Whispering Clowns in the Woods: The Genesis of a Panic

Hysteria consumed the globe in 2016 - starting in Summer and concluding after Halloween. There were men patrolling neighbourhoods across the world dressed as clowns, and these sinister figures were menacing children, chasing pedestrians and even sometimes attacking people with various weapons. Several arrests were made, proving that the majority of these clowns were flesh-and-blood criminals exploiting a growing atmosphere of panic, but there are certainly some reports which seem to be slightly more mysterious. The first of these anomalous reports took the form of the first report of the entire panic. Today I am taking you to Fleetwood Manor in Greenville, South California - be warned, there are clowns in the woods.

This photo fits the description of the first two clowns

Outbreak! 

The young son of a woman named Donna Arnold would become patient zero in a coulrophobic hysteria that would soon reach pandemic proportions across the globe in the Summer of 2016. It was 8:30pm on the 21st of August - and the boy could see two men dressed in bright clothing in the nearby forest behind the local basketball court. As he looked closer, he soon realised that he was looking at two clowns - one of whom was wearing a red fright wig and the other had a black star painted on his face. The clowns apparently whispered something to him, but what exactly this was remained unclear throughout the reporting. Donna was originally skeptical of her son's claims, but felt it necessary to report the incident to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office just in case. She told her son to calm down and assured NBC News that she wasn't eager to let rumours of clowns spread across the community. She said that her son had 'seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises'.

A police deputy was dispatched to investigate the matter, and he uncovered several other sightings of kooky characters dressed as clowns. An anonymous individual said that she had seen a 'large-figured' clown with a blinking nose stood under a post light near a garbage dumpster area. The strange man waved at her and she nervously waved back, but the enigmatic entertainer did not approach her or harm her in any way. He seemingly just stood there. The neighbourhood had suddenly been taken over by clowns. Another woman claimed that her son had told her that he had heard clanging chains accompanied by a banging noise at the front door.

Things would only spiral out of control from there - and although Donna had disbelieved her son, she would soon be forced to reevaluate this conclusion when thirty children approached her the day after her son had allegedly seen the phantom figure and asked her if she had seen the clowns in the woods. Although the reporting somewhat differs among my myriad of sources, it would seem to be the case that her son then took her to where he had seen the clowns - and she would become the second confirmed adult witness of the phenomenon. She saw two clowns in the forest 'flashing green laser lights' before they ran off into the woods. It had taken one day for the clown hysteria to reach epidemic proportions among the child population of the area.

The Greenville County Sheriff's Office released a report based on the findings of their investigations in the week of the first sighting, and most of the details from the former two paragraphs are sourced from there. The Greenville police also said that children had told them that the clowns had showed them 'large amounts of money' in order to persuade them to follow them into the forest according to the police report obtained by ABC News. The children also believed that the clowns lived in 'a house located near a pond at the end of a man-made trail in the woods'. This might've sounded like a fantastical detail pulled from a fairytale, but deputies working for Master Deputy Ryan Flood searched the forest and found a house matching this exact description after following a trail - but it was completely empty and didn't contain any 'clown paraphenalia'. Every time they investigated this house, they continually failed to find 'clothing or anything else' that might've indicated that anyone lived there. Flood stated that he didn't think there were any circuses in town, and that there was apparently no history of unusual clown sightings in the area. Interestingly, he also stated that there were no CCTV cameras installed anywhere that the clowns had allegedly been spotted, and so the reports were all impossible to substantiate.

Nothing Spreads Faster Than Fear 

It took three days for the clown hysteria to spread beyond Fleetwood Manor. On the 23rd of August, Greenville City Dispatch responded to a late-night call from Shemwood Crossing on Shemwood Lane about a menacing clown which had made its getaway in a dark car after being confronted. The residents told a crew from WSPA News that they had been alerted to the presence of more clowns when their children had told them that the costumed freaks were lurking by the local playground. They chased after the clowns, whereupon the odd characters high-tailed it out of there in a mysterious vehicle. This took place at roughly 9:00pm. The police were planning to increase patrols in this region.

The letter sent to Fleetwood Manor tenants

Just because it had spread didn't mean that it wasn't still holding Fleetwood Manor in its clown-gloved hand. On the 24th, the manager of the apartment complex sent a letter to all their tenants warning them about the alleged presence of the clowns and encouraging them to call the police if they saw anything strange. Greenville County law enforcement was apparently conducting routine patrols around the apartments in light of the reports. A community activist by the name of Bruce Wilson noted that there were between 200 and 300 children in the area, and told WDTV News that he was now getting involved in making sure that the police are 'doing the right thing'.

It was 8:20pm on Monday, August 29th when the Greenville Sheriff's Office received a panicked phone call from a 12-year-old girl on White Horse Road. She was calling from Emerald Commons apartment complex, and she told deputies that she had seen a man riding on a blue bike taking photographs of children from around her backyard area. Shortly after she noticed this, a man wearing a black jacket and a clown mask emerged from the woods 'before going away'. This newly-infected apartment building was 20 minutes away from Fleetwood Manor.

The Lakehouse

In October of that year, Matthew Teague and a team of reporters for the UK newspaper The Guardian ventured to South California to report on the clown situation from the scene of the crime, as it were - and they found that things had changed quite considerably. The clown panic had already gone global, stretching across the United States and then spreading to the United Kingdom. Within the next few days it would move to Spain, Chile, Singapore, Brazil, Sweden, Mexico and Denmark.

When the news crew got there, Donna Arnold was still eager to tell them about the clowns she had seen with her son, and she pointed them towards the woods and explained about the abandoned house from which the clowns had allegedly originated. Intrigued, the reporters followed the odd little path down towards the house in the forest - and found it just as derelict as it had been initially described - but something odd had happened in the two months since it had been reported on. Although the balcony was sagging down and someone had boarded up the windows, a modern security system had been installed outside it, apparently quite recently. New bags of potting soil had been left near to the basement door. It still looked as if nobody had lived in it for years, but it seemed that someone was now planning something.

Perplexed, the confusion felt by the reporters would only grow in strength when a gleaming white Mercedes of a new model pulled up to the house shortly after sunset. The driver stepped out of the mysterious vehicle - which 'looked as out of place as any clown car' - and she was immediately ambushed by the waiting pack of reporters. They asked her about the house and she said that she had bought it recently as an investment due to it sitting on a free space of five acres in an area that was otherwise quite densely populated. Interestingly, she refused to give her name - and was wearing an in-ear headset which meant that it was often quite difficult for the reporters to tell if she was talking to them or to someone on her phone. When they asked her about the clown sightings, she scoffed at them and asked why none of the children had taken photographs on their phones - which they could obviously work far better than she could and so it made no sense to her that there was still no evidence.

Thinking that this information would comfort Donna, Teague naively went back to her house and told her this. She laughed at him and then invited him to come round to the back of the home. The house backed onto the dense woods in which the clowns had first appeared - and Teague couldn't help but notice the ugly dent in the back door where the paint appeared to have been chipped away. With complete conviction, she told him that the clowns had hit the door with a chain. She had seen them hit the door with a chain and then run off into the forest as soon as she approached them with the intention of making them answer for their crimes. She was now certain that there were men dressed as clowns in the forest out to torment the good people of Greenville.

