Monstrous Monday

Continuing a series of monsters from the now defunct Paranormal Magazine: a hideous entity said to have appeared in a remote country cottage and emanating pure evil. The illustration is by Shaun Histed-Todd and appeared in PM 54, accompanying an article by Richard Freeman.

Monstrous Monday

Continuing a selection of monstrous images from Paranormal Magazine, I continue with another by Anne Elizabeth Robinson, simply because it's seasonal (just). Anne's scary Santa, commissioned for the January 2010 edition (published at the end of Nov 09) accompanied an article on seasonal spooks by John Stoker. Despite being so grotesque, he manages to look quite friendly.

Monstrous Monday

Now that Paranormal Mag has come to an end I thought it would be good to revisit some of the monstrous illustrations I used in the publication. First off this superb 'birdman' drawn by my friend Anne Elizabeth Robinson for issue 33 in support of articles on Owlman and other Winged Humanoids by Janet Bord and Jon Downes. We also used it on the cover.You'll need to click on the image to get the full effect.

Spooky Sunday

The latest article to be posted on Uncanny UK (www.uncannyuk.com) is by Mark Greener, a science jourmalist who contributed a lot to Paranormal Magazine. Here he points out how easy it is for us to let our imaginations run away with us, especially out in the dark countryside. He offers cautionary tales involving screeching owls, distressed hares and a damp badger. The article has been posted in the More Uncanny section, which is for members only, so if you'd like to read it, you'll have to register.

Monstrous Monday (belated)

There is the first of a two-part article going in Paranormal Magazine issue 55 (out at the end of the month) by Dr Karl Shuker on 'Frgotten Cryptids' - weird, as yet unidentified creatures that even most cryptozoologists seem to have forgotten about. One of the critters Karl highlights is an alleged giant, poisonous water shrew that used to live - of all places - Scotland! He writes:

'According to traditional lore in northern Scotland, certain deep pools and rivers in Caithness were once home to a small yet potentially dangerous mystery beast known as the lavellan.
Although likened in superficial form to a water shrew, it was said to be bigger than a rat and extremely venomous (interestingly, shrews are known to have a weakly venomous bite). Famous naturalist Thomas Pennant investigated reports of it in the 18th century while visiting Ausdale, and learnt that water in which the preserved skin of a lavellan had been soaked was popularly used as a cure for livestock ailments.'

As he points out, even if the tales were true the animal would certainly be extinct by now. Incidentally, Thomas Pennant lived at Whitford, near Holywell, Flintshire.

Spooky Sunday

Jonathan Edwards's spiffing double-page spread for an article by Nick Redfern on a growing idea among loony American Christians that so-called 'aliens' might be demons in disguise; plus the magazine it appears in, Paranormal issue 54. Jhnathan called his picture '666 Squadron', which I think is great. More stuff at his IHeartPencils blog (see links to the right).

Monstrous Monday

In the hope that Blogger doesn't crash again, here at last is a blog entry. And what a corker it is. Two digital images produced for the next Paranormal Magazine by a guy called Shaun Histed-Todd who I met at the Weird Weekend in Devon. He's a lovely bloke, like a punk version of Bernard Bresslaw. He's come up with five superb illustrations for an article by his cryptozoologist friend Richard Freeman on evil creatures and the 'nameless dread'. (Incidentally, after subbing that article I then moved onto one about a nice seafood restaurant, such is the weirdness of working on InOut magazine at the same time!). The vicar vs sea serpent image is particularly stunning (of course, these are only low-res versions), and I am going to ask for it to be used full-size in the magazine.

Weird Wednesday

Isn't this great? Admittedly it helps if you're familiar with the old Observer's Books. I asked Dan Berry, illustration lecturer at Glyndwr University in Wrexham to mock it up for me. It will accompany an article on common alien morphology by UFO expert Nick Redfern, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of Paranormal Magazine (out at the end of the month). He's done a lovely job. To see more of Dan's work, visit: www.thingsbydan.co.uk

Monstrous Monday

Four illustrations by Anthony Wallis from The Great Yokai Encyclopedia by Richard Freeman, just published by CFZ Press (you can find it on Amazon).

Yokai are traditional Japanese spooks, a blend of ghost, goblin and demon. He we have (top) a monstrous, malevolent skeleton; a weird, dumpy creature that likes to cut off women's hair; a giant sea-cucumber which grew out of a dead girl's discarded underwear and now menaces shipping; and a naked bloke with an eye in his bum, frightening off a Samurai.

