Blog – Paranormal Magazine

Location, location, location

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

When I began to research the ghostly folklore of Wales some years ago, I soon noticed that certain locations boasted far more spooky stories than others.

The odd thing was that these clusters had nothing to do with the one factor I would have expected: their population. Naturally, one would expect more ghosts to be reported from places where there were more people around to see them, ie the towns and cities. Indeed some might argue that since more people have died in the populated regions, the higher proportion of ‘unquiet spirits’ there might be floating about.

In the case of Wales, however, these clusters of old ghost stories were evident in the rural areas, particularly the Vale of Glamorgan and the county of Montgomeryshire. However, I soon learnt the reason for this isn’t that they are (or were) more haunted than other parts of the Principality – it was simply that the few people with a real interest in ghosts and folklore 100 or so years ago happened to live there.

The Vale of Glamorgan, for example, was the home of four or five important collectors of folk tales and Montgomeryshire was the home county of the Rev Elias Owen, the most important of the 19th century Welsh folklorists.

These early folklorists were actively seeking ghost stories from their neighbours and writing them down for future researchers such as myself to discover.

The same principle applies today. There do seem to be ‘window areas’ – regions where a concentration of paranormal activity occurs – but there also seem to be certain places that attract writers and researchers. Not big cities, but rural communities.

The county of Devon is one that springs to mind. No less than four of our regular writers live in Devon (Jon Downes, Richard Freeman, Nigel Watson and Lee Griffiths) and there are others, too. I live in a corner of North-East Wales and so was both surprised and delighted when two of my favourite authors, Janet and Colin Bord, happened to move into the neighbouring town. It was only after I started editing Paranormal that I discovered that top British ufologist Jenny Randles had also moved into the area.

No doubt other clusters will become apparent as time goes on. Anyway, it explains why in this issue you have two thoroughly enjoyable articles on haunted sites in Devon: a jolly little café which has some surprisingly sinister nocturnal visitors, and an innocuous patch of countryside where you might encounter anything from a glowing ball of light to a phantom cow.

The latter piece, by Jon Downes, is the first in a new series of ‘Popular Haunts’ – short articles extolling the spooky virtues of a favourite haunted spot in an author’s neighbourhood.

Location is important. There is so much we can learn from our surroundings (as successfully argued by Robert Goodman in his article, ‘A Sense of Place’ on page 28).

Not so long ago a zoologist decided to thoroughly investigate her own back garden in Leicester. She found three species of insect previously unrecorded by science. Similar success can be achieved in less orthodox disciplines.

If you haven’t already done so, why not get out there into your community, meet the local WI, Rotary Clubs, Historical Societies and so on – and see just how many unrecorded encounters with the paranormal you can uncover? You may learn of any number of previously unknown haunted properties, or a multiple UFO sighting many years ago. Who knows?

Whatever you find out – please be sure to let us know!

Richard Holland, Editor

Tell the editor about your own experience with the paranormal. Email: editor@paranormalmagazine.co.uk or write to Richard Holland, The Editor Paranormal Magazine, Jazz Publishing, The Old School, Higher Kinnerton, Chester CH4 9AJ. Or submit your story through the EXPERIENCES section on our website by clicking HERE

A rational interest in the irrational

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Some people regard anything with more than a passing interest in the paranormal as ‘eccentric’, a little ‘around the twist’, a ‘conspiracy nut’.

It’s a prejudice that, as a science writer, I experience all too often. Meanwhile, a growing number of scientific papers go further. Indeed, some psychiatrists suggest that believing in magic is a hallmark of a mild form of schizophrenia. And that’s worrying for everyone interested in the paranormal.

Many psychiatrists believe that a pattern of thoughts, beliefs and behaviours called schizotypy lies between ‘normality’ and schizophrenia. Marked schizotypy is, essentially, ‘mild’ schizophrenia. Among other characteristics, schizotypical personalities may show odd or eccentric behaviour and appearance; demonstrate ‘cognitive slippage’ (linking unrelated concepts by tangential connections, such as bird to cola: bird, bat, ball, dance, Tango, cola); and report perceptual changes and magical thinking.

To Western psychiatrists, magical thinking is having beliefs that defy ‘scientific’ cause and effect, including astrology, spirit influences, and telepathy.

