After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Hauntings, Hangings & a Beast: Bodmin Jail

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Bodmin Jail can claim to be one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Perhaps that's because of all the hangings that took place here. Or the postmortem punishment the jail dolled out to prisoners. Or perhaps it is because it's in Cornwall - land of giants, beasts and all things otherworldly.Maddy and Anthony are joined by Jess Marlton, manager of Bodmin Jail, to talk about life, death and afterlife at this unique 18th century prison. Plus we have a bonus interview about the Beast of Bodmin with Ross Barnett, author of The Missing Lynx.Produced by Stuart Beckwith and Freddy Chick, Edited by Tom Delargy, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Well, hello there, and welcome to this episode of After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. Now, jails occupy a special place in our collective historical memory and imagining. Behind their fortress-like walls have existed many people who have walked in the shadows of life. They are, of course, filled with stories too, ghost stories in many cases, and today's location is no different. So for this episode, we invite you to join us behind the gates of Bodmin Jail in Cornwall, perhaps the most haunted of all the jails in Britain. And you don't have to dig very deep to unearth its dark past. We are delighted to be joined by Jess Marlton, who is the manager of Bodmin Jail.

Jess, welcome to After Dark. Good morning. It's lovely to be here. Jess, you're so welcome on the episode today. Before we get into some of the specific stories associated with the jail, can you give us a little bit of background to it? When was it built? And what was life like there in the earliest decades of its existence? So Bodmin Jail was built in 1779. And it's a landmark building. It was the first reform prison in the UK, designed following the premise by John Howard that we need to start rehabilitating prisoners. So it really did set the benchmark for what our modern prisons are today. And now

the conditions within that jail might, to modernise, not look particularly salubrious. But at the time, you would have had single cell occupancy, running water, meaningful reward, meaningful punishment, and that would have been physical. And the whole idea was to make you into a decent member of society and get you back out there contributing. Very much the premise that our reformed prisons have today. However, these things don't always go to plan and the prison was often overcrowded. It was a prison for men, for women and for children. The youngest we had here, unaccompanied, being six years old.

And of course, crime and punishment and our perceptions of them historically are very different. So you'll have had people in here for crimes that today would seem almost negligible. So sheep stealing, burning crops, stealing handkerchiefs, nicking horses. There's a whole cross-section of society that is going to come through Bodmin Jail. So as somebody who has not been to Bodmin, if I were to arrive outside Bodmin Jail tomorrow morning, what would I be been to Bodmin, if I were to arrive outside Bodmin Jail tomorrow morning, what would I be faced with? What does it look like? What's the feeling? What's the atmosphere? Today you'd be faced with a Victorian building, a very beautiful one actually, very

imposing, very grand, completed here in the 1840s. You are faced with two wings, a wing for men and a wing for women, and also a new build done sympathetically because it's a grade two listed building, which contains part of a dark walk for people to go to. And that would have been actually where the original debtors prison and later the hospital wing would have sat. So the prison itself is made of stone. You would come through, as you do today, the gatehouse. That would have had two walls on either side of it, very enclosed, very intimidating, deliberately so. The Victorians are going to try and make you feel like a lowly worm. You are the bottom of the pile. You are scum. Five sets of gates with wardens accompanying you the whole way. And when you come in, you're going to be given a uniform to wear. You're going to have your hair shaved off. You're

going to be delust. And if it's after 1860, you're going to be inoculated against smallpox. You'll not be permitted to talk. It is a silent building and you will be taken straight down onto a dark landing. This is a cell in the dark by yourself and you will stay down there until you prove you can behave yourself. Only then will you start moving to the lighter cells above you. So thinking about the kinds of people who were in Bodmin Jail, Jess, and you talk about the youngest child being, was it six years old, I think? What are the sorts of crimes, and I'm using crimes, you know, sort of a loose term there, because I think some of the reasons why a six-year-old, for example, is ending up in