Sources 

Reports of Clowns Trying to Lure Kids Into Woods in South Carolina Prompt Investigation for ABCNews

Clown Sightings: The Day the Craze Began for The Guardian

Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy for The New York Times

Creepy Details Released in South Carolina Clown Sightings for CBS News

Children Claim Clown Tried to Lure Them Into South Carolina Woods for CBS News

Reports of Creepy Clowns Spooking Residents of Greenville, SC for NBC News

Apartment Complex Warns Residents About Clown Trying to Lure Kids into Woods for CNN

Another Child Reports Clowns in South Carolina Woods for CBS News

More Clown Sightings in Greenville, Deputies Say for WSPA News

Residents Anxious After Clown Sightings, Letters Received at South Carolina Apartments for WDTV News

A Visit to the Puppy People

 Like most good things, the book first appeared in October. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon was independently published on the 10th of October, 2021. It tells the story of a program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) that ran out of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2008 to 2010. It investigated UFOs and other paranormal happenings. A special focus of the program was on the 'Skinwalker Ranch' property in Utah's Uintah Basin - and an alarming discovery was made through study of this site. It seems to be possible for paranormal experiences to move among populations as if they were infectious agents. A contagion of the impossible. 

One documented case of this apparent infectious capability of the Skinwalker Ranch phenomena was told in the first chapter of the book. Jonathan Axelrod (likely a pseudonym) was a senior aerospace engineer in Naval intelligence, and had been involved with the AAWSAP program since the beginning. He had been sent to Skinwalker Ranch in July of 2009, and there - along with two of his team members - he had an encounter with a bizarre unidentified flying object. After he went home from this mission, however, it would soon become apparent that what he had seen on the ranch was not content to stay on the ranch. 

Among other escalating anomalies on the Axelrod property, one of the details I was shocked to see in the DOD-cleared book was a description of a strange animal - or animal-like entity - that menaced the aerospace engineer's family. This beast was said to resemble an enormous wolf. It stood on its hind legs, and ran bipedally with no qualms. It seemed highly hostile towards the family. Both Axelrod's wife and two children saw the hairy horror prowling their property. If the Defense Intelligence Agency - and by extension the Pentagon itself - takes reports of werewolf-like monsters seriously, then perhaps it's time we should too. If we take this plunge, what kind of nightmarish wonderland might we find ourselves in? 

Well, there's a story that I heard coming over crackling airwaves one night which might shed some light on that question...

Dial D for Dogman

Every time young James went to his aunt and uncle's house, he would ask to go to the room with the phone booth. It was an eclectic little space, filled with all sorts of retro paraphernalia. The phone booth was in one corner - it was a wood-framed glass box with bi-fold doors and a nice bench. There was no phone in it, but rather simply an empty box where the phone would've been. It still worked well enough to have a light and a fan that came on when he closed the doors, though, and so it was good enough for him - he was only five or six years old, after all.

James' mother and his aunt were really close, and so he has many fond memories of going over to that house in the evening with his grandmother, so that the three adults could catch up and play dice together. His cousins were all significantly older than him, and so he often found himself simply marooned all by his lonesome. It was him and the phone booth. 

One evening in the late 1980s (either '87 or '88), James and the cousin who was closest in age to him were playing in the yard of the aforementioned house. They were tossing a softball and their grandmother had stashed in the yard back and forth between them in the dusky light. His cousin threw it a little too high for him to catch, and so it flew over his head and over the rusty chain-link fence that surrounded the yard. Presumably grumbling to himself, he approached the fence and moved towards the overgrown alleyway just behind it - and as he did so, he could hear something moving. Getting closer, he could now see movement. 

The thing behind the fence had brownish fur, and at first he assumed it was a dog. Then he realised it was too big to be a dog, and that its body looked wrong. It looked like a man, lying down on its belly. There were distinct hands, holding onto the chain-link fence. It had a pointed snout and long ears, and it appeared to be attempting to drag itself down the alley. James froze, staring at the creature. The only word his young brain could conjure was 'monster'. 

Finally snapping out of his dazed state, James ran back into the main section of the yard to fetch his cousin. "Hey, there's something crazy in the alley back here!" He explained that he'd seen something weird, and then of course his cousin wanted to see whatever it was too. They headed back towards the alleyway together, but by the time they arrived there the creature had vanished. James pushed it from his mind, and thought nothing of the crawling terror until his sophomore years in high school, when it would force its way back inside his head. 

During his teenage sophomore years, he would always get home from school, have a quick bite to eat and then go to his bedroom and lie down before even thinking about doing homework or going out anywhere. He was always tired. One night, he was lying in bed when the distinct feeling of not being alone anymore came over him. It was dark in his room and it was dark outside, but his bedroom door was open a crack. Light came in from the rest of the house, meaning that the room wasn't totally pitch black. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he noticed a number of figures stood around him. At first he thought it was his parents, but then he noticed that they didn't quite look human. They were too tall. His heart sank as he thought back to the alleyway. There were at least three or four of the monsters in his bedroom. He lay there for a moment - paralysed with fear. He closed his eyes for a split second, and then when he opened them again the beasts were gone. 

In the years since, he tried to rationalise this experience away as a dream. A hormone-fuelled nightmare. But it didn't feel like a dream - it felt physically real, it felt like they were there in his room. He said that he felt like he was being observed by the creatures. 

The next time he would see one of the monsters would be 2005, when he was working at a Borders Group bookstore. He had a large group of friends, and they would often go to eat out at a restaurant in the same shopping centre as the bookshop. On the nights that he wasn't working, they might all drive to one of their houses and share in merrymaking and a few drinks. One of these nights, however, it was just James and Gary going to a friends' house. Gary was James' boyfriend at the time - later his husband. They drove up to the house, stayed for some appetisers and perhaps a beer before they felt the need to go home and unwind. As they were driving down a rural road, just a few blocks away from their house, James noticed that there was something in the road. 

He slowly stopped talking and started to focus solely on the strange thing in the centre of the road. Gary followed suit, and soon the two lovers were sat in silence in the car. The weather was misty, but not too foggy to impede visibility. The object blocking their path was an animal. It had a long snout and pointed ears, like a dog. It was on all fours at first, but then it stood up on its hind legs - showing that it had a torso and arms like a man. Its legs were digitigrade - bent backwards like those of a dog, not plantigrade like a human's. The horrifying apparition looked towards them, and then faded out of visibility. "It was just sort of not there anymore". 

All the other encounters, James could at least try to rationalise. Maybe the creature in the alley was just an injured animal that had managed to drag itself out of view before his cousin saw it? Perhaps the entities in his bedroom were the product of a hormonal teenager's nightmares? But this experience was something beyond that. There were multiple witnesses, as Gary would later confirm to James. He wondered if perhaps the werewolf-like creatures really were from his mind, and that he had somehow 'projected' it into the street. But they felt physical every time. 

As he thought more about it, James realised that he was the common denominator in all of these experiences. The wolfmen had followed him from his grandmother's house, to his parents' house and now to his own house. They were stalking him. Seemingly unprompted, he started to think back to his times playing in the phone booth. It felt like it was connected somehow. He called his mother and asked if she remembered it - to which she replied by confirming that she did. He asked her what he had told her he was doing in there, and she was unsure. She said that he would just sit on the bench, giggling and talking to himself. A little while later, however, she called him back. She'd remembered something about what he had said about his time in the phone booth. James had said that he would go to visit the 'Puppy People'.

Source

Radio Rental: Episode 13

François Bertrand: The Monster of Montparnasse

Content Warning: This article discusses topics related to sexual crimes. Reader discretion advised.

