CFI Blogs

Whitby Museum have one, Walsall Museum do and so do I and that’s about it as far as I know.  Does anyone else have one?  And is there any conclusive proof that they were actually used as described?
For those who don’t know a hand of glory is the hand of an executed criminal which has been turned into a candle.  When the candle is placed in a house all the occupants will remain asleep whilst the candle burns.  Cue the burglars who come in and make away with everything.  At least that’s one version of the story – variants include it petrifies whoever it is handed to and it has the power to open all locked doors.
Supposedly the use of the Hand of Glory dates from 1440 although the name does not crop up until the 18th century where it appears to have been borrowed from an old description of Mandragora root.  If you’ve not been to Whitby, Walsall or my house you may not have seen one – possibly the easiest one to see is in the good version of the film The Wicker Man – that’s the one with Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee just in case there is any doubt.
Lets have a look at these three Hands of Glory.  The Walsall one is unusual in that it is actually an entire arm.  

My recent post on the folklore of 'bottomless lakes' such as the Bodensee (Lake Constance – above) brought an extremely interesting email from an old friend, the Dutch historian Dr Henk Looijesteijn. The Dutch being a people whose history is inextricably bound up with water – both as a trading nation and a country literally built on land reclaimed from the sea – Henk's own research has often put him in contact with local folklore, and his comments are pretty revealing. They strike me as well worth posting here.

'Your blog on bottomless lakes brought something to memory,' Henk writes,

Loch nam Breac Dearga really isn't much to look at: a puddle on the western slopes of Meal Fuar-mhonaidh (2,284 ft/696m) in the Highlands of Scotland. Yet once upon a time the little mountain lochan (above) possessed a fearsome reputation. Sir John Murray, the great oceanographer who devoted more than a decade of his life to a comprehensive survey of Scottish lakes, was told that "this loch was locally reputed to be of great depth, or even supposed to be bottomless."

Many of us are aware of the subject and theories of Sacred Geometry, ley lines etc and hot on the heels of a new book on the subject (Prehistoric Geometry in Britain: The Discoveries of Tom Brooks) comes startling research from Matt Parker.

Parker, of my alma mater Queen Mary College, University of London, decided to apply the techniques used by Brooks.  As the title of this piece suggests he applied them to the ancient and mystical locations of Woolworths.

“We know so little about the ancient Woolworth stores, but we do still know their locations” explains Parker, “so I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs.”

And aligning to an accuaracy of 0.05% (between 30 and 40 feet off) Parker was able to discern several stores lining up to produce equilateral traingleswith other stores present on lines continued from the triangles.  For 173.8 miles.  Further work yielded more triangles and points of intersection.

Parker concluded that “these incredibly precise geometric patterns mean that the people who founded the Woolworths Empire must have used these store locations as a form of ‘landmark satnav’ to help hunters find their nearest source of cheap sweets that can be purchased in whatever mix they chose to pick". 

Usually I refrain myself from posting preliminary and still unformed thoughts on various fortean subjects. Most of the times, I make a mental note and promise myself that one day, given enough time and resources, here's a fascinating research subject to try and dive to the bottom of. One of those cases that for years remained buried deep but that has never quite gone away, was Rosa Lotti's CEIIIK.

More than a quarter of a century has passed since a couple of psychologists named Theodore X. Barber and Sheryl Wilson first published their important study into the central role that a percipient's fantasy life plays in the nature, frequency and detail of the paranormal claims they make. According to this theory, 'fantasy-proneness' (the term Barber and Wilson coined to describe such imagination-driven experiences) directly correlates with – and to a large extent explains – a wide variety of unusual and psychical experiences, including the propensity to see ghosts, hear voices, and undergo close encounters with UFOs and entities of various exotic varieties.

The critical point, according to Barber and Wilson, is that the 'fantasy-prone personalities' they identified were liable to blur the divide between imagination and reality, allowing the former to intrude into the latter in ways that made their imaginary experiences seem quite real. The pair went on to list a total of 14 indicators of fantasy-proneness, and suggested that individuals who experience six or more of these could be labelled "fantasy-prone". These 14 indicators are:

It may have been Charles Fort, in one of his more memorable passages, who described the strange discovery best:

London Times, July 20, 1836:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave.

Seventeen tiny coffins.

Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently in both style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third one begun, with one coffin. 

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:

That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier,  the effects of age had not advanced to far. And the top coffin was quite recent looking.

