“This scares me and I don’t know what it is. I have been seeing them since I was a little girl. Always outta the corner of my eye a tall black shadow. I always feel like something or someone is by me. Last night I went down to my bedroom. There it was. Standing next to my dresser. I ran upstairs crying to my mom. She went down and looked saying it was only ’cause I was overtired. But I KNOW what I saw. It was so scary. I don’t know what it is. I need all the help I can get!” – Jessica’s cry for help, 10, January 2010.

Tales of walking Shadows come from across the world. Some of these Shadow People wander through the periphery of our lives; others stay for years. People can rarely make out features of these darker-than-night, human shaped entities other than an occasional set of blazing red eyes. Shadow People often appear dressed as a Medieval monk, wearing a fedora, or bald and sexless. These entities may simply trek through our bedroom at night never to be seen again, while others may lurk in doorways, just watching, day after day. Still others attack with energy-draining fear.

What are they?

I’ve studied the Shadow People phenomena for the past decade, and have come to the conclusion the term “Shadow People” is a catchall for entities that exhibit certain characteristics – but their origins can be wildly different. Through research and personal experience, I’ve categorized these creatures by behavior.

Benign Shadows: Shadow People that seem to travel briefly through a person’s life. I saw these entities as a child. They appeared to walk with purpose through my room, never acknowledging me, and never straying from their path. I never felt an unholy fear, just the fear of watching a dark human-shaped trespasser walk past my bed.

Negative Shadows: Although these Shadow People tend to simply lurk, they are associated with a feeling of unnatural terror.

Red-Eyed Shadows: These entities are always negative, but stare at experiencers with blazing red eyes. Victims often say they feel this creature feed from their fear.

Hooded Shadows: Dressed as an ancient monk, people who encounter these Shadow People feel a deep rage bubbling behind the black cowl.

The Hat Man: This entity is the most curious. Dressed in a fedora, and sometimes appearing to wear an old-time business suit, the Hat Man appears to people in cultures across the planet.

Shadow People may be demonic entities, ghosts, inter-dimensional travelers, or other denizens of the dark realm we call the Unknown. Regardless of their label, Shadow People could very well be more than just one type of being. Brad Steiger, author of “Shadow World,” has studied the paranormal for more than 50 years and agrees – there are many possible explanations for Shadow People. “I would say that experiencers are seeing all of the above and giving them/it the name of Shadow People.”

Whatever these entities are, they’re shocking to those who see them.

A gray sheet of clouds stretched across the sky as 12-year-old Doug ran to the corner store. “It was overcast but not raining, and in the middle of the afternoon,” Doug said. The day was shadowless, and decades later he still doesn’t know what he saw on his way home from the store, arms laden with food. At first, he thought it was a friend. “As I approached the corner to turn onto my street, I saw something black sticking beyond the bushes in the front of my house,” Doug said. “I yelled, ‘Andre,’ and started running toward my driveway where the bushes are.”

The dark figure wasn’t his friend Andre. A black, man-shaped Shadow grew from behind the bushes in this quiet afternoon and began running toward Doug’s house. “After a few steps I saw the Shadow running down my driveway toward the back yard,” he said. “I ran up the driveway to the gate that leads to my back yard. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Doug stood at the gate as the black Shadow in the shape of a man ran across his yard and disappeared through a fence. “I was shocked,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This thing; what could it be? Why was it black when most stereotypical stories said that ghosts were white? Could this be demonic? Could it be like me, just a person?”

What did Doug see? A ghost? A demon? A dimensional traveler? Or was it all in his mind?

Science

“I’ve been visited by what I presume to be the same Shadow three times in my life, and the memories have haunted me ever since. When I was six, I saw it at my dad’s new house, towering over my bed. I couldn’t move, and I don’t remember what happened next. All I remember is trying to scream, but there was this horrible weight on my chest.” – Luke Purdy

Most of the Shadow People encounters I’ve collected over the years are readily explainable. The experiencer wakes to find a black, human figure standing in the doorway of their bedroom, or leaning over their bed, just watching. A tightness grips their chest like the weight of a person is upon them. They can’t breathe. Suddenly the choking eases, and the Shadow being is gone. This type of encounter is common, and psychology has a name for it – sleep paralysis.

April Haberyan, a psychology professor at Northwest Missouri State University, said most Shadow People encounters are probably the product of dreams. When people sleep and enter the REM phase, “it’s very common for them to see things,” Haberyan said. The fear, the paralysis, and the entities are normal. “There are hormones in REM sleep that paralyze the major muscle groups and it’s called paradoxical sleep,” she said. “(Although) this happens during REM, these people don’t stay asleep and the hormones are still in their bodies. It can last up to eight minutes and they feel pressure on their chest and can see people.” When the experiencer becomes fully awake, the Shadow Person encounter is over – all that’s left is the fear.

Other Shadow People encounters – as well as those of ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot for that matter – can be attributed to the same trick of light and shadow that allows us to see faces in clouds and carpets. These sightings can also be from electrical stimulation to certain parts of the brain, or drugs. Chemist Rick Toomey said anything that throws off the chemical balance of the brain causes all sorts of problems. “All sensation is in the nervous system and it’s all chemistry,” he said. “If every neurotransmitter is chemistry, you can wreak havoc with that.”

However, many encounter Shadow People in full consciousness and full daylight, removing the logical, scientific answers, and leaving something terrible.

The Religious World

“My best friend, when he was a boy he was laying on his bed with the lights on. A shadowy figure emerged from his closet and moved towards his bedside. The Shadow being reached out a finger and touched my buddy’s leg. He screamed and the figure vanished, and his folks were there in moments. My friend’s father noticed that the closet door was open, and his parents knew he NEVER slept without it closed. The black spot on his leg remained visible for several years, but the Shadow being never returned. To this day my friend has no idea what happened, but he does know one thing – it was real.” – Paul Sycros

Although most reported Shadow People encounters involve an entity simply appearing and disappearing, many aren’t that innocent. Negative Shadows, Red-Eyed Shadows, and Hooded Shadows, all bring a feeling of horror when they step into someone’s life. These creatures are known by different names, demons, jinn, dark shadows, sgili, but their nature is the same.

Bishop James Long, pastor of St. Christopher Old Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has studied demonology for years and knows Shadow People well – to him they are something evil. “Shadow People must be taken seriously and they can be quite dangerous,” he said. “When a human spirit tries to manifest itself, its form is black, or otherwise known as Shadow. It is energy trying to manifest itself so that it can appear to have the physical characteristics it had when living on earth.” These entities can move, communicate, and attack, drawing energy from their human victim. “Certainly Shadows that attack are demonic in nature and should be avoided at all times,” Long said. “I would strongly encourage anyone who witnesses a dark Shadow to be careful.”

