Charles Rawding · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Pendle Hill

added29 August 20261612

A Lancashire hill beneath which the most famous English witch trial took place in 1612: twelve accused, ten hanged, charges of ten murders by witchcraft. Much of the evidence came from a nine-year-old girl testifying against her own family. Thousands climb to the summit every Hallowe'en, and Lancashire police ask them not to every year.

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53.86900, -2.30000

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UFO sightingOrange

Todmorden and PC Godfrey's Missing Time

On 28 November 1980 PC Alan Godfrey was looking for stray cattle in this Yorkshire town when, by his report, he saw a rotating diamond-shaped object across Burnley Road. The next thing he remembered was driving on down the same road with a quarter of an hour missing from the clock. A dry patch was left on the tarmac on a wet night. Godfrey filed an official report and later described, under hypnosis, being examined inside a craft. The police distanced themselves from the story, and his career ended there. Six months earlier the body of a miner, Zygmunt Adamski, had been found nearby in circumstances the coroner called inexplicable; the literature links the two cases, though nothing supports the link.

22 km away

DebunkedWhite

Cottingley and the Paper Fairies

In the summer of 1917 sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths came back from the beck behind the house with five photographs of themselves sitting beside tiny winged figures. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had just buried his son, published them in the Strand Magazine and defended them for the rest of his life. The fairies were cut from card, copied from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, and held up on hatpins — one pin is visible in a print. Both women confessed in 1983, a few years before they died; Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was real.

32 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Crying Boy and the Fires

On 4 September 1985 the Sun printed the story of the Hall family of Rotherham: their house burned to the ground and a cheap print of The Crying Boy by the Spanish painter Bruno Amadio survived on the wall. Firefighters confirmed they had seen such pictures in the ashes more than once. The paper gathered hundreds of letters and staged a public burning of the prints. The explanation was simple and was tested in 2010 at the Building Research Establishment: the prints were made on dense board coated with a fire-resistant varnish and hung on a cord, which burns through first — the picture falls face down onto the floor, where the temperature is lowest. More than fifty thousand copies of The Crying Boy were sold, and most of them hung in kitchens.

79 km away

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