Last month I owned up to the peculiar extraterrestrial fantasies of my childhood. A new article has now stirred up another half-forgotten early memory.

New writer to Paranormal, Mark Salmon, got in touch with several ideas for features, one of which really hit home with me. Mark told me he had discovered that large numbers of people shared a similar, inexplicable memory: of having floated down the stairs when they were children. And he’s one of them: he can recall drifting down stairs that had been secured by a child-gate when he was an infant barely able to stand up.

My younger brother shared this talent. I remember seeing him float down stairs when he was a toddler, his little pink feet never touching a single step. I guess I would have been five or six at the time. Reminding Stuart of this extraordinary incident, he surprised me by saying he was sure it was no isolated occurrence; indeed he went further.

‘I don’t think I needed to actually walk down the stairs until I was about five or six,’ he said. Ulp!

So, is this a new phenomenon Mark has uncovered? Are there many more people who can recall being able to defy gravity as infants? Can anyone recall floating upstairs – surely that bit more difficult? (What am I saying? This job is giving me a really skewed perspective on things!) Anyway, if any reader can shed more light on this remarkable subject, do please get in touch.

Flight is something of a theme this issue. ‘Eye-opener’ showcases photographs of levitating people and objects. Ten pages are devoted to horrible half-human winged things, thanks to Jon Downes and Janet Bord. Dr Karl Shuker discusses the intriguing idea that UFOs might be luminous creatures floating in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Back down to earth – kind of – Nick Redfern completes his two-part article on ‘shape-shifters’ by focussing on were-cats and spirits which take on animal form after death. And don’t miss Jerry Glover’s informative article on Spontaneous Human Combustion, in which he successfully argues that the cause of this most gruesome of phenomena is far from solved.

My own contribution is a short one on a scarce category of spook, the ghost bird. In this I mention the fact that certain birds were once seen as bad omens: for example, it was considered very unlucky if a crow came down your chimney. Which brings me to another anecdote (sorry).

When I lived in a rustic cottage a few miles from the Paranormal offices some years ago, I heard quite a lot of scraping and scratching coming down my chimney, but I assumed it was just soot. The chimney ended in a metal pipe which connected to a closed, pot-bellied wood-burning stove. Several hours after the ‘soot’ had ceased to fall, I opened the flap on the stove and gave it a good prod inside with a poker, assuming that it was full of rubbish. But nope, it seemed completely clean. I rattled the poker around inside just to make sure, then removed it.

Seconds later, a dusty jackdaw emerged from the darkness. It squeezed through the aperture and perched blinking on the rim. How I missed it with the poker I do not know but the bird’s sudden appearance was so uncanny that I dropped it on my foot in surprise. Fortunately, the crow didn’t croak out ‘Nevermore’, or I might not be here today to tell you the story. In fact, the only ‘unlucky’ result of the adventure was getting loads of sooty claw marks all over my walls while attempting to shoo it outside.

Richard Holland

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