New Cross Panther Latest

Yesterday's Sun reported:

A WOMAN fled and dialled 999 yesterday after she spotted what looked like a wild panther in a cul-de-sac. Cops searched the street — close to a primary school — but could find no trace of a beast. A source told The Sun: “She was terrified. She described it as a huge, black wild cat with large fangs and a long tail. The woman was very respectable, not drunk or imagining things, so the call was taken seriously.”

The 8.30am terror in New Cross, South London, came eight years after a man was mauled by a 6ft-long panther-like cat in nearby Sydenham. More sightings came in 2007 and 2009. The Met Police said: “Officers did a search but could not find the animal.” Research group Big Cats in Britain said: “There have been sightings in this area before.”

The Newsshopper has gone one better today and located the sighting as being in Southerngate Way by Fordham Park in New Cross and reported the witness saying: "I was walking to work in New Cross and looked to my left and saw a long black tail hanging down from the roof that covers the bins outside our block of flats. I then looked up and saw the biggest black cat I have ever seen - this was no domestic cat. It was very built with strong large leg muscles that you could see very clearly from the rear view. It was just perched with its tail dangling down'

See previous posts on various supposed beasts in Bexley, Crystal Palace, Borough High Street, Nunhead, Shooters Hill, Thamesmead etc.

Lost Steps: Haunted London

Transpontine contributor Scott Wood was interviewed on Resonance FM's great London show, Lost Steps, last week along with Camberwell-based artist Sarah Sparkes. The theme was Haunted London, with some South London tales including an underground ghost at Elephant & Castle; a fearsome 'thing' upstairs at the Thomas a Becket pub on the Old Kent Road; a spook that was said to get into bed with guests in a house in George Lane, Hither Green; a thirsty ghost in 1804 at St Pauls Church in Deptford said to climb out of a coffin and demand ale; and the 1948 dancing girl of One Tree Hill.

There's an interesting exchange on the significance of ghost stories, with presenter Malcolm Hopkins suggesting that 'behind every haunting there's got to be a story.... whether you believe in the haunting or not becomes irrelevant because the actual snippet of social history you get tells you a lot about London at a particular time'.

As Scott put is, 'the ghost is almost an oral memorial... a memorial that's not physical but is passed between people so they don't forget the stories of what's happened to people'. Examples include ghost stories as folk memories of World War 2 disasters, such as the haunting of the (now closed) Kings Arms on Peckham Rye said to be related to its bombing during the War, or stories related to the New Cross V2 explosion in 1944.

You can listen to the whole show at the Lost Steps website.

Check out more of Scott's London ghost and other spooky lore at the Londonist.

Scott is also hosting a Peckham ghost walk on Halloween and a London Bridge ghost walk on 27 October - details here.

Deptford spooks

Following on from the recent Brockley ghost tales, here's a couple from Deptford. The first comes care of Old Deptford History which recently reproduced a story from the Woolwich & Charlton Mercury 1994 (reprinted later in the Fortean Times). It tells of a resident of Watergate Street in Deptford who apparently suffered around that time from eery footsteps, doors slamming and a flying mirror, not to mention the sighting of a ghostly 'little girl with blonde curly hair'. The poltergeist activity was reported as coming to an end following the intervention of Gary Stock, a medium from Thames Street, Greenwich.

A more sceptical account of a Deptford ghost story comes from an interesting book entitled The Lone-Star of Liberia - Being the Outcome of Reflections on Our Own People by Frederick Alexander Durham. Published in 1892, this book by an African man living in London attempted to turn racist attitudes to Africans on their head by arguing that the natives of London were at least as superstitious and credulous as his compatriots.

The story, from 1891, is of a crowd of thousands turning out at St Pauls Church in Deptford to try and spot a rumoured ghost - said spirit apparently no more than a trick of the moonlight on some flyers posted on the church door.

The account remarks 'Just imagine the good people of Deptford believing in Junabaes!' The latter is obviously some kind of ghost, but does anyone know anymore? I googled that word and could find no trace of it.

Update 31 October 2016:

I have found a further account of the 1891 Deptford Ghost, from Maitland Daily Mercry (New South Wales) 15 July 1896. It adds the additional detail that 'a well-know local man who had committed suicide under somewhat romantic circumstances was at that very time awaiting inquest in the mortuary adjoining' and that this had fuelled belief in 'a ghost garbed in a flowing white sheet':

Sea Monster in Tooley Street

In Mark Pilkington's recent talk at South East London Folklore Society, he suggested that military agencies had sometimes deliberately played along with UFO and related stories as a cover for their own clandestine activities. For instance he talked about the Lake Pend Oreille Paddler, Idaho's very own Loch Ness Monster, which just happens to frequent a lake used for many years for secret US submarine tests.

All of which makes me wonder, why is this particular sea monster in a flower bed in Tooley Street, SE1? Is it part of a plot to disguise dubious goings on in nearby City Hall? I think we should be told.

