Bøger af Patrick J Gallagher

The Australian continent was a strange place for early European settlers, full of exotic wildlife unlike anything encountered before. As settlements spread across the country, opening up new areas, it must have seemed like almost anything was possible with regards to the discovery of new flora and fauna.The legends of the local indigenous tribes were fertile ground for sowing the seeds of expectations. Folklore involving giant hairy men or strange aquatic creatures seemed all too plausible given the nature of other creatures already encountered and catalogued.So it should be no surprise that European accounts of the Yowie, the giant hairy man-beast (Australia's own Bigfoot), or the swamp-dwelling, seal-like Bunyip, began to be reported in the newspapers of the time.Did these creatures once roam the Australian bush? Might isolated communities of them still exist in the dense hinterlands? This book presents the available evidence of the former, while we still seek proof of the latter.

APRIL, 1921 - GUYRA, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA.For over a month in 1921, the tiny town of Guyra in northern NSW was the focus of national attention as events unfolded that would form the basis of Australia's most prominent poltergeist case, as the home of the Bowen family was bombarded by stones from nowhere, and the walls were pounded on by unseen hands.Here, for the first time, is a collection of all the available newspaper articles that were published regarding the incident at the time.This book is not a "ghost story" in the sense of a standard linear tale. This is a collection of evidence, from which you are invited to draw your own conclusions as to what happened in Guyra all those years ago. Hoax? Or a true case of paranormal phenomena...?

The 1930s were most definitely the boom years for the Loch Ness Monster, that enigmatic cryptid which supposedly dwells in one of Scotland's deepest lakes.The imagination of the world was excited by the apparent emergence of the creature in 1933, with dozens of sightings reported by people from all walks of life. The high volume of sightings continued through 1934, making these two years the all-time peak in "Nessie" sightings.But then, gradually, the number of reported sightings in the press began to taper off. Never again would "Nessie Fever" grip the Scottish Highlands in quite the same way. There were occasional spikes in reports, but nothing to match those original two years.That decline is reflected in this volume, which contains original newspaper accounts pertaining to the Loch Ness Monster between 1935 and 1955.

As far as the British press were concerned, the year 1888 was very much the year of "Jack the Ripper". The still unidentified killer stalked the ill-lit streets of Whitechapel, brutally slaying five prostitutes between August and November of 1888 before slipping back into the shadows from whence he came.But while "Jack" was one of the earliest, and undoubtedly the most famous serial killer, he wasn't the first to fit the profile. In fact, it would appear that even at the time that "Jack the Ripper" was chalking up his bloody tally, another serial killer was stalking the streets of London.Between May 1887 and September 1889, the dismembered remains of four women were found in, or in the vicinity of, the Thames River.Collected here are the original newspaper accounts of these murders, tracing, in the voices of the time, the events, theories, and pursuit of a "forgotten Ripper".The number of leads are few, the number of theories just as thin on the ground. But the case of the "Thames Torso Murderer", this "Forgotten Ripper", is one which holds just as much mystery, if not more, as his more famous counterpart.

In 1933 "Nessie" erupted into the public consciousness with a deluge of sightings of "something" in the waters of the 22 mile long and 700 foot deep Scottish loch.Since then the Loch Ness Monster has captured the public imagination more than any other cryptid creature.Gathered in this book are the original newspaper accounts from the years 1933 and 1934, when "Nessie Fever" was at its height. Not just sightings, but plans for monster hunts and government responses to the appearance of this unknown creature are presented here.A number of the sightings documented here, possibly too "mundane" to be sensationalised by the national press, are seeing print for the first time since the 1930's, after languishing in the archived pages of the small local newspapers in which they first appeared.Whatever your stance on the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, these accounts provide a fascinating insight into the happenings and opinions that swirled around Loch Ness in the early part of the 20th Century.

On a warm November evening in 1892, a Mrs Spink and Mrs Underwood, two residents of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorne, were making their way home. As they proceeded down Manningtree Road, one of the ladies spotted a parcel lying in the middle of the footpath.Curiosity getting the better of them, they opened the hessian-cloth bag, and were horrified to discover two severed human legs. It was then that they noticed the note pinned to the outside of the bag... "Lot #1 - J. Ripper." Police investigations into the origins of the ghastly parcel gained little traction. Then, several days later, another parcel was discovered several miles away in Fawkner Park, South Yarra. This one contained a pair of arms, ascertained by the police to be from the same body as the previously discovered limbs. In 1898 and 1906, there were two more unsolved dismemberment murders in South Melbourne. Curiously, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with only one exception, these were the only unsolved dismemberment murders in the entire country, all occurring in one relatively small area of the same city. Three similar, ghastly, unsolved murders, all occurring in the same place, over a relatively short period of time, the like of which have not been seen in Australia since. What was going on in the southern suburbs of Melbourne...?

At the end of the 19th Century, and even into the early 20th Century, large areas of eastern Australia were still in a state that could be regarded as "wilderness" despite the proximity of cities and towns. Dense scrub, rough bushland and imposing mountains all combined to create places that had little appeal for human habitation by any but the hardiest of souls.It's probably little surprise then that it was easy to give credence to stories of strange, unknown animals roaming the populated fringes of the country. Legendary creatures, such as the Yowie (Australia's answer to Bigfoot) and the Bunyip, received their share of accounts in the newspapers of the time. But the most common "strange animal" reports concerned creatures that would be somewhat more mundane in comparison were it not for the out-of-place nature of their appearances.Tigers and lions.Presented here, then, is a collection of original newspaper reports of "big cat" sightings spanning the years 1885 to 1955. In cryptozoology circles, these creatures are known as "Alien Big Cats" or ABC's. The "alien" in this case refers to something foreign to the environment and not something from space.Whether it was a case of mistaken identity, people seeing thylacines (the marsupial 'Tasmanian Tiger', not yet declared extinct at the time), or people had not yet come to terms with how large feral cats could become in the wild, there were many sightings of something prowling the Australian bush.