prison perhaps wouldn't register today as being crimes to modern eyes. But what are the misdemeanors that people are being imprisoned in Bodmin for? So we are dealing with a society that views crime and punishment very differently from our own. The biggest reason anyone is in prison historically is for debt, running out of money. Charles Dickens, his dad was in prison in the Marshall Sea in London, actually, because he had a bake of 40id. And he pops and he has to stay there until he's made the money back. And that's why Dickens goes to work in a shoe polishing factory. And why possibly he writes about the plight of the poor as passionately as he does. So we have a debtors prison on site, people who don't have money. And actually, that typically sits with men.

They are the breadwinners historically. They carry the financial burden of the nation. You run out of money, you're a social failure, mate. Get yourself together. And of course, the moral shame of the nation will sit with women. And we'll see that actually rather tragically on our execution list. So there are six women executed in bombing jail throughout its time, and four of those were for the crime of infanticide, like child murder, and they are killing illegitimate children. Now, for us today, it's indefensible. You don't hurt children. Of course you don't. But I cannot put myself back in that time frame and understand just how shameful that would have been and how impossible it might have been to try and raise a child out of wedlock. You are

a social pariah and in fact we can see that can't we in the recent studies into the Maginot laundry houses in Ireland as recently as thes, that social stigma sitting on women. So there is no questioning of why did you do it? It is what you have done. And that is how the nation is going to react. So they're very tragic tales. They're very difficult tales. And they shine a rather uncomfortable spotlight onto our ancestors. Absolutely. And I think we often sort of conceive of prisons in our mind as these separate, isolated worlds that people are removed from society and placed in them. But actually, if we look at the historical record, and indeed today, it's very clear that the issues that

everyone experiences and is aware of in the outside world, in society, transfer to the prison. And actually, they're completely interlinked in terms of gender, in terms of class, in terms of race. And this is completely apparent in the 18th century and the prison world that kind of builds up around that. One thing I find so exciting about Bodmin Jail, Jess, is the fact that so much of it survives in its semi-original form, I guess. And I know that it's been, you know, the building has been adapted for various purposes. And as a historian of the 18th century, I just find this so compelling. I know Anthony has worked on Newgate Prison in London, and I have as well. And we often are thinking about and writing about and doing research into people who were in spaces that no longer exist. And it's so difficult to dive into that world

and to recreate an environment that was incredibly specific, sometimes to the actual buildings. Prisons had their own sort of unique cultures, and I'm guessing that Bodmin was no different in that regard. You know, their own economies within that, so people sort of buying and trading favours or small items and trinkets within prisons. But to have Bodmin surviving is incredibly important nationally, not only for the history of Cornwall. So can you paint us a little bit of a picture of what the environment would have been like, say, on an execution day? So people who are in for crimes that are going to get them executed, they've been taken to the prison, maybe they've already been sentenced, maybe they've been held at the prison and then sentenced. What's the environment like? What's the atmosphere like

on a day like that? Huge. And this is very difficult, isn't it, I think, for us to get our heads around today. We are hanging in public all the way until the late 1860s when the Capital Punishment Amendment Act comes in. And prior to that, we are hanging in public for nearly 2000 years. It's only very recently that we haven't. It's part of our landscape. It's part of our language. It's part still actually of our everyday geography. And we know that because we can hear it in our expressions, such as you're pulling my leg, pull the other one, money for old rope, towing the line. They're all gallows expressions. Even our wonderful gala day comes from the Anglo-Saxon gallows day. They are public events and you are meant to go because punishment is carried out

in public as a deterrent and a warning theoretically to others. But what it turns into is a festival and hanging crowds are big. Here in Bodmin, county market town of Cornwall, prestigious town, you would expect to see between 20,000 to 30,000 people coming to see a hanging. In London, in the same time period, so we're talking mid-1800s here, you could ramp that up to 50,000 to 60,000 people reported to come and see a hanging. That's extraordinary. That's Wembley Stadium in some cases, isn't it? And they are not standing there being diligent and good and kind. They are drinking cider and eating food and picking pockets and selling whatever there is to sell. And on a hanging day, the town would have filled up.