[Fort, Complete Books p.169]

 Lethbridge Herald, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, 18 December 1936.

One of the most unsettling tales in the dark corners of Fortean cryptozoology is that of Gef, the talking mongoose. Before such cryptozoological icons as Mothman and Bigfoot, the Dover Demon and the Lizardman, the Beast of Bray Road and even the venerable Monster Of Loch Ness, this little (we may assume that it was not that big) critter held sway and fascinated our ancestors. News about the mysterious creature also reached Canada as the image above demonstrates, and the United States, where several newspapers observed with a curiosity mixed with just that slight dose of jealousy that strange spell that the talking mongoose cast on the British Isles. After all, hadn’t they been publishing the most far fetched and weird tales in abundance for decades? We can, though, now reconstruct part of the spectrum of reporting in the American newspapers. So what did they write? The Indiana Evening Gazette, a newspaper published in Indiana, Pennsylvania, took its hat off in its 3 December 1936 edition and noted with a certain admiration for the outlandishness of the tale:

A Bow To Britain.

I've only been firebombed the once, and to be honest it wasn't as dramatic as it sounds. Mostly because the firebomber was astoundingly incompetent, but also because I was three miles away at the time.

An intro of this sort requires some explanation. Here it is: for years during the 1980s, while I was at university, I spent several weeks each summer working as a watch leader with the Loch Ness and Morar Project. Although set up to search for the lake monsters said to dwell in Scotland's two deepest lochs, the LNMP gradually transformed itself into a biological survey, more interested in studying the limnology of Loch Ness than it was in actively hunting for its supposed monsters. The Project's leader, Adrian Shine – a self-taught naturalist and FRGS – often popped up in the media, where he talked a lot of sense. As such, he swiftly earned the enmity of the other major monster-hunter in the field at the time: Frank Searle, a former greengrocer and one-time soldier who had been at the loch since 1969 and was notorious, then as now, for producing large numbers of dubious photographs.

I've lived in Edinburgh for something like 15 years now and it truly is a beautiful and amazing city.  My most recent book, Paranormal Edinburgh, looks at the Fortean side of Edinburgh.  Here is one of my favourite stories from the book.

This much is beyond dispute: that on the afternoon of 31 July 1915, in the first year of the First World War, the British steamer Iberian was shelled, torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland by the German submarine U28. This much is disputed: that when the Iberian went down, there was a large underwater disturbance – caused, it is supposed, by her boilers imploding. Quantities of wreckage were hurled into the air, and there, amid the debris, six members of the U-boat's crew beheld "a gigantic sea-animal, writhing and struggling wildly", which "shot out of the water to a height of 60 to 100 feet." [Source: Bernard Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1968) p.395]

This sea-monster yarn first saw light nearly 20 years later, in the autumn of 1933, at a time when the Loch Ness Monster was much in the news. It was told by the U-boat's skipper, Georg-Günther Freiherr (Baron) von Forstner (1882-1940), an old U-boat hand who had formerly commanded SMS U1, and who wrote an article about Loch Ness for a German paper that dragged in his own sighting. According to Von Forstner, the creature had also been seen by five other members of the submarine's crew, all standing in the conning tower. It "had a long, tapering head and a long body with two pairs of legs. Its length may have been some 20 metres [roughly 65 feet]. In shape, it was more like a crocodile than anything else." [Source: Deutschen Algemeine Zeitung, 19 October 1933]

I admit that, after my last post, my thoughts involuntarily drifted back to that strange account of the parcel containing freshly cut-off human ears. What frightening serial ear collector or worse was stalking the city of Lodz and its environs? What actually do I know about such an arcane subject as pre-world war II Polish urban terrors, night stalkers, mystery prowlers and serial killers? Not much. Searching for clues on the internet yielded nothing in terms of weird crime in that country and that time period remotely resembling the account published earlier. 

I briefly read up on some modern day Polish serial killers with terrible sounding names (as if they had stepped out of a Penny Dreadful) as 'the Vampire of Bytów', the 'Zaglebie Vampire' or the 'Gentleman Killer'. But on my mysterious ear collector, nothing.

Digging for other accounts of the event and possible follow-ups in an American digital newspaper archive, I located a brief follow-up published in several newspapers, that I reproduce here solve the mystery. I reproduce them all here, since there are some subtle differences in the accounts. Most astonishing of all is that the 26 human ears had become 52 human ears - possibly an error in translation.