A 1936 illustration of the case

Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the beautiful city of Paris, and despite the peaceful veneer it now possesses, it was the site of the first encounter with a ghoulish spectre that would come to briefly govern a reign of pure terror throughout Paris for several months in 1847. This foul creature was known to visit cemeteries in and around Paris, scaling tall walls and inexplicably resisting attacks by guard dogs in order to violate and even devour recently-buried corpses. Eventually, however, the perpetrator of these gruesome attacks would be apprehended - but far from solving the mystery, this turn of events would present investigators with what nowadays looks very much like a real-life mirror of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...

A Nocturnal Violation

It would glide behind the rows of tombstones, and the guards of Père Lachaise Cemetery were seemingly powerless to stop whatever nefarious business it was carrying out. It was described as being 'partly human and partly animal' and would vanish like an illusion when the guards attempted to capture it. The guards' dogs refused to attack the beast - barking and howling with 'abject terror' when deployed to catch the thing.

The next morning a truly foul scene awaited the terrified guards of the cemetery. Graves had been dug up and coffins had been burst open. The contents of these destroyed caskets had been scattered all over the ground, and had - horrifyingly - been partially eaten by the same ghastly thing that had visited the graveyard the night before. This horrifying cycle would continue 'at length' - with the phantom always evading capture and violating yet more resting places in search of its sickening meals. When consulted, medical professionals announced that the damage to the cadavers had been done with human teeth, which I can imagine was somehow both comforting and the exact opposite at the same time. The quantity of guards watching over the cemetery was doubled, but no sign of the true culprit of the raids was ever found. A young soldier attempting to meet with a friend at the cemetery was arrested under vampiric suspicion, but he was found not guilty and released.

It must've seemed like the terror in Père Lachaise would be unending - and yet eventually it suddenly drew to an abrupt halt. However, the monster was not quite finished with its rampage, and instead of vanishing entirely it had merely relocated its horrific crusade against those who rest in peace. A young girl - 'greatly beloved by her relatives and friends' - was to form the monster's next meal. Her funeral was attended by a large group of saddened onlookers, and so of course the outrage was truly enormous when her coffin was discovered to have been exhumed overnight so that some mysterious pervert could feed on her body. The girl's father was briefly listed as a suspect, and was actually arrested for the crime, but his innocence was quickly established and he was released. Some members of the public were now beginning to suspect that perhaps the perpetrator of these horrific crimes was not of flesh and blood - seeing as the cemetery in which the girl had been devoured was protected by 'very high' walls and massive iron gates kept shut all night. It seemed as if no mortal man would be able to scale these obstacles.

However, these walls, which had once seemed to throw a hefty spanner into the proceedings of the investigation in the matter, would soon become what would ultimately lead to the capture of the culprit. An old army officer crucially noticed that there was a certain point on one of the walls that showed signs of having been frequently scaled. Although it was nearly 10ft tall at this specific point, precautions to catch a human perpetrator were taken just in case. The aforementioned officer constructed a booby trap - consisting of a tripwire attached to an explosive - on the wall in question, meaning that nobody would be able to climb it without causing an explosion. Sure enough, an explosion was heard from the vicinity at around midnight that night.

The detectives that had been tasked with keeping watch over the beseiged graveyard rushed to the scene of the detonation. There, they caught sight of a humanoid figure stood at the base of the wall. Immediately opening fire upon the apparition, they were seemingly able to wound the creature but unable to capture it - seeing as it supposedly dashed up the wall with prodigious speed, moving 'with the agility of a monkey'. Despite its escape, it was the beginning of the end for the Parisian prowler. A trail of blood had been left behind when it scaled the wall, and there were scraps of torn uniform scattered about the scene. It was thus concluded by the onlookers that the perpetrator was wounded, and was a soldier.

This might not have been enough to catch the one responsible if it weren't for mumblings between members of the 74th Regiment which were overheard by some local grave-diggers. These soldiers were talking about how a sergeant of their regiment had been taken to Val-de-Grâce Hospital after being badly wounded the night before. This seemed like a promising lead, and so the identity of this sergeant was at once found out and he was questioned. Sergeant François Bertrand was interrogated and freely confessed his guilt.

The First Necrophile

Sergeant Bertrand seemed to present himself as being as much of a victim as his deceased prey. He claimed that he had been being controlled by some external force, and that this nebulous force would never leave him. He appeared to be a victim of possession - being unable to describe his sensations while he was under the thing's influence but knowing that he was 'not himself' while thus controlled, and was instead some vicious and ravenous animal. He told of how he didn't require any instruments to dig up the bodies - instead just tearing through the soil and the coffins with his bare hands under the moonlight, like some starved beast. He confessed to having once exhumed and bitten fifteen bodies in one night.

A 1936 illustration of the Sergeant

Apparently he would always fall into a very deep sleep after his nocturnal activities - during which he was aware of his body undergoing some inexplicable type of metamorphosis. He told the court that he had first fell into one of these literally transformative slumbers after an excursion to one of the secluded locales he often liked to visit when he was younger. He was apparently something of an introverted youth, preferring the company of animals to that of his fellow man - and often choosing to spend his time in isolated regions such as moors and deserts. The evening after he first fell into his supernatural sleep, he was passing a cemetery in which some grave-diggers were busy covering a recently interred corpse - and was seized by a sudden urge to enter the site and watch them at work. He was unable to resist this, and when a sudden bout of rain prompted the grave-diggers to briefly abandon their work (leaving a cadaver unattended) - he found himself afflicted by 'horrible desires'. His head throbbed with pain and his heart felt like it would break out of his chest.

He was only prevented from feeding on the corpse before him by the arrival of some of his friends on the scene. He was thus able to resist the temptation, but for many a night in the future he would not be so lucky. He claimed that the same grotesque urges would invade his mind every night from then on, and he would often find himself figuratively (and perhaps literally) transformed into a man-eating monster. He would eviscerate the corpses of his victims before masturbating - experiencing pleasure that was 'nothing in comparison' with what he could experience with living partners.

Once the trial, held in front of a military counsel on the 10th of July, 1847 and presided over by one Colonel Manselon, ultimately concluded that Bertrand was guilty of everything he had confessed to - and sentenced him to one year in prison. His case would become the inspiration for Joseph Guislain, a Belgian physician, to coin the term 'necrophilia' to refer to the condition under which people gain sexual pleasure from dead bodies.

Werewolf or Pervert?

Interestingly enough, I don't think that the reports of Bertrand being 'partly human and partly animal' have ever been properly addressed or explained. Although some more sensationalistic sources have called him a vampire, I would instead be driven to conclude that his case more closely fits the folkloric definition of an Arabic ghoul. These gruesome spirits would feed on the flesh of the dead, prowling cemeteries at night and hunting in packs. They were also said to be capable of shapeshifting to deceive humans and blend into their society. While deliberate shapeshifting seems not to have been an element in Bertrand's case, the description of a morphing monster feeding on corpses sounds very much like a classic ghoul. Obviously, another folkloric connection could be made to the legend of the werewolf. The description of Bertrand scaling a 10ft fence at extreme speeds also seems not to fit with the notion of this being a purely mundane crime spree, and of course his testimony of not being in control of himself during his ghastly excursions becomes a lot more interesting when viewed through a lycanthropic lens. This same lack of control has been reported in other cases involving cannibalism and other such abhorrent crimes, in the case of Austin Harrouff for example. 