And they'd have been coming in for days before that. There are reports here of the turnpike roads coming into Bombay. There's five of them, making brilliant business, the inns and the taverns filling up. We have a wonderful account, actually, of the execution crowd from Matthew Weeks, executed here in 1844, hanging crowd of approximately 20,000 people. You couldn't get a place to sleep in the town for days. The recommendation for him actually was to try and get into the fountain inn or the railway inn. That was just up, well there's a pizza hut now, that's where that would have been closest one to the jail and if you couldn't get in there then the recommendation

was pretty billy's boarding house i don't know who pretty billy was but i could imagine that it was a bit rough and ready and of course you'd have had the ballad singer so not everyone is able to read and write in 1844 so there would have been a song that would have been written about the crime. And a gentleman would have walked through the town with a big placard of a woodcut, possibly of the murder, possibly of the murderer on it, and they would sing the ballad of what had happened so everyone knew and then down to the jury would come. Now in the same time period we have the Lightfoot Brothers executed here and they actually put on a special train to bring people to Bodmin from Wadebridge, Indian Queens and from London to

come and see the West Country hangings. This was spectacle in the extreme. We have this idea nowadays that there's something new, I guess, or something kind of novel in the True Crime podcast, right? Where we were asking ourselves, why are we so interested in these crimes? What is captivating in this moment in time about these crimes and these murders in most cases? But this isn't new from what you're describing. This has a very long history of kind of capturing the public imagination. And the fact that there are trains, there's almost a kind of a holiday industry being built up around these journeys. Yes. I mean, one of the rumours is that actually the first trains down here were organised by

Thomas Cook, the much-missed Thomas Cook, to come and see the West Country execution. But you're absolutely right. Our fascination with crime really does start from the Georgians into the Victorians, perhaps with the Ratcliffe Highway murders, where it suggested that 2,000 people come and see the murder scene. And for Matthew Weeks, exactly the same thing happened. So Matthew Weeks stepped out with his sweetheart, Charlotte Diamond, went out for an Easter walk and only Matthew came back. She was found in a stream up near Routor with her throat slit. Matthew had absconded. He'd run away and everyone pointed at him.

He was always a bit odd. He's punching above his weight, they said. She's rather lovely and he's a bit odd. He's punching above his weight, they said. She's rather lovely and he's a bit odd. Now, did he run because he thought that's what everyone would say is one argument? Because they could never actually really prove it. And in fact, the evidence was completely obliterated by thousands of people going up there to see if they could find out who did it. They walked all over the moors. It wasn't until the following day that the police went up with one of his shoes to see if they could fit it in a footprint.

Well, by that chance, by that time, they're going to have ample opportunity, aren't they? Because there's probably enough people with the same size feet. There is a public fascination. And of course, this is absolutely the same decade as we have the Jack the Ripper murders coming through, where the public are just lapping it up. essentially that builds up around crime in this period, around the sort of the penal system and going into prisons and, you know, the spectacle of execution. But there's also something here about the contrast between the urban world and the people who are consuming these kind of stories, who are, you know, attending executions of criminals who've become famous through the news, and a distance between that world maybe,

and a more rural world. And we've spoken a little bit about the Turnpike roads that from the late 18th century onwards are connecting Cornwall to, you know, the sort of main arteries of travel across England. Do you see a sort of a fascination or almost a fetishization of Cornwall as a sort of remote gothic setting I mean of course you know we we know that comes later particular about uh Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn in the early 20th century but is this something that you're seeing perhaps in the in the Victorian period in particular this sort of fascination with Bodmin jail and the setting around it in particular? There is this brilliant word, other, isn't there, that's being used quite a lot actually in connection with Cornwall today,

