The Black Monk of Pontefract

One of the difficulties with discouraging bogus claims of the paranormal is the profit motive.

A lot of it, of course, is that the money that stands to be made can be significant.  There's not only the possibility of writing about alleged supernatural encounters, and/or making films about them, there's also paranormal tourism -- and I'm not just talking about the "ghost walks" that happen pretty much every night in every big city the world over.

I ran into a good example of this just yesterday when I happened upon a link to the story of the "Black Monk of Pontefract."  This apparition has been called "the most violent poltergeist in Britain," and is seen at 30 East Drive, Chequerfield Estate, Pontefract, West Yorkshire.

The story began when a couple named Jean and Joe Pritchard, and their children Phillip and Diane, moved into the house in 1966.  Shortly afterward, the entire family -- along with Jean's mother Mrs. Scholes, and a neighbor named Marie Kelly -- started experiencing bizarre occurrences.  Sometimes when the kitchen tap was turned on, green foam came out instead of water.  A wardrobe in Phillip's room suddenly started swaying back and forth, thumping on the floor.  Puddles of water appeared in various locations around the house.  Scariest of all, Marie Kelly was locking up the house -- she was looking after it while the Pritchards were away -- and found that Joe and Jean's wedding photograph had been slashed.

There was a lull for a while, but soon events picked up again, and in fact got way worse.  Food left on counters showed bite marks.  Light switches flickered on and off with no one there.  The family members heard footsteps, and saw objects thrown through the air.  Worst of all was when the local vicar came and tried to talk to the culprit -- and a candlestick floated up into the air, followed by the entire china closet falling over, smashing everything inside.

The haunting had numerous witnesses.  Joe Pritchard's sister Maude Peerce, a vocal disbeliever in paranormal phenomena, said as much while in the house -- and the next thing she knew, an unseen hand had dumped an entire pitcher of milk on her.  René Holden, Jean Pritchard's sister-in-law, saw a whole carton of eggs fly through the air and smash against the kitchen wall.

It was only after this had been going on for some time that the Pritchards actually saw the entity itself.  It was, they said, a figure wearing a dark robe and cowl, like a monk's habit.  This was the point that the paranormal investigators got involved, in the person of Tom Cuniff of the Doncaster Psychical Research Group.  He got made contact with the perpetrator, he said -- it was the ghost of a monk who had been hanged during the reign of Henry VIII for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and whose angry spirit still resided there.  It even got the attention of novelist Colin Wilson, who visited the house in 1980.  "The ground itself contains some peculiar force that favours 'manifestations,'" Wilson wrote.  "The early haunting was triggered by Phillip and by his psychological tension.  The 'entity' remained in the area until Diane – who herself seems to possess undeveloped mediumistic powers – could provide the energy it needed to manifest itself."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The house has figured prominently in books and at least one film.  But here's where the profit motive comes in; shortly after the film (When the Lights Went Out) was released, producer Bill Bungay bought the house for £80,000 -- and rents it out to thrill-seekers and paranormal investigators for a cool £300 per person per night.

It's currently booked up two years ahead, with a waiting list as long as your arm, despite the fact that you have to sign a hold-harmless waiver before you can stay there.

Okay, so what's going on here?

As I've said many times before, I'm not saying the paranormal is impossible.  Thus far, the evidence I've seen does not meet the minimum standard that would be required to convince a rationalist skeptic, but that's as far as I'll go.  Present me with better quality evidence, and I'll have no choice but to change my mind.

Here, though... I see very little that couldn't be accomplished by fakery.  If it is a hoax, which of the eyewitnesses were dupes and which were in cahoots with the perpetrators is anyone's guess; I'm not going to point any fingers.  I've just seen too many examples of "True Tales of the Supernatural" that turned out to be some mix of trickery and gullibility to dismiss the possibility out of hand.  And considering how many honest-to-goodness skeptics are out there, willing to investigate, you'd think if there really was a honest-to-goodness haunting that was this blatant and in-your-face, it'd be a shoo-in to win someone James Randi's million-dollar prize for proving a paranormal claim under scientifically-acceptable conditions.

So I'm still dubious.  Especially -- to return to my original point -- considering how much money there is to be made from the Black Monk's existence.