Richard started work on the Encyclopedia when he realised very little had been written in the West about the rich heritage of the Yokai. He wrote an article on them for Paranormal Magazine in early 2009 but the book wasn't launched till the Weird Weekend in Devon last month. The Yokai are lots of bizarre and gruesome fun: no wonder Japanese comics and films are so monster-orientated. Pokemon characters can trace their family tree back to the Yokai.

Spooky Sunday

Sorry chaps, this'll have to do for Spooky Sunday - sneak peak of the next issue of PM (52), out at the end of the week.

Weird Wednesday

Three fuzzy snaps from the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Weird Weekend held last weekend in the community centre of the North Devon village of Woolfardisworthy (Woolsery for short). Under the logo we have Jon Downes, the director of the organisation - surely just the geezer to hunt man-beasts worldwide - and below him zoological director Richard Freeman with his even furrier friend Orang Pendek. Weird stuff to be sure.

Pretty cool, though. Got to meet fortean supremo Andy Roberts who, incredibly, turns out to have moved about five miles away from me a few years ago; re-met Mike Dash, the former Fortean Times publisher who once offered me a job as a sub-editor on that esteemed journal; the Danish cryptozoologist Lars Thomas; and lots of other interesting chaps. Thanks to Lars' research, they are now convinced that a leopard or two prowls in the woods around the village. The 'Tasmanian tiger' skin he examined turned out to belong to a small African antelope, though. Can't win 'em all. I have high hopes that Mike and Andy will both be writing for Paranormal Magazine in the near future.

Read more about the CFZ at www.cfz.org.uk

Weird Wednesday

A tad late but it's deadline week, so there. I've just used this somewhat tacky pic in the second part of the history of the Devil article by Dr Leo Ruickbie, which will appear in Paranormal Mag issue 52. It looks like it was drawn in the 1970s or something but in fact dates from 1911. It is by Martin van Maele, one of several illustrations to La Sorciere by Jules Michelet. I can find only one book of Van Maele's artworks generally available, and that for £30 second-hand. I'm familiar with the artist's erotic art, because it appeared in Taschen's bawdy magnum opus Erotica Universalis, so I'm hoping The Satyrical Drawings Of... will feature a wider selection, including more from La Sorciere (although it looks like all his stuff is fairly saucy).

Weird Wednesday

Sneak peak of issue 51 of Paranormal Magazine, on the shelves this weekend. I don't know whether this really counts as a Weird Wednesday entry but I'm a bit hassled because I'm going away for a long weekend. Next entry will be Tuneful Tuesday.

Spooky Sunday

My article for issue 51 of Paranormal Magazine on weird apparitions developed a theme of deformed or grotesque human shapes, before shifting to strange animal forms. Here is a short extract:

Sometimes only parts of the body are seen. The Well of the Phantom Hand on the eastern shore of Loch Ness, for example, is named after the hand of gigantic proportions that is said to reach out and startle people gathering water there. This odd phenomenon has been reported for the past 200 years.

Regular readers may recall the letter in issue 48 from a Mr Patel about a disturbing haunting in his shop, which included a spooky eye that would peer at his family from various parts of the building. His wife saw it watching her through a crack in the door and his son saw it peeping through a hole in the garden fence. Mr Patel wrote: ‘Things reached fever pitch when I was at the kitchen stove one lunchtime and I noticed from a knot-hole in the floorboards a human eye watching me, so I took a kettle of boiling water from the stove and poured it through the hole, but the eye was back several minutes later.’

Remarkably, this is not a unique experience. In 1958, Mrs Violet Nicholls of Pattingham, near Wolverhampton, found her five-year-old son staring at a large knot-hole in the floorboards in his bedroom. Peering back at him was ‘a pale blue, unmistakably human eye’. According to Peter Moss, in his Ghosts Over Britain (1977), the eye ‘at first seemed to be frightened and then cautiously watchful’ as it ‘glared unblinkingly upwards’. It moved about as if trapped in the confines of the knot-hole then, after five or ten minutes it faded away never to be seen again.

Paranormal Magazine issue 50

High time I plugged issue 50 with its improved cover design. It's not my 50th issue, of course - I think I've done 21 now. Bloody hell, already.

Spooky Sunday

Here's a sneak peak of an article that will be going in issue 50 of Paranormal magazine. Richard Freeman, of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, is interested in ghosts as well as strange creatures and has written a piece on bizarre ghosts he's come across through reading up on the subject. I'm goint to get a couple of other writers to do the same because it's a fun idea. I've also asked Jonathan Edwards to illustrate them, because I knew he'd come up with some stylish, fun imagery. This is his illustration for the following brief story from Richard's article:

"During a poltergeist outbreak in Kilakee, Ireland, in the 1960s, furniture exploded, pools of glue manifested themselves and the house in question was invaded by a swarm of phantom hats. The hats seemed to come from all ages and styles, including Victorian top hats and bonnets as well as modern hats. The swarm of hats vanished as quickly as it had come and no explanation for them was ever found."