the folk horror revival, looking at our roots, what are we standing on, what did we bury in the field that we forgot? And Cornwall actually exemplifies that, and it did for the Victorians. You will see a lot of writers, poets, artists coming down to Cornwall in the 1800s searching out the other. You only need to look at Sherlock Holmes and Dartmoor to start seeing that coming through. Thomas Crookshank writing his Cornish litany postcards, the haunted county, as it's perceived, because it is so remote. And in fact, that's only very recently changed. Even as a young girl, I can remember you'd hit Exeter on the way down to Cornwall, it would be the last post of civilisation, fill your car up, go on that single road across Bodmin Moor and don't stop, because there are things out there on the moors. And I think for many people, it still holds that fascination.

And maybe that does stem from our Victorian ancestors, who really saw it as an opportunity to step away from modernity into a world of the past where people still lived as they'd always done and romanticised it consequently. So if we zoom back into the jail specifically then, and you've spoken about the Weeks case and the hanging, in some aspects we might be able to start thinking, well, that's the end of that cycle. But actually, at Bodmin, well, not just at Bodmin, but you find this kind of lean towards a postmortem punishment, I believe. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Absolutely. And I think the first part of this is we get very stuck today on the physicality of execution. We're taking a life. In public, that would have been a short drop. So what you're watching is not quick.

That can take, in worst case scenarios, up to 20 minutes. It's an uncalculated length of rope. It is asphyxiation. Following the Capital Punishment Amendments Act, it's the long drop. We have the last working long drop execution pit here. And that is a calculated length of rope based on your physicality. So if you are, you're built like Frodo Baggins or Dwayne the Rock Johnson, because you'll need a very different length of rope

to break your neck. So there is a change that happens, but that is not actually the focus of why we execute. We execute to deny heaven. And that is where post-mortem punishment comes in, because the punishment isn't just taking your life, it's owning your soul. Now, in the Georgian period, they had over 220 reasons to hang you. It was known as the bloody code. That was their way of controlling crime. Put as many bizarre and hokey and weird things onto that list as you can, and they just won't

do it. Well, they evidently did, but they needed to make the horrible crime of murder, as they called it, the Murder Act of 1751, stand out. So they said this, you'll murder someone, we'll hang you, but afterwards your body will be displayed in chains, gibbet cages, and you will be displayed where you committed the murder, and your body will be displayed where you committed the murder, and your body will be suspended between heaven and the earth, and you'll rot in it as a warning to others. Absolutely grim. There you are, out for a lovely afternoon stroll, and there's a body hanging in a gibbet cage. But what it's doing is denying you heaven. You're not in consecrated ground and you don't have a

whole body. When you get up to those pearly gates, you are going to need both of those to get in. And if you don't, your name's not on the list. Now that wasn't a particularly embraced very well by the public. Gibbet cage is not a nice thing to see. So you'll find other post-mortem punishments coming in. These will be medical dissection. So giving your body to the surgeons. And in fact, there were reports of people fighting over bodies at the gallows so the surgeons could have them. And if you are dissected, no heaven. And we had a lady here, Sarah Paul Green, who that fate did await her. She was medically dissected following her death. And of course, this introduces the grave robbers, doesn't it? So take a trip around Edinburgh, and what a delightful city that

is for body snatchers. But you can understand now, I think, why people were so horrified by it. It's not just taking your loved one, it's denying them heaven. It's this idea of kind of post-mortem, I guess we would call it today, trauma is coming through quite strongly in what you're describing there, Jess. And I think it's this battle for a soul. It's the battle for what happens to the remains of a person who has just passed away. But within that kind of trauma and within the drama, I suppose, not to be too glib, but within the drama of the hanging and the what happens after they've been taken from the rope there is scope then for this kind of

