Blinded by the Light: Kids on LSD stare at the sun until they go blind

Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun

But mama, that’s where the fun is

(Manfred Mann’s Earthband)

I heard about this guy once. Took LSD, lay down in a field and stared at the sun until his eyes melted… He was discovered later by friends staggering round the field permanently blinded and utterly mad. He never recovered his sight or his sanity.

That’s how I first heard this cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. The shocking image of the tripped-out acid freak with his eyes dripping down his face is certainly an arresting one, and perhaps this is why the legend has become such an enduring part of Acid Lore. We’ve all been told tales of the poor soul who was blinded after staring at the sun on an LSD trip. But it’s just a myth, right?

Well, the real story begins in the Summer of Love in California…

Don’t Stare!

Here Comes the Sun

The front page of the Los Angeles Times on 19 May 1967 carried a report by an anonymous ‘staff writer’ with the headline ‘Four LSD users suffer serious eye damage from sun gazing while on trip’.

According to an anonymous spokesman from the Santa Barbara Ophthalmological Society, four students on separate occasions had taken LSD and stared at the sun causing permanent damage to their vision. One of the students told doctors he had been ‘holding a religious conversation with the sun’, while another said he had stared into the sun ‘to produce unusual visual displays.’ As they gazed at the sun, they all apparently had no awareness of the damage they were doing to their retinas.

According to the article, the four Santa Barbara students all suffered the same kind of eye damage. They had not been totally blinded; instead, the sun had burned pinhead sized holes in their retinas. This meant they could never read again – they could see the corners of the page, and the shape of the print, but they were unable to see the word their eyes were pointing at due to a permanent blind spot ruining their reading vision. So much for their studies – their young lives destroyed because of careless experimentation with a dangerous drug. That’s the lesson that many readers will have taken from the article which was gleefully picked up by newspapers across the US and around the world.

There are many reasons to be suspicious of this story. No names are given, for one thing. The story also seems implausible because bright sun in the eyes instinctively causes them to fill with water, the pupils to narrow and it would be almost impossible not to look away, especially with dilated pupils when on an acid trip. It seems highly unlikely that four students in the same city would independently be dumb enough to stare at the sun on drugs long enough to cause permanent eye damage.

In any case, this seems to be the earliest print reference to the story, though we can speculate that it was circulating by word of mouth before then.

A few months later, an even more horrific new version of the tale was hitting the headlines.

Let the Sun Shine In

One sunny spring morning in 1966, six Pennsylvania college students headed to a nearby meadow to trip out on LSD. Six hours later, they had not returned, and concerned friends went to the meadow to look for them. They were horrified to find all six were helplessly blind after lying on their backs and staring at the sun in a psychedelic daze.

They didn’t realise they had been staring at the sun until they came out of their trance. Somehow the drug had kept their eyelids open. The six students permanently lost their sight and were receiving rehabilitation treatment from Pennsylvania Welfare Department.

This report surfaced in the Los Angeles Times on 13 January 1968 and was covered widely in other newspapers. The source for the story was Dr Norman Yoder, a man who had been blind since a childhood accident and who worked for Pennsylvania Welfare Department as the state commissioner for the blind.

Dr Yoder said he could not reveal the names of the students, nor the college they attended. He did tell the press that as of 1968, the students were back at school and doing well, though still suffering from remorse and shame.

The story was confirmed as true by a number of state officials, including governor of Philadelphia Raymond Shafer in front of a news conference. Nevertheless, there was growing scepticism as well as pressure on Yoder to reveal the names of the supposed victims. Reporters searched in vain for the blinded students, and Yoder’s superiors began to note inconsistencies in his claims.

Finally, Yoder confessed that he had fabricated the story as he was concerned about the dangers LSD posed to the young. After revealing his hoax, Yoder collapsed and was taken to a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia. Governor Shafer, one day after telling the world he was convinced the story was true, found himself before another news conference to reveal that it had all been a hoax.

Some 1968 headline

The previous summer Yoder had attended a lecture about the effects of LSD on the eyes and afterwards felt the need to do something. Perhaps inspired by an already circulating legend, or a memory of the Santa Barbara reports, Yoder concocted his morality tale. He increased the horror by making the hapless students totally blind, rather than suffering the partial visual damage of the Santa Barbara four.

Children of the Sun

So, the Pennsylvania six were invented by Yoder, and the Santa Barbara four were also likely a hoax or an urban legend reported as news. But people do stare at the sun deliberately or accidentally and suffer solar retinopathy – damage to the retina from sunlight. This is most likely to be the result of watching a solar eclipse, but people have also deliberately looked at the sun to get out of military service, because they were mentally ill or were conducting sun worship rituals.

And yes, it has been documented in LSD users, though these cases occurred after the Santa Barbara and Pennsylvania hoaxes. Just as life imitates art, it also imitates urban legends.

In a 1973 paper for the British Journal of Ophthalmology, Schatz and Mendleblatt examined the treatment for two cases of solar retinopathy involving LSD. One young man had taken the drug and gazed at the sun. He had a religious experience with the sun having the significance of God, though his spiritual ecstasy was short-lived as he almost immediately realised his vision was blurry. He could see spots before his eyes, struggled to read and had to look to the side of something in order to see it clearly. He was treated with steroids, and although his visual acuity returned to normal, he was plagued by blind spots in his visual field. The man had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

The second case involved a fifteen-year-old girl who had been to a lecture on the dangers of drugs. The lecturer related the tale of the students who took LSD and damaged their eyes, and the girl thought ‘it would be a neat thing to burn out my retinas.’ She took some acid and gazed at the sun for an unknown period of time feeling omnipotent and unaware of any potential damage to her eyes. She later found she couldn’t read newspaper print or the blackboard at school, though after treatment she recovered well. She was described as having a ‘hysterical personality’.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

A number of other academic studies have examined similar cases, so perhaps the practice of sun gazing on LSD was more widespread than we might expect. In a paper for the Annals of Ophthalmology in 1971 Roger Ewald described the treatment of nine US army soldiers who had engaged in psychedelic sun gazing independently of one another. ‘A funnel led up to the sun’, one said about staring at the sun on LSD.  ‘A voice told me to look at the sun,’ said another. Some of the nine had taken to sun gazing as they felt it brought about a flashback, calling it ‘tripping out on the sun’. The patients, who were all described as having ‘character and behavioural disorders’, suffered varying degrees of damage to retinas as well as blind spots. One man thought he was stuck in a permanent acid trip because his blind spot meant that whatever he pointed his eyes at seemed to disappear.

Abstract for Roger Ewald’s 1971 paper in Annals of Ophthalmology

Interestingly, Ewald seems to suggest that staring at the sun to enhance a trip or try and induce a flashback may have been common practice: ‘Based on the comments of several patients it is apparent that sun gazing associated with LSD is by no means confined to the military environment and is probably more common in the drug community than is generally appreciated.’

Eward notes dryly in the abstract to his paper: ‘Counselling directed toward the serious ocular effects of sun gazing would hopefully discourage repeated incidents’.

So the story about the acid trippers who stared into the sun and damaged their eyes is a myth, but it’s also something that really happened after the myth had been circulating. Perhaps hearing about the myth was part of what motivated people to try sun-gazing on acid, a process folklorists call ostension – the acting out of legends. The real-life sun-gazers were clearly very disturbed or very silly.

It still happens today – a 2021 paper in the journal Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy examined the treatment of a teenage boy who had taken ecstasy and then stared into the sun…

So, if you take LSD and gaze at the sun, the good news is you probably won’t go totally blind. You might lose some visual acuity and suffer from blind spots or see constant spots before your eyes, perhaps permanently. On the other hand, you might get an article about you published in Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy.

Too much sun will burn

(Traffic)

For more psychedelic urban legends see here: https://paulweatherhead.com/2026/03/08/mellow-yellow-the-great-banana-hoax/

This article was first published in Psychedelic Scene Magazine

Three-eyed Tibetan Monk flies to Venus in a Flying Saucer: The Story of Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa

Ever wondered what it’s like to have your third eye opened surgically? In his bestselling 1956 book The Third Eye, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa describes the procedure that he underwent on his ninth birthday in a Tibetan monastery.

One lama held young Rampa’s head between his knees to keep him still. Another lama applied a herbal compress to the boy’s head and then took out a scary looking tool with a U-shaped blade covered in tiny teeth.

The lama said it would hurt. In Rampa’s own words:

He pressed the instrument to the centre of my forehead and rotated the handle. For a moment there was a sensation as if someone was pricking me with thorns. To me it seemed that time stood still. There was no particular pain as it penetrated the skin and flesh, but there was a little jolt as the end hit the bone. He applied more pressure, rocking the instrument slightly so that the little teeth would fret through the frontal bone… Suddenly there was a little ”scrunch” and the instrument penetrated the bone… For a moment the pain was intense, like a searing white flame. It diminished, died and was replace [sic] by spirals of colour, and globules of incandescent smoke…[i]

The operation, Rampa claimed, gave him special powers like the ability to see auras, leave his body, levitate and read minds…

The book that started it all

Later in this and subsequent books, Rampa tells how the monks of Tibet had created amazing giant kites and how lamas would go flying through the air in them. He also encountered a yeti, was tortured by the Japanese and travelled to Venus in a spacecraft…[ii]

Monk takes a trip in kite (from the Third Eye)

As a young teen, I devoured the works of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. They had everything: astral projection, auras, Atlantis, yetis, hollow earth, telepathy, levitation, prophecy, mysticism and flying saucers all seasoned with a superficial knowledge of Buddhism and the Theosophical tradition. Rampa wrote of the Akashic record, an infinite library of books containing everything that ever happened or would ever happen. The Akashic record is an idea Rampa borrowed from Theosophy, but as a bookish youth this endless library of wisdom was my idea of heaven. It sounds quaint now. The Akashic Record would probably all fit on your phone.

A naked lady astral projects – illustration from You-Foerver

But who was the eccentrically monikered Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, this mysterious lama from Tibet?

As the lama says, ‘The more you know, the more you have to learn…’

Lama Chameleon

As soon as Rampa’s book The Third Eye was published, experts on Tibet and Buddhism decried it as a hoax. Some scholars went so far as to hire a private detective to investigate this mysterious man from the east.

