Download or read book Under the Shadow of Meon Hill written by Paul Nigel Newman and published by Abraxas Editions. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UNDER THE SHADOW OF MEON HILL THE LOWER QUINTON & HAGLEY WOOD MURDERS By PAUL NEWMAN Who d kill a gnarled old man going about his daily toil in the late evening of his life? The murder was an outrage that seemed to run counter to the decorum of natural law. Within a few years, the shadows would have claimed him as their own and the earth taken him in gently. So why this violent intrusion, this flagrant disruption of the natural course, so that a person who had lived so humbly and inconspicuously, in apparent harmony with birds and nature, should meet a blood-spattered fate that more befitted a doomed tyrannical king in a Greek tragedy On February 14th, 1945, Charles Walton, aged 74, a hedger and ditcher of Lower Quinton, Warwickshire was found dead on Meon Hill. A pitchfork had been thrust through his neck, pinning him to the ground, and what looked like the sign of a cross slashed across his chest. Classing it as a major murder enquiry, the police selected the most famous detective of the day, Inspector Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard, to investigate. Employing modern techniques, Fabian combed the crime scene and surrounding area, using surveillance aircraft and metal detectors to search for clues. He interviewed locals, POWs from the camp at nearby Long Marston and individual soldiers, but found no convincing leads. Neither did Fabian find the locals especially confiding. Doors were closed in his face; people refused to talk and the atmosphere turned hostile. Abruptly the investigation took an unexpected twist after one of the detectives drew Fabian s attention to a work on folklore that suggested Walton had been killed in the way that witches once were stanged or pierced with a pitchfork on a sacrificial date. Eventually the enquiry turned devilish, bizarre and tortuous. Black dogs, bizarre coincidences and macabre threats were overwhelming the detective work. Years later, incredibly Aleister Crowley s mistress was cited as organising the crime. Academics and experts on witchcraft were invited to give their views, including the famous anthropologist, Dr Margaret Murray, and psychics held s ances to contact Walton s disembodied spirit. What started out as a hard-headed investigation dissolved into a disturbing occult morass. Making use of Fabian s original papers, the whole story is now set down for the first time in Paul Newman s bone-chilling account of this historically significant and gruesome enquiry. The second case highlighted in Under the Shadow of Meon Hill is the killing of Bella in Hagley Wood, near Birmingham, commonly twinned with the Walton Murder. Taking place two years earlier (1943), a group of country children, playing around the Clent Hills, came across the rotted body of a young woman stuffed in a tree trunk. Her hand had been cut off and she had formerly been pregnant. This hapless corpse was nicknamed Bella but who was she? A gypsy? A witch? A prostitute? A German spy? The investigation stoked up tales of vengeful magic, espionage and conspiracy. Who put Bella in the Wych Elm became a catch-cry. However, despite the thoroughness of the investigation, no one was able to identify Bella, and the case remains open.
Download or read book The Meon Hill Murder 1945 written by M J Trow and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2023-10-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing months of the Second World War, an old hedger was found bludgeoned and hacked to death in a Warwickshire field. His name was Charles Walton and the place was the little village of Lower Quinton, under the shadow of Meon Hill. They called in the local CID; they called in Scotland Yard; they interviewed hundreds of people; they asked thousands of questions. But somebody wasn’t talking. The whole village was silent, as if someone had drawn down a blind. After the case was scaled down, the rumors remained. Was Meon Hill the center of a witches’ coven? And was old Charlie Walton, with his ability to talk to birds and toads and his magic watch, a witch himself? For eighty years, the supernatural has hovered over the murder of Charles Walton, with vague, haunted memories of secret rites and black dogs. Even the dead man’s grave has vanished. Rumor has been piled on innuendo, adding to the excesses of writers determined to make a supernatural mystery out of a very local tragedy, until the dead man himself has disappeared into a morass of hocus pocus. This is the first book to get past the nonsense, accessing original police files that say precisely nothing about witchcraft. Analyzing the facts from the time and removing the ever-more ludicrous layers of fiction, it gets as near to solving the mystery as we are ever likely to.
Download or read book The Case That Foiled Fabian written by Simon Read and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Wednesday 14 February 1945, the body of Charles Walton was discovered on the lower slopes of Meon Hill near the sleepy Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, his torso pinned to the ground by a pitchfork. Myths and rumours soon swirled about the crime. Accounts claim Walton, a retired labourer and a lifelong resident of Lower Quinton, was believed by many to be a clairvoyant who could talk to birds and exercise control over animals. It has even been reported that many villagers attributed Walton's death to ritual witchcraft. But what is fact and what is fiction? The most famous police officer in Britain, Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, was promptly dispatched by Scotland Yard to solve this increasingly peculiar and foreboding mystery. 'Fabian of the Yard' was not a man prone to superstition and had dealt with some of the most notorious killers of his time – but there was something strange about the Walton murder. Did the clues point to ritual witchcraft as the modus operandi, or was the black magic angle merely a ruse? With the villagers unable – or unwilling – to shed light on the matter, Fabian faced, for the only time in his glittering career, the daunting prospect of failure. The Case That Foiled Fabian lays out for the first time what actually happened and distills the truth from the many myths about this case that are today mistaken for facts.
