38. London UFOs Part Four Newspapers across the world were being bombarded by UFO reports by the time the ‘50s had glided by. On July 15th 1963 a farmer from Charlton found a crater, measuring 2 ½ metres wide and the same deep on his land. Around the hole were four impressions, as if something had stood or landed there – soil and foliage surrounding the hole were scorched. Weird lights seen over the......

37. London UFOs Part Three The 40s were the start of something huge for ufology after pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine disc-like craft over Washington in 1947. For London, it was the 22nd of November when a female witness, whilst under hypnosis, spoke of being abducted by two silver suited females and put before a man who burned the figures ‘H6AQ’ onto her leg, which were still visible when she awoke from her trance.......

36. London UFOs Part Two To list every UFO sighting London has ever experienced would be nigh on impossible, so over the next few episodes I’d like to share with you some of the best reports, continuing from last week’s more historical sightings. After the original ‘scareship’ mystery (see episode 10) in the February of 1934 at Dollis Hill, a married couple watched in amazement as two men wearing caps appeared to be tending......

35. London UFOs Part One When the new millennium dawned, many UFO buffs, researchers and spotters packed up their binoculars and disposed of their files because UFOs weren’t ‘in’ anymore. Sightings had allegedly dissipated and the sceptics were rubbing their hands. However, whilst no strange craft appeared to be crashing in the deserts of the U.S. or buzzing witnesses in Mexico with any frequency, the millennium still offered much in the way of alleged......

34. Phantom Assailants: Part Four Continued from episode 31… The London cat-rippings of 1998 continued into 1999. Even more bizarre was the RSPCA voice that stated, after several months of methodical research into the strange deaths, that vehicles were to blame! An inspector analysing the decapitations claimed that foxes, badgers and dogs had also been the cause, although I’m unaware of any animal native to England that kills in such a fashion. The vehicle......

33. Big Cat Round Up 2007 was a record year for my own research into ‘big cat’ sightings – www.kentbigcats.blogspot.com – although London and the infamous ‘beast of Bexley’ was reasonably quiet, this proved to me that such animals had wider territories. In January a black leopard was seen at Bexley by a Miss Skinner as she walked her dog. The massive cat sped across a field. A few days later, two yellowy-green eyes......

32. The Spirit Of Christmas Christmas ghost stories told by a crackling fire are a rare occurrence in the modern age, so let me chill your spine with a few yarns relating to festive phantoms of the wintry city. The first haunting is said to occur on Christmas Day at the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street, and concerns the ghost of actress Lillie Langtry, once a mistress of Edward VII. The spook is not a......

31. Phantom Assailants: Part Three The last two episodes of the Strangeness have concentrated on bizarre and elusive individuals who have slashed their way into folklore. This third instalment in the mini-series continues the thread except that the victims have been domestic cats! 1998 was a very grisly year throughout the city with regards to frequent mysterious moggie murders, by way of decapitation and tail removal. Forty cats had turned up in eight months......

30. Phantom Assailants: Part Two One hundred years before the fog-saturated reign of Jack The Ripper there was the London Monster of 1788 (see previous episode). Fifty years later came the bewildering spectacle of the iron-clawed Spring Heeled Jack (episode 11), another tormentor and slasher of females. Fast-forward almost thirty-years and gasp at the horror of the Phantom Skirt-Slasher Of Piccadilly, who for a terrifying reign of six-months prowled the London underground like some......

29. Phantom Assailants: Part One One hundred years previous to Jack The Ripper’s reign of ghastly terror, London was overshadowed by another spectral attacker – a phantom aggressor that, although seemingly dreadful and unique, would simply become one of many urban legends pertaining to mysterious and elusive assailants across the world, with many actually analysing the peculiar cases of ripping, and asking ‘did such psychopaths exist or were they the product of local hysteria’?......

28. Urban Legends Of The Underbelly! Urban legends are often vague, friend-of-a-friend tales (FOAFtales) similar to ‘Chinese whispers’, in that they are distorted, exaggerated and through generations of storytelling, they become myth, embedded in our society. For the last fifty or more years there has been a sinister legend pertaining to the London Underground that a mysterious, possibly caped figure, lurks in the cold tunnels, and is known for the ghastly act of pushing......

27. More Terrors Of The Tube! To continue from our last stop of ghosts pertaining to the London Underground, the spectral girl of Elephant & Castle appears to be a rail relation to the phantom hitchhiker legend, in that several witnesses have described, often whilst sitting in an empty carriage, encountering a young woman who takes a seat but often vanishes between stops. Just like many phantom hitchhiker myths, this particular spook story is......

26. Going Underground Urban legends of the more sinister variety have always intrigued me, so continuous whispers and friend-of-a-friend tales concerning a mutant race of beings inhabiting the dark tunnel systems, sewers and subterranean passages beneath the capital are always welcome, even if unfounded (despite rumours circulating as far back as the nineteenth century). However, one thing us folklorists do know is that the underbelly of the city is teeming with all manner of......

25. More Road-Related Horror! Lord John Angerstein’s coach has been sighted pulled by four headless horses, in the vicinity of Trafalgar Road, travelling onwards to Vanbrugh Hill in southeast London. Why the horses appear headless no one knows. On the Bayswater Road near Hyde Park, another phantom coach and horses is said to travel, without sound. But the most astonishing vehicle to haunt Greater London has to be that of a spectral bus, sighted......

24. Haunted Roads For Halloween! Despite London’s congested roads and the daily chorus of thousands of beeping horns, ghosts of the cities roads are in fact sporadic. Look through any catalogue of phantom hitchhikers or ghostly vehicles (for example http://www.roadghosts.com/) and you’ll notice a distinct lack of activity within the capital pertaining to tarmac terrors. Why this is we’ll never know – maybe it’s simply down to the fact that elsewhere in the country,......

