally believe in things like that but it’s quite spooky.”

Colin Brown, chief executive of The Deep, said: “We are a scientific centre and we’re sure there must be a logical explanation. It’s just that we can’t find it. There must be some sort of optical illusion or reflection of images between the window, but we cannot figure out how it has been done.”

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