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Eleven Popes have sat on the throne of St Peter since the turn of the last century, and most authorities would rank Pius XI (b. Achille Ratti, r. 1922-39) among the two or three most influential of that number. An able diplomat, fighter for social justice, noted critic of capitalism, fervent opponent of contraception and, inter alia, a one-time librarian and founder of the Pontifical Academy of Science, Pius was the first Pontiff in nearly half a century to abandon successive Popes' self-imposed exile within the precincts of the Vatican. In the course of his reign, he had to deal with the rise of Fascism and Nazism – which he condemned rather more forcefully and consistently than his controversial successor, Pius XII. But in his spare time, it now emerges, Il Papa was also an enthusiastic cryptozoologist.

Adam Sisman's sympathetic new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), the brilliant if acerbic historian, contains an unexpectedly fascinating passage on the great controversialist's declining years that sheds a ray of light on the way in which witnesses perceive ghosts.

In his late 80s, Sisman notes, Trevor-Roper was diagnosed with glaucoma and then developed a cataract. Soon afterwards, he began to suffer some alarming hallucinations: "He would look up from his desk and see the trees in leaf in mid-winter, or the landscape whizzing by as if he were aboard a train... Once, as he went to put out the dustbin, he found himself lost in a cemetery of dead machines, surrounded by rusting combine harvesters, lorries, cranes and derricks. Inside, the house grew an extra staircase." Other outlandish figments of the historian's imagination included gigantic trees and even a complete train at a platform at Didcot Station (which Trevor-Roper attempted to board).

It's thirty years now, more or less, since I first began writing for Fortean Times, and in all that time I doubt we covered a more shocking or more important story than the great Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of 1989-1991.

It's hard to convey to those who did not live through those years just how widespread – and how widely accepted – allegations of SRA were. Cases actually began well before 1989, and ran past 1991, and they were reported from across the English-speaking world, most often from the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK. I know of no reliable overview of the entire panic, but it certainly involved, at minimum, well over a hundred individual episodes and must have affected several thousand families in all. What's most remarkable, looking back, is just how outlandish many of the allegations were. High-profile cases typically included suggestions that large gangs of well-organised, hereditary Satanists were abducting, abusing and murdering dozens, if not hundreds, of young children. Sometimes it was alleged that the abusers were using pre-schools to identify and groom their targets; in the UK, most of the cases involved families who were supposedly assaulting their own children. There were numerous allegations that the rituals included sacrifice – that is, murder – as well as abuse.

We've seen, in two earlier posts, how the Saarland village of Marpingen experienced a dramatic series of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) during the mid-1870s, with associated claims of miraculous cures and healing, and how the leader of the three girls who claimed to have encountered the apparition in woods outside the village eventually confessed that the entire experience had been invented – thanks, in part, to leading questions asked, and pressure placed on the three child-witnesses by, the eager adults of the village. Today I'm going to conclude this series of analyses, drawn from David Blackbourn's magnificently detailed study of the episode, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century Germany, by taking a closer look at the reasons why there was so much expectation and religious fervour in Marpingen in the summer of 1876, and why the appearance of the BVM meant so much to the villagers themselves.

A couple of days ago we looked briefly at events in Marpingen, a German village in the Saarland, during harvest-time in 1876, and saw how a group of young female visionaries claimed to have witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in some woods outside the village [right] – an account written up in vast detail by the Harvard history professor David Blackbourn in his 1994 book Marpingen. Today we're going to follow Blackbourn deeper into the local archives and look in considerably greater detail at the witnesses, at what they said they saw, at how their accounts of their experiences were shaped, and varied over time – and at what the raw data from Marpingen may imply about the gradual processes of sanitisation and consolidation that have worked to produce the much less controversial, much more uniform visions that have been formally approved by the Roman Catholic church. All this, as I noted in my first post on the subject, comes from an extensive collection of official and private documents assembled at the time, and gives us an unusually close look at what actually happened during one apparently quite typical set of Marian visions in the late 19th century – as well as offering several keys to understanding such events.