It turned out that the supposed Tibetan lama Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was born as Cyril Hoskin to a Devonshire plumber. He was not Tibetan nor a lama and had never been anywhere near Tibet yet alone Venus. He had, though, shaved his head and changed his name to Dr Kuan-So. Still, his accent was less eastern than west country.

Some 1950s newspaper headlines

At the time of his expose, Rampa aka Dr Kuan-So aka Cyril Hoskin was living in Howth near Dublin with his wife and a young woman called Sheelagh Rouse, a society hostess who had left her husband and children to become Rampa’s disciple.[iii]

It seems Rampa had also been attempting to photograph the human aura. This activity required a succession of young female models (their auras are brightest, apparently) to pose naked (the clothing interferes with the aura, apparently).

In any case, it seemed the game was up for the bogus lama, as the press were now calling him.

But Cyril Hoskin had plenty more up the sleeve of his saffron robe…

And he could explain everything…

How Cyril Henry Hoskin became Tuesday Lobsang Rampa

Rampa explained that Cyril Hoskin had been attempting to take a photo of an owl when he fell out of a tree. When he got to his feet, he was surprised to see that his body was lying in a crumpled heap where he had fallen. Just then, a saffron-robed Tibetan lama floated across the lawn and told him telepathically that he wanted Cyril’s physical body for the good of humanity. Cyril wasn’t thrilled with this prospect, but the lama told him he would be back in a month for his answer, but in the meantime he was to grow a beard and think it over.

A month later, the lama returned with two companions and met Cyril in his garden. He decided to go though with the exchange of souls. In order for the ‘transmigration’ of souls to occur, the lama told Cyril to climb the tree again and throw himself out of it once more which he did. Cyril Hoskin went straight to paradise allowing Tuesday Lobsang Rampa to take over his physical body.[iv]

Mrs Hoskin didn’t seem to mind that her husband was now a Tibetan lama, and the best-selling books continued: The Doctor from Lhasa, the Rampa Story, Cave of the Ancients,  Wisdom of the Ancients, the Hermit, Tibetan Sage, I Believe, You Forever, the Saffron Robe, Feeding the Flame, As it Was… and several others. One book, Living with the Lama, was even dictated by his cat, Mrs Fifi Grey-whiskers!

I was overjoyed when I got my hands on his 1965 book You Forever. This was the one that told you how to do everything. How to see auras. How to develop psychic powers like clairvoyance, psychometry and telepathy. And best of all, how to leave your body and go travelling on the astral plane to visit the Akashic Record. I followed his instructions meticulously night after night, but my psychic powers remained undeveloped, and my astral body stubbornly refused to budge.

Not knowing of his newspaper exposes in the 1950s, it only when I read of his journey to Venus that even my teenage credulity was stretched to its limits…

The Lama Goes to Venus

In articles for the Flying Saucer Review magazine, Rampa told how he became one of a group of seven telepathic lamas who discovered an ancient alien spaceship high in the Tibetan highlands. Venturing inside the craft, they met telepathic alien giants who took them for a ride in their flying saucer.

The magnificent seven telepathic lamas were taken on a tour of the alien giants’ base on the dark side of the Moon before being flown at the speed of light to Venus. There they found the planet to be full of fairy cities, with towers, domes and spires all glittering with beautiful colours…

Seven telepathic monks in a flying car on Venus (from My Visit to Venus)

Rampa and the other lamas were taken in a flying Venusian car to the Hall of Knowledge, where the Lords of Venus projected for them the entire history of the planet earth from the eons before Atlantis to the year 3000…

And then they were taken home again…

As the lama himself says, ‘If people don’t wish to believe, it doesn’t matter how much proof is offered…’

Epilogue

Tuesday Lobsang Rampa died in 1981 aged 70. An excellent recent biography of the man by R.B. Russell sums up his ubiquitous books:

…a unique mix of derring-do, hardship, pseudo-orientalism and various New Age beliefs, although there was also a great deal of home-spun philosophy with additional reactionary grumbling.[v]

Yes, he was a New Age charlatan who made a living from writing specious books about his imagined experiences in a Tibet he had never even visited. But his books also fired the imaginations of many around the world looking for exotic excitement and occult adventure. He still has his devotees today and his website contains online versions of all nineteen of his books, including the one written by Mrs Fifi Grey-whiskers his Siamese cat.[vi]

As the lama once said, ‘Humans upon earth are an irrational figure given to believing that which is not so, in preference to that which is…’

[i] Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (1956) The Third Eye, Corgi, pp.75-78

[ii] Rampa’s adventures on Venus were published in Flying Saucer Review and are available here: https://educate-yourself.org/cn/My-Visti-to-Venus-1957-Dr-T-Lobsang-Rampa.pdf

[iii] R.B. Russell (2025) T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith (Tartarus Press)

[iv] See the excellent R.B. Russell (2025) T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith (Tartarus Press) for the different versions of Rampa’s transmigration story in his various books

[v] Russell (2025) p.100

[vi] This website run by Rampa’s devotees including his live in disciple Sheelagh Rouse and contains all his books in various digital formats: https://www.lobsangrampa.org/research-material.html The snippets of Rampa wisdom (the lama says etc …) are taken from the above website

Funny Smell Fears Fuel Fainting Fits Across Britain

Feeling anxious? Feeling stressed about war, terrorism, inflation, pollution, infection, shortages?

If so, you’re not alone. But…what’s that smell? Sort of chemical-like… You’re feeling a bit nauseous and your head is starting to spin…

And down you go. And then someone else bites the dust. And then another….They’re dropping like flies… Could this be a terrorist poison gas attack?

Call the police. The men in hazmat suits rush in. Evacuate. Lockdown. Investigate…

Then nothing.

Funny smell fears are fuelling fainting fits across the country… What’s going on?

On 30 April 2026, a funny chemical smell was noticed by some passengers at Farringdon station on the Elizabeth Line in London. The station was evacuated and emergency services rushed to the scene including armed police. Fourteen passengers received medical treatment and two were taken to hospital.

Farringdon Station (Luke Wooding BBC)

Tests found no elevated levels of chemicals.[i]

On 8 May, a funny chemical smell was noticed by customers in a branch of the NatWest Bank in Golders Green, London. Several people became unwell. Cue emergency services, men in hazmat suits, evacuation, hospitalisation and investigation.

A few people were given medical treatment, but no unexpected chemicals were found. A police spokesman said: “A number of people were experiencing a range of symptoms which could indicate exposure to a chemical or other substance. Crews carried out a thorough search of the area using detection, identification and monitoring equipment and have now confirmed there are no elevated levels of hazardous materials present.”[ii]

Golders Green (Izzy Sampson)

A third incident occurred not in London but in Manchester. On Monday 11 May, police received reports of a chemical smell coming from a hotel on Canal Street, the heart of Manchester’s gay village. Nobody was reported as needing treatment, but emergency services cordoned off the street. The hotel and nearby bars were evacuated, and a man was taken into custody. Police said there was no terrorist threat and no risk of explosion.[iii]

Canal Street Manchester (the Manc)

On 12 May, emergency services were called to a Norwich ambulance control centre as staff complained of a ‘mysterious odour’. The centre was evacuated though nothing unusual was found.[iv]

Something Smells Funny

Concern, anxiety, panic, nausea, shortness of breath and fainting are all common reactions to a funny smell in tense times such as the ones we’re living through. Often the episode starts when someone notices an unusual odour – perhaps from a cleaning fluid, someone’s perfume or even a surreptitiously deployed stink bomb. In 2023, a number of poison gas panics in Iran were indeed started by stink bombs.[v]

When people are suffering from free-floating anxiety, they can become hypervigilant of their surroundings and pick up details they would normally miss. A strange smell can be misinterpreted as dangerous and then the nocebo effect takes over – people start to feel unwell because they believe they have been in contact with a noxious substance, even though they have not. The nocebo effect is the evil twin of the famous placebo effect. One’s mind and one’s expectations create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You expect to feel sick. Then you do feel sick.

Typically, the symptoms spread form person to person. When one person complains about an odd smell and a headache before fainting, it’s likely that others nearby will behave in a similar fashion.

Media amplify these episodes with footage and photos of police cordons, medical personnel, sick people on stretchers and scary-looking investigators in protective clothing. This feeds the flame of the panic and it spreads…

These panics are a normal part of the human reaction to anxiety and stress. It’s called mass psychogenic illnesses, though is perhaps better known by the more politically incorrect term, mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria occurs when emotional conflict or anxiety lead to the simultaneous development of physical or mental conditions in a group of people when there is no organic cause. It’s socially contagious and spreads easily between individuals.

Mad Gassers

The classic instance of funny smell mass hysteria was the Mad Gasser of Mattoon panic of 1944. Dozens of residents of Mattoon, Illinois reported the smell of a sweet gas that they thought had been sprayed into their homes. The victims immediately began to suffer from nausea, paralysis, dizziness and other symptoms. Some were sure they’d seen a shadowy figure at their window.

There was intense and sensational media coverage as more and more cases of alleged gas poisonings were reported. However, no evidence of any poison gas or a mysterious prowler materialised. Newspapers had been filled with claims that the Nazis were planning gas attacks on the US, so when people in a hypervigilant state noticed a smell, they took normal smells (blocked chimneys, bug spray, flowerbeds) for poisonous fumes.[vi] The apparent attacks were a hysterical reaction to wartime anxiety and fear that chemical weapons would be deployed by the Germans.

Similar panics took place in Palestine in the 1980s, in Afghanistan in the 2000s and Iran in 2023. All were against a backdrop of conflict and fear of chemical weapons.[vii]

Of course, contributing to the Golders Green incident of May 2026 is concern after several attacks on synagogues in the area as well as the knife attack on two Jews and a Muslim by a deranged Somali man on the 29 April.[viii]

Epilogue

We are cursed to live in interesting times, and interesting times fuel hysterical outbreaks. I don’t think these are the last funny smell panics that we’ll see in the coming months, so keep your eyes open…and hold your nose…

[i] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/travel-chaos-as-gas-leak-closes-londons-farringdon-station-with-passengers-feeling-unwell/ar-AA224M1b?ocid=BingNewsVerp

[ii] https://metro.co.uk/2026/05/11/police-people-chemical-suits-swarm-evacuated-north-london-bank-28321415/

[iii]https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/businesses-evacuated-over-fears-chemical-33928546 ; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgz890vempo

[iv] https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/26097646.norwich-ambulance-centre-evacuated-fire-crews-called/

[v] Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead Social Panics and Phantom Attackers (Palgrave Macmillan: 2024) p.218

[vi] Bartholomew and Weatherhead (2024) pp.16-21

[vii] Bartholomew and Weatherhead (2024) pp.217-223

[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Golders_Green_attack

Spiked with One Sip!

