Tuesday 2 February 2016

Satanic Goat Peril!

I don't bother with 'news' items about ghosts, as a rule, because a. there are just too many of them and b. most of them are quite silly. But I feel that claiming you were driven out of your house by a Satanic Goat is worthy of note. As Cole Porter so very nearly wrote.
The haunting spectre of a satanic goat has left a woman so terrified of her home that she's put it up for sale. 
Vanessa Mitchell's cottage has been dubbed "Britain's most haunted" after a series of spooky incidents prompted the terrified home owner to search for a brave buyer. 
The 43-year-old claims to have been shoved while heavily pregnant, smacked on the bottom and to have seen blood splattered across her floor whilst living in the house in St Osyth, Essex.
I don't want to trivialise Ms Mitchell's plight, but being smacked on the bottom and seeing blood spattered about the place are not always paranormal phenomena, and that goes double for Essex.

Oh, hang on.
The property, also known as "The Cage", was formerly a medieval prison and is said to have hosted one of England's most infamous witch trials, in which eight women were killed.
Well, that would have Mulder convinced from the get-go, while Scully would point out that anyone living in such a historically charged environment might well be haunted by bad dreams and hallucinations, and interpret even the most commonplace event in the context of a rather simplistic, Hammer film view of English folk history. Then a cup would fly across the room and shatter against the wall.

But fair play, if you're going to encounter demonic forces, it would seem to be the ideal place. And, if we riff on Nigel Kneale's 'stone tape' hypothesis, perhaps the real horrors of the cage have somehow been imprinted on the very fabric of the building. If we accept that the experiences and imaginings of people can be 'replayed' (a very big If, as there's no evidence they can) it would be the ideal site to encounter our ancestors' worst fears. Including, presumably, goat demons. 

Put another way, maybe living in a place called The Cage isn't the wisest of moves. It might make a perfect bank or supermarket.


vanessa mitchell
Paranormal forces make photographer lean sideways

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting case, especially the dark, witch-haunted history of the house, but I always take such cases with a pinch of salt.
And if I may point out, though perhaps you already know this, the hypothesis for the ''stone tape'' comes from the English archaeologist and parapsychologist, T.C. Lethbridge. Lethbridge, a fascinating character, began his career as an archaeologist before branching out into the study of the paranormal, investigating psychic powers and phenomena, ghosts, witchcraft, and even extra-terrestrial intervention in ancient human affairs. In a sense, he was something of a real life Quatermass, and he believed that the supernatural of one generation would be the science of the next.

Liam

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