Jeff Buck · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Whitby Abbey

added29 August 20261890

The ruins of a Benedictine abbey on a cliff above the North Sea, where Bram Stoker spent a holiday in 1890 and found the name of the Wallachian prince Dracula in the local library. In the novel it is here that the Demeter runs aground and the count, in the shape of a black dog, bounds up the hundred and ninety-nine steps to the church. The steps are real, the abbey is real, and one of Europe's largest goth festivals gathers in Whitby every year.

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54.48900, -0.60800

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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.

108 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Hexham Heads

In February 1971 two boys digging a garden behind a house on Rede Avenue in Hexham turned up two small stone heads. A neighbour soon reported seeing a half-man, half-wolf at night, the researcher Anne Ross said the same creature had appeared to her in her own house in Southampton, and the heads were declared Celtic and eighteen hundred years old. Then Desmond Craigie, a previous occupant of the house, came forward: he had made them in 1956 for his daughter Nancy, out of concrete and sand. To prove it he made a third in front of witnesses, indistinguishable from the others. Geologists confirmed the material was cast concrete with quartz sand, not carved stone.

109 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.

127 km away

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