Here Be Dragons:A Journey Into The Highest Strangeness.

Bigfoot piloting a UFO, werewolves in Northumberland, giant glowing floating crabs, demons in Cheltenham, fairies dressed as monks caving rabbit's heads in, and a hellhound having a run in with an exorcist on a desolate Yorkshire beach.

Welcome to the world of The Highest Strangeness, a land where normal Forteana (UFOs, sea serpents etc;) is turbocharged into what last night's speaker for the London Fortean Society, Richard Freeman - an unreconstructed cryptozoologist, describes as 'batshit' crazy. Freeman, who sometimes bogs his interesting talks down with anti-woke rants (last night it was how Dr Who has been ruined in recent years but a few years ago I heard him tell an audience how disappointing it would be for a woman to be raped by a mythical ape that only had a very small penis), is the zoological director at the Centre for Fortean Zoology (that's a real job!?) and he was at The Bell in Whitechapel to tell us all about some of the weirdest cases he'd encountered, ones he's been collecting and forming into a book.

Judging by the length of the speech (it was a long one - and he cut loads out) it'll be quite a hefty tome. What we were getting was, in Freeman's words, "the tip of the tip of the iceberg". It was quite a tip. He began by talking about monsters. Not normal Fortean monsters like the Yeti or animals believed by scientists (if not Freeman) to be extinct like the Tasmanian wolf but monsters like the owl man and the moth man and Freeman's favourite of all - dragons.

Dragons exist in every culture on Earth and the ones Freeman spoke about included a gigantic white dragon seen flying over car parks in Wisconsin and breathing out balls of fire. He mentioned that a similar dragon had been seen flying in the ash clouds of Iceland's infamous Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010 though, for me, none of them held a torch to the flying snake of Namibia:- a winged serpent with a glowing light in its head that is said to have attacked many people and whose existence, apparently, is widely accepted throughout Namibia.

Then there's our old friends the werewolves. One was sighted in Hexham and the story was reported on Nationwide. When two stone heads were dug up in the same town (a story I've written about before) it was first believed they were supposed to represent a witch and a skull and soon "a hairy man" appeared as if awoken from his slumber by the digging up of the stones.

Dr Anne Ross believed a 'Celtic head cult' had been discovered so she took the heads and soon found herself haunted by that same hairy man. But it soon transpired that the heads were made of concrete, were made in the 1940s, and were supposed to be crude caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini. 

So the werewolf visions remain, like most in this talk, unexplained. As does the story of a werewolf in Hull called Old Stinker who is believed to be able to jump thirty feet into the air. We didn't get long on the poltergeists of New South Wales but there was an interesting digression, there were lots of digressions, into Bigfoots. They crop up everywhere and Freeman believes they do exist in places like Bhutan and Sumatra but he has no time for the Bigfoots that have been spotted in Leicester, Sussex, and Cannock Chase. The Cannock Chase Bigfoot, according to reports, was described as a "shambling apeman". Which presumably doesn't mean he's a big fan of The Pastels.

In the world of Forteana you can have monsters and you can have ghosts but you can also have ghost monsters and few can compare to the giant glowing floating crab seen in Durban, South Africa in the 1890s. The mischievous spectral crustacean would float over a young girl's bed at night and even tie her hair to the old fashioned brass bedstead.

 

Another one who reported a very unusual ghost sighting is Freeman's favourite Dr Who, and former Worzel Gummidge star, Jon Pertwee! As a child, Pertwee was staying with friends in Sussex when, during the night, he smelt putrefying flesh in his bedroom. He didn't say anything but on the second night the smell came back and looking to the bottom of his bed he saw a ghostly tree trunk that was undulating and spewing bubbles out. It was also moving towards him.

Pertwee wet the bed, told the owners of the house who seemed to know about this ghost tree anyway and then promptly closed that 'wing' of the house forever. But it's not only men who went on to make a living playing scarecrows and timelords that spot bizarre apparitions. In 1925, in Pennsylvania, two women were out on a 'moonless' night when they saw a vast snake that coiled its body round houses and even a school. Others reported seeing it too. Others said they couldn't see it but they could feel its presence.

