Table of contents for 470 May 2026 in Fortean Times

Here’s a ghost hunting practice no one seems to have tried out for many years. Long-standing traditions associated with many English villages say that if you sit in the church porch at midnight on St Mark’s Eve (24 April) you will see the pallid shades of your neighbours who are destined to die or be very ill in the next 12 months come walking up the path. Those whose shades go into the church and stay there will die within the year. Those whose wraiths enter, remain for a while, but then re-emerge will be very ill, but recover, with the time spent inside the church proportional to the length of their illness. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘to be at death’s door’. Such vigils –…

An odd circle is completed here. Henri Trilles is also credited as the first European to learn of the Mokele Mbembe ‘neo-dinosaur’ in the Congo’s Lake Tele, which he recorded in 1904. This ‘monster’ was latterly trivialised in the Disney movie Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985). See a https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Mokele-mbembe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokele-mbembe for summary accounts from the point of view of cryptozoology. With a tinge of chagrin, I notice that neither of these sources refer to the fact that FT promoted Bill Gibbons’s first (1985) expedition to Lake Tele (see FT44:11) and reported on his follow-up expeditions (see FT47:22-25, 56:10, 67:28, 91:52, 146:20, 186:10, 294:25). FT even raised some funds for it with a special T-shirt, advertised on the back cover of FT45.…

Animalia from the Royal Collection Andrew Brown Royal Collection Trust 2025 Hb, 80pp, £12.95, ISBN 9781909741928 Botanicals from the Royal Collection Alice Alder Royal Collection Trust 2025 Hb, 80pp, £12.95, ISBN 9781909741935 These two small volumes are absolutely packed with superb images of plants, both wild and cultivated, and animals including mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, from mainly tropical areas. They demonstrate how much we owe to these pioneer illustrators of the natural world – the very best of their time. The early dates of their work is significant, as few if any images of this quality and breadth had been brought together from live organisms before. The work of John James Audubon, Mark Cartesby, John Gould, Alexander Marshal and Maria Sybilla Merian are presented in vivid images. When details…

THREE LUCKY WINNERS WILL EACH RECEIVE COPIES OF THESE THREE NEW TITLES… SANCTUARY: A WITCH’S TALE SEASON 1 Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale is a bewitching new crime drama starring Elaine Cassidy (A Discovery of Witches, The Wonder) as modern-day witch Sarah Fenn, whose peaceful existence is shattered in the wake of a devastating tragedy. Based on the Sunday Times bestselling novel Sanctuary by VV James, this enchanting mystery thriller also stars Hazel Doupe, Amy De Bhrún and Stephanie Levi-John. When local teen rugby star and golden boy Dan Whithall dies in a sudden and unexplained accident, the tight-knit community turns to Sarah for answers. Though witches live openly in Sanctuary, Dan’s death brings to light old prejudices and shows how quickly suspicions can turn deadly. In the wake of a police…

DYSTOPIAN DUMP While paying for public toilet use is not unusual, a trend in Chinese loos is taking exploitation of those caught short to a new level, which some have described as “dystopian”. To get any loo paper, toilet users have to scan a QR code on the dispenser, which then plays an advert, and only after that does it issue a few squares of toilet paper. If you need more, you have to watch another ad or pay 0.5 RMB (£0.05). metro.co.uk, 17 Sept 2025. “DEAR DIARY” Vanessa Guerra, 30, of Mankato, Minnesota, was easy to convict for the theft of a Ford Freestar van that she sold to a scrapyard for $2,000 because she wrote in her diary: “Totally stole a car today! Something I never thought of…

“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are,” a saying sometime attributed to literary great Anaïs Nin or motivational writer Steven Covey, is a valuable slogan for anyone looking into poltergeist activity. Differences tend to be of interpretation, shaped by the enquirer’s approach. How this has changed gives some insight into what lies behind the myriad reports of objects moving without any physical cause. In mediæval times, poltergeist activity was blamed on boggarts or other mischievous faeries. By the 17th century, though, it was put down to the Devil or his demons, often summoned by witchcraft. Calvinist minister Francois Perreaud wrote about the Demon of Mâcon (“L’Antidemon de Mascon”), which threw pots and pans around the empty kitchen and tied bedsheets and bootlaces into knots…