I've already mentioned, in these pages, the alarming lack of awareness Forteans show of all the progress being made in the fields of academia. Only rarely does one see purely scholarly works cited in the literature, and this considerably impoverishes us – most obviously because it limits our capacity to understand the subtle underpinnings of a wide range of phenomena.

Many countries have folk-tales that feature foolish kings – monarchs whose vanity causes them to make catastrophic misjudgements or attempt impossible things. Greek mythology offers the tradition of King Midas, who lived to regret wishing for the power to turn everything he touched into gold; for we Brits, the foolish ruler is King Canute, who – at least in the common modern telling of the tale – allowed courtiers to flatter him that even the seas would obey his commands, and consequently got his feet wet in a failed attempt to turn back the tides.¹

Most of these legends are, of course, hundreds of years old, but the motif is a potent one and it still crops up from time to time. Here, for instance, is a story that has stuck firmly in my mind ever since I first read it in The Book of Lists, a best-selling compendium of all sorts of remarkable trivia, first published in 1977:

Let's begin with the obvious: the camera lies. And because we know it lies, we tend to doubt the things it tells us. A million gallons of ink have been spilled on analyses of classic photographic images, very often with devastating results for those who have chosen to place faith in them as "proof" of any sort. Adamski's UFO: a chicken brooder.* The Surgeon's Photograph: a model mounted on a clockwork submarine. The ghosts snapped from the SS Watertown: nothing but a cut-and-paste job. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall: a simple case of double exposure.

The consequences of this home truth are profound, if obvious. Photos can't be trusted. The stuff that does exist tends to fall broadly into two categories. On the one hand are the hazy, badly-focussed shots of "something" – which might possibly be genuine, but are rarely proof of anything. On the other are unambiguous, clear images, which look exciting at first glance but are almost always fakes. And the whole field is the Fortean equivalent of a money pit, sucking up endless resources without producing anything concrete in return.

For reasons that ought to become in clear in about a month, I've acquired a bit of an interest recently in Pierre Van Paassen, a Dutch-born Canadian journalist who enjoyed a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent during the 1920s and the 1930s. Van Paassen (1895-1968) [below], who wrote for the New York Evening World and the Toronto Star, led a pretty action-packed life, getting himself thrown into Dachau concentration camp – and later out of Germany – for criticising Adolf Hitler back in 1933, and going on to cover the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War before giving it all up to become a Unitarian minister. That need not concern us here, however. What does is that, long before any of this happened, in the spring of 1929, Van Paassen was living in France when he experienced – or said he experienced – a particularly peculiar series of encounters with a ghostly black dog. These events, so Van Paassen tells us in his autobiography, Days of Our Years (1939) pp.248-51, were corroborated by at least three other witnesses – one of them a priest – and also resulted in the death of a "police dog." And, just to top things off, the priest eventually identified the source of all the trouble as a teenage girl living in the same property, thus suggesting the black dog case had some sort of links to the poltergeist phenomenon.

It's hard to think of another event in the troubled twentieth century that had quite the shattering impact of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand [below] at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Archduke was heir to the throne of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire; his killers – a motley band of amateurish students – were Serbian nationalists (or possibly Yugoslav nationalists; historians remain divided on the topic) who wanted to turn Austrian Bosnia into a part of a new Slav state. The guns and bombs they used to kill the Archduke, meanwhile, were supplied by the infamous Colonel Apis, head of Serbian military intelligence. All this was quite enough to provoke Austria-Hungary into declaring war on Serbia, after which, with the awful inevitability that AJP Taylor famously described as 'war by timetable', Europe slid inexorably into the horrors of the First World War as the rival Great Powers began to mobilise and counter-mobilise against each other.

At a time when MPs are in the news, and not often for the right reasons, I want to take a moment to dwell on the more worthwhile, and (from a Fortean perspective, anyway) peculiarly illuminating career of a long-forgotten predecessor of the current bunch of petty crooks. His name was Walter Powell (1842-1881) [below left], he was Tory MP for Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and his strange and lonely death offers a good deal of unexpected insight into the perennially fascinating topics of expectant attention and witness perception.