Sources

'Werwolves' by Elliott O'Donnell

'François Bertrand' on Wikipedia

'The Infamous Sergeant Bertrand' on Vampires.com

In Cold Blood: The Qui Mansion Haunting

I can imagine the looks on their faces as they opened the warehouse door for the first time - a sea of coloured dyes danced before their eyes like a room full of harlequins. It was 1915, and the Great War was raging across the world - bringing Europe to its knees. China would have an important role to play in the conflict of World War One behind the scenes, but it would never send troops into battle - and so the Qiu brothers were safe from being hunted down for any sort of military service. Instead, they had just made it big. They were migrants, living as peasants under a German employer - but of course he fled the city due to the conflict, and the worth of dye had just skyrocketed thanks to the closure of the ports. The two worker siblings would become millionaires in the city of opportunity that was Shanghai - but their fortunes wouldn't last forever, and would come to a bizarre end. Despite their stories ending suddenly, their playthings weren't going to let go of this mortal plane so easily...

A House Haunted by Dragons

Qiu Xingshan and Qiu Weiqing built their mansion in the 1920s, and they lived like kings - their epic decadence surpassing that of the nouveau riche and legendary gangsters. The mansion complex consisted of two identical palace-like buildings (the East Block and the West Block) in which each of the brothers could live with his family and friends. The estate was surrounded with a beautiful garden, and all sorts of exotic animals were released into this Eden-like display of opulence. Tigers prowled through the magnolia trees, and crocodiles basked on the shores of a man-made lake. There are even stories of two thousand pigeons being released from the aviary every day at noon, darkening the sky over Wujiang Lu (then called Love Lane).

They were legendary - like kings of their own little neighbourhood - and so it was all the more baffling when they both suddenly vanished. No trace of either of them has ever been found, and their mansions started to fall into disrepair thanks to their lack of an heir. The garden grew over and became a tangled jungle, and the unfortunate animals were all either sold off or eaten by the people of Shanghai - who were now in the grip of a famine. Eventually, one of the Qiu mansions was razed to the ground, while the other was announced soon to be dug up, foundations and all, and moved to another location to make room for more high-rise buildings. Although various sources claim that it was this event which kicked off a violent haunting on the premises, the earliest reference I can find to traceable stories about paranormal activity there dates back to 2009.

It was the Summer of 2009, and something very weird was going on at the nearly-demolished Qiu Mansion. Construction workers were turning up at the local Yueyang Hospital with what night nurse Li Fei described as 'bite wounds'. However, no wild animals were found in a thorough search of the building, and the victims were left too frightened to return to their jobs. On the Meadin.com forum website, employees at the Four Seasons Hotel could be seen complaining about the terrifying ghostly animals that manifested to them on their night shifts. In August of 2009, local blogs started printing the story of a mason working at the site who had seemingly suddenly snapped and attempted to attack his manager with a hammer. When he was later questioned about his motive for the violent attack, he simply said that the 'lizards' made him do it. Some other versions of this same story describe them as having been 'lizard-like creatures'. One Mrs. Ye, who lived near the construction site in the alley off Wujiang Lu, even claimed to have seen a monstrous dragon crawling along the arm of a construction crane.

One final creepy twist comes to us courtesy of JHMoncrieff.com. The bloggers behind this award-winning website visited the Qiu Mansion in late 2016 or early 2017, and although it had been successfully moved and deposited down on some new foundations elsewhere in mid 2010 - thus obviously warranting the end of construction work there. So it would be a very good question to ask who the workmen who were 'clearly' seen by the bloggers moving around on the second floor were...

Sources

'Cha House' on Wikipedia

'The Qiu Mansion, Shanghai' on Paranormal Asylum

'Haunted Travel: The Ghosts of Shanghai' on JHMoncrieff.com

'Haunted Shanghai: The Phantoms of the Qiu Mansion' on travel.cnn.com

Honey, Aliens Shrunk the Kids

With a title like that, I really can't blame you for clicking on this article, and I really hope that you won't be disappointed. Today I have another case from the UFOs Northwest archives which involves the apparent abduction of an 18-year-old and his brother by otherworldly beings, which seemingly resulted in the two young victims becoming spontaneously shorter overnight...

The New Gloucester Abduction

It was 1973, the dreaded Year of the Humanoids, when an anonymous witness, his brother and two other friends - who were driving close to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine - suddenly became aware of a bright UFO following them, visible in the window of the driver's side of the car. They were on the road towards Middle Range Pond when they first saw it, and they promptly decided to make a 'sharp left' towards Oxford, Maine in what was presumably an attempt to evade the odd object. After they got to the Oxford Plains Speedway, they turned around and headed back the way they had come.

They had just reached the apple orchard by the intersection between Route #26, Outlet Road and Quarry Road (the latter of which was known as Shaker Village Road at the time) when they noticed that they had seemingly slipped into the Twilight Zone. There were no other cars on the busy and usually well-travelled road, and the Sun had gone down 'awfully fast'. The stars were apparently abnormally large in the night sky, with the witness saying that it felt as if he could 'reach out to them'. The world around them appeared to have gone completely silent - with the usual chirping of the crickets being totally absent. In this odd state, the witness could feel and hear his heart pounding in his ears, and he said that it was like they 'were inside a vacuumed bottle'.

The UFO suddenly made itself visible once again - hovering above what is still the only tree that is placed slightly ahead of its fellows in the orchard. It was a large, round object which 'lit up orange' and was totally silent. The four dumbstruck witnesses just sat and stared at the aerial enigma for what they thought at the time to be roughly one hour. However, when they finally decided to return home, the person who would later report the incident to UFOs Northwest noticed that 'it became daylight way too soon', and requested that his brother - who was driving the 1967 Tan Chevy Nova in which the group was travelling - redirect them to the Auburn, Maine police department so that they could report the bizarre happening. However, they were apparently about to witness further strange events.

This is sadly where the narrative gets a little cloudy. The witness said that he would write back to the organisation detailing his further experiences, but failed to do so if I am interpreting the records stored on the organisation's website correctly. However, he did describe (confusingly in an earlier letter) the bizarre physiological effects that this event had on him and his brother. Trying to report their abduction - it was an abduction, the witness clarifies, saying that they 'were taken onboard' and released one day later - was apparently a mistake. Instead, he elected to go to a local hospital for a checkup, seeing as his nose was bleeding, the whites of his eyes had gone a 'deep orange', and his lungs ached when he breathed. He was understandably 'very concerned' about this, but his shock would only get greater when the nurse read his height as 5ft 9 inches, seeing as he was supposed to be over 5ft 10 inches tall. Telling her that she was incorrect, he had the nurse re-check the measurements only to find that he had seemingly lost an inch of height overnight.

Map of the terrain around the abduction

When he and his brother returned home, their mother was apparently very vocal in her alarm at the state of her children. She demanded to know what had happened and remarked that they were both shorter and that she wanted to know what had happened to their eyes. Presumably panicking at this point, the witness ran to his bathroom mirror and was horrified to note that, indeed, he 'didn't look right'. In an effort to prove to the local authorities that this had happened, he implored them to check his high-school medical records and the photographs taken on his eighteenth birthday, roughly two weeks before the apparent abduction event. He asked them to compare how he looked now and how he was recorded as being back then. 'How many 18-year-olds lose an inch overnight?'

Analysis

I'm not sure what to make of this case. I know that at least one case in which the height of a UFO witness spontaneously changed after the event, and so this report is not unique. The language used by the witness in the letters transcribed on the UFOs Northwest website make me think that he is either possibly executing a rather-immature hoax, or is genuinely emotional and panicked to an extreme degree by the memories he now possesses. I think that I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, especially since he said that 'the emotional experience of my abduction never stops'.