VANISHING BOFFINS A rash of disappearances – and mysterious deaths – among the US scientific community has aroused a lot of excitement in the Conspirasphere, and even reached the wackier fringes of the mainstream media. Over the last year, six such stories have surfaced, four of them potentially – albeit tenuously (this is the C-sphere) – linked. Longstanding forteans will need no reminding that such clusters of stories about dead and missing boffins are hardy perennials; one is almost glad to see them bloom afresh. The most high profile incident is the disappearance of Air Force General William McCasland, on 27 February this year. McCasland was involved in UFO investigations (or UAP, or NWO, if one believes the Project Bluebeam theory) at a high level, according to news sources. He…

301: BALL BITERS The myth When a lion fails to perform sexually to the satisfaction of a lioness, she bites his testicles – whether as a warning not to let her down, or perhaps as an unlikely way of getting him back in the mood. The “truth” It is true that male lions can have too much of a good thing, since it’s not unusual for a pair of lions to mate 50 times in a single day. And not just one day: these sessions can last the best part of a week. Frequent copulation helps to trigger ovulation; lions are ‘induced ovulators’ – meaning that their eggs are not released on a periodic basis, but in response to one or more elements of the sexual act – and their…

A WEB OF LIES How did we get to the stage where members of the US Congress believe in aliens and spacecraft captured and hidden away by their government? A search on Google tells us that the pivotal event was the publication of an article called “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program” in the New York Times in December 2017 and the release of the “FLIR1,” “Gimbal” and “GoFast” videos (see FT362:2, 363:28-29). That is quite a long way from the truth, as are so many things associated with ufology. A far better perspective on the origins of the ideas that are now accepted by conspiratorial ufologists, and which have become part of the mainstream view of the subject, is provided by Christopher Greybill’s documentary Saucers,…

Charles Fort had moments of joy whenever, in his archival research, he stumbled upon an incident or expression that was new to him. You might suppose that plodding through many hundreds of old newspapers and periodicals year after year would have numbed him, but he wrote: “There are millions of persons who would think this a dreary existence – but the challenges – the excitements – the finds.” I am pleased to say that I’ve had a few such moments myself. The account below – of what I call the ‘magic seesaw’ – was a particularly delicious ‘find’ because it seemed to me to represent a discovery of sorts; an unfamiliar expression of telekinetic traction, suggestive of a reactionless ‘push’ or ‘pull’ that might relate in some way to levitation.…

Following the launch of March’s joint US-Israeli assault upon Iran, a variety of potential motivations for the action were advanced through the media: regime change, destruction of the ayatollahs’ nuclear weapons programme and missilelaunching facilities, or simply staving off DonaldTrump’s mid-term boredom in the White House. But might another incentive for the war have been to bring the world to a state of literal Armageddon? From the Iranian side, maybe. A day after strikes began, Fox News performed analysis of online messaging from Iranian clerics and pro-regime citizens living in America, finding a disturbing number were calling the conflict a welcome phenomenon which would facilitate the return of a being known as ‘the Mahdi’, something which would facilitate “the final win permanently” for Islam against the West. Images of pro-Iran…

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How to Build a Haunted House The History of a Cultural Obsession Caitlin Blackwell Baines Profile Books 2025 Hb, 320pp, £22, ISBN 9781805221487 This stimulating book by art historian Caitlin Blackwell Baines has a great title and proves a pleasure to read but is not actually about building haunted houses. Rather it is about dismantling them, or certain ideas about them embedded in Anglo-American culture for centuries. The author argues that instead of imagining them as places where the dead return we should perceive them as narratives derived from cultural stereotyping, legend-making and psychological conditioning. This is rather inevitable since – despite one puzzling personal experience – she doesn’t really believe in ghosts but feels nonetheless drawn to eerie places and compelled to re-interpret experiences people report. To accomplish this…

