The mystery of the Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines are probably the world’s best-known example of “geoglyphs”, which can be defined as large-scale man-made markings on the ground that are made for artistic, religious or social reasons. But why are they there?

The Nazca Lines are in southern Peru, on barren land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. They comprise a huge collection of designs that cover many square miles. They take the form of straight lines, spirals, geometric shapes and depictions of animals and birds including monkeys, condors and hummingbirds.

The Lines are best seen from the air, which is what gave the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken the extraordinary idea that they were created by extra-terrestrials who used them as landing strips for their flying saucers in prehistoric times.

However, there is no need to go to these lengths to explain how the Lines came into being, although their precise purpose has yet to be established with certainty.

The Nazca were a tribe of people who lived in the area from around 400 BC to 600 AD. They were farmers who cultivated lands that were watered by rivers that ran off the Andes and flowed to the west. Their civilization was reasonably advanced and they produced distinctive pottery and textiles that bear patterns similar to those seen in the Lines.

This is a naturally arid region, not helped by the fact that the weather pattern known as El Niño can lead to seasons in which little rain falls and the rivers dry up. There is evidence that the people were highly religious and developed elaborate rituals to appease their gods in the hope of ensuring that the rivers would flow and their crops flourish. The Nazca Lines may well have played an important part in these rituals.

The Lines are narrow pathways that have been trodden flat and marked by stones along their edges. The stones are darker than the underlying dusty soil, being rich in iron ore, and are to be seen everywhere in the area as a result of natural geological processes. The paths were clearly intended to be walked along, although they do not lead to anywhere in particular. It may well be that one way of appeasing the gods was to walk a path from beginning to end, and it is noticeable that the paths form continuous lines with few if any crossings – a Nazca could take a ritual walk, chanting a prayer as he or she did so, and not run the risk of bumping into anyone else.

Shards of pottery have been found at intervals along the Lines, so it is possible that walkers may have smashed pots containing oil or some other precious liquid as they walked, as a means of reinforcing their prayers.

The Nazca civilization disappeared about 1,400 years ago, so it is not possible to be certain about the purpose of the Lines. That said, any explanation involving Earth-bound people is surely more likely than that they were navigational aids for little green men from outer space!

© John Welford

Why a red dragon is the symbol of Wales

The flag of Wales is dominated by a handsome red dragon. Why? According to the 12^th century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth it all goes back to the legends surrounding King Arthur and Merlin.

The story, as told by Geoffrey, concerns Vortigern, who may have been a Celtic king who ruled in central England and Wales in the 5^th century AD. The name translates as “supreme leader” so it may be more of a title that applied to a succession of kings rather than to just one man. However, Geoffrey was happy to assume that Vortigern was one person.

According to Geoffrey, Vortigern tried to build a strong fortress tower in Snowdonia. However, all the work done during the day was reduced to ruins every night. The druids advised him that the only way to make the building secure was to sacrifice a “fatherless child”, because the child’s blood in the tower’s foundations would ensure that it never fell down.

A young boy was found who fitted the bill, because he was the product of a demon and a princess. However, before he could be killed he spoke up and said that he knew why the tower kept falling down.

This was because, deep down below the tower, was a pool of water in which there was a huge stone chest, and in this chest two dragons were constantly fighting each other. The vibrations caused by their nightly battles were what undermined the tower.

Vortigern ordered his men to dig down and, sure enough, they found the chest and opened it. The two dragons, one red and one white, flew out and continued their fight in the air. The red dragon won the battle and killed the white dragon.

The boy explained that the white dragon represented the Saxons from overseas who would invade the country and threaten the Celtic Britons. The red dragon represented the Celts of Wales who would stand against the invaders and hold them back for a time.

The boy said that his name was Merlin. He prophesied that Vortigern would be killed but a greater king, named Arthur, would follow in his place. Arthur would bear the symbol of the red dragon on the crest of his helmet.

And that is why the symbol of Wales has, ever since, been the red dragon!

© John Welford

Debunking the Bermuda Triangle

The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle may not be so mysterious after all. There would appear to be rational explanations for just about every event that has prompted people to create the Triangle myth.

