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Feb. 28, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:47
Edition 615 - Charles Christian
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my international family here that seems to be growing all the time, and thank you very much for the kind emails that you've been sending.
I'm going to name check a few people before we get stuck into it.
The guest on this edition is Charles Christian.
He is a man who talks about folklore, ghost stories, werewolves, all kinds of stuff from Yorkshire and other places.
He is a man of so many parts.
I'll tell you more about him in just a moment.
So Charles Christian, the guest on this edition, thank you very much to Adam for his work on getting the shows out to you and honing the website to be the sharpened tool that it is now.
Theunexplained.tv.
That's the website.
If you want to get in touch with me, go there, follow the link, and you can do it real easy, as they say.
Just a couple of your emails, a couple of shout-outs too.
Bart Sibrell, the guest about the moon landing conspiracy, the consensus of your emails is that you may not agree with him, but mostly you agree with his right to say what he says.
That's the view certainly of listeners like Steve O'Vale, who's a regular listener to this show.
Paul said that he always had questions about the Apollo 1 fire, great tragedy at the start of the Apollo program, which was referenced by Bart and the conspiracy theory around that.
Jedd in Manchester said Bart Zibrelle needs to learn some maths and physics.
He says, I also think his explanation of satellites in low orbit transmitting fake radio messages from the astronauts baffling.
Chodrell Bank, the big radio telescope here in Cheshire, UK, the observatory, used their radio telescope to track the whole event.
I think the scientists knew where to point their massive dish.
In other words, you can't argue with the data.
Kelly from Angel Karma Crystals got in touch.
Thank you, Kelly and Xander for the nice things you said.
Good to hear from Alan.
Alan, like me, studied politics at the University of Liverpool in former happy days.
And I think we, even though you went there a bit before me, I think we shared some teachers and lecturers there.
Wonderful place to be, and I learned a lot.
First person in my family ever to even think of going to university, went to a secondary modern school in Liverpool that became a comprehensive, and they encouraged me to try and get into university.
And I stayed at home to go to university, and I'm really glad that I did.
Nice emails about medium Isabeau Maxwell recently, by the way.
People like Sam and Darren in Australia.
It was a conversation that I massively enjoyed, and I'm glad that you did too.
Sometimes mediums bring me some adverse feedback, but I think if we're to cover the whole spectrum of the unexplained, we need to talk to them.
And it's something that's fascinated me my entire life.
So it's going to be part of this show.
All right, guest on this edition then, Charles Christian, barrister and Reuters correspondent, turned writer, podcaster, radio host, award-winning tech journalist, and sometime werewolf hunter.
And that's only part of it.
So let's get to him now.
Charles Christian, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Well, thank you for inviting me, Howard.
You're a man of many parts, all wonderfully functional, Charles, I have to say.
You know, you've done so many things with your life, and we'll get into some of this.
And I think we probably need to do it as a prelude to the conversation we're about to have because it leads in very nicely.
So talk to me first about you.
I know that you were born in Scarborough, and I know that you trained in the law in London.
And that's the thumbnail sketch.
Right.
Well, I trained in Scarborough.
Sorry, I was born in Scarborough, and then I went to Leeds University.
And that's where I first started doing a bit of, by modern standards, highly primitive ghost hunting, going out at night with cameras and coffee and notebooks, waiting to see a ghost.
Didn't see anything.
And then I thought, well, I better try and earn a living.
So I went off to London, moved to London and studied to be a barrister and indeed qualified and practiced for a brief time as a barrister.
However, it was one of those periods where there were too many covers at the bottom end.
So I moved on and by circuitous routes found myself in the world of journalism.
And possibly because I spent a lot of time hanging around bars in Fleet Street.
And then for the bulk of my working life, I've been a journalist, primarily a technology journalist, though with a legal leaning on it.
And did the usual freelance thing.
If you get the brief, yes, I can write it.
And you worry about what you actually have to write later.
And such delights, which will be totally alien to anybody listening now.
But getting up at the crack of dawn to drive around the North Circular to magazine headquarters to deliver either a paper manuscript or the manuscript on a floppy disk before the rush hour.
And then it was some years later we moved to, my wife and I moved to East Anglia.
And then I was lucky enough to be able to sell my newsletter business I'd got and semi-retire and spend more time doing other stuff.
Which is where my interest in all matters supernatural occult folklory reappeared.
Because obviously, back when you're young and you've got mortgages and bills to pay, you can't actually make a living out of folklore.
Unless, of course, you become, which you later became an author on these things.
It's very difficult.
But your background is unique, absolutely unique.
I haven't come across anybody else.
I'm presumably I'm going to get emails now from people who say, oh, no, there's so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so, so-and-so.
But you have a background in the law which makes your approach to things forensic.
It also makes you used to cutting your way through tall stories, which you have to encounter in legal matters all the time.
But also journalism gives you the gift of writing and brevity, being able to keep things succinct.
