Phantoms and Rituals in Staffordshire

Artwork from Hellebore Magazine

The origins of the ritual are still shrouded in mystery to this day. Folk knowledge asserts that it dates back to a long-lost pagan fertility ritual, and modern historians remain unable to state with any certainty where the practice comes from.

It was Monday, September 8th, 1986 – and Mick Dodds, his wife Lila [1], and his mother-in-law had spent a long day in the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley, where they had borne witness to the age-old performance of the Horn Dance. As they put the village in their rearview mirror on the way to Stowe-by-Chartley, they had no idea that the ritual wasn’t done with them yet.

The Wildman's Hunt

After dropping Lila's mother back at her cottage in the nearby village of Stowe-by-Chartley, Mick continued driving northeast until he reached the A518 road that would take them home. It was nighttime by now, but both parties were looking forward to the drive that would take them through the idyllic West Midlands countryside and past the 11th century ruins of Chartley Castle.

Perhaps the couple's casual conversation was suddenly interrupted. Something large and dark lurched out of the field to the right side of the road, and Mick slammed on the breaks in shock. It was a massive stag, its velvet antlers glistening in the moonlight. The giant animal wandered across the road directly in front of their vehicle, leaving both Mick and Lila silent with awe. While they watched the deer, something else was quickly making its way through the field under cover of darkness.

Lila screamed with horror as the grotesque thing leapt out onto the road, seemingly in pursuit of the stag. It seemed to be a large primate, like a chimpanzee. Neither passenger registered how the stag reacted to this, however, because the chimpanzee only made it halfway across the road before stopping dead in its tracks and turning to look directly at them through the car's windscreen. It began to move towards them, picking up speed.

Red hot panic overwhelming his senses, Mick put the car into reverse gear and attempted to back away as quickly as possible as the ape began a flat-out charge towards their vehicle. The engine stalled. Just before it reached the car's bonnet, the chimp stopped and retreated. Fumbling to restart the engine, Mick accidentally flooded it and left them completely stranded and helpless. Maybe sensing weakness, the hairy thing charged again.

Just before it reached their car, it stopped once again. Was it mocking them? The terrified couple and the monstrous ape remained deadlocked like this about twenty seconds, and it made at least one more mock charge before beating its final retreat. It bounded off the road and into the dark field to the left of their car, presumably chasing the stag. It had never actually touched the car, and the passengers were (physically) unscathed by the encounter. 

Mick set about the gruelling process of restarting the engine, pale as a ghost and shaken to his core [2].

Clashing Antlers and Pagan Cults

At the start of this article, I mentioned the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley. I feel that this is particularly relevant because of the contents of the performance, which seems to have been somehow reflected in that evening's weird happenings on the A518. 

The 'horns' of the ritual are actually antlers, held by six costumed men who perform what is perhaps a strange re-enactment of the clashing of rutting stags throughout the day on Wakes Monday (the first Monday after 4th September). They are accompanied by a motley crew of other characters who provide a musical backdrop for the ceremony, including a fool, a bowman, a hobby-horse, a triangle player, and a man in costume as Maid Marian.

Beginning at 8am at St. Nicholas' Church, the stag-men pass through key sites throughout the parish of Abbots Bromley, forming into two parallel lines at each location and methodically advancing towards each other. Their antlers are held at chest height as they pass, but they never actually collide with one another. This strange rite is repeated all through the parish for twelve hours, before a final dance is performed in the street at 8pm [3]. 

The first mention of a hobby-horse dance at Abbots Bromley dates from 1532, but does not mention the antlers. A 1686 source discusses the antlers in a description of a performance witnessed around 1630. It has seemingly been performed annually since then, with a short hiatus for the English Civil War. 

Before the Civil War, it was likely a Christmastide festivity associated with St Nicholas' Day and New Years Day. The antlers used have been dated to the 11th century, having been from domesticated reindeer perhaps imported from Scandinavia sometime between then and the 17th century.