O, take heed girls! One sip is all it takes…Look what happened to Millie Taplin. She accepted a drink from a strange man and was rendered paralysed, trapped in her own body and squirming and gurning as if possessed by a demon.

Millie’s mother released a shocking video of her daughter taken while she was in hospital after the alleged spiking incident. The story of Millie Taplin has been all over the international media this week along with lurid headlines about demonic possession, paralysis, malevolent strangers and drug-induced horrors so you’d be forgiven for thinking this was news. In fact, it happened in 2021.[i]

Millie’s story is often presented as a warning in social media posts and news accounts. A kind of fable for young women. You could be next!

We’ll get to what I think is going on shortly but first let’s look at the myth.

Are you ready for a fairy story?

One sip is all it took…

Once upon a time a young woman called Millie went for a night out with friends. She had just turned eighteen, she’d never been to a nightclub before and at last the lockdowns that failed to stop the pandemic had just been lifted. Finally, young people were free to enjoy a night out.

Millie’s mum sent her daughter an ominously prophetic text warning her not to leave her drink unattended, because….well, you know what might happen to an innocent young woman – and everyone’s heard the stories.

At Moo Moo’s nightclub in Southend, Essex, a stranger chatted with young Millie and offered her a drink of vodka and lemonade. Her mother’s wise words seemingly forgotten, Millie took a sip…

Soon she began to feel hot and sick and went outside. Her vision went blurry. She was taken to hospital where her condition deteriorated. She could no longer walk, her hands were clenched into claws, her body went stiff and her face underwent grotesque contortions as if she’d been possessed by a demon.

Later Millie said she’d been fully conscious in the hospital but unable to control her spasms. It was as if she had been trapped inside her own body.

Medical staff concluded that Millie had been spiked with two drugs. One to knock her unconscious and one to paralyse her.

Fortunately, Millie recovered from this dose of a dangerous cocktail of narcotics after a few hours and went home.

But YOU might not be so lucky…

Drink! Drugs! Sex!

This is the story roughly as it’s been told in hundreds of social media posts and news articles around the world, and the release of the video of Millie contorted and writhing like little Regan in the Exorcist has brought it back to lurid public attention.

For all their ostentatious concern, the media LOVES it when young girls on a night out get spiked. Drink, drugs and sex – who could want more for a news headline?

Some of the headlines and social media posts

But we have some good reasons to be sceptical about Millie’s story. Firstly, there doesn’t appear to be any drug or combination of drugs that would lead to the symptoms Millie exhibited, especially after only one sip, and when the worst symptoms appeared hours later in a medical setting. Some accounts make it two sips or a few sips, but the point still stands.

There appears to have been no blood tests carried out. Or if there were, the results were negative and not released. The medical staff who supposedly suggested Millie had been dosed with a combination of narcotic and paralytic are not named. This may have been nurses’ speculation passed on to the media by Millie’s family.

Furthermore, CCTV cameras are everywhere. Surely the sinister stranger who gave Millie the drink would have been arrested and charged if he had indeed been responsible.

Could it be that Millie, unused to public drinking, and filled with government induced anxiety about Covid-19, simply drank too much and, primed by the text she received from her mum and other media accounts of women being drink or needle spiked, misinterpreted her own intoxication? When she first started feeling unwell, Millie thought she had just drunk too much, as did her friends. The effects of too much alcohol, excitement at her first night out in a club and anxiety induced by government fear propaganda could all have led to a panic attack that made her seek medical aid.

Typical of many Instagram posts

Of course, seeking medical aid is the right thing to do if you think you’ve been spiked. But drinking too much and throwing a wobbler is embarrassing to admit, so it’s easy to see how the assumption – or invention – of a spiking attack could be useful to the alleged victim. Instead of blame and criticism, the ‘victim’ becomes the centre of attention, gains 15 minutes of fame, garners sympathy and enjoys the status boost associated with being a brave victim.

The academic literature suggests that the use of drugs in sexual assaults is rare.[ii] When they are used, it’s more likely that they will be used to facilitate an assault in a private space such as the victim’s or perpetrator’s home. Incapacitating someone with criminal intent in a public space surrounded by staff and CCTV cameras is not a wise move as it would involve carrying or dragging a clearly intoxicated person through crowds of witnesses.

As drink spiking expert Pamela Donovan points out, if someone is going to spike you for malicious purposes, they are likely to do it in a private rather than a public space and they are probably known and trusted by the victim.[iii]

Drink Spiking: the Evidence

A number of studies have carried out medical tests on alleged spiking victims. Results show the vast majority of people who think their drinks have been drugged are wrong. An Australian study examined the blood of 97 people who reported to a hospital saying they had been spiked. Guess how many of that sample actually had any sedative or other drug (aside from narcotics knowingly taken) in their system? That’s right. None of them.[iv]

A similar study in Wales tested 75 mostly female patients who had presented to a hospital A&E department reporting that they had been spiked. The tests showed that while many of the patients had certainly had a lot to drink, and quite a few had ingested various recreational drugs, none of them had actually been spiked.[v]

Other studies have similar results.[vi] People who turn up at casualty departments thinking they have been spiked seem to have no drug in their system (other than ones they had taken voluntarily).

We’re told that drink spiking is common. But if it’s so widespread and blatant, why aren’t our jails bursting with the villains? Nightclubs are full of potential witnesses and CCTV cameras are everywhere. Police have investigated thousands of alleged spiking cases – 6,670 between 2017 and 2021 – and only 130 of these resulted in a charge. This survey, conducted by the Independent, does not actually tell us how many were eventually convicted, though it does say that some of these charges were for other offences to the one initially brought against the defendant.[vii] And we don’t know how many of these cases actually took place in a public place such as a nightclub.

One police force, Avon and Somerset, recorded that from 2016 to 2021, there were 486 cases of drink spiking investigated, resulting in 27 arrests but no convictions.[viii]

Tragic Magic

So what’s going on? How can so many people think they have been spiked when they haven’t?

First, perhaps the victim had not kept track of how much she was drinking, or had a bad reaction to drugs (prescription, illicit or both) she had voluntarily taken. This bad reaction might mistakenly be assumed to be symptoms of spiking – about which everyone has heard the scare stories. And as an excuse for being inebriated, being spiked would certainly gain more sympathy than having knocked back one too many Jagar-bombs. As Pamela Donovan puts it, it’s a kind of redemptive tragic magic.[ix] A drink spiking story instantly conjures up archetypes of damsels in distress and dastardly villains and magically shifts the responsibility.

Being spiked confers on one sympathy, moral status and also suggests that the victim is so irresistible that dastardly villains will do anything to get their hands on them.

Another possibility is that the victim suffered a panic or anxiety attack and then became hypervigilant about the state of their body such that a nocebo effect occurred. The nocebo effect is the powerful evil twin of the placebo effect. When you’re primed to expect negative symptoms, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and the mind does the rest. In other words, what psychiatrists of a bygone age might have called a hysterical reaction.

We’ve had plague, wars, inflation, climate doom-mongering and God knows what else relentlessly over the last few years. Constant free-floating anxiety creates the ideal conditions for hysteria. People become hypervigilant about their body and their surroundings, and their mind and the nocebo effect does the rest.

But there is also a third possibility – that the victim made the story of being spiked up to gain attention or sympathy. This may sound unlikely, but it’s certainly something that happens frequently. A famous case is the Halifax Slasher panic of 1938 when dozens of victims in Halifax and then hundreds more around the country claimed to have been attacked by a razor blade wielding maniac. It turned out that the victims had cut themselves and invented the story of the attack.[x] Let that sink in.

Angry Haligonians search for the Halifax Slasher… who didn’t exist…

There are a small but significant number of people in every culture who cry wolf…

Epilogue

But what’s the harm, you might ask, in women on a night out taking extra care to make sure their drinks are in their sight at all times? Why not sell anti-spiking glass covers, drug testing kits or run spiking awareness raising campaigns?

The problem is that these precautions and warnings reinforce a false narrative which is unlikely to stop anyone actually being spiked but is likely to lead to more supposed victims imagining or pretending they’ve been spiked.

Over the years I’ve been following spiking episodes we’ve had drink spiking panics, needle spiking panics and vape spiking panics. These panics stretch back through the twentieth century and reflect the cultural fears and folk devils of the age.[xi]

In fairy stories like these, the nightclub takes on the role of the dark spooky forest, the innocent young woman out for a good time takes on the role of the little girl who ignores mother’s sound advice and strays from the path, and the big bad wolf is a nasty man with a phial, vape or syringe full of date rape drugs on the prowl for his next victim…

And therein lies the insipid horror of the spiking myth. It could happen to you anytime. Be constantly vigilant, suspicious, aware. Spend your leisure time haunted by fear and anxiety. Might as well check under your bed every night for a mad axe murderer. You never know…

…Or better still.

Be sceptical.

