There are plenty of films with a connection to Ray Harryhausen so you are quite spoilt for choice in finding one to pick. However there could only be one film for me to choose and that would have to be The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. The film is the second of three Sinbad films that Harryhausen was involved in, and in my opinion the best. And why, you might ask. Was it because of the effects? Being honest, no that isn’t the answer, it’s because it featured Dr Who.Okay not exactly Dr Who but rather a pre-Dr Who Tom Baker, he plays the part of the evil magician Koura, no scarf and jelly babies for this incarnation just menacing black and lots of dark trickery and foul deeds. It is by using the dark arts that he is able to call forth the assistance of a centaur, not any old centaur mind you but a cyclopean centaur, why have two classical beasts when you can merge them into one.
Now you might wonder how I am going to connect this to anything cryptozoological, after all a centaur is hardly going to be sighted skipping through the countryside (of course not, the big cats have eaten them all). No, instead I am using the centaur as a tenuous link to a very strange encounter that was had by John Farrell and Margaret Johnson in 1966 in the Republic of Ireland. The sighting took place in County Louth as they were driving past Lord Dillon’s estate, and what an odd sight they saw.
The following account given by Margaret Johnson is taken from Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland by Graham J. Mc Ewen.
‘A huge horse with a man’s face and horrible bulging eyes. I could see by John’s face he saw it too. I think I screamed, but both of us were so frightened that we were paralyzed. The thing had a horse’s body. But it was the face, leering and hairy and huge which shocked.’
Alright then it wasn’t a true centaur nor was it cyclopean but you have to admit the human-faced horse of County Louth does sound good, almost the counter to the horse-headed man who has been so prominent in the news recently.
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