haunting element and go and jails are very well known for having ghost stories associated with them so I'm very excited to ask you this part of it because I have a feeling the answer might be yes is there anything at Bodmin jail we should be looking out for when we visit? This is the most common question we are asked because what you're saying is, is it haunted? And the very short answer is yes, there is something here. Now, as someone who loves history and who is a rationalist, it's quite unusual, I think, for me to be quite so firm in my answer. But I've worked here long enough to be able to say there is something here. What it is, what it wants, not entirely sure. And some days I'm not really that keen that it tells

me. But I've had enough weird and uncanny things happen here to make me firmly have respect and a belief that actually there's something watching. And this may well be because I know there are bodies buried in the jail. This was what happened after we stopped chippeting and after the body snatchers went away. The law said, if we hang you, you will be buried within the confines of the jail with your feet facing the prison in unconsecrated ground, no headstone. You're not facing east-west like in a graveyard. You are put in prison soil. And I know from accounts, the Lightfoot brothers are buried actually in the car park.

Matthew Weeks, also very rainy day when he was buried within the jail, they had to weight his coffin down with stones to stop it from bobbing up. They're still there. They haven't been moved. And I think that leaves a lingering energy, a disquiet, a uncanny unhappiness. I am definitely coming to Bodmin Jail. I'm sorry I haven't been yet, but this is on my list

more and more as I talk to you because it just sounds so fascinating. How does that manifest? How do those, let's say hauntings, but let's say maybe the recurring elements of some historical trauma, how does that manifest there at Bodmin specifically? dark. Ghosts don't wear watches. They don't go, gosh, it's nine o'clock. Let's get out there and get busy. I think as humans, we are more inclined to be aware of our senses when it's dark, because that's one of the things that would have eaten us, would have eaten us, right? So actually, most of the experiences I've had here have happened in the daytime. I've had my hand held walking through this prison, walking through quite early in the morning, and little fingers holding my hand as I walked through. Now, anyone who has children in their lives will know that when kids hold your hands, they tend to pull down.

They put their fingers around the end of yours, and they're comfortably, thank you, at a slight angle. That's exactly what it was. And I just carried on walking quite stoically. I've been shouted at in this prison. I was standing on the basement staircase. It's an old, original spiral staircase. And I was leaning over it, actually, looking down into the basement to hear if there was anyone down there.

I thought if there was, I'll go down and have a chat with them. If it's a customer, tell them about the place. And a man shouted up the stairs, get out. And he said it three times. He sounded very agitated, very upset. And they couldn't see him because it's a spiral staircase. You can't see down there. So ignoring every rule of horror that I know,

and I watch a fair number of horror films, I went down into the basement. Rookie error, Jess. Rookie error. Rookie error. Down I went. Don't worry, sir, I'm coming. I went down into the space and it's a long arched corridor and there was nobody there. And I remember standing there for quite a few seconds going, that's odd. I mean, he just heard him. Where could he possibly have gone before the penny dropped that there was no one in the basement. And I'm not ashamed to admit I did run back up those stairs like Scooby-Doo. Now, that sound could have come

from up or down. We know sound travels differently, but it certainly put my hackles up. And when I went up into the cafe and said to the people there what had happened, one of the cleaners said, oh, that's Mr. Get Out. Yes, several of us have heard him. We have things thrown at us. That's happened several times in the naval wing. Small stones get lobbed. That can be interesting. And we have things dropped from the ceiling. Feathers will often materialise and drop down. It's not pigeons. We don't have any in some of the areas of the building and of course we have our paranormal events here and they will frequently have occurrences running through them they use a manner or manner of equipment in an attempt to communicate and they frequently report

as well. I think whether whether our listeners believe in the supernatural or not, what's very evident is the trauma of the treatment of inmates during their lifetimes in the prison. And there certainly seems to be a kind of resonance of that left behind, especially when some of their bodies, both living and dead, are treated in these kind of derogatory and pretty abhorrent ways. I wonder, Jess, if you can tell us the story of, is it Joan White and what happens to her body after she has been killed? Because there's a paranormal story associated with that. And I think it, whether we take it at face value or not, it says so much about the kind of ethical dilemmas of prisons in the 18th and 19th centuries and how bodies are treated