Anyhow, that's our creepy tale for the day.  Even if I'm not convinced by it.  And if I end up getting pelted by eggs or having my china closet fall over today, I guess it's no more than I deserve.

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Footprints in the snow

My puppy Jethro is currently convalescing from knee surgery, following an ACL injury caused by an over-enthusiastic wrestling match between him and his best friend Rosie.  The surgery went well, and a week and a half later he's back to his usual ebullient self, but will be on serious exercise restriction for another month and a half.

This means that instead of letting all three dogs out into our big, fenced back yard, I have to take Jethro out on leash several times a day, starting when I get up, usually around 5:30 AM.  And when I brought him out a couple of mornings ago, I saw in the glow of the front porch light that there was a fresh coat of snow on the ground -- further evidence that the First Day of Spring doesn't mean that much here in upstate New York.

I was still dressed in my robe and slippers, and when Jethro was done outside we retreated gratefully back into the warmth of my office.  The morning dawned bright and clear, and the temperature quickly climbed into the mid-forties.  When I looked out of the window later in the day I could still see the line of footprints I made while taking Jethro out earlier, but the effects of the Sun had widened them from the clear indentations of a human wearing rubber-soled slippers into diffuse, open blobs -- and it immediately put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England.  Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale.

Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow.  The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon.  On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.  There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other.  The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across.  Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor.  On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.

What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles.  The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water.  Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down).  The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*).  The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.

The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the slipper-prints in my front yard.  The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.

A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand

The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack.  The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work. The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path.  The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."

Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.

Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman.  A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams.  The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash.  The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.

Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.

Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings became less frequent.  Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist).  With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker.  As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest.  It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.

The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories. I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue."  Still does, in fact.  Enough that I was glad when the fitful March sunshine finally eradicated my slipper-prints in the front yard -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.

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Guilt by association

I've played English country dance music for years.  It's a lovely repertoire, and playing for dances creates a wonderful synergy of sound and movement.  My previous band, Crooked Sixpence, featured a fiddler who is an exceptionally talented musician.  She hails from England, and is married to an Irishman from west Cork, so she is deeply familiar with the music of both the UK and Ireland.

One day, the dance caller we worked with sent us the set list for the next gig, and on it was a tune called "Lilliburlero."  I played through it, and it's a sprightly little thing, but I didn't know it by that name; I'd heard it as the tune to a bawdy seventeenth-century song called "My Thing is My Own."  I'll leave to your imagination what the "thing" was the singer is laying claim to, but... it's meant to be sung by a woman, and here's one verse as a clue:

A master musician came with intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument;
I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle must not be played on.

The tune, I found out, is often attributed to Henry Purcell, but apparently predates him by at least three decades.  (The link is to a lovely performance of the song by Ann and Nancy Wilson, of Heart fame, if you want to hear the whole thing.)

So I was surprised when Kathy, our fiddler, told the caller, "I'm not playing that."

Upon inquiry, it turned out that "Lilliburlero" also goes to a different set of words, lyrics that were written during the invasion of Ireland by the troops of William of Orange and which are meant to ridicule Irish language, culture, and religion.  Read through the lens of history, you can easily see why they're deeply offensive, and remain so to many people 350 years later -- to the point that just playing the tune can raise hackles, even though it existed as a dance tune, and then a (non-bigoted) bawdy song long before the ugly anti-Irish lyrics became attached to it.

Songs and tunes can be powerfully evocative, both positively and negatively.  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago was the birthday of late nineteenth, early twentieth century British composer and musician Hubert Parry, most famous for writing a gorgeous musical setting of William Blake's poem "Jerusalem."  I heard a performance of it on the satellite radio classical station on my way home from my volunteer gig (sorting books for the Friends of the Library used book sale), and later that day saw it posted more than once on social media:

The commenters on the posts seemed evenly split between "I love that piece" and "I hate it."  This by itself isn't that unusual, considering how variable musical tastes are, but it got interesting when I read why some of the latter disliked the piece so intensely.  I kind of figured it out when one person wrote, "Yes!  England's second national anthem!" and another responded, "Goddammit no it isn't, it's jingoistic trash, and people need to STOP SAYING THAT."