So you've got all of that going for you, plus the interest in paranormality.
I'm sure that's a unique mix.
It seems to me that the only thing you haven't done, unless you're going to tell me something, you haven't been an MP yet.
No.
I wouldn't recommend it.
I wouldn't recommend it.
No.
No, the more I look at it, the more I think, oh.
Funnily enough, funnily enough, actually, when I was at Leeds University, my degree was in politics.
So I did wonder about a career in politics, but then I met a lot of politicians and thought, no, not for me.
Well, I think it's a hard road, especially these days.
I think you've probably done the right thing.
Funnily enough, I think chasing werewolves is probably easier than being a politician and trying to represent a constituency, but I digress.
Now, according to some biographical data that I've seen, you were born in, or certainly lived some formative years in a haunted house.
I did indeed, yes.
My parents' house is still standing.
It's mainly noticeable as a shop these days, is right on the harbour front in Scarborough.
And it's one of those old properties.
The frontage looks sort of Georgian, probably was, but behind it, it's medieval.
And it was one of those properties whereas the seafront and the harbour front was built up and stathes were built and the like, they expanded the property outwards.
And it was a complete muddle of properties linked together that had then been hived off and sublet and resold.
And so there were bits of it going to places that just stopped.
You know, there were tunnels underneath the house that just would go into the ground horizontally and then just halt for no apparent reason.
And, you know, was there something through there bricked up or was it just a little storage area?
And the original house had a pan-tiled roof and the timbers were quite clearly from old ships.
And I say, it just was redolent in atmosphere and there were certainly spooky occurrences.
A spiritualist friend of my mother said she could detect the sound of men in large boots marching about above at the top of the house.
And we later learned that my great-grandmother on the father's side, when she'd owned the property, she'd been, would let sailors, fishermen who were caught in the harbor because of a storm sleep up there in the loft.
And of course, you know, we're talking here the late 19th century and all the fishermen there, if you ever see pictures of them, they all wore huge thigh-high wader boots.
Sou'esters.
And the sou'esters, yes, but they'd have had these huge boots.
So they definitely would have been clonking around up there.
So do you think that inhabiting that house, bearing in mind some of the previous inhabitants, albeit temporary ones, do you think that some of those people, as a lot of people did off that coast, perished at sea and perhaps came back to a familiar place?
I think so.
I think so.
I mean, there were the boats they went out to sea in were up until the early part of the 20th century, a lot of them were purely sail-driven or had a very, very primitive little engine in there.
And, you know, very flimsy.
And Scarborough's notorious, the harbour, for it being, it needs skill to get into the harbour when there's a heavy sea running.
So you've got to sort of swing almost the wrong way in the boat, as if you're almost missing it to avoid rocks and make a safe entry.
So there were a lot of wrecks along there and a lot of drownings along there.
And, you know, even through to my sort of childhood, there was a disaster.
I think it was about 1953 when the lifeboat overturned and several of the crew drowned as they were trying to return to the harbour.
So, you know, it was something you were conscious of.
And it was something all the old fishing families along the seafront would have had people who had died at sea.
And, you know, we lived right in the middle of it.
And I dare say we probably had some as well in the family.
We certainly had some notorious uncles and cousins.
There were two of them, Jack and Sampson.
Sampson's a wonderful name.
Very biblical.
Yes, Jack and Samson Christian.
And they, I've got sort of newspaper clippings.
I mean, one newspaper, they're described as being heroes for jumping in the harbor to pull out somebody who had fallen in and was drowning.
And in another newspaper, they're described as villains for throwing people in the harbour who they're having an argument with.
So you've got to live all of that down then in your answer.
Well, exactly, yes.
No, but look, it is a rough coast.
You do get some terrible storms there.
I'm lucky enough, I think, to be from the other side of the Penn Ines.
Liverpool, you know, we have a great maritime tradition there, but I don't think the storms we got, even though some of them off the Irish Sea, can be particularly rough if you get caught on the boat going to Dublin, which I did a number of times in a storm.
It's not fun.
But I don't think it's Anything like the North Sea, you have to have your wits about you there.
You do, you do.
And, you know, there's the sandbanks and the shore, the rock shoals and things everywhere.
You know, so there's a lot of places where you can come adrift on there.
And the boats you see people were going out in, still do, the little Scarborough cobbles, are very primitive little boats.
You know, I mean, the cobble is supposedly directly descended from the Viking longship and has a similar design as you see on Viking longships of the hull and specifically made for running up onto beaches or shingle shores.
So, no, it was definitely that sort of vibe there.
Which brings me to a mutual friend and a fellow Yorkshireman for you, Paul Sinclair, who, of course, does a lot of his research in the very area that you were brought up in and know so well.
That whole coast not only has a reputation for the bad things that happen at sea, which sometimes result in strange hauntings and presences, but also a history that comes right up to date of people spying lights in the sky and things that you might deem to be UFOs.