So, if you believe in magic, cast horoscopes or consult your guardian angel you could be on the way to being diagnosed with mild schizophrenia. Ironically, Swedish researchers note that patients who report paranormal experiences and beliefs tend to be healthier than those with more mainstream views (Personality and Mental Health 2009;3:193-202). Paranormal experiences can help solve life crises and improve mental health.

Psychologists argue that magical thinking offers an appearance of control in circumstances when you cannot exert real influence. Some psychologists regard people with paranormal beliefs as having cognitive deficits – in other words, impaired mental abilities. In particular, they suggest, paranormal believers tend to misunderstand probability and relationships between events (the ‘conjunction fallacy’).

For example, if I constructed a sigil to get a new job and succeeded, I could believe the ritual helped. Cynics would argue there was no link: my success was down to my CV. Such ‘misunderstandings’, they suggest, help form and maintain paranormal beliefs (Applied Cognitive Psychology 2009;23:524-42)

Other papers argue that people with ‘magico-religious beliefs’ tend to think intuitively rather than analytically (European Journal of Personality 2006;20:585–602). Yet analytical thinking develops largely through a scientific or philosophical education. Even if they’re interested in the paranormal, few scientists admit their secret vice. On the other hand, many people investigate the paranormal because science doesn’t hold all the answers. (Despite a decade as a research scientist, I agree.) So, it’s hardly surprising if those studied think intuitively.

Nevertheless, some people cast a scientific eye over the paranormal. In a series of articles over the last 15 years, I’ve tried to examine the irrational rationally. Much more importantly than my humble scribbles, groups such as the Centre for Fortean Zoology, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, and Society for Psychical Research investigate the paranormal analytically. Indeed, some past-presidents of the SPR were eminent scientists, including Sir William Crookes, who discovered thallium and cathode rays.

And I can’t help feeling uncomfortable at the implicit assumption in many of these studies: that a belief in the paranormal is a sign of marginal psychosis or dysfunctional thinking. There’s a real danger of turning a paranormal interest into a disease that needs ‘treatment’ – in the same way that psychiatrists once regarded homosexuals as ‘ill’.

As late as 1977, the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases included homosexuality as a mental illness. It’s easy to argue that an overemphasis on the scientific materialist method is also abnormal. As is so often the case, the ideal lies in the middle.

As the old saying suggests: ‘Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.’

by Mark Greener

Mark Greener is an award-winning freelance journalist specialising in health and bioscience. Mark is a former research scientist who has written widely on his life-long passion: cryptobiology. He’s the author of nine books and his features have appeared in magazines worldwide. He lives between Cambridge and Ely and keeps a sharp look-out for the Fen Tiger but has sadly never even seen a footprint.

Can wizards retire?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

In September I went to Ireland, together with my wife Corinna and my friend and colleague Max Blake. We were visiting my old friend Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels; a surrealist painter, playwright, musician, wizard, conjurer, and self-confessed thimble-rigger and charlatan.

He is best known to forteans and devotees of the paranormal for having photographed the Loch Ness Monster in 1977, and his involvement with (and some say manufacture of) a series of strange events that happened in southern Cornwall between 1975-1986. These were a series of sightings of two Cornish monster icons: Morgawr the sea dragon and the grotesquely surreal Owlman of Mawnan, a feathered humanoid creature which appeared to young women near Mawnan Smith, about seven miles from Falmouth.

At the time of these sightings Tony was best known as a busker and proponent of street theatre, performing at events like the Padstow mayday celebrations in Cornwall, and the Killgorlin Puck Fair in Co. Kerry. For many years the Shiels Clan (Tony, his wife Chris, three daughters and two sons) commuted between Cornwall and the Republic of Ireland.

In the early 1970s, an Irish newspaper dubbed Tony Shiels ‘The Wizard of the Western World’; a title which he held until earlier this year. For Tony is both a magician and a Magician: a conjurer and a practitioner of a magick that I do not profess to understand, although I have witnessed it on so many occasions as to be convinced of its existence. I am a scientist, but I have seen him do many things that conventional science cannot explain, from bending spoons to calling up monsters, and I have no doubt he is capable of even more.