Parry wrote the music at the height of the British Empire and English colonialism, and for many, it has become associated with that spirit -- "the sun never sets on the Empire," "the White Man's Burden," and the exploitation of indigenous people and their land to serve the power-hungry and the bigoted.  What's interesting is that Blake's poem was written in 1808, and if you read the lyrics, it's not clear -- to me, at least -- that it's at all celebratory of any desire for the English to run out and conquer everything and everyone:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant land.

To my reading, the lyrics are not saying that the English are The Chosen People 2.0, but that they have a long way to go before God would find the place worthy of building a new Jerusalem there.  After all, it's pretty clear that Blake's answer to the four questions in the first two stanzas was a resounding "no."

William Blake, Ancient of Days (1794) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And it bears mention that Blake himself was more of a mystic than a politician.  In fact, he was arrested (later acquitted) of uttering "treasonous and seditious statements against the king," and was notable for being anti-war and critical of the damaging effects of the Industrial Revolution on both the natural environment and public health.  (Thus the line about England's "dark Satanic mills.")  I find a lot of his writing kind of obscure at times, and certainly evocative -- but hardly jingoistic, like much of the work of Rudyard Kipling.

What seems to have happened here is guilt by association.  A mystical poem is set to music, and then becomes famous during a time when that pro-Empire sentiment was at its height.  It became used as a recessional on Saint George's Day.  It's a staple of the choral repertoire, meant to stir the hearts of loyal Brits the world over.  The 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Olympic Games, got its title from the lyrics, and the song is played at the end of the film.  In fact, it was played at the opening of the London 2012 Summer Olympics -- as well as at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.  In 2019, it was voted "Britain's favorite hymn," although if you read the lyrics, it's debatable whether it even qualifies as a hymn in the traditional sense.

Music has a tremendous capacity to evoke emotion, and when lyrics are attached, even more so.  This causes the music itself to gain an additional layer of meaning that persists even when it's performed as an instrumental.  The interplay between music, words, meaning, and emotional response is complex and highly individual -- as I described in a post a few months ago, creativity is a dialogue, and each person brings to the experience their own background, opinions, worldviews, and tastes.  So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the same piece of music can set the heart pounding in one person, anger the absolute hell out of another, and leave a third unmoved either way.

Like with other matters of the creative relationship, chacun à son goût -- and the checkered history of some pieces of music make the matter even more complicated.

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Renaissance

It's easy to get beaten down by the constant barrage of bad news.

This effect is amplified if you, like me, suffer from anxiety and depression on good days.  All I have to do is spend a while reading the headlines, or (worse) hanging out on social media, and I start catastrophizing.  Everything is awful.  The bad guys always win.  We're all doomed.

I can spiral down that whirlpool really quickly, while at the same time knowing that it's not true.  A wise friend once told me, "The biggest lie that depression tells you is that the lows are permanent."  Yes, there are some very bad things happening right now.  But it is possible to hold that in your mind at the same time as believing there's still hope for the future.  I can agree with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and still wish it would bend a hell of a lot faster.

It's why I post here every day, and (mostly) focus on the positive, or at least the intriguing, rather than writing about the current political horror show day after day.  I do believe in speaking up for truth, fairness, and compassion, and decrying their opposites -- and I have done.  But I've found that it's equally important to find things that give us hope.  There is good news out there, and people are still doing lovely, kind, interesting, important, and wonderful things.

Sometimes those little sparks of hope come from odd quarters.  Which brings us to the Dover Twist.

It sounds like some sort of obscure English country dance, but it's not.  It's a species of moth native to southern England, Periclepsis cinctana, a little brown-and-white creature with a wingspan of only a bit over a centimeter.

It's an extreme habitat specialist, requiring chalk grasslands, which have largely been cleared for building.  And as we've seen over and over, when conditions change -- especially with human disturbance -- the specialists always get hit first and hardest.

So it was with the Dover Twist.  Although related populations still persist in mainland Europe, and a small relic on the island of Tiree off the northwest coast of Scotland, the last individual in its original habitat of southeastern England was seen in 1953.  Attempts to relocate it failed, and it was declared extirpated.

Until a couple of months ago, when conservation ecologist Rebecca Levey discovered a thriving population of them on a downland in Lydden Temple Ewell Nature Reserve, northwest of Dover.

