RICHARD FREEMAN: Gabba Gabba Hey

Have you ever wondered how many stories of strange creatures are actually based on encounters with severely deformed human beings? Here are two cases of deformed humans told to me by people I know. Both have an otherworldly strangeness about them.

George Bishop, crop circle expert and one-time stalwart of the Weird Weekend, used to be an electrician in Plymouth. Once, in the 1970s, he was called out to a house in an ordinary-looking street in the city.

In the front room he was talking to the woman who lived in the house when he saw what he thought was a table move. The table was in fact the flat head of a tiny person. George said the figure was dressed in a flat cap and brown suit and moved in a stiff limbed fashion like a toy solider. He had a tiny face beneath a broad flat cranium that, in the cap, looked like a round table top. Apparently he was never let out of the house. George did not enquire too much about the strange little person.

The girlfriend of a former friend of mine once told me that one of her past boyfriends (a gofffb story?) that he had been visiting a small, remote village in northern Cornwall one evening when he saw what looked like a werewolf. The man who was dressed in a flat cap (again!) and normal-looking clothes had skin covered with hair and a jaw that jutted outwards, and was furnished with fangs. All in all he looked like the werewolf from the film The Werewolf of London based on Guy Endore’s short story The Werewolf of Paris. A man who was with the ‘werewolf’ explained that he was the man’s brother. He had been born that way and had lived in the village all his life. Locals knew him but he tried to avoid strangers so as not to scare them. He only came out when few people were around - usually at night.

It makes you wonder how many more poor souls are out there, living in isolation, away from the prying eyes of humanity.