I had always assumed that being a wizard was something that you were born into: a bit Harry Potter. (‘Don’t mention Harry ****ing Potter in my house,’ roared Tony, when I said as much to him, but there was a gleam in his eye as he did so). Nevertheless, earlier this year he resigned as Wizard of the Western World.

He has passed on his title to Keith Barry – a well-known Irish TV magician, illusionist and mentalist. Mr Barry not only seems to be a very talented man, he is also politically active as his actions prove following a burglary which led to the death of his grandfather. He threatened to cause havoc in Ireland if the government did not take immediate measures to protect vulnerable pensioners like his grandfather.

‘I mean that,’ he said. ‘And it’s going to cost millions. I’m going to shut the country down’

I know to my cost that hell hath no fury like a wizard scorned, and if I were in the Oireachtas I would presently be seriously worried (but even in Ireland they don’t let fat anarchists who believe in magick into parliament).

And am I the only person to have noted with a grin that Keith was born in 1976, the year that saw the death of Max Ernst (Doc’s greatest hero, methinks) and the greatest scenes in the Morgawr and Owlman saga? Greatly significant? Who knows? Tony I suspect but he’s not saying.

But what of Tony? Even after leaving office, an American President is still called ‘Mr President’, and accorded presidential honours, and I think any claims (even from him) that he has hung up his magical hat for good should be treated strictly cum grano salis. He may not want to admit it, but there is life in the old Doc yet.

by John Downes

Paranormal parallels

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

It’s interesting to note how similar encounters with the paranormal can be, no matter in which country or culture they take place. One of the high points this month is an article by a new writer to Paranormal Magazine, Tamsin Oxford.

Tamsin writes about the Tokoloshe, a malignant spirit firmly believed in – and feared – all over Africa. She has personally interviewed people who claim to have encountered the Tokoloshe as well as the traditional healers (sangomas) who seek to protect people from them.

One South African sangoma told Tamsin the following signs of a Tokoloshe: ‘You’ll always feel as if there is this presence around you and you’ll smell a sickly stench. Sometimes you’ll hear scratching and mischievous laughter and his nasty rasping voice.’

Now compare this to what paranormal investigator Steve Mera learned of a haunting that had broken out in a house in northern England (‘The Stockport Poltergeist’). The suffering family told him they were ‘plagued by the sound of scratching at night’ and one of the two daughters of the house heard ‘a deep rasping voice’ before being pushed by something invisible. Steve himself was assailed by ‘a horrific smell’ in one of the bedrooms.

In her article, Tamsin also states that a typical assault perpetrated by the Tokoloshe takes the form of ‘scratches on a child’s back and upper legs during sleep’. One of the teenage girls in the Stockport case woke one morning to find scratch marks on her legs.

Similar unnerving experiences: in the UK blamed on a poltergeist and in South Africa on a Tokoloshe.

In the second of his two articles on the paranormal in the Philippines, Owen Elias tells us about trees said to be possessed by evilspirits which bring misfortune to anyone who interferes with them. Such a belief is prevalent in western Europe, too. As we reported in Paranormal News, in issue 40 (‘Ghost tree is felled’), a tree in Finnis, Co. Cork was believed to be haunted and the parish priest had to intervene to stop electricians cutting it down to make way for power lines.

In issue 39, Richard Freeman focused on the strangest spooks said to haunt the Philippines and this month he turns his attention to Brazil.

Richard describes many incredible bogeymen, nuttier than the nuts the country is famous for, including a werewolf that can detach its head and a mule that conversely has no head but shoots fire out of its neck!

Too crazy for the UK? Not a bit of it. What about the headless donkey I was told about that clatters about on two hooves in a lane in Monmouthshire, or the huge, skinless bull which haunted two locations in Shropshire? Many of the paranormal beasts reported from Asia and Latin America share characteristics with our own spectral Black Dogs.

The Tokoloshe-poltergeist similarities remind me just how many people worldwide have experienced and continue to experience the supernatural, people who live thousands of miles apart, who have no connection to each other and who come from very different cultures. I don’t know whether Tokoloshe exist or what causes poltergeist phenomena, but I do know that in any arena other than the ‘paranormal’ such a wealth of testimony would be considered proof enough of truth.