Mainland European church documents from between the 4th and 11th centuries frequently denounce midwinter practices that were viewed as pagan, which included animal guising and ritual transvestitism, just like the Horn Dance we see today. These have frequently been interpreted as fertility rites.

While none of these references refer specifically to Britain, or to any time beyond the 11th century, 20th century folklorists frequently saw the possibility of a connection between these ancient practices and modern day rituals. 

Doubt has been cast on the pagan theory by modern scholars due to lack of direct evidence, and Ronald Hutton postulates that animal disguises and crossdressing may have independently arisen during medieval festivals as an easy way for ritual participants to express the suspension of normal social rules (distinctions between the sexes, and between humans and animals) that took place at midwinter [4].

A Place Between Places

Rituals in which the spirit world was invoked frequently involved the dissolution of normal social categories and boundaries. Initiation rites often feature a middle stage between the initiates' separation from their previous social roles and their reaggregation into a new position in society, which has been called liminal. This same quality of liminality (neither-here-nor-there-ness) has been identified in settings conducive to paranormal activity in the modern day [5].

One such setting between settings nowadays would certainly be a long road, such as the A518, the site of the Dodds' encounter. In fact, the Dodds are not the only people to have seen something strange along this road. Local resident Tom Goode told investigator Jim Foley of his recollection of seeing a large number of cars parked near Weston Bank (about 3 miles southwest of Chartley Castle) sometime around the summer of 1950. When he asked what the drivers what they were doing, he was told that they had seen strange objects in the sky and wanted to get a better look.

Apparently unidentified aircraft had been seen coming towards the road from near Stafford, and "hovered and darted to and fro". Tom stayed in the area for a little while, but was unable to see the lights. He dismissed this event as having been due to secret aircraft testing at a nearby airbase [6].

A newspaper article from the October 27th 1995 edition of the Post and Times, written by Rosemarie Davies, is also reprinted in Foley's excellent book on the folklore of the road. It details a poltergeist outbreak that took place over the course of three days at Lower Loxley Farm (approximately 3 miles northeast of Chartley Castle) one August in the 1890s. 

Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, along with their 13-year-old maid, were horrified to repeatedly witness kitchen items and shoes pick themselves up and fly through the air at great speed, accompanied by loud knocking on the walls and ceilings. Stones were thrown at the house from outside, shattering windows up to the third floor. After Mr. Wilson called the police, they witnessed the strange happenings too, and then apparently threatened the maid with jail time if she did not confess to the whole thing.

There was only ever one incident in which the maid was seen to throw a small stone at the house, and she was frequently with the Wilson couple when all three of them witnessed strange things happening, well beyond her ability to accomplish. When spiritualist F. Brittain asked her about her experience of the three days, she said that she didn't have much memory of them and had felt as if "a bandage was wrapped tighly around her head, so tight at times that it hurt her". She described experiencing strange sensations all over her body at night, and fainting uncontrollably.

After the first night of activity, the maid slept in the same room as the Wilson couple. One night, Mr. Wilson noticed that she raised her head while breathing very heavily and making "peculiar noises in her throat" whilst the knocking sounds were occurring. The bizarre events ceased when the maid left the farm on the 21st of August, leaving behind more questions than answers [7]. 

Conclusion

I cannot remember exactly where I heard it, but I think it was on an episode of the podcast Strange Familiars with Timothy Renner. He said that when he investigates Bigfoot sightings, he will often ask the witness if they have seen anything else out of the ordinary. He is rewarded so often with further stories of strange lights and apparitions that he has come to expect this pattern. It seems that the same holds true for the 'British Bigfoot'.

Many sources grasp at a possible connection between manifestations of inexplicable phenomena and human ritual behaviour. If the area around what is now the A518 seems to be especially prone to strange happenings, then perhaps it is no surprise that such a modern remnant of an age-old boundary-defying ritual is still annually performed there too. Just like the costumed performers become something that is neither human nor animal, it seems that forces beyond our knowledge might take on similar costumes given the right circumstances...