Boy who cried wold (Francis Barlow 1687)

[i] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-18-old-girl-left-123300419.html; https://x.com/MohiniWealth/status/2044015534925328537

[ii] Anderson, L., Flynn, A. and Pilgrim, J. (2017) ‘A global epidemiological perspective on the toxicology of drug-facilitated sexual assault: A systematic review’, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 47, pp.46-54

[iii] Donovan, P. (2016) Drink Spiking and Predatory Drugging (Palgrave Macmillan)

[iv] Paul Quigley et al (2009) ‘Prospective study of 101 patients with suspected drink spiking’, Emergency Medicine Australia, 21(3) pp.222-228 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1742-6723.2009.01185.x

[v] Hughes, H.et al (2007) ‘A Study of Patients Presenting to an Emergency Department having had a Spiked Drink’, Emergency Medicine Journal, 24 (pp.89-91)

[vi] See Bendau, A. et al ‘Spiking Versus Speculation? Perceived Prevalence, Probability, and Fear of Drink and Needle Spiking’, Journal of Drug Issues https://doi.org/10.1177/00220426231197826

[vii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/drink-injection-spiking-offences-charge-b1978121.html

[viii] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Spiking: Ninth Report of Sessions 2021-2022, April 26, 2022, p. 35

[ix] Ibid, p.81

[x] See chapter one of my Weird Calderdale for the full story of the Halifax Slasher. For other astonishing phantom panics see Bartholomew and Weatherhead Social Panics and Phantom Attackers (Palgrave Macmillan: 2024)

[xi] Robert E. Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead, Social Panics and Phantom Attackers: A Study of Imaginary Assailants (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Wind-Heeled Jack: The Terror of Brum 1886

A strange and terrifying figure haunted Birmingham in the autumn of 1886. He was tall, powerful, shrouded in white and his hideous face burned with an unearthly fiery glow and the sight of him was enough to send you insane. Some thought him a ghost and some thought him a devil. Others suspected he was a cruel prankster, but none could catch him. He could leap and bound over hedges and rooftops with almost supernatural strength and agility before vanishing into the night. It was rumoured that he had invented a pneumatic device attached to his boots that could send him flying with a blast of steam over the roofs and chimneys of Birmingham. You’ve heard of Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London; but this is the story of Wind-Heeled Jack, the Terror of Brum…

A Tall White Thing with a Fiery Face

In October 1886, a nine-year-old milkman’s son called Burton was standing at the gates of a farm on, ironically, Spring Hill Lane, when ‘a little black thing’ came jumping around him like a dog and a moment later the boy was confronted by the monster that had been haunting the outskirts of Birmingham for weeks.

The figure was all in white, tall and powerful. He cavorted grotesquely in a ghost like manner before disappearing behind a hedge only to return with his face ‘all over fire’. The flaming faced ghost capered in front of the young lad who was frozen with terror.

On the same night, Frank George (18) was walking home from work on Foxholly Road when he came across ‘a tall white thing with a fiery face’ who danced in front of him before vanishing. The youth was said to be brave, but this experience shattered his nerves.

Many people had similar experiences with the Acock’s Green Ghost as it was first called after the Birmingham suburb where the early sightings proliferated. It was assumed that a powerfully built man was responsible and that he was painting his face with phosphorous to give him a fiery glow, though it is more likely he was using a luminous mask.

In any case young men formed patrol groups to try and catch the culprit and reportedly gave chase to the Ghost on one occasion but he was too fast for them. It was rumoured that the guilty party was a young toff who had made a bet that he could frighten people for three months without getting caught.[i]

Britain was plagued by similar ghosts throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People would dress up in white sheets or devil masks then jump out and scare people after dark.

A West Stafford ghost hoaxer about to be thrashed by an angry mob (including his wife!) Illustrated Police News 29 September 1894

This bizarre pass time was called ‘playing the ghost’ and was a regular occurrence. Often it would lead to mass impromptu drunken ghost hunts where revellers and the curious gathered to catch, see or at least talk about the ghost. Sometimes it would lead to angry mobs rioting drunkenly through the streets. It would often lead to copycat hoaxers who would carry out similar pranks as well as to opportunistic ‘victims’ who would fabricate encounters with the Ghost and then harvest the attention and sympathy as they languished melodramatically suffering from the shock. People would be scared to go out.[ii]

These ghost panics really gripped communities.

The press often referred to these ghost pranksters (somewhat ironically) as ‘Spring-Heeled Jacks’ after the legendary monster that haunted London in the 1830s. Jack wore a devil mask, had metal claws and would vomit blue fire in the faces of his victims before bouncing over the hedges and rooftops on his specially designed boots. He was also rumoured to be a toff trying to win a wager that he could scare his victims to death.

That’s the legend. However, descriptions of Jack varied. Sometimes he wore an animal skin or a white sheet over his head. It is likely that some of the racier attacks by Spring-Heeled Jack were invented by twentieth century researchers. We know from episodes like the Halifax Slasher that it is also quite probable that some of the supposed victims of Jack made up their stories. The press were also likely to make up stories, print rumours and urban legends as facts and exaggerate and sensationalise wherever they could. (So, what’s new, you may ask?)

Spring-Heeled Jack became a Victorian proto-superhero in Victorian penny dreadfuls

As the nineteenth century wore on, the label of Spring-Heeled Jack was applied to any mischief maker with a white sheet over his head. And remember, ghost pranksters were legion in this time. The same is true of Birmingham in 1886 – the Acocks Green Ghost soon became known as the latest incarnation of Spring-Heeled Jack. As is often the case in these episodes, the panic migrates from one area to another – ghost panics are contagious.

Jack Goes to School

In late October hundreds gathered outside Birmingham’s Summer Lane elementary school every night. It was rumoured that the city’s Spring-Heeled Jack would be seen, and indeed some claimed to have seen this mysterious figure skipping over the rooftops, though no specific witnesses are named and this was likely just a rumour. Others suggested a magic lantern had been used to project images onto the skyline. Horror shows called Phantasmagoria were very popular throughout Europe at the time. In these events projectors and mirrors were used to create scary images of ghosts, demons and skeletons on a semi-transparent screen.

Schoolboys pelt the Woolwich Ghost in the Illustrated Police News 6 November 1897

In any case, the crowds grew until they numbered five or six hundred, at least according to the press. When Jack failed to appear, scuffles broke out, stones were thrown and some pockets were picked. The police, along with a caretaker expertly wielding his trusty broom, managed to disperse the disorderly crowd.[iii]

Wind-Heeled Jack

On 13 November 1886 a mysterious letter was published in the Birmingham Mail that purported to explain the mysterious goings on of the previous weeks. The letter was signed ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’.

The author of the letter claimed to be a professional gymnast who had invented a contraption in which compressed air was pumped through tubes attached to the man’s legs and feet and controlled by levers. The letter explained:

By turning a stopcock I allow a certain quantity of air to go to the levers which are then pressed with great force against the ground, causing one to rebound a considerable distance into the air.

London’s Spring-Heeled Jack was reputed to have springs hidden in the heels of his boots, but Birmingham’s equivalent goes even further with a beautifully steam punk compressed air accessory allowing him to make his death-defying leaps. I’ve taken the liberty of giving him the nickname Wind-Heeled Jack.

The author of the letter had, he went on, been experimenting in secret with this device while wearing his white gymnast’s costume and this is what witnesses, first at Alcocks Green and later at the Summer Lane school, had seen.

The letter further claimed that now the inventor had perfected the steering mechanism and that he would demonstrate this the following Monday evening between 7 and 8pm at Birmingham’s famous Bull Ring by leaping from the top of the Market Hall to the Tower of Saint Martin’s Church – an impossibly daring feat.

Bird’s eve view of Bull Ring, Birmingham. Red arrow (right) points to the Market Hall and red arrow (left) points to St Martin’s Church

Of course, as Monday 15 November came, expectant crowds gathered in the Bull Ring waiting to see Jack’s acrobatics. The crowds supposedly numbered ten thousand, though one source says there were (rather improbably) a hundred thousand onlookers stood gawping in anticipation at the Birmingham skyline.

Some excitement was created when a top floor window was opened, but this was a false alarm. Attention was also caught by a bright object floating above the Bull Ring, though this turned out to be a balloon.

The disappointed crowd soon dispersed.[iv] It seemed that Wind-Heeled Jack had chickened out…

Epilogue

The letter printed in the Birmingham Mail was clearly a hoax perpetrated by the newspaper and inspired by recent spooky pranks. Ghost related newspaper hoaxes were fairly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see the bottom of this post for links to more of these), and this is a classic that doesn’t appear to have been written about anywhere else.

That this was a hoax was made obvious by a follow-up letter again purporting to be from Spring-Heeled Jack published on 20 November.

In this letter, Jack claimed he didn’t show because he had emigrated to Wellington, New Zealand. He had so perfected his pneumatic apparatus that he could now leap across continents and even oceans, landing occasionally on the odd, fortuitous ship to make it all the way down under.

He had leapt back across the ocean to deliver his final letter explaining his no-show before bounding away on his steam-powered boots to the other side of the world.[v]

And so ends the story of Spring-Heeled Jack’s Brummie cousin, Wind-Heeled Jack.

Flaming supernatural figure levitating over a spooky graveyard and Victorian mansion at night.
Wind-Heeled Jack – as hallucinated by our AI overlords

[i] ‘Playing the Ghost at Acock’s Green’, Birmingham Mail, 2 October 1886, p.3

[ii] Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead, Social Panics and Phantom Attackers: A Study of Imaginary Assailants (Palgrave Macmillan)

[iii] ‘Extraordinary Hoax’, Eddowes’s Shrewsbury Journal, 20 October 1886, p.5

[iv] Robin Goodfellow, ‘Table Talk’, Birmingham Daily Mail, 13 November 1886, p.2; ‘The Gullibility of Birmingham’, Portsmouth Evening News, 17 November 1886, p.4; ‘The Spring-Heeled Jack Hoax’, Newark Herald, 20 November 1886, p.8

[v] Robin Goodfellow, ‘Table Talk’, Birmingham Daily Mail, 20 November 1886, p.2

Mellow Yellow ~ The Great Banana Hoax

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if a cheap, easily available store cupboard ingredient could provide you with unlimited and totally legal psychedelic experiences? Enter Musa sapientum, ‘the fruit of the wise’, otherwise known as the humble banana. Some called it ‘Mellow Yellow’, some called it Bananadine or Bananadine Acid or simply Banana Sunshine, the store cupboard psychedelic…

As teenagers in the 1980s, my budding psychonaut friend and I had heard rumours that if you dried ripe banana peel and then smoked it, it would become psychoactive as the peel contains bufotenine, the same psychedelic chemical found in toad skins. Donovan had even supposedly written his 1966 hit ‘Mellow Yellow’ about it: ‘Electrical banana is gonna be the very next craze….’

And a banana-flavoured joint is surely more appealing than licking a toad…

Donovan’s 1966 hit

Not having a recipe, we dried ripe banana skins on hot radiators. They turned black and slimy and were impossible to light. Thus our quest to open the doors of perception with bananas proved ultimately fruitless.