I mean, that's leaving aside the cryptid creatures and all the rest of it.
It is a place of high strangeness.
And again, I don't think my side of the Pennines can quite match it.
It is.
It is.
I wonder with my, you know, slightly more skeptical hat on whether a lot of it is actually military aviation.
I mean, in Scarborough, just a few miles south of Scarborough, is Staxton Wold, where there is an early warning station.
And before there was the early warning station, there was a radar mast from the Second World War.
And curiously, before that, 1900 years before that, there was a Roman signal station.
So, you know, there certainly, when I was a kid growing up there, there were always military aircraft flying at very low levels or high levels coming in to test the radar and flying backwards and forwards, you know, flying off the sea and up the Vale of York.
So I do wonder whether that was one of the issues.
And also, you do get odd perspectives.
I know a lot of people have reported seeing mysterious lights to the south of the Yorkshire Walls, but that's because they're actually seeing the lights on the top of the Humber Bridge, which at night you can see from a very, very long distance.
So, you know, there are...
Plus, of course, you know, not to be too dismissive, but there are always the reports that certainly in places like America, but also in this country, strange craft, if such things exist, perhaps from another dimension or place, seem to be abnormally attracted to radar stations and military installations and that kind of thing.
So it all adds to the general air of mystery.
Although I'm sure, as you say, you know, there will be a number of these things, quite a number that can be explained by, for example, long-distance sightings of the lights on the Humber Bridge, which I'd never actually thought of.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you can also see, oh, where is it?
Scunthorpe.
There's petrochemical works and things.
And again, they have flare towers and things.
So you do see odd things in the light up there.
And because Scarborough is surrounded by a big rural area where there's pretty much nothing, you do get odd light effects.
You know, on certain times, you can see an orange glow in the south.
And that was actually the lights of Hull because that's the nearest city, even though it was 40 miles away as the crow flies.
So, you know, it was.
But I say it's, I think, well, of course, nowadays as well, we have Russian aircraft zooming around the North Sea as well.
Probably more so at the moment, yes.
However, that drama will play out.
All right, let's get back to your somewhat erratic young teenage and formative years ghost hunting then, because you say that obviously education tends to get in the way somewhat, but you did do some of it in Leeds.
And I think you did a little bit of it when you moved to London to study the law.
So talk to me, fill in the blanks, talk to me about those things that you did.
I think you went to Highgate Cemetery, which of course is the resting place of Karl Marx and others.
Yes.
Well, I say I started up in Leeds and had an interest in that.
One of the people there was shared a house with.
And we went out on a number of occasions, all sadly very unsuccessful, didn't find anything.
But we did try doing the St. Mark's Eve porch watching, which is this tradition.
It's quite popular in the north of England, particularly the eastern side of the Pennines.
It was a belief that on St Mark's Eve, if you sat in a churchyard between the hours of about 11 and 1 at night, you know, either side of the midnight hour, you would see a parade of the spirits or manifestations of all the people in that parish who were going to be buried in that graveyard that coming year.
And they would go in there.
It's quite a long established tradition, and you can find tales of it taking place during the 17th century.
And that was what would happen.
And there's even a permutation that if you saw somebody go into the church and then come out again, that meant that they were going to be very seriously ill that year, but they would survive.
So we did that, but we saw nothing.
But again, we'd made a fairly fundamental schoolboy error and overlooked the fact that the churchyard was redundant.
So no one was going to be buried in that churchyard that year.
But it's all good experience, isn't it?
It's all good.
Yes.
What about your encounter with the Highgate vampire, so-called?
Yes.
Well, I mean, again, we're going back.
This is when I was in London and studying at the law.
And there's two sides of Highgate Cemetery.
They're both now open to the public.
But in the 60s and early 70s, one side with Karl Marx was open, but the other side was overgrown, chaotic, tree roots everywhere, breaking up the stonework and masonry of tombs and various parts.
And so that was not open to the public, but it was sufficiently accessible that you could clamber over a fence and get in there.
And there was a big scare, I suppose, in 1971, 72.
I remember looking into this.
Yes, it was in the local newspaper.
It was the Highgate, whatever, Highgate and something.
Hammond High.
Hammond High.
And there were reports that a vampire had been seen in there and report in the church, sorry, in the cemetery.
And it got to the point where there was a sort of mass vampire hunt with a couple hundred people climbing over one night and going around the cemetery looking for vampires.
And it was very much a sort of 15 minutes of fame.
And there does appear to have been some grave desecration, but you never know whether it's by people who are serious and are practicing black magic, or whether it's by people who are just jumping on the bandwagon and doing it just for the hell of it, sort of rather macabre vandalism.
But there were incidents of it there.
I suppose its longest lasting legacy is that it became the origin of one of Hammer's last great horror movies, Dracula AD 72,
which is set in a church where some amateur satinists try and bring back Dracula from the dead, and lo and behold, he does bring Dracula back from the dead, and chaos ensues.
