—First of all, what I’ve heard from Callum Wright isn’t new to me – it wouldn’t be the first time such things have happened when building work takes place in remote areas.
In Iceland – near a place called Kópavogur, just south of Reykjavík – there’s a hill called Álfhóll, which literally means ‘elf hill’. It sits between Kópavogur and Reykjavík, and when, in the 1930s, the authorities decided they’d build a road between the two cities they planned to pass it straight through the hill. However, things didn’t quite go to plan. Just like what Callum Wright alleges happened at Wentshire Forest, the machines stopped working, tools were lost, and finally the money dried up. And Álfhóll remained unscathed. It didn’t only happen once either. There were plans to level Álfhóll in the eighties, but this time the workers themselves refused to go near the place and the media reporting on the story claimed that their cameras wouldn’t work on the hill. The road that’s there today goes around Álfhóll rather than through it.
And it’s not just Álfhóll. Workers suffered injuries when they tried to build a highway near Siglufjörður on Iceland’s northern coast. An ‘elfin lady stone’ was covered with earth while they were digging. That was the issue.
—A what stone?
—Throughout Iceland there are large stones that are claimed to be sacred to the elves.
In Iceland, they call them huldufólk or ‘hidden people’. In the UK, they have many names: púca, sídhe, goblins, pixies, piskeys. Significantly for your case, in Wales they’re called the tlywyth teg – the ‘fair family’. In all these cases they’re considered to be a parallel race of spirits that dwell in nature. To upset them incurs a cost.
—So upsetting the elves could be a theory behind what went wrong at the Great Escapes building site?
—It’s a theory. However, the similarities to the Icelandic accounts are pretty significant, wouldn’t you say?
—That’s all interesting stuff, Howie, there’s no denying it. There’s also no denying the link between this folklore and the events of 1988. It certainly begs the question whether Sorrel or Sonia were aware of these stories and ancient beliefs.
—I’m certainly not suggesting that fairies were to blame for Alfie’s disappearance. I’m just saying, from a folkloric perspective, there are some interesting parallels. But there are other things about Callum Wright’s account that have raised some more similarities with other famous cases.
For example the Bell Witch case of 1894.
The Bell family of Adams, Tennessee saw all sorts of strange creatures around their farm – beasts with the head of a rabbit, the body of a dog, for example – as well as an old woman walking in their orchard.
—These sorts of things are not exclusive to the Bell Witch, though.
—No, but there are some other similarities to Callum’s story. Members of the Bell family claimed that next there was knocking – on their walls, on their doors, just like Callum describes at the site.
—Thank you so much for your input, Howie.
—I just hope I’ve helped, man. But, like I say, I’m not suggesting that the poor kid was whisked away by fairies.
—I know that, Howie. Thank you again.
Like Howie, I don’t feel that the solution to this case lies in superstition. I do think, however, it is important to cover all possible aspects to Alfie’s disappearance.
We’ll be examining this case from four more angles after this episode. We have to look at those closest to the disappearance – namely the child’s parents. But this is easier said than done. Sorrel has his tale and Sonia has been driven into hiding.
And I would also like to see what we can find out about the child himself. His voice in this whole affair has not been heard. I hope in the next episode that we will be able to glean something of the lost little boy’s perspective.
This has been Six Stories.
This has been our second.
Until next time.
SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 3
00:00:00
Echoes
You’ve written out your questions. You wrote ten of them in the morning dark, scrawling them on the edge of an old newspaper. You’ve copied them up – neat handwriting in a fresh notebook.
Lack of sleep is clawing behind your eyes. It’s been hot this week; too hot at night. That’s the excuse you’ve been using for your insomnia. But you were sleeping fine before you began this case.
And now almost like the meeting you’re about to have with Anne is a break – offering solace from the case.
15th August 2018, 10:12 a.m.
I’m only recording this because I swore I would record everything from now on. Any visit. Every interview, regardless of who it is. It’s a safety net. I know that there’s nothing to fear with Anne … But just in case.
Take two. I’m going in.
OK, so that didn’t work. Anne asked me not to record her. She wouldn’t say why not. I could have done it anyway – brought this thing in, hidden in my pocket. But I didn’t. I didn’t record her, because I respect her. Despite everything.
My head is all over the place after our discussion. I made notes, but I want to talk about Anne right now, while it’s still fresh.
There’s something about her. I’ve known it since our very first meeting. The best way to express it is this: I should hate her … but I don’t.
Perhaps it will help me if I say it out loud.
Anne Manon gave Alfie Marsden’s parents false hope after Alfie vanished. Her psychic ‘abilities’ did not find their son.
There.
Now how do I feel about Anne Manon?
No different. But saying it out loud does help me to put my feelings into words. You see, I don’t think she intended to give them false hope. I am convinced that Anne Manon believed she knew what had happened to Alfie Marsden.
When Anne went into her ‘trance’, when she asked the spirit world to find Alfie, she received only a single phrase – that Alfie was inside ‘a royal court’.
What was she claiming about Alfie when she communicated this message? It could be taken in any number of ways. The most common interpretation harks back to something Howie told me when I first contacted him about the case: ‘The fair folk of the Welsh woods were precious about the breninbren – their sacred monarch oaks.’