But the (entirely spurious) belief that smoking dried banana peel gets you high has proved remarkably persistent, despite it being regularly debunked as a myth. Its origins are slippery, but it seems to have begun with articles in the underground press explaining how to dry banana skins and extract the ‘bananadine’ powder that could then be smoked.

A wave of banana smoking swept through the hippy scene and this was picked up by the press – and soon Mellow Yellow was everywhere.  Donovan, Country Joe and the Fish, the underground press, anarchists and the Food and Drug Administration all play a part in the story of how the banana became a short-lived symbol of the hippy underground. It’s also a story of how government laboratories created banana smoking machines to isolate its elusive hallucinogenic compounds and kids everywhere blew their minds on one of their five-a-day…

Electric Bananas for Mind and Body

In February 1967, legendary psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish were flying to Vancouver for a concert. On the flight, drummer Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh told Country Joe McDonald that you could get high by smoking dried banana peel as it contains THC like cannabis. After arriving in Vancouver, the band headed to the nearest store and stocked up on bananas which they then took to a nearby hippy shop and asked if they could bake the peels in the oven.

Country Joe and the Fish

When they were dry enough, the band scraped the white stuff off and smoked around twenty joints of it before going on stage for their final set – and that’s when it hit them. Tripping wildly, they couldn’t stop playing their song ‘Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine’ and ended up doing a 45-minute version of it. When they came off stage, they ran back to smoke some more, crying (according to Country Joe’s website) ‘Man this shit really works, I am so high I can’t believe it.’

After the gig, Joe and the band began telling everyone they knew of the wonder drug they had found. When they returned to Berkeley, at a gig in California Hall the band passed five hundred banana joints around the crowd telling them it would get them high.

However, what the band had forgotten is that as they were smoking the banana joints in Vancouver, they had also been taking copious swigs from a jar of water at the side of the stage that was full of LSD for the band (it was the 1960s). They were tripping on acid, not banana joints.

The band’s manager, Ed Denson, wrote about being turned on to the fruit in his column in the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb in the issue dated 3 March 1967, and this seems to be the first print reference to the practice. The ‘recipe of the week’, Denson wrote, was to scrape the pith of banana peels, dry them in the oven until they can be crumbled and then smoke in a joint. The effect, supposedly, was similar to opium. Denson also suggests (for ‘those who feel experimental’) soaking grass in banana oil.

In the same issue, an anonymous letter to the editor claimed that the Berkeley police narco squad were hanging around the grocery section of the local Co-op. They had been assigned to observe people who were buying large amounts of bananas. There was also the suggestion that the government was planning to criminalise the possession of a certain quantity of the fruit.

LA Free Press May 1967

In a 2022 interview with Psychedelic Scene, Country Joe and the Fish drummer Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh described what happened next:

‘At any rate, the following weekend, you couldn’t buy a banana any place in the Bay Area. It was like Safeway stores sold out of bananas. The Co-op in Berkeley, you couldn’t get a banana. And since then, I’ve learned that you know, it just swept the nation. It went all over the world. You know, we’ve run into people in England who tried smoking bananas. You know, the underground press jumped on it. The Federal government ended up testing to see if there was anything that in them.’

Trip on a Banana Peel

Enterprising hippies began drying bananas and selling the powder ready to smoke in $5 ‘psychedelic turn-on bags’. ‘Trip on a banana peel,’ their adverts in the underground press said, ‘Mellow Yellow is here.’

Roll up and and get stoned on Banana Peels (advert in the Berkeley Barb 1967

Indeed, Donovan’s 1966 hit ‘Mellow Yellow’ was perfectly timed with its lyrical references to being ‘born high forever to fly’ and how ‘electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze’. It seemed obvious to many that Donovan was trying to turn the world on to the psychedelic delights of smoked banana skin. However, in his autobiography The Hurdy Gurdy Man, the Don writes that the song was a ‘cheeky little number’ that was influenced by his smoking of the green herb, not the yellow fruit. The song was a throwaway party piece singalong that producer Mickie Most decided should be his next single. The ‘electrical banana’, Donovan says, was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink reference a magazine advert for a vibrator.

By the end of March articles began to appear in the mainstream press about the latest youth drug craze. The New York Times of 27 March described how the crowds at an Easter ‘be-in’ in Central Park were chanting ‘Banana! Banana! Banana!’ By 30 March, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that marijuana farms were lying idle as students were instead getting stoned on bananas.

Ban the Banana – Repeal the Peel: The Banana Labelling Act of 1967

The banana smoking craze even made an appearance in the US congressional record on 9 April 1967 thanks to New Jersey politician Frank Thompson’s tongue in cheek speech. ‘From bananas,’ he said, ‘it is just a short but shocking step to other fruits… Tomorrow we may face strawberry smoking, dried apricot inhaling or prune puffing.’

Thompson proposed a ‘Peel Corps’ of ‘swinging’ young Americans to travel to the jungle and observe the effects of bananas on their biggest consumers – monkeys. Furthermore, those banana smoking beatniks should be targeted with new legislation, the Banana Labelling Act of 1967. Just as cigarette packs carried government health warnings, so should bananas: ‘Caution: Banana peel smoking may be injurious to your health. Never put bananas in the refrigerator,’ would be stamped on every fruit.

‘I will only breathe easier,’ he said as he finished his impassioned speech, ‘when this country, this land we all love, can declare, “Yes, we have no bananas; we have no bananas today”’.

The Banana Smoking Machine

Although Thompson was clearly jesting, concern was growing about the supposed mind-altering effects of bananadine, and so the US Food and Drug Administration stepped in. To test the hallucinogenic properties of the fruit, a banana peel smoking machine was constructed that trapped the smoke in tubes so it could then be analysed. Several different processing recipes were tried, as was banana juice. The results were clear. Bananas didn’t contain any known psychoactive chemical. The FDA’s tongue in cheek press release of the 26 May 1967 summed up the results of the experiment: ‘A laboratory apparatus ‘smoked’ dried banana peels for more than three weeks and never did get high’.

‘Was it all a hippy hoax?’ the FDA asked.

Taking the Pith

So, did a hippy hoax fool both the counterculture and the mainstream media alike? Gary Hirsh’s account suggests he really believed bananas could get you high, as does Country Joe’s account. On other occasions, though, Country Joe claimed he knew it was a hoax all along, and it’s hard to ignore the satirical element in the banana craze. If governments legislate against psychoactive herbs and fungi, what would it do if a common foodstuff could be easily turned into a drug by any kid with access to an oven? And, of course, the banana is the most comical of fruits.

Although the Country Joe and the Fish story is the most well-known origin of the banana rumour, there is a rival account, again involving the underground press, but this time on the east coast. In his autobiography Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, underground publisher Paul Krassner described a visit to the office of the East Village Other newspaper. There he met the editors who were speculating that as LSD caused the release of serotonin in the brain, then perhaps bananas (which contain serotonin) might have a similar effect. Krassner suggests that the editors were confusing serotonin with ‘serotin’, though this makes no botanical sense. Bananas do contain small amounts of serotonin, but it’s not going to get you high, no matter what you do with it. In any case, Krassner claims that this is where the idea came from which was then picked up by the Berkeley Barb.

Paul Krassner’s autobiography

So, it’s not clear whether the Great Banana Hoax started as a deliberate piece of hippy satire to bait the authorities, or a genuine belief in the psychedelic properties of the fruit’s dried peel or a simple misunderstanding. Perhaps the myth had been floating around for a while before Country Joe and Paul Krassner got to hear about it. There can be no doubt, though, that what makes this piece of drug lore unusual is that the underground hippy press played a key role in its spreading.

Too Much Monkey Business

Despite regular debunking, the mellow yellow myth persisted, certainly helped by a recipe included in the infamous Anarchist’s Cookbook by William Powell in 1971. Along with tips and tricks for the amateur terrorist, such as making explosives and hand to hand combat training, there are instructions for processing bananadine. This is probably the best-known recipe, though if you plan on trying it, you’re going to need a lot of bananas:

Take 8 pounds of ripe bananas (that’s about thirty) and scrape the pith from the inside of the peel. Add this to water and boil for three or four hours before straining and then continue to boil until reduced to a black tar-like paste. Spread on a baking tray and bake on a low heat until dry and can be crumbled into joints.

How many eager psychonauts tried the recipe is impossible to tell, but the number must be very high – unlike the smokers themselves.

However, it’s understandable that many believed in the psychedelic effects of Mellow Yellow. Like Joe and Chicken, they may have smoked their bananadine at the same time as they ingested LSD or marijuana and confused the effects of those drugs. Banana smokers may have been in a setting that included trippy light shows and psychedelic music, and the powerful placebo effect might have done the rest…

Although the banana peel hoax of 1967 is most likely an amusing piece of hippy satire that went viral (as we might say nowadays), it also reflects the quest for the ultimate organic high that could be hiding in plain sight. When Country Joe heard that the FDA’s banana smoking apparatus had found no hallucinogenic properties in the fruit, he suddenly remembered that in Vancouver, as well as smoking bananadine, they had also been drinking acid-spiked water. Joe went over to Chicken’s house and told him that bananas didn’t work – it was the LSD that got them high.

‘Forget about that,’ Chicken replied. ‘If you smoke a cigarette through a bell pepper it gets you really stoned…’

Speaking of peppers, according to Paul Krassner, the Los Angeles Free Press wanted in on the hallucinogen hoaxes – they promoted ‘pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted.’

‘All over Southern California,’ Krassner claims, ‘heads were sticking vegetables up their asses.’ But that’s a story for another day.

‘I’d Love to put you on’

The Great Banana Hoax (the Electric Prunes)

This article was first published in Psychedelic Scene Magazine.

RIP Country Joe McDonald (1942-2026)

Mother Cuthburt and her Daughters: The Forgotten Witches of Lancashire

The story of the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trials is well known. Eight women and two men were found guilty and executed for heinous crimes involving witchcraft, often accused by each other, their own families or convicted on the testimony of a little girl. Their names still resonate today – Old Chattox, Old Demdike, Mouldheels, Squinting Lizzie…

However, the story of Old Mother Cuthburt and her two daughters is largely forgotten. It appeared in a pamphlet published probably in the 1780s called The History of the Lancashire Witches, and it’s a mix of fantasy, folklore and fiction, bearing very little in common with the unfortunates of 1612. It shows just how much attitudes had changed over the decades, with this family of witches portrayed as mischievous folk heroines enjoying a series of bawdy adventures and supernatural jolly japes.