The Bermuda Triangle

The Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean that is delineated by the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico and the coast of Florida, which is as close to an equilateral triangle as one might like. Since 1945, so the sensationalists like to claim, there have been too many disappearances of planes and ships to be mere coincidence. There must, so they say, be a paranormal explanation, and many such have been put forward by a host of books and other media that have kept their authors very nicely supplied with cash over the years.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who, incidentally, would have loved to have indulged himself in the weird and wonderful theories put forward to explain the Bermuda Triangle) famously made his character Sherlock Holmes say that once you have eliminated all the possible explanations then the sole remaining one, however improbable, must be the truth. In the case of the Bermuda Triangle this process does not seem to have been exhausted, and conclusions have been jumped to that are simply not justified.

“Mysterious events”

The first mysterious event that gave rise to the legend of the Bermuda Triangle occurred in December 1945 when  a training exercise by five US warplanes, known as Flight 19, went disastrously wrong. After completing a bombing run on a chain of uninhabited islands, Flight 19 should have flown west back to base in Florida. Instead, the planes flew east and were never seen again. It appears that the flight leader was confused when both his compasses malfunctioned.

That event, strange though it was, would not have gathered any further significance were it not that other disappearances in the region, from previous years, were also brought to public attention. This is when credulity starts to become strained, because there is no reason to assign any reasons to those events that smack of the paranormal. All can be explained perfectly rationally as the results of human error, terrible weather or bad luck.

In March 1918 USS Cyclops sank, with the loss of 306 passengers and crew while on passage from Barbados to Baltimore. Nothing was ever found of the ship, so it became a “mystery sinking” when remembered years later. However, it is not certain that it actually sank inside the Bermuda Triangle, and its loss was almost certainly due to bad weather coupled with dangerous overloading.

SS Cotopaxi went down in December 1925 between South Carolina and Cuba, with the loss of 25 lives. There was nothing to suggest at the time that there was anything abnormal about the sinking, but that did not stop Steven Spielberg, in his “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, from having the ship discovered in the middle of the Gobi Desert!

A more recent loss, with 39 lives, was that of SS Marine Sulphur Queen in February 1963, off the Florida coast. The fact that nothing was found other than small pieces of debris excited the Triangle theorists, because it was not possible to come to a firm conclusion about the reason for the sinking,  but the Coast Guard report mentioned that the ship was in a poor state and should never have been allowed to put to sea.

There’s no mystery worth speaking of!

The theorists often seem to imply that ships and planes that enter the Bermuda Triangle are taking a huge risk, and that losses and sinkings rarely take place anywhere else. However, the statistics do not support this conclusion, given that this is a very busy piece of ocean in terms of aircraft and ship movements, and the number of disasters that have occurred over the years is no more than might have been expected.

Fortunes have been made by people who have formulated weird theories about the Bermuda Triangle, some of whom have not been above twisting the facts to fit their conclusions. It seems that as long as people want to believe that ships and planes are being dragged into parallel universes or abducted by aliens, then writers with an eye to the main chance will continue to satisfy their cravings for sensation and weirdness, happily snapping up the book and TV royalties in the process.

© John Welford

The drummer of Tidworth

Poltergeist activity, which involves objects being moved around a room, doors suddenly opening and closing, etc, is a form of psychokinesis, which means the use of the mind to control matter. It used to be thought that evil spirits were responsible for such events, and these were often the ghosts of dead people who wanted to vent their anger on the people they had left behind. However, many psychic researchers now take the view that psychokinesis is just as likely to be the result of a living mind making strange things happen, quite possibly without the agent’s knowledge.

One example of a poltergeist created by a living person was the “drummer of Tidworth”. The story dates from 1661 when King Charles II was on the throne and belief in witchcraft was extremely strong, especially in rural areas.

The mysterious drummer

The drummer, whose name has been lost from the historical record, lived in the village of Ludgershall in Wiltshire. He practised his drum at all hours of the day and night and, not surprisingly, caused a great deal of unhappiness among his neighbours. He was arrested by John Mompesson, who lived in the nearby village of Tidworth, who also confiscated the drum.