Source

UFOs Northwest - Man Recalls Abduction Experience, He Sustained Injury from Experience

鵺: Demon of the Night

The Kojiki ('Records of Ancient Matters') is a book that was published in Japan in 712 AD. It contains myths, legends, songs and genealogies - as well as a number of supposedly historical accounts. It is in this source that the creature which would come to be referred to as the 'Nue' would be first mentioned. In this source, it was said to be a mysterious bird (now considered to have likely been the scaly thrush) that cries mournfully in the night. Its harrowing calls were regarded as evil omens - however it is only later that the term once used for this nefarious bird would come to be used in reference to something far more monstrous. This bizarre creature is first described in the Heike Monogatari, an epic account of the Genpei War between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of Japan in the closing years of the 12th century. In this text, we read a frightful description of a beast with the head of a monkey, the body of a tanuki, the limbs of a tiger and the tail of a snake. Such a chimeric beast can't possibly have been real, right? Well - there are several historical accounts which would seem to provide evidence for the contrary.

Ino Hayata and the Nue by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Terror in the Palace 

The Heike Monogatari discusses a strange incident which supposedly took place in the Summer of 1153. Emperor Konoe was saying in the Seiryō-den of the Kyoto Imperial Palace (situated in the Kamigyō-ku ward of Kyoto today) when a cloud of black smoke suddenly appeared before him. It was accompanied by a bizarre shrieking voice, and the Emperor became quite afraid. After witnessing this manifestation, he would be plagued by nightmares to the point that he fell seriously ill, unable to be helped by any forms of conventional medicine or prayers. Eventually the Emperor's companions started to believe that the palace was under constant visitation from an evil spirit of some kind during the early morning hours of every day. This strange haunting would eventually culminate in a storm suddenly appearing over the Imperial Palace, and the roof being struck with lightning - resulting in it catching alight. Realising at this point that these events couldn't be allowed to escalate further, one of the Emperor's close associates called for legendary samurai Minamoto no Yorimasa to slay the spirit.

That night, Minamoto no Yorimasa ventured to the palace accompanied by his servant Ino Hayata, equipped with a bow and an arrow made from an arrowhead he had inherited from his legendary ancestor Minamoto no Yorimitsu and the tail feathers of a mountain bird. It didn't take long for the monster to show itself. It announced its presence with an unnatural gust of wind, before manifesting once again as a thick bank of black cloud that covered the Seiryō-den. Thinking fast, Minamoto no Yorimasa fired his arrow into the smoke, and a shriek of supernatural agony echoed out of the cloud bank. A dark shape plummeted to the earth, just north of the nearby Nijō Castle. Ino Hayata leapt onto the creature, and promptly finished it off. It was either him, or the samurai himself. Soures differ as to who actually killed the beast. Two or three cries of the common cuckoo were heard above the palace, signalling that peace had returned to Japan. The Emperor's health soon returned to him. As a gesture of gratitude, the heroes were gifted the legendary katana known as Shishiō. This katana remains on permanent display in the Tokyo National Museum.

The Shishiō Katana

Mortal Remains

If we continue with the narrative as laid out in the Heike Monogatari, then we can say that the people of Kyoto were fearful enough of incurring the posthumous wrath of the monster in the form of a curse that they put the fallen creature's corpse in a boat and floated it down the Kamo River. The boat floated down through the Yodo River in Honshū's Osaka Prefecture, briefly making landfall on the shore of Higashinari County before floating back out to sea and washing up at its final resting place on the shore between the Ashiya and Sumiyoshi Rivers. The Ashiya locals decided to give the strange corpse a burial service, and built a commemorating mound over the thing's tomb. This mound is still there to this day, and can be easily visited. It would be interesting to see if there is actually anything in the tomb.

The Nuezuka (the mound built over the Nue's tomb)

According to the Edo Period geography book known as the Ashiwake Bune (I cannot actually find any more information about this source, and so take what it says with a grain of salt), an incident occurred in which the body of a Nue washed ashore on the Yodo River. The villagers feared a curse, and so notified their head priest. This priest was called Boon-ji, and he apparently recommended that the body of the creature be interred and mourned for, before having a mound built over the top of it. Sometime during the Meji Period (October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912), the mound was supposedly torn down and the local populace were afflicted by the wrath of the beast's vengeful spirit. The mound was swiftly rebuilt and the attacks ceased. There is yet another story taking place during Edo Period involving the body of a Nue having been buried at the Kiyomizu-Dera Buddhist temple in the Kyoto Prefecture - and resulting in a terrifying curse when it was later unearthed. 

There are also a lot of other legends surrounding the Nue encountered in 1153, including allegations that it was actually a monstrous form assumed by Yorimasa's wrathful mother and that its corpse turned into a horse which was later raised by Yorimasa. It seems also that a wide array of landmarks across various prefectures have been named after the Nue and have been presumably retroactively associated with Yorimasa's battle with the aerial demon. I will expand on these many rich folkloric expansions of the encounter in another article somewhere down the line. 

What was the Nue?

Well, it's interesting to note that the term 'Nue' originally just referred to some completely unknown creature that happened to sound like a certain bird. It was never originally meant to be the chimeric monstrosity that we know today, but it seems from the description of the Yorimasa incident that the beast involved with that encounter was indeed such a chimera. Outside of presuming this story to be entirely mythological and thus a folkloric fabrication, I think there is some interesting precedent for similar cloud-borne entities in the annals of Fortean lore. As a Fortean researcher, I could definitely see Yorimasa's encounter as something that might've really happened. 

I shall tell two tales of cloudy strangeness here. The first of these took place in the summer of 1980 in the city of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. A lone man was walking home one day when he saw a strange cloud floating above the ground with what appeared to be a humanoid shape silhouetted against it. This figure soon became visible, and he would describe it as having had skin as white as snow with two beady black eyes and a long tail. This entity leapt up onto the cloud, causing it to emit a misty vapour, before once again jumping down onto the ground and proceeding towards the witness. Terrified, the man stumbled and fell to the ground, covering himself with his coat and awaiting whatever fate the monster may have had in store for him. Luckily for him, however, when he next dared to take a peek out from behind his coat, the entity was once again stood atop its cloud and appeared to be floating away. 

The other story was reported by a tourist visiting Sydney, Australia in the spring of 1965. Late one afternoon, she was looking out of the window of a clifftop house along the seashore, and saw a beautiful pink cloud stationary above the water. She later took a glance out of that same window again, about an hour later, and was shocked to see that the cloud was now moving in her direction, seemingly following a diagonal downwards course of movement. It eventually descended to such a degree that it was below her eye level, and she was able to look down on it to see that it was actually not a cloud at all. Instead, it was a rounded white object with what appeared to be vents on its side emitting grey steam. As this steam enveloped all but the top portion of the object, it turned pink. The cloud seemed to have been an artificial creation. An engine sound was coming from the object. 

A bright, glowing ladder was lowered from the object's underside, and a strange humanoid figure clambered down to a lower rung. It perched on this rung and shone a searchlight down at the water below it. At this point, a pink flare seemingly shot out of the water some distance away from the cloud-like craft. The ladder then immediately retracted back into the pseudo-cloud and the object sped away towards the flare. The tourist was able to notice a long-bodied but not clearly visible shape beneath the surface of the water, from which the flare had seemingly been fired. Both the UFO and the strange submarine then promptly vanished in a 'vivid pink flash'. 

I have provided these strange accounts to illustrate a specific point. This point is that strange mists and vapours are often associated with the appearance of incomprehensible apparitions of various types, and from what we know from authors like John Keel and Jacques Vallee, it would theoretically not be at all impossible for the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon to have produced a bizarre chimeric animal to baffle the residents of 1153 Japan.

