RICHARD FREEMAN: THE GIANT FLEA OF GATESHEAD

Now this is just weird; an amazing piece of synchronicity. Totally independent of each other, Richard Freeman and Mike Hallowell recount the same very obscure story in blog postings submitted to me on the same day. I am posting both of them because they are both fine and entertaining writers with slightly different takes on the same peculiar tale.

Back in the 1970s I read an excellent short story. It was in a freaky anthology called either Horrors Horrors, Horrors or Terrors, Terrors, Terrors. I can never remember which of these anthologies it was as I read them pretty much back to back. They are notable for having stories with very odd premises. There is one about a man who, like me, has a dread of large moths. He transforms into a bat and eats them. In one sequence he wakes and thinks that he is tucked tightly in bed when in fact the tight sheets are his own wings wrapped around him.

In another story, narrated in the first person, a boy's little sister begins talking about strange things and places she has never seen or been to, like the grandfather moon and the dark woods. When she meets an old man whose family name is Moon she dies of fright. The strangest story was The Bakerloo Flea by Michael Rosen, which deals with a giant flea that terrorises the Bakerloo line on the London underground. Like an urban legend, it is told second-hand. Cleaning ladies who work in the tunnels each night relate the story to an acquaintance of the narrator. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across an account of a giant flea in Karl Shuker’s book From Flying Toads to Snakes With Wings. A lot of internet digging brought some sparse information on this odd case.

In 1857 the eminent entomologist Professor J. O. Westwood was sent a dead flea that had been found squashed flat in a bed in Gateshead by a Dr Blackhouse. He saw that the monster was twenty times larger than Pulex irritans, the common flea. Professor Westwood named the giant bloodsucker Pulex imperator, the Imperial flea. Upon closer examination, however, it was found to be the distorted carcass of a young cockroach. It goes to show how anyone can make a mistake.