An intersting report surfaces via the Irish Times.  Recent supposed appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) have been following the pattern made famous at Fatima - namely word gets around, lots of people turn up and then they claim to see the sun dancing around in the sky.  October the 31st saw 10 000 people attending and an earlier appearance on the 11th of October also saw large numbers.  At both gatherings people claimed to see the sun shimmering, changing colour and dancing in the sky.

Joe Coleman, described as a local visionary, has predicted that the BVM will put in another appearance this Saturday - the 5th of December.  Police have previously asked people to keep away and perhaps some of the locals feel the same way too - as a precaution the pubs are closed and Knock becomes dry.

So what is the problem?  Well people are quite naturally looking at the sun attempting to get their own view of a miracle.  Some are then presenting themselves to University Hospital Galloway with vision problems.  Dr Eamonn O'Donoghue, consultant opthalmologist reports that they have witnessed five recent cases of solar retinopathy (damage to the retina from prolonged exposure to the sun - i.e. from staring at it).  This might not seem like a tidal wave of vision problems but the hospital would normally be suprised if they were presented with one case per year. 

From the Irish Times

“These people came in because they have had a significant reduction
in their vision and they could very well be a smaller representative
sample,” Dr O’Donoghue said, adding that two of those who had presented
to the hospital had also reported that other members of their families
had suffered visual damage.

Scanning old newspapers, one comes across some very odd things. One of these is accounts of the discoveries of uncanny amounts of human parts. Suitcases overflowing with human hair. Collections of skulls found in trunks. But the gruesome one below I had not encountered before.  

The clipping stems from a German online archive and was originally published in the Illustrierter Sonntag, from the city of Augsburg, Germany, dated 7 June 1930. Searching for all kinds of Fortean weirdness in the German digitised newspapers and magazines is a very difficult task. Where in place, the search engine capabilities of these digitised archives are very rudimentary. So you need a lot of patience to find anything. 

But then there's this item that I found after many hours of ploughing away on my antiquated computer. "26 Cut-Off Human Ears", is the brief headline. My translation of this strange and horrible item follows:

"The police of Lodz stand before a mysterious event, previously unrecorded in the police chronicles. From a train travelling from Starzhsto to Warschau, in the vicinity of Tomaszow, a parcel was thrown, wrapped in newspapers. A railroad employee opened the parcel and to his dismay saw in it 13 pairs of human ears still bleeding. The blood was still remarkably fresh. Extensive investigations notwithstanding, it could not be established whether a horrible act of murder was involved or an alltogether equally weird act of theft from an anatomical institute. As of yet requests sent to various anatomical institutes have not been answered. Sofar the search for the perpetrator has also been without success."

During the course of the publications of his Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents and New Lands, Fort wrote and received many letters. These letters became scattered after his death in 1932. Fortean researcher Mr. X managed to locate several collections of Fort's letters, and today we can find a number of these transcribed on his website.

Fort made efforts to probe deeper into some reported odd events by writing letters to newspapers or principle witnesses. As the result of this, Fort concluded that often these witnesses did not exist: "I have had an extensive, though one-sided, correspondence, with people who may not be, about things that probably aren't."

Who did exist, but would vanish completely off the earth, was Dorothy Arnold. Fort wrote in his Lo!: "Upon Dec. 12th, 1910, a handsome, healthy girl disappeared somewhere in New York City. The only known man in her affairs lived in Italy. It looks as if she had no intention of disappearing: she was arranging for a party, a tea, whatever those things are, for about sixty of her former schoolmates, to be held upon the 17th of the month. When last seen, in Fifth Avenue, she said that she intended to walk through Central Park, on her way to her home, near the 79th Street entrance of the park. It may be that somewhere in the eastern part of the park, between 59th Street and the 79th Street entrances, she disappeared. No more is known of Dorothy Arnold."

A deeply strange serial murder case from Peru – involving the apparent butchering of 60 or more people in the mountainous Huánuco region so that their bodies could be rendered for their fat – rang a distant bell when I turned to it this morning. According to the BBC, the gang of killers (four of whom were caught in possession of bottles of the stuff [right], and who were allegedly realising $15,000 per litre for it from a cabal of European cosmetics manufacturers) have been nicknamed 'The Pistachos' "after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat."