"I was absolutely blown away," Levey said.  "It's the kind of discovery you dream of making, but you never expect it to actually happen.  With so many butterflies and moths in trouble across the UK, it’s fantastic to find this tiny little species bucking the trend.  After a 73 year gap in sightings, I'm so pleased to share that we now know it is still in Kent and I'm sure it'll be keeping me busy in the near future as we begin the task of uncovering the exact habitat it needs as part of Butterfly Conservation's work helping to save our most threatened moths."

The unexpected renaissance of this species is not only lovely news in general, but gives hope that some other species thought extinct -- especially ones like the Thylacine and Ivory-billed Woodpecker, that live(d) in remote and poorly-explored regions -- might still persist.  (Both of those, in fact, have been the subject of repeated sighting reports, but thus far, nothing that convinces the skeptics.  The search continues.)

I'm not sure why this story cheered me up as much as it did.  The Dover Twist is certainly not what my ecology professor called one of the "charismatic megafauna," something that'd be likely to end up featured in a calendar entitled "Majestic Wildlife."  But that this little insect survived undetected, virtually under our noses, is a symbol that things can turn out well.

The good guys do win sometimes.  Even if in this case, the good guys are a British ecologist and a minuscule brown-and-white moth.  Maybe it's not a dramatic victory, the kind that would make headlines, but it does give me a little boost of hope.

And this morning, that's enough to go on.

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Lost and found

I'm currently reading Michael Novacek's fascinating book Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, which is about the expeditions led by Novacek into the backcountry of the Mongolian Gobi Desert in search of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.

And they found 'em.  In abundance.  The remains that Novacek's team unearthed changed our understanding of the evolution of dinosaurs and early mammals in central Asia -- I've already lost count of the number of new species his group found, and I'm only about a third of the way through the book.

What struck me, though, is the combination of physical and personal hardship that the team members were willing to tolerate to achieve their goals.  The Gobi Desert is, even today, largely untraveled and unmapped; the nomadic groups that live in its arid wastes have to keep moving to survive in a climate that is broiling hot in the summer and viciously cold in the winter, has little in the way of drinkable fresh water, and is thin pasturage for domestic animals even at the best of times.  These scientists launched into the arid badlands in old, Soviet-era trucks that broke down every time someone sneezed hard, with carefully-rationed food, water, and gasoline, and exactly zero margin for error.

The fact that they not only survived, but achieved their scientific goals (and then some), is downright astonishing.  And every other page, I've shaken my head and thought, "I would never have the courage to do something like this.  Not in a million years."

Keep in mind, too, that this is coming from someone who did his share of backcountry camping, mostly in the Cascades and Olympics of Washington State.  Being a teacher has its perks -- June, July, and August being top of the list -- and when I was in my twenties I frequently disappeared into the fir-shrouded forests during the summer for weeks at a time.  So I'm no stranger to sleeping outdoors and hiking with a heavy pack.  (Or at least I was.  Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I'm afraid my appreciation of the creature comforts has done nothing but increase.)

But still: I would never have been brave enough to take off into the wilds of Mongolia the way Novacek et al. did (repeatedly).  Which probably would have scotched any intent I might have had to become a paleontologist.

On the other hand, sometimes -- admittedly, it's probably rare -- great paleontological discoveries can come from merely opening the right drawer in a museum.  The reason the topic comes up (besides my current reading-in-progress) is the chance find by paleontologist Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, who was doing some research in London's Natural History Museum and stumbled across the bones of a very unusual fossil snake that had been overlooked for forty years.

Dubbed Paradoxophidion richardoweni -- "Richard Owen's paradoxical snake" -- it lived in England during the Eocene Epoch, something like 37 million years ago.  At that point, England was a great deal warmer than it is now.  The world was just exiting the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at eight degrees Celsius higher than today one of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded.  The hot times favored diversification of ectothermic animals -- such as snakes -- in what are now regions with much cooler climates.

"It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there," said study lead author Georgalis.  "So, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling.  It's especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there's not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened."

The snake species, Georgalis said, seems to be related to a group called acrochordids now found only in southeast Asia and Australia -- although more study is needed to be certain.  And it also brought up the tantalizing question of what else might be hiding in museum drawers and cabinets.