Joan White is a story within a story within a story what we do know about Joan White is that she was incarcerated in Bombingen in 1813 for fighting, actually. She was a bit of a brawler. Her nickname was the Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin. She was a non, in fact, fantastic. She was a cunning woman. If she'd have been alive 200 years earlier, the word witch would undoubtedly have been associated with her. Now, she did practice craft up at Scarlet's Well.

You could go up there and get treatments for your pains and ills from her, but she isn't put in here for witchcraft. She's put in here for scrapping. And she dies in the prison, probably of pneumonia is the theory. But she has no family to have the body released to and she is medically dissected this is not uncommon at that time as we've already mentioned the grave robbers and the needs for bodies for medical the medical science the London company of barbers and surgeons has set up they are going to train

x amount of doctors a year but you're only going to be able to do that by looking in people and I'm not giving them my body because I want to get to heaven so you're going to give them the criminals and the poor so this is exactly why she goes off now her bones it is said, are then returned to the jail. And in the 1800s, they are subsequently used in a seance. Now, how much truth there is in this is actually, I think, largely irrelevant, because this is the story that's been told for over 100 years of Joan White. When she is used for the seance, it all goes horribly wrong. There's a lot of activity. People get very frightened and her bones are given away. And they end up in the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle. Now, I know this for a fact because as a small girl, I saw them.

When you first came into the Witchcraft Museum, there was a glass coffin, a kind of screwed up snowed white, and there was Joan's bones. The last witch of Cornwall, said the label stuck on the side of it. Now, her bones stayed in the Witchcraft Museum for a number of years until it changed hands. And the feeling was actually not only were they very unsettled, hands. And the feeling was actually not only were they very unsettled, but this was not the right thing to do with the bones of anyone. And she was privately interred in the woods above Boscastle, near a church called Minster. And you can go and see her grave. She is not buried within Minster Churchyard, which is possibly my favourite churchyard. If you could invent a Neil Gaiman churchyard, that's your one. It's a delight.

She is buried just outside the Lynchgate. And there's a little gravestone that says, Joan White died Bodmin jail 1813, no longer abused. And there were always offerings left there she had a sweet tooth so people leave toffees cookies rolling tobacco whiskey now it's highly unlikely that her bones are right under there because let's be honest a witch's finger bone is probably quite a high commodity on the black market i would imagine so she's off in the woods somewhere. But this shows you, not people's concern at the time for what had happened to bodies, but our obsession with bones, with storytelling, with prisons, with seances, with the afterlife. And criminal classes were a huge part of that. Well, if you are sold and if you are visiting Cornwall, please make sure to

visit Bodman jail because that's all i want to do now that's going to be on my the top of my visit list for the next few months um thank you for joining us on this episode of after dark jess it has been an absolute pleasure and when we do visit please make sure to come with us you would be welcome yeah you would be absolutely welcome. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII,

who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Before we go today, we have got something special for you. We have a bit of a bonus interview. It's about the Beast of Bodmin. And so the story kicks off in the early 1990s with multiple and various different sightings of this Beast of Bodmin and attacks on some sheep too. And because it was the 1990s, we don't have iPhones, we don't have videos on our phones,

so we're using a handheld video camera, the good old days. And it played an integral role as one of the farmers in the local area managed to capture footage that does look a lot like a big black cat slinking down a Cornish field. We spoke about the beast at the end of our interview with Jess, and she saw it as the latest version of a monster that's always haunted the moors. But many would disagree that this beast exists purely in folklore. Instead, they suggest it's a real living, breathing animal, something you might find on a David Attenborough documentary. The only difference? It's roaming the English countryside. Now, when I think of Britain, it's not somewhere that I really think about where there's beasts abandoned and roaming around in this day and age, but maybe I'm wrong. What if there is still flesh