So here is their story. The other Lancashire witches…

How Old Mother Cuthburt Became a Witch

Mother Cuthburt and her two lusty daughters lived at the bottom of a bleak hill known as Wood-and-Mountain-Hill – perhaps a reference to Pendle Hill. The family were very poor, but all this would change when Mother Cuthburt was walking through the forest and saw a rabbit run out in front of her. The rabbit then transformed itself into a hound and then a man. The old woman was terrified and frozen to the spot, but the man only pressed some coins into her hand and told her to come back the next day.

She returned home and told her daughters what had happened, and they advised her to go back the next day.

As she entered deep into the forest, she saw a tree rise out of the ground and move towards her and then surrounded her by turning into a thick wood. She feared she would be lost, but then heard music and followed it to a house where a matron invited her inside.

Witches and Devils have a bit of a do (from History of the Lancashire Witches c.1780)

She found herself in the middle of a wild party, with men and women dancing and the tables groaning with food and drink, and when the dancing stopped Mother Cuthburt was invited to partake of the banquet, which being very hungry, she did.

After the feast, the matron who had welcomed Mother Cuthburt struck the floor with a wand and summoned a host of witches’ familiars – demons in animal form that do witches’ bidding. The matron, a witch from Wales named Mother Crady, began clanging out a demonic tune by beating a griddle with some metal tongs, and all the cats, bears and apes danced around the palatial hall to the merriment of all who saw it.

Mother Crady invited Mother Cuthburt to join their company and anointed her breast with some ointment, and gave her some more to take home with her. She uttered some magic spells and gave her a small box with a little imp in the form of a mole-like creature inside. Then all the gathered witches jumped on coal staffs and flew away, leaving Mother Cuthburt to wonder what she had seen.

It’s interesting that these witches eschewed the more traditional broom, opting instead for coal staffs, a long, pole-like implement for carrying coal – something more associated with the urban than the rustic.

But now Old Mother Cuthburt had the power to get up to all kinds of mischief…

Old Mother Cuthburt and the Mayor of Lancaster

Some years prior, Old Mother Cuthburt had stolen the Mayor of Lancaster’s wooden pail and used it for firewood in the depth of a frozen winter. She had subsequently been whipped for the crime her poverty had driven her to. With her newfound magical powers, the witch vowed to get revenge on the Mayor.

She went to the Mayor’s grand house where he was revelling with his rich friends and sent him a note. When the Mayor read it, he suddenly told his guests that he needed to run a race and stripped off all his clothes. He then took a whip and lashed himself through the streets of Lancaster and none could stop him. When he came to his senses, he found himself in the middle of the city, stark naked and bloodied from head to foot. He later said that he had thought he was riding in a horse race.

Old Mother Cuthburt could play tricks on your mind.

Old Mother Cuthburt and Friends (from the History of the Lancashire Witches)

Old Mother Cuthburt Righting Wrongs

One interesting aspect of the Old Mother Cuthburt stories in the History of the Lancashire Witches is that rather being portrayed as evil, the witch is more of a folkloric heroine, perhaps like a female Robin Hood.

On one occasion Mother Cuthburt came across a party of officers carrying a poor man to Lancaster prison for the crime of being unable to pay his debt. When the witch asked the officers what the man’s crime was, they rudely pushed her out of the way.

Mother Cuthburt then pulled out a magic pipe that Mother Crady had given her, told the prisoner to cover his ears, and began to play. Pied Piper-like, she led the officers, who were magically compelled to follow, through hedges, briars and deep dirty ditches, finally leaving them bruised, scratched and bloody in the middle of a stinking pond.

The prisoner, meanwhile, made his escape.

Another time, Mother Cuthburt overheard some thieves bragging about how much they’d stolen and recited some magic words that made the robbers’ horses stumble. Then the thieves heard the clamour of what they took to be an angry mob rapidly approaching, yet their horses refused to move. They had no choice but to dump their loot and flee on foot.

Of course, there was no angry mob only Mother Cuthburt and her magical mind games. She returned the loot to the poor people it had been stolen from.

Well, at least she returned some of it…

Witches and Devils do the Hokey-Cokey… You put your left hoof in, your left hoof out….(History of the Lancashire Witches)

Epilogue

I’ve spent the last couple of years researching and writing a book on the history of demonic possession in Lancashire, so this little pamphlet with its comical and sceptical tone was nice contrast to those written by the zealous Puritan exorcists I’ve been reading.

Stay tuned for the amorous adventures of Mother Cuthburt’s witchy daughters, Margery and Cecily, and Margery’s doomed love for the splendidly named Roger Clodpate…

Killed with Money: The Bolton Windfall Mystery

In the early hours of 20 August 1913, PC Machlachlan saw a man behaving in a strange manner on the banks of the Rochdale Canal, in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. The man seemed dazed, confused and dejected and as if he were not in his right mind. The policeman worried that the man was about to throw himself in the canal, so he engaged him in conversation, though the man only rambled incoherently about trouble and pain in his head.

In the man’s pocket was a notebook with some strange messages that gave a clue as to his identity:

William Tunstall; Westwell real name; tired, pains in the head something awful… Mad, mad with pain… Where have I been? God only knows, I don’t… Wish had never known about money… Mad, mad, mad, killed with money… If this is having money I am tired of it. You will find me where you find this. Goodbye and God bless you.

W. Tunstall Westwell[i]

The only thing was, William Tunstall had been reported dead and buried at sea a few days earlier…

The officer took the forlorn Tunstall to the police station, and it became a sensation as news spread around the town. The remarkable story of William Tunstall, how he inherited a fortune but then died mysteriously before he could claim it, had been on everyone’s lips for days. And now here he was, seemingly back from the dead and walking the towpaths of Todmorden.

The press called it the Windfall Mystery, but the solution to it was right under their noses all the time.

The Bolton Windfall Mystery

In the summer of 1913, the great feelgood news story was that of middle-aged Bolton man William Tunstall. Tunstall worked for the council laying paving stones and seemed to be somewhat down on his luck, when in true rags-to-riches fashion he received a telegram from Australia. His father-in-law had died leaving him a legacy of around £400,000, which would be close to £60 million in today’s money. His father-in-law, Mr Westwell, had emigrated to Western Australia where he had made a fortune in the silk and pearl fishing industries, and all this along with a huge estate was William’s. The only condition was that he take on his late father-in-law’s surname. With the help of Harry Hart, a friend from Glossop, William planned to join the steamship Omrah to sail to Australia and claim his inheritance.

William Tunstall (Daily Mirror 19 August 1913)

In a letter sent just before he was due to sail, Tunstall wrote touchingly: “I have had a hard struggle through life with short exception… I have always been true, honest, upright, and attentive to my work.” He was seen as a pious, abstemious and down-to-earth man who attended Bible classes and supported several orphaned children on his meagre income.[ii]

The story of how William came into his fortune was a romantic one indeed. It began when he was on holiday in the Isle of Man and rescued two women after a sailing accident. A pleasure boat was struck by a sudden squall and capsized, and Tunstall being a strong swimmer became the hero of the day. The husband of one of the women Tunstall saved was Mr Westwell, and they became friends.

Some years later William was being treated in hospital for a mystery illness and fell in love with the young nurse who was looking after him. The nurse, though, disappeared and William despaired of ever seeing her again. To help him recover, Mr and Mrs Westwell invited him over to Douglas in the Isle of Man to be their guest for a while. It was there that he finally found the young nurse he had fallen for, and sounding like something from a Mills and Moon love story, she turned out to be the daughter of the Westwells.

A romance blossomed between the two and the young Miss Westwell asked William to marry her, such was the admiration and gratitude she felt for the man who had saved her mother’s life. But William, we are told, was a modest man and painfully aware of the difference in social status between the couple and refused for a time before eventually setting aside his scruples and marrying her in 1900. They had a child together.[iii]

Soon after, Mr and Mrs Westwell decided to move to Australia and insisted their daughter and grandchild go with them, but William declined and stayed at home to look after his ailing mother.

A few months later, William received devastating news – his wife and child had been killed in a carriage accident.

Ten years later William married the woman who had taken over the care of five orphaned children he had been financially supporting.

And now he was a rich man, heir to a silk and pearl fishing fortune. His second wife and the children had moved to the South of France using an advance on his inheritance and he said goodbye to his family, workmates and friends from his Bible class, and headed to London where the steamship Omrah waited to take him to his fate. His biggest fear, we are told, was that news of his fortune would leak out making him famous, in which case he would have to ‘disappear suddenly’, as he said ominously.[iv]

Steam ship Omrah

Shortly after the Omrah had set sail, Tunstall’s brother John received a terse telegram: Sorry, your brother dead: buried. Myself am going to Canada.[v]

Tunstall’s landlord received a similar message: Sorry Tunstall dead; buried. Tell friends.[vi]

The laconic telegrams were unsigned, but it seemed likely that it had been sent by Harry Hart, the man who was organising William’s passage to Australia. The mysterious death of the windfall man was a media sensation that seemed straight out of the pages of a Sherlock Holmes mystery…

The Plot Thickens

As journalists began to investigate the suspicious death of William Tunstall, the whole story began to unravel. Reporters from the Daily Express found that Australia didn’t have a significant silk industry and the pearl fishing business was nowhere near as lucrative as Westwell’s supposed fortune. Furthermore, no record of anyone of that name in the pearl fishing enterprise could be found.

Journalists from the Manchester Evening News checked the passenger list for the Omrah. Nobody called Tunstall had been on the ship, let alone died and been buried at sea.[vii]

Further enquiry revealed that nobody – not even his own brother and sister – had ever seen or met Tunstall’s supposed first or second wife.

But if Tunstall had not sailed on the Omrah, then where was he?

Mad, Mad, Mad…Killed with Money

It turned out that Tunstall had been working as a labourer in Hollingwood, near Oldham. It was from near here that he had sent the telegrams to his brother and landlord. At his lodgings in Hollingwood, his landlady saw him write his name and address on an insurance card and then realised he was ‘the fortune man’ but decided not to say anything as he seemed comfortable there and wasn’t causing her any trouble.

