Emma Cannell, Norwich, Norfolk, 1997
SPECTRAL CAT AND PHANTOM PONY
About 12 months ago we had our cat put down after a long illness. He was a major character and well loved by many people. After a few days, I began to see him around the house again, coming into rooms as I arrived home. This reached the pitch that he would come in through the cat flap while I was having breakfast, with the cat flap moving as he came in. There was no mistaking this cat - there cannot be many of his colour with one eye and a plastic hip.
A number of years ago, I was cycling down a sunken lane after leaving a friend’s house near the Stiperstones in Shropshire in the early hours. A large white pony came over the hedge from my right, landed on the road and just disappeared. It was as if there was a screen halfway across the road; the animal vanished slowly from head to tail. This was incredibly vivid and real; I was used to working with horses at the time.
Phillip Evans, by email, 1999
THE RETURN OF WELLINGTON
I am a home-visiting private tutor of music. About seven years ago, I began teaching electronic organ to Ian, a retired police officer. In the course of the fifth weekly visit and while listening to Ian’s organ work, my attention was drawn to the door in front of me, which on this day was ajar by about 8in (20cm). A large white and tan cat was slowly walking through the gap. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed it pass my chair. Recalling that my pupil had previously said he owned a cat and that it was incontinent, I followed it immediately, at the same time explaining my actions to him. The room was, in fact, a tiny closet with toilet facilities. There was no other door, no sign of the cat and no way it could have doubled back past me. I came out from the closet.
My host had run from the room, but returned promptly, holding a black cat. “I thought you were mistaken,” he said. “I knew the cat was asleep in the other room”. “The cat I saw was white and tan,” I said, “not black”. His reaction to this observation was startling. He dropped the cat, and clasped his hands together. “Thank God!” he positively shouted, “Now I know I’m not insane! What you saw was my old cat, Wellington. He died six years ago and is buried outside. Since he died, I have seen him and felt him brush against me on many occasions. My wife thinks I’m mad. My son thinks I’m mad. Oh, thank you so much!”
Roy C Cotterill, Orrell, Lancashire, 2003
HIDING FROM THE DOG
In 1933, when I was eight, I lived in Woodseats, Sheffield, with my parents, three sisters, and a cat. I was pestering my father for a dog. I shared a double bed with two of my sisters, aged 19 and 16; the eldest, aged 20, had a small bedroom to herself.
I was put to bed before my sisters. Every night a large dog walked from the door, round the bed to a certain spot. I don’t know what happened then, as I shot under the hot and stuffy bedclothes as far as I could go; there to sleep until, I suppose, I was pulled up by my sisters. I knew the dog was large by the sound of its step on the lino and I had no doubt that it was black. Wanting to own a dog was one thing, but this creature frightened me. We hadn’t got a dog!
When my eldest sister left home, I was put into the small bedroom. One morning, my mother asked me if I had heard the hullabaloo from my sisters’ room in the night: “They were screaming blue murder... they said there was a horrible noise coming out of the picture.” This was a sketch of Colyton Church in Devon by my 19-year-old sister. I told her I had heard nothing. She asked if I had ever heard anything when I slept there; and, to my lasting shame, I said “No” and left the room swiftly. I feared being laughed at if I had mentioned the dog.
Sheila Clark, Wraysbury, Buckinghamshire, 1999
Mutants
FROGGY OMEN
I live in a ground floor flat in Birmingham. One morning, I raised the seat on my toilet and noticed something projecting from under the rim of the bowl. At first I took it for one of those sticky blooms you get on rhododendrons. However, a closer inspection determined that the object was a small frog. My first response was to scoop the little blighter out and return him to the wild via the toilet window, but innate paranoia stayed my hand. The frog was of a colour I call premature-baby pink, an unpleasant fleshy purple; not a normal-looking froggy colour at all. It brought to mind images of poisonous tree-frogs of the Amazon basin (rather than the Birmingham toilet bowl); I could almost hear the hushed tones of David Attenborough describing the little critter’s toxic nature. So, rather than risk an appearance in FT’s ‘Strange Deaths’ column, I flushed the Alien Toilet Frog (ATF) away; it took two goes to swish him around the u-bend.