and blood killers prowling this green and pleasant land? Well, Ross Barnett is an expert on the history of big cats in Britain and the author of The Missing Links. That is such a good name. The past and future of Britain's lost mammals. And he's going to tell us a little bit more about what he thinks is behind the story of the Beast of Batman. So, Ross, welcome. We're absolutely delighted to have you here. It's great to be here. Thank you. I think something else that we can kind of establish here going into this conversation is just how prevalent stories of big, scary animals, have been reported over a really broad chronology. And I think in some ways going into this, the Beast of Bodmin, for me, in my mind, sat within this kind of pantheon. Some of the reports we have are things like,

there's a 13th century poem, and I'm very sorry for my Welsh pronunciation. It's called Pagur, which talks about a large cat that roams Anglesea and that's actually killed by an Arthurian knight there's tales of I think around the year 1400 there's a land owner in the New Forest who actually excavates supposedly a giant lion that has antlers and it's red not sure what's going on there and as late as the 1760s you know the radical politician William Cobbett actually speaks about growing up in Surrey and seeing you know big cats climbing trees in the landscape there so there's a kind of I guess a tradition that in some ways is very specific to different regions of the UK but there's a sort of I guess they share a common characteristic that

we're very interested in, these animals that may or may not be visible in the landscape. So Ross, do you want to give us a sense of the kinds of sightings people have claimed to have about the so-called Beast of Bodmin and when these have occurred? I mean, they sort of tend to follow a very kind of similar pattern in the ones that I've heard anyway. So the reports tend to be sightings of a large black panther. That's how they're often described. That's how they're often reported. Having said that, there are also other sightings where people claim to have seen pumas, lions, tigers, any kind of large cat, essentially. But black panther is kind of the classic reporting of what people see it's

so interesting ross because and and kind of refreshing i think because again i just didn't know you people i don't mean you people as in scientists the british we're so obsessed with big cats maybe a good point to mention that i've been involved with some actual scientific research on british big cats and we actually have records of what is the earliest evidence of an exotic cat on the loose in Britain, which was a lynx in Devon. So not too far from Bodmin in the Edwardian period. So around about 1903, it was shot for hassling sheep

and then was just put into Bristol Museum and kind of forgotten about. But along with colleagues, colleagues Darren Nash, Max Blake and a few other people we that's what we discovered and we we tried to throw a battery of modern scientific tests at it to see if we could figure out what it was what species where it'd come from and what it was doing in Bristol or even in Devon really. So Ross you talk there about alien big cats and you know we don't mean cats that have been beamed down to earth, Scotty. So can you explain a little bit about what alien big cats are, what they might be doing in Britain and how they maybe

have found themselves wandering the wilderness here? Sure. So alien big cats is kind of a general term for some field of cryptozoology as a whole, the kind of study of monsters and unknown creatures, which is kind of parallel to zoology i guess but in cryptozoology you have you know from your yetis and your big boots to your Loch Ness monsters to your abcs alien big cats and so as Manny said alien just in the sense of not being from Britain i mean Britain has no native big cats our largest native feline is the Scottish wildcat, which is not doing very well and is actually very endangered and in a lot of trouble. So ABCs, alien big cats, yeah. That's so interesting. So I'm just looking at my notes here and there are a few other examples of

these supposed alien big cats. We've got the Surrey puma, also the Staffordshire panther. Now, I should say I grew up in Staffordshire, very close to Rudyard Lake. Did you see a panther, Maddy? Did you see a panther? That's what we all want to know. I'm so sad to say that I didn't, but it was very much, very much a thing on everyone's mind growing up in that area. So this is so interesting. And there's always that kind of speculation around how these animals might have found their way into the world. So we actually have quite a lot of relatively surprising solid evidence. You talk, Ross, about the Edwardian lynx. So is that a pet that's found its way into Britain? Yeah, that was our conclusion. So from looking at the taxidermy mount, so the kind of skin of it, and looking at the bones that we had,