Richard Holland, Editor

The burden of proof

Monday, November 9th, 2009

First off, I must offer a belated thank you to Dave Wood of ASSAP for his highly informative and valuable series of articles on Scientific Investigation which came to its 12-month conclusion in the previous issue.

This Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (try saying that after a few drinks) has been at the forefront of amateur scientific research into the paranormal for decades and is the most respected organisation of its kind. We couldn’t have asked for any better authority to guide us through the most effective ways to carry out scientific research into ghostly phenomena.

After all, we couldn’t have asked any professional scientific body or government department to help us: there aren’t any.

There are a few parapsychologists dotted about but their role seems to be to prove we’re all hopelessly deluded, not to discover whether there is any truth behind the countless reports of ghosts, poltergeists etc throughout history which might, if investigated properly, lead to perhaps the most important breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of existence since apemen gained the power of speech and started throwing ideas around instead of rocks.

Of course not. You wouldn’t get a grant for that. At least ASSAP hope ‘there’s something in it all’: they’re just careful to keep a lid of common sense and good practice on their enthusiasm.

ASSAP’s particular bête noir are the increasing number of gadgets people take with them on their investigations, almost all of which, they argue, serve no good purpose. Jerry Glover, in this month’s Bookend, has come up with a rather radical and intriguing suggestion for a bit of kit ghost hunters should employ more often – but I won’t spoil the surprise by mentioning it here (turn to the inside back page if you can’t wait to find out).

It all depends on whether you are interested in gaining proof of a spooky occurrence or interested simply in the experience itself. If you wish to gain proof then of course you must be scientific about it. If all you have as evidence is an odd reading on some meter or other you better be pretty sure you know precisely what that means – or it’s worthless.

However, there is a lot to be said for holding quiet vigils somewhere with a haunted reputation and seeing what happens. It might be worth taking along a friend. There’s always the chance that if something peculiar happens, you will both experience it – and at least that will rule out the possibility of it having been entirely down to your own imagination.

Either way, if you do see or in some other way experience a ghost, you will have no proof of it. But you will have had the experience: of something rare and fascinating, something that may prove – even if only to yourself – that there exists a world of strangeness and wonder outside the confines of our ordered modern lives.

Whatever the true nature – or supernature – of the paranormal, whatever scientific explanations may one day be forthcoming for the various phenomena, the paranormal remains a human experience, one that affects us personally, emotionally.

That is why sharing one’s own experiences of the supernatural is so important, irrespective of any additional evidence. It still helps to add to our sum of knowledge.

And, of course, it’s always of interest. Especially to us.

So here’s a hint: Experiences begins on page 76 this month. We look forward to reading yours next month!

Richard Holland, Editor

Watching the detectors

Monday, November 9th, 2009

You’ve chosen a location to investigate possible paranormal activity. What should you bring along to ensure you won’t miss anything?

A camera would be an obvious choice; a sound recorder could also be essential. But what about the range of esoteric gadgets that have become almost de rigeur for the paranormal investigator – the EMF meters, infrared motion sensors, gaussmeters, digital thermometers, anenoameters? It all looks very serious, scientific and foolproof. But is any of it really going to detect anomalous phenomena?

As regular readers of Paranormal Magazine will know, ASSAP is a research organisation promoting a scientific approach to paranormal investigation. ASSAP’s series of Scientific Investigation articles which ran in the past 12 issues adopted a sensibly cautious position towards these instruments, stressing there is no real proof that ghosts or strange manifestations have any correlation to what is being detected by them.

This chimes with my own belief that the materialistic fascination with this hardware (fed by TV paranormal ‘investigation’ shows) is eclipsing the most reliable and sensitive kind of paranormal detector you can use to empower your investigation. I am talking about animals.

Let me share the experience that crystalised this for me. At around noon on December 19, 2006, my family and I went for a walk in a field at the edge of our town. The day was beautifully sunny and crisp, and as I turned a corner at the bottom of an upward slope I noticed that Ellie, my dog, was standing motionless, looking straight ahead up the hill. Looking ahead, I noticed something emerging from behind a tree, moving along the line of a path outside the field about a hundred yards ahead.