Was that Peter Cushing in that one?
Both Peter Cushing was in it playing Van Helsing's grandson and Christopher Lee was in it as the vampire.
And also the lovely, oh, what was her name?
Charlotte Lamb.
Oh, right, not Ingrid Pitt.
No, Ingrid Pitt wasn't in it.
It was Charlotte Lambling.
Charlotte Rempling.
No, no.
No, no.
No.
Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte.
She was the Lamb's Navy Rum girl.
And she was also a Bond girl.
Okay.
Now you're going to keep talking.
I'll find out.
Keep talking.
Yeah.
And anyway, it was a good cast and it was a good movie.
And I say that was the most longest-lasting impact of it.
And I say I went on and with a friend of mine, because by then I was living in London and I was a member of the Ghost Club, which goes back to the 19th century, a sort of slightly more populist version of the Society of Psychical Research.
Arthur Conan Doyle, I think, was part of it, wasn't he?
He was indeed, yes.
And Peter Hayning and lots of people, you know, through the years.
Anyway, we went there and had a look around and lo and behold, we did find a tomb that had been broken open and you could see inside that somebody had staked the corpse and then set fire to it and you could see it there.
But I say, these were in the days when it was still derelict and no one had done anything about it.
So that was.
I mean, there is a whole area, isn't there, where folklore and popular tales meets the reality of paranormality.
It's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
Yeah, it does.
And I say, you get this whole thing, don't you, with which comes first?
Is it the folklore or is it a popular tale that then later gets taken to be regarded as true and based on a real event?
And I say it was, no, it was intriguing, that.
And I say it took on a life of its own.
The...
The...
The Highgate Vampire.
Caroline Munro, by the way, is the answer to your question.
That's it, Caroline Munro.
I could tell you anything about her now.
Wikipedia says that she's an English actress born in 1949, model and singer known for her many appearances in horror, science fiction, and action films.
Yes, indeed.
There was also Stephanie Beecham in there.
Oh.
And Marsha Hunt, who at the time was better known as one of Mick Jagger's girlfriends.
In the days of great British films.
I think all of this has set the scene nicely then for a lot of the work that you've done in that area, that strange area, that area of high strangeness in Yorkshire.
And let's talk about the Wold Newton Triangle.
Now, because I'm from the other side of the Pennines, I'm not entirely sure where that is.
But what I do know about it, it's a very strange place.
So talk to me about the Wold Newton Triangle.
Right.
Well, the triangle is, the, I'm not very good at geometry.
The apex.
Anyway, one of the pointy ends of the triangle is Flamborough Head, which is a big headland which sticks way out into the North Sea.
And the coastline forms two sides, and there's a road that goes through the wolds, and almost all the weirdness happens to the east of that road and between the headland.
And with a little bit of judicious penwork, it does come out as a triangle.
And it just seemed a nice way to describe the area.
I suppose my interest, again, goes right back to when I was a kid.
And we used to, as people did in those days, in the 1950s, go out at the weekend with the family in the car.
And we'd drive off somewhere and, you know, typically go to a stately home and have a tea and cakes and then come back again.
And we were making our way across the wolds on the way back home to Scarborough one day.
And we went past a semi-derelict pub.
And my mother told me that during the war, so we're talking the Second World War, that the Women's Royal Army Corps, who used to do a lot of the driving trucks around and things, so that they were doing jobs that would have taken men away from the front line,
if you like, they were given special permission that at night they could go the long way around via York rather than go along this road and pass this house because it had such a bad reputation for being haunted.
And that really sort of, it's just one of those things that clocks in your memory and you think, hang on, there's a war on, fighting for survival, petrol is rationed and everything is serious and urgent and yet these people are giving special permission.
The officers are giving special permission for people to waste petrol going the long way around.
Which makes you think there's got to be a reason for that.
There's got to be a reason for it.
And that property is still standing and heading from Driffield.
It's on the west side of the road, but left-hand side of the road.
But the intriguing thing about it is, however often it changes hands, whoever gets it can't make a success of it.
And it's being cafes, restaurants, pubs, tea shops.
I think somebody even tried to set up a little theatre business there.
And it never ever lasts long.
And it never thrives.
And one half of the property looks lived in and the other half looks semi-derelict.
And I say it's always had this air of bad luck about it.
And that just intrigued me.
What was it about it?
That it didn't work properly.
And I say, the more I looked into it and sort of remembering from my youth and things, because that was sort of in my tramping ground as a youth, either on push bike or later on in a car, looking around that area, the more weird bits and odd bits that I discovered.
And, you know, as essentially it's a triangle of weirdness.
It just seems to attract mysterious legends, stories, and tales.
Now, could it be something to do with, I mean, I'm just thinking off the top of my head here.
You know, I mean, a lot of people in the West Country go on about, oh, the ley lines, they run that way through Wiltshire, and it has a profound effect on what we see and feel.