Cody Lilly’s family has encountered this type of Shadow for years, a black, human-shaped figure, featureless except for a wide-brimmed hat. “We called him the Cowboy because he kind of looked like the Marlboro man,” Lilly said. The Cowboy stepped into Lilly’s life his sophomore year of high school in Clarinda, Iowa, and visited almost nightly for two years, pacing about his room, waiting for something. The entity, with fiery red eyes, never spoke, and never approached him, but Lilly knew why it was there – it hungered. “It was feeding,” Lilly said, convinced the Cowboy was absorbing energy from his terror. “The first time I saw it I was completely incapacitated by how scared I was of it.”

Lilly soon went to college thirty miles south and the visits stopped until after graduation in 2011 when he moved to Nebraska. “My girlfriend that is now my fiancée is in Kansas City and I’m in Omaha. I was crashing with friends here,” he said. “My car started acting up, I’m in the process of looking for a job, finding an apartment, buying an engagement ring. I had a lot of stuff on my plate, which might have brought on what happened.” What happened was the Cowboy. “I’m sitting in my car on the phone with my mom. I don’t know much about cars, but my mom does.”

As Lilly described the car’s behavior to his mother, he noticed a movement in the corner of his right eye. Lilly turned toward the passenger side window and saw it – the Shadow Man that once tormented him in the night. The Cowboy. “It was full on. A Shadow Person in an old fedora,” Lilly said. “It was standing there. It leaned over like it’s bending to look at me.”

As Lilly stared in horror at this red-eyed Shadow Man in full daylight, the Cowboy reached out it’s arm and knocked on the car window. “It knocked two times,” Lilly said. “After it knocked it dissolved in my vision. It just showed up, knocked on my window and was gone.” Lilly wonders if the Cowboy wanted to let him know it was still around. “It’s been quite some time that I saw him,” he said. “I’m just kind of thinking he just showed up. I was feeling stressed out and I think he showed up just to feed on that.”

In Islam, the supernatural Jinn can be a companion, or a dark, Shadowy predator. “Jinns are invisible entities believed in by most all Muslims and Middle Eastern folklore,” said religion expert, Dashti Namaste. “Jinns get in and out of human spheres regularly, and it is believed that any human is able to make contact with a Jinn.” Although Jinn can be benevolent, some Jinn are wicked, appearing as dark figures that lurk in ruins and cemeteries, waiting for an unsuspecting human soul to stumble by. The wicked Jinn, much like the demons of Christianity, are deceivers and may present themselves as the ghost of a loved one to insert themselves into a human’s life.

Wahde, a Cherokee, said the nature of Shadow beings in the American Indian tradition are just as dark. “They’re humanoid shaped, but not proportionate to a normal person,” Wahde said. “Their appearance is more monstrous in nature.” These Shadow beings are the product of medicine men that have strayed from the path of healing. “There seem to be a classification of spiritual beings that are Shadow for the most part. These things can be manipulated by bad medicine or bad magic,” Wahde said. “They either take that form to attack other people, or they use some other spiritual being as a spiritual attack.” In the Cherokee language, these dark medicine people are sgili, or witch. “They’re still alive to some degree, but they’re not necessarily considered human.”

Ghosts

“I have a young boy shadow/spirit in my home. He appears as a solid black cutout-like figure. He is a prankster, too, but he’s NOT mean, or evil. He let’s us know he’s here at times by playing with the animals. Kittens, dogs, puppies, etc. PLAY, not mean. The dogs and puppies are wagging their tails. He moves my Barbies if he really wants my attention. And the other day he didn’t want the door to his room closed, so he opened it. He’s a good kid.” – Kim Tamsor

A family sees a black figure come down the stairs at the same time at night, turn into the kitchen and disappear. A dark man in an out-of-date suit walks through a child’s bedroom and down the hallway. Some Shadow People encounters – benign ones like these – could very well be disembodied spirits wandering the earth. D.H. Parsons, president of The Bliss-Parsons Institute of Metaphysics in Columbia, Missouri, has encountered many Shadow People while investigating a haunting. Although many fellow investigators consider Shadow People demonic, Parsons doesn’t necessarily agree. “My feeling is that a Shadow Person is another representation of a residual memory of a person who had such a strong personality in life, that a bit of their energy remained here in this dimension after their spirit crossed over,” Parsons said. “Most of the time the spirit beings are either friendly to us, or confused by us, or curious as to why we are there. But they have never done us any harm, not even the Shadows.”

Not so for eighteen-year-old Dave Stanfield. Stanfield didn’t expect something to be waiting for him in his room when he woke. Something was – something dark. A strange feeling pulled Stanfield from a deep sleep. As he lay in the gray room, staring at his bedroom wall, he saw it. “I woke for no reason, had no weird dreams, and I wasn’t groggy or half asleep,” he said. “My room was dark other than some stray beams coming through the blinds, and I could see a man, darker than the night like a void.”

The figure stood at the end of the bed. “I could only make out the silhouette of his head and shoulders. The rest of him just went straight to the floor,” Stanfield said. “There were no legs or feet. No red eyes, no facial features whatsoever.” Terrified, Stanfield slid low in bed, pulling the covers slowly over his face, watching the black, man-shaped figure standing over him until his blankets hid the horror from his view and Stanfield fell back to sleep.

Stanfield is now 29, and although he doesn’t know what this Shadow Being was, he knows he saw it – and it haunts him still. “Only in the past couple of years have I been able to find anything on the subject matter,” Stanfield said. “It’s almost like re-victimization when reading stories from other people that describe experiences like mine. I never knew it could be so widespread and am still dealing with the shock.”

But, as with Parsons’ encounters, this being didn’t harm Stanfield. At least not physically.

Interdimensional travelers

“Harmless. Just a watcher is all.” – Don Hall

Most Shadow People encounters are benign, a dark figure lingering in the corners of your life, watching. Could these entities simply be watching us from a realm barely removed from our own? Marie Jones, author of books exploring science and the paranormal, thinks other dimensions could be homes of Shadow People. “In my research into quantum and theoretical physics, I came across … concepts that really opened up the possibilities to me that entities from somewhere else could be coming here” Jones said.

One of these concepts is wrapped around different dimensions. “Theoretically, if these infinite other universes exist, we really should not physically be able to access them,” Jones said. “Yet even theoretical physicists entertain the thought that perhaps the laws of physics on the other side allow for some crossover.”

Clark Kent’s* grandfather died in 1977 and his grandmother moved to a small apartment leaving her old house empty. Shortly after, ten-year-old Kent’s family moved in. “My first friend in the new neighborhood was my next-door neighbor, Jim,” Kent said. “We are good friends to this day.” On a day in 1979, Kent invited Jim to his house to play Ping Pong – and it’s haunted him since.