What I initially interpreted as two people wearing old-fashioned brown clothes suddenly felt not quite right. These ‘people’ were a constant shade from top to bottom. For ten seconds or so this vaguely human-shaped brown mass moved slowly along a wall and out of sight, possibly around a corner, it was difficult to tell. Ellie, who is as old as time and sees very poorly, continued to act totally out of character for the duration, frozen to the spot.

A minute or so later a group of people walked across the same spot, allowing me to observe how they looked perfectly normal and nothing at all like the previous thing. By this time my family was alongside us, seconds too late to share this bizarre sighting with me.

My terrier’s extremely guarded and vigilant posture, alerted by some means that couldn’t have been her terrible eyesight, strikingly demonstrated the old wisdom of how animals have extrasensory abilities. Many animals are known to have foreknowledge of earthquakes. The work of Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows how pets can react to events beyond their immediate location, attuned to what he calls ‘morphic resonances’. Why not paranormal phenomena as well?

A genuinely serious investigator of the paranormal should acknowledge how the nature of anomalous phenomena is too subtle, too elusive to be left exclusively to exotic instruments. A good dog could indeed be worth more than any ‘investigation kit’. Ellie showed no lasting trauma from her experience, and I hope to have her by my side if anything like it ever happens again.

By Jerry Glover

Over the course of two decades Jerry Glover has worked as an actor, comedian, satirist, critic, comedy writer, TV format-developer, BAFTA-nominated television producer, journalist, photographer, band manager and writer. His work has appeared in publications ranging from countercultural to academic and mainstream books, magazines and journals. He lives with his wife and daughter in Leighton Buzzard.

Will mediums get rarer?

Friday, October 9th, 2009

A few weeks ago I was kindly invited along to take part in the Great Unexplained Debate. This is an hour-long recorded as live round-table discussion of all things odd hosted by the genial Karl Beattie – yes him, from Most Haunted.

The Debate is on twice a day on The Unexplained Channel, which used to be the Paranormal Channel but has changed its name (to widen its scope, I’m told, to include mysteries that aren’t strictly paranormal). I was invited in for two debates in which we discussed all manner of strange stuff, while Karl kindly saved me from shamelessly plugging the magazine by doing it himself. Cheers, Karl!

When it was first launched by a different publisher a few years ago, Paranormal Magazine was supported by Karl and his wife Yvette Fielding, with other Most Haunted regulars contributing. I understand this support fizzled out after a while. At any rate, there has never been any such link (other than some advertising) since the title was bought by Jazz and I took over as editor. Indeed, I am one of those who has always eyed Most
Haunted with some suspicion, largely because of the activities of its less than convincing mediums.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn, therefore, that there has been a major change of attitude over at Antix Productions, Karl and Yvette’s TV company, which owns the Unexplained Channel and still produces Most Haunted for Living TV. During the first debate I took part in, Karl warmed to the subject of mediums and announced to the world at large:

‘I came from a position of believing in psychics but having worked with them, I now realise I don’t believe in them. Outside of Most Haunted, none of the programmes I do or Yvette does will have mediums in it.’

Although he didn’t say so, and I wasn’t in a position to ask during an almost-live recording, I suspect this is because Living TV requires that Most Haunted’s successful format remains unchanged.

Fellow guests Andy Lewin, who runs Manchester Haunted investigation group agreed that he would ‘prefer not to use mediums’ and Hazel Ford, who runs the ghost hunting entertainment group Haunted Happenings, was critical of the psychological damage fake mediums can inflict on the vulnerable. Earlier in the programme Hazel had stated that her group now runs an increasing number of medium-free events ‘by public demand’.
So, even people seeking nothing more than an entertaining evening are getting fed up with mediums.

This is not to say that some psychics may not have genuine paranormal abilities – of some sort or another (see psychologist Dr Matthew Smith’s ‘Bookend’ this issue for more on this theme). But I remember the days when earnest mediums who worked through Spiritualist Churches would never dream of ‘performing’ for money – indeed they believed the spirit world would take way their ‘gift’ if they did so.

It’s too easy to call oneself a medium, or clairvoyant, or – the hedge-your-bets label – a sensitive (ie someone who’s a bit imaginative). And as Hazel pointed out, such people make themselves the focus of any investigation, spouting forth unverifiable information that detracts from other, perhaps more genuine, experiences that might have been witnessed by others in the group.