So, you know, maybe ley lines, maybe the makeup of the makeup of the, you know, the rock beneath might be something to do with that or something else, or perhaps water courses and where they run.
Well, all of those.
All of the above.
All of the above, Tick, yes.
No, I mean, there is a ley line that runs through there, well, ends there.
There's a church in a village called Rudston, and in Rudston, there is this very large monolith, standing stone, that is, totally out of place for one thing.
Totally out of place.
I mean, that was the Christian church being very tactful in their missionary work when they came back to re-Christianize England.
And they took a policy that instead of destroying sacred sites, they would simply incorporate them into the Christian belief.
I looked at a photograph of it today preparing for this, and I've never been there.
It is the most incongruous thing, because if you can imagine this archetypal British church with gravestones and the spire and everything else, I mean, it looks like a film scene.
But stuck in the middle of the graveyard almost is this lozenge, this monolith.
You might remember a year or so ago there was a great flap around the world about these monoliths, these large shards of metal being found around the place, looking completely out of place in some national park in America.
If you can imagine a big lozenge piece of stone is stuck there, it is a most bizarre sight.
It just looks as if somebody's fired it down into the ground from some great cosmic bow and arrow.
Yes.
And the intriguing thing is that the archaeological excavations around it have found that it goes a long, long way into the ground and that when it was first put there, it would have been a lot, it would have appeared a lot taller than it does now.
And even the stone that's there now is taller than any of the stones at Stonehenge.
You know, it really is spectacular.
It's also a type of stone which would have had to have been dragged a considerable distance, possibly 20 plus miles, including going up hills and down dale to get it there.
So whoever put it there, and you can give me a rough idea of when that might have been, but whoever put it there went to an extraordinary amount of effort to site it exactly where it is.
Exactly.
And I say it's Neolithic.
So you're looking about 4,000-ish, maybe a bit more years ago.
So, you know, somewhere there, there was something about the place that they wanted to put this large monolith there.
And if you can imagine it going back to earlier times, there would have been no buildings near it.
The layout of the land would have been different.
It would have been standing there like, I don't know, the Washington Monument or, you know, it would have been huge.
It would have been, as you say, in Congress.
You wouldn't have been able to miss it.
So it was clearly an important feature of the landscape.
And strange that it's in this triangular area of strangeness that may relate to those factors that we discussed.
In terms of stories in that area, are there stories of people going...
Is it a place where you've got a compendium of those stories going on?
Well, there is.
I mean, there seems to be an awful lot of ghost stories around the area.
I suppose what's intriguing is in ancient times, there were hundreds and hundreds of barrow burials or tumuli burials built there and there.
Essentially mass graves.
Mass graves.
Some were mass graves, some were single graves.
And a lot of the smaller ones have been lost to plowing.
But there are still some big ones around there.
Willie Howe is one of the best known ones.
Though sadly amateur archaeologists in sort of the 18th century have hacked into most of them so they no longer look very interesting in a basic treasure hunting.
But they were enormous.
What's been left of the archaeology has revealed there have been high net worth individuals buried at the center of them and then other people have been buried around them as it's a sacred place to be.
They're all dotted around that area.
Willie Howe in particular has got a long legend of being associated with fairy folk and that this was one of the ways into the other world of the Fae.
And there's tales going back to medieval times.
So it's not sort of Victorian sentimentalism, but going back to medieval times.
Tales of people seeing fairy folk there.
And there's a story that one man was invited in by the fairies and he knew that if he took any food and drink from them, he would be under an obligation to them and be captured and would stay in fairyland until whenever they wanted to free him.
So he waited until no one was looking, tipped the drink out of the glass that he'd been given, and then did a runner, but taking the glass with him.
And it sounds as if it was made of amber and then circuitously it ended up being given to the king of Scotland who kept it in his royal treasury for a few generations.
They kept it in their treasury for a few generations.
So, you know, it's one again, this obscure little relatively thinly populated area produces a mysterious treasure that ends up being kept in a royal treasury.
So, you know, there was that surrounding it.
So there's a lot.
There's also a now deserted medieval village in that area.
And my brain is Warren Percy.
The name of it is.
Warren Percy.
W-H-A-R-R-R-A-M Percy.
And it probably was killed off by the Black Death and changes in agriculture and the move over to sheep farming rather than more intensive agriculture.
And are there remnants of places where people lived there?
Or do we just have map records?
We have a church.
There's a remnant of a church there.
And if you are an archaeologist or if there's snowfall there, you can see the mounds and trackways where buildings have been and the paths used to go.
Now, it's been excavated by professional archaeologists for a very long time.
But a few years ago in the churchyard, they uncovered a number of burials where people had been ritually mutilated on death.
And so their legs had been broken, their heads had been cut off.
