Bigfoot in Wigan
I enjoyed the article on “British Bigfeet” [FT425:30-36]. Coincidentally, I only became aware of Bigfoot in Britain about three weeks before the magazine came out. On a walk along the Leeds–Liverpool canal in the vicinity of Haigh Hall to the west of Wigan, I saw a few small posters put up by paranormal researcher Mick McLaren asking if anyone had any weird events to relate. I’d previously seen these around the Rivington area, and so on returning home, I checked him out on google and came across a video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8mkCQ8ZgLQ) where he described a Bigfoot encounter around 1987 at Wigan Flashes – a nature reserve and wetland caused by mining subsidence. I note the ‘W’ motif – Tunbridge Wells, Wallasey, both mentioned in the FT article’s strapline – and now Wigan, and also that one location given in Scotland was in a former mining area; another was by a canal, and indeed, the sighting Mick gives occurred a few miles further along the canal from where I saw his poster.
Norman Darwen Bolton, Lancashire
Spectral Horsemen
Fascinating as was Gary Stocker’s letter [FT423:61], quoting an unattributed passage from Aidan Chambers’s Great British Ghosts where, in 1914, a British soldier saw not angels but protective horsemen, the indefatigable David Clarke has already noted this in his excellent 2004 book The Angel of Mons. Clarke cites the same passage, with this introduction:
“Among the columns of British troops moving towards the Marne was ‘a distinguished Lieutenant-Colonel’. In a letter published by the London Evening News in September 1915, he described how his division came into action at dawn and fought until dusk, under constant shelling from German artillery until the order came to withdraw from Le Cateau.”
It wasspecifically that it appeared in the on 14 September 1915. Clarke also mentions that as General Sordet’s French cavalry corps were moving towards Le Cateau to support the British at this time, it is possible this was what the correspondent and his companions saw.