Being an historian, I readily admit to a special fondness for that rarest of Fortean phenomena, the "timeslip" case. These are incidents in which a witness appears to travel back through time, in some unexplained and unexpected way, and is able to witness at first hand an event in the past. The proper name for the phenomenon is retrocognition, and by far the best-known example of it is the celebrated Versailles incident of August 1901, which involved two female English academics on a visit to Paris who took a fork in the path in the grounds of the palace of Versailles and became convinced that they had somehow begun walking through the gardens as they existed in the late eighteenth century, at the time of Marie Antoinette. In the course of their 'adventure,' the ladies remembered passing several structures which did not exist in 1901, and encountering a number of people, clad in convincing period dress, whom they initially supposed to be actors rehearsing a play. Their story has been the subject of considerable investigation, and though far from all of the results favour the ladies' interpretation, the incident nonetheless still ranks among a surprisingly large number of researchers' "classic cases". There are, however, three or four other, much less celebrated, timeslip cases that follow a very similar pattern, and I want to have a look at one of those today.

Just a quick update to let you know that the CFI now has it's own Facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168799436477&ref=ts

The blog page and the main website at www.forteana.org areof course still the main areas to keep you aware of what is happening but the Facebook page is a more informal location and gives you a chance to comment as well.

This is just one of many changes and projects that we are working on at the moment, so watch any of these spaces!

Visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary rank among the most interesting of Fortean phenomena. They are, to begin with, often very well evidenced; there are frequently multiple witnesses, and series of visions can run for days, weeks, months, or even years. Because of their theological implications, such experiences have also been the subject of intensive contemporary investigation, and though devout interrogators don't always ask the questions that we Forteans want answered, the fact is that we know vastly more about the background and early lives of percipients such as St Bernadette or Catherine Labouré than we do about most people who report strange things.

BVM experiences are also of special interest to those of us who take an interest in the psychological and cultural factors that underpin all such reports. They are very culturally specific, being reported - with one or two notable exceptions - exclusively by Roman Catholics and often include either prophetic or doctrinal elements. (One of the most interesting thing about the visions at Lourdes was the BVM's statement to Bernadette that "I am the Immaculate Conception," a comment that rather conveniently affirmed quite a new and controversial bit of Catholic dogma.) Cases often feature bizarre and surreal elements - one thinks particularly of the visions at Pontmain, in France, during the Franco-Prussian war, in which the Virgin hovered in the sky "surrounded by an oval frame, and her words, far from being spoken, inscribed themselves slowly on a twelve-foot-long strip of parchment that materialised beneath her feet. She then disappeared from the feet up into a 'kind of bag.'" [Dash, Borderlands p.55] Marian apparitions are also exceptionally fascinating from a purely evidential point of view, because in cases where there are multiple witnesses it is entirely normal for the various percipients to see and hear very different things.

From Bob's recent post on indexing the impossible to imaging the impossible - ghost photography.

Earlier on this year I was co-organiser, along with Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt, of a one day event for the Edinburgn International Science Festival - The Science of Hauntings.  Along with the other other invited speakers on the day I gave a talk on the history of spirit photography - two of my passions combined in a very logical way - photography and organised spiritualism were born at round about the same time and consequently their history is intertwined.  From the desire to talk to the dead their soon arose the need for photographs of spirits (initialy photography was used to take photographs of the recently departed but this was a step beyond that).  From the earliest spirit photographs of William Mumler and others through to the latest orbs the subject is still rich in controversy and unwritten histories.  Over forthcoming blogs I will concentrate on different aspects of this story.  If anyone can't wait and they're in London at Halloween then come along to the British Library where I will be delivering an illustrated lecture on just this topic from 14.30 to 16.00.

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event95734.html

And if anyone would like to fund me in a PhD study of this topic just let me know - I'm champing at the bit!

"In a little book hailing from the fringe of the delectable region of Loch Ness, Mr R.L. Cassie describes his researches concerning the Monsters of Achanalt," noted The Times of 27 December 1935, adding, a little ominously: "It is a small book for so great an undertaking."

The monsters' story is indeed a remarkable one. In June 1934, about a year after the Loch Ness Monster first made international news, Cassie began to notice odd shapes in the lochs and rivers near his home in Achanalt, a village a short distance to the noth-west of Inverness on the picturesque Kyle of Lochalsh railway line. These soon resolved themselves into whole families of monstrous creatures, from 10 to 900 feet long, which choked the local waterways and spilled out onto land – in fact appearing more or less wherever the 77-year-old poet and author looked.