However, this did not stop the drum from playing! Not only that, but drumming was heard to come from all over Mompesson’s house, inside and out. Other strange things happened, including objects being thrown around, candles floating across rooms, chamber pots being emptied on to beds, voices and footsteps being heard and the children of the family being levitated above their beds at night.

These phenomena went on for two years, giving Mompesson and his family no peace at all.

However, when the drummer was arrested for theft and sent away to Gloucester jail, the drumming, and the accompanying events, came to a halt. While he was in jail he claimed that he had caused all the problems for John Mompesson, which was a foolish thing to do because he was then put on trial for witchcraft. Despite being found guilty his punishment was relatively mild, namely to be exiled from his home area.

Many years later the drummer was released from his sentence and allowed to return to Ludgershall, although he did not settle there. The poltergeist activity started up again whenever the drummer was in the area but disappeared when he was not.

An explanation?

Although the drummer said that he was responsible for the happenings in the Mompesson house, there is no evidence to suggest that he was directing what went on. If the psychic researchers are to be believed, it only took the drummer’s presence, together with his abiding anger, to make everything kick off at the house in Tidworth.

© John Welford

The Turin Shroud

The debate continues about whether the Turin Shroud is genuine or not. Opinion is divided based in part on personal belief. Unfortunately it is impossible at present for science to settle the matter once and for all.

What is the Turin Shroud? 

The Turin Shroud is a piece of linen cloth that has been in the possession of Turin Cathedral since 1578. The shroud is about fourteen feet long by four feet wide and it bears on it an image of the front and back of a man. The image is faint, and it shows up best when photographed and the negative image used (the accompanying picture shows the shroud in negative and positive images). It then becomes clear that the man has suffered injuries consisted with those of Christ when he was crucified. The conclusion drawn by many people is that this is the cloth in which Christ’s body was wrapped when he was taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea.

Obtaining proof

Efforts to prove the shroud to be either genuine or a fake have gone on for many years. In 1988 a fragment of the cloth was analysed and it was found that it was made at a date between 1260 and 1390. That seemed to settle the matter, especially as it placed the shroud in the medieval period when the production of religious fakes, for sale to gullible pilgrims and others, was being done on an almost industrial scale. It is estimated, for example, that at least forty shrouds were doing the rounds at one time, all of them claiming to be the genuine article but some being more obvious fakes than others.

However, the objection was then made that the piece of cloth that was analysed in 1988 could have been from an area of the shroud that had undergone repair in the 13^th/14^th century and that the rest of the cloth, especially the part bearing the image, was considerably older. Just to add to the argument in favour of the shroud being genuine, it has been shown that the weave of the cloth is consistent with the type used at the relevant time and place.

The clinching argument could be made either way if the analysis could extend to investigating how the image was imprinted on the cloth. However, the Vatican has never allowed this work to be done. Some people see this as suspicious – does the Vatican know that the shroud is a fake but does not want the outside world to find this out? Or is the motive merely one of wanting to protect the shroud and avoid any risk of damage?

The known history of the Shroud

Another line of enquiry is based on tracing the history of the shroud. If it could be proved that the artefact held at Turin has a provenance that goes back beyond the era of faked relics, that would be a considerable factor in favour of it being genuine.

On this score, there is some evidence, albeit circumstantial, that links the shroud to the “Image of Edessa” that was known to exist in Constantinople before the year 1204. It is contended that the Edessa cloth, of which there is a record from the early 12^th century, was moved to Constantinople from Edessa (a town in south-east Turkey) before the latter city was sacked by the Ottomans in 1144. Constantinople was itself sacked by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and it is possible that this was when the shroud found its way to Europe, as part of the booty of a crusading knight.

The undisputed provenance of the Turin Shroud takes the story back to the mid-15^th century, when it was held by the Duke of Savoy. It is almost certain that the House of Savoy acquired it from the de Charny family, and it is known that a French knight named Geoffrey de Charny held what could easily have been the shroud in 1355. Geoffrey de Charny was descended from a crusader, so it is indeed possible that the story of the shroud being looted from Constantinople is true.

On the other hand, the date of 1355, which agrees with the 1988 carbon dating test on the cloth, is also slap bang within the problem era of forged relics. So could de Charny have had the cloth made to substantiate a family story that an ancestor had brought the Image of Edessa back from the Fourth Crusade?