Download or read book The Hagley Wood Murder written by M. J. Trow and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which too place eighty years ago. In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right. McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime!
Download or read book The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends written by Simon Young and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-06-27 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Brian McConnell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from “Beetle Eyes” to the “Shoplifter’s Dilemma” and from “Hands in the Muff” to the “Suicide Club.” While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives—particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.
Download or read book Argentine Perspectives on the Falklands War written by Nicholas van der Bijl and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new assessment of the Falklands War from the Argentine perspective. In 1982, the United Kingdom and Argentina fought a war over an historical disagreement over the colonial “ownership” or rights over the Falkland Islands. Within months of the Argentinian defeat, General Edgardo Calvi, then the Argentine Head of the Army Joint Chief of Staff, was instructed to undertake a wide-ranging and formal inquiry to investigate the performance of the Argentine Army during the Falklands. Calvi concluded that while the Army had the motivation, it lacked the organization, equipment, training, and ability to oppose an army capable of operating in a variety of environments. The war exposed political, military, and public weaknesses in a period of considerable internal unrest during the seven years of the Dirty War. Several senior officers who fought in the Falklands were imprisoned for offenses committed during the Dirty War. Secrecy and political disagreements isolated the Service chiefs of staff from the logistic and operational planning. This book tells the story of the Falklands War from the Argentine Army perspective.
Download or read book Lure of the Sinister written by Gareth Medway and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A frequent writer on comparative religion and the history of occultism, Medway begins by exploring what a Satanist is and why people worship Satan, then looks at such topics as the history of Satan and the Pact, Satanic crime, hell on earth, sex slaves of Lucifer, and the relationship between paranoia and conspiracy. He explains that as a Pagan he does not believe in Satan, but neither does he believe in Christianity but knows Christians are real. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Blood of Beelzebub written by James Seymour and published by BookLocker.com, Inc.. This book was released on 2023-08-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Valentine's Day, 1945, the gruesome murder of a crippled hedgecutter, Charles Walton, shocked the townspeople of Stratford-upon-Avon. With its simmering links to Satanic ritual, the murder remains a mystery, one of Scotland Yard's rare cold cases, a crime as relevant today as it was eighty years ago. On a cold, mist shrouded February evening, the 74-year-old Charles Walton was found on the slopes of Meon Hill in the rural parish of Upper Quinton, Warwickshire. He had been impaled to the hard earth by a pitchfork driven through his neck. Walton's attacker had bludgeoned him with his own stick, then cut his throat with a slash hook. According to press reports, the sign of the cross had been carved into the laborer’s neck. Required to solve this difficult crime, Alec Spooner, the local Warwickshire head of C.I.D., joins forces with London's crime-fighter Robert Fabian, to determine the murderer's identity and whereabouts. They soon discovers signals indicating the possible influence of witchcraft or paranormal activity. Reluctant to reveal to Fabian that he wants to dig deeper into these heretical theories, Alec can't ignore others who want his help to reveal the unknown forces believed to cause the death of Edith's dear uncle Charles. When the highly desirable medium Sam Zawalich, an early advocate of Charles, attempts to make contact with him on the "other side," she discovers she can't succeed without Alec Spooner's help. As most of his other conventional attempts to find the killer fail, Alec weakens and agrees to help Sam convene with Charles' spirit. Unfortunately, the communion of the living and the dead does not go according to plan and further death complicates any rightful conclusion to the matter. Spooner, unable to win over Sam, and resigned to losing his case, can only find satisfaction in the knowledge that his book about the investigation may help others to finally find the real killer after he is gone. In the meantime, Alec and Sam reveal countless inequities in a system of justice still beholden to money and ironclad tradition.
Download or read book Bella In The Wych Elm written by Andrew Sparke and published by APS Books. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A baffling unsolved 1943 Worcestershire murder - a woman's body stuffed into a hollow tree and not found for 18 months. Witchcraft or spies or just the vicious murder of a spurned lover? Missing evidence and even the skeletal remains mislaid. Conspiracy or incompetence or even the work of MI5? With contemporary photographs and original case documentation.
Download or read book Who Put Bella In The Wych Elm Volume 1 written by Alex Merrill and published by APS Books. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who put Bella in the Wych-Elm? And who was she? Found in a hollow tree in Worcestershire in 1943, nobody knows, except her killer.,Now Alex Merrill makes us the first people to see her face since the day she died, approaching 80 years ago. In doing so, he opens up new leads from- the crime scene which could finally solve this legendary Midlands mystery.
