Monsters Myths and Manias

In 1893 composer Erik Satie wrote Vexations, a dissonant, repetitive and unnerving piano piece that takes up to 24 hours to play. Demonic music that warps the minds of those who played it, a topless cellist, a bra made of televisions and a phial of amphetamine... This is the weird musical history of this piece and the disturbing and uncanny effect it had on its performers... More weird stuff on my...

Yorkshire in the 1300s was a strange and frightening place. The living dead crawled from their graves, wandered round the lanes and accosted the villagers, at least according to accounts written by an anonymous monk. But these zombies were very different from the gut munchers of modern popular culture, and it wasn’t your brain they were after. So why were the dead shuffling round Yorkshire six cen...

In recent decades there have been some fine zombie films, but these mainstream offerings tend to suffer from one fatal flaw: respectability. The zombie films from the golden age (which I’ve taken as being from the late 60s to the early 90s) are different. They are gloriously disreputable, so much so that many were banned in Britain or were only available in editions butchered by the censors.  In t...

In this episode, bizarre and spooky urban legends about ghost hoaxes going wrong and scarring the hapless victim to death!

Atheist philosopher A.J. Ayer choked to death on a piece of smoked salmon and had a bizarre vision of the afterlife before being revived... What did he see and did it change his mind?

Naked ghosts – people who wandered the streets at night starkers frightening any unlucky victim they happened to meet - were surprisingly frequent, especially in the early nineteenth century.  They were a combination of ghost hoaxer, streaker and flasher.  The sight of someone stalking a secluded location with his wan naked body eerily reflecting the gas lamps or moon light would have been a very...

Professor Weird explores the castration cult that swept Russia and Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century. They were known as the Skoptsy, and the operation (which they called the Fiery Baptism) involved a red hot poker and no anesthetic... But we would never do anything like that in the modern day and age... would we?

The West Yorkshire village of Calverley became the centre of public attention over 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 g...

To mark the release of his new book, Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hunts, Ghost Hoaxes and Ghost Panics, author Paul Weatherhead examine the weird history of ghost hoaxing, a bizarre activity that was surprisingly widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These hoaxes often led to mayhem, drunken rioting, ghost hunters dressing in drag, and even death.... Phantoms of...

In January 1726 the British ships the Compton and the James and Mary anchored off a desolate uninhabited island in the South Atlantic for repairs. Men were sent ashore to find provisions, but instead came across a tent with a man’s skeleton lying near it. Next to the skeleton was a manuscript – a diary of the dead man’s last days as a castaway on this remote island. The diary was written in Dutch...

Fishermen are known for their tall tales, but few are as tall as the tale told of the gigantic fire breathing sea serpent that attacked a Scottish trawler in 1903. Reports of sea monsters were fairly common in the newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the desperate battle between the crew of the Glen Grant and the fire-breathing North Sea Monster is one of the most exciti...

In 1954 a group of undercover psychologists joined a doomsday UFO cult who believed the world was about to be destroyed and the true believers whisked away in a flying saucer. What would happen to the believers' faiths when the prophesised apocalypse didn't happen, the psychologists wondered? The results reveal an important truth about human nature...

In early 1923 a Fenland farm was visited by strange destructive phenomena – household objects mysteriously flying across the room and smashing. Some said the house was haunted by a poltergeist, others blamed witchcraft or even demons. The haunted house became a national sensation, leading to psychic investigators, spiritualists, an exorcist, a witch and Arthur Conan Doyle all trying to solve the m...

The strange history of prophetic herring and how they spelled doom for mighty men. Plus, how herring farts nearly brought about the apocalypse...

A monster fly three feet in length and with an 18 inch dagger like tongue caused mayhem when it escaped from a laboratory and went on the rampage in Yorkshire in February, 1932. This is according to a contemporary Bulgarian newspaper and reported by Reuters in several British papers a few months later when it created quite a buzz... Sources Sheffield Daily Telegraph 12 December 1932; Yorkshire Pos...

The Hippy Babysitter (also known as the Baby Roast) is one of the darkest pieces of acid lore to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs is actually older and more widespread than you might think. This episode of Monsters, Myths and Manias examines different versions of this psychedelic myth and traces its weird and disturbing history around the wo...

The true story of Professor Charles Munter, the real life Svengali who invented the Corsets of Immortality...    SOURCES: ‘She is Trilby in real life’, Milwaukee Leader, 18 May 1912, p.12 ‘Woman, hypnotised, sings operatic airs’, Bridgeport Evening Farmer, 29 June 1912, p.10 ‘Prince of Healers’, Westminster Gazette, 26 July 1923, p.7 ‘Professor Munter himself…’, Catholic Telegraph, 10 March 1921,...

In this week's episode, a brief history of talking cats, cat organs and cat orchestras... Sources  For talking cats see the following: Hamilton Daily News, 16 February 1912 Nelson Leader, 3 June 1932 Dundee Evening Telegraph, 12 July 1946 Dundee Evening Telegraph, 21 September 1946 Dundee Evening Telegraph, 20 June 1947 For the cat organ and cat orchestras see the following: GH Wilson, The Eccentr...

Panic about maniacs lurking in the shadows ready to jab innocent girls with syringes dripping with evil drugs is nothing new. Similar episodes have been occurring for over a century. In this week's Monsters, Myths and Manias we uncover the hidden history of needle spiking and explain why the maniac with the syringe is a phantom of our imagination. For a full history of needle spiking and other pha...

The bizarre story of Mary Bateman, witch, serial killer and psychopath and how she made a fortune from a chicken who laid eggs that predicted the end of the world... Sources Arthur Vincent, Lives of twelve bad women; illustrations and reviews of feminine turpitude set forth by impartial hands, (London: T.F. Unwin,1897);  E. Baines, Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Wi...

This episode tells the story of one of the strangest entities ever to haunt this land - the demonic headless bear from hell. This strange monster is nowadays forgotten, but he left odd tracks in the realms of demonology, the works of William Shakespeare and also in the language we speak. A monstrous headless bear, a flaming demonic snail, levitation and a possessed woman rolled around the house li...