This is one of those cases in which people tend to accept the evidence that supports their desired conclusion and reject the rest. The real key to solving the mystery lies with discovering how the image got on the cloth, and that is one piece of the puzzle that is frustratingly absent from the evidence base!

© John Welford

The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976) provided a mystery of her own in 1926. On the evening of 3^rd December she disappeared from her home in Berkshire and the next morning her car was found abandoned a few miles away.

The event became big news as 15,000 people volunteered to search the surrounding countryside and a lake was dragged by the police, the fear being that Mrs Christie had met her death by accident or design.

However, the search was called off eleven days later when Agatha Christie was found, perfectly safe, staying at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Despite this outcome, the mystery of what had happened during the interim between disappearance and discovery continued, because Agatha Christie had no memory of how she had got from Berkshire to Yorkshire and could offer no explanation for her behaviour.

The mystery has never been solved, although various theories have been put forward.

One thought was that the whole thing was a publicity stunt designed to boost sales of Agatha Christie’s latest novel, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”. However, this is unlikely because the book was doing very well anyway and there was no need for any such promotion.

Another suggestion made at the time was that she had suffered an attack of amnesia after the recent death of her mother.

A more likely explanation is that it had something to do with Agatha Christie’s private life, particularly her state of mind over the crumbling of her marriage to Archibald Christie. A clue to this possibility is that she checked into the Harrogate hotel using the name of Archibald’s mistress, which must mean that the affair was uppermost in her mind.

The marriage stumbled on for another two years before the Christies divorced. Agatha would later find happiness with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. She used to joke that an archaeologist was the perfect husband because he got more interested in his spouse the older she got!

The story of Agatha Christie’s disappearance was featured in the Hollywood film “Agatha” in 1979. This frankly disappointing production starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, the latter playing a completely fictional American investigating journalist. The attempt to make an exciting story out of something that was basically a non-event led, somewhat predictably, to a result that left much to be desired.

© John Welford

The Greenbriar ghost

Most ghost stories are just that – stories. However, when an account of ghostly visitation is used as evidence in court to convict a murderer, something very strange is happening. Read on!

The Greenbriar ghost

Zona Heaster was born in 1873 near Greenbriar, Virginia. In 1896 she met a blacksmith, who was new to the area, and fell in love with him. This was Edward (or Erasmus) Shue. Zona’s widowed mother, Mary Heaster,  took an instant dislike to him but could not prevent the pair from marrying, which they did on 26^th October.

On 23^rd January 1897 Edward Shue was at work when he asked an 11-year-old boy, Andy Jones, to go to the Shue house to see if Zona needed any help. When Andy opened the door he found Zona lying dead on the floor. Andy rushed back to summon Edward.

When the local doctor, George Knapp, arrived, he found that Edward Shue had dressed Zona in her Sunday best and was cradling her in his arms in a state of utter distress. Dr Knapp therefore found it impossible to examine the body. He assumed that Zona had died in childbirth.

However, Mary Heaster, Zona’s mother, was far from satisfied with this explanation. She was particularly suspicious of the fact that Edward Shue insisted that Zona’s body could not be seen without her favourite red scarf round her neck.

Mary then came up with the story that Zona’s ghost visited her one night and told her that she had had her neck broken by Edward who had flown into a violent rage because Zona had not cooked his supper properly. The ghost then spun her head round in a complete circle.

Mary insisted that the local prosecutor must order the body to be exhumed, and this was done on 22^nd February. An autopsy revealed that Zona’s neck had indeed been broken, just as Mary claimed the ghost had told her. Edward Shue was arrested and tried for murder.

Despite all the evidence against him being circumstantial, Shue was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 1900.

Was justice served?

It seems quite likely that Shue did kill Zona, but there were other possibilities. One suggestion has been that Mary had found her daughter dead and broke her neck in order to frame Edward.

At all events the jury at Edward Shue’s trial did seem to find convincing Mary Heaster’s evidence of being visited by Zona’s ghost, especially when Mary was able to state that the ghost had said that her neck had been “squeezed off at the first vertebra”. However, this does seem to betray remarkably detailed anatomical knowledge on the part of a simple countrywoman, and should lead us to wonder if the “ghost story” was an invention on Mary’s part, whatever role Edward might have played in Zona’s death.

