52. Snake Attack! When you consider just how congested the capital is, how on Earth do so many mysterious creatures suddenly appear within the hustle and bustle of it all? We've spoken of huge birds, wolves, mystery exotic cats, pigs in the sewers, seals in the ponds... and now... snakes! Adders are of course common in the UK, but for a handful of other relatives to suddenly appear in London over the course of......

51. The Abbey Wood Anomaly! Something has been disturbing chickens coops and pets around Abbey Wood, Belvedere, Welling and Plumstead for a few years. Many believe it is the so-called 'beast' of Bexley, or it could even be the 'beast' of Bluewater... although these mystery cats are possibly one and the same. However the is growing concern, despite scepticism, is that these exotic felids are roaming closer to the city as housing developments eat......

50. The Lioness Of Winchmore Hill On Tuesday 22nd April I appeared on BBC London Radio with JoAnne Goode and Paul Ross to discuss mystery big cats around London, so what better way to celebrate reaching the fiftieth Saturday Strangeness installment than with another 'big cat' tale from the capital... In the March of 1994 there were reports that a lioness was on the loose in North London and had been sighted by a......

49. The Horror Of Hackney Marshes Way back in Episode Four, I very briefly touched upon a bear-like critter roaming London. I would now like to elaborate on the weirdness after seeing so many vague descriptions of events around the web. It began on 27th December 1981, when four young boys came across a beast they described as "a giant great growling hairy thing" as they were playing in the thick snow on the......

48. The Phantom Cat Whilst searching through my archives, like a gleeful grave-digger shoveling out the mounds of soil on a moonlit night, I literally stumbled across a text from a pamphlet dated 1674, in reference to a peculiar haunting, if it was indeed a haunting, or maybe one of the first ever encounters with a large 'panther'! I make no apologies for transcribing the original document exactly for weirdness sake! News from Puddle-dock......

47. More feathery invaders! In the November of 2007 a huge, dark-coloured bird was sighted in the skies over Battersea. The flapping wonder was photographed by a Brian Barnes as it glided near the power station. The mystery bird left local press puzzled. Was it an eagle? A buzzard? Was it the same creature seen two weeks previous in Kingston? Whatever the case, it wasn't the only mysterious aerial anomaly to visit the skies......

46. Attack of the flying things! For some reason the capital has always attracted hordes of flapping, screaming, leathery, frighteningly feathery, demonic and mysterious birds over the years... and I'm not just talking about those terrifying hen-nights in Soho! Tudor historian John Stowe wrote in the 1500s of a dreadful creature that invaded St. Michael's Church in the Cornhill ward, as told to him by his father: My father told me that on the......

45. Creatures From The Black Lagoon The capital has a dark history of strange beasts emerging from the silted depths and breaking the surface, causing the general public to flee in terror. Terrapins in local ponds, wild pigs in the sewers, a piranha in the Thames, exotic snakes around lakes and giant rats in the pipes. Mere myths? In 1996 something even bigger was lurking in the inky waters of Dollis Brook, in North......

44. Cry Wolf! In 2005 I met a guy who told me that, whilst living in the Battersea area, he recalled from childhood around twenty-five years ago several nightmarish tales that would send him cowering under the bed sheets. One of these yarns concerned rumour that wolves were inhabiting the local woods! I have always been fully aware of strange creatures roaming the thickets, but wolves – surely not?! Then I came across an......

An African Big Cat In London This weekend dear readers you are being offered a double dose of weirdness from the capital due to last week's mysterious missing episode... Today, we're back to strange exotic felids prowling the capital, after a report appeared on a cryptozoology-based website regarding an incident from 1995 pertaining to a very close encounter with a large, black leopard. Californian college student Matt Beloof was only twelve-years old at the......

42. The Phantom Ape Apologies that last week's installment of the weird and sinister went missing... the author decided to go in search of a phantom ape, but never returned... so, in the style of 'Blair Witch' we bring you his notes for another episode of the bizarre and the obscure. The story revolves around a Mr Ward, a Hampstead man who during the early 1900s went to Sumatra on an expedition through the......

41. London UFOs Part Seven By the mid to late ‘80s reports of alien abductions were spreading like wildfire across the world, and it appeared as though the abductors had taken on their latest, slimlined form – that being of large headed, bug-eyed and slender extraterrestrials keen on paralysing witnesses and performing varying surgical procedures on them, from impregnation to the insertion of strange microchips. However, some encounters also involved other entities that harkened......

40. London UFOs Part Six The ‘70s began slow for UFO reports over the capital, but then things got very weird! Firstly, at Acton, a witness reported a UFO sighting to Hounslow Police Station. Then, two police officers in the same building spotted presumably the same craft and watched it with binoculars. The craft was circular and bright but showing black spots. A Scotland Yard spokesperson confirmed the sightings. Then, in 1975 near Erith,......

39. London UFOs Part Five In the summer of ’67 in South London, three witnesses described encountering a black craft with a luminous yellow glow hovering around fifty-feet from the ground. The object suddenly descended, beaming an orange light to the soil, as there suddenly appeared a weird hairless humanoid with webbed hands, which soon re-entered the object that then took off. During the winter of 1967 one of London’s most impressive UFO sightings......

38. London UFOs Part Four Newspapers across the world were being bombarded by UFO reports by the time the ‘50s had glided by. On July 15th 1963 a farmer from Charlton found a crater, measuring 2 ½ metres wide and the same deep on his land. Around the hole were four impressions, as if something had stood or landed there – soil and foliage surrounding the hole were scorched. Weird lights seen over the......