Bibliography and Notes

1. Pseudonym, Mick's wife goes unnamed in the original source. 

2. Redfern, N. (2012) ‘Chapter Sixteen: A Monstrous Castle’, in Wildman! The Monstrous and Mysterious Saga of the British Bigfoot. CFZ Press, pp. 95–98.

3. Roud, S. (2008) ‘4th September: Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’, in The English Year: A Month-by-Month Guide to the Nation’s Customs and Festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night. Penguin, pp. 394–397.

4. Hutton, R. (1996) ‘Chapter Eight: Hobby-Horse and Horn Dance’, in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press, pp. 81–95.

5. Hansen, G.P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal. Xlibris Corp.

6. Foley, J. (1998) ‘Tom Goode’s Story’, in The Road to Chartley: Ghosts, Legends & Stories of the A518 (Part I), pp. 38–49.

7. Foley, J. (1998) ‘Strange Goings-on at Lower Loxley’, in The Road to Chartley: Ghosts, Legends & Stories of the A518 (Part I), pp. 103-105.

There's Something in Devil's Hole!

It was 1969. Brushing his mattted brown hair out of his eyes, Charlie Manson looked up at the sun beating down on his Family from above Death Valley, Nevada. Perhaps he thought he was destined to be the 20th Century Moses - he was leading his followers through the desert towards a safe haven in which they could live. He had wandered for days through the desolate wastelands, and he now believed that he had finally found his Promised Land. He was now in the Amargosa Desert - one of the hottest areas in the Western Hemisphere, and only separated from the ominous stretches of Death Valley by the Funeral Mountains. He was looking at Devil's Hole - a fissure in the ground that led straight down into a labyrinth of flooded caves. However, Manson was certain that he wasn't just looking at the entrance to caves occupied only by water - instead, he was staring at the gateway to a lost underground city, and to the 'Bottomless Pit' mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation (9:1-12). The US Government was covering this up. All he had to do was drain the floodwater from the caverns to reveal what would surely be a haven for his flourishing cult in which they could escape the coming Helter Skelter Apocalypse. Legend has it that he would spend three days inside the observation area above the hole, meditating and trying to figure out a way to drain the caves of water.

Teleporting Fish and Tiny Tsunamis

Death Valley was declared to be an American National Monument in 1933 before finally being officially recognised as a National Park in 1994. There is a detached unit of this same National Park in what is called the Ash Meadows Complex, and this specific unit is called Devil's Hole - a geothermal pool situated within a limestone cavern. Its waters have a near constant temperature of 33°C, and a salinity which is just as consistent. It is at leas 500ft deep, but the bottom of the pool has never been mapped. As far as anyone knows, it might as well go down forever. There is an opening at the surface of the pool which is approximately 6x18ft wide, and leads down into caverns which are at least a further 300ft deep. Geologists JM Landwehr and IJ Winograd have stated that the pool formed over 500,000 years ago. Tectonic activity from earthquakes as far away as Indonesia, Chile and Japan has been recorded in the pool - which makes itself known in the form of small-scale tsunamis within its cavernous depths. Water has been observed to splash up to heights of up to two meters onto the walls of the hole.

The mysterious pupfish in question

The hole is also home to a confusing biological enigma known as the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pupfish is unique to the hot, oxygen-poor water within the mysterious chasm - and has been described as the world's rarest fish. There are naturally usually no more than 500 of these fish, meaning that they were one of the first species to be officially protected by the Endangered Species Act in America as of 1966. Local landowners do not have the right to draw water from the hole due to the laws surrounding the protection of the rare fish. They have been found at depths of up to 66ft in the hole, but normally forage on the algae and diatoms growing on a shallow rock shelf near the surface. The population of these exceptionally rare fish has been decreasing from 200 in 2005 to only 75 in 2013. This decline is as of yet unexplained. The mysterious element of this information, which might otherwise be uninteresting from a Fortean perspective, is that it seems as if the fish appeared in the hole as soon as the hole opened up. According to University of California researchers Ismael Saglam and Michael Miller, it seems as if the collapse of the cavern's roof and the near-instant colonisation of the pool by this unique species of fish may have been caused by an 'unidentified geologic event'. So there we have it - teleporting fish!