23. The Woman In Black This week’s feature on London’s darker side is more of a review, simply because last week, Saturday 13th October, myself and my cousin ventured to see The Woman In Black stage show at the Fortune Theatre, on Russell Street in Covent Garden. For those of you who are not familiar with this chilling ghost story, it is an adaptation of Susan Hill’s fine book and has been running in......

22. The Thornton Heath Happening During the 1930s and 1970s several ghosts besieged residents of Thornton Heath, Croydon. The case was investigated in 1938 by researcher Nandor Fodor, who claimed that the victim of the poltergeist was in a sense possessed by the spirit of a murderer, stating that the visions and nightmares she’d been having were in fact memories of something akin to a past life. The case was never solved, as various......

21. The Beast Of Barnet For ten years the so-called Barnet ‘big cat’ caused confusion in the London suburbs – a few years before the ‘beast’ of Bexley reared its head, even though both were possibly the same animal, or at least part of the same puzzle. Strangely, in 2001 the press claimed that the elusive wild cat had been caught – after many years of frustrating police searches, fruitless tracking, and numerous sightings......

19. Freakish Falls! During the August of 1920 in Woodford, stones poured from the sky for three consecutive days without explanation. Four years later at Eltham, Plumstead, Woolwich and Shooters Hill a great ice storm battered the area, despite the afternoon being the hottest for two years! The hailstones were the size of eggs, and some jagged in nature, measuring five-inches which fell from the sky, cutting residents who ran for cover. In January......

18. The Cheetah Of Shooter's Hill Over the years many ‘flaps’ of ‘big cat’ sightings have hit the headlines, from the so-called ‘beasts’ of Exmoor and Bodmin, to the more recent Bluewater leopard Bexley ‘big cat’. However in south-east London during the early 1960s, the Shooter’s Hill ‘cheetah’ scare was on everyone’s lips – back during a time when such cats were considered extremely mythical and were often misunderstood and wrongly identified, but were......

17. A Letter Supports The Legend In Episode 7 of The Saturday Strangeness, we briefly covered the Brentford Griffin – the murky yet wondrous tale of a winged creature allegedly sighted over the capital; a legend that was quirky yet fleeting amidst confusion, panic and deception. Now, whilst such a creature may well have been nothing more than fanciful rumour, we would like to share with you a letter, submitted to Fortean Times magazine,......

16. Strange Invaders Whilst residing at his terraced house in Kentish Town, during the 1980s, Christopher Fowler began to notice glimpses of unusual whitish creatures in his back garden. After finally finding the time to fully investigate, and to dismiss such possible hallucinations on his own behalf, Mr Fowler was astounded to discover several albino lobster-like critters, which plagued his yard for several months. A friend of Mr Fowler’s, whilst visiting one evening, almost......

Saturday Strangeness 15 – Dragons Over London? Dragons are probably the most celebrated yet misunderstood mythical creature across Britain, yet several sightings of such leathery legends have been recorded, and such monsters feature heavily in the lore of the British countryside (remember St George?). During modern times such leviathans have been relegated to the league of fantasy, where they only exist alongside unicorns and fairies. However, dragon-like 'sky serpents', which have also been connected to......

14. The Jewel House Apparition Mr Edmond Lenthal Swift was the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, at the Tower Of London from 1814 to 1842. It was here, as mentioned in a previous episode, that a sentry encountered a huge phantom bear, which he reported to Mr Swift, before dying of shock two days after the frightful incident in which he speared the creature with his bayonet, only for the blade to pass right......

13. The Horror Of Berkeley Square Over a century ago, No. 50 Berkeley Square, W1 was London's most famous haunted house. Some of the residents to have lived on the street are William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham (No. 6), Horace Walpole (No. 11) and Lord Clive (No. 45, which is where he committed suicide in 1774). A certain Mr Myers occupied No. 50 for many years; he brought the house and was due......

11. The Weirdest Creature! It was a sunny day in October, the year 1878, when a naturalist and London Aquarium employee named Mr Davy exhibited his unusual beast, whilst on an afternoon stroll. Many onlookers and passers by gasped at the bizarre form, a creature most certainly unknown to science and described at the time as, ‘a living cube’ – standing two-feet in height, being two-feet in length and bereft of abdomen, with its......

10. Scareships Just previous to the First World War, as Germany prepared to release the Zeppelin air ships, a spate of phantom airship sightings took grip on the world. London was just one city in the UK to become besieged by the mysterious aircraft that had no definitive origin. Were they the first UFOs? How did such craft seem to vanish or escape pursuit? Here's a chronicle pertaining to the capital: 9th May 1909......

9. London Leviathans In 2006 many onlookers marvelled at the appearance of a bottlenose whale that became stranded in the Thames – the first recorded sighting of such an animal since 1913. However during the summer of 1658 another whale turned up at Greenwich; unfortunately the creature had been struck with a harping iron out at sea, become weakened and died. In a newsletter written by a John Barber to the Viscount Scudamore, dated......

8. The Incomprehensibles ‘Zooform phenomena’ was a term coined by Fortean zoologist Jonathan Downes to categorise ‘creatures’ which even cryptozoology – the study of hidden animals – dares not to investigate. These are the forms which have animal characteristics, yet are quite simply too bizarre to be flesh and blood. Take for instance the Mantis Man of London, a weird apparition that visited a ‘Jim’ on the night of January 16th 2004 as he......

7. The Brentford Griffin Picture the scene: it’s a summer’s day in 1984, and Kevin Chippendale is strolling along Braemer Road, Brentford, when something suddenly catches his eye flying near to the Green Dragon apartment building. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a Griffin! But aren’t such flying wonders merely creatures of mythology? Well you may scoff at such a sighting, but for a short while the soaring oddity that......