Monstrous Monday

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" - Francisco Goya's famous engraving. Richard Freeman, of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, has written an article for Paranormal Magazine issue 49 on mistaken monsters and has asked for it to be used to help illustrate the piece. So it seemed a fair post for Monstrous Monday, too.

Spooky Sunday

Tonight I'm giving a talk at The Sportsman's Arms, which is out in the middle of nowhere on the Denbigh Moors in North Wales. The nearest building, in fact, is the ruined hunting lodge known as 'The Haunted House' by everyone because it looks like it ought to be (although, in fact, it isn't).

This vast area of moorland and conifer woods known as the Hiraethog is rich in folklore, particularly fairylore, and in the middle of the woods some years ago local resident Judy Young found a tiny wigwam structure among the trees. It was less than a foot high but beautifully constructed of bracken and twigs and had a neat fence round it made of pine needles and woven grass. She managed to get a photo of it (it's reproduced in my Wales of the Unexpected) but was never able to find it again.

Anyway, it's Judy who's organised the talk. The Hiraethog is so vast and empty that I guess the Sportsman's has a wide catchment area. Judy has arranged a series of talks and events (holy wells expert Tristan Gray-Hulse was there recently) to keep business going out of the tourist season. There's no pay, but I'm hoping it'll be quite good fun and some interesting people to meet. It was Janet Bord, a friend of Judy's, who encouraged me to take part, so she will be there and with any luck there will also be people in the audience (assuming there is an audience!) who will have ghostly experiences of their own to relate.

I'm not putting together a formal talk, I'll wing it a bit, chatting about some of the things I've picked up since editing Paranormal Magazine, as well as weaving in some local ghost stories. Which reminds me - I must find out if anyone knows anything about the 'cursed Roman bridge' that's supposed to be in the vicinity of the pub. Allegedly, it's haunted by a Roman soldier, but to see him means certain death - unfortunately, the only source of the story is the late Jane Pugh, who was unreliable to say the least.

Read all about it

Paranormal Magazine issue 48, on sale now.

The cover story's particularly good. It's written by Dr George Stuart, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at St John University, York - but it's not by any means biased towards psychological explanations for 'What is a Ghost?' On the contrary, Dr Stuart looks at many angles, including an intriguing idea of his own that apparitions are composed of light waves with unusual properties. I also asked half a dozen of my regular writers, like Nick Redfern, Mark Greener and parasycholgist Dr Matt Smith (no, not THAT Matt Smith Doctor), for their opinions.

The 'Doing Deals with Demons' article is another good one, a down-to-earth and entirely convincing illustration by a practising occultist on what can happen when you start dabbling with magical texts. Never mind whether demons are objectively real, the writer argues - weird and scary shit happens nonetheless.

Also check out www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk

Spooky Sunday

I got to know Cate Ludlow, an author and freelance editor with the History Press through Paranormal Magazine. Cate is an enthusiastic collector of old journals like me - but of even older ones. She's managed to track down quite a few of the so-called Penny Dreadfuls or Penny Bloods of the late 18th and early 19th century, including an extensive collection of one of the best known, the Terrific Register.

After we began chatting, via email, she very kindly sent me as a gift a few pages of the Terrific Register, featuring a ghost story: 'The Apparition of the Duchess of Mazarine'. This tale is one of what I call the Friends Reunited class: two good friends make a pact that should one die, he or she should return in spirit form and visit the other. Such were the Duchess of Mazarine, mistress to Charles II, and Madam de Beauclair, mistress to James II. The Duchess died young but did not appear as a ghost, so Madam de Beauclair decided there was no afterlife and became a bitter atheist. Many years later her dead friend did appear to her, but only to warn her that she was soon to join her in the great beyond.

Such, at least, is the story. The picture above is a scan of the accompanying woodcut showing the Duchess appearing to her friend in a cloud of ectoplasm. The extract Cate was good enough to send me features a few other stories, with titles like: 'The Self Convicted Murderer', 'Escape and Sufferings of Three Officers from the Cannibals of Tate Island' and (I love this) 'Sarcastic Cruelty'. There's no date on it but I'm guessing it was printed not long after 1794, the date of the cannibals report.