Every time the autumn comes around, a chill runs down my spine as childhood memories are conjured like swirling wisps from a witch’s cauldron stirred on All Hallows Eve. The bonfire-scented month of November crackles with a soundtrack of crisp, trodden leaves and takes me back to a horror that has stuck with me for decades. And it’s a horror quite well known and often regurgitated within fortean circles.
It started for me as a kid. I was born in 1974 in Kent – a county steeped in folklore. During the early to mid 1980s I was already immersing myself in a subject that, unbeknownst to me back then, was known as cryptozoology. My introduction was the 1974 Carey Miller book A Dictionary Of Monsters, given to me by my grandfather. As an excited eight-year old I lapped up the bizarre entries and images of mythical beasts such as harpies, basilisks and vampires. The abominable snowman, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster leered from the pages as black and white illustrations. When my grandfather planted in my young mind the possibility that such things could exist, I was both terrified and amazed.
My obsession had begun and was bolstered further when my grandfather’s brother handed me a video cassette of a movie called The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which at the time I took to be a real-life documentary about a small town in Arkansas named Fouke, which for many years had been haunted by a lumbering, hair-covered bipedal creature (see FT223:44-49). The movie was made in 1972 and directed by Charles B Pierce. Today, many monster hunters cite this eerie film as being a major influence on their lives. However, for me, all of these monsters seemed a world away; possible manifestations confined to dense, unreachable forests and inhospitable plateaux in distant countries.
A KENTISH HORROR
And then the horror came closer to home. My mother’s uncle introduced me to the world of John Keel through a book called published in 1975, within which lurked a chapter entitled ‘The Man-Birds’. It outlined a case that had allegedly