That day after school, Kent and Jim had about two hours before Kent’s parents came home from work, which meant Ping Pong in the basement between peeks at the forbidden stash of Playboys in a dusty alcove. It was there Kent saw something he didn’t expect. “During our game, I was facing the alcove,” Kent said. “At a certain point, something caught my attention.” Standing in the alcove was the shadow of a man wearing a fedora.
“It was creepy, and I had to pause,” Kent said. “I could not figure out how any combination of the boxes could cast such a shadow. Then it moved.”

Kent stood at the Ping Pong table, staring at dark figure watching him from the alcove. He then quickly looked at Jim who was looking at him. “He realized I had seem something,” Kent said. “I was struck by the realization that no man was casting a shadow on the wall, the Shadow was solid and was not attached to any object. I turned and scrambled up the stairs with Jim right behind me.” At the top of the stairs, their breath coming fast and heavy, Kent slammed and latched the basement door, then “looked at Jim with wide eyes.”

Jim denied seeing the Shadow man that day and for nearly thirty years after. As the two met for a long needed reunion, Kent mentioned the Shadow Man in his basement. “Jim sunk into his chair and spoke in a whisper, ‘I’ll never forget that hat.’ I was stunned,” Kent said. Then he asked the same question he’d asked three decades ago, did you see it? “Yes, I did,” Jim told him. “I was scared.”

But did this entity, this watcher, step into Kent’s life from a parallel universe?

Although some physicists entertain the idea of these multiple universes, physicist David Richardson isn’t eager to join them. “I hate to bring this up in this context, but if there were extra dimensions … (Shadow People) might actually be people,” he said. “I’m skeptical of that, but it’s possible. We’re just starting to figure out that sort of stuff.”

Ghost? Demon? Jinn? Sgili? Traveler? Regardless of the nature of these entities, regardless of their intentions, the advice for each encounter is the same – proceed with caution.

*Yes, this person’s name is actually Clark Kent. Although bearing the name of Superman’s alter ego may be a burden to some, Kent said his name has netted him many free bottles of beer from strangers at taverns. Who doesn’t want to buy a drink for the Last Son of Krypton?

Follow Jason on Twitter @TheJasonOffutt

The images used in this post are for illustration purposes only.

In his definitive book on the subject Explore Phantom Black Dogs, author and researcher Bob Trubshaw wrote thus: “The folklore of phantom black dogs is known throughout the British Isles. From the Black Shuck of East Anglia to the Mauthe Dhoog of the Isle of Man there are tales of huge spectral hounds ‘darker than the night sky’ with eyes ‘glowing red as burning coals.’ The phantom black dog of British and Irish folklore, which often forewarns of death, is part of a world-wide belief that dogs are sensitive to spirits and the approach of death, and keep watch over the dead and dying.”

And, during the summer of 2007, one of these most ancient and sinister beasts of folklore and the paranormal reared its ugly head in, of all places, the Lone Star State: Texas. On May 31, 2007, I received a mid-morning telephone call from a late-middle-aged woman named Ronda who lived in the city of Amarillo, deep in the heart of the Texas Panhandle.

“Are you the guy who writes about strange animals?” she asked, in somewhat wary tones. I told her that, yes, I was. And having done so, I sat back and listened to what she had to tell me. According to Ronda, only two days earlier, and with her daughter and son-in-law, she had traveled to a spectacularly beautiful, and huge, canyon a short journey from Amarillo called Palo Duro Canyon.

The trio trekked a mile or so into the canyon and found a pleasant place to sit that overlooked its vast, expansive depths. All seemed normal and Ronda and her daughter unpacked their picnic basket and duly set about preparing lunch. As they did so, Ronda told me, she developed a sudden and eerie feeling of being watched. For reasons that she was not really able to understand, Ronda quickly turned around and could see at a distance of a couple of hundred feet a large dark colored dog staring intently in her direction.

Ronda told me that at first the dog did not act in an exceptional manner: it merely stood its ground with its gaze fixed firmly in her direction. For almost a minute, Ronda estimated, the two exchanged looks, after which she felt uneasy and started to slowly turn her back on the beast. At that point, the dog’s demeanor changed drastically: it charged to within about fifty feet of Ronda, her terrified daughter and son-in-law, and viciously growled, barked and snapped its immense jaws in a fashion that was clearly confrontational in the extreme.

By now, with the benefit of seeing the animal at closer quarters, the three of them could see this was no normal dog. Ronda estimated that it was “half as large again” as a “big German Shepherd,” and its eyes shimmered and “seemed to glow silver: not like normal eyes.” But that was not all: on three occasions the dog, Ronda explained to me, seemed to “bounce” into the air “like it was on springs.”

I asked Ronda to clarify this point for me further and she explained that “it was like it jumped into the air about three feet, but with no effort from its legs. It just seemed to go up and drop down.” More bizarre: Ronda told me that at one point the animal seemed to briefly change shape into that of a “humongous black panther.”

Needless to say, the family scooped up its belongings and made its way along the trail that led back to their car. They continued to watch as the dog practically stalked them the entire way – that is, until they reached a certain point, whereupon the dog vanished – literally before their startled and terror-stricken eyes. There was no puff of smoke; no blinding flash: one second it was there, still glaring at them, and the next second “it just wasn’t there anymore.”

The phantom-like, fiend hound of times long gone, it seems, is not quite so long gone, after all…

People occasionally ask me, as an author, what types of books I enjoy reading. Well, I’m a big fan of Jack Kerouac’s work (aside from his poetry, which I think is a collective, appalling, rambling mess), Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo-driven titles, and the UFO/paranormal-themed books of Gray Barker, John Keel, and my good mate, Jon Downes of the British Center for Fortean Zoology. However, most of the books I read tend to be biographies and autobiographies, mainly of actors, rock-stars, and various and sundry celebrity types (particularly of the bygone, Golden-years of Hollywood).

So, when Anomalist Books’ Patrick Huyghe sent me a review copy of their recently published title, Robert Cracknell’s The Lonely Sense: The Autobiography of a Psychic Detective, I knew this was going to be an interesting read. And it was!

With a Foreword from a true legend in the field of paranormal-themed research and writing – Colin Wilson, no less – The Lonely Sense tells the story of one Robert Cracknell, a man with extraordinary psychic skills, and one whose powers pushed him down some strange, bizarre and supernatural pathways. They even led him to extensive liaison with officialdom on unsolved murder cases. But, Cracknell’s book is far more than just that.

It’s a brutally honest, open and highly entertaining study of the author’s life, that takes the reader from its very beginnings, his time spent in the British Royal Air Force, and to a profound experience that occurred during that same time spent with the military that sent him on the road to becoming a definitive psychic detective. That’s when Cracknell’s life begins to change drastically.

Not surprisingly, Cracknell reveals that coming to grips with his surfacing powers of the psychic kind was not easy. In fact, parts of his story are downright traumatic as he struggles to understand and utilize the near-unique talents at his disposal, as well as how his awakening to a new, previously-uncharted world resulted in problems close to home, with family, friends, and work colleagues.

