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.