This afternoon we received an e-mail from Michael Cox, one of the jolly nice chaps at Donside pictures who were responsible for the massively entertaining Occasional Monsters the best look at dole-queue cryptozoology, and tooled up losers with mad girlfriends that wasn't written be me or Freeman. He has a proper blog posting due in the next few days, but he writes...
Hi Jon
After reading the blog posts featuring Richard Muirhead & Nick Harlings' newspaper clippings, I remembered that I had notes of a few fortean newspaper entries of a cryptozoological bent dating from 1860s; these were incidental finds I happened across while researching other local weirdness from the same period.
I'm not sure whether they'll be of interest to you, but here they are all the same.
All taken from the 'Aberdeen, Banff & Kincardine People's Journal':
10th May 1862
"A farmer in the neighbourhood of Douai possesses an extraordinary phenomenon in natural history - namely, a fowl which has four legs, placed like those of quadruped. It walks with difficulty, and the other fowls drive it away, and refuse to associate with it."
18th October 1862
"An unusually large raven was lately shot in France, having round one of its legs a small iron ring, on which were engraved the words, 'Born at Courtray, in 1772'."
From the same edition:
"In cutting up a tree at Moxley, the other day, the workmen came upon a hole about three inches in diameter, and inside it was a nest containing the skeleton of a bird and two eggs. The hole was some five inches within the bark of the tree."
31st January 1863
"A letter from Rio states that the great sea serpent has been caught at last. Report says he is 150 feet long, with a head and tail like a lizard, and that it took six men to carry one of his ribs."
All place names and punctuation accurately reproduced!
All the best
Michael Cox
Donside Pictures
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