My own ATF theories are as follows: it was an exotic variety, escaped from a private collection or travelling show; or a normal frog whose famously sensitive skin had been effected by a cocktail of bleaches and detergents; or, perhaps, a representative of some weird, mutant breed of urban sewer-dwelling frog; or, finally, an omen of ill luck, presaging some unutterable doom which has yet to overwhelm me.
What really struck me about this encounter with the supernormal was the way it undermined my composure. For several days I felt as if I were walking on thin ice; as if reality were hollow and eggshell-thin. All this from meeting one little ATF; no wonder people who suppose themselves to have encountered Bigfoot, ghosts or aliens seem a little strung out.
Euan Smith, Acocks Green, Birmingham, 2000
ALBINO LOBSTERS
I live in a terraced house in Kentish Town, north London. Some while back, over a period of months, I found what appeared to be lobsters in my garden. They were quite large and albino. No one believed me, and I didn’t think to keep them - they weren’t too fresh. One night, a friend who was visiting for dinner stumbled upon one of these creatures by my back door. We concocted a number of implausible theories for their presence, including seagulls snatching them from market stalls.
Finally, he posted the specimen to the Natural History Museum, where the Crustacea Section was able to help. The aggressive Turkish Crayfish (Astacus leptodactylus salinus) have turned up in Camden’s canal system. The road next to my own is called Angler’s Lane. The river for which this road was named went underground long ago, but still links up with the drains between my road and the canal. The crayfish appear to have crawled out of my drainage outlet and onto the lawn. I am now beginning to appreciate the thin line between the commonplace and the absurd...
Christopher Fowler, Kentish Town, 1993
WINGED CATS
Saturday, 23 May 1998 was hot and sunny here in Kumamoto, Kyushu, Japan, and I waited for the cool of night to go running. At midnight I ran my usual, familiar route. Halfway through, I came across a couple of cats sitting on a wall overlooking the road. I called to them as I would to any cats. As I am unable to call cats in Japanese, they don’t usually respond to my miaowing and pusspussing noises, but this time one of them did.
It jumped up and purringly made its way over to me. I was shocked to feel how bumpy its back was; then I realised that it had weird growths - not fat or bones, but jutting out fur-covered wing-like growths. I looked the cat over and in all other respects it seemed quite normal. Admittedly it was dark, but a little light was coming from an overhead lamp and I have no doubt about what I saw. The growths were triangular in shape and covered in soft fluffy fur. They felt like the wings of a chicken, although they were not so long. I stroked it a little longer and then ran on.
Rebecca Hough, Kumamoto. Japan, 1998
Back in 1975 my neighbourhood was on the edge of what was once one of Arizona’s last true wilderness areas; now it’s tract houses and luxury retirement golf communities. One of the original residents was an elderly widow with about a hundred cats, all descended from a single pair. Of course, by that time the generations were inbred as all hell, and bore little resemblance to average cats. The woman died suddenly, and the folks who dealt with her estate handled the cats in a quick manner — they opened all the doors and windows and shoo’d them away. We were soon overrun with cats. Coyotes, foxes and golden eagles soon took care of the majority, and neig
hbours armed with .22 rifles took care of the rest.
One cat was left. I first noticed this strange beast at a distance, a small bluish feline with what looked like a pair of large wings hanging off the top of its rear pelvis. It had a face that looked like it had been hit by a brick, flat and grossly distorted. One eye was clearly larger than the other, and one side of the jaw had no lip covering. It looked quite ghastly, really. This cat seemed to take delight in killing all manner of native small wildlife and not eating them, and raiding local gardens with the sole purpose of smashing and trashing anything that grew. It got into my small garden twice in early summer, completely destroying it.