So did the vague message Anne received from the spirit world suggest Alfie Marsden was trapped in Wentshire Forest? Was the royal court a clearing surrounded by these ‘monarch’ oaks? The same monarch oaks that Clive the foreman took an axe to? If this is the case, why didn’t Anne simply say so?
It was a question that had been bothering me all week.
So I asked her it, and she answered me straightaway. She said interpretation of messages was not the job of the medium – that she was only a vessel and she was merely trying to help. She told me that words from ‘the other side’ can be seen in many ways.
That pressing question answered, I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to know why she had written to me. And most of all I wanted to find out what she knows about Alfie Marsden that the rest of us don’t.
Frustratingly, though, Anne did not disclose to me anything that pertains to Alfie Marsden. The worm she dangled in front of me in her letter has turned out to be threaded through a hook. But in a way, I don’t mind.
I guess the point I am making is that I believe her. I believe she was trying to help.
I enjoyed sitting with Anne today. She told me a bit about her early life. At the age of seven, she was removed from her parents and placed in a children’s home in Bangor. The home was run by Catholic nuns back then. It was a place for ‘wayward girls’ and the abuse Anne received there was systematic and catastrophic.
By the age of twenty-one, Anne was living in Shrewsbury, near the Welsh border. She describes herself at this time as ‘flotsam’. No real purpose, no direction, no dreams. She was floating around, sleeping on sofas, taking what work she could.
There were men in her life
at that time, she said – men who used her and abused her just like those nuns. Then they discarded her, just like her parents did. She deserved it. That’s what she kept saying to me, and I longed to comfort her, to hold her hands and tell her that no one deserves that.
Anne showed little emotion when she was telling me these terrible things. She told me not to cry for her. She said she isn’t worth it.
Then I remembered what she said in her letter: ‘I was indeed close to the Alfie Marsden case.’
But I couldn’t press her on this. Not after she’d told me her story.
Then she stopped speaking. She had had her head down while telling me her potted, terrible history. But then she looked up at me, and I swear it was like she could see … but into me. She asked me how I was sleeping.
I nearly passed out.
Does this mean that Anne’s claim of being psychic has any truth? It’s possible. Or it could just be good guesswork. I told her all about the sleepless nights, the dreams. I told her how I’ve been waking up and making notes, writing ‘monarch oaks’ on scraps of paper.
She smiled at me and nodded. She said she understood. And I felt lighter. I felt like telling Anne she had shifted the load that this case has been building up inside me. Maybe we’re good for each other. Maybe it’s the fact we don’t really know each other that allows us to chat like this.
Or is it that Anne is playing a game with me? To keep me coming back? I don’t know if she knows anything more about the Alfie Marsden case. And I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that I don’t care.
What I do care about is that there’s a lonely old woman in that house whom everyone’s hated for the last twenty years for something that she said – for trying to help find a missing child.
An old lady that needs a friend.
And for some reason, despite the fact I am trying to research, record and produce a new series of Six Stories, despite the fact that she lives a good few hours from me, I believe I could be that friend.
Episode 3: Cauliflowers Fluffy and Cabbages Green
—Case study. Child A. 13th of December, 1988.
Where to even begin? I mean … oh dear…
Christmastime is hard for them at this age. I know. It’s supposed to be magical, isn’t it? And it is, for us. It’s when they’re all in their costumes. Little boys in tea towels; little girls in tutus. Silver-foil halos. The dolly in the manger and Mrs Pugh clonking away on the piano.
Oh, I could have fallen asleep on my feet on the day of the performance. It’s like herding cats: tears and tantrums. So-and-so wants to bring in his own cuddly toy lamb to hold. So-and-so’s angel wings have a hole in them. I swear to you, I never want to see white crêpe paper and garden wire again for as long as I live!
Hang on, is this a C90 or a C60? It doesn’t matter. It’s just nice to get this all out. When I’m as good as Mrs Moss, able to get them quiet with one raised finger, I’ll listen back to these recordings and laugh. Keep them for posterity, Mrs Moss says to me. Like a diary.
It’s easier than writing it all down.
So anyway, on to business. It was me who volunteered to sit with Child A during the first performance, the one they do for the staff. We stayed in the classroom after the others set off in a crocodile to get changed in the hall.
Child A is sat at the back of the room beside the nature corner with his back to me. He’s allowed nowhere near the nativity. Thank God!
He’s calmer when it’s quiet, less unpredictable. I walked over to him and … oh, dear me … I have to admit I was feeling a little bit scared. Of a seven-year-old. I ask you. But I’m going to be honest here. I have to be. For posterity. Child A is sat at one end of the room with his back to me. I can tell he’s angry; his ears are all red. I’ve still never seen him cry. None of the others have, either. He screams though. It’s unnerving, it is. Scary. I’ve never heard a noise like that in my whole life. If you look at his face when he’s doing it, it’s even scarier. He’s screaming but there’s no emotion in his eyes. It’s almost as if he’s doing it just to upset us. I hate thinking like that, but that’s how it feels. Everyone else wants to say it but they don’t. He’s all squinty, his face screwed up. He’s little as well – smaller than the others. There’s nothing going for him, is there? Poor lamb.
