Monday, November 5, 2007

Shrinking Sherwood and the Spectral Sasquatch...

This story - concerning the decline of Nottingham, England's fabled and magical Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood fame is a real tragedy. Let's hope this once-mighty area of woodland can be saved and returned to its majestic glory of centuries-past.

And while there is no doubt that the aforementioned Robin Hood was (and arguably still is) the most famous resident of Sherwood Forest, according to some people the woods have been home to far stranger things, too - and of a distinctly cryptozoological nature even.

Some Thing in the Woods was the headline that appeared in the November 28, 2002 issue of the Nottingham Evening Post newspaper. It transpired that Chris Mullins, a British-based mystery-animal researcher, had been given details of an "eight-foot, hairy man beast with red glowing eyes" seen within the legendary forest.

It was this story that prompted a man to contact Chris on December 4, 2002 with details of his own sighting of a seven-to-eight-foot-tall ape-like creature in the vicinity of Sherwood Forest late at night in 1982.

Accounts like these fascinate me.

As I revealed in my book, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, there are countless stories of large, hairy man-beasts roaming the British Isles. The problem - as the new story on the decline of Sherwood Forest amply demonstrates - is that Britain simply does not have enough forestland to adequately support - and hide, too - a colony of giant, ape-like creatures.

And yet, people see them.

In my view, this is yet more evidence suggesting that the big hairy man is a paranormal entity (and I use that as a simplistic, catch-all term for something of which we have a poor understanding), rather than a straightforward flesh-and-blood beast.

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