Once I watched this animal from a few feet away before it noticed me. It was thin, starving, deformed in face and body, and was covered with tics, lice and all manner of clinging insects. The ‘wings’ caught my attention. The two hanging off the pelvis were about 6in (15cm) long, 2in (5cm) wide at the base, perhaps an inch (2.5cm) wide at the end, and were covered with dirty fur. The cat saw me, drew back as if to attack, and the wings began to flail around in random directions. Then I noticed two deformed claws sticking out of the end of each tip. The cat let out a fearful scream and fled faster than I thought possible. When it turned, I noticed a second set of wings, much smaller than the first, stationary, on top of the creature’s shoulders.
Russ Williams, Prescott, Arizona, 1999
The Little People
Legions of little people populate folklore - elves, pixies, sprites, gnomes, dwarves, fairies. Generally, they hide from humans, but occasionally a brownie is heard making shoes or a fairy sighing; a pixie is glimpsed running through woodland, or the shadows of tiny dancers play over a cupboard. Sometimes even the more exotic species - miniature golfers, and flying Barbie dolls - are spotted...
Noises off
KNOCK KNOCK, WHO’S THERE?
Until 1939, when I was 10, my family and I lived in a Victorian terrace in Stewkley, near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, before moving to my present address in the same village. Opposite the terrace (now demolished) was - and still is - a large house with grounds. The field separating the house from the road was laid out as a small ‘gentleman’s park’ with clumps of trees of various sorts.
One evening - it must have been autumn or winter because it was dark - there came the sound of hammering from high up a pine tree: three hits, hammer laid down, three more hits, and so on. My father mended shoes, so I know what it sounded like.
All the inhabitants of the terrace were out listening - the people from the big house and their servants and probably others as well. The owner of the big house shone a torch up the tree and called out: “Who’s there? What are you doing? Stop it!” and things like that, but the sounds continued. They occasionally stopped briefly and then began again. My parents said it lasted for over an hour; to me as a child, it seemed much longer. Then it ceased and, as far as I’m aware, never came again, but as I say we moved, so I can’t be sure.
A year or two ago, I met a woman who was something of an expert on folklore. I told her about the hammering and she said it was a working Brownie, a fairy shoemaker. “There are a lot of reports of that sort of thing,” she said. I’ve never believed in fairies, but it couldn’t have been somebody doing it for a joke: what, up a pine tree in the dark? There were plenty of other trees easier to climb - beech, lime, horse chestnut. And at that date it couldn’t have been a tape recording. Moaning and howling round haystacks in a bedsheet to scare folk, that would be the peak of invention in a village before the war.
Mr J Keen, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, 1999
FEAR THE FAERIES
My new wife and I went to Aberfoyle, Scotland, in September 1979 to investigate the famous disappearing Reverend Kirk, the 17th century author of The Secret Commonwealth, that great book about the faerie folk. At the tourist kiosk in the town centre, we were told that no one in the town believed in Kirk’s story any more, nor that the hill behind the town, allegedly housing the hidden gateways to the Faerie lands, was anything more than just a hill. It was thickly covered with trees, with a large oak at the top standing higher than all the rest.
Tradition had it that if you climb the hill at around midnight, on certain nights of the year, the doorways to Faerieland would be visible and open for a man to step through. As we walked up the wide road that curved towards the top of the hill, we realised that this was not a trip to make late at night. The sun was shining, there were birds singing in the trees, yet there was something vaguely unsettling about the area. Even encountering other hikers did nothing to dispel our unease. One expected to be suddenly startled by something otherworldly. I picked up a large branch to use as a walking stick in order to stiffen my resolve to get to the top.
As we climbed, we noticed a faint sound that was becoming louder and louder. It was like thousands of houseflies buzzing all at once. The sound was everywhere and yet its source could not be located. There were no insects in the air or anywhere else on the hill. By this time, nearing the summit, birds had ceased to sing, the air was still and oppressive, and yet was filled with the infernal buzzing. As the noise was permeating everything, even into our skulls, we became even more uncomfortable, and so turned around and walked briskly down the hill.