First, a snippet of biography. Walter Powell was the youngest son of a tough and ruthless Welsh mine owner (a tautology, I know) who ran his pits for profit first and safety very much last, emerging during the 1840s as the largest coal exporter in the world. Having driven through a 20% cut in wages and broken the resultant strike, Thomas Powell's mines were plagued by accidents, culminating in two major explosions at Dyffryn, in Aberdare, and the deaths of more than 80 men. According to Walter Powell's biographer, the Dyffryn disasters belatedly shamed Thomas senior into repentence for his past behaviour, and inculcated in Walter Powell a determination to use his own inherited wealth more for the public good.

The thing about lake monsters, I think it's generally agreed, is that they really ought to be seen a lot more often than they are. Take even a reasonably substantial body of water, one the size of Loch Ness, for instance, add a self-sustaining monster population (25 animals? 40? Nobody really knows, but it'd have to be a decent number), and the brain begins to boggle slightly at the sheer implausibility of all those creatures paddling about the centre of the Highlands, within a few yards of a major road, and yet being spotted and reported perhaps three times a year.

The real problem, of course, is that virtually all of the usual suspects – the plesiosaurs and long-necked seals and, god help us, giant prehistoric whales (if there's one LM candidate that combines the worst aspects of every conceivable theory in one utterly unlikely package, the zeuglodon is it) – are air-breathers. And you don't have to spend too long at Loch Ness, just 22 miles long and only one mile wide, to realise how preposterous the idea of air-breathing lake monsters is. Seals, which do get into the loch occasionally, are quite regularly spotted and identified, so there's simply no reason to suppose larger animals would go unnoticed. That's why I long ago converted to the idea that the solution to this mystery more likely lay in the realms of witness perception, human psychology and cultural expectation than it did in cryptozoology. But, even so, I still suspect that one type of animal does play a central role in some lake monster sightings: fish.

I love history and I love research: always have done, to a degree other people find – well, let's just say 'unusual'. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me take you back to the summer of 1982, and the last term of my first year at university. Now, first years at most Cambridge colleges sit their Prelims in that term – that's preliminary exams, the sort that don't count towards your degree but do count when it comes to ruining one's summer. By sheer dumb luck, however, I had gone up to Peterhouse, the oldest and most eccentric of colleges, and Peterhouse scorned Prelims. This meant that I spent the eight weeks of that term bombarding my bemused supervisor with 5,000 word essays and still had a lot of spare time on my hands; most of my friends, the ones at other colleges, were feverishly revising, and there wasn't a great deal going on. My fellow Petreans took advantage of this freedom to do a lot of drinking, punting, and garden partying, but even aged 19, I have to admit, my idea of a good time was more to head to the University Library and read.

I wasn't quite swot enough, in truth, to spend the time reading stuff that might have helped me academically. What I actually did was to retreat to the dusty pastures of North Front 6, where it was always cool and dark and the smell of ancient books was overpowering. Nobody ever seemed to go North Front 6, which had tiny windows and no natural light, and was, and probably still is, a sort of elephants' graveyard where old, moribund and essentially useless periodicals went to die. It was paradise for me, though, and it was up there, that term, that I first chanced upon a run of one of the magazines that I want to talk about today.

A few months ago, I created a spin-off from this blog, featuring only the better-researched posts, for various arcane reasons that I won't trouble you with here. [Clue: they're not unconnected with amazon.com's determination to rope in authors in its relentless trudge towards world domination.]

One unexpected spin-off of this decision is that I suddenly find myself with access to the wide variety of search terms visitors are using to stumble across my stuff. This is actually a little disconcerting, in part because it can be a bit of a stretch to work out how some of the wackier ones actually drive people to my work, but mainly because it's something of an eye-opener to see the sort of off-the-wall searches that are going on out there.

I can only hope the people searching hopefully for the following nuggets of information weren't too disapointed with what they actually found. I would imagine, however, that they were. Especially the guy (and you just know it's a guy) with a thing for giant prehistoric crocodiles.