But, as The Lonely Sense demonstrates, like so many people who came before him – and doubtless like so many who will follow in his footsteps – Cracknell ultimately found himself elevated, empowered, and ready to make use of the skills given to, or developed by, him.

In fact, one could say Cracknell’s transformation and elevation eerily paralleled that of ancient Shamanic figures, who realized they were not quite like everyone else, but who used their differences to ensure positive change and results via means of a psychic, paranormal, and spiritual nature.

And it’s from this moment on that we see Cracknell plunged into a whole new world, one in which he is sought out by the public, the media, and even the British Police Force, on harrowing and distressing murder cases and much more.

Again, Cracknell is open and honest about the nature of those cases, and the effects that immersing himself in them had on his mind and soul. He also provides a fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the time he met Uri Geller, which makes for interesting reading alone.

As the book comes to a close, we read of Cracknell’s retirement on Cyprus, of his studies of the Jack the Ripper saga, and of much more, too.

So, what we have with Robert Cracknell’s The Lonely Sense (it runs to just over 300-pages) is not just yet another study of psychic phenomena. Rather, it is a unique account of how one man found himself in a world that he did not ask to be plunged into, but who accepted the challenge – and both the good and the bad that came with that acceptance – and did something positive with the powers at his disposal.

The Lonely Sense is, then, a must-buy for those interested in psychic phenomena, life-after-death, and the mysterious abilities of the human mind. But, it’s also required reading for anyone who wants a deep, revealing insight not just into the world of psychic phenomena, but into the swirling, turbulent and emotion-filled heart of the psychic individual, too.

They go by many names… but whether people may choose to call them ghosts, shadow people, entities, or denizens of the darkness, few who have encountered them would argue that there is any question to their existence… whatever “they” may be. Quite simply, barring any errors in identification that may transpire, they could only be considered “nonhumans” in our midst.

While the conventional model of what a “ghost” is supposed to be might lead some to categorize them more appropriately as “post-human entities” or something similar, the general idea that there are semi or altogether nonphysical “personages” in our midst has always been both intriguing and terrifying to us. And yet, reports of such high-strangeness encounters do seem to occur from time to time, with beings that seem to defy any kind of rational explanation.

A good example appeared in Roger Marsh’s UFO Examiner column recently, detailing a report with what could very easily be likened to a “Shadow Person” encounter that took place on a woman’s back porch in Tennessee. The witness described seeing a “human-shaped solid black, very dark black, being was standing on the other side of my deck. It was turned towards the field, leaning on the railings, and seemed to be looking into the field.” Once the “thing” turned to observe her, the woman claimed it backed away slowly, reminiscent of a cat stalking its prey, and disapeared behind the side of her house. It reportedly then appeared again, and peered at her from around the corner of the house, at which time the witness claimed she felt “threatened” by the strange manifestation.

Indeed, this odd tale fits well into the mythos surrounding Shadow People, which are a fairly recent phenomenon as recognized by this name. Some of the best among modern “classic” stories regarding these beings stem from Art Bell’s tenure as host of the late night radio program Coast to Coast AM, where Bell featured the subject quite often, along with listener stories (you can hear some of those stories by clicking here).

This thing looked like someone had concreted a very, very large man in a diving suit, bell helmet and all and contoured the head into the shoulders as if there were no neck, no facial features…only smooth grey (lavendar tinted from a nearby guard light)…a light, monochromatic color overall.

It stopped as if it had became aware of us and from where it stood; not yet reaching the driveway level in its course, it appeared that I was only looking at the thing from the waist up – almost 1/3 as tall as the 15 foot tree next to the trail and at least 3 feet across at the shoulders. The thing appeared to be potentially some 10 feet tall.

I froze where I was for a very brief moment and when I looked at Terry, he looked at me and I knew he had seen and was looking at what I was seeing. Two  cars could pass each other on this driveway and that was much too close to whatever that thing was for comfort and we bolted simultaneously for the car, which Bob had kept running. He hadn’t seen a thing. We drove away and never looked back – and lived to regret it.

Terry and I have talked about this incident many times and we’ll never know what that thing was; but, the only description I’ve had for it all these years is Golem -a mud man – because that’s exactly what it looked like – an enormous clay-like figure rising up from the dark before us – featureless, massive and unlike anything I’ve ever seen since that night.

The woman came into the church off the streets of Nassau in the Bahamas. The parishioners knew of her, but they had never seen her in this church, a charismatic Church of God.

Lillian Wolff, of Kansas City, Missouri, and her husband ministered this church in the mid-1960s. Their daughter Terry Byrd, also of Kansas City, grew up in that church. “It was wonderful to live down there,” she said. “There are different cultures. Voodoo and things like that. It was very strange. The people are wonderful.”

But darkness grew over the Wolff family the day the woman appeared. Lillian remembers the woman well, although she hasn’t seen her for more than forty years.

“She was black, I would say she was in her mid to late thirties,” Lillian said. “I don’t recall her ever being in church before.”

Terry was about ten years old that day; a day burned into her memory. “Her name was Naomi,” Terry said. “She had been a dancer and a hooker.”

Naomi, seemingly in a daze, had slipped into the back of the church and silently dropped into a pew.

“This lady was sitting in the congregation kind of normally as people do in church,” Lillian said. Then the woman changed. “During the service she began to act very strangely and making some kind of unusual noises. If I recall they were kind of grunting type noises.”

As the pastor stood at the pulpit preaching, Naomi began to speak. “She said very bad things you would never hear in a church,” Terry said. “He would be preaching and she would call him a liar. He would go on preaching.”

That is until Naomi rose from her pew and sank to the floor. The pastor stopped, and the congregation turned toward this strange woman.

“She kind of slithered her way down the aisle,” Lillian said. “By that I mean she got down and kind of crawled until she got in front of the altar. And then my husband came down from the platform.”

He knew something was wrong. “He recognized there was a demon in her,” Lillian said.

As Naomi crawled, lizard-like, toward the alter, she came closer and closer to the front row where Terry sat. “It was a lady but it was a wicked voice that came out of her,” Terry said. “A kind of fighting; off and on, good against bad.

Naomi’s face contorted as she fought whatever was inside her. Lillian said ugly crawled across the face of this attractive woman spewing hate.

“It’s hard to describe what the sound was. It was very eerie; it wasn’t a woman’s voice that was coming out. It was very scary,” Terry said. “The elders of the church came and prayed. They were really praying.”

The pastor laid hands on Naomi’s forehead, “and prayed in the name of Jesus that this ugly demon spirit would come out of her,” Lillian said. “It must have come out of her because she kind of relaxed.”