Sources

Nue - Wikipedia 

Nue on Yokai.com

Nuezuka on Tripadvisor.com

Monster! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena by Neil Arnold

The Daily Problems of Giant Snakes on Japaneseswordlegends.wordpress.com

The Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Physical Phenomena by Jerome Clark

If It's Rats He Wants...

We are small but we are many

We are many we are small

We were here before you rose 

We will be here when you fall

- Neil Gaiman, Coraline 

I can imagine that the two children of the Bredlow family chattered amongst themselves in excitement in the back of the car as they pulled up to cabin. It was a dazzling piece of coastal Americana - a small cabin nestled among the towering cliffs of the Oregon coast. Waves crashed and foamed below - ready to provide the background noise to the crackling of a wood fire. It was July of 1997, and the Bredlows were looking forward to spending two weeks in this cabin - relaxing and getting back to nature. However, the house they were now stood in front of was already occupied by something incomprehensible – and that something wouldn’t give up its property easily. A dream vacation was about to become a nightmare.

... It's Rats He Gets!

The Bredlow family was made up of four members. Margie Bredlow, a 47-year-old music teacher, had married Loyd Bredlow, another teacher, one year older than his wife. Together, they had had two daughters – Violet, who was eight years old as of that May and DeAnne, thirteen years of age. Nearly as soon as they stepped into the house, Margie noticed a strange feeling coming from one of the storerooms in the back of the building. Violet seemed to feel the same thing, holding her stuffed kitty doll ‘Muggins’ up to her mouth and whispering ‘I hope we don’t have to sleep back there’ into its cloth ear. DeAnne and Loyd helped Margie unpack the family’s stuff before it got dark – they were all hoping to go out hiking in the woods while it was still light.

Now wandering through a narrow forest path, the family were approaching a beautiful waterfall. This was going to be two weeks of rural idyll, they doubtless thought. The two girls were walking ahead of their parents when a ‘strange kind of mist’ settled around the group. Visibility rapidly declined to zero, and in the confusion Loyd and Margie called out desperately for their girls to follow the sound of their voices and come back to them. DeAnne responded immediately, quickly retreating back to the comfort of her parents’ arms. The family clung together in the ‘frightening’ fog, calling out for Violet but receiving no response. Just as the icy daggers of panic were starting to set in, the mist dissipated into nothingness just as quickly as it had come. Violet’s voice called out from behind them, prompting the other three to turn around in astonishment. That shouldn’t have been possible. They had been on a narrow path, shouting her name. There was no way she could’ve walked past them. However, when they asked her how she had done this – she replied that she hadn’t walked. Instead, she said ‘They carried me through the air and set me down again. It was pretty scary but they promised they wouldn’t hurt me.’ She apparently hadn’t heard the desperate shouts of her family, and hadn’t seen any fog. Margie would later say that she regretted not packing everything up and leaving that instant – but in that moment she decided not to let her ‘imagination’ run away with her. Whatever was wrong with the property would soon lift itself out of the realms of possible dismissal in such a way.

As they had dinner that night, they were presumably all trying to keep their minds off the bizarre events of that afternoon. Well, all of them save for Violet. After she had finished her food, she started preparing two plates from the leftovers. When Margie approached her and asked what she was doing, her daughter replied that ‘they’ must be fed twice a day, or they would become very angry and force the family out of the house. Margie asked about the identity of the mysterious ‘they’ – and the response allowed her to put worries of home invaders from her mind temporarily. Violet said that they were ‘the two little people who carried me in the air above the trail and who live in the storage room’. Margie likely smiled at this, thinking that her daughter was just playing a game – and she told her to go ahead, walking with her to the back storage room. Violet opened the door eagerly and set the plates down on the floor, before kneeling down and waiting the arrival of her diminutive friends. Everything was still for a moment, before Violet broke the silence and told her mother that the little men wouldn’t eat while they were watching. With this, she took Margie’s hand and stood up. The pair hadn’t taken more than two steps out of the room before the storage room door suddenly slammed shut with a loud bang – making Margie jump and momentarily shriek in shock. Loyd came running to the sound of the commotion, and when he asked what was happening, Violet matter-of-factly replied that they were feeding the little people in the back room. Her father assumed that she was talking about vermin of some kind, and so chided her before opening the door to have a look…

Eating the leftovers from the two paper plates just behind the slammed door were two plump and satisfied-looking rats. Margie and DeAnne looked in to see these rodents as well, and Loyd responded to the sight by finding a nearby broom and walked towards the room to shoo the pests out of the house. Violet begged him not too – seemingly afraid of angering the rats – but Loyd paid no attention to his daughter’s cries. However, just as he was reaching the door – armed with his trusty broom, the door once again slammed violently shut. Presumably sighing with annoyance, Loyd reached for the handle and tried to open it – only to find that it wouldn’t open, no matter how hard he tried. Eventually, he gave up and wandered off – mumbling about the door having somehow locked itself from the inside. Quite how he imagined this happening is unclear to me. As soon as Loyd had left the scene, the door opened itself once again, and two plates were seemingly pushed out onto the floor. They had been licked clean. Violet smiled up at her mother, telling her that the little men had enjoyed the potato salad and Jell-O, but that they wanted more of the baked beans. ‘They don’t really like to be called rats, but they can look like anything we want them to’, she added.

Curious, Margie asked her youngest daughter how she could hear what the so-called ‘little people’ were saying – to which she replied that she could hear their voices inside her head, which was also how the entities had spoken to her when they had met on the trail. Perhaps starting to allow her disbelief to suspend, Margie continued to ask questions. When she asked what the creatures looked like when they weren’t rats, Violet answered that they looked ‘like two little people… but weird little people with funny, crinkly faces’. Margie henceforth agreed to help her daughter feed the little people. Even if they were just rats, it seemed that she didn’t particularly mind. For the next few days, this is exactly what the mother-daughter team did – in secret from the other two members of their household. Loyd busied himself reading, Margie worked on her music compositions and their daughters either read or worked puzzles. However, this peace was about to come to an end. Nobody else knew that Loyd had just laid out a rat trap that he’d bought in the local village earlier that day.

On the fifth afternoon of their stay in the cabin, just before sunset, Margie heard the awful noise of metal slapping onto wood, accompanied by a high-pitched scream. Baffled and alarmed, she ran into the room and found Violet there with her hands pressed against her temples in agony. The dreadful scream was coming from her. In that instant, Margie somehow knew that one of the elven beings that had been co-occupying their holiday house had been caught in the rat-trap (I am also not certain how she knew about the rat-trap to begin with) and that the telepathic bond they had seemingly formed with her daughter was causing her to feel all the pain of the ordeal. Running to the storage room, Margie threw open the door and found – to her ‘everlasting astonishment’ – two diminutive humanoids clad in green. One of them was trying to free the other from the metal bar of the rat-trap which had slammed closed across his foot. The elf in the rat-trap had his mouth wide open in a silent scream, which was seemingly issuing from Violet’s mouth instead. Gritting her teeth and summoning all her courage, Margie darted forward and clasped her fingers under the bar of the rat-trap and lifted it just high enough for the elf to free his foot and escape from the painful situation. As soon as the entity had removed his foot from the trap, both critters disappeared in a flash and Violet stopped screaming. Coming from some invisible source – Margie heard a tiny voice say with anger ‘If it’s rats he wants, it’s rats he gets!’

Margie had barely recovered from the bizarre situation when her eldest daughter came running down the hall yelling hysterically about rats. There were rats everywhere. Dozens and dozens of the furry vermin had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and were currently in the process of completely overrunning the cabin. Realising that there was no other real option – the Bredlow family gathered up what they could from the ruins of their perfect vacation and fled the house. To this day, Margie remains convinced that she and her daughter achieved contact with something utterly inexplicable.