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Today is St David's Day, the national day of Wales, and it seems an appropriate moment to post what remains my very favourite story among all the thousands of strange tales that have featured in Fortean Times over the years. That is a large claim – the complete set of FT must run to several million words by now – but even after all these years I still find what follows so surreal and so magical, in its combination of the gentle, the mundane and the extraordinary, that for me each reading is like immersing myself in a warm bath. All right, it's pretty hard to credit that it's literally 'true'; it helps that it's a Welsh story, and that I'm a proud Welshman – and that the tale remains all but unknown; the account first appeared in print in 1928, and so far as I can tell has never made it onto the Internet. The Fortean Times version of the story is by Paul Sieveking, and it was published in FT48:32 (Spring 1987). The names of the characters involved are so common that it would be extremely difficult to check if they were actually real or not; Radnor Forest, though, is real – and is, according to local legend, the place where the last Welsh dragon still lies sleeping (Daniel Parry-Jones, A Country Parson. London: Batsford, 1975). The strange stamps you're about to read of apparently did exist. No other comment is possible – but then perhaps none is necessary. The best thing to do is simply to sit back and enjoy.

Natives of the Red Dragon

Few creatures have struck more terror into more hearts for longer than the basilisk: a crested snake, hatched from a cock's egg, that was widely believed to wither landscapes with its breath and kill with a glare. The example at right comes from a German bestiary, but the earliest description that we have was given by Pliny the Elder, who described the basilisk in his pioneering Natural History (79AD) – the 37 volumes of which he completed shortly before being suffocated by the sulphurous fumes of Vesuvius while investigating the eruption that consumed Pompeii. According to the Roman savant, it was a small animal, "not more than 12 fingers in length," but astoundingly deadly nonetheless. "He does not impel his body, like other serpents, by a multiplied flexion," Pliny wrote, "but advances loftily and upright" – a description that accords with the popular notion that the basilisk is the king of serpents – and "kills the shrubs, not only by contact, but by breathing on them, and splits rocks, such power of evil is there in him." The basilisk was native to Libya, it was said, and the Romans believed that the Sahara had been fertile land until an infestation of basilisks turned it into a desert.

Spring-heeled Jack cut such a fearsome figure in his prime that it is no surprise that he has been blamed, over the years, for causing a number of fatalities. On at least one occasion he is supposed to have actually murdered his victim, but in most cases he is said to have polished them off using that old bogeyman's stand-by, the ability to frighten an unfortunate witness to death.

The most notorious of Jack's killings, of course, is his alleged murder of a 13-year-old London prostitute named Maria Davis. She is said, by a good number of secondary sources, to have been flung into the foetid waters of Folly Ditch, in Jacob's Island, in November 1845 and left there to drown. The Davis killing is, however, a fake; it was first mentioned by the notoriously unreliable Peter Haining in his The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-heeled Jack, pp.84-5, and an examination of the surviving London coroner's records and death certificates shows that no such incident ever occurred.

The new issue of Fortean Times contains an interesting essay on haunted inns by Alan Murdie which discusses, among several gory stories, the supposedly spook-infested Ostrich Inn in Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire – where ‘a past landlord named Jarman is supposed to have murdered up to 60 guests on the premises, in either the 16^th or 18^th century’ [FT259:17]. The pub's unusual name rang a bell, and after a short hunt I turned up a story about the same place that I clipped from the Daily Telegraph, 31 October 1989:

In the shadow of one of London’s ghastliest locations, one of England’s oldest pubs is on the market – together with a ghastly history.

The Ostrich Inn, a Grade II listed freehouse near Heathrow Airport, is said to date back to 1106 and was the scene of 60 grisly murders committed by 12^th century landlord John Jarman and his wife.

After inviting wealthy travellers to sleep on a specially-made hinged bed, Jarman would say to his wife, "There is now a fat pig to be had if you want one." She would answer: "I pray you put him in the hogsty till tomorrow." The victim would then fall through a trapdoor into a vat of boiling water.

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."

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

"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."

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

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.)