In Loch Achanalt itself (above right) dwelled a saurian which Mr Cassie christened 'Gabriel'. Gabriel was 900 feet long if an inch – only 150 feet shy of the length of the tiny loch itself. Yet he shared his domain with innumerable smaller brethren and at least six monsters of between 100 and 200 feet. "Many of the animals seen in the lakes are of enormous size," Cassie wrote, with careful understatement. "A hundred feet may be considered a mere minimum length."

In the last few weeks I have at last begun a project that was long on my mind ... an online index to Fortean Times. The initial stages will explore the potential of Internet tools (such as wikis) to make this a live project available to all via the CFI website.

As some of you may know, Steve Moore and I compiled detailed index to FT up to issue 105 (1997), but, in the 12 years since then, the count has risen by another 149 issues.

A few years ago, I offered some small help to Jonathan Betts, the curator of horology at the National Maritime Museum, while he was writing his biography of my boyhood hero, Rupert Gould. Gould (pictured right with his wife Muriel shortly after their marriage in 1917) is best known for his decade-long labour of restoring the four prototype Harrison chronometers that revolutionised navigation in the eighteenth century, but also penned (or rather pecked out on ancient typewriters - he owned one of the country's finest collections of antique typing machines)  four or five of the most wonderfully stimulating and imaginative books ever committed to print, among them the first book ever written on the subject of the Loch Ness Monster and the less well known Oddities: A Book Of Unexplained Facts. I discovered a copy of the latter buried on the shelves of my aunt's house when I was about 13, and it remains one of my three or four favourites, containing, as it does, seminal essays on Orffyreus's Wheel and the long-lost 'science' of nauscopie.

Anyway, Fortean Times was forced to prune back the review I wrote of Betts's book, and, re-reading it today, it struck me as worth posting in full here; remarkably little information about Gould is available on the net. Both the biography and the man himself deserve to be vastly better-known – and what wouldn't I give to have copies of Mares' Nests and Nine Days' Wonders sitting nestling in my library alongside The Case for the Sea Serpent and The Stargazer Talks?

Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, The Man Who Knew
(Almost) Everything

Jonathan Betts

The Ghost that came back for its photographs

This is a story from my recent book Paranormal Newcastle and whilst this story is in the book the relevant pictures are not, so here they are.

From left to right we have

Mr Dickinson, a photographer on whom a ghostly client called
The Photographic shop and studio of Mr Dickinson
The Portrait of Mr Thompson which not even the grave would keep him from collecting
Warning in W T Steads book for those about to read the ghost stories within

Here is the relevant section from the book to give you a taste

Pearson's Weekly, a British magazine popular during the early years of last century, ran a peculiarly interesting article on 'Mysterious people who have worn masks' some time in the latter half of 1903. I picked up a reprint in New Zealand's Christchurch Star, 24 November 1903, and the story leads with a fascinating account of a contemporary urban terror in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. The city was then – thanks to the June 1903 disembowelling of its unfortunate king, Aleksandar I – in the midst of one of its frequent bouts of extreme political instability, and the Serbian bogeyman had some extraordinary features. He was tall and slim and interested in children,in a manner entirely typical of his breed, but was much more violent than most, being rumoured to bloodily murder the offspring of the ruling classes, while leaving the children of poor families unscathed. Still more peculiarly, his victims' "mangled bodies" were supposed to turn up by the roadside "drained of every drop of blood," suggesting definite links to the still-strong local vampire tradition – for which see Paul Barber's excellent Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore And Reality (Yale University Press, 1988). The article describes the monster as a "vlkoslak", which it defines as "a Servian word [meaning] indifferently either a vampire or a were-wolf."

My instinct is that this long-forgotten scare might have a good deal to teach us about bogey figures in general and the vampire traditions of the Balkans, and would certainly repay further research. (Download or click + drag the clipping to your desktop for a larger, more readable copy.)

A further slew of dusty old newspapers has been digitised and made available online, and that bit of news prompts me to cull the best of the new content and combine them with with some older links to create the beginnings of a more comprehensive list of useful resources. By useful, I mean larger English-language newspapers or multiple-title archives that are searchable and can be accessed privately online - anything, essentially, that looked beyond the narrow purview of small-town doings and local politics for its news. Many are paysites, but of these, almost all will allow free searches, so at least you can find out if they hold enough useful material to make paying worthwhile.