One night in Hollingwood Tunstall went out for a herbal beer, and as he was walking down the street someone shouted, “lucky dog!” at him. He returned to his lodgings, presumably distressed that he had been recognised, though he told his landlady that there was a labourer from Bolton that had the same name as him that had been left a fortune. Tunstall told his hosts that he was going to a friend in Newcastle to find work. The journey involved changing trains at Todmorden, where he was found by PC Machlachlan dazed and confused on the banks of the Rochdale Canal.[viii]

A Todmorden journalist went to Vale Street police station to meet the famous Mr Tunstall and found him lying on a bench complaining of a pain in his head and saying that he had gone blind. ‘My eyes are gone,’ he said in a weary tone, and this seemed to be confirmed when the journalist put his fingers close to his face and got no reaction. Tunstall maintained his inheritance was true, and that he had gone to London with Harry Hart to sail to Australia but had no memory of what had happened. ‘I wish I had never had the money,’ he told the journalist. When asked directly why he hadn’t sailed to Australia, he replied ‘That’s what I want to know.’

Todmorden police had contacted Tunstall’s sister Sarah who arrived at this point. When she saw her brother, she let out a glad cry and ran to embrace him. She then shook him vigorously and told him he was coming home with her and talked of how worried they’d been after the telegrams about his death.

Tunstall began to weep on his sister’s shoulder. ‘That’s right, have a good cry, you’ll feel better. He has been like this many times,’ she then told the journalist. ‘And it does his eyes good to cry. I like to see him cry. It always does him good when he has trouble with his eyes.’[ix] It seems he had gone temporarily blind on previous occasions.

William Tunstall and sister Sarah Whalley (Todmorden District News 22 August 1913)

The last we hear of the mysterious Mr Tunstall is that he returned to Bolton with his sister, still blind and supposedly in a critical condition.

Epilogue

William Tunstall was a teller of tall tales. His Australian fortune. His heroic sea rescue. His serendipitous romance. The tragic death of his wife and child. His second wife and retinue of orphans. His apparent betrayal by the mysterious Mr Hart. His suspicious death and dramatic burial at sea… all were pure fiction. So, perhaps, was his seeming madness, loss of memory and blindness when he was discovered on the banks of the Rochdale Canal in Todmorden.

However, Tunstall’s story was believed by his sister and brother, by his friends at Bible class and by many others in and around Bolton. He had faked his death because of the stress and strain caused by all the public attention his fortune had brought him…

Perhaps Tunstall was what contemporary psychiatrists might call a pseudologue – that is someone suffering from Pseudologia Fantastica, the symptoms of which are a pathological compulsion to tell self-aggrandising lies in which the teller is always the hero, heroine or victim. In doing this they harvest attention and nurturing from those around them, perhaps out of a sense of emotional desperation.[x]

My own research on episodes like the Halifax Slasher, ghost hoaxes and fake abductions makes me think that pseudologues may be far more common than we believe.[xi]

In any case, I can’t find any subsequent accounts of the further adventures of William Tunstall in the newspaper archives, but I can’t help but think his imagination kept on spinning melodramatic narratives to anyone who would listen.

For more exciting but dubious tall tales, see below…

Kidnapped! The Amazing Adventure of Emily Raynor
The Rosa Day Mystery
Yorkshire Cave Girl Mystery!

[i] ‘Windfall Story’, Manchester Evening News, 20 August 1913, p.4

[ii] ‘Bolton Labourer’s Big Windfall”, Lloyd’s Weekly News, 17 August 1913

[iii] ‘Sequel to Labourer’s £200,000 Windfall’, Staffordshire Sentinel, 19 August 1913, p.2; ‘Son’s 13 Year Sacrifice’, Daily Mirror, 19 August 1913, p.4

[iv] ‘Bolton Mystery’, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 20 August 1913, p.4

[v] ‘Windfall Mystery’, Manchester Evening News, 19 August 1913, p.4

[vi] ‘Mystery of an Heir’s Death’, Daily Express, 19 August 1913, p.5

[vii] ‘Mystery of an Heir’s Death’, Daily Express, 19 August 1913, p.5; ‘Windfall Mystery’, Manchester Evening News, 19 August 1913, p.4

[viii] ‘Mysterious Mr Tunstall’, Manchester Evening News, 21 August 1913, p.6

[ix] ‘Bolton Romance’, Todmorden and District News, 22 August 1913, p.8

[x] Marc D. Feldman(2024) Playing Sick Routledge pp. 38-39

[xi] Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead (2024) Social Panics and Phantom Attackers, Palgrave Macmillan; Paul Weatherhead (2022) Weird Calderdale, Tom Bell Publishing

Beam me up, Ezekiel: Erich von Däniken Returns to the Stars

Erich Von Däniken, the man who popularised the enduring ancient astronaut theory, has boarded his chariot of fire and returned to the stars. He’s left behind him over 60 million books about ancient aliens building pyramids and mating with us monkeys to create the human race. A plethora of books and popular archaeology (or ‘starchaeology’, as I call them) documentaries.

Alien Cave Girl Shaggers Built the Pyramids

It was in the early 1980s when browsing my favourite section of Hebden Bridge library – the one that was labelled ‘The Mind’ – that I came across his first book, Chariots of the Gods? (1968). I was a voracious reader of books about aliens and UFOs, and this was right up my street. Alien cave-girl shaggers built the pyramids? I was convinced. I was hooked.

Daniken’s Debut

The Chariots of the Gods? of the books title – note the cheeky question mark – was a reference to the biblical Book of Ezekiel. This ancient Hebrew prophet and had a bizarre vision of God on a flying throne with wheels within wheels and strange winged creatures with sparkling calves’ feet and four faces each – one like a man, one like an ox, one like a lion and one like an eagle…[i]

If you thought that sounds like a UFO full of weird aliens, Von Däniken was of the same opinion.

God in a flying saucer? Ezekiel’s chariot vision by Matthaeus Merian 1593–1650)

And this is what Von Däniken did. He combed ancient texts, art and archaeological sites for evidence of ancient randy astronauts. That’s not a halo over the saint’s head – it’s a space helmet! That flying chariot isn’t an apocalyptic vision, it’s a flying saucer! The weird shapes carved in the desert sands of Nazca, Peru, they’re a runway for alien spacecraft!

Alien airport? Expect delays…. The Nazca Lines (Diego Delso)

In my early teens I devoured his books… Chariots of the Gods, Gods From Outer Space, Gold of the Gods, Miracles of the Gods, Signs of the Gods, Return of the Gods, Oh no not more Gods….

OK, I made the last one up.                  

But the evidence was clear. Daniken’s overall thesis was this: Long, long ago in a galaxy far away, two ancient alien civilizations had a war and the losers picked Earth to go into hiding, building a huge network of underground tunnels to hide from the victors who were still in pursuit of them.

To throw them off their trail, the losers put some decoy beacons on the fifth planet in our solar system and the victors blew it up. All that’s left of that planet is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter…

Dumb aliens blew up the wrong planet – doh! – and created the Asteroid Belt?

All makes sense, doesn’t it?

These randy aliens just couldn’t keep their hands off our primitive earth girls and by mating with them and genetic engineering, they created us!  In the Book of Genesis it says:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.[ii]

Debunking of the Gods

One day in the library searching for the latest von Daniken, my eye was caught by a book titled Some Trust in Chariots, edited by Barry B. Thiering and E. W. Castle. I rushed home expecting more ancient astronauts, randy aliens and chariots of fire, but instead found essays by scientists and historians that pulled von Daniken’s thesis apart. I was devastated.

But the more I read, the more it became clear that von Daniken’s thesis was based on misunderstanding, ignorance, cherry-picking of evidence and wild speculation.

Mayan King Pacal the Great blasts off in his spaceship

And at the heart of the ancient astronaut thesis is the arrogant belief that ancient humans were incapable of the majestic structures they created because they were just stupid primitives without the miracle of alien technology.

It all taught me a valuable lesson – always investigate what the other side say with an open mind. Seek out the contrary view, the one you don’t agree with, the opinion you find deplorable. You never know what you might learn…

Epilogue of the Gods

Erich von Daniken had a colourful past, mostly working in the hospitality industry in Switzerland. He was imprisoned for fraud a number of times, and it was while behind bars that he wrote his best-selling debut Chariots of the Gods?[iii]

After the success of his many books, he opened a theme park in Interlaken, Switzerland called Mystery Park in 2003. The park had pavilions dedicated to various ancient mysteries related to his ancient astronaut thesis – the pyramids, the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge – but closed due to financial issues a few years later.

Theme Park of the Gods? Von Daniken’s Mystery Park design (Swiss Info)

Although von Däniken’s arguments and evidence have been roundly debunked over the decades, he certainly had imagination and vision (if not many scruples) and he filled my young teenage brain with awe and wonder leaving me with a lifelong obsession with the weird…

Rest in extraterrestrial peace, Herr von Däniken (1935-1926)

Erich von Daniken (Michal Manas)

[i] Ezekeil 1:1-28

[ii] Genesis 6:4

[iii] The Associated Press, Erich von Däniken, author who spawned alien archaeology theory, dies: Available at: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/erich-von-d%C3%A4niken-author-who-spawned-alien-archaeology-theory-dies/ar-AA1TZOo2?ocid=socialshare

The Calverley Ghost ~ A Yorkshire Tragedy

“Old Calverley, Old Calverley, I have thee by th’ ears

I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears…”

(Chant to raise the spirit of executed child killer, Walter Calverley)

The West Yorkshire village of Calverley became the centre of public attention at Christmas 1904 after reports of a mysterious phantom were widely published. However, the Christmas ghost of Calverley has a long history, involving tales of schoolboys raising the dead, headless horses, exorcism and haunted preachers. The story begins, though, with a horrifying Jacobean murder spree that spawned a grim piece of gory theatre that William Shakespeare may have had a hand in…

A Yorkshire Tragedy

In the West Yorkshire village of Calverley, between Leeds and Bradford, stands Calverley Old Hall, once the family home of the illustrious Yorkshire family that gave their name to the village and the ancient house. It was in the oak-panelled bedroom of this house that Walter Calverley committed his infamous murders in April 1605.

