Simon’s Reviews > Haunted Britain and Ireland > Status Update

from an overall Fortean angle it is so, so interesting how many reports there are of giant black cats and dogs that clearly look and act as something different than everyday flesh and blood animals, e. g. the mysterious hideous cat haunting Killakee House in Dublin or the Barguest of Troller's Grill in North Yorkshire.... I think this is what cryptozoologist Jon Downes calls "zooform entities"

Interesting to read not just about Lord Byron's ancestral home Newstead Abbey and all the ghosts haunting it (blamed on the misadventures of his EXTREMELY dysfunctional family) but also the mysterious lights in the sky above Longdendale in Derbyshire - usually attributed to fairies or witches but would probably be called UFOs had they first been sighted after WW2. Longdendale is also home to phantom aircraft...

curious to read about a British fishing village called Dunwich, which was reduced to a small fraction of its original size by much of the ground it was built upon falling into the sky - seems like American horror author H. P. Lovecraft not only modelled his own Dunwich (located in Massachusetts) but also Innsmouth (a decrepit fishing village) upon that town

I like the Cornish story about the ghost of the Reverend F. W. Densham whose sermons were so boring the congregation boycotted him so his ghost now haunts Warleggan Church, other than that A LOT of the ghost stories in the UK seem to be connected to either the English Civil War or the Wars of the Roses often being said to be revenant nobles who either fell in those wars or were executed during them

remember this being recommended a thousand times on the Centre for Fortean Zoology's youtube channel so I finally borrowed this from the local library - gonna see if it lives up to the hype