THE WEIRD WARBLING WHATSIT

One of the more bizare episodes, which happened to us during the long hot summer and autumn of 1997 was what my friend and colleague Jan Scarff dubbed 'The Case of the Weird Warbling Whatsit of the Westcountry'. We were sitting at home when the telephone rang. It was a lady living at Clyst St Mary (a little village just outside Exeter) who had been hearing strange bird calls outside her window in the middle of the night, every night for the previous five weeks.

She didn`t know whether she had a strange wild bird living in her garden or whether she was being haunted by some kind of poltergeist. After talking to her for a few minutes we became convinced that the matter was a strictly paranormal rather than a zoological one.

Luckily for us, it transpired that she had managed to make a cassette recording of one of these episodes of strange bird calls, and she played it, first to Jan and then to Jon, down the telephone. It sounded like nothing else I had ever heard before, although it was mildly reminiscent of the weird call of an Albatross, but even though Albatrosses have been known to venture into the Northern Hemisphere on odd occasions the chances of one alighting outside a lady`s bedroom window at precisely the same time each night and issuing forth unearthly cries for a precise number of times before dissappearing every night for six weeks, was so unlikely as to be statistically impossible.

We decided to visit the scene of these events, and in the words of the characters from a dozen third rate US TV cop shows "stake out the joint". This we did on the night of the following Friday, accompanied by Dave Hopkins - a keen ornithologist, whom we brought along not just because he is good fun, but because we thought if it WAS some strange bird making these noises then he would be the person in our team most likely to know what sort of bird it was.

According to our witness these noises always occured at four minutes past two in the morning, and so we began a long and lonely vigil in the car park of the boozer opposite her house. Curious, the pub landlord stood outside with us giving us coffee and telling us ghost stories. Apparently a bar manager several years before had hung himself and ever since there had been a string of poltergeist reports and even the occasional sighting. Some of the more superstitious bar staff refused to work after hours alone.

Although we started the evening in high spirits and an atmosphere of hilarity had prevailed, by the time two o`clock approached we were actually getting quite scared, and when all the owls in the area started to hoot and screech we were quite unnerved, but unfortunately we heard nothing even approaching the noises that had been played to us. Feeling somewhat deflated we all went home, but the next day Jan telephoned me to tell me that much to his surprise, the lady had reported hearing the same noises as usual on the previous night, and had even been watching us wandering around the garden at the same time as she had heard them. This was getting very strange indeed and when, on the next two nights (saturday and sunday) she produced tape recordings of what was apparently the same sound, we decided that there was only one thing that we could sensibly do - we had to go to her house, at four minutes past two, wait in her bedroom and see what happened.

Understandably she was loth to have a whole bunch of quasi-fortean weirdos trampelling around her boudoir and therefore It was only Jan who visited her laden with paranormal investigating equipment the following night. As the hour of two approached the atmosphere in the house became strained and tense, and by two o`clock you could, (in Jan`s words) "cut the atmosphere with a knife".

Four minutes later the unearthly sounds started. Jan, together with the lady`s son Paul, rampaged around her bedroom and eventually found the source ofthe noise... it was a novelty Japanese watch with an alarm consisting of the electronically generated sound of a cock crowing.

The mystery was solved, but there is an object lesson here for us all. During the days before we knew what had actually caused these sounds Jon appeared on BBC Radio and played the tape, voicing his opinion that here MIGHT be a genuine paranormal occurence. As it was, it was nothing of the kind, but if we had not come public here in this column with the truth of the matter "The Case of the Weird Warbling Whatsit of the Westcountry" could well have passed into the canon of fortean literature as a genuine unsolved mystery.

One wonders how many other well known cases have equally prosaic explanations?