"I'm planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen" Georgalis said.  "These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century.  There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven't been investigated before that I'm interested in looking at.  These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution."

So I guess you don't need to endure sandstorms and blistering heat and terrible food to make significant contributions to the field.

This also highlights the critical importance of museums in the entire scientific enterprise.  I found out yesterday the amazing news that one of our best local museums, the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth, has received enough donations to remain open -- funding cuts were looking likely to shutter it permanently.  On the one hand, I'm thrilled that enough people were willing to donate to keep this wonderful place going (and if you're willing, I encourage you to go to their website and do so as well -- even if they met their goal, they can still put every penny to good use).  On the other, though, isn't it sad that we never seem to run out of money for stuff like funding war and paying kickbacks to corporate billionaires, but cutting-edge scientific establishments that are inspirations to thousands basically have to hold a bake sale to stay in business?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matt Wedel, Yale brontosaurus, CC BY 4.0]

In any case, here's another puzzle piece adding to the picture of what the Earth was like tens of millions of years ago, that had been hidden away in a museum cabinet for four decades.  I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating, which probably explains why the topic of paleontology is such a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia. 

But as interested as I am, I still don't think I'd be brave enough to venture into the Gobi Desert to study it.

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High strangeness in Warminster

Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew.  But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?

It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard.  This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.

Here are the basics of the claim.

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above.  It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles.  "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported.  "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones."  Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside.  There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation).  But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."

Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.

At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds.  At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road.  But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close.  Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel."  The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.

But the incident wasn't over yet.  As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack."  "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."

A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force.  Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place.  I could hear an odd humming tone.  It was most unusual.  It lasted no more than a minute."

All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.

Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.

There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds.  People reported flocks of birds being found dead.  "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported.  "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.  It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."

This time, though, people began seeing things as well.

Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars.  Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky.  Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it.  It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall.  It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it.  It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."

By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:

By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965.  He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.

So, what's going on here?

There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them.  The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster.  The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.

A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts."  Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect."  It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life.  He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing.  They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.

Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.

In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here.  I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)

So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory.  When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.

Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation.  Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.  

The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident.  That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.

The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything.  We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category.  Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965.  Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria."  But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.

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Dark matters

A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful.  The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices."  We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.

What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this.  I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate.  I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?")  By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.

Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor.  I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.

The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there.  It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.

When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could.  This was that year's winner.  Pretty good, isn't it?  [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]

The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb.  Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences.  The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex.  The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives.  "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes.  "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted...  Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint.  This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives.  Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."

The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills.  One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello."  They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source.  More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe.  There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point.  (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room.  "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")

The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience."  The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences.  Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences.  Some of these episodes are guided, and others not.  The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.

Their responses are intriguing.  The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds.  I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:

For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear.  Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.

What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience?  I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment.  But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality.  We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.

Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary.  It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence.  I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").

I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation.  But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that.  The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.

I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

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Jumping on the bandwagon

There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious.  I call it the bandwagon effect.  The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."

The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell."  It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Leatherdale, Supposed UFO landing site - Rendlesham Forest - geograph.org.uk - 263104, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Here are the facts of the case.

On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest.  He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it.  Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."  One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."

Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle.  They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).

Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon.  The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."

The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.

There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming."  Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse."  The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.

In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered.  So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.

But what about Halt's testimony?

It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon.  He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly.  The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits.  The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights.  The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse.  Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.

Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:

Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken.  Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation...  All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap."  Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him.  So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years.  When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist.  The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest.  Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.

Which is it exactly.  But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.

As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol.  But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me.  I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it."  "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back.  Then we can talk.  Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."

But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting.  And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to.  Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

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Jenny's ancestry

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It's manifested in other realms of study.  My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction.  More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy.  Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them.  She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds.  (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories.  (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.")  And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either.  That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.  

So where does "Greenteeth" come from?  It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow.  Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers.  They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.

What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots.  The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero.  In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man's form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night.  He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water.  He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I've always felt sorry for Grendel.  He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way.  He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts.  It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel.  He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain.  Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth.  Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown.  Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind."  The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate.  Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history.  I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth.  I'll keep my eye out, though.  You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.

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