For one thing, could Mary have seen the autopsy report at some stage before the trial? Another interesting point is that the “Greenbriar Independent” that carried the story of Zona’s death also contained a report of a case in Australia in which a ghost had been invoked as providing evidence of a murderer’s guilt. It would be a remarkable coincidence if Mary had come up with her story without having read about the Australian case in the same newspaper that reported her daughter’s death.

Either Edward Shue did kill Zona, and Mary made sure that he would be convicted, or Zona died of natural causes and Mary used the ghost story to frame Edward with her murder. In either scenario there are disturbing details that don’t quite add up. This is probably a case in which the truth will never be established to everyone’s satisfaction.

(The photo is of the Greenbriar River)

© John Welford

Cheese rolling at Brockworth

There is something about the human spirit, or at least the young male human spirit, that delights in bravado and risking one’s life for the sheer hell of it. In Spain it is traditional for hundreds of young men (and even a few women) to run through the streets of Pamplona chased by a herd of bulls. In England, things are done a bit differently. Here they fall down a hill while chasing a cheese!


Cheese rolling at Brockworth

The village of Brockworth is in Gloucestershire, where the Cotswold Hills meet the plain of the River Severn. Cooper’s Hill is a particularly steep slope on the edge of the village and it has been the site of the annual cheese rolling event for hundreds of years. It has been recorded as taking place since the early 19th century, but its origins may be even older than that. The traditional date was Whit Monday, but in recent years it has taken place on Spring Bank Holiday which is the last Monday in May.

The idea is that a round Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down the hill and the first person to run after it and catch it wins it as their prize. The only problem is that the hill is extremely steep (almost vertical in places) and the chance of actually running down it, let alone keeping up with the cheese, is virtually nil. Before long gravity takes over and the runners turn into fallers, tumblers, rollers and, if they are really unlucky, candidates for a ride to the nearest hospital in the back of an ambulance!

Although the event was of purely local interest for most of its existence, in recent years it has attracted worldwide attention and people travel from all over to take part or merely spectate. It is now common for four races to take place, each of about twenty competitors. Should all the ambulances be occupied after the first or second race, there is sometimes a delay before the next one can start.


The race

The racers stand at the top of the hill and wait for the traditional call from the master of ceremonies of: “One to be ready. Two to be steady. Three to prepare. Four to be off!” The cheese has a one second start, but it is in little danger of being caught before the end of the 230-metre course as it can reach a speed of 70 miles an hour before it thuds into the straw bales at the foot of the hill. In the photo above you can just see the cheese on the edge of the shadowed area.

Cuts and bruises are to be expected, and dislocations and broken limbs are not unknown. Needless to say, the event has been threatened by health and safety considerations, and the owner of the cheese has been warned that they might be held legally responsible for any injury claims that are forthcoming. However, the force of tradition has always won through and no doubt eighty more idiots will hurl themselves off the Cotswolds every year they are given the chance.

© John Welford

The World Black Pudding Throwing Championships

You can be a world champion in many different ways these days. Perhaps one of the more unusual world titles that might come your way is that of World Black Pudding Thrower.

Ramsbottom’s day of glory

The event is held in September every year at the Royal Oak pub in Ramsbottom, Lancashire, England. Ramsbottom is one of the myriad of small towns that are strung along the valleys north of Manchester and were once the centre of Britain’s cotton spinning and cloth-making industry.

The black pudding is a traditional Lancashire delicacy (if that is the right word) consisting mainly of pig’s blood, oatmeal, onions and pork fat. Ramsbottom is a centre of black pudding making, and the town is therefore very proud of its heritage.

But why throw them? And at what?

The answer to the latter question helps to answer the first. The target for the black puddings is Yorkshire puddings, which are very different beasties, being made from flour, eggs and milk. However, it is the “Yorkshire” that is probably more significant here than the “pudding”.