taxidermy mount so the kind of skin of it and looking at the bones that we had it looked to be a canadian lynx which you know very obviously is from canada but it had clearly been in captivity for a while it was probably somebody's pet it had obviously been looked after it had some other kind of skeletal abnormalities that suggested it had been cared for and it only had probably been let loose when it became too much of a burden and this is i think one of the kind of key explanations for the abc phenomenon is that you know prior to 1976 if you want to own a big cat as a pet in the uk no problem no questions asked and you can imagine in kind of 60s and 70s with the kind of swinging scene that there was many people wanted to have a pet lion or a pet cheetah or a pet leopard or whatever that was a pretty cool thing to do you could walk into harrods and buy yourself a lion if that's what you wanted to

do but i'm i'm sorry you could walk into harrods and buy a lion yeah absolutely what you go into harrods for a new perfume and you come out with a lion. Who knew that was on the cards? Impulse buy. I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what I've always wanted? A lion. Perfect. But you're talking about, and this is why I think you're such a good guest to be talking about this, Ross, the scientific investigations that you and your team did into the Canadian links. But there have been some investigations, probably more journalistically driven, right, into the Beast of Bodmin specifically. I think the BBC carried out some kind of investigation at some point.

Sure. And, you know, there have been some really interesting things that have come out of that. So one of the things that were found in Bodmin was a leopard skull, I think, in the 90s. And, you know, this was huge, like a leopard skull, physical evidence of a big cat in Bodmin. And everyone was like really excited now we have the proof we've been looking for but they did some really interesting scientific tests on that including forensic entomology so looking at insect life and they found some actual i think pupa so like the kind of larval stages of of insect inside the skull from when it had been kind of decomposing and And they were able to see

from that insect evidence that this was a species of insect that you do not find in the UK. It was a tropical species of insect. And so they were able to work out that this is something that was not native, had not died on Bodmin, but had actually been imported from abroad from the leopard's native habitat and either disposed of or planted on Bodmin. The subtitle of the podcast is Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. And this seems to me that there's a bit of myth building, like purposeful myth building in some cases going on

with some of these sightings and some of this proof that's coming to... We're venturing from science now, so forgive me, Ross, but I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on why there are certain landscapes and certain areas that inspire this kind of myth building. That's a good question. The problem with Britain is that it's an empty landscape. Ecologically speaking, we don't have what we should have.

And so a lot of my own research has been looking at the process of extinction and and how much is actually missing from our our ecosystems and so in the uk you know our largest carnivore is you know the badger the fox the things that are pitifully small we're missing lynx we're missing lions used to live in the uk we're missing hyenas we're missing you know mammoths and woolly rhinos and all these other kind of incredible megafauna that disappeared since the Ice Age. Bears have gone since the Iron Age as well. And I think that kind of leaves a long shadow.

People are aware that wolves used to live in the UK. People are aware that bears used to live here. I think there must be a little bit of wish fulfillment that people look out and see how kind of bare and empty of life quite a lot of the UK is. At least the life is not large and impressive. And they want to see stuff compared to other kind of industrialized nations, even within Europe, we don't have the large mammals that we should have. And I think people feel that. I love this idea that it's almost an inherited memory, this wish fulfilment that we're

magicing these animals into the landscape because we feel their absence. That's absolutely fascinating. I think we'll probably leave it there. But Ross, thank you so much for absolutely fascinating and slightly different conversation. We're very used to talking to historians, but it's always nice to venture into the scientific and to think about those boundaries, I suppose, between folklore and the scientific realities that we're faced with today. So thank you very much indeed. We hope that you have enjoyed listening to this episode of After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.

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