Terry’s young eyes were fused to the scene before her. “He cast out the demons and they left,” she said. “You could tell that after a long time the spirit that was inside of her came out and the woman wasn’t even the same lady. It was like 180 degrees the turn that this lady made.”

Naomi stood from the spot of her exorcism, turned and walked toward the back of the church, then sat down.

“After that moment she became a Christian until her death, but it was freaky. Freaky freaky,” Terry said. “I’ve remembered it all my life. I can close my eyes and see it all again.”

The Wolffs moved from the Bahamas to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1968 to minister the Calvary Temple Church, and evil came calling again.

The church sits on St. John Avenue, the old building once the Belmont Theater during the era of neighborhood movie theaters. Terry’s daughter Julie Honeycutt said as a six-year-old, she was fascinated traveling to that church. “It was culture shock,” she said. “So many strange things happened around that church I couldn’t tell you. Prostitutes walking by. There was a bar next door and two bars across the street. It wasn’t odd that people would walk in intoxicated.”

One day still haunts Julie’s life. “My grandfather. He had performed an exorcism in the middle of the service,” Julie said. “It’s something that’s affected my life a lot.”

Like that day in the Bahamas, a woman strange to the congregation walked into the church. Like the woman from all those years ago, she was attractive, in her thirties, with long black hair. “She wasn’t uncommonly beautiful but she had a striking appearance,” Lillian said. “I think she had been a go-go dancer.”

Much like Naomi, this woman sat in the back, left her seat during the service and made her way down the aisle, voices spewing forth, evil voices, voices not her own. Deep, hissing spewed from this woman’s mouth, repeating ‘we’re going to kill her and you can’t stop us.’ “That’s what she was saying as she was coming down the aisles, over and over,” Lillian said.

Terry sat in a pew with her husband as this woman walked by. “I’m an adult at this point,” Terry said. “This person started behaving weirdly. Good and evil fighting. It was like in a movie.”

As this woman walked on shaking legs, the pastor asked the congregation to gather around the woman and pray, pray for her to be rid of her demon. People rose from their seats and surrounded this howling, spitting woman. “We prayed for her,” Lillian said. “These demons came out of her.”

As the howls and rising chant of prayer filled the sanctuary, the pastor challenged the devil himself. “My father was saying, ‘Satan, come out of this person and come into me,’” Terry said.

Julie can still hear those words. “‘Come into me.’ That’s what he said. ‘If you want to pick on somebody, pick on somebody of my size. Come into me,’” Julie said. Although she was young, the memory is crisp. “(Before the exorcism) I remember him saying, ‘have your mind on God, and if you don’t think you can do that, leave the sanctuary,’” Julie said. “They were afraid of (the demon) going into other people. I think back now, not that anything bad happened in my life, but I should have just left.”

Julie escaped unscathed. Her grandfather wasn’t as lucky.

“Within months it’s like his life went downhill,” Julie said. “At the time, we didn’t think of (the exorcism).”

The change in the pastor began slowly. “One incident was while he was preaching, he thought he could walk along the back of a pew,” Julie said. “You know how small that is. He ended up falling and hurting himself.” Then it escalated. Terry and Julie are convinced the demon accepted the pastor’s invitation. “I think to this day it’s what happened to my father,” Terry said. “I believe with my whole heart that when he cast those demons out of that lady, they went into him. He’s not the same man I grew up with.”

Soon after the exorcism, Terry’s father changed from a solid family man and Holy Roller preacher, into someone the family no longer recognized.

“He started in with a woman in the church who had been in my wedding and my sister’s wedding,” Terry said. “He slept with a married woman. I understand preachers are human, but for a loving father to change and be with a lady my age? No, that’s sick.”

Julie grew up with this changed man, and still can’t believe the severe shift in his life. “He lost the pulpit,” Julie said. “He was a very angry person. Just a complete personality change after that. On my twenty-first birthday he was at a bar buying me drinks.”

As the grandchildren grew, and great-grandchildren born, the man left his wife and disappeared from their lives. “He kind of dropped us, but we kind dropped him too,” Julie said. “I was very, very close to my grandparents. Contact is gone; there is none. It is sad. Any of us are going to open up a newspaper and he’ll be dead. That’s where we’ll find out he’s dead.”

But his legacy of exorcisms will stay with the family always.

“I had nightmares,” said Julie, who still sleeps with covers up to her neck. “My husband is amazed. We’ll watch ‘The Exorcist’ and he’s cringing and I’m like, hey, you haven’t seen it in real life. You might see a movie and think it’s not real. It is.”

On the evening of July 30, 2008, a 22-year-old Canadian man named Tim McLean was killed and mutilated under truly horrific circumstances while on-board a Greyhound Canada bus as it neared Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. According to the shocked passengers, McLean was sleeping when suddenly, and without any warning whatsoever, the man next to him pulled out a large hunting-knife and began to wildly and viciously stab McLean in the chest and neck – no less than forty times, police were later able to graphically determine.

Needless to say, complete and utter pandemonium broke out on the bus, as people clambered to quickly escape. But far, far worse was to come. Several of the terrified passengers held the door of the vehicle firmly shut from the outside to prevent the man leaving the scene of the crime. As they did so, they were shocked to the absolute core to see that he had by now decapitated McLean and was calmly walking towards them down the aisle of the bus, with his victim’s head in his hand, no less.

“There was no rage in him. It was just like he was a robot or something,” said Garnet Caton, one of the passengers aboard the bus. Royal Canadian Mounted Police quickly arrived on the scene and arrested the killer – who was identified as 40-year-old Vince Weiguang Li.

For most people, the incident was seen as just another further example of the overwhelming violence and rage that seems all too prevalent in today’s world and society; and particularly so when police revealed that Li had, apparently, even devoured some of his victim’s flesh while on the bus. As the investigation progressed, however, it moved away from being simply an infinitely violent crime, and took on decidedly ominous and almost paranormal overtones.

It transpired that a little more than a week before he killed McLean, Li had been delivering copies of the Edmonton Sun newspaper to homes in the area. Interestingly, the very issue in question contained an extensive article written by Andrew Hanon that profiled the work of a historian named Nathan Carlson, and his research into a monstrous beast known as the Wendigo.

A creature that appears prominently within the mythology of the Algonquin people – the most populous and widespread of all the North American Native groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds – the Wendigo is an evil, cannibalistic and rampaging creature into which humans have the ability to transform – particularly if they have engaged in cannibalism – or which are said to have the ability to possess human souls and minds to do their dark bidding. Notably, in centuries-past, those who were suspected by the Algonquin of being Wendigos were decapitated after death to prevent them rising from the grave.

In the wake of the terrible and tragic death of Tim McLean, Nathan Carlson noted that there were a number of similarities between Li’s actions and those of the Wendigo, and told the Edmonton Sun on August 11, 2008: “There are just too many parallels. I can’t say there’s definite connection, but there are just too many coincidences. It’s beyond eerie.”