Ever since the Wars of the Roses of the 15^th century, which pitted the House of York against the House of Lancaster, the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, either side of the Pennine Hills, have been rivals. This rivalry has been contested most fiercely on the cricket field, but the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships offers a fresh opportunity. If you are going to hurl Lancashire’s finest at something, why not Yorkshire’s paltry (they would say) offering?

The event attracts competitors from all over the world – probably even Yorkshire. Typically, several hundred people turn up to try their hand at lobbing black puddings at piles of Yorkshires.

There are strict rules, as one might expect. The black puddings are specially made for the competition at a regulation weight of 170 grams and are wrapped in pantyhose to prevent them from disintegrating when thrown. Likewise, the Yorkshires must be of a consistent consistency, which can mean changing them frequently if the weather is wet when the event takes place. A soggy Yorkshire is more difficult to displace than a crisp one.

Another strict rule is that all throws must be underarm, although various techniques can be employed. Expert throwers have devised all sorts of spins and trajectories to achieve maximum devastation of Yorkshires.

Championship day

The event is carried out with considerable celebration. Just down the road from the pub is Ramsbottom station on the preserved East Lancashire Railway. The “golden grid”, which is the “oche” from which throwers take their aim, is transported to Ramsbottom on a steam-hauled train and then borne aloft to the Royal Oak to the accompaniment of Scottish bagpipes.

Other amusements take place during the somewhat lengthy event, including a separate children’s championship and a one-day music festival that is imaginatively entitled “Pudstock”.

At the end of the day the dislodgers of the most Yorkshires, senior and junior, are declared World Champions and everyone goes home happy, having probably drunk the pub dry in the meantime.

© John Welford

The ghosts of Berry Pomeroy Castle

Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon has more than its fair share of ghosts to alarm the unwary visitor!

Berry Pomeroy is a village in South Devon, England, not far from the town of Totnes. The Pomeroys were a Norman family that “came over with the Conqueror” in 1066 and were granted lands in the area. However the castle was not built until the late 15^th century. It was sold in 1547 to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and his son built a completely new four-storey manor house within the curtain wall of the original castle. This manor house was later abandoned by his descendants and fell into ruin.

Stories of hauntings have been told for hundreds of years and seem to be associated mainly with the original owners, the Pomeroys.

The White Lady is believed to be the ghost of Margaret Pomeroy. She haunts the dungeons, where it is said that she was imprisoned by her sister Eleanor. Margaret was the more beautiful of the sisters and had no trouble in attracting men. Eleanor’s jealousy reached such a pitch that she threw her sister into the dungeon where she slowly starved to death.

The Blue Lady roams the whole castle and has the nasty habit of beckoning people to follow her to her tower. The legend says that should anyone be taken in by this trick they will meet their death by falling from the top of the tower.

The Blue Lady is supposed to date from an earlier period than the White Lady and to have been the daughter of one of the early Pomeroys from Norman times. However, this seems unlikely as it has been proved by archaeology that, although they owned the land, the first Pomeroys did not build anything on this site.

The story goes that the Blue Lady was raped by her father who then strangled the baby that she bore, although another version states that it was she who killed the baby. Whichever version is true (assuming that either of them is!) a sight of the Blue Lady is supposed to be a harbinger of death, and not necessarily by falling from her tower.

A 19^th century doctor is supposed to have seen the Blue Lady during a visit to the castle to treat the wife of a steward. Although she seemed to be making a full recovery, she died soon after the doctor had left. The viewing of the ghost sounds rather like a convenient excuse for administering the wrong drugs and causing the death of one’s patient!

Just for good measure, Berry Pomeroy Castle also boasts a Grey Lady, a cavalier, and strange shadows that have nothing solid to cast them.

© John Welford

The Cottingley Fairies

Many people were convinced that a photograph taken in 1917 really did show fairies at the bottom of the garden. It was many years later that it was proved that the whole thing was a schoolgirl prank that got out of hand.

A famous photograph

Four fairies dance in a woodland setting, with a waterfall in the background. Three of them have huge wings growing from their shoulders, while the fourth plays a set of fairy pipes. Behind them, on a different scale to the fairies, a young girl looks at them and at the camera. To all intents and purposes she has found the fairies at the bottom of the garden and her friend has captured the scene in a photograph.

