Montauk and the Ditch Plains Carcass
In July 2008 something washed up on Ditch Plains beach near Montauk: a bald grey carcass with long clawed limbs and a face like a beak. The photograph spread instantly, and the theories ran from a chimera escaped from the laboratory on nearby Plum Island to an alien. The palaeontologist Darren Naish worked through the anatomy from the picture: the limb proportions, the dentition and the shape of the skull are an ordinary raccoon's, after weeks in the water had taken the fur off and the soft tissue of the face had rotted back to the nasal bones. The body vanished before anyone examined it in person.
William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper
William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.
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