Eerie is without doubt the right word for what took place on that fateful evening in July 2008. And, while for many people this particular affair was perceived as being just yet another example of how our society is becoming ever more violent, some were of the opinion that matters extended into far stranger territories. For some,  this particularly notorious and savage incident was suggestive of the sensational possibility that Li himself had become a Wendigo.

Whatever ones own views on this admittedly curious case, it perhaps serves to demonstrate one thing more than any other: Even in today’s fast-paced world, with our technological marvels, and our sprawling concrete cities, when circumstances dictate it, it does not take long at all before our minds swing back to the mysteries, mythologies, folklore, and paranormal-themed fears and superstitions of centuries, cultures and eras long gone.

The wild things, whether the stuff of reality, or of ingrained superstition and legend, are still very much among us…

While in recent weeks stories of “mystery noises” filling the air have captured the attention of many, sometimes the less easily discernible sounds around us could hold the key to unraveling strange secrets of time and space. This is particularly the case with Electronic Voice Phenomenon, also known as EVP.

I’ve always been fascinated with EVP personally, because unlike a number of other elements that are often associated with paranormal research, there seems to be a long history of interest in the recorded sounds of inexplicable voices that have provided tangible proof, according to many, that something strange is indeed going on. But if claims of EVP can be believed, what is the real basis for the phenomenon; how does it occur, and what, if anything, can we hope to learn from it?

Interest in electronic means of gathering voices of unknown origin dates back to the early days of electricity and its use in powering devices within the home. Thomas Edison was even asked whether popular spiritualist practices might be further augmented with the use of sensitive recording equipment that could discern the soft voices of the deceased. Edison agreed that doing so might present a more plausible approach to studying parapsychology of the day, as opposed to the sorts of table-tapping and séances that were so popular around the turn of the last century. This acknowledgment of the “spirit potential” likely contributed to the sense that Edison himself might have attempted to build such a device, though there is little evidence that this actually occurred.

The lesser-known American political dissident William Dudley Pelley would also make attempts at spirit communication, with claims that he had built a device used for communication with the dead during the 1940s. Again, there is little proof that this project really ever got off the ground; however, according to Pelley historian Vance Pollock, who managed to track down an old associate of Pelley’s named Guy Harwood in the late 1990s, Harwood had claimed that Pelley “build a machine that could speak with the dead.”

Later on, another revision of the infamous device for dead-talking came with William O’Neil and George Meek’s Spiricom, which was allegedly so successful due to O’Neil’s own prowess as a medium. However, many critics argue that O’Neil had likely hoaxed many of his recorded conversations with the deceased. A number of other attempts at recording ethereal and otherworldly voices would be attempted over the years as well, citing varying levels of success with the controversial art of EVP.

In all likelihood, if EVP does exist, it is capable of being recorded via of one of just a couple of processes. One possibleway this is achieved is by the recording of sounds that may be sub-audible to most natural human hearing; in other words, while an individual with very acute hearing may do better in terms of detecting such noises in real time (something which a few mediums claim to be able to do), these noises would remain almost inaudible to the average listener. Perhaps more likely as an alternative solution to the way EVP are recorded is the notion that electromagnetism and/or resonance are somehow involved. For instance, when recorded sounds are sent as an electrical signal to an antenna, rather than a set of speakers, the information being broadcast is no longer capable of being heard. However, the use of a dynamic microphone, which functions by a process of electromagnetic induction, will enable the sounds to be recorded nonetheless, as the signal broadcast from the antenna resonates with the coil in the microphone. On playback, one will find that some things that cannot be heard with the ear can nonetheless affect recording equipment.

So does an experiment like this provide some justification for how EVP might work? While we can assume that it does, it is still impossible to discern exactly what the source of such strange noises may be. EVP, while inconclusive in terms of being that all-hallowed “proof” of an afterlife, nonetheless presents some rather compelling evidence for something inexplicable… but what, precisely, is it? Will science ever reach a point where technology will be capable of discerning the likelihood that voices of the deceased, perhaps remaining in the physical world in some energetic form, can still make their presence known through electronic means?

Life in Bolckow … never a cell phone or internet signal … landlines down constantly … electricity blinking on and off sporadically … locals are reclusive and unfriendly … stories of strange disappearances and mutilated pets … sounding like a horror movie yet?

— Tamin, Facebook post, February 3, 2011, 3:03 p.m.

A long, winding grey asphalt road splits from a rural highway thirty-some miles north of St. Joseph, Missouri, and runs between brown winter farm fields and a scattering of trees before it enters the tiny town of Bolckow, Missouri. A weathered sign welcoming visitors stands at the city limits. To some, the welcome ends there. This hilly town with its curbless streets, long dark business fronts, and many houses with grand days decades past, hides something sinister.

Tamin and Tony Morrell bought a house here in 2008; they signed the papers on Christmas Eve and moved in Christmas Day. “When we bought the house it was known as ‘the old haunted house,’” Tamin said.

The house was strange from the first day, partially because the previous owners never really moved. “They left everything,” Tony said. Furniture sat as it had for years, pictures hung from nails on the walls, dirty socks lay crumpled in the bathroom closet.

“It was spooky,” Tamin said. “The table was made. There was food in the refrigerator. Their clothes were in the drawers. They just left.”

The Morrells bought this two-story, four-bedroom house after a foreclosure. Few prospective buyers had looked at the house, Tamin would find later. “I got it really cheap,” Tamin said. “But I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

As Tony, originally from Davenport, Iowa, Tamin from nearby St. Joseph, Missouri, and her children Katheryn and Jake Hatfield, finished carrying boxes into their new home, trickles of strangeness began to fall. “The first night I slept on the couch, and I heard pots and pans rattling around,” Tamin said. “But we hadn’t unpacked. We weren’t using the kitchen.”

Tony heard something, too, but not pots and pans. It was a voice. “It sounded like a kid crying,” he said.

Last night I was awakened by my son’s voice calling “Mom” … yet he was sound asleep.
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 21, 2011, 8:42 a.m.

The first morning in the house, the smell of breakfast cooking greeted the waking family, but there was no breakfast cooking in the small kitchen. “It was weird,” Tamin said. “But there’s always weird smells.” Like death. The family began to notice the smell of rotting flesh throughout the house, but the smell never lingered. This scent of decay would appear in some parts of the house, then move to others and disappear, only to come back weeks later. The smell continues to plague them, but they have never found a cause.

During the first month the family lived in Bolckow strange occurrences in the house slowly escalated. The smells, children’s voices, doors slamming, cabinets opening, and the sound of footsteps were their constant companions. The worst thing about the house, however, was the feeling. “A lot of people say in a room upstairs they feel it,” Tony said. “A depressing feeling.”

