Paranormal Magazine

When we think of monsters, we imagine them inhabiting the wilds of the earth: deep forests, inaccessible mountain ranges, remote lakes and distant oceans. But this is not always the case.

Sometimes the monsters come closer to home. They swap the jungle for the concrete jungle and are glimpsed lumbering just beyond the neon lights or lurking in suburban gardens.

Bigfoot seems the ultimate symbol of the wild, untamed wilderness, and yet huge ape-like creatures have also been reported from the cities and suburbs. On January 9, 1974, Richard Lee Smith was driving along Hollywood Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the early morning when his car collided with a massive figure that lurched out of the darkness. Smith pulled up and got out of his car to help – but was appalled to see the ‘man’ he’d struck stagger up to a height of 8ft and then make for him with a roaring sound. He hurriedly got back into his car and sped away.

This rest of article can be found in Paranormal issue 36.

[Image courtesy of Tia Stoneman. Visit her website at: www.stardustillustration.co.uk]

Sexual hauntings are among the most disturbing and mysterious of paranormal phenomena. Assaults and seductions by inhuman entities have been recorded for thousands of years. Veteran researcher BRAD STEIGER discusses several of the many such cases that have come under his notice.

The email was not a request.  It was an urgent plea: ‘You must help my sister!’
In the body of the email, a woman stated that her sister – an adult female living in her own apartment – had suffered a number of nocturnal attacks by an invisible being.  These terrible night visits by the molester were described as violent and sexual in nature.

One night, she said, admitting to me that a seed of doubt persisted in her mind, my correspondent left her children home with her husband and went to spend a night watching over her sister.

After her sister had fallen asleep and she herself was beginning to nod in the rocking chair beside the bed, she witnessed for herself the unbelievable onslaught on her defenceless sister.  The covers were torn from the bed by an invisible force, and a nightmarish struggle between her sister and her determined and increasingly aggressive assailant began.

(Full article in Paranormal issue 35, available now. CLICK HERE to buy the issue and for subscription information, or CLICK HERE to download the digital issue from www.zinio.com)

Grave-robbing rabbits, bum-fondling terrapins, killer cucumbers – it will be no surprise to learn that this roster of bizarre paranormal beings belongs to Japan. RICHARD FREEMAN introduces the Yokai, crazy ghosts and critters more monstrous than any Manga comic.

Japan has a folklore tradition unrivalled for its richness and strangeness. Collectively, the ghosts and monsters of Japan are known as Yokai. With a handful of exceptions, the amazing creatures and characters belonging to this supernatural menagerie are almost unknown in the west.

Yokai is really a catch-all term for any odd, unnatural, ghostly or monstrous being. They fall into a number of categories.

The Henge are shapeshifters. Unlike the western lycanthropes and other were-beasts, the Japanese Henge are usually animals that take on human form rather than vice versa (such inversions of western conventions are not uncommon in eastern lore). Henge can include foxes (Kitsune), raccoon dogs (Tanuki) and cats (Bake-neko); animals most of us would consider harmless. In Japanese legend all of these creatures can take on human form to spread chaos and misery.

Yuki-onna, the snow woman is one of the best known of all yokai, having being popularised by author Lafcadio Hearn. Yoki-onna is the most beautiful and sexually provocative: an inhumanly lovely woman with long, silky black hair and exquisitly pale skin.

The rest of this feature can be read in Paranormal issue 31

The Borley Bug, © Joyce Mercer

RICHARD HOLLAND revisits one of the strangest stories regarding one of Britain’s most celebrated haunted houses, Borley Rectory.

The story of Borley Rectory on the Essex/Suffolk border is one of the best known in British ghost-lore. Investigated, among others, by the legendary Harry Price, who dubbed it the ‘Most Haunted House in England’, the Rectory burned down in 1939 after years of ghostly activity.

One of the strangest of the myriad phenomena reported from Borley was that experienced by a Mrs Margaret Wilson; it strikes me as being quite unclassifiable, if not unique. Mrs Wilson was a painter whose favourite subject was ‘old and picturesque houses’. Unfortunately, as Price pointed out to her, Borley was not very old and in his own opinion ‘ugly’. This did not deter the lady, however, and having obtained permission to visit, she set up her easel on August 22, 1938.

The rectory had been vacated by this time and Mrs Wilson was entirely alone in the garden. She chose a spot near the summer house and opposite what had become known as the Nun’s Walk, two areas where apparitions had often been seen. She insisted that her interest in Borley had been aesthetic rather than spiritual and, after meeting her, Price stated that he found Mrs Wilson ‘particularly unemotional and… a very hard-headed businesswoman, in addition to being an artist’. Nevertheless, she found the place oppressive.

This Feature can be found in Paranormal issue 31 still available for purchase. For subscription information simply click here.

[SOURCE: The Most Haunted House in England by Harry Price, second revised edition, March 1941, pp 132-7].

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

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

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.”

[via]

Subscribe to newsfeed:

• Browse features

  • Aliens (2)
  • Black Magic (4)
  • Creatures (7)
  • Ghosts (5)
  • Poltergeists (2)
  • UFOs (2)

• Browse news items

  • Aliens (3)
  • Black Magic (4)
  • Conspiracy (4)
  • Creatures (15)
  • Entertainment (7)
  • ESP (2)
  • Ghosts (18)
  • Mythology (2)
  • Poltergeists (2)
  • UFOs (18)
  • Witchcraft (2)

• Browse archives

• June 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008