Into the Abyss

Of course, the Endangered Species Act and other conservation acts by the US Government now protect the hole from any unwanted visitors - but such was evidently not the case in 1965, and this fact would cost two children their lives. Three young adventurers took the plunge into Devil's Hole in the darkness of nighttime on June 20th of 1965. They were going skin-diving that fateful Sunday night, and were presumably simply eager to make memories among their friend group. There were actually four of them originally, but one apparently had decided that it wasn't a good idea, and had stayed on dry land. The one diiver that survived the experience would forever be left with memories of a very different kind. Among the original three were brothers-in-law David Rose (aged 20) and Paul Giancontieri (aged 19) - and they would be the unfortunate two would never be seen again after getting into the water that night. 20-year-old Paula Rose, who had been married to David for two months at the time, was waiting outside the hole for her husband to emerge - and so was Giancontieri's mother - and both were horrified when only one diver clambered out of the water.

The search effort began soon after this horrifying double-disappearance. Fourty-five rangers and volunteer divers patrolled the cave for days, splitting into teams of four or five men each and diving to depths of 315ft with the aid of air tanks strapped to their backs. One of these divers was a man named Jim Houtz, and reporter Chris Dixon for the surfing magazine The Inertia spoke to him about his experiences with diving down into Devil's Hole in 2011. Just before the search commenced, he was giving a presentation on diving at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club to about sixty or seventy people. He suddenly got a call from the Federal Government asking him if there were any air pockets down in the hole - to which he replied in the affirmative. He quickly went up to Los Alamos accompanied by a small crew, whereupon he was met by a seaplane - a Grumman Albatross - on the runway with its engines running. He and his men boarded the plane, and they promptly took off, leaving the hatch open in their haste. They tried to land in the Ash Meadows Complex, but after three or four attempts they decided that this would be impossible. Instead, they landed at Nellis Air Force Base at dawn. The state police were out there, along with the military and the media. Houtz set up his first team of two men, including Harry Wham - who had accompanied Mel Fisher on a failed treasure-hunting dive in 1957 and would later be murdered by family members in 1981. They descended into the hole in increments, with divers at two different junctions to combat any issues that might've been posed by decompression. When Houtz got down to the lower chamber of the endless pit, he found a snorkel mask and a diving fin. A dimly-lit flashlight was discovered tied to a rock, and a decompression chart was later found as well. Houtz made a point of saying that once someone gets that deep, they will start to suffer from nitrogen narcosis, which induces a drunken state and makes it far more likely that they'll do something stupid. He had been training to overcome this.

A photo of Jim Houtz in Devil's Hole

Houtz returned to the surface and notified everyone about what had happened, and then said that he would go back down to recover the last of the discarded gear. He made it down to a depth of 325ft, which was marked by a little ledge after which the vast underwater pit opens up like a colossal inverted funnel. The water apparently gets slightly warmer as it goes deeper. Lt. Walter Butt of the Clarke County Sheriff's Department said that they would've continued the search if there was 'any indication that the bodies could be discovered'. The search for the missing boys was called off just before midnight on June 22nd 1965 - and their bodies have never been found.

Out of the Abyss?

It was Spring of 1892, and the unincorporated community of Daggett in San Bernadino County, California was about to be seized by monster fever. One Mr. George May reported to The San Francisco Examiner that sightings of a colossal reptile had been taking place around the community, and that a party was being organised to pursue the creature. According to May, EW Spear was seemingly the first to see the monster after having followed a strange trail he had found. He described the entity as being 'thirty feet long and thoroughly unpossessing'. Spear promptly retreated from the scene and would later tell his story to the local community, only to be laughed at. Henry Brown became the next witness, seeing the same creature and beating just as much of a hasty retreat from the beast's territory.