Tamin added, “If I’m the only person here at night I feel really depressed. Almost frozen, like I can’t breathe.”

The atmosphere on the ground floor of the house is thick, heavy. But, Tony said, so is the atmosphere of the town. “I’m the biggest skeptic in the house and I’ve felt things here,” Tony said. “This house is weird anyway. The whole town is weird. The first month we lived here we only saw kids. No adults. Yeah, this town is weird.”

Driving down the road in to town, heard rain drops hit the car, stuck our arms out and felt the cold stinging raindrops hit our hands and arms, smelled the rain … yet our hands and arms were dry when we pulled them back in the windows, there were no visible rain drops on the car … weird place Bolckow is!
— Tamin, Facebook post, March 20, 2011, 8:16 p.m.

Strange things in the house continued. Thousands of flies appeared in an upstairs room, and the day after the family cleared them out, a thick mass of flies lighted on the porch. A sound like a bowling ball rolling down the upstairs hallway has woken Katheryn in the night. The dogs refuse to go into the basement. And Tamin has seen shadow figures wandering through the house. The occurrences became commonplace to the family, then the house grew violent. “I got thrown down the stairs,” Tamin said. “It was morning time. I was not scared or anything. I was standing on the landing with my dog Chewie, and the next thing I knew I was halfway down the stairs bouncing down and wondered what happened.”

They decided to move back to St. Joseph. Although Tamin said the main reason was financial, Tony said another was their now bizarre life. “We didn’t like being in this house.” The move culminated at Halloween.

The previous family who owned the house was pre-occupied with Christmas … ironically they moved in on Halloween (OUR favorite holiday) … btw … we moved in on Christmas day … coincidence?
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 10, 2010, 2:55 p.m.

Neighbors in Bolckow didn’t seem to take kindly to Halloween, and given the fact that the town’s population is 234, everyone is a neighbor. “We volunteered to donate Halloween decorations to the park,” Tony said. “People said, ‘we don’t celebrate Halloween. We celebrate the fall harvest.’”

The family decided to celebrate anyway; with a haunted open house. They didn’t realize their house was well known outside of Bolckow. “When we handed out fliers in St. Joseph,” Tamin said. “This guy said, ‘I know that house. It’s in Bolckow. It is evil.”

The event didn’t get any easier. Although many locals shunned the event, some came. “When they were drunk,” Katheryn said. “Some kids went through but their parents weren’t supposed to know about it.”

Most of the guests came from out of town to tour Bolckow’s haunted house, and the house performed, the audio system in the attic behaved of its own free will, and ornaments spun from strings in the dead still attic. The activity soon grew intense. “There was a girl in my room and the window imploded,” Tamin said.

Katheryn was there. “She stepped back and it blew on her.”

“It was a mistake, I think,” Tamin said, “to do the haunted house.”

Today I was upstairs sorting clothes in the closet and came out with scratches on my hands and arms!
— Tamin, Facebook post, April 12, 2010, 5:51 p.m.

In November, the family moved back to St. Joseph, leaving the strange house behind. They rented the house to Jim, a long-time friend of Tony’s, but the house hit the renters with everything it had.

“They changed so much,” Tamin said. “They changed when they lived here.”
Jim, his girlfriend, two teenage boys and a ten-year-old girl moved into the house and immediately felt the weight of the house upon them. “The little girl said she came to our house to talk to ghosts,” Katheryn said.

One day the renters were just gone. “They left their clothes here,” Tamin said. “They left their cell phone.”

“There was food in the fridge,” Katheryn said.

And worse. Buckets of grease and urine were scattered throughout the house. Tamin and Tony didn’t know what had happened to the people who lived in their house, but they knew the house had done something to them. “We didn’t know where they were and they never came back for their stuff,” Tamin said.

Reluctantly, Tamin and Tony moved their family back into the Bolckow house soon after.

This house has not lost its depressing, suffocating, oppressive feel. It’s like the house sucks every bit of hope and happiness out of a person when they walk through the door.
— Tamin, Facebook post, February 13, 2010, 5:01 p.m.

“Since we’ve moved back, I have not been able to sleep well, and I can always sleep,” Tony said

“We all don’t,” Tamin said.

Katheryn sat in a kitchen chair, holding her hands. “I feel like someone is shaking me.”

They moved back into the “hell house,” as Tamin calls it, because of personal finances, and crime rates in St. Joseph. “I thought, ‘let’s go back to Bolckow and everything will be fine.’”

It wasn’t. The haunting continues. Katheryn told Tamin of a dream about a little girl who lives in the house. The girl told her “the grey kitty is my favorite.” That morning Tamin found the grey cat had been inexplicably locked in the parlor all night.

“My life has been nothing but insane since I moved to Bolckow,” Tony said.

Tamin nodded. “I feel like I’m in a movie.”

They lurk in the shadows by cover of night, waiting for their victims to fall asleep. Then, entering bedrooms beneath the unforgiving shield that pale moonlight provides, the strike; biting the neck and sucking precious life’s blood from the innocent. These are the unearthly habits of the vampire, and their particular manner of devilish dealing has continuously managed to capture both the minds and hearts of the masses, as evidenced by the nearly constant appeal this subject has maintained through books, films, and television.

For most of us, the fascination with Vampires ends with the silver screen. However, there have been a few to have come and gone who asserted far more interest in the subject than that which exists merely within the bounds of horror fiction. For some, Vampire hunting Van Helsing-style has grown out of a mere fascination with the occult, leaving those involved pondering whether blood-suckers that exist by night might not have some factual basis in reality.

I was reminded of one such individual while visiting The Reynolds Mansion, a haunted nineteenth century mansion in Western North Carolina, at the request of a friend who worked their. There were numerous stories of ghosts in the building, and while being given a private tour, the host, Billy Sanders, showed me a particularly unique item among his collection of macabre art and film memorabilia: an actual vampire kit, used as a prop in the 1960s Hammer Films release The Brides of Dracula.

Digging through the kit, one would find a coffin key, actual silver bullets, wooden stakes of carved oak, holy water, and a host of other things expected for use in battling the undead. However, perhaps my favorite item contained within this unusual collection of belongings was an old 1928 hardbound edition of Mantague Summers’ The Vampire: his Kith and Kin.

Summers, born in 1880, had been described through his life as an eccentric occultist and clergyman, with a variety of unusual interests. One of his earliest published works dealt with poetry dedicated to the Bithynian youth Antinous, whose relationship with the Roman emperor Hadrian was believed to have involved pederasty. Summers himself would go on to be accused of maintaining such relationships with young boys, although he would be acquitted in a court of law of these accusations.

