Paranormal Magazine

Exploring the world of the unexplained

Jazz Publishing

Fairies Today

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

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

Dogs of Darkness

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

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

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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