MUIRHEAD`S MYSTERIES: A DAY`S CRYPTOZOOLOGY WORK IN MANCHESTER

On Friday, May 13th I went to Manchester; about 1 and a half hours by bus from Macclesfield. I am not superstitious, given the date, and I was not unlucky. Read on!

I was looking through the North Express, which I know nothing about except it caught my eye as the Local Studies Library only had 18 months of film and I didn`t have much time. I found three items of interest from a cryptozoological and ancient-technological point of view.

Firstly, a story from December 2nd 1901 from the Klondike, the gold rush speculating area of the Yukon.

PREHISTORIC MAN
HE WORE NAILS OF SOLID SILVER ON HIS SHOES
A miner named Beaumet, who has returned from Klondike, has brought with him evidences of prehistoric man in that region in the shape of solid silver shoe nails of the same shape as those now used, the nails having regular indentations in their sides.

Several dozens of them were found at a depth of 110 feet on the bed rock of a creek. Some bones of a mastodon which were found in the same place give a clue to the age of the nails (1)

Part of the following item is reproduced here; the parts of relevance to us:

WILD ANIMALS IN THE FAR EAST
Many parts of China Afford Great Attractions to Sportsmen

The Northern Deer Park, in the mountains north-west of Peking, is one of the finest preserves in the world, and contains a very large herd of giant deer…Szechuan is also the home of a peculiar animal that might be called a “ missing link”. It is a species of ape growing quite large, adults reaching four feet in height. It lives in the mountains, and is protected from the cold by heavy fur and mane. It is peculiar for the fact that hibernates like a bear and the Chinese recognizing this peculiarity call it the run-hiung, or the man bear. It is much sought for its flesh, and its paws are prized as great delicacies…The southern provinces of China are remarkable for a monkey, which in grotesque and variagated colurs, can only be compared to a mandarin duck and gold fish, which are also peculiar to China. These southern China monkeys have bodies of a light brown colour, but the face is a brilliant orange, with a black band across the forehead.

The arms are white, but the hands a most intense black. The tail and a large spot over it are also white, while the thighs are black, and the legs a brilliant red. (2)

Finally:

SNAKES BY THE YARD

A small gulch near Florence, in Colorado, has been found to be full of snakes – great stone snakes whose wriggling days are over; prehistoric snakes with enormous heads and tails like rudders.

An effort is being made to get some perfect specimens of some of the strangest of these wonderful fossils for museums.

The first find, which was made only a few months ago, was a head measuring two feet and a half by two feet eight inches.

It was so unmistakably the head of a fossil animal of some sort that the discoverers determined to search for the rest of the body. They found it in sections, part on one side of the gulch and part on the opposite side…The tail is shaped like a rudder and pitched downward, which leads the discoverers of the reptile to the belief that it was a swimmer rather than a crawler. The shape of the body is much like that of a salmon, with the narrow edge downward. The marks on the fractured, stony edges of the body indicate that the serpent had no vertebrae, but only cartillage for holding the long mass together…Many of the fossils are to be found in this spot. One that has been taken out has a head thirty-three by thirty-six inches. Four pieces of the body and the head measure seven feet in length, and weigh 700lbs.

The belief amongst scientists who have heard of these discoveries is that they are of great value. Can the sea serpents whose reported appearance from time to time we treat with such incredulity , be the descendants of such monsters as these? (3)

1. North Express December 2nd 1901
2. Ibid Dec 7th 1901
3. Ibid Dec 23rd 1901

THE ALARM THE DECEIVER

You are the “power and the glory”
You are the weakness in defeat
Like the rise and fall of the British Empire
You make me sick with your conceit

You are,you are the weakness
You are,you are,you are
You are the sickness that`s in my soul
You are, you are,you are “the Maker”
You are called greed and you re a cheat
You are,you are, you are the Deceiver
You are not welcome in my life