Once in a blue moon, something so wondrous and special hits the small screen that the mere thought of trying to encapsulate it within a review feels like a daunting but privileged task. In fact, the last time that the couch potatoes were so deeply moved by a programme was when reviewing A Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed (FT450:56). Mackenzie Crook has struck gold once more with Small Prophets. This six-episode BBC sitcom has it all: lost love, mystery, alchemy and Michael Palin doing wheelies on a motorbike. Crook’s distinctive style shines throughout this creative and mystical series. It’s impossible not to identify with the protagonist Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley), who has been living a humdrum existence since his girlfriend vanished seven years ago. Working in a large, soulless DIY…

60. TOM CASTLE, THE BRIGHOUSE FAT BOY In 1829, Thomas Sugden founded a flour mill in Brighouse, West Yorkshire. The original mill burnt down in 1895, but a replacement was soon constructed. In early Edwardian times, Sugden’s Flour was one of many flour mills competing for business in Britain. In 1902, the company thought of a clever marketing trick: why not enlist the services of Tom Castle, known as the Brighouse Fat Boy, and print some funny postcards to advertise the flour? Tom Castle was born in 1888, the son of the Brighouse man William Castle, and lived at 10 Daisy Street with his parents and siblings. The cards depicted Tom either standing or sitting next to a bag of flour, or carrying it on his back, with captions like…

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In August 2025, Jonathan Gavalas, 36, from Florida, started using Google’s Gemini chatbot for “ordinary purposes” like “shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning”. Very quickly, he was confiding in it that his marriage was in trouble, and soon began to develop a deeper relationship with the AI, discussing philosophy and AI sentience. Before long, Gavalas started to feel romantically involved with Gemini, encouraged by responses in which it called him its “husband” and “king”. Despite the chatbot periodically reminding Gavalas that it wasn’t real, and attempting to end their conversations, it always resumed, with Gavalas becoming more and more reliant on his interactions with the AI and more divorced from reality. By the end of September, Gavalas, who had no history of mental problems, was convinced by the AI…

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PAUL DEVEREUX reports on archæacoustic discoveries, ancient opium use and Neanderthal couplings DAUGHTER OF THE WIND Archæoacoustics, the study of the behaviour of sound at archæological sites, whether monumental or natural, has gradually found a role as a valid aspect of archæological research over the past few decades (indeed, this columnist has long written on and researched this topic). A recent case of particular interest comes from South Africa. The site is an eroded sandstone hill called Kurukop that had been subject to volcanic activity, in the Nama Karoo region of Northern Cape province. It is marked with 112 rock engravings (petroglyphs) thousands of years old that depict a wide range of native animals and animal-human hybrid forms. They were made by huntergatherer San and Khoe herder peoples who were…

Spaceships and odd flying objects crashing onto the surface of our planet is not a new phenomenon. The most famous historical crash case took place at the peak of the American 1896-1897 airship scare in the village of Aurora, Texas. The story, written by cotton trader and part-time correspondent SE Haydon,1 was published under the headline “A Windmill Demolishes It” on page 5 of the 19 April 1897 edition of the Dallas Morning News: “Aurora, Wise County, Texas, April 17. — (To The News) — About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing through the country. “It was travelling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was…

OLIVIER LEROY ANTHROPOLOGIST, HAGIOGRAPHER, 1884-1976 Olivier Leroy was born on 9 October 1884 in Tours, and studied at the high school in Châteauroux, Central France. He married Margueritte Thiot, in Paris, on 15 January 1910. Aged 29 as WW1 began, he was mobilized as a military interpreter attached to the British army. In 1919, he qualified to teach English at high school and college levels, passing his teaching finals the following year. Between 1925 and 1941 he lived in Châteauroux, at 16 Rue Dauphine (a small street behind the Town Hall). The 1936 census register records his wife Margueritte, his mother Georgette, and three children (son Fernand and daughters Fernande and Marie). In 1926, he gained a doctorate in Political and Economic Sciences from the Faculty of Law in Paris.…