Oscar W. Clark now becomes our central figure. He was a geologist working with the Royal Academy of Sciences, and had been staying in Daggett to research the geological features of the coast there. He was on his way through the Death Valley desert to get some rest in the resort city of Coronado when he caught sight of the colossal critter. He was approximately 30 miles away from Daggett by 6pm when he stopped to rest, having already made some exciting additions to his fossil collection. He stole a glance to the Southwest through the desert haze, whereupon he saw a strange entity moving along roughly one mile away from his position. He approached it - and was 'both elated and horrified' to see something completely unlike anything else he knew to exist in our modern era. He described the immense creature as being 30ft long and as partially walking on its hind feet and partially 'dragging itself through the sand'. It left strange tracks, showing three-toed feet and 'a peculiar scratchy configuration' in the sand beneath it whenever it changed from walking to dragging itself. Its forelimbs were very short, but it sometimes used them to grasp at scraggly pieces of foliage to eat. There was a 'strong, conical spine' on the thumb of the forefoot. When the animal was stood upright it was said to be 14ft tall. Its head was the size of a large cask and was shaped like that of a horse. The body was as large as an elephant's, and its tail reminded Clark of that of an alligator. The whole thing was liver-coloured with bronze spots, and its eyes were described as being the size of saucers and as projecting out from its head - gleaming with fire. Steam-like vapour was exhaled from its mouth, and apparently smelled of 'something awful'.

An oil painting of an Iguanodon by Zdeněk Burian

He claimed that the monster was on the edge of a 'great sinkhole of alkaline water' which his guides had previously informed him was bottomless, and he speculated to be a remnant of Death Valley's days as an 'inland sea' (Lake Manly in the mid-Pleistocene era). Clark crept up on the beast, waiting in the sand approximately 100 yards away from it - from which vantage point he was able to watch the creature for half an hour. After this time had elapsed, the beast let out a 'blood-curdling' bellow - bringing itself to the edge of the hole before lashing its tail and falling into a dormant state. Clark took this as his cue to leave the scene - taking the opportunity to attempt to obtain the assistance of his guides in capturing the sleeping monster. However, they were apparently terrified and refused to help him.

According to the newspaper report, he would eventually send a description of his experience to the Smithsonian Institution so that they might consider organising a scientific party to capture the reptilian fiend. He said that he was 'rather anticipated' by the testimonies of Spear and Brown, and claimed that the monster he had seen was 'living proof of the exact authenticity of the researches made by savants into the field of paleontological study'. He was apparently certain that what he had seen was a specimen of 'Iguanodon Bennissantensis of the European Jurassic' - satisfied that his deductions were 100% correct based on his knowledge of the geological features of the Pacific slope, specifically of the Death Valley area. The species 'Bennissantensis' does not actually exist, but the species 'Bernissartensis' does, and so I am satisfied that this is not a slip-up which renders the story an obvious hoax. Of course, it seems likely that this incident was just one of the many such happenings fabricated by bored journalists in the days of yellow journalism. Researcher John LeMay analysed the report and proved to be unable to match the people mentioned in the article to any real people, unfortunately.

Conclusions

LeMay, however, also pointed out that the bottomless pit mentioned by Clark in this report was likely Devil's Hole, and then went on to talk about Loren Coleman's observation that places with the word 'devil' in the name are often rife with reported paranormal activity. If the reports that I've presented in this article are anything to go by, then it is clear that Devil's Hole is no different to any of the examples cited by Coleman.

Sources

'Devil's Hole' on Wikipedia

Information Provided by the National Park Service

'In A Hole' for The Economist

'We Know Where the World's Loneliest Species Came From' for BBC Earth

'Devil's Hole' on spookygeology.com

'Haunted Hikes' by Andrea Lankford

The Tuscaloosa News on June 23rd, 1965

'A Conversation with the King of Abalonia' for The Inertia

'Devil's Hole' on atlasobscura.com

'Cowboys and Saurians' by John LeMay