The story fits nearly with an old Scandinavian legend about a ghostly megasnake that would coil round churches and crush them. Equally bizarre are the reported sightings, from all over the world, of black dogs with glowing red eyes. The best one, perhaps, being the story of a UFO landing and ten black dogs disembarking the spaceship.

In Todmorden in West Yorkshire, a policeman reported being abducted by aliens, taken on to their spaceship and hypnotised. While on the spaceship he reported seeing a black dog with glowing eyes. Other similar sightings have been reported in Cannock Chase which is either a hotbed of weirdness or has some very effective bullshitters living nearby.

But it's not just dogs and bigfoots flying around in UFOs. Freeman told us about the Mince Pie Martian of Rowley Regis in the West Midlands. This dude would wear a fairly standard silver space suit but with a pointed hat and he also had a set of wings. Presumably he'd landed in the Black Country during the festive season because he became fascinated by Christmas trees and enjoyed eating mince pies.

But one thing the Mince Pie Martian didn't like is fire and when he saw a cigarette he ran away never to be seen again. It seems odd that an alien civilisation could be so advanced as to send a spaceship to another planet but had yet to understand how to harness fire.

Aliens spotted in Florida were said to be in league with robots and even a dissolving alien craft was reported in Philadelphia. Then there's the UFO that was said to be seen floating over the stone circle at Avebury. A woman who claimed to have seen this told the police she's seen a monstrous 5ft long worm come out of its doors. When the police investigated they found no sign of a worm but they did find a slimy trail on the ground - similar to one a snail might leave.

Fairies may not sound as terrifying as some of these rather ludicrous creatures but fairies can be right bastards. Disney have done a good job of cleaning up their image but folkloric fairies are nasty, mean spirited, jealous little thugs and they are, apparently, very commonly sighted in modern times.

Freeman's best fairy story (possibly in more than one sense) is about a man who had several pet rabbits. He'd regularly wake up to find one of them had had their head caved in. Suspecting a fox, or perhaps a badger, he placed a piece of wood over the hutch and a brick on top but the rabbits still kept getting killed. One morning he came downstairs and saw a fairy (or a goblin), wearing a monk's cowl, wielding a massive hammer and preparing to turn poor old Thumper's brains into soup.

Time was running out so Freeman had to rush through the stories of demons in Cheltenham, Gef the talking mongoose (though I've written about him before so click here for more on that fellow), and a headless talking badger (how does he talk with no mouth?) called Geoffrey but he wasn't going to let us go without telling us about the giant cat (four times the size of your average domestic tabby) with human eyes who could talk and warned children about a paedophile hiding in the woods.

Which turned out to be true. Though my friend Alex pointed out, quite reasonably and accurately, that this simply sounds like a description of Charley from the Charley Says public information films in 1973. Though admittedly Charley was called Charley and the cat in Freeman's story was called 'the Venom of God'.

Most of the talk was given over to telling these fantastical, bizarre, and mostly unbelievable, stories but Freeman did, at the end, briefly ponder what gives rise to these stories, why they crop up all over the world and have done so for tens of thousands of years. He had a few theories but, for me, the one that held the most water was that these fabulous beasts, aliens, and ghosts were distorted analogues of things that preyed on our distant ancestors.

To be afraid of a snake, a crocodile, a poisonous frog, a lion, a killer dog, or a spider is not irrational because these things can, and do, often kill us. For our distant ancestors who lived much closer to and with nature, and at a time when medicine was rudimentary at best, these fears were even more a part of everyday life. Over the years these stories have been twisted, elaborated, and inverted and we end up with giant ghost crabs, goblins with hammers, and martians scoffing mince pies while black dogs fly around in spaceships.

It'd been a fun, and interesting, talk but on the way home I was more concerned about getting to Tesco before it closed than being attacked by a werewolf or chased by the bubbling ghost of a tree trunk. Thanks to Richard Freeman, thanks to host David V Barratt and the London Fortean Society, and thanks to Jade, Dewi, Paula, Michael, Tim, and Jackie for keeping me company on my journey into the highest strangeness.