This photograph, the most famous of a series, five in all, achieved notoriety in the early 20^th century as offering proof of the existence of fairies. The “Cottingley Fairies” convinced many people at the time, not least Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories, who wrote about the photographs in the Strand Magazine and thus brought them to wide public attention. How could they be anything other than what they purported to be, especially as the photographer was an innocent young girl aged 16?

A famous hoax

Although the photographs had their doubters, it was not until 1983 that they were finally proved to be fakes, by Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography. He confirmed this by talking to the photographer, then in her 80s, who admitted that she and her cousin had concocted the hoax as a childhood prank, but it had got completely out of hand.

Early suspicions about the photographs revolved over whether some sort of double exposure technique had been used, which was a normal method for producing “ghosts”, but this was dismissed by experts at both Kodak and Ilford. Others wondered about the exposure used for the photographs, because, although the background waterfall is blurred, the dancing figures are in much sharper focus, which would have been unlikely with the long exposure necessary to get a good image in a relatively dark setting without supplementary lighting.

Despite this, some of the “experts” who accepted the photographs as being genuine claimed to detect “movement” on the part of the fairies, but they failed to consider that this could have been due to inexpert handling of a camera by a young amateur photographer, or even produced at the developing stage if the image had been under-exposed.

What really happened

The story of how the Cottingley Fairies were created goes back to a day in 1917 when two young girls were told off for playing in the stream and getting their clothes wet. Elsie Wright lived with her parents at Cottingley Dell, near Bingley in Yorkshire. Staying with the family was Frances Griffiths, aged ten, who lived in South Africa but was lodging with her uncle and aunt while her father was fighting in the War. The two were clearly great friends and would do anything to defend each other if one of them got into trouble.

Thus, when Frances claimed that the reason why they were late back and their clothes were wet was that they had been playing with the fairies, Elsie decided to produce the proof. A few days later, Elsie and Frances set off for the Dell with Elsie’s father’s plate camera and came back with a plate which they asked Mr Wright to develop. When he did, there was Frances, playing with the fairies.

At first, the Wrights laughed off this “evidence”, so the girls went back for more, eventually producing four more examples, including one of Elsie with a gnome. Mr Wright, who was happy to go along with all this and continue developing the pictures taken by his daughter, was always sceptical about how they had been produced, but Mrs Wright took them far more seriously. She mentioned them to someone she met at a lecture on folklore, and the thing snowballed, eventually gaining the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was a convinced spiritualist, whose beliefs had been stirred after losing his son in the War and, like many others at the time, was seeking a way of making contact with his son’s spirit. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, which was particularly active in the post-war period and provided a ready audience and support for anything to do with the spirit world and parapsychology.

Conan Doyle praised the two girls to the skies, and actually gave them twenty pounds apiece. This made it very difficult for them to do anything other than stick to their original story, namely that the photographs were genuine.

Of course, they were not! Elsie Wright, although not particularly clever academically, did have some talent as an artist and later made a career as a colourist of sepia photographs. She simply copied some pictures of fairies from a book on to stiff card and cut them out. These cut-outs were then mounted on hatpins and arranged as required at the scene, along with the human model. On some of the photographs the hatpins are clearly visible, but those who did not wish to see such evidence of fakery simply did not see it. Even when Conan Doyle did detect a hole in one in the fairies’ bellies, where the hatpin had pierced the cut-out, he used it to claim that fairies must be able to reproduce as this was clearly a navel!

And so the Cottingley Fairies lived on in the public imagination, or at least in the imagination of those who would have been convinced of their genuineness come what may. The two girls, as they grew up, were always somewhat coy about what they had done, leaving open the possibility, to some people at least, that there was more than mere trickery behind the photographs. Having achieved fame from their childhood prank, they were determined to dine out on it for as long as possible. Despite Elsie’s admission to Geoffrey Crawley in 1983, she still maintained a mischievous attitude about the affair until the day she died, in 1988.

© John Welford

Borley Rectory, "the most haunted house in England"

Borley Rectory was once famous (or notorious) for being “the most haunted house in England”. During the years of its greatest fame, namely the period from 1929 to 1938, it was certainly much haunted by psychical researchers, but whether anything more other-worldly ever happened there is a matter for considerable doubt and conjecture.