Calverley Hall, Woodhall Road, Leeds by Mark Stevenson

Much of what we know about the Calverley murders comes from an anonymous pamphlet published in 1605 titled Master Calverley’s Unnatural and Bloody Murder. The pamphlet also formed the basis for a Jacobean domestic drama called A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) which was once attributed to William Shakespeare, though most modern scholars consider Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Middleton to be the true author.[1] In any case, the gory drama is perhaps the Jacobean equivalent of a sensational modern serial killer docudrama or true crime show.

Title page of the quarto publication of A Yorkshire Tragedy, 1608 – written by W. Shakespeare (not)

Walter Calverley had been one of Yorkshire’s most eligible bachelors, but after marrying Phillipa Brooke he frittered away his fortune on gambling, riotous parties and various unnamed vices. He took to brooding and raving, blaming his family for his ruinous finances. Deep in debt, despairing and horrified by the thought of his wife and children in penury, he brutally murdered two of his infant sons and attempted to stab his wife to death, though she was saved when her whalebone corset deflected the blade. Calverley was on his way to murder his youngest son who was out to wet nurse, but his horse stumbled and he was caught.

Illustration of the play A Yorkshire Tragedy, from The Works of William Shakespeare (Nicholas Rowe)

Although he was undoubtedly guilty of the heinous crime, Calverley refused to enter a plea, meaning that his surviving family would not forfeit his estate to the crown. Calverley therefore was sentenced to be pressed to death, a slow and agonising form of execution reserved for prisoners who refused to plead guilty or not guilty. He was stretched out naked with his wrists and ankles tied to a post with a board placed over him. Weights were gradually added to the board to try and force a plea from him. Local lore has it that Calverley defiantly cried, ‘A pound more weight – lig on, lig on’ – ‘lig’ being Yorkshire for ‘lie’. It’s said that a loyal servant took pity on his master and ended his suffering by standing on the board and hastening Calverley’s end. The servant was duly hanged.

Pressed to death 1780 edition of the Malefactor Register

Local legend holds that the bloodstains on the floor of the murder room could never be washed clean, no matter how hard they were scrubbed.  The notorious murders committed in Calverley Hall would echo down the centuries, as the tragic events were retold and embellished and local legends developed.

A Night in the Murder Room ~ The Preacher’s Tale

As the village of Calvery shuddered under the early January snow one Saturday evening in 1777, renowned methodist preacher Richard ‘Dickie’ Burdsall came to deliver a sermon at Calverley Hall.[2]  Afterwards, Burdsall stayed as a guest in the murder room and recorded what happened in his 1797 autobiography.[3]

This is what he wrote:

…and after being asleep some little time, I thought something crept upon me up to my breast, pressing me much; I was greatly agitated and struggled to awake.

Not only was something crawling onto his chest and crushing the life out of him, his bed seemed to swing such that he was thrown upon the floor. He got to his knees and gave thanks that he was unhurt. Fearing for his sanity, he checked there was nothing unusual about the bed before summoning up the courage to get into it again. Twice more, he was violently tumbled onto the floor.

The Murder Room (Loidis and Elmet by Thomas Dunham Whitaker 1816)

By now it was one in the morning, and Burdsall decided that he would not lie down on the bed again and got dressed. On several occasions he went to the bedroom door as if to leave the room, and he was often about to cry out and wake the household, but he finally decided to face his waking nightmare alone. At a loss to explain what was happening to him in this gloomy oak panelled room, he could only conclude that Satan himself was testing his faith. This is how Burdsall described his agonising wait until daybreak:

I longed to see the light of the morning, and had I been immured in a dungeon and heavily fettered in irons I think I could not have been more desirous of my liberty than I was for the return of the morning.

When the wintry light eventually crept through the window of the oak-panelled bed chamber with the dark stains on the floor, Burdsall saw that his room adjoined the churchyard, and below him, under ancient yew trees were the melancholy snow-covered graves of many past inhabitants of this great Yorkshire hall.

Of course, when Burdsall related his nocturnal adventure to his hosts, they informed him of the Calverley murders of 1605. They would also have told him about Walter Calverley’s agonising execution – a demise that seems eerily similar to the preacher’s experience of something crushing his chest.

However, if you’ve ever experienced sleep paralysis, a fairly common sleep disorder, you might recognise elements of Burdsall’s night of terror. When sleep paralysis strikes, nightmarish hallucinations often accompany the feeling that someone – or something – is crushing one’s chest. These waking nightmares feel utterly real, and being paralysed and unable to escape adds to the terror. Perhaps Burdsall suffered an episode of sleep paralysis, and later interpreted it in the light of the murders that had been committed in the room in which he had slept.

Furthermore, we don’t really know how much Burdsall embellished his experience. Historian and Calverley resident Edward Garnett points out that Burdsall somewhat spoiled his story by saying his room looked out onto the graveyard. There is no view of the graveyard from Calverley Hall.[4]

It seems likely that news of Burdsall’s adventure would have spread quickly through the community, and those of a certain age might remember stories their grandparents told them of ‘Owd Calverley’ and his monstrous deeds. And so ghostly legends and traditions, and eventually a Christmas connection, began to emerge.

Ghost Tales

If you were riding across Greengates Beck Bottom in Calverley after dark in the early nineteenth century, you might feel someone leap onto the back of your horse and not leave you until the beck was crossed. This was the ghost of Owd Calverley, according to local ghostlore.

There were also stories that Calverley’s spirit would gallop around the village of a night clutching his bloodied dagger on a headless horse. Sometimes he might be accompanied by the faithful servant who had put an end to his master’s sufferings and paid with his own life. He too, of course, would be on a headless horse. There seems to be no particular reason why the horses were headless, apart from, perhaps, it creates a striking ghostly image.

In any case, as Owd Calverley’s ghost atop his headless horse galloped through Calverley woods, it would cry ‘A pound more weight – lig on, lig on!’ Of course, if the ghost confined itself to the woods, he wasn’t much bother, but he created great consternation if he rode his ghastly horse into the village. Locals say that a skilful exorcist cast a charm that prevented Owd Calverley from passing the church as long as the holly grew green in Calverley Woods.[5]

Nevertheless, many of the village children believed that the murderer’s evil spirit could be raised if you performed a certain ritual. An anonymous correspondent reminisced about his childhood ghost hunts in the Bradford Observer.[6] In order to summon Old Calverley’s spirit, first the children would pile their caps in a pyramid in the churchyard and some pins and breadcrumbs leftover from tea were scattered about. Then the children would hold hands to form a circle around their caps and recite the magic words:

       Old Calverley, Old Calverley, I have thee by th’ ears,

       I’ll cut thee in collops unless thou appears.[7]

Collops are cutlets or slices of bacon.

At the same time as the recitation was being chanted, some of the braver boys would go and whistle through the keyhole of the church door before repeating the rhyme. The correspondent claimed that on one occasion he and his friends saw – or thought they saw – a pale and ghostly figure appear, though they did not stay to have a proper look but fell over themselves in a mad dash to escape the graveyard.

The ghost of Owd Calverley was also thought to have been responsible for a campanological mystery. Around Christmas 1872 the bell in the church tower at Calverley began tolling in the early hours of the morning. They continued ringing for a long time, and the villagers came running from their warm beds into the cold night to see what the matter was. The door to the empty church was locked, but still the bells tolled. For a long time the bells rang on as the villagers searched in vain for the key to the church door. When it was finally located, the bells stopped the instant the key was put in the lock.[8]

Perhaps it was the Preacher’s winter adventure, or the mysterious tolling of the church bells in December 1872 that first connected Calverley’s ghost with Christmas. Or perhaps it’s his name being associated with holly that makes him a seasonal ghost, for the exorcist’s charm made the murderer’s shade avoid the village while the holly trees grew green in Calverley Wood. Or it could just be that everyone loves a ghost story at Christmas.

The Horsforth Man’s Tale

In 1904, some boys started a fire that left twenty acres of the holly trees in Calverley Wood burned black. Could this be why the ghost of Old Calverley chose the Christmas of that year to make his presence known again?

On Sunday 18 December 1904, a gentleman referred to only as ‘the Horsforth Man’ (after a village near Calverley) was walking home past the church yard. It was a cloudy night, though at times pale moonlight peered through the darkness. According to the Yorkshire Evening Post, this is what happened next:

…without any preliminary warnings there was a flash and a phantom-like form floated before the astonished pedestrian. He was all alone, the villagers having long since retired to bed. The apparition then disappeared, and all was quiet again.[9]

The next day the Horsforth Man told a friend who was acquainted with local folklore about his experience. When he heard about the Yorkshire Tragedy, he became convinced that he had seen the ghost of Owd Calverley himself.[10] Of course, the story was widely reported in the local and national media, and many locals embarked on nocturnal ghost hunts in the hope of catching Calverley’s restless spirit.[11]

Epilogue

There was some scepticism about the Horsforth Man’s story, and the anonymity of the witness suggests it may have been a journalistic joke, ‘trading on the credulity of a number of London journals,’ as the Leeds Mercury put it.[12] The Mercury suggested the mysterious Horsforth Man didn’t even exist – and if he did, his spooky experience was a case of one too many festive tipples down the pub.

Calverley Hall is now holiday lets.

The Yorkshire Tragedy lives on as a gory curio in Shakespeare’s apocrypha.

This is an edited excerpt from Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hoaxes, Ghost Hunts and Ghost Panics by Paul Weatherhead (6th Books).

First published in Northern Life Magazine

[1] R. V. Holdsworth ‘Middleton’s Authorship of A Yorkshire Tragedy’, The Review of English Studies, 45:177 (1994), pp.1-25

[2] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 December 1904, p.4.

[3] Richard Burdsall, Memoirs of the Life of Richard Burdsall, (York, 1797), pp. 118-123

[4] Garnett, (1991) p.75

[5] ‘Tragical Story’, Christian World, 1 December 1868, p.10; ‘More about the Calverley Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 24 December 1904, p.4

[6] ‘Calverley Forty Years Ago’, Bradford Observer, 28 March 1874, p.7

[7] Ibid

[8] John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (London: Gibbings and Company, 1897), p.399

[9] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 December 1904, p.4

[10] ‘A Christmas Ghost’, Cheshire Daily Echo, 21 December 1904, p.3

[11] ‘More about the Calverley Ghost, Yorkshire Evening Post, 24 December 1904, p.4

[12] ‘Alleged Apparition at Horsforth’, Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1904, p.13