This story comes from The Inhumanoids by Barton M. Nunnelly, which is a great book for the sheer diversity of the humanoid encounter stories told within its myriad pages – but is unfortunately not nearly as great when it comes to sourcing these stories. I have been able to track a few of the tales related in the book back to Neil Arnold’s Monster! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena, which should be notorious for misrepresenting and distorting stories into one-sentence paragraphs. Also, the story of the Vampire of Croglin Grange is included within it as well – which I was able to debunk as a hoax/Penny Dreadful chiller with just a Google Search. This fairy story, while intriguing and fun, may well just be another spooky urban legend – but then again, the evidence for this claim is just as solid as the evidence for the opposite claim. There is no source listed for where this story originally came from.

1958: The Bigfoot Hoax That Wasn't

Artwork by Rick Spears, I think?

Raymond Wallace was born in Clarksdale, Missouri on April 21, 1918 - and has since posthumously risen to fame as one of the most prolific Bigfoot hoaxers the world has ever known. He was known to use large, badly-crafted foot-shaped wooden shoes to create the tracks supposedly left by the unknown primate. He is also even said to have been behind the famous clip of a hairy humanoid filmed by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967. These claims to fame were made after his death by his nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, after his uncle's death in 2002. He had allegedly started hoaxing the world in 1958, when he went stomping around one of the construction sites he owned in Northern California. It was the tracks he left on this occasion which became the first to mean that the creature behind them was referred to as Bigfoot. However, some evidence suggests that Wallace's hoax in 1958 might've outgrown its creator - and that the creature might've somehow sprung to life...

Calling His Bluff (Creek)

A photo of Jerry Crew holding his famous footprint cast

Jerry Crew arrived to work on a Wallace-owned construction site in Bluff Creek, California on August 27, 1958. He was busy bulldozing some nearby brush to make space for a new road when he caught sight of some odd footprints pressed deeply into the ground beneath him. He got down off his bulldozer and took a closer look at the prints - and it would be this action that would ultimately launch Bigfoot into the public consciousness. Crew and his... well... crew decided that the tracks were perhaps the work of a prankster - and apparently already knew to point the finger at their boss Ray Wallace. They knew that he was 'demented' and would probably have been the one behind the unconvincing tracks. A county sheriff even went as far as to publicly accuse Wallace of creating the tracks. However, a longer line of tracks would appear that year in September, and would convince Crew and the other workers that there was perhaps more to the story than they had initially thought. Casts were taken of these prints after a taxidermist named Bob Titmus declared that they were too faint to be used as evidence just by themselves and the story made the front page of the local newspaper, and this is technically the first time the term 'Bigfoot' was used to describe the culprit critter.

Ray and Elna Wallace as of 1947

Although the crew had originally settled on the assumption that the tracks were naught more than hoaxes, there were some interesting anomalies which seemed to show the holes in this conclusion. After the original tracks had been found - the workers on the site decided that the monster making the footprints must've also been behind some other disturbances on the construction site. For example, a 450-pound drum of diesel had vanished one summer previously - leaving only its imprint and some odd footprints in the dust behind. It had obviously been picked up and moved as opposed to dragged. It later reappeared at the bottom of a nearby gulley. The foliage on the other side of the gulley had been broken by something large, suggesting that perhaps something had thrown the drum into the gulley. Another example of this odd phenomenon was brought to the crew's attention by one of the Wallace brothers - Wilbur 'Shorty' Wallace. A 700-pound spare tire meant for a road-grading machine had found its way into a ditch thanks to some mysterious force. Some of the footprints found around the moved equipment varied in depth, indicating that whatever had left the prints was actually carrying the objects - something which Ray Wallace might not have been able to do.

The condition of the second trail of tracks (the ones which resulted in Titmus coming to the scene) is also worth mentioning here when discussing the possibility that perhaps the Bigfoot activity in the area wasn't just the work of an opportunistic hoaxer. The tracks made a trail of several miles in length, which went deep into a steep and mountainous forested area. Bob Titmus and Edward Patrick, another man on the site, decided to follow the trail into the woods. As they made their way along this impressive trail (even more impressive if we're to assume that the then-skinny Raymond Wallace made it), they came across yards worth of coiled 3x16 inch steel-braided wire. This wire would've weighed over 100 pounds, and had apparently been dropped in an area covered with brush of sufficient density that the two men couldn't continue past it. Patrick was left with the distinct impression that it wouldn't have been possible for Ray Wallace to have carried this wire up such a sharp incline and to have dropped it in such a well-forested area. The only tracks leading to or away from the wire were the ones supposedly made by Wallace's cast, and these prints allegedly continued off into terrain that even Titmus couldn't brave. Patrick had been initially skeptical, but now he felt that something mysterious was almost certainly afoot.

While there is no doubt that Wallace was behind quite a lot of hoaxery during the genesis years of the Bigfoot phenomenon, there also seems to be at least some doubt that he was behind all of it. He was aided by a man named Rant Mullins who constructed the crude stamps he used to create Bigfoot tracks, and he even possessed a Bigfoot suit which was worn by his wife to make fake photographs. After Ray's death in 2002, his family decided to release the information regarding the tools he had used to 'invent Bigfoot' - and it turns out that not one of the foot-shaped stamps matches up with the cast taken of Crew's trail of mystery footprints. The holotype Bigfoot cast taken of one of the prints found by Crew is just over 16 inches in length, while none of Wallace's stamps come close to this measurement.

Ray Wallace's stamp (right) against Crew's trail (left)

Realistically, all we can say is that Ray Wallace may have been responsible for the find that resulted in the coinage of the name 'Bigfoot' - and that's not even for certain. He was a prolific hoaxer, but the father of Bigfoot he was not. So if Mr. Wallace wasn't behind all of the destructive phenomena taking place around his construction sites, then what was? Perhaps a real monstrous creature was summoned into existence by the certainty of its existence held by some of the workers - like a Tibetan Tulpa? Then again, it seems as if something was throwing tires around the site at least a year before Wallace stepped into some exceptionally large shoes. There are certainly plenty of reports of hairy humanoid monsters that predate 1958, and so perhaps a Sasquatch really was wandering around Bluff Creek all those years ago, and the opportunistic practical joker decided to expand on its activity? It's a mystery that will likely go unsolved, despite what the public at large may believe. Ray Wallace did not invent Bigfoot.

Sources

Raymond L. Wallace - Wikipedia

'Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend' by Joshua Blu Bluhs

'The Ray Wallace/Rant Mullins Mess' - bigfootencounters.com

'Bigfoot - The Curiosities of 1958' by Bob Gymlan on YouTube

Forgotten: The Kundanbagh Horror House

He must've eventually gotten used to the bodies. There were three of them, lying prone on the dust-covered bed. The first time Mohammed Sajid broke through the window into the two storey house was some time in early Summer of 2002, and since then he had been routinely making his way into the abandoned home - after all, there was nobody alive in the house to watch him. He would often raid the empty rooms, opening all the almirahs (armoires) and rifling through the cheque books of the departed family. It was only when he was caught by the local Shahinayathgunj police during another crime that he finally told the story of what he had found in that accursed house. This confession would jump-start a media journey down a bizarre rabbit hole involving three unexplained deaths, witchcraft, and a house full of ghosts...

Something Terrible Happened Here...