By the time we reached the bottom, the sound was completely gone. As we crossed the threshold from the hill path to the road back to town, I felt a sudden blow on my right shoulder, immediately causing numbness and tingling in my hand. It did not subside until I had thrown the walking stick back onto the path up Faerie Hill. “What’s theirs, they keep...”
Peter Sutherland, by email, 2001
FAIRY HELP
Today is 30 April 2006, Walpurgis Night, and I had an interesting experience this afternoon.
In 1996, I had three experiences over a 48-hour period while travelling through upper New York State, experiences which I can only define as evidence of the existence of fairies. Since that time, I’ve studied fairly lore in depth and have become something of a believer, though I maintain an open mind on the subject.
I live in Bayridge, Brooklyn; there is a beautiful four-acre botanical garden right on the harbour several long blocks from my home. There are several hawthorn trees on the green, which I know are considered sacred to fairies in some quarters; and I do think of them that way myself. For the last eight years, I’ve taken a thorn from one of the trees every 31 October and 30 May, and placed it in one of the inner pockets of my wallet; I always place it in the same spot. At the same time, I remove the thorn I’ve been carrying for half a year, and push it back into the earth beneath the tree I’ve taken it from. I do this to both honour the fairies and also as a means of seeking a kind of protection from them.
This afternoon, I walked to the botanical garden, sat beneath my favourite hawthorn and searched my wallet for the thorn, but couldn’t find it. I removed the entire contents of my wallet and checked every fold: no thorn. But I did notice immediately that my credit card was missing from the pocket where I always keep it by itself. I panicked for a moment, then realised I must have left it at the restaurant where I had dinner the previous evening. I immediately walked back to the diner, and when I entered, the owner smiled, waved, and produced my credit card, which I’ve never lost or left behind anywhere before.
Back under the hawthorn, I removed a thorn from the tree and placed it in my wallet, thanking the fairies for it as I did so. After a moment, I realised that had the thorn I removed from the tree last October not been missing, I probably wouldn’t have discovered my credit card was missing for several more days. Coincidence, personal fancy, or a blessing from the fairies on the afternoon of Walpurgis Night? I am single, and though I share my home with a family member, I’m certain no one goes through my wallet. What actually happened to the missing thorn will probably remain a mystery.
Joseph E Barnes, New York 2006
WOODLAND SIGH
Back in 1986, three friends and I formed a secret society, partly out of dissa
tisfaction with 1980s youth culture, but mainly for a laugh. This involved spending a lot of time in nearby local woodlands and fields, practising our survival skills, building camps and reciting Monty Python sketches. Around sunset on Midsummer Night’s Eve (24 June 1987), from our camp in the woods adjoining a field, we noticed a dog-walker - not unusual, as it was a popular dog-walking spot. However, this one didn’t seem normal as the dog was white and the owner was dressed entirely in white, including his hat. Two of my friends decided to try and get a closer look and stalked around the field perimeter, while the other friend and I remained hidden in the bushes to see if the strange-looking character passed us by.
After about five minutes of sitting in silence we heard an unmistakably human sigh directly behind us. But there was no one to be seen, either on the ground or in a tree. We were surrounded in all directions by crisp leaves, so no one could have crept up on us. The noise we heard was like a sigh made by a young woman or a boy and sounded as if it came from someone sitting right there with us. The friend who had been with me recalled the story only last week [July 2007]. He is now a police officer and probably not keen to reveal his identity - but is still adamant concerning what we heard. I’m not sure if it was a faerie, but it was dusk on Midsummer Night’s Eve at a place with a pagan history - surely a recipe for faeries!
As for the mysterious dog-walker, he never passed us and the others ‘lost’ him as they were trying to get closer. He may have been of this world, but the sigh was not.
Fortean Times: It Happened to Me vol.1 Page 9