And it was very much a medieval fear that certain people who'd had a bad death, as in they hadn't had the last rites or they'd lived a wicked life or had been murdered or were murderers or whatever, but generally they were the people who weren't going to go to heaven.
They was a fear that they would walk after death.
The medievals, I mean, we have the idea of a ghost, which is a sort of transparent, floaty thing, and we have zombies and we have vampires.
And we all know what those terms mean.
The medieval period, they had a thing called a revenant, which was really meant that when you died, your physical body came back from the grave, had literally burst out of the grave overnight and then would wander around plaguing the living before returning to the grave again.
And to stop these creatures or likely candidates to become revenants from walking, steps were taken to prevent them doing it.
So they would break their legs, so chop their legs, so you obviously can't walk if you haven't got legs.
They would bury them face downwards.
They would put their heads between their legs, behead them and put their heads between their legs.
So again, if the body tried to get up, there was no head, so they couldn't see where they were going.
And they were all methods used to prevent what people thought were a chance that corpses would become walking dead.
And was this 100% effective in...
It seems to have been regarded as that way.
I mean, there's plenty of tales where people haven't done that, and then they've been plagued by the revenants, which literally in some cases are so decaying and rotten that they've brought pestilence, presumably some form of plague, to the village and caused lots of deaths because they haven't been done.
And then in that case, the body has to be dug out of the grave, its heart cut out of it, cut to pieces and everything burned.
So you can see where a lot of these legends that we now have in vampire tales and zombie tales come from.
And I say the people of that era were very much convinced this was a real problem.
I mean, there's an intriguing bit that most of these tales we have coming down to us come from a medieval historian called William of Newborough.
And this is Newborough, as in now Newborough Priory in North Yorkshire.
But the particular character, William, he was born in Bridlington or born in the Bridlington area.
And Bridlington then had a very large, very wealthy church, Briddlington Priory.
And it's just intriguing that, again, someone within the Wold Newton Triangle comes down to us in history as one of the most extensive chroniclers of medieval revenants, ghosts, and spooky activities.
I mean, we have to remember, don't we?
And it's very hard for us to bear this in mind because of the lives that we lead today, that the supernatural was very much a part of people's daily lives.
And it seems to me from what you've just been saying that the business of protecting yourself from the supernatural was a very serious thing.
Yes.
I mean, you know, you have to also bear in mind that in most villages, possibly the only literate educated person would be the priest.
And they were the fount of all knowledge, and they in turn took the Bible as the source of all knowledge.
And they had a very black and white view of the universe.
And they really believed that there was a devil out there.
They really believed that the resurrection was a physical manifestation.
You know, they had a very basic view on life and that, you know, the resurrection was a physical thing.
And that come the day of judgment, people would pop out of their tombs as they were, you know, in a corporeal form, and await final judgment.
And so, you know, it was essential, it was believed essential that you were a good Christian, that you didn't do evil things, that you didn't practice witchcraft, I would have thought.
Definitely not practice witchcraft, definitely not practice anything of the dark arts variety, and that you had, you know, the final absolution of sins and last rites on your deathbed.
And if you didn't, then you were at risk.
And I say, people of that time, they didn't want to go to hell, but they also didn't want to go to purgatory, which was a sort of midway place between heaven and hell, where you had to, you were still under assessment, if you liked.
And so, you know, anything vaguely dark was to be avoided.
And I say, if you didn't have a good death, then you were at risk of becoming a revenant or if not going to hell, but at least sitting in purgatory for an indefinite period of time, having an unpleasant time.
So I say, it's the thing is, it's inconceivable now to the modern mindset that people would have these worries, but they really did.
And of course, with a modern mindset, you would come to all kinds of conclusions like, well, this was a way of the church keeping the people under control and authority keeping people under control.
Now, that would be fine, were it not for the fact that weird things did happen.
Exactly.
The church was, I suppose, almost in the position of paranormal investigators or, you know, we're talking about Van Helsing.
The church was your stood between you and the devil and demons and evil.
Did they do exorcisms then?
They did do exorcisms then.
They did indeed.
And I say there were plenty of tales of unquiet spirits in some instances just because they died in unfortunate circumstances, away from home,
away from a priest or anything of that nature, and were unquiet and unable to get peace and were coming back to annoy the living.
And as far as you know in that era, in that place, these days we know that the Vatican has a course for would-be members of the clergy to go and train as exorcists.
How would you learn your craft then if you were there to purge evil and to get rid of bad spirits?
Who teach you that?
How would you learn it?
Well, you've got to remember that in those days, it's in the era of the monasteries, and there were monasteries, priories, religious institutions everywhere that had libraries and scholars there.
Again, they were centers of education.
So if you were the village priest and something like that happened, you would send off for help to the local priory or monastery where they would certainly know somebody could help.
And I say, in the case of the Woll Newton area, Bridlington had this huge priory there and was a source of information and learning.
So, you know, there was no shortage of people who would be able to help you there, who had learned it and read up about it and knew about it and knew the procedures.
