It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...One of my favourite authors is Elliot O’ Donnell. Sure, he leans more towards the supernatural with his yarns but the atmosphere he creates and the stories he unearths are often quite bizarre.
On July 24th 1898 Elliot had a peculiar encounter in Greenwich Park, London. He was perched on a park bench admiring the scenery and within the shadows of a diseased elm tree, when suddenly something caught his eye. Something had fallen, or dropped, from the tree. It was no leaf or piece of rotten bark but in fact a creature, half-human, half-animal, which, he recalls, “…was stunted, bloated, pulpy and yellow”, and moved sideways like a crab. Mr O’ Donnell was so scared of the form that he fled the park, and when looking back on the encounter simply spoke of it as a ‘nature spirit’. Just what had he seen ? Mere insect, or something akin to a fairy, or something far weirder ?
A freaky form was encountered by two psychics in 1921 as they investigated the allegedly cursed Exhibit 22542, at the British Museum. The item was a mummy discovered in Egypt in the 1800s, and such was its awful reputation that not many were brave enough to even look at the body. The psychics attempted some kind of exorcism to lift the curse, but were confronted by a floating monster said to have resembled a jellyfish!
London hides many mysterious monsters, and they are the subject of my next book!
Hi Neil.
ReplyDeleteAlan F here.
I remember reading that story about O'Donnell's sighting of the 'nature spirit/elemental', in his book of true ghost stories when I was fourteen. I found it very creepy, to say the least.
Perhaps the Highgate vampire and many other creatures that seem to inhabit a world of 'questionable' reality are in fact beings that we glimpse through the cracks in time and space, and in the guise that quite possibly our own imagination invests them with.