Despite the ill repute that Summers would become known for, these were hardly the most bizarre accusations made against the man, who would go on to also convert to Catholicism, even claiming to have been ordained a Catholic priest. Indeed, the eccentricity of Montague Summers extended well beyond a mere interest in the occult with titles such as the aforementioned thesis on Vampirism; he also worked as a devotee to the Gothic genre, translating such titles as The Castle of Otranto, The Malleus Maleficarum, and authoring works of his own devoted to the darker aspects of literature, such as his 1938 book The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel.

The strangest thing, perhaps, about Summers’ interest in vampires had dealt with his treatment of the subject as though vampirism were a very real condition. The Vampire dealt with not only accounts of biting ghosts and bloodsucking agents of the evening, but also the prescribed methods of dealing with such devils, which of course, became popularized in film (often with the use of such tools as those included with the vampire kit I described earlier). Based on his writings, Montague Summers either boasted a kind of eccentricity with his stylistic offerigs that blurred the lines between his treatment of fact and fiction, or he we must assume that he very much believed that the vampire was a real agent of evil, and one that must be dealt with through drastic means.

Was the quirky cleric indeed merely pulling our leg with his professed concern with denizens of the undead realm? Or do Summers’ written works indeed point to the mind of a man who perhaps bought a bit too much of his own hype, resulting in a twisting of fact and fiction around what has become one of the chief staples of the horror genre in modern times?

The very idea that the green and pleasant British countryside may well be playing host to hidden populations of wild baboon sounds manifestly bizarre and unlikely in the extreme, which, for the most part anyway, it surely is! And, yet, sightings of baboon-like animals certainly do surface from time to time, and from across much of the entire nation. That these same sightings, of what are actually African and Arabian Old World monkeys, are comprised of encounters with both flesh-and-blood entities and beasts of a distinctly spectral and paranormal nature, only adds to the mystifying strangeness, as you will now come to firmly appreciate.

In 1913, Elliott O’Donnell penned the classic title Animal Ghosts, which included in its pages the decades-old story of a ghostly baboon seen in a large, old, imposing country-house-style abode near the English town of Basingstoke, Hampshire. In O’Donnell’s own words:

“A sister of a well-known author tells me there used to be a house called The Swallows, standing in two acres of land, close to a village near Basingstoke. In 1840 a Mr. Bishop of Tring bought the house, which had long stood empty, and we went to live there in 1841. After being there a fortnight two servants gave notice to leave, stating that the place was haunted by a large cat and a big baboon, which they constantly saw stealing down the staircases and passages.

“They also testified to hearing sounds as of somebody being strangled, proceeding from an empty attic near where they slept, and of the screams and groans of a number of of people being horribly tortured in the cellars just underneath the dairy. On going to see what was the cause of the disturbances, nothing was ever visible. By and by other members of the household began to be harassed by similar manifestations. The news spread through the village, and crowds of people came to the house with lights and sticks, to see if they could witness anything.

“One night, at about twelve o’clock, when several of the watchers were stationed on guard in the empty courtyard, they all saw the forms of a huge cat and a baboon rise from the closed grating of the large cellar under the old dairy, rush past them, and disappear in a dark angle of the walls. The same figures were repeatedly seen afterwards by many other persons. Early in December 1841, Mr. Bishop, hearing fearful screams, accompanied by deep and hoarse jabberings, apparently coming from the top of the house, rushed upstairs, whereupon all was instantly silent, and he could discover nothing.

“After that, Mr. Bishop set to work to get rid of the house, and was fortunate enough to find as a purchaser a retired colonel, who was soon, however, scared out of it. This was in 1842; it was soon after pulled down. The ground was used for the erection of cottages; but the hauntings being transferred to them, they were speedily vacated, and no one ever daring to inhabit them, they were eventually demolished, the site on which they stood being converted into allotments.

“There were many theories as to the history of ‘The Swallows’; one being that a highwayman, known as Steeplechase Jock, the son of a Scottish chieftain, had once plied his trade there and murdered many people, whose bodies were supposed to be buried somewhere on or near the premises. He was said to have had a terrible though decidedly unorthodox ending – falling into a vat of boiling tar, a raving madman. But what were the phantasms of the ape and cat? Were they the earth-bound spirits of the highwayman and his horse, or simply the spirits of two animals? Though either theory is possible, I am inclined to favour the former.”

Moving on, in September 1979, wild rumors that a terrifying monster was haunting the dark woods of Brassknocker Hill, near the old British city of Bath began to surface. Described variously, and in both excited and hysterical tones, as resembling a baboon, chimpanzee, spider monkey, gibbon or lemur, the creature was of far more concern to some than it was to others. Eighty-one-year-old Brassknocker Hill resident Frank Green, clearly hyped up and living out his Dirty Harry fantasies, took up nothing less than a shotgun vigil and said loudly: “I am very fond of some animals, but I reckon this creature could be dangerous and I am taking no chances.”

By the following summer the mystery seemed to have been solved when a policeman caught sight of a chimpanzee in the woods. “We were sure this mystery creature would turn out to be a monkey of some sort,’ said Inspector Mike Price, adding with humor: “After all, men from Mars aren’t hairy, are they?” Quite! But rumors of baboons on the loose in Britain don’t end there.

On January 17, 1999, a very curious story surfaced in the pages of Scotland’s Ayrshire Post newspaper. Titled Baboon sighted near Prestwick Airport, it read as follows: “A motorist spotted what he believed was a ‘Baboon-like creature’ on the Shaw Farm Road in Prestwick, not far from the airport. Police rushed to the scene, and as the officers got to within 30 yards of the animal it disappeared into the undergrowth.”

A police spokeswoman told the newspaper: “We received a call from a local man who said he’d narrowly avoided hitting a baboon-like creature on Shaw Farm Road, Prestwick. A patrol car was sent out and after a search of the area the officers reported seeing an animal of some sort, although they couldn’t be sure what it was.”

Given that the eye-witnesses to the beast included members of the police, the matter was taken seriously, and newspaper staff noted that careful-but-futile checks were made at the airport, which, rather interestingly, had received a cargo of livestock only days earlier. A baboon, said an airport spokesperson, was most certainly not part of that same cargo. As the mystery grew, and with no answer in sight, checks were also made with numerous zoos across Scotland, but none had lost a baboon – or, more correctly, none admitted to having lost one.

The final word on the matter came from a senior policeman, who – in light-hearted tones – told the press, always eager for an entertainingly weird story, and one that ultimately, albeit briefly, threatened to eclipse Scotland’s most famous mystery beast – the Loch Ness Monster – that: “The officers were very careful how they phrased the sighting over the radio…They didn’t want to make monkeys of themselves.”

So, what can we say for certain about these very odd cases, which span more than 170-years? Well, the answer has to be: not a great deal! But, if you should ever find yourself in the wilds of Britain and you come face-to-face with a baboon – spectral or physical – of one thing you can be sure: you won’t have been the first to have had such an encounter, and based upon what we have seen, you probably won’t be the last!