And again, the character I mentioned earlier, William of Newborough, he tells tales of people being sent from various monasteries to go and deal with outbreaks of demonic possession, ghosts, revenants, and the like.
And generally, they knew the way to lay the ghost and how to deal with it.
So there were methods known.
And the average person in those days seems to me that this was very much a part of their lives.
You know, these days, you either believe in these things and you're interested in researching them, or you just kind of turn on, you know, reality TV and it's not part of your life.
But in those days, it seems to me that religion was very big, was very much a part of people's lives, and the way that their lives were constructed, all of these elements, the paranormal that we would call it today, were very much part of your day-to-day existence.
It seems to me that whereas it's gee whiz and abnormal today and we'll make the newspapers, in their day it was just another day at the office or another day at the priory.
Well, exactly.
And I say, we forget this was in the days when the only church in England was the Roman Catholic Church.
And people, well, the church was a fundamental part of the local community, and all the saints' days were feast days, what we'd now call public holidays.
And the church would organize church services in the morning, and then a big feast with lots of food and beer, and you know, time for the local peasants to have their best meal of the month, if you like.
There were plenty of them, of saints' days and religious festivals.
And it was the center of village life.
And the church porch was a meeting area and people would go there.
Now you'd say, you know, going to the village hall or you're going to a social club or somewhere.
You would meet people in the church porch and business would be conducted there.
And it's inconceivable to modern life, but church attendance was vital on a Sunday.
And indeed, it was your one day off.
And you were jolly grateful for the church for giving you the day off.
Now, you've researched, I understand, and you don't hear many reports of this kind.
You do from certain places at certain times.
I think South Wales in this day and age is one of those places.
But you don't get very many reports in this day and age, in this country, of anything equating to Bigfoot.
I don't think so.
But you have researched one, and I think it's called, is it the Wood Woes or Wood Woes?
It is A Wood Woes.
A Woods.
A Wood Woes.
Yeah, that's where I am now in East Anglia.
But there are sightings of them around the country.
And essentially, it is the same characteristics of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, whatever you want to call it, or even the Yeti or abominable snowman, a large, hairy, man-like creature, human-shaped creature, that is seen elusively wandering around rural areas.
And again, in where I am in East Anglia now, it's very similar.
Lots of rural areas, small roads and the like, lots of woods and forests.
And I say reports of people seeing a shadowy creature rushing across the road.
But again, it's been happening for a very long time.
It's not a sort of passing social media fad, if you like.
There's a long tradition of them.
And you see it in the churches in this part of the world where a lot of the stonework, either over the entrance porch or supporting the font, they feature a woodwose.
And it's a hairy man with a big beard, typically wielding a large club.
And it is just a feature.
So again, it's something that's gone back to at least medieval times.
This belief that there is a creature around here that is not human, but it's not a normal animal.
It's something else.
And is astonishingly elusive, just as those creatures from around the world, the Sasquatch, the Yaoi in Australia, Yeti, incredibly elusive, but there's a commonality of descriptions.
Exactly.
It's a commonality, which leaves you to think, well, is it just, if it had been only relatively recently, then you'd think, well, it's some sort of, you know, urban legend or something.
Yeah.
But the fact it goes back so long, and you certainly know that in medieval times, there would have been no contact with North America or the Himalayas, or certainly not Australia.
So, you know, it's an independent tradition that's sprung up in different places with a huge geographic space between them.
Yet there's this common belief.
So it always coexisted with us, maybe even predates us.
Well, that's where it gets interesting, doesn't it?
Because, you know, are we...
Is it some kind of...
Some kind of throwback or some kind of branch of the human family tree that's gone off in its own way.
I mean, we are discovering that the human evolution is a lot more complicated.
I mean, it used to be there's Uslot who are basically Homo sapiens and descended from Cro-Magnons.
And then there were the Neanderthal, who were sort of rather more brutish and ape-like, who became extinct.
But we now know that the Neanderthals coexisted with us for several thousand years and not only coexisted, but interbred with us.
So we've all got a bit of Neanderthal in us.
But we're also discovering other branches that were previously unknown, such as the Denisovans in Europe, in Central Asia.
And then there's the little creature generally referred to as the hobbit, which is in Indonesia, one of the Indonesian islands.
Life cycle coincided with ours, you know, with modern humans.
we interacted with them.
So, you know, was it a simple case of all the other ones died off or did some branches continue but realise...
All in the family, but realize humans are bad news, so we'll keep away from them.
Well, I think they've probably got a point.
Now, let's...
Let's move to this, the very end of our conversation here.
I've talked about this a few times with a few people, certainly on the radio show.
The story that is a gift that keeps on giving and certainly impinges on us today.
Old Stinker in the Hull Humberside area, or the Flixton werewolf.
I think it's got a couple of names, several names in fact.
And I found a newspaper article from Hull five or six years ago, and I'll quote from it.