One of the many photos of the house

The house in question was nestled in the city colony Kundanbagh within the city of Hyderabad, which is the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Mohammed Sajid was arrested sometime in early September of 2002, and the police soon began their investigation of the abandoned house about which he seemingly had so many stories. This police investigation either took place on the 7th of September 2002, or one week later - the sources are unclear. A 56-year-old divorced woman from West Godavari named Jayaprada lived in the house with her two daughters, but this small family hadn't been seen by their neighbours for months. The last time anyone had said that they'd seen them was in June - and the stories the neighbours had to tell about this family were worrying to say the least. The community said that the people who lived in the house were 'a queer people' who apparently practiced witchcraft or something very much like it.

They would apparently light candles at midnight and walk around their house, and strange noises were often heard coming from the building. People reported that they had sometimes seen what appeared to be bottles of blood hung out on their verandah (open air porch). One of their daughters was said to have sometimes been observed sat outside on the porch playing with one of these blood bottles. Despite their garbage bins being just two minutes' walk away from the house, they would always use the car to travel this minuscule distance. Jayaprada would use an axe to chase away passersby - and it is said that her husband had left her because of how dangerous the family was. There was no money flowing into the house, no cable connection. Two to three years' worth of electrical bills had been paid in advance. A complaint had been filed about the odd family by some students from a nearby college roughly two years ago, according to the assistant commissioner of police for the area, P. Rama Rao.

The police soon learned that the family had mysteriously gone missing in June of that year - nobody saw them and presumably everyone was much too scared of them to go up to their door and enquire as to their wellbeing. Newspapers from June 21st had piled up on their porch, and the front door was locked from the inside. The police soon found the entrance which had perhaps been used by Sajid, however, as they discovered that there was a side door which wasn't padlocked. When the policemen got inside the house, they noted that the entire place had been ransacked - perhaps thanks to Sajid's handiwork - and that the family's clothes had been neatly stacked next to their bodies. Various documents were scattered all over the floor. The bodies were badly decomposed. The temperature had not been too high during that period, and so putrefication had been much slower than it might otherwise have been, meaning that the neighbours had not even noticed the stench of decaying bodies. A bottle of black liquid was discovered in the room where the bodies lay, and it was promptly sent off to a lab for analysis along with the bodies for autopsy.

Tall Tales

After such an upsetting incident (which was reported in local newspapers at the time and so is unlikely to have been a total hoax), it is hardly surprising that legends started to take root. Although details about what came of the autopsy examination are seemingly nonexistent - with a report from the time simply resorting to speculating that the cause of death was poisoning - stories about what this autopsy found have seemingly sprung up in the absence of any real information. Well, either this or there is real information that I have failed to find. What these stories say is that the autopsies revealed that the family had been dead for six months. This, of course, placed something of a spanner into the works of a purely materialistic explanation of this whole situation - the family had stopped being regularly seen three months after they had supposedly died. The residents of the surrounding city of Hyderabad were now questioning who they had been seeing performing those bizarre rituals and threatening passersby with axes.

Although the house lacks electricity after having been derelict for over a decade now, lights are apparently still turned on at night for no discernible reason. The gates are always locked, and there is a line of large rocks across the driveway for some nebulous symbolic purpose. There is a story about a cyclist whose headlight spontaneously went out as he entered the lane on which the haunted house is situated, resulting in him immediately getting into an accident with one of his friends who was driving along the lane from the opposite direction. The police are now apparently very present around the house to prevent any would-be ghost hunters from breaking and entering.

The Sowmith Testimony

A Quora forum user named Sowmith Raja claimed to have once been something of an afficionado for the stories surrounding the mysterious house. He lives in Hyderabad, and if his testimony is to be believed then he found something far stranger than any of the other stories while investigating the alleged haunted house. He discovered that the house which had been photographed and previously thought to have been the house in which the strange things had happened didn't quite fit the description of the property given in the story. There was no garbage disposal point two minutes away from it - and the nearest garbage disposal point was two minutes away from a different house. Beside the house which had been photographed was a lane which split into two. One of these lanes was fairly well-lit with streetlights while the other was completely dark. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dark lane was the one which had the garbage disposal point on it and thus also had the real haunted house.

A photo that might portray the castle

On this lane there are three doors which are painted dark green, and are higher off the ground than normal doors. The three doors all lead to the same stretch of grounds, and contained within these grounds are several structures - a bungalow (as is sometimes described in variations of the main story despite the supposedly legitimate haunted house being two storeys high) and a castle-looking building. This odd space is apparently what is known as the Kundanbagh Haunted Palace, and it is much less well-known than the fake house which was apparently highlighted as being the location of the crime by the CID to stop people breaking in - as they allegedly did one Ramadan in order to ransack the place and vandalise a Honda City car which had apparently been previously parked outside this haunted palace.

A photograph which might portray the gates

The story about the light on the upper floor always being on in the haunted house is said to instead refer to the castle building by Mr. Raja. He says there are nightly police patrols around the haunted palace area, and that there was once a sign on the gates which read 'CID RESTRICTED AREA'. However, I must admit to being somewhat skeptical of what Mr. Raja is saying here on the grounds that he seems to have been able to enter this highly guarded area and yet it seemingly never occurred to him to take any photographs which could be used as evidence for his claims. Then again, there are a few photographs floating around the Internet which show the so-called haunted house as being a very different looking structure to what is normally depicted in other mainstream photographs, and this odd structure has dark green doors...

Turning on the Light

A blogger by the name of Aditya Chintha claimed in 2013 that he had solved the mystery of the haunted house and that he had conclusively debunked the claims made about it. He did so in a blog post which was later taken down 'due to the concern of the people in the neighbourhood'. Luckily, I have been able to retrieve the original post thanks to the Wayback Machine - and the story he uncovered is intriguing not least because it flies directly in the face of much of the rest of the testimony given about what may or may not be going on in the Kundanbagh house. He too lives in Hyderabad, and so during the summer of that fateful year he went out with a group of his friends to try and find the house. While he initially had some difficulties locating it, thanks in no small part to the reluctance of the people in the neighbourhood to reveal where it was - he and his companions were eventually able to find it - and they were sorely disappointed. It looked like a normal house. The gates had been locked and there were indeed rocks out in front of of the driveway, but a conversation with a neighbour cleared this up quickly - the residents of the house (yes, there were apparently people now living in the house) had locked the gate to discourage potential ghost hunters from breaking in while they were out on summer vacation. The stones were apparently placed there to make sure that people couldn't use the driveway as a free space to park their cars or bikes. Aditya thus considers the story to have been conclusively debunked. I am not so sure...

A photograph taken by Aditya Chintha depicting the gates and the stones outside said gates.

Theories

The neighbours to which Aditya talked said that the story about the strange family and their unexplained deaths had been true - and I am also inclined to believe that this is the case. It was reported in the Times of India newspaper in 2002 as the story broke. The details about the family and their deaths can all be backed up with proper sources - but unfortunately the detail about the autopsy finding that the family had died three months before they went missing cannot be verified as of yet. I will of course continue searching for a source, but I have not currently found one which I am comfortable with trusting. Aditya's explanation makes some sense in this context - and if we are to assume that the story about the ghostlly manifestations is false then we are still faced with an odd story about a family of witches who died under mysterious circumstances.

The testimony given by Sowmith Raja is intriguing, especially in light of the seemingly distinct buildings shown in different photographs from across the Internet - but unfortunately the lack of photographs taken by Mr. Raja himself points towards his story having potentially been fictional. Overall, the whole situation with this literally ungodly house is a tangled web of conflicting accounts. I've presented the information - make up your own mind.