Borley Rectory

The rectory was built in 1863 to accommodate the Reverend Henry Bull, the rector of Borley near Sudbury in Suffolk (although Borley is just over the border in Essex). The house was later expanded as his family grew – Rev and Mrs Bull eventually had 14 children.

Nothing untoward was noticed at the Rectory until 1900, when Ethel Bull, one of the daughters, reported seeing the ghostly figure of a nun in the garden. This seemed to tie in with a local legend to the effect that the rectory site had been that of a monastery in the 13th century, and that there had a been a nunnery not far away. A monk and a nun had supposedly fallen in love and had been killed before they could elope.

The natural conclusion to draw is that Ethel had heard the story and become so convinced by it that she imagined seeing the ghostly nun. Ethel lived to the age of 93 and always maintained that the ghost was real, but, again, that is not the most convincing reason for believing the story to be true. Indeed, research has shown that there was never a monastery at Borley, so the original story could not have been true.


Harry Price investigates

In 1929 the psychical researcher Harry Price became interested in the Rectory, not least because the then incumbents, Rev and Mrs G E Smith, had reported (according to Price) all sorts of strange goings-on in the house, including odd sounds and smells, objects being moved, bells being rung, writing appearing on walls, doors slamming, and fires starting without warning.

Harry Price held a séance, in which the spirit causing all these phenomena turned out, according to the medium conducting the séance, to be Reverend Bull!

The Smiths moved out of the Rectory, to be replaced by the Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne. The poltergeist activity increased, as did Harry Price’s investigations.

When the Foysters could stand it no longer (either the phenomena, or Price’s constant presence, or both), they abandoned the Rectory and Harry Price leased the house himself. He invited a whole team of researchers to spend nights in the house and record their observations, as well as making plenty of his own notes.

Harry Price summed up his findings and conclusions in a book, “The Most Haunted House in England”, published in 1940. What he wrote convinced a great many people at the time, and the house’s reputation entered the public consciousness.


The aftermath

The rectory burned down in 1946, with reports that a ghostly figure was seen at an upstairs window. Whether the fire was started deliberately or accidentally is a matter for debate. When bones were found buried underneath the house, this added more “evidence” to the side of the argument that claimed the hauntings to be genuine. However, whether the bones were human, as opposed to those of farm animals, has never been established.

Harry Price died in 1948 and left his huge collection of books and documents to the University of London Library. The current writer worked for a short time at the library in 1974-5 and became familiar with the Harry Price collection – indeed the copy of “The Most Haunted House in England” that I read was Harry Price’s own copy. However, what most impressed me about the Harry Price collection was the large number of books it contained on subjects such as conjuring and magic tricks, as well as more esoteric material on witchcraft and the occult. Therein lies an important clue to the whole Borley Rectory story.

Harry Price was a trickster who had begun his professional life by exposing the tricks used by others. As well as using some genuine scientific methods to investigate strange phenomena, such as measuring temperature changes and photographing evidence, there is every reason to think that many of the incidents were faked, being little more than conjuring tricks, and that purely natural events were given a significance they did not deserve.

For example, Price’s team of 40 investigators mostly comprised known mediums and students. The reputation of a medium depends on their being able to detect spirit presences, so they are hardly likely to say that they have not done so when given such a golden opportunity. As for the students, it is much more fun to say that something weird has happened than that it has not.

One of the most damning pieces of evidence against Price is that, while an independent investigator was being shown round the house, having been told that things got thrown around for no apparent reason, he was hit on the head by a pebble. Harry Price’s pockets were later found to be full of pebbles.

Another reason for doubting Price’s claims was that Mrs Smith declared in 1949 that, far from what Price had written in his book, the phenomena he reported had only begun after he turned up at the Rectory and not before.

The Borley Rectory saga is therefore one of a story getting out of hand. Harry Price, who had absolutely no qualifications for the job and lacked any scientific training, was desperate for recognition as a genuine psychical researcher. He needed an opportunity to prove himself, and Borley Rectory was that opportunity. He knew the sort of evidence that should be present in a genuinely haunted house and was fully capable of producing it, which he did.

© John Welford