Hull residents have reported several sightings of a half-human, half-dog beast roaming wild in the woods, reportedly, about eight feet tall.
It was reportedly sighted running on two legs and then on all fours around the Balmstone Drain, a man-made channel near the town of Beverly in Yorkshire.
A woman who claimed to have spotted the mysterious beast in December of the year that this was run five or six years ago, told the Express, it was stood upright one moment, the next it was down on all fours running like a dog.
I was terrified.
Now, this is something that's impinging on our day-to-day lives today, it seems, but has got a hugely long history.
Well, the general name for it is Old Stinker, but the first stories about it go back to medieval periods, and it was thought that Old Stinker was a shape-changing creature,
which definitely makes it a werewolf, in the traditional definition of a werewolf, that used to lurk around villages and towns during the day and see who was going to be heading on rural roads back from a market that same day,
and then at night would transform into a wolf and lead a wolf pack who would then attack and eat, kill and eat the victims.
And I say he got the name of Old Stinker because his breath was apparently so noxious, because it also would eat carrion, that it stank.
And it's always described as being bigger than a human.
So, you know, the eight foot you just mentioned would be right, having a big long tail that was powerful enough to knock people over, and that it would walk on its hind legs, and that it had two very large orangey-red eyes.
And as a old stinker crops up in the medieval period, there is a tale of it cropping up in the sort of 18th century.
And when I was growing up in Scarborough, which again is not very far from the villages of Folketon and Flixton, there was a report that a lorry driver said he was driving along the road, thought he saw a car stopped in front of him because he saw these two reddy-orange lights, and then realized they weren't car-rear lights.
It was a large creature, a large wolf-like creature, which jumped up at his cab, but he drove on and escaped unscathed.
So it's got a long pedigree, and there were tales of it cropping up again in Hull in the winter of, I think it was 2015.
Right, so that tallies with these newspaper reports from, I say, five or six years ago.
It was then, and it was then on the Balmston Drain, which is a drainage canal that runs, as you say, from Beverly.
I think it was once used as a, had hopes to use it as a canal, down into Hull.
And it runs through a former industrial area.
And because of the nature of the Balmstone Drain, where it goes through Hull, it's got relatively steep banks.
And it's got a lot of industrial pollution in there, more in past years than now.
So it's very, you know, there's always a sort of foggy mist coming from it.
And there'd been historically a lot of drownings in there, typically young kids jumping in there and then finding they couldn't get out because of the steep bank around it.
And it's been estimated that, you know, somebody's died drowned in there every year for about a hundred years or so.
So it's got quite a bad reputation.
So, but it's got a lot of derelict properties, former, or, you know, cleared industrial sites around it.
And this is where the creature was reported in the winter of 2015.
And I was approached by a local newspaper who asked me about it.
And I said, somewhat jokingly, it sounds like Old Stinker has come back from the dead and is now moved 20 miles south and is now in that area.
And so unfortunately, I think I gave it the name of Old Stinker.
And it went on from there.
And again, very much became a course celeb, 15-minute wonder.
And it got extensive newspaper coverage in the late 2015, early 2016.
I got interviewed on radio shows, even got interviewed by a Russian radio show about it.
So, you know, it attracted a lot of interest.
But the fact that so many people over the years have reported something kind of indicates that there might be some substance to this somewhere.
I wonder if anybody is, but I wonder how it could be properly investigated.
Well, I mean, it's now it sort of reached peak publicity in the summer of 2016, but then rather faded away and has now, you know, interest in it is lost.
So you don't know whether it was one of those things that became, you know, an urban legend that had traction at the time.
No, I think he's due for a reappearance myself.
But has now faded from interest.
But, you know, again, it's a rural area.
There's a great long area where nothing, you know, small roads, you know, no large towns in that area.
Largely agricultural, plenty of places where creatures could stay themselves, yeah, very much.
Secrete themselves, you know, a bit like the woodwoves down here.
You know, there's where you've got nothing around.
Well, it's possible that you could have viable populations of some creature.
Oh, Charles, we've only covered part of the ground that we could have covered, so we'll have to talk again.
I hope you've enjoyed this conversation.
I certainly have.
I've totally enjoyed it.
You know, it's just nice to be able to talk about these things.
And what a life you've had.
I was going to ask you about the technology journalism and all of those things, but there's no time for that.
Thank you so much.
If people want to read about you, have you got a website?
I guess, you know, technology man has to have a website.
I have a website.
It's at urbanfantasist.com.
Lovely title.
Lovely web moniker.
Charles Christian.
And you can find all my books and stuff on there as well, he says, getting a quick plug-in.
Urbanfantasist.com.
Charles Christian, thank you so much.
Thank you indeed.
Charles Christian, what a fascinating guest.
Very pleased that I got him.
Thank you very much to you for being part of my show.
Keep the messages coming.
Keep the guest suggestions coming too.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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