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Legends can be funny things. In Dallinghoo, Suffolk, there was an old local story of a ghost which protected a hidden hoard of treasure. A team of twelve clergymen descended upon the village; armed with bell, book and candle, they faced the ghost but even their combined faith failed to banish the entity, who remained to guard his treasure... Tales such as this litter the British countryside, however this one has a twist - on 19 January, news broke that a man armed with a metal detector had discovered 825 Iceni coins in the area, 2000 years old, and valued at around 500,000. No phantom was around to comment. So what happened? Did the twelve clergymen actually exorcise the entity, and did themselves an injustice by prematurely declaring the operation a failure? Did the phantom just give up? After all, 2000 years is a long time to do the same job...

ABC (Alien Big Cats) are not uncommon across the UK, but an even larger cat sighting took place near Chorleywood, 29 January, as a woman drove along the M25. The witness spotted the creature near the roadside, and described it as black in colour, a long tail and ten times the size of a dog, making it a very big cat indeed, perhaps cow-sized?. Another media feeding frenzy kicked off at the start of the month, after a rotting carcass washed up on the beach at Croyde. The decaying skull possessed razor sharp teeth, fuelling speculation that the body could be the mythical Beast of Exmoor. Fortunately, Jon Downes and his team from the Centre for Fortean Zoology were quick to analyse the skull and declare the creature to be a Grey Seal. Still, as someone who has been chased by an angry bull seal, I appreciate the comparable fear factor.

The normally quiet Essex town of Wivenhoe also found itself in the January news after a police officer spotted the 'Beast of Essex' just outside his police station in the early hours of the morning. The large black cat, speculated to be an escaped puma by some quarters of the media, escaped down the side of the police station. The officer raised the alarm, but despite a search, the creature could not be found. It later emerged that another officer at the police station had reported encountering a UFO the previous year. The orange (or yellow) UFO hovered near Brightlingsea before flying off vertically and disappearing from view. The sighting was reported to the MoD, but it is not thought they followed the case up.

The UFOs did not stop in Wivenhoe. Several counties away in Lincolnshire, a UFO was held accountable when two blades on a wind turbine at Conisholme Fell were damaged. Initially one was declared 'missing', though was found buried in the mud where it fell close by. A local councillor reported seeing a strange light in the sky the night before the damaged turbine was discovered, while another local described something akin to a floating octopus around the same time. The conspiratorial part of me suggests that, rather than a stray UFO hitting the turbine, the UFO story was pushed to distract the public to the fact that this expensive yet reliable energy generation may not be so reliable after all.

To finish the month off - is there anything that can scare a Colonial Marine? I mean, after surviving chest busters, alien warriors and other Giger creations, you would expect the soldier to be unflappable. Not so. In Glasgow, according to the News of the World, the Alien Wars experience in The Arches is home to a phantom little girl who has unnerved several staff and performers. The petite spook is thought to be 200 years old, appears to have taken a liking to xenomorphs, and be more than a match for any human actor.

This Week's Paranormal Diary

13 February
The general area around Glencoe, Argyll and Bute
Murdered in cold blood by the clan Campbell, forty members of the MacDonald family return to the scene of the crime in phantom form.

Darren Mann
www.paranormaldatabase.com