In which the author is about to give a mysterious talk in Aberfeldy…

This Thursday (26th May) I’m at Aberfeldy, giving a talk at the Breadalbane Community Campus at 7.30pm. The subject is ‘Mysterious Perthshire’ although I’ll be concentrating exclusively on the Highland part of Perth & Kinross, with episodes ranging from Pitlochry and Moulin through Strathtay to Loch Tay and Ben Lawers.

On the slate will be: Big Cats in Highland Perthshire, including a photograph of a big cat print in snow; UFOs, especially the notorious Calvine/Pitlochry Incident of 1990; and the Alleged Haunting of Ballechin House, a Victorian ghost investigation by the Society for Psychical Research that led to scandal, rows, and angry letters to The Times. All these will be taken from my recent book Paranormal Perthshire.

A big thank you to Bruce Paterson for letting me witter on for his show on Heartland FM.

Tickets for the talk are £5, available from the Breadalbane Community Library, or by phoning 01887 822405. The event starts at 7.30 and lasts for about an hour, and there’s free parking. Oh, and I’ll also have books for sale, as managed by my glamorous assistant.

In which the author turns into a pathetic fanboy…

Anyone interested in great writing should pop along to the Steps Theatre in Dundee’s Central Library on Thursday night (May 19th), because the splendid Denise Mina is giving a talk. I will most certainly be there.

Denise Mina is primarily known for her bestselling crime novels set in Glasgow, and I’m very fond of one of her unconventional heroines, investigative journalist Paddy Meehan. But my fanboy sense is tingling because she has also penned two graphic novels featuring Hellblazer himself, the man with the trenchcoat, permanent fag-end and surly attitude – occultist John Constantine.

Since making his appearance in Alan Moore’s version of Swamp Thing in the 1970s, John Constantine has been one of the most fascinating of comics characters, a working-class former punk who looks like a degenerate Sting, makes as many mistakes as he does right moves, and spends his time in magical conflicts with demons, angels and other nefarious beings.

Denise Mina brought the London-based Constantine to Glasgow in Empathy is the Enemy and The Red Right Hand darkly puckish tales of misery-eating demons and grim apocalyptic cults. The climax in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery is a classic. I mentioned the graphic novels in The Guide to Mysterious Glasgow and The Guide to Mysterious Iona and Staffa.

Crime and John Constantine – what more could you possibly want from an author event?

Steps Theatre, Central Library, Wellgate, Dundee, DD1 1DB. 
Thursday, 19 May 2011, 7.00pm – 8.30pm. 
Tickets are free and available from Central Library (01382 431500) and Waterstones, Dundee.

…In which the author falls in love with standing stones all over again

Just back from a three-day trip to the archaeological wonderland that is Kilmartin, in Mid-Argyll, on Scotland’s west coast. Megalithic structures abound in the region, and we visited dozens of standing stones, burial cairns, cists and other ancient sites. Highlights inclu­ded Temple Wood stone circle and the Dunadd hillfort and royal complex, plus a lake crannog and a huge standing stone carved with a Christian cross. Plus I got to lie down in a subterranean prehistoric grave (and found it a tad cramped).

 

The area has also the best collection of cup-and-ring marks (prehistoric rock art) in the country, and although some of it takes something of an effort to get to – especially in the infamous Argyll rain – it was well worth it. Because prehistoric British rock art is non-representational and abstract, its meaning is lost to us, making it not just beautiful but enigmatic and mysterious. Some cup-and-ring sites are notoriously difficult to find, and many a time the rain-swept glens echoed with the distinctively plaintive cry of the rock art hunter: “It’s meant to be around here somewhere!”

 

The trip was arranged by the earth mysteries magazine Northern Earth, www.northernearth.co.uk, with organisation by the editor, John Billingsley, and field leadership by archaeologist and rock art expert Paul Bowers, both of whom did a bang-up job. More about the utterly fantastic Kilmartin area can be found on the website of the wonderful Kilmartin House Museum, www.kilmartin.org. The bookshop there has a superb collection of books on Scottish archaeology, history and folklore, and also happens to stock signed copies of “101 Things To Do With A Stone Circle”

 

…In which the author noses about looking for ghosts

Do You Have A Ghost Story in Dundee or St Andrews?

 

I am currently writing a book entitled Haunted Dundee. This is a follow-up to Paranormal Dundee and a partner to Haunted Aberdeen, both of which came out in 2010. Later this year I’ll also be working on Haunted St Andrews & District.