Download or read book The Occult written by Colin Wilson and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2015-05-17 with total page 855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of The Outsider explores occult ideas, practices and figures from Kabbalah to Aleister Crowley in this “fascinating history of magic" (The Washington Post). Colin Wilson is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on occultism. His classic historical study on the subject is an essential guide to the mind-expanding experiences and discoveries made by occultists through the centuries—from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa to Giacomo Casanova, Helena Blavatsky, Grigori Rasputin, and many others. More than a chronicle of people and events, however, Wilson has produced a synthesis of the available material, presenting the occult in the light of reason—and reason in the light of the mystical and paranormal. The result is a wide-ranging survey of the subject that provides a comprehensive history of magic, an insightful exploration of our latent powers, and a revelatory journey of enlightenment. "This most interesting, informative and thought-provoking book on the subject I have read." —Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Sunday Telegraph
Download or read book Fabian of the Yard written by Robert Fabian and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Who Put Bella In The Wych Elm Volume 2 written by Alex Merrill and published by APS Books. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More on the the body in the hollow tree mystery. Alex Merrill explores the people who lived and worked near Hagley Woods who could have pinpointed who Bella was and why she was murdered. Offering new revelations; a fresh perspective of all the different theories, thoroughly researched and referenced, and complemented by historical facsimiles, photographs, and bespoke maps and charts, Alex suggests the possibility that the identity of Bella was known to the police long ago and that the case was closed because prosecutors deemed there to be insufficient evidence that the police had solved a mere gypsy murder. It also asks how much of the spy stories told by Wilfred Byford-Jones, Una Mossop, Donald McCormick and others was sheer fantasy, invented for personal gain and to sell newspapers and books and whether the shoes discovered at the scene of the crime pushed Professor Webster and his colleagues into misinterpretations of the evidence setting the police off on the wrong trail from the outset. And surprisingly for some readers, the mystery now focuses more on the town of Halesowen and hardly at all on Hagley.
Download or read book A History of Women in Medicine written by Sinéad Spearing and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the female healers of centuries past, and how they went from respected to reviled. Witch is a powerful word with humble origins. Once used to describe an ancient British tribe known for its unique class of female physicians and priestesses, it grew into something grotesque, diabolical, and dangerous. A History of Women in Medicine reveals the untold story of forgotten female physicians, their lives, practices, and subsequent denomination as witches. Originally held in high esteem in their communities, these women used herbs and ancient psychological processes to relieve the suffering of their patients, often traveling long distances, moving from village to village. Their medical and spiritual knowledge blended the boundaries between physician and priest. These ancient healers were the antithesis of the witch figure of today; instead they were knowledgeable therapists commanding respect, gratitude, and high social status. In this pioneering work, Sinéad Spearing draws on current archeological evidence, literature, folklore, case studies, and original religious documentation to bring to life these forgotten healers. By doing so she also exposes the Church’s efforts to demonize them in the eyes of the world, leading female healers to be labeled witches and persecuted in the ensuing hysteria known today as the European witch craze.
Download or read book Cross Country written by Peter Ashley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cross Country photographer and author Peter Ashley unleashes his passion for Blighty. He takes us on an enlightening jaunt that encompasses many of England’s most loved regions. His love of buildings and landscape extends far beyond architecture in picturesque surroundings. By combining personal reminiscence and an ear for intriguing anecdote, he shows us with wit, and sometimes irreverent comment, just how richly varied the fabric of England is: abandoned Cornish tin mines above tide-washed caves; Norfolk boat sheds leaning on salt marches; Romney Marsh shepherd’s houses disappearing behind roadside willows; and hedges looked over in Wiltshire. Local details are found in both Essex estuaries and Cumbrian sand dunes; and long abandoned railway lines are once again pressed into service to take us around his beloved High Leicestershire. Ashley never misses the curious and neglected – be it a sheep wash in the Cotswolds or a disused petrol pump in Herefordshire. He travels deep into t eh countryside he cares about. His wry observations allow us to rediscover and delight in what many of us might previously have deemed familiar territory.
Download or read book The Cotswolds written by Joscelyne Finberg and published by Methuen Publishing. This book was released on 1977 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Drowning Ground written by James Marrison and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chief Inspector Guillermo Downes is a long way from his native home of Argentina, heading up the police department in the English Cotswolds. But he isn't far enough to escape the memories of his past, or to lose the baggage he carries from the loss of someone close to him. So when a young girl, Gail, disappears--the second girl in the span of two weeks to go missing--Downes makes a promise to the child's mother to find her no matter what it takes. Ten years later, that promise remains unfulfilled. And though the girls are never far from his thoughts, the job goes on. The body of a local man, Frank Hurst, has just been found dead, sprawled on a hill in town. Frank Hurst also had a past. His second wife drowned in their swimming pool and his daughter, Rebecca, left home soon after. Downes remembers the case well. And although many in the town think Frank murdered his wife, his alibi was confirmed. Still, it now seems that there might be a connection between Frank and the missing girls, which might give Chief Inspector Downes another chance to make good on the promise he made all those years ago.