So, I start straightening chairs and picking up paper. We’ve not even done any cutting-out today, but there’s still bits of paper all over the floor. It’s like the children are shedding.
If I go over to him straightaway, Child A will run. That’s what he does if he’s singled out. And he’s quick and slippery – like an eel. All wiry and hot with rage. He bites too. The caretaker had to get him off the roof the other week; he’d swarmed up the drainpipe like a spider monkey, left Mr Camberley with a red ring of teeth marks on his arm and some terrible language on his lips! Getting Child A down was like coaxing a wild cat. I’m sure I heard Mrs Moss asking if anyone knew a vet with a blowpipe. In the end they had to call his mam to come and get him. She didn’t drive – had to walk to the school, so she took ages, and when she got there she looked like she’d just got up. I don’t know what she said to him, but he came down alright! He didn’t even look at her. She just said sorry to us then scuttled after the little boy like he was lord of the manor. Stank of drink, she did.
When she’d gone we all rolled our eyes. No wonder he is the way he is, poor little soul.
This is the voice of the late Delyth Rice. In 1988, Delyth was a trainee primary school teacher in Audlem, Cheshire. Delyth passed away in 2015, having spent the majority of her adult life working with nursery and primary-age children. She never actually retired, instead working on a reduced timetable right until the end of her life. Staff in the schools and nurseries where Delyth worked have nothing but good things to say about her: ‘Like a grandmother’, ‘hugely popular with staff and students’, ‘still missed’ are just a few of the ways she’s described.
—I am careful as I go over to him. I’ve found that the thing to do is pretend you’re busy with something else, so I start singing away to myself, humming nursery rhymes that I used to sing when I was a little girl.
Wrth ddychwel tuag adref, mi glywais gwcw lon
Oedd newydd groesi’r moroedd i’r ynys fechan hon.
He’s not looking at me, all crumpled up in that chair like a lump of Plasticine. His ears are almost beetroot. I’m picking up the paper and the blocks. They’re a bit beyond blocks at their age but Child A loves them and I think Miss Moss keeps them in her room to keep him quiet. Child A goes out of his mind if anyone else touches them. They’re old and scuffed, the colours on them long gone, but they feel nice in your hands. And they slot neatly back into the box, all of them in their right place. Maybe he finds them comforting. I wish I knew why it’s the blocks and putting them back that’s the only time I ever see Child A peaceful. That might be a good place to start my dissertation, actually. The blocks are a flashpoint for him, too, though. But Mrs Moss says that’s what he needs to learn – that it can’t always be his turn.
Holi a ci,
Holiacici a holiacwcw,
Holiacici a holiacwcw…
I know he likes this one. The cuckoo song. I’ve seen him swaying back and forth to it, almost like he’s trying not to.
‘Oh dear!’ I say. ‘Oh dear! All these blocks. I wish I knew someone who was good at putting away blocks!’
It breaks my heart, thinking about it. How he jumped out of his seat, his face flushed, not with anger, but with desperation. The Christmas songs were drifting down from the hall: Oh little town of Bethlehem… Child A’s never going to sing those words; he’s never going to stand there with a tea towel on his head, poor lamb. But now he’s putting away the blocks and looking up at me, all earnest. In that moment, I can see the little lost boy, and I want to take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. That’s a big no-no; if I get caught doing it I’m in trouble. So what I do is take out the little pot of bubbles I keep in my pocket. ‘Emergency b
ubbles’ I call them. I take them out and blow a stream of them into the space between us. Child A loves it. He’s laughing and popping them with his finger, as fast as I can blow them.
I’m laughing, too, and our laughter’s drowning out all the singing. He looks up at me again and his face twists, that little boy gone – almost gone; it’s still there … just in his eyes.
‘Miss Rice?’ he says, and I give him a big smile. ‘Miss Rice?’ he says, ‘can I call you “mum”?’
Delyth Rice sadly passed away in a house fire in 2015. The recordings I have at my disposal came my way courtesy of her son Emyr, who I managed to track down. It is one of these recordings that you have been listening to.
There is no more of this particular recording. It is telling, however, that the abrupt clunk as the recording device is stopped is preceded by a sob. The recordings were made onto cassette tapes, which were in a box salvaged from the fire at the Rice house. Emyr only opened the box a month or two ago and nearly threw it away. It was filled with college papers and folders from his mother’s training years, along with the pile of cassettes. Unfortunately, the water used to extinguish the fire has rendered most of them unplayable and the dissertation paper mostly unreadable. However, the child she is discussing, as far as I understand it, is Alfie Marsden.
Welcome to Six Stories.
I’m Scott King.
Alfie Marsden was seven years old when he vanished on Christmas Eve, 1988, somewhere in Wentshire Forest. He was in the care of his father, Sorrel Marsden, who was transporting the child over the Welsh border via Wentshire Forest Pass.
Relatively little is known about the child, so in this episode we’ll try to address that deficit. Before we start, though, I think I should warn my listeners that there are things in this particular episode of Six Stories that some may find distressing.
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