This information is scattered all over the web at present, and the signal-to-noise ratio is such that it's increasingly difficult to distinguish the useless from the useful, and - in some cases - to locate the most important links. In order to avoid littering this blog with my own scattering of occasional discoveries, I also plan to add future finds to this list, and will keep this entry updated with any changes in web address as I become aware of them. If you use digital archives on a regular basis, in short, you may find it worth bookmarking this entry. And, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, I'll explain a nifty trick for getting unrestricted access to the biggest of the pay sites at a bargain $20 a year.

• Alaska's Tundra Times 1962-1997. By and for the Inuit community.

• Arizona Casa Grande Newspaper Project 1912-present. 

For those who failed to purchase the Cottingley Fairy Cottage blogged about on these very pages another home is for the sale.  The house that was used for the filiming of the original House on Haunted Hill is up for grabs at a mere $15 million.  It was also used in Blade Runner.

Good luck.

Frank
Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, a Los Feliz hilltop masterpiece composed of
patterned and smooth concrete blocks that has been mightily threatened
by man and Mother Nature, is being offered for sale at $15 million by
the private foundation that has been restoring it.

Eric Lloyd Wright, the architect's grandson and a member of the
nonprofit Ennis House Foundation's board, said that, given harsh
economic realities, private ownership would be the best way to save the
house and honor his grandfather's intentions.

In general as time goes by jobs become easier due to for example mechanistation or increased use of computers.  Think how easy it was in the past to build a house and compare that to how easy it is to build a skyscraper today.  Despite this you would think some things would never get any easier, for example the job of being Indiana Jones.  Jones is a tomb raider (lets be honest) and so far in his exploits we have seen him tangle with the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and many other items.  But quite frankly for these two named pieces he need not have gone to all that trouble.

We all know from the work of Graham Hancock (The Sign and the Seal) that the Ark is at Axum in Ethiopia (I still think this is Hancock's best piece of work).  It's in a church not open to anyone and it is guarded by a single monk who is the only person allowed to see the Ark.  At least that is how the story has been told (if you're wondering why it's there Solomon had an illegitamte son with the Queen of Sheba and he took the Ark back home to Ethiopia - that's why it appears to vanish from the Bible). But news reaches our ears which has some bits of excitement in it. 

Glamis Castle, in Scotland, is a famous place: a picture-postcard tourist destination, birthplace of the late-lamented Queen Mother Gawd Bless ‘Er™, and – not incidentally for the purposes of this blog – notoriously the most haunted ‘house’ in Britain. Any number of spook stories are associated with the castle, from tales of ghosts materializing in visitors' bedrooms to the legend of the infamous Earl Beardie, the so-called "Tiger Earl" – a fifteenth century Earl of Crawford whose soul is said to have been claimed by the devil while he unrepentantly played cards at Glamis upon the Sabbath day.

Best known by far, however, is the strange story of the Monster of Glamis, which (thanks in large part to its vague royal associations) has some claim to be ranked among the more pervasive legends of the twentieth century. In its evolved form (and it took some time to evolve, as we will see), this legend relates how, in the early nineteenth century, the wife of the then heir to the Earl of Strathmore gave birth in the castle to an boy who was so hideously deformed that the family took the decision to lock the child away in a secret room, denying him the chance to succeed to the earldom. Malformed though he was, however, the hideous infant proved to be surprisingly long-lived. Supposedly he survived well into the twentieth century, dying only in the 1920s, and knowledge of his existence became the dark secret of the Strathmore family, passed down from father to son just before the boy came of age at 21. Aside from the present Earl and his son, the only other person privy to the secret was supposedly the family’s chief factor – the manager of the Glamis estate.

Archives tend to be sedate places, usually, but of late they have been plunging online with such unrestrained abandon that even stuck-in-the-mud old hands like me have begun to feel a little giddy. It’s only a couple of weeks since my last update on newspaper and journal digitisation, and already there’s some significant news to be reported.

Most important, at least in its massive potential, is the appearance of a beta–test version of the long-touted Historic Australian Newspapers, from the National Library of Australia. This site, now freely available online, covers the period 1803-1954, and though only a tiny fraction of the planned holdings are currently available, it already looks extremely promising. Material from 26 papers is available, the titles ranging from the Melbourne Argus to the Perth Gazette and including no fewer than five from Hobart alone. It’s likely to develop rapidly from now on, too, with thousands of pages being digitised each month.