A Floating Head at Brockley

Brockley Central has a good local ghost story from 1894, the tale of a man walking down Brockley Road and encountering 'the motionless figure of a man on horseback... Neither man nor beast was in the flesh. They were shadowy forms, but so distinctly did they show the man’s face under a three-cornered hat, his leather pistol pouches and the panting and swearing horse'. The story claims that hundreds of local people had made their way to visit the scene of the appearance on 'the lonely lane leading from Ladywell to Brockley Rise' - said lane is presumably the old Brockley footpath which ran (and still does run in parts) from Ladywell to Nunhead via Brockley, crossing Brockley Road by the Jack.

Here's another spooky local tale, from Real Ghost Stories by WT Stead (1897), this one featuring a floating head with green eyes and matted hair:

Hither Green Spiritualist and Bin Laden

Why is Gordon Brown sending all those troops into danger when the 'war on terror' could have been ended years ago thanks to a Hither Green spiritualist? According to a story in this week's News Shopper (15 December 2009), Angela Bayley's prediction of where 'Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan was not taken seriously when she made it eight years ago. But now Angela Bayley says her prediction, exclusively reported in News Shopper in 2001, has been proved true in a US Senate report'. Back then she 'dangled an Islamic charm over a map of Afghanistan to find bin Laden and felt a strong pull to Waza Khwa, in the south-east of the country'.

Bayley has her own theory about what's really going on : 'I don’t believe they want to find him because the longer it is they can’t find him, the more they can blame on him. They have wasted billions of pounds and dollars on a war no-one wants. They are never going to find him and they know it.'

They came from outer Sydenham

A couple of recently spotted South London fortean stories.

Neil Arnold at the Londonist reports a tale from 'several years ago' of an odd supposed sighting in Brockley: 'We saw a figure walking up the street towards us. The word we coined later to describe its movement was 'lolloping' - a kind of up and down bouncy walk. It took a few seconds for the two of us to realise this was no human being. The creature was entirely black and like a cardboard cut-out, flat and one-dimensional. It had no features at all, and it had arms that hung down to its knees. It seemed to be ignoring us, then it seemed to realise we could see it and it began to lollop faster towards us' (full story here).

Meanwhile the Newshopper (16 November 2009) reports strange lights over Sydenham:

'A mother and daughter had the fright of their lives when they saw two strange orange lights in the sky. Nurse Sue Hentschel was driving her teenage daughter Jessica to a dance class when they witnessed a terrifying vision in the sky. Their car was stuck in heavy Sydenham traffic on November 2 at around 6.10pm when they saw two mysterious lights. Mrs Hentschel, of Stembridge Road, Anerley, said: “We saw these two lights which were orange coming towards us. “My daughter looked up and said ‘Mum, what’s that?’ “I didn’t know. I just said ‘What the hell is that? What is it?’” She says they stared dumbfounded for several minutes as the lights hovered over Hazeldene School;.

The comments thread to this story has other people reporting seeing the same lights, but others provide the more prosaic explanation that they were in fact Chinese lanterns rather than spacecraft.

UFOs over Streatham?

Claims of strange lights in the sky over Streatham in the last few weeks:

'On Tuesday night at around 10.30pm Gary Richardson, 42, was out walking his dogs when he saw a UFO displaying unusual-shaped lights slipping silently over Mitcham towards Streatham, before suddenly disappearing. Three weeks ago TV editor and sci-fi fan Mark McConnell called the Guardian newsroom reporting that he had seen a similar object, three lights giving off a dull glow, hovering 200ft over St George's hospital on the night of August 14'.

Full story in This is Local London, 12 September 2009

Occult Lewisham Films for free

Brockley Max is presents a taster of the cryptozoological-Brockley film Bigfoot of Suburbia and a preview of an occult Deptford film King of Deptford Creek tonight, for free, at the Ladywell Tavern at 7pm.

May well see you there.

Details are:

Bigfoot of Suburbia (2006). Written and Directed by Fred Rowson. Starring Richard Proctor
King of Deptford Creek (2009). Written and Directed by Fred Rowson. Starring: Simon Pearsall, Director of Photography: Jaime Feliu Torres

Tank Gallery presents two films by local Filmmaker Fred Rowson. We will first introduce a taster of Bigfoot of Suburbia whose main character, Peter Kingsley, is a jobless loner, lost in the heat of a South London summer. However, when a brief local news story catches his attention, his life is given a purpose: even if it costs him his reputation and his home, he knows that he must track down the mysterious beast that is hiding in his local park, Hilly Fields…

We will then screen a full preview of King of Deptford Creek, due to make the round on the festival circuit this summer. This is the story of a South London-based Private Investigator, Eliot, whose journey to find the missing Philip obsesses him to the point that he drops out of society. He becomes so caught up in the search that he too disappears - thanks in equal parts to a failing marriage and a missing diary. The story is set around a Thames tributary, The Ravensbourne, and its tidal reach, known as Deptford Creek, an eerie environment that slowly swallows Eliot’s identity.

The audience are then invited to join us in an informal discussion with a small panel including Fred Rowson and Richard Proctor. The audience will get the chance to see a full screening of Bigfoot of Suburbia either after the discussion or on a later date.

Entrance Fee: Free
Venue: Tank Gallery at the Ladywell Tavern
80 Ladywell Road London SE13 7HS