37. London UFOs Part Three The 40s were the start of something huge for ufology after pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine disc-like craft over Washington in 1947. For London, it was the 22nd of November when a female witness, whilst under hypnosis, spoke of being abducted by two silver suited females and put before a man who burned the figures ‘H6AQ’ onto her leg, which were still visible when she awoke from her trance.......

36. London UFOs Part Two To list every UFO sighting London has ever experienced would be nigh on impossible, so over the next few episodes I’d like to share with you some of the best reports, continuing from last week’s more historical sightings. After the original ‘scareship’ mystery (see episode 10) in the February of 1934 at Dollis Hill, a married couple watched in amazement as two men wearing caps appeared to be tending......

35. London UFOs Part One When the new millennium dawned, many UFO buffs, researchers and spotters packed up their binoculars and disposed of their files because UFOs weren’t ‘in’ anymore. Sightings had allegedly dissipated and the sceptics were rubbing their hands. However, whilst no strange craft appeared to be crashing in the deserts of the U.S. or buzzing witnesses in Mexico with any frequency, the millennium still offered much in the way of alleged......

34. Phantom Assailants: Part Four Continued from episode 31… The London cat-rippings of 1998 continued into 1999. Even more bizarre was the RSPCA voice that stated, after several months of methodical research into the strange deaths, that vehicles were to blame! An inspector analysing the decapitations claimed that foxes, badgers and dogs had also been the cause, although I’m unaware of any animal native to England that kills in such a fashion. The vehicle......

33. Big Cat Round Up 2007 was a record year for my own research into ‘big cat’ sightings – www.kentbigcats.blogspot.com – although London and the infamous ‘beast of Bexley’ was reasonably quiet, this proved to me that such animals had wider territories. In January a black leopard was seen at Bexley by a Miss Skinner as she walked her dog. The massive cat sped across a field. A few days later, two yellowy-green eyes......

32. The Spirit Of Christmas Christmas ghost stories told by a crackling fire are a rare occurrence in the modern age, so let me chill your spine with a few yarns relating to festive phantoms of the wintry city. The first haunting is said to occur on Christmas Day at the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street, and concerns the ghost of actress Lillie Langtry, once a mistress of Edward VII. The spook is not a......

31. Phantom Assailants: Part Three The last two episodes of the Strangeness have concentrated on bizarre and elusive individuals who have slashed their way into folklore. This third instalment in the mini-series continues the thread except that the victims have been domestic cats! 1998 was a very grisly year throughout the city with regards to frequent mysterious moggie murders, by way of decapitation and tail removal. Forty cats had turned up in eight months......

30. Phantom Assailants: Part Two One hundred years before the fog-saturated reign of Jack The Ripper there was the London Monster of 1788 (see previous episode). Fifty years later came the bewildering spectacle of the iron-clawed Spring Heeled Jack (episode 11), another tormentor and slasher of females. Fast-forward almost thirty-years and gasp at the horror of the Phantom Skirt-Slasher Of Piccadilly, who for a terrifying reign of six-months prowled the London underground like some......

29. Phantom Assailants: Part One One hundred years previous to Jack The Ripper’s reign of ghastly terror, London was overshadowed by another spectral attacker – a phantom aggressor that, although seemingly dreadful and unique, would simply become one of many urban legends pertaining to mysterious and elusive assailants across the world, with many actually analysing the peculiar cases of ripping, and asking ‘did such psychopaths exist or were they the product of local hysteria’?......

28. Urban Legends Of The Underbelly! Urban legends are often vague, friend-of-a-friend tales (FOAFtales) similar to ‘Chinese whispers’, in that they are distorted, exaggerated and through generations of storytelling, they become myth, embedded in our society. For the last fifty or more years there has been a sinister legend pertaining to the London Underground that a mysterious, possibly caped figure, lurks in the cold tunnels, and is known for the ghastly act of pushing......

27. More Terrors Of The Tube! To continue from our last stop of ghosts pertaining to the London Underground, the spectral girl of Elephant & Castle appears to be a rail relation to the phantom hitchhiker legend, in that several witnesses have described, often whilst sitting in an empty carriage, encountering a young woman who takes a seat but often vanishes between stops. Just like many phantom hitchhiker myths, this particular spook story is......

26. Going Underground Urban legends of the more sinister variety have always intrigued me, so continuous whispers and friend-of-a-friend tales concerning a mutant race of beings inhabiting the dark tunnel systems, sewers and subterranean passages beneath the capital are always welcome, even if unfounded (despite rumours circulating as far back as the nineteenth century). However, one thing us folklorists do know is that the underbelly of the city is teeming with all manner of......

25. More Road-Related Horror! Lord John Angerstein’s coach has been sighted pulled by four headless horses, in the vicinity of Trafalgar Road, travelling onwards to Vanbrugh Hill in southeast London. Why the horses appear headless no one knows. On the Bayswater Road near Hyde Park, another phantom coach and horses is said to travel, without sound. But the most astonishing vehicle to haunt Greater London has to be that of a spectral bus, sighted......

24. Haunted Roads For Halloween! Despite London’s congested roads and the daily chorus of thousands of beeping horns, ghosts of the cities roads are in fact sporadic. Look through any catalogue of phantom hitchhikers or ghostly vehicles (for example http://www.roadghosts.com/) and you’ll notice a distinct lack of activity within the capital pertaining to tarmac terrors. Why this is we’ll never know – maybe it’s simply down to the fact that elsewhere in the country,......

23. The Woman In Black This week’s feature on London’s darker side is more of a review, simply because last week, Saturday 13th October, myself and my cousin ventured to see The Woman In Black stage show at the Fortune Theatre, on Russell Street in Covent Garden. For those of you who are not familiar with this chilling ghost story, it is an adaptation of Susan Hill’s fine book and has been running in......