In investigation scenarios, mediums muddy the waters. I’m relieved to find that TV presenters, events organisers and the public as a whole are becoming disenchanted with them. I do hope mediums become rare. You never know, we might be left with some real ones.

by Richard Holland, editor

Am I going gaga?

Friday, October 9th, 2009

That is the question I have been asking myself ever since receiving an email from the man who runs a website called BadPsychics.

As its name suggests, BadPsychics is largely dedicated to exposing ‘psychics’ and ‘mediums’ as nothing more than frauds and conmen (or conwomen); or at the very least as individuals who are deluded into thinking they might have paranormal abilities. The website also hosts a collection of forums on which members debate (or perhaps debunk) the latest psychic to grace our television screens.

The email was to inform me that someone had posted to one of the forums asking if Dr Matthew Smith had gone gaga as they had read that I had been quoted as describing a particular medium as ‘one of the most impressive mediums I have seen’.

You might wonder why anyone would care if I had gone gaga. Well it all stemmed from the fact that the good folks at BadPsychics knew me as a voice for the ‘sceptical community’ through my involvement on a TV show called Most Haunted. My role, as a psychologist and parapsychologist, was to put forward alternative explanations for apparently
paranormal occurrences that took place during an investigation of an allegedly haunted location. As far as this programme was concerned, I was the ‘voice of reason’ who did not believe in ghosts and was there to ensure that the rational explanation for any apparently ghostly phenomena was heard.

So to be quoted as describing a medium as one of the most impressive I’d seen clearly raised a few eyebrows. But being sceptical doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, rule out being open to apparently paranormal phenomena. It is more to do with having a questioning approach to unusual and extraordinary claims.

Mediums claim to communicate with spirits of the dead. By anyone’s account, this is quite a remarkable claim and so it is reasonable to be sceptical. But I am also intrigued. Many mediums give messages that are rather vague and likely to apply to quite a few people, and so they do not provide compelling evidence that they really are receiving messages from the dead.

However, on the several occasions I’ve seen this particular medium perform, he has given messages that seem to contain both accurate and specific details such as names (first and last), dates, even addresses. He has even been known to provide such information under conditions that seem to rule out some of the more obvious non-paranormal explanations like cold-reading. So, yes, I am happy to be quoted as regarding this medium as one of the most impressive mediums I have seen.

The question I am now asking myself is, how does he do it? Is he really communicating with spirits of the dead? Is he drawing upon some other as yet unexplained power of the mind like telepathy? Or is there some other non-paranormal explanation for his apparent abilities?

These are the really interesting questions to ask. And sceptics should ask questions – they should seek to find answers – not make assumptions.

by Dr Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at Liverpool Hope University. He has conducted research on telepathy, precognition, luck, séances, and psychic pets, and was for a time the resident ‘sceptic’ on Most Haunted on Living TV. He is currently exploring the world of psychic development by seeing if he can develop his own psychic abilities.

Bad Science was pure gold!

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Few things irritate me as much as sceptics who deride our ancestors’ belief that the sun moved around the earth, that swallows hibernated in mud at the bottom of ponds, or that alchemists could transform base metals into gold.

Consider our ancestor’s perspective: the sun seems to travel across the sky; the idea that swallows, which weigh just 25 grams, could fly 200 miles a day to winter in South Africa seems preposterous; and while chemists often regard alchemists with the affection that we attach to endearingly eccentric great aunts, it’s worth remembering that many of the greatest minds of their time believed in the transmutation of metals, including St Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton.

F Sherwood Taylor, an eminent historian of chemistry, notes in his superlative book The Alchemists that alchemy arose from a theory, formulated by Aristotle, that there was only one type of matter, which was capable of infinite forms.

Taylor notes, ‘it follows that no material change is impossible, though some changes cannot take place directly’. A horse doesn’t spontaneously transform into a lion, he remarks, but if a lion eats a horse, matter loses its horse ‘form’ and takes on that of the lion. As the remains decay, the horse matter gains the form of, say, a maggot. Alchemists aimed at the demise of the form of copper and the matter’s resurrection in the form of gold.

Some attempts to transform matter’s form seemed to work. When heated with brimstone, copper loses its metallic form. Taylor explains why: the reaction between sulphur and copper produces a black mass of copper sulphide. Reacting copper with alum, acids and certain arsenic compounds produces alloys that ‘were white, lustrous, and much like silver in appearance’.
Around the late 13th century, the Arabic alchemist Abu’l-Qāsim al’Irāqī noted that heating lead for a long time yields small quantities of silver. We know – although medieval Arabs did not – that lead ore contains silver. Alchemists produced yellow alloys of copper with tin, lead, zinc, iron, silver and mercury. Taylor comments: ‘Though we must doubt if any goldsmith ever took any of these to be gold, their yellow colour must have given hope that success was near.’

Alchemists did not benefit from sophisticated chemical theories or high-tech analysis. They couldn’t tell – beyond the appearance and basic physical properties – whether they’d made a precious metal. So when they created a lustrous metal ‘much like silver’ when they altered the colour and properties of copper, it must have seemed that they had changed the form of matter. Many modern scientists placed in the same alchemical laboratories, furnished with the same chemicals, supported by the same Aristotelian theory, would probably come to the same conclusion.

Whether you see the earth going around the sun or the sun circumventing the earth depends largely on the theories you’re taught. New evidence, experimental techniques and insights continually refine scientific theories. Eventually, old theories become anachronisms. We now know the earth orbits the sun.

Scientists have no right to be complacent. Three-quarters of the energy that cosmologists predict should be in the universe is invisible (so-called dark energy), for example. I can’t help feeling that future sceptics will regard many of today’s scientific theories as just as quaint as chemists consider alchemy to be.

As Sherlock Holmes comments in The Sussex Vampire: ‘One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them.’

by Mark Greener

Curiouser and curiouser

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I remain boggled by the vast wealth of weirdness that exists or has existed in every culture throughout the world.

This issue I have been introduced to the extraordinary ‘draugr’ of medieval Norse belief. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a gently drifting lady in white or a spectral chanting monk wouldn’t be enough to spook a Viking. Oh no. It’s not enough to go ‘boo’ to Eric Bloodaxe or Snarrl the Mighty (who I’ve just made up). They’d just chortle through their beards – before getting very, very angry.

The idea of a Viking ghost is a much more visceral and vastly more terrifying entity than the rather self-effacing spooks we’re used to today: an animated corpse grown to twice human size, with super strength and a violent, vengeance-fuelled temper. Imagine the Incredible Hulk but with blue skin, wielding an axe and clawing its way out of a tomb and you get some idea of how a draugr would appear. (Now have a nice cup of tea to calm yourself down).

These horrors feature in more than a few Norse sagas, mainly from those of ancient Iceland. They make their startling debut in Paranormal thanks to a new writer for the magazine, Thomas Polkinghorne, to whom we are most grateful for scaring us silly.

Meanwhile, several of our established writers are planning to outdo themselves in uncovering the most bizarre entities from other cultures around the world today. Richard Freeman, who has already done a good job in suggesting that the Philippines harbour the strangest spooks (see last issue) is now preparing an article encouraging us to think the same of Brazil. Richard’s colleague, Jon Downes, is planning to highlight the nightmarish beings said to haunt Puerto Rico, an island he knows well through carrying out several long-term investigations there.

But I’m pleased to say the Dr Karl Shuker is taking up the cudgels on behalf of good old Blighty by seeking to come up with his personal Top Ten of the weirdest entities ever seen on these shores.

Karl’s current article on the Witchie Wolf and other mystery canines of the Americas is also full of fascinating material, while Nick Redfern helps to underline the high strangeness to be encountered in the USA with his article highlighting that most paranormal of states, Texas. We also journey to Italy for a tour of surely one of the most mystical cities in the world, Turin, a place where the forces of good and evil are said to meet.

The UK holds its own as ever this issue, with ghosts reported from Cornwall, Hampshire, the Scottish borders and elsewhere, to say nothing of Janet Bord’s review of her favourite fairy-haunted sites.

And looking down on all of us, the world over, is the Moon – a place that may not be so lifeless and barren after all, but the possible centre of the entire UFO enigma.

All in all, this issue would tempt me to say ‘It’s a funny old world’, if that cliché were not so hopelessly inadequate.

Richard Holland, Editor

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