 

So, if you have a personal experience or a family tradition of an alleged ghostly encounter in the Dundee or St Andrews area, I would be interested to hear from you. Just go to the contact form.

 

I am interested in the full range of phenomena:
Apparitions
Poltergeist activity
Crisis visitations
Anomalous sounds and smells
Communications
Doppelgangers
And any other related incidents, including known hoaxes

Please include all relevant details – what was experienced, when, where, and by whom, plus a way to get in touch.

 

Not every story can be used for the book, so the more confirmatory details there are, the more likely the story will be considered for inclusion. Vague mails that read something like ‘I saw a goste it was dead scary and real, honest’ will almost certainly not be of interest. Correspondents can be anonymous in the book if they wish. I will not pass your details on to any other person or organisation.

 

Haunted Dundee will be out in winter 2011, while Haunted St Andrews & District will be published early in 2012.

 

I look forward to hearing about your experiences, and thank you in advance. Input your ghost story here!.

 

In which the author becomes a museum piece…

 

(c) 2011 University of Aberdeen, Kings Museum, ‘100 Curiosities Exhibit’

 

Badass big cats. I love them, especially when they turn up in areas where they have no right to be, to perplex and bamboozle us with their out-of-place predator-feline activities. From the Surrey Puma and the Beast of Bodmin to more recent sightings of alleged panthers and pumas in Scotland, these cats have been an enduring cryptozoological mystery.

 

So when Scotland’s newest museum, the King’s Museum in the University of Aberdeen, asked if I would choose an object for their opening exhibition 100 Curiosities, I knew exactly which specimen to pick. The exhibition draws on the massed collections within Aberdeen’s several museums, and I knew that nestling within the glass cases of the city’s stupendously wonderful Zoology Museum was a stuffed and mounted Kellas Cat, which has a tangential if fascinating relationship with the whole question of just what these cats are.

 

Here’s the description I wrote for the card that accompanies the cat in the King’s Museum:

“Out-of-place animals such as ‘ABCs’ or Alien Big Cats hold a special attraction for researchers of the supernatural and strange. Are pumas, panthers, lynxes and other exotic felids roaming our countryside? In some cases the answer is definitely yes, as physical specimens have turned up in Inverness-shire and the Borders. The Kellas Cat – named after a Morayshire village – isn’t an ABC, as it’s actually a bad-tempered hybrid of the domestic moggie and the Scottish Wildcat. But I suspect this black-furred bruiser is responsible for some of the reported sightings of ‘big cats’ in the North-East of Scotland. Nice kitty…

Geoff Holder, author of The Guide to Mysterious Aberdeen.”

 

Early museums grew out of the strange and bizarre ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ assembled by wealthy gentlemen (there is a splendid recreation of one in the British Museum), so it is only appropriate that the King’s Museum is acknowledging the past with this opening exhibition. You should go, as admission is free, and the eclectic collection is definitely worth a visit.

 

The King’s Museum opened in April 2011 and can be found at

17 High Street,

Old Aberdeen,

Aberdeen AB24 3EE

Tel 01224 272000

Opening hours are 9.30am-4.30pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 9.30am-7.30pm on Tuesday, and 11.00am-4.00pm Saturday.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/kingsmuseum/

 

And while you’re in the area, check out the Zoology Museum. In weird creature feature terms, it’s utterly scrumptious.

 

I would like to thank the King’s Museum for the invitation to choose this specimen. And if any other museum curators out there want to get in touch, I have an idea for an exhibition entitled Dinosaurs, Daleks and Druids…

 

Cannibals! Vampires! Giant Korean Centipedes!

I’ve just returned from the Annual Conference of the Folklore Society, which took place at the University of Worcester.

With ‘Childlore and the Folklore of Childhood’ as its theme, the event turned up a truly diverse and fascinating set of talks. As a result I now know an awful lot more about Lithuanian horror stories, fairy changelings, the Evil Eye, and, yes, giant Korean centipedes. I love my job.

The organisers put my talk on just before lunch, although happily it appears no-one was put off their food by my tales of the cannibal children of old Dundee town.

The entire event was well organised by Mikel Koven and Caroline Oates, the company was agreeable and joyous, and the collective meals splendid and filled with talk of supernatural guardians, djinns, Japanese subcultures, witchcraft and urban legends. Did I say I love my job?

One of the participants, playwork researcher Marc Armitage, has blogged his thoughts on the conference at www.marc-armitage.eu, while Jeremy Harte’